So. Like everyone (except I think Tory MPs) I read the Coalition agreement and quite liked it: some really important unexpected wins on the environment and constitutionally. Remarkably little that was truly offensive.
Of course, the knack is to use coalition negotiations as an opportunity to lose those bits of your own manifesto you don’t like by offering them up as sacrifices on the altar of co-operation.
There is of course nothing in the agreement about culture, media or sport. So I thought I would have a go: look at both manifestos, ditch the whacky bits and insert some bits that were carelessly omitted (eg on libraries and sport – what were the front bench teams thinking?).
Here’s the result:
- Return the national lottery to its original purpose and change the tax system from a ticket tax to a gross profits tax
- Use cash from dormant betting accounts to set up a capital fund for improving local sports facilities
- Ensure that the Olympics and Paralympics leave a lasting legacy focused on inspiring young people to take part in sport.
- Introduce a national Olympic-style school sport competition.
- Make Britain a European hub for hi-tech, digital and creative industries.
- Amend local media ownership rules
- Create a system of commercially viable local television stations;
- Deliver nationwide superfast broadband by 2017
- Scrap the ‘Phone Tax’
- Promote and protect a strong and independent BBC by ensuring that it is properly audited by the National Audit Office
- Set up a ‘creative enterprise fund’, offering training, mentoring and small grants to loans to help creative businesses get off the ground
- Encourage the development of live music through using funds from dormant bank accounts to provide rehearsal studios for young people
- Recognise the importance of tourism as the nation’s fifth largest industry: remove the role of regional development agencies in tourism and transfer their funding to local authorities.
- Maintain free entry to national museums and galleries and open up the Government Art Collection for greater public use.
- Encourage local authorities to modernise the library service, recognising that libraries are vital community hubs, providing books, knowledge and learning: abolish MLA and the Advisory Council on Libraries and fund the Improvement and Development Agency to provide peer challenge and support between library authorities.
- Review remaining DCMS quangos, seeking to transfer as many functions as possible to local authorities: the Arts Council and Sport England will deal mainly with national bodies and projects of national significance.
- Allow local authorities greater powers to terminate or refuse liquor licences. In addition:
- Double the maximum fine for underage alcohol sales
- Increase duty on those drinks associated with anti-social drinking
- Abolish the increase in cider tax
- Ban the sale of alcohol at below cost price
- Permit local councils to charge more for late night licences to fund the costs of policing and monitoring
I look forward to your comments….
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Knaptoft: The very heart of England
We do have a two-tier policing system but it is not what our homegrown racists think it is.
From Norman settlement to a civic square
Tom Arms
Ruth Bright
Tom Bailey
Alex Macfie
12 Comments
How about breaking up the Department for Culture, Media and Sport altogether?
While I see overlap between the three areas, I think as a single department, its remit is too big for it to manage, and can lead to internal conflicts that become hard to resolve, especially when you have issues such as arts funding losing out to investment in sporting events such as the 2012 Olympics, the 2014 Commonwealth Games and the 2018 World Cup bid, all of which are just as important.
One thing I’d like to see is continued backing for Ofcom, which for all its faults has rendered good service in opening a narrow band of the airwaves to independent community broadcasting: we need more of the latter, not just a commercial free-for-all. And we need protection for the independence and financing of the BBC, for all its shortcoming still widely considered the best broadcaster on the planet.
Another is a limit on local authorities’ ability to dispose of library stock accumulated over generations, without proper local consultation and a public account of what’s gone. I’d also like safeguards against the unilateral disposal of joint collections by the authority entrusted with their storage. There’s frankly not a lot left after 30 years of flogging off (or just binning) the family silver, but it’s time something was done to save the best of what remains.
I’m against raising the cost of late drinking licences: the problem isn’t extra hours, it’s a drinking culture distorted over nearly a century by absurd constraints lacking in better-behaved countries. Thus restricting late hours would harm smaller independent venues that promote the musical & artistic innovation in which we excel. We need to clamp down on outlets that promote disorder, not to penalise those who offer a creative alternative to drinking for its own sake.
And yes, let’s promote diversity and accept that there’s more to life than beer, football, Pop Idol & McChicken. Let’s have policies to reverse the cultural homogenisation of our high streets and promote that creativity that so often finds itself at odds with official hankerings for control & uniformity.
Sport England should be renamed .Admin England’. Traditionally small sports clubs in the UK have been run by willing volunteers and the donations by its members. The admin overload from Blair World has meant that volunteers think twice about any involvement. Police checks for everyone and an assumption that every volunteer is a paedophile unless proved otherwise.
The volunteer world of the ‘Big Society’ was there until it was killed off by Health and Safety rules and an assumption of criminality amongst all those willing to do something for nothing. Get rid of the ridiculous rules and sport, drama, recreation etc, will flourish.
By 2017 it will be obsolete. Stop trying to deliver today’s technology in ten years time. That’s what we’ve been doing, and it’s why all the stuff we have is grossly outdated compared to everywhere else.
If you want to fix the UK’s problems with internet technology (aka BT), you need to stop these centralised plans. Instead, look at the reason why the market is not doing anything (hint: it’s caused by government monopolies preventing the market from doing anything).
