Thoughtland

PK column in The National: This is how shows like Jeremy Vine's feed social media

By Pat Kane. First published on JUNE 29TH, 2019

BELIEVE me, I know all about morning television. The soft furnishings, the militantly pleasing colours, your face literally aching from its permanent smile. The researchers chopping away at your massively subtle perspective (book/politics/album), until it fits their news grid for the morning.

The twitchy alertness of the news presenters, caffeinated out of their gourds, trying to balance journalistic rigour with holiday-camp bonhomie. The green room collisions, whether it be with basketball players, misery memoirists, urban gardeners. Or some unidentifiable reality TV star, sleek as a seal.

PK column in The National: Event TV is what I’d call ‘engagism’ – and a big part of modern life

By Pat Kane. First Published on MAY 11TH, 2019

WHAT makes “Event TV” an event is that it’s not really escapism. It’s almost, to coin a phrase, engagism. Something in the storyline, however formulaic and recognisable, is meshing with our deeper collective anxieties.

Showmakers might well aspire to that moment in their writing – but it takes the public to complete the circuit.

As a respite from the shrapnel of nationality politics, I’ve found myself wrapped up in two “event” TV moments recently.

PK column in The National: My review of The Nine's first week: Beamed in from a parallel universe

By Pat Kane. First published on MARCH 2ND, 2019

THE best thing for me about BBC Scotland's The Nine, after watching three of its five episodes in its initial week, is its opening title sequence.

That sounds dismissive, but it isn’t. When Channel 4 News opens up its swirling graphics and toots that trumpet line, you know that Jon Snow and his colleagues are about to deliver their cool, liberal take on the day’s news. Good: that’s why you’re here.

PK column in The National: In praise of Laurel and Hardy, a pair of comic geniuses who lit up my childhood

By Pat Kane. First published on JANUARY 12TH, 2019

IT’S a long, high set of public steps, and the piano crate is hurtling down to the bottom of them, for about the fifth time. Two men, in work clothes and bowler hats, look down – the fat one appalled, the thin one (as ever) dreamily confused.

Elbows out, they bustle to the bottom, and try again to deliver the goods. By this time, you doubt they’ll ever manage it.

PK column in The National: It's time to ask some serious questions ... about the BBC's Question Time

By Pat Kane. First published on OCTOBER 13TH, 2018

THE tweets went round, a little less desultory than usual: “I suppose this seems like a BBC Question Time (#bbcqt) I might watch this week.” And indeed, Thursday’s show – its cast-list scattered all over the HolyroodParliament chamber – looked as if it might rub cliches together vigorously enough to catch some flame.

A strangulated editor of the Spectator, a Duracell-powered young Scots Tory, the near-papal Michael Russell, a Celebrity Who’s Clearly Getting Out Of Here, and Val McDermid (representing literature and humans). Plus a “diverse” audience which we now know is carefully assembled by an “audience producer” (with equally carefully placed “star turns”, in case the pabulum threatens to choke us all). Haud me back.

PK column in The National: Changed days from when Monty Python were the only circus in town

By Pat Kane. First published on JULY 14TH, 2018

THE other day I watched John Cleese – the head of the comedy institution known as Monty Python – announce on Newsnight that he was leaving Britain, because of the “awfulness” of Brexit and the British press.

Cleese harrumphed away about “friendly races” and “I only lived here two weeks last year”, sounding sadly like one of the bumptious blimps he used to satirise. The backdrop on Newsnight was a tidily animated tumble of various Pythonesque symbols: random legs, flying fish, antique pointing hands, coconuts, an old TV.

All too comfortable. Or maybe a bit pitiful. Much of the original Monty Python was about taking such TV talk show moments – those mainstream framings that attempt to make reality stable and sensible – and tearing them to pieces. (The closest we got on Newsnight was Cleese clumsily knocking his pin mike off, with the interviewer, Emily Maitlis, scrambling to fix it.)

But as I watched, a realisation started burning its way to the surface. Monty Python shines a weirdly illustrative light on the coming Brexitannic era. I took myself to Netflix this week, and watched their first series. From Python’s beginnings in 1969, the continuities with the present are startling – and the prophesies sometimes even more so.

I mean, let’s just begin with Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson. Watching these two must be odd for the remaining Pythons, They would seem to be carbon copies of the kinds of stiff-necked (or bumblingly eccentric) members of the ruling class the satirists thought they were delegitimating in the 1960s and 70s (with sketches such as “Upper Class Twit of the Year”). Is this a sign that Brexit heralds a reversion to the power structures of 40 years ago? Wait: it may be subtler and stranger than that.

The Pythons were educated in the same Oxbridge circumstances as their targets. So much of the early humour involves showing off their own intellectual assets, while at the same time subverting them with popular culture.

