One good thing to emerge from the Queen’s Speech

In the spirit of praising best practice when it arises, I feel it incumbent upon me to record that, for once, the BBC’s radio and online reporting of Wednesday’s Queen’s Speech was exemplary in pointing out when the proposed legislation related solely or mainly to England and not the whole of the UK. The news broadcasts I heard on Radio 4 pointed out explicitly that the key measures for schools, the NHS and social care applied to England alone: something quite unprecedented for the BBC. And the summary of the legislative programme on the BBC website indicated for each item which UK nations they related to. E.g. Children, Schools and Families Bill, “Whole bill applies to England. Other parts cover Wales and extends in part to Northern Ireland”; Personal Care at Home Bill, “Applies to England only”; and Health Bill, “guaranteeing cancer patients in England a consultation within two weeks, a free health check for all over-40s and that no-one will have to wait more than 18 months [I think that should read 'weeks'] between a GP referral and hospital treatment”. Well done, BBC!

I can’t comment on the TV news or on other news media, as I didn’t see them. But I was further encouraged yesterday by Radio 4’s reporting on the farcical row that has broken out about the proposals for free personal care, with some Labour MPs complaining they have pre-empted the conclusions of a consultation that ended only this week (a blatant case of electioneering, then). The Radio 4 report, on ‘Today In Parliament’, was prefaced by the mention that the proposals related to England only.

If the BBC can make it clear in this way which parts of the UK the government’s legislative programme relate to, then there’s hope that, come the general election, it will similarly make an effort to point out which of the UK’s nations are affected, and which are not, by the policies the parties present and debate during the election campaign. In any case, I’m keeping a watching brief and will be bashing off further emails of complaint should the occasion arise. I nearly did so the other night, in fact, when I heard a BBC World Service discussion on the work of NICE (the National Institute for Clinical Excellence): the body that decides whether to approve drugs for the NHS in England and Wales based on a cost-benefit analysis. The World Service report failed to mention NICE’s geographical remit, implying that its work related to the whole of the UK; whereas we know that Scotland enjoys better per-capita funding than England for drug treatments and is not under NICE’s thumb. But it was kind of late; and I need to get out more!

I have, however, received a holding reply to my last complaint, about the misreporting of the government’s proposals for ten new nuclear power plants, all but one of which are to be located in England – and none in Scotland (wonder why). So watch this space.

Complaint about BBC coverage of Britain’s new nuclear power stations; and reply regarding the One Show

Below is the text of an email of complaint I sent to the BBC yesterday:

I am complaining about the fact that the BBC’s reporting on the government’s plans for ten new nuclear power stations, announced yesterday, failed to explain why almost all of them (nine) are to be built in England and none in Scotland. This is because the new ’streamlined’ planning regime, brought about by legislation passed in 2008, relates mainly to England, and to Wales only with respect to energy installations and harbours. The same applies to the quango, the Infrastructure Planning Commission, set up to oversee the new planning system.While the reports on BBC radio, TV and online news did indicate that none of the new nuclear plants were to be built in Scotland, they failed completely to explain why. Instead, government spokespersons (e.g. Ed Miliband) were quoted referring to the energy needs of ‘the nation’; and references were made to the IPC and its framework guidance on ‘nationally significant infrastructure’ projects, in such a way as to imply that policy in such matters is being formulated and applied on a consistent UK-wide basis. This is, however, not the case, and the vast majority of the planning framework documents that the IPC is currently formulating will apply to England only; and the one regarding nuclear power under which planning applications for the new plants will be handled relates to England and Wales only.So whereas the UK government does have responsibility for energy strategy across the UK, the system under which it is attempting to drive through controversial developments is largely restricted to England. This is a critical fact that should have been mentioned given the concerns over the environmental impact and safety of nuclear power. Indeed, some of the proposed plants are situated close to major population centres, such as Bradwell in Essex (very close to London) and Oldbury in Gloucestershire (near Bristol). By contrast, Scotland would really have been a much more suitable location for some of these plants given the remoteness of some of its coastline and its greatly inferior population density.

