One of the great challenges for governments in the 21st century will be to contain the power of global corporations. To say this is not to suggest that multinationals are inherently and invariably wicked; it is merely to observe that power in concentrated form is always dangerous because it is apt to reduce diversity, to squeeze out the regional and local, to stifle dissent and exploit the weak. These things matter even in the manufacture and sale of soft drinks, fast food, leisurewear and accountancy services. They matter all the more in the media industry, the operation of which is so crucial to the health of democracy. Yet the government's enormous Communications Bill, which has just started on its committee stage in the House of Lords, would loosen restrictions on global corporations and sacrifice the public interest to the interests of capital. This is the judgement not of anti-globalisation protesters but of those stalwart new Labour media lords, David Puttnam, Melvyn Bragg and Waheed Alli, who are leading demands for amendments to the bill.
The most important clauses would abolish the requirement for the owners of television companies to be British or EU citizens and ease restrictions on media cross-ownership, so that in future big newspaper proprietors will be able to buy into TV. It has escaped nobody's notice that, in both cases, the most likely beneficiary is Rupert Murdoch, who, despite denials, has long had his eye on Channel 5, and of whose wrath ministers and their spin-doctors live in terror. Mr Murdoch is a US citizen and became one precisely because US law restricts foreign control of American newspapers and broadcasting outlets. Moreover - and importantly, given Mr Murdoch's belief, once expressed to Harold Evans at the Times, that the punters never want more than a brief paragraph about, say, Nicaragua - the proposed new single regulator for the media industry, Ofcom, will be able to water down public service requirements on ITV companies. With Mr Murdoch in control of Channel 5, eating away at audiences and advertising share, one can well imagine the pressures on ITV to shake off obligations to provide regional programming, original drama and serious news.
The dangers of weakening media regulation are apparent in Britain and across the world. Here, the regional structure of ITV, with its diverse, internationally known brands (Anglia for its nature programmes, Yorkshire for its First Tuesday documentaries, and so on) has been virtually destroyed. If the Competition Commission allows the merger of Carlton and Granada to go ahead, all English and Welsh television on the third terrestrial channel will be under the control of a single company, and it is likely that programme-making will be further centralised in Manchester and London.
Mr Murdoch uses cross-subsidy and cross-promotion to weaken his competitors or drive them out of business, as the newspaper price-cutting war and the demise of Sky's solitary satellite rival showed. All his papers consistently and shamelessly rubbish the BBC and campaign against the licence fee, mainly because the BBC is the most important rival to his satellite and digital channels. In the US, Mr Murdoch's Fox News channel was notoriously gung-ho for war in Iraq and there are rumours that its proprietor would like Sky News to follow the same model. Also in the US, the radio giant Clear Channel, which plans to move into Britain, organised pro-war rallies. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi provides a chilling example of how cross-media corporate power can colonise politics, and in effect put a businessman above the law.
We are told that, to compete internationally, Britain needs strong, well-resourced media groups. What nonsense is this? The best British media brand, known and respected throughout the world, is the BBC, to whose news services many Americans turned during the invasion of Iraq in preference to the simplistic bias of their home-grown programmes. The danger now is that a more commercialised and more debased culture, created by a growing influx of cheap and bland American programming, will tempt the BBC further to dilute the quality of its output.
The BBC, for all its faults (bureaucracy, arrogance, over-caution), has a unique ethos of public service that has become part of the ecology of British broadcasting and which influences all other channels in this country. It creates public expectations of how a broadcasting channel should behave and, if the model sometimes seems insufferably high-minded, it is infinitely preferable to nearly every other in the world. This is a non-market institution that actually works; everything possible should be done to protect it.
The great engineers
New Labour's decision to call in Jarvis, the engineering contractor, to help 700 failing English secondary schools, at a cost of £1.9m, sets an interesting precedent. Jarvis, it will be recalled, is at the centre of the police investigation into the Potters Bar rail crash, amid allegations that it failed to maintain the tracks properly. So now there can be no bar to the public sector offering its expertise to private firms. Corus, the troubled steel giant, could benefit from the advice of Islington Council. Enron might have survived if it had had the sense to call in Stephen Byers. And we would all travel by rail with greater peace of mind if we knew that the leaders of the National Union of Teachers were maintaining the tracks. "Would you wish an unqualified surgeon to operate on you?" is the standard rejoinder to anybody who questions the value of exams. To which one may now reply: "It depends on whether he was taught by an engineer."
