The mydavidcameron.com site is brilliant – letting us all have a go at unmasking the real values behind the smarmy smile.
For those who haven’t seen it, the idea is to simply replace whichever vacuous slogan a group of highly paid advertising executives have thought up and plonked next to David Cameron’s face. They are on billboard posters everywhere. But viral campaigns are undermining all that hard work.
Among the ingenious bastardisations are: “Toff on crime, toff on the causes of crime” and “I’ll show you my policies, if you show me yours first”.
My favourite – and the one that sums up the fears of thousands of media workers – is: “I love the BBC so much, I want to cut it up in to little pieces and give it to all my friends”.
This week, I was meant to meet Jeremy Hunt to discuss Conservative plans for the media. He cancelled the meeting. However, even if it had gone ahead, how much would I have learned? First the Tories’ culture spokesman said he would “tear up” the BBC charter and then he changed his mind. Then he said he was against top-slicing the BBC licence fee and then Shadow Chancellor George Osborne said he proposed to do just that.
Then a special committee set up to come up with a raft of attractive-looking policies on media issues was due to report last autumn. It didn’t. The only thing to have emerged is to ditch the licence fee and replace it with direct taxation. Cameron rejected that.
Then the Tories championed ultra-local television services. The problem is the two “beacons” – Kent TV and Channel M in Manchester – are hardly shining any more. One has closed because of a lack of public subsidy. The other is teetering on the brink after the Guardian Media Group sold the rest of its north-west media portfolio to Trinity Mirror.
The need for a coherent policy for sustaining and building newsgathering and independent journalism has never been greater. Just this week, we’ve seen more signs of the crisis confronting journalism. Staff at The Independent titles had a gun held to their heads and were told that, unless they accepted a halving of their redundancy terms, the sale of the various titles to former KGB man and now London Evening Standard owner Alexander Lebedev would be off – and the paper would close within weeks.
Staff working for the Manchester Evening News/MEN Media were informed that the titles had been acquired by a rival newspaper group. They were then told they were moving them to Oldham. Add that to the 101 newspapers closed in just nine months, the job cuts at new media and broadcasting companies and the crisis is stark.
The only ray of hope some see is the potential of the new Independently Financed News Consortia (IFNCs). These are alliances of news providers who will come together to produce the local and regional TV news programmes for ITV in three pilot areas – Scotland, Wales and the north-east of England.
They are far from ideal, but they at least recognise that public funding has a role in helping to sustain local TV news and will help to save some jobs. There are dozens of outstanding questions about how they would function and the need for strict conditions on their operations, such as the reinvestment of any profits in programme-making instead of it being dished out to shareholders. Why not make them not-for-profit organisations? At least IFNCs are better than the other option on offer, which is to allow ITV to ditch or walk away from local and regional news. And did I mention the Tories would abolish IFNCs if they came to power?
So, for now, they are better than the other option on offer. That sounds like the way many trade unionists are thinking about the forthcoming general election.
To cheer yourself up, why not go and make your own Tory poster?
Jeremy Dear is general secretary of the National Union of Journalists