The reason why Scotland is excluded is of course devolution: planning in Scotland is the responsibility of the Scottish Parliament, which is refusing to authorise any new nuclear plants. So the BBC’s lack of rigour in reporting on this issue is another example of its failure to be critical and explicit in making clear whenever UK-government policy applies to England only or mainly, as in this instance. This relates to previous complaints I have made about this more general failing on the part of BBC news coverage, and to a reply I received from Paul Hunter dated 25 October 2009.

By the way, while I’m on the subject, the website for the Infrastructure Planning Commission is a classic example of the way many websites for England-specific government departments or quangos contain very few up-front references to the actual name of the ‘nation’ they’re supposed to be serving. If all you look at are the home page and the general ‘about’ pages, often the only way you could be sure these are UK organisations of any sort is by looking at the web address or by other indications such as language and web-site design. Other classic examples of the genre include the (English) Department of Health and the Department for (English) Children, Schools and Families, whose website proclaims: “The purpose of the Department for Children, Schools and Families is to make this the best place in the world for children and young people to grow up” – ‘this’ being the way they refer to England. I wonder what cyber visitors from other countries make of this shame-faced way of suppressing references to your own country, whereas their government websites plaster the name and symbols of their nations all over the place; contrast the French Health Ministry or the German Environment Ministry. I suppose at least they have the decency not to stick the Union Jack on all the pages and refer to ‘the country’ as Britain on these websites; instead, they avoid explicitly naming the country at all.

Yesterday, I also received a reply to my earlier complaint about an episode of BBC1’s ‘One Show’:

Dear Mr RickardThank you for your e-mail regarding ‘The One Show’ on 28 October and for your comments on the report about proposals to begin giving children career advice at the age of seven..

 

While a Government proposal, limited to England, may have been the topical trigger for this report its focus was the general idea of giving children careers advice at this young age; something which although perhaps not a reality for any part of the UK at the moment the programme felt was an interesting idea to explore.

Ruby Wax set out to look at the wider issues and to gauge reaction to such an idea. This encompassed looking at some of the concerns about children’s aspirations in life which prompted the proposal, as well as the likelihood of people growing up to do the jobs they wanted to do when they were seven years old.

I note however that you would have appreciated some mention of the fact that the Governments proposal is limited to England at the moment and would like to assure you that we’ve registered your comments on our audience log. This is the internal report of audience feedback we compile daily for the programme and senior management within the BBC. This ensures that your points, and all other comments we receive, are circulated and considered across the Corporation.

Thanks again for contacting us.

Regards

Stuart Webb
BBC Complaints
__________________________________________
www.bbc.co.uk/complaints

In essence, this response amounts to dismissing my complaint about the programme’s failure to clarify that the government’s proposal related to England only as a personal preference rather than a substantive criticism that the lack of such an indication was fundamentally misleading: in this instance, perpetuating the ignorance of English viewers that the government’s education policies apply to England only; and, in the case of non-English viewers who are not especially well versed on the effects of devolution, potentially alarming them about something that in fact does not affect them. Note the sheer ignorance and complacency of the sentence, “some mention of the fact that the Governments proposal is limited to England at the moment”: no, it’s not ‘at the moment’, you utter ignoramus – any UK government proposal on these matters can only ever relate to England only, unless there are plans to reverse devolution. Trouble is you can’t reply to these BBC emails, but you have to do a whole new complaint. So this is effectively my response.

I also note that Ruby Wax talked only to people on English streets and English education specialists. Why not go and talk to people in Glasgow or Cardiff if the programme was merely mooting a general idea? Well, that’s because this would make the (intended?) implication that the government’s ideas were relevant to the whole of the UK far more explicit; and hence would make the programme more vulnerable to accusations of misleading inaccuracy when reporting on England-specific affairs.

Clearly, the item was relevant to Britain only in one of the modern meanings of the word ‘Britain’, which is ‘England’. But the One Show is predicated on the lie that there is still just One Nation in political terms.