Does anybody really believe that will work? They’ll just move to whatever is the cheapest.
Yeah, I can’t say I’m happy that the minister for sport is involved in internet infrastructure.
please note that there is no such thing as the arts council – please specify england, scotland, wales or northern ireland or write in the plural if you mean all 4
I think I’ like to see the department split up too. BUT I live in Wales, it’s different here. don’t think Welsh or Scottish MP’s should allowed to be ministers in areas that don;t cover Wales. At one time the art’s minister was from newport gwent. He spoke at a national conference for gallery education and had to keep saying in England – of course as many other speakers did too, but coming from a Welsh MP it was ridiculous. If I’d been a constituent I’d have been pretty vocal about him spending time on stuff that had no bearing on Wales at all.
just seen that more money coming up! http://www.culture.gov.uk/news/news_stories/7067.aspx
I’d like a bit more broadband for everyone by next year…then a bit more FOR EVERYONE…long term targets ok but not when they leave some behind (and new systems arrive).
really when looking at sports arts health etc it shows that there need to be assemblies in england too. then less MPs and they just deal with UK wide stuff.
I’m an artist….
Sport, drama and domestic science in schools used to be practical subjects. When I started as a P.E teacher in 1973 pen and paper was something found in English lessons and rarely in our sports department.
Gradually more paperwork and assessment hit all the practical subjects and removed all the enjoyment for pupils and teachers. There was little practice so pupils actually rarely became as proficient as they had previously.
You cant learn to swim or bake a cake by reading a book and writing about it.
Lack of physical exercise also accounts for the fatness not fitness seen in many youngsters.
Remove the admin and assessment from all the practical subjects and Sport and the Arts in schools will start to flourish again. Also remove the ‘cotton wool’ Health and Safety Rules that mean no-one gets hurt because nobody actually does anything. You cant make an omelette without breaking eggs !!
Using funds from dormant accounts seems awfully like theft to me. “Haven’t used that in a while? Sure, you don’t need it anymore then…”
The local TV proposals sound excellent. Unfortunately far too little has been done in this sphere so far. The few good local stations there have been have not been treated well and there were few plans made to allow them to migrate to digital. As a result, stations all along the south coast, Oxford and Northern Ireland have an uncertain future. Even where digital local stations have been advanced there is little care given to licensing quality. Channel M in Manchester is very professional but in Cardiff the local licence went to a company with no published plan to use the spectrum but who just seem to think it might be profitable one day.
Overall the switch to digital has been mishandled. Stations are popping up on the country’s main TV platform Freeview – the equivalent of launching Channel 6 or Channel 7 on the old system – which would never have met the licencing conditions for a terrestrial licence even after Mrs Thatcher got hold of them. The multiplex system means that existing big broadcasters like ITV and Channel 4 are able to control which companies get access to channel space and at what price. This is unacceptable.
I would like to see Ofcom actively managing the TV spectrum and being the gatekeeper for channel operators to get onto Freeview. There should be a fixed price to cover costs and then they should rent slots on the basis of the product being offered. Give the existing public service channels an allocation of space to run a couple of channels but if they want to launch MoreITV3+1USA then they will need to compete for a slot.
Media ownership should also be addressed on satellite and cable too. It cannot be good for the Market that the owner of the biggest pay TV platform in the UK is also a 50+% shareholder in so many of the UK versions of popular channels. Ever wonder why Discovery or History Channel or a dozen other big names don’t go free-to-air and get a higher audience like E4 did? It’s because Sky owns half of them.
Benjamin, I agree with your point about Discovery etc, but one which did go FTA from the outset was abc1, owned by Disney and run via the US network. Problem was it didn’t have first run series and basically wasn’t a success – think the only thing I ever watched on it was repeats of “Moonlighting.” You could also argue that there should be a clear split between broadcast platform providers and channel providers, e.g. splitting Sky One from Sky Broadcast, or the old Flextech channels from Virgin Media, but Murdoch’s influence over the Tories will stop this.
I also think we need to look at giving more broadcast influence to the devolved assemblies / parliaments. It’s silly that the Scottish Government, for example, has direct input over who runs trains in Scotland, but has no say over who gets the Scottish Channel 3 franchises. I’m pretty sure that a Scottish Government-influenced body would not have allowed STV and Grampian to merge in the way they did, decimating a local station which had served NE Scotland for a generation.
Chris, don’t forget the Live Music Bill – I know you oppose it, but it should be in there as a shared manifesto commitment. (I support it, obviously.)
James, the conflict between these areas, which will always be fighting over the same money, is best sorted out within one department rather than becoming an inter-departmental brawl for cash… The department actually makes a lot of sense.
Dave, most of the internet infrastructure is under Vince’s watchful eye – but you’re right about the Sport Minister being involved…
flofflach, you are right that the devolution confusion pervades a lot of cultural policy. In Wales, music education is dramatically underfunded relative to the rest of the UK.
Get competition back into sport, all this everyones a winner and its the taking part that counts is absolute rubbish. Curb the H&S culture in this country, the fastest growing depts in local governement in recent times is EH&S all vying to make their mark. Health & Safety is importatant but its OTT and killing extra-corricular activity.
Spooky to see how many of these proposals have made it into the coalition’s programme for government today!