A return for my occasional series 🙂
Emergency Exit Fail: have you ever felt like this?
An article about Holyrood TV could apply to the EP, I reckon. There is something of a paradox, with lots of talk about openness and transparency, but little interest in such channels. Why should that be? Is it in the execution, or the principle?
Most likely, you will not feel culturally enriched or in any other way transfigured for having watched events from the Holyrood parliament on a live internet feed. Nor will you, in years to come, remember where you were when you heard the news, revealed last week, that these proceedings receive only 7,000 hits per month. Yet this is about 5,000 more than the entire number of people who watched Kirsty Wark’s $1m docudrama about the making of the Scottish parliament when it was first released.
And if you have ever, by chance, watched the Welsh parliament unfolding you may feel that Holyrood TV, in comparison, is being directed by Quentin Tarantino. Unsurprisingly, such a paltry number of viewers has led to loud calls for the service to be discontinued.
Yet this would be an unwise course of action and betrays an ignorance of what Holyrood TV is for. There are many countries where an unaccountable executive and corrupt judiciary daily subvert democracy. For these enslaved people the existence of a kingdom where politicians and their actions are scrutinised daily on the internet may feel like the land of milk and honey.
That is not to suggest though, that live coverage of Holyrood cannot be improved. Indeed, perhaps what is required is for coverage of parliamentary debates to be broken up with little programmes that show our elected representatives in a more human light and make the business of politics more accessible to the punter in the street and the chiel on the croft.
A Guardian editorial on the shift in British diplomacy makes some interesting points about the UK’s EU policy:
A fairer and more transparent way to promote UK business interests is by influencing and enforcing global trade rules through multilateral institutions. That means a closer relationship with the European Union. Britain’s EU partners are relieved that the more rampant strain of Tory hostility to Brussels is not reflected in government policy. Mr Hague, flanked by the usefully polyglot Nick Clegg, has charmed European audiences.
But civil neighbourliness is not the same as constructive engagement. For most of this year the eurozone has been in crisis. This is a problem of existential proportions for the UK’s most important trading alliance, and yet the government has said nothing of substance about it. Many Tories feel smug at having opposed UK membership of the single currency; some Lib Dems are abashed at having advocated it. That might make it an awkward topic within the coalition, but it doesn’t erase the fact that Britain lacks a coherent European policy.