Oh well, we’ll keep chipping away.

Multi-cultural Britannia

As a kind of neat synthesis of and addendum to my previous three posts, relating to multi-culturalism and the BBC One Show’s failure to say ‘England’ when England is meant, I stumbled across this One Show article about ‘multicultural Roman Britain’.

The report, by black presenter Angellica Bell, focuses on the discovery in York of a fourth-century skull which, an expert explains, must have been that of a black-white mixed-race woman. And not a slave, either; but a wealthy person with a comfortable lifestyle – perhaps the wife of a Roman soldier stationed in the city.

But the bit that I find really hilarious is that the whole report is framed at the beginning by shots of Hadrian’s Wall: the northern frontier of the Roman Empire, and the original border between Caledonia (Scotland) and Roman Britannia. This makes it quite clear that when the report that follows refers to Roman ‘Britain’, it actually means what we – or some of us – now like to call England (and Wales): the territory that constituted the Roman province of Britannia. Later, the report refers to York as a vital northern fortress city for Roman ‘Britain’; but in fact, it was a frontier city only by virtue of the fact that the Britain of that time corresponds to the England of now.

From a single skull, the report extrapolates to a picture of a highly multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan Roman Britannia, which is then explicitly compared with the multi-cultural character of ‘Britain’s’ cities today. But the report has gone out of its way to indicate that the ‘territorial extent’ of that multi-cultural Britain – then as now – is actually England (and Wales). As much as to say that ‘”Britain” has always been multi-cultural, even from Roman times’, i.e. from before the Anglo-Saxon invasions that transformed it temporarily into an apparently mono-cultural and mono-ethnic ‘England’.

And so the ‘multi-cultural Britain’ that has replaced the distinct, homogeneous, national and cultural identity of England under New Labour is projected by the programme back to pre-English times, making it appear somehow more authentic and historically rooted than the English tribe itself – now seen as just one of the many ethnic groups that have migrated to ‘Britain’ over the centuries and continue to do so. And yet what is referenced by the term ‘multi-cultural Britain’ is England only.

No wonder the One Show can’t seem to be able to say ‘England’ in relation to present-day English matters: for them, it seems, the country has only ever been ‘Britain’.

Email of complaint to the BBC over tonight’s One Show

Below is the text of an email of complaint I’ve just sent to the BBC regarding tonight’s One Show programme on BBC1:

“I am complaining that the feature in tonight’s One Show about the government’s proposals to provide elementary careers advice to seven-year-olds in schools completely failed to clarify that the proposals affect England only. Schoolchildren in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will not have such ridiculously premature careers guidance imposed upon them; but this was not mentioned. Nor was it indicated that the direct activities of the ‘National’ Children’s Bureau (a name implying UK-wide responsibilities), whose spokesperson was interviewed in the feature, relate to England only.

“The subject matter of this specific complaint relates to a general complaint about the failure of the BBC to indicate when policy matters being discussed relate to England only, for which I received a reply from Paul Hunter only this week. Evidently, this is an endemic issue at the BBC.”

 

The reply to my previous complaint to which tonight’s email referred was the Corporation’s final response to my Open Letter to the BBC calling on them to ensure that English policy matters are clearly indicated as such during coverage of the forthcoming general election. It read as follows:

 

"Dear Mr Rickard

"Thank you for your recent e-mail.  Please accept our apologies for the
delay in replying.  We know our correspondents appreciate a quick response
and we are sorry you have had to wait on this occasion.

"I must explain that your original complaint contained a link to your open
letter, as featured on an external website.  However as this was you own
material and published on an external website, we aren't obliged to open
the link.

"Despite this, I can assure you that we have noted your comments on this
issue and I fully appreciate that you feel strongly about this matter.
Therefore I would like to assure you that we have registered your comments
on our audience log. This is the internal report of audience feedback which
we compile daily for all programme makers and commissioning executives
within the BBC, and also their senior management. It ensures that your
points, and all other comments we receive, are circulated and considered
across the BBC.

