The Chancellor George Osborne was talking of his plans to cut a further £10 billion from the UK’s annual welfare budget as I drove through rush-hour traffic to Kingston-upon-Thames.
News of his crowd-pleasing speech to the Conservative party conference spouted from the radio as I wondered how such questions might be decided with more accountability to the public.
Just what might UK finances look like if ordinary people had greater say over how much money gets raised in taxes and where to spend it?
Working from back to front – the bogusness of our democracies is that ordinary citizens get nothing like the influence implied by the word “democracy” – which the Ancient Greeks defined as government by the people.
The UK budget process is a case in point, consisting of rounds of closed-door horse trading between government departments and ministers. The latest City-loving Chancellor then waves about a battered red briefcase for the media before delivering some crowd-pleasing stunts at the Dispatch Box to hide the fact that most ordinary people are getting stiffed while status quo money holders carry on swimmingly. Gross over-simplification, of course, but it covers the last 30 years of British government relatively well, save for pre-election sweetener budgets and some of Gordon Brown’s giveaways.
The problem is, ordinary people get not a look in on what is the most important function of elected governments. The same problem occurs at lower tiers of government and let’s not even talk about the European Union.
This clip explains why such an approach can transform local governance, improving its accountability, transparency and the fairness of its revenue raising and spending.
So rather than “bogus” democracy – we get something more like real democracy.
And bad journalism? It’s all journalism that ignores the bogusness of our current governance systems, at every level, which is pretty much all mainstream journalism.
Actor Hugh Grant tells a public rally for media reform how press problems go way beyond Murdoch. Photo by Patrick Chalmers
The crimes and misdemeanours of large sections of the British media were aired by their various victims during a public rally for Media Reform at Westminster Central Hall in central London on Thursday evening. The question on people’s lips was what will be their punishment and whether the ongoing Leveson Inquiry will be able to bring meaningful reforms either to British journalism or the political establishment it pretends to watch over.
Marc Barto and I elbowed our way through the crowds to land a series of video interviews with some of them, though Hugh Grant proved adept at dodging our efforts to engage him. No matter with the likes of former Crimewatch presenter Jacqui Hames and others on hand to give first-hand accounts of their thorough maulings by the media.
Rounding off the evening, Labour MP Tom Watson explained how grassroots pressure for reform will be critical once the inquiry reports later this year, when pressure on MPs to water down proposals is likely to be intense.
We ended our interview series by asking HRW’s Andrea Holley on her organisation’s thinking about the hows and whys of these video fests. Are they preaching to the choir, reaching out to new audiences or bringing real stories to the often-dry and abstract facts and figures?
As well as answering that question, Andrea explains how HRW selects the documentaries it screens and how film makers can pitch their finished stories.
The no-edit interview was shot using a Samsung Galaxy SII smartphone with an audio splitter and a basic microphone following visionOntv’s mobile reporting template. The reason I like the approach so much, and recommend it in the conclusions of my book Fraudcast News as a basic tool for citizen journalists, is because it cuts out so many of the hurdles to getting video news out there quickly.
I’m due to interview Bettina Borgfeld for visionOntv later today to talk about Raising Resistance, a film she co-directed with David Bernet about
the fight of the small farmers of South America against industrial agriculture.
The subject is one close to my heart, I covered a version of it over many years while working for Reuters as EU environment correspondent in Brussels and then again as an independent journalist following the trials of French farmers fighting against genetically modified maize produced by Monsanto and others.
Today’s film depicts this conflict as it plays out in Paraguay, describing the global impact of most of today’s genetic engineering on people and on nature. The film makers describe their documentary as a parable on the suppression of life, the diversity of plants and cultures, and how resistance arises both in people and in nature.
Carlo Augusto Bachschmidt, director of the documentary Black Block, explains how work by independent media helped piece together the story of unprovoked Italian police violence at the G8 2001 summit meeting in Genoa. (Italian with English interpretation).
His film features powerful testimonies by some of the dozens of activists who were savagely beaten by Italian police during a raid on the Diaz school at the G8 meeting. Lena, Niels, Chabi, Mina, Dan, Michael, and Muli recount in painful detail how they went from demonstrating in the streets to what they thought was a safe shelter for the night — the Diaz school on the outskirts of the northern Italian city of Genoa.
Each describes what they experienced that night and in the days that followed. Despite their trauma, the survivors have continued with their activism, in addition to suing the Italian police through the courts.
Bachschmidt says video and still images gathered by independent journalists in Genoa meant the facts of police brutality reached a wider public, painting a far more accurate picture of events than portrayed by the authorities or conventional media.
The idea is to do short videos that can be rapidly uploaded to the internet with minimal hassle, vastly increasing the chances of making media that gets seen. Just the sort of thing needed for covering the likes of the Genoa G8.
Journalist Mark Covell was beaten unconscious by Italian police during the 2001 Genoa G8 summit.
He speaks here about the power of independent media and how independent journalists should buddy up, train and prepare to cover potentially violent demos so as to keep safe.
He was speaking before a screening of Black Block, a documentary about demonstrators attacked in cold blood by Italian riot police. It was shown as part of the Human Rights Watch Festival 2012 in London.
I did the interview with fellow independent journalist Glenn McMahon, who used an iPhone and iRig mic to shoot a no-edit video interview based on the visionOntv mobile phone interview template. The idea is to shoot short videos that can be rapidly uploaded to the internet with minimal hassle, vastly increasing the chances of making media that gets seen.
If you’re interested in the Black Block the film, which I highly recommend, you can get a sense of its shocking story in the following trailer.
Documentary film-maker and photojournalist Mimi Chakarova talks about her film, the Price of Sex, which screened in London this week as part of the Human Rights Watch Festival 2012.
Chakarova describes how it took her four years to persuade some of the East European women who’d been sold into sex slavery to tell their stories on camera. They describe being duped by promises of well-paid jobs abroad into leaving their homes and lives in poor parts of Bulgaria and Moldova.
It’s a brutal tale about how poverty makes young women vulnerable to traffickers’ promises, leading them to become trapped inside the virtual cells of brothels and bars in Athens, Istanbul and Dubai.
“You don’t make a film unless you feel that there’s a possibility to change things,” says Chakarova, who branched into film-making having reached what she felt were the limits of photo journalism.
“It’s depressing subject matter but you have to turn it around,” she said, urging everyone to watch and learn from The Price of Sex. Though the film features only a few cities, she makes clears its stories play out every day on streets around the world.
RT @nickshaxson: More calls for UK to smash secrecy in its tax havens. It can strike down their laws at will, but chooses not to http:// ... 1 month ago
Patrick Chalmers gives an insider's account of our media's complicity with power.
An ex-Reuters reporter, he relates how getting into and out of conventional journalism opened his eyes to the realities of his chosen career.
On the way he found how mainstream media, including his former employer, were far from being the public watchdogs of power they like to pretend. Quite the opposite – the bulk of their work blinds people to their powerlessness in the face of modern politics, at every layer of government.
Yet this is a hopeful story, including a plan for how people can make their own media and lay claim to their political voices.