Take the Philosophers’ Football Match (with Marx on the left wing, Nietzsche on the right, Wittgenstein all over the place). Or their endless pisstakes of pretentious arts shows. Or Terry Gilliam’s cut-out animations, with Botticellis dismembering themselves and doing crazy dances.

The creepy thing to consider is whether our current Anglo-American overlords are actually self-consciously Pythonesque in their strategies, rather than being the dumb targets of satire.

When Rees-Mogg said the current Brexit is “the greatest vassalage since King John paid homage to Phillip II at Le Goulet in 1200”, it could easily have been a line in a Python sketch (spoken by someone in a suit of armour, holding a rubber chicken).

Yet the true horror may not be that Mogg is being authentic, and that the upper class has returned with a vengeance. It’s more that he’s consciously cultivating an eccentricity that cuts through the modern media maelstrom.

That is, he is as concerned with his affect – the emotional impact he makes, his sheer memorability – as his effect. As Mogg is third in the polls among Tory Party members for potential leader, it shows that something must be working.

Boris Johnson has parlayed the same self-satirical routine for decades (what Python sketch could beat him sticking his mayoral legs out of his flying fox harness, waving a paper Union Jack?).

However, Johnson’s schtick currently seems to be palling, as ministerial office has revealed his laziness and limitations (a well-timed Cicero or Churchill quote doesn’t get you out of geopolitical trouble). But there is an elite-right strategy dimly visible here. As Trump stomps around the world stage, dropping wise-guy logic bombs everywhere, sucking all the media attention to whatever issue he decides to frame, you come to a queasy conclusion. These figures are learning from the satirists – much more than they might fear their tongues.

The theory seems to be: If you can crowd the electorate’s mental reality with as many bewildering and taboo-breaking stances as possible, you can exhaust them enough so that they’ll respond gratefully to the one clear offer you make.

This policy was trialled early in the Vladimir Putin administration by his advisor Vladislav Surkov. Surkov was educated as a theatre director, with a particular love of surrealism. This he decided to apply to the art of political propaganda itself.

As the Russian writer Peter Pomerantsev puts it, under Surkov’s control, “the stage was always changing: a dictatorship in the morning, a democracy at lunch, an oligarchy by suppertime. While backstage, oil companies are expropriated, journalists killed, billions siphoned away”.

Surkov was “at the centre of the show, sponsoring nationalist skinheads one moment, backing human rights groups the next”, continues Pomerantsev. “It’s a strategy of power based on keeping any opposition there may be constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it’s indefinable”.

This strategy also sounds, to be honest, like a standard Python episode. There’s a sketch in series one, episode five, where a management training interviewee’s sense of normality is completely ripped apart by Cleese’s artful mix of nonsense and authority. It’s more like a harsh psychological experiment than a comedy moment. But it also anticipates the daily surrealism of our current affairs.

So never mind Norwegian blues pining for the fjords. Should we be pining for a new wave of Monty Pythons? But given the deliberate reality-bending already deployed by these oligarchs, how extreme would they have to be?

Chris Morris (with The Day Today and Brass Eye), our own Frankie Boyle, and Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror are probably the only attempts that have gotten anywhere near the requisite intensity. And after Brooker’s pig-meets- prime-minister episode was outdone by David Cameron’s own porcine explorations, the writer was moved to redefine his work as “a documentary series”.

But until we figure out how to disconnect from this brain-seizing spectacle (Scots: there is a democratic device for this in your toolbox), we can still grimly enjoy the Pythons’ capacity for prophecy. If you google “Python” and “Brexit”, the mashed-up video remakes are endless.

Particularly popular is the scene from their movie Life of Brian, where the Judean People’s Front (or is it The People’s Front of Judea?) ask “whatever has the EU” (substituting for Rome) “ever done for us?”. Cue the list of 57% of its trade, environmental and workplace regulations, massive infrastructure investment …

There’s also many droll online comparisons with Monty Python and the Holy Grail. An EU official compares Brexiteers to the movie’s Black Knight – “who, after being defeated terribly and having all his limbs cut off, says to his opponent ‘let’s call it a draw’.”

You can even find an entire mini-film called Teresa May and the Holy Grail. Her face is digitally mapped on to King Arthur’s, saying desperately: “Nothing has changed! Nothing has changed!”

All fun and games, as the phrase has it — until someone loses an eye. And that may be, metaphorically at least, the right strategy. There is a Cleese character in the Kilimanjaro explorer sketch (series one, episode nine), who has to put his hand over one eye to stop seeing double. Indy-minded Scots may have to do the same.

By which I mean that we block out the Brexitannic spectacle (or Trump’s Caligularity) and train our remaining eye on the Scottish prize.