"Thanks again for taking the time to contact us with your views.

"Regards

"Paul Hunter
BBC Complaints"
__________________________________________
www.bbc.co.uk/complaints

I’m going to keep on sending these complaints Paul Hunter’s way from now on. Feel free to do the same!

Patients Association report on mistreatment of vulnerable patients in the NHS: why hide its England-only character?

The Patients Association – a lobby group that looks after NHS patients’ concerns and rights in England and Wales – yesterday published a shocking report containing 16 case studies of the mistreatment and neglect of elderly and vulnerable patients in NHS hospitals.

It probably won’t surprise my readers to learn that all the case studies in question related to English hospitals. However, this fact appeared to elude the media yesterday. At one point, on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, it was stated that the case studies were drawn from “across the UK”, wording that was reiterated on the BBC website. Later in the programme, in the news headlines, they did indicate that all 16 case studies involved the experiences of English patients only, while clarifying that people from throughout the UK had contacted the Patients Association with similar examples of neglect. Another article on the BBC website does make this explicit while failing to make clear that not only the examples of abuses but the whole objective and scope of the report are to highlight instances of malpractice in England, and to call on the Department of Health (England) and the Care Quality Commission (the quango that looks after the quality of health- and social care in England) to take action.

Sky News are no better. The report on their website equally makes no mention of the England-only content and purpose of the Patients Association report. The Sky News web page contains a video in which agony aunt Claire Rayner, the president of the Association, asserts that many of the problems derive from the government’s obsession with targets, which force NHS staff to regard patients as mere units and as boxes to tick off rather than real people needing time, care and attention. Of course, this government-driven target culture, and the innumerable targets themselves, affect the English NHS only. They do things differently in the devolved NHS’s.

(Incidentally, I drew the failure of the Sky News report to mention the England-only nature of the story to the attention of their person in charge of dealing with viewer concerns, with whom I’ve been having an email dialogue following on from an open letter to the BBC that I posted on English Parliament Online and drew to Sky News’ attention. I received an initial response from the Sky News executive in question, in which he maintained that Sky does always take care to indicate when a political story relates to England only. I’ve since drawn to his attention two instances relating to the English NHS – including the present one – where this has manifestly not been the case; but I have yet to hear back from him.)

One of the reasons why the lazy media got it wrong – again – is that the Patients Association report does not make it explicit at any point that its observations and recommendations relate to England only. But they do affect only England: as I said, all the case studies concern events that took place in England; and the report’s call to action is addressed only to the authorities that deal with the English NHS. This absence of explicit references to England is in fact a characteristic of all the Patient Association’s communications and campaigns. Indeed, looking at its website, you’d be hard put to work out that the Association’s active campaigning is limited to England and Wales, and then in the latter country only in instances relating to common English and Welsh law. However, reading between the lines, all of the Association’s campaigns dealing with issues of health-care delivery, and the way in which they’re described on the website (with references to ‘the government’ and the Department of Health (England)), emerge as England-specific: GP services, care of older people, health-care-associated infections, dentistry and mixed-sex wards. I then discovered that there is a separate Scotland Patients Association – not affiliated to the (England and Wales) Patient Association – that deals with the corresponding issues for the Scottish NHS.

Why does the Patients Association (England and Wales) appear to go out of its way to conceal the in fact mostly England-specific nature of its activities? This seems in part to be an issue of funding. The PA reported that, after its report was publicised in the media yesterday, it had been “inundated by hundreds of emails and calls from patients across the country contacting us to offer their support and relate their own experiences of poor care”. This will in effect have served as a massive membership drive, and the Patients Association welcomes members (and corresponding financial contributions) from across the UK. It was therefore important for the Association to emphasise that their report deals with issues of concern to people across the UK, which the rush of offers of support and information on further abuses yesterday confirmed. Also, to be fair, the PA does provide information on how to complain about, and seek legal redress for, poor NHS treatment in each of the UK’s nations. But in terms of campaigning for action and change, the Patients Association’s activities are largely limited to England. The Association is in effect soliciting financial support from Scottish and Northern Irish citizens that would probably be more effectively directed to their own patients’ associations, which can actually do something about issues in those countries.

A similar situation applies to corporate sponsorship. The Patients Association’s list of corporate sponsors contains some impressive names; e.g. AstraZeneca, Denplan, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, 3M, Napp Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer and Virgin Healthcare. Compare these with the sponsors of the Scottish Association: Arnold Clark, Barrhead Travel, It’s so Easy! Travel Insurance, Lloyds Pharmacy, Mobility Scotland, ScotWest Credit Union, Ross Harper Solicitors and Vision Call – Eye Care Home Services. Hardly as prestigious nor, one suspects, as remunerative! The Patients Association is clearly passing itself off as the ‘British’ association in order to secure the backing of such global blue-chip enterprises. Does it fear that if it more accurately designated itself as the Patients Association for England and Wales, it would lose some of these sponsors and the revenue they bring, and would have to rely on more ‘parochial’ English names?

On one level, I am reluctant to criticise the Association for this, as it is clearly important that it maximises its income in order to act as an effective advocate for English and Welsh NHS patients. However, is this advocacy not itself severely impaired and limited by the Association’s almost total avoidance of references to England, or to England and Wales, in the campaign material it puts out? Referring to issues relating to health-care delivery in England without any reference to England itself, as if they were issues of relevance to the whole of the UK, insulates the Association’s critiques and prevents them from becoming a truly powerful cross-UK analysis involving comparisons between practices, patient satisfaction and funding in each of the UK’s health services. It is as if the Association does not want in any way to connect its criticisms of bad practice in England with the politics of devolution, and of health-care funding and provision in the rest of the UK. But isn’t it vitally important to compare the experience of patients in England with that in Scotland or Wales; and if they’re doing things better in those countries, what can we in England learn from them – and do we need to direct more funding into improving the situation in England, given that per-capita expenditure on health care in England lags that in the other UK nations?

But clearly, the Patients Association has decided to avoid getting enmeshed in such political controversies. It would rather carry on working away in its own little bubble: drawing its concerns to the Department of Health (England) and the (English) Care Quality Commission without embarrassing either of these bodies by pointing out to the public that they’re letting England down compared with the corresponding bodies in the other UK countries that are more focused on the needs of their countrymen and -women. After all, rock the boat too much, and you could put off the corporate sponsors; and go on about England too much, and you could put off the individual members from Scotland and Northern Ireland.

But is it possible for the Patients Association to help bring about real improvements to the care provided to English NHS patients if the Association itself doesn’t care enough about England to mention her by name?

Email of complaint to the Today programme on coverage of the ‘British NHS’ debate

Just sent the Today programme this email:

Do you think that Today and the BBC in general could take a bit more care to differentiate between what relates to the NHS across Britain as a whole and what is specific to England? In none of the discussion anywhere in the BBC yesterday did anyone point out that the party spokespersons’ competence related only to the English NHS, and that many of the discussion points concerning NHS funding and organisation were relevant to England only.

Another example: the discussion on this morning’s programme comparing US and British attitudes to each other’s health-care systems. The ‘British’ expert was in fact an English health-care practitioner and most of his points related to England only; e.g. NICE, the two-week cancer pledge, the statistics on waiting lists, etc.

Please when talking about the English NHS, call it as such. For further discussion on this, see my blog post: http://britologywatch.wordpress.com/2009/08/15/the-conservatives-are-the-%e2%80%9cparty-of-the-nhs%e2%80%9d-but-which-one/.

Government response to swine flu: over-complicated by devolution?

In media coverage yesterday of the change in the official response to swine flu from ‘containment’ to ‘treatment’, I was struck by the usual ambiguity as to whether the information provided related to England only or the whole of the UK. For instance, in the BBC News website’s report, it stated: “Andy Burnham, the health secretary in England, said: ‘The national focus will be on treating the increasing numbers affected by swine flu. Cases are doubling every week and on this trend we could see over 100,000 cases per day by the end of August’”. Pleasing that the BBC correctly characterises Andy Burnham as the English health secretary; but then, is the “national focus” one for England only or for the whole of the UK? Probably the latter, as the 100,000 cases per day figure was being talked of as the UK-wide total. But all the same, this got me wondering: how is the response to swine flu being co-ordinated – if at all – between the UK government and the devolved administrations, with their separate responsibilities for health care? And is the apparent failure of the containment strategy in part a consequence of different approaches having been adopted in the different UK nations?

Unlike the radio and TV coverage, the BBC website article did report that, “Scottish Health Secretary Nicola Sturgeon announced similar changes to the flu strategy at a simultaneous briefing in Edinburgh”. So it appeared that there is a single UK-wide strategy and a co-ordinated response across the different health departments. This was even more apparent when I visited the Department of Health [England]’s and the Scottish Government’s websites and read their remarkably similar statements on the change in tactics.

After much further investigation, it turns out that the Department of Health [England] has retained the responsibility for drawing up the overall UK strategy for dealing with flu pandemics, along with the lead role in co-ordinating the operational response to any actual outbreak; although the devolved administrations are supposed to put in place their own NHS and civil-contingency systems and resources for responding to any crisis – in line with the UK plan.

As the government’s national framework document puts it: “A ministerial committee (MISC 32), comprising ministers from across central government departments and the devolved administrations, oversees and coordinates national preparations for an influenza pandemic”. Then, in the event of the World Health Organisation declaring that a pandemic has reached phase 4 or higher (currently, we’re on phase 6 for swine flu), the following happens: “the Government’s dedicated crisis management mechanism – the Civil Contingencies Committee (CCC) – [is] activated in support of the Department of Health. The CCC will direct central government activities, coordinate the wider response, make key strategic and tactical decisions on the countermeasures required and determine national priorities. The CCC will be guided by input from central departments and agencies and from local responders through Regional [English] Civil Contingencies Committees (RCCCs) and the devolved administrations. It will work with the national News Coordination Centre to maintain public confidence [i.e. manage the news]“.

So we’re currently in a situation where a nebulous Civil Contingencies Committee is co-ordinating the response UK-wide, in keeping with a pre-established plan, and managing the news in such a way as to maintain morale. No wonder that the English-UK and devolved health departments appeared yesterday to be singing perfectly from the same hymn sheet in their media pronouncements in a display of quite exceptional synchronisation and unity! And that, despite the imminent prospect of 100,000 new cases of swine flu per week, we’re being blandly reassured that we’re now moving in a controlled, pre-planned way from containment to ‘treatment’ – implying that it can be successfully ‘treated’ in the vast majority of cases; whereas, in reality, we’re all just desperately praying that it doesn’t suddenly become much more virulent or resistant to Tamiflu.

But, as I said above, one can’t help wondering whether the failure of the containment approach (surely, prevention is better than cure?) is partly the result of the wheels of co-ordination between the UK central government and the devolved administrations not running as smoothly as yesterday’s united front would have us believe. If you read the national framework document, the sheer number of organisations – international, national-UK, ‘regional’ (English), devolved and local – that are involved in formulating strategies and co-ordinating the response is mind-boggling. Amid this already hugely complicated landscape the fact that the NHS and civil-contingency measures are replicated with slight variations in each of the devolved nations and the ‘English regions’ surely cannot help to streamline processes and ensure that everybody knows what everybody else in the chain of command is supposed to be doing.

Take a look at the section that deals with the different organisational elements involved in each of the devolved administrations (pages 49 to 52). This is a masterpiece of bureacracy-speak, and of bureacracy full stop, with departments, committees, sub-committees, groups, sub-groups, directors, trusts, agencies, directorates, etc. etc. all having a role to play. I can’t prove that having these complicated and distinct organisational schemes in each of the devolved countries has contributed to the ineffectiveness of the containment measures; but they surely cannot help. And it is the case that Scotland is one of the ‘hotspots’ of the disease, in part – allegedly – because no Scottish-Government advice for people to stop travelling to Mexico was given out in the early stages of the outbreak.

But, for the time being, we are supposed to be resting assured that all the UK health departments are acting perfectly in concert according to a well-structured plan. But the only reason they’re able to both act in this way, and be on message to such an extent, is that their actions are being centrally directed by a shadowy Whitehall committee, which is also driving the media communications in such a way as to reassure the populace that ‘the government’ has everything under control.

And one of the principal, and well-tried, weapons of media misinformation at the fingertips of the national ‘News Coordination Centre’ is to imply – to gullible people in England, at least – that everything forms part of a homogeneous UK-wide health-care and emergency-response system. Well, the plan may be UK-wide – and the operational direction currently is, too, now we’re in an advanced phase of the pandemic – but the delivery certainly is not.

The BBC gets it right: perhaps the nagging is working!

Just spotted this on the BBC news website, writing about Brown’s ‘Building England’s Britain’s Future’ vision statement that is due to be inflicted on us this afternoon:

“The policy document being unveiled by Mr Brown in the House of Commons at 1530 BST is called ‘Building Britain’s future’ – although many of the proposals are thought to relate to England only as a result of devolution in areas such as health and education.”

By Jove, I think they’ve got it! Perhaps all the nagging is finally paying off. But mustn’t speak too soon: let’s see how the TV and radio cover it later on.

The World At One concedes they were wrong

Got a reply from Jamie Angus, the editor of Radio Four’s World At One programme, to my complaint about an article on Friday that completely omitted to mention that the government’s proposed reforms of literacy and numeracy teaching in primary schools related to England only (see previous post):

“David you are absolutely right. The item in the news bulletin mentioned
this was England-only, but we should have mentioned it again in the
interviews that followed later in the programme. Apologies for getting
this wrong.”

Changes to teaching of literacy and numeracy in primary schools (in England)

Here’s a note of complaint I sent to the BBC Radio Four World at One programme yesterday:

“I would like to complain about the article on today’s programme concerning the government’s plans to hand responsibility for achieving targets on English and maths in primary schools to local authorities.

“Not once in the entire article, including the interview with the Secretary of State, was it mentioned that these changes relate to England only. Granted, many of your listeners are well informed about devolution; but there must have been many thousands who were not aware that the current system and the government’s proposals affect only English schools.

“It is a dereliction of your duty to contextualise the news not to have indicated this. Most listeners in the devolved nations will probably have realised the article didn’t concern them; so it was insulting to them, too, to pretend that this was a UK story. Unless the default ‘nation’ for domestic policy stories is in fact England, meaning you’d only have to spell it out if it was a genuine UK-wide report. Which is it?”

This matters because the government is obviously trying to make political capital out of this U-turn and adoption of Tory policy ahead of the next general election. If listeners are made aware that the existing and proposed policies affect England only, this invites comparison with Scotland and Wales, which have already abandoned ‘central-government’ control over teaching methods. The plans to ‘localise’ much of education policy – in England – were even referred to at one point as a ‘devolution’.

So in England, we’ve had to put up with an authoritarian, rigid form of control from Westminster for the duration of the Labour government, whereas in Scotland and Wales, they’ve already been able to develop strategies that hand more responsibility over to teachers, because of devolution. Now we’re getting our own devolution of primary school teaching in England; but this is devolution down to local not national level. But, by omitting to reference the England-only character of the government’s move, the impression is created that a UK-wide policy change is being carried out. The government thereby earns kudos for making a long-overdue improvement but avoids awkward questions about why they insisted on a methodology for England that had already been abandoned in the rest of the UK.

And they also avoid questions about the democratic legitimacy of their power to legislate on English education only without a specific mandate from the English people. Instead, the very existence of any national-English level at which this policy could be examined, decided upon and implemented is circumvented by making out that this is a programme of UK-wide localisation, instead of an England-only policy that lacks the authority and national vision of the policies in Scotland and Wales.