It’ll be less absorbing, perhaps, but the reality distortion game is huge these days: it’s not just Monty Python and the satirists who are flying circuses around.

Scots should start to address the issue of how we define, and thus act, on our own desired reality. Because that’s what everyone else is up to.

You can watch the first series of Monty Python on Netflix

PK column in The National: Mark Millar's superheroes offer escape from a world of real uncertainty

By Pat Kane. First published on NOVEMBER 11TH, 2017

ACROSS from my mum’s house in Coatbridge, on the crest of the Blair Road, an archway of superheroes scrapes the sky (well, nearly). Wrought in the kind of iron railing my grandfather Kane used to hammer out in his Monklands blacksmiths, and surmounting the entrance to the old commercial canal, Captain Coatbridge raises her arms in flight, flanked by two other female exceptionals.

Underneath there are a few granite blocks, rooted there for the ages, and carved with what look like comic strip action words. These turn out to be, delightfully, “Dunt!”, “Scud!” and “Skelp!”

PK column in The National: Still Game is still funny – and captures exactly what it means to be Scottish

By Pat Kane. First published on AUGUST 5TH, 2017

IS Scotland different? Well, here’s one indicator. The most watched BBC show north of the Border in 2016 was the geriatric comedy Still Game. Its most watched episode matched the numbers for Andy Murray’s Wimbeldon final last July.

It’s a good shake-up to the Scottish cultural elites, myself included, who might lazily bemoan the absence of HBO or Danish TV style dramas coming from BBC Scotland. I’ve been an occasional watcher, but I sat down over the last few days to watch the chart-topping seventh series.

It is easy to report that Still Game is as beautifully wrought as any other leading Scottish artwork, in any other genre.

PK column in The National: Why the Big Yin deserves big, big love as Billy Connolly fades from our sight

By Pat Kane. First published on MAY 20TH, 2017

HE looked like a wise, hippy lion — but very still, nothing spontaneous, other than the occasional tremor. Earlier this week, Billy Connolly was beamed in from beachside in Florida, sporting a tropical shirt somewhere between very expensive and complete piss-take, as he received a lifetime achievement gong.

He fingered the extremely ugly glass ornament with great care, the eyes fully alive to the absurdity of this and many, many other situations. But his words faltered and wandered just a bit too often; there was a helpful edit midway, for a man who could once stream consciousness at will, never mind stream video. His farewell was wee, quiet and distant.

PK column in The National: Let’s all channel our thoughts on what we want to see on the BBC's new Scottish platform

By Pat Kane. First published on FEBRUARY 25TH, 2017

‘ALL things are possible. But happen less and less”. It’s always been a sore line from Deacon Blue’s Fergus Sings The Blues – a shot straight to the heart of our national miserabilism.

But the new BBC Scotland channel is something of a triumph for those who steadily believe things can happen more and more in Scotland, even short of our necessary statehood.

PK column in The National: Are we ready for the space-time shift of having a female Doctor?

By Pat Kane. First published on FEBRUARY 18TH, 2017

SO the bookies say Tilda Swinton, our resident White Witch of Nairn, leads the betting on who will become the new Doctor Who.

For this viewer – best described as a brooding former fan – the prospects of this are instantly pleasing. First, there’s the scene where the reincarnated Doctor starts to gingerly lay hands on his (now, hopefully, her) new form.

For connoisseurs of those moments when TV captures a moment of social change, there are great possibilities here.

PK column in The National: Why serious stuff still demands a sense of humour

By Pat Kane. First published on FEBRUARY 4TH, 2017

SO if you’re going to prank Donald Trump by chucking swastika-covered golfballs at him, as he opens one of his tremendous courses, you should do it at Trump Turnberry.

According to the comedian Simon Brodkin, whose stage name is Lee Nelson and who perpetrated said stunt last June, he was slumped in custody when a Scottish sergeant noted: “You’re that guy”.

PK column in The National: Is genealogy the anchor we crave in a troubled world?

By Pat Kane. First published on NOVEMBER 19TH, 2016

‘WHO do you think you are?” No, don’t worry – this isn’t an angry quote from a Channel Four interview conducted in the heart of Trumpland (or for that matter, Leavetown).

Readers of the Radio Times will recognise it as this week’s front cover headline, heralding the return of the BBC’s successful family history show. Inside, we discover Eastenders’ Danny Dyer is a distant relative of William the Conquerer, Edward III and Oliver Cromwell. Well, thanks for that.

The National column: Isn’t it time the BBC started taking Scotland seriously?

My Saturday column in The National, dated August 29th, 2015 (online version). All shares and comments welcomed. Note: ***response to social media criticism of the column, below fold at end of the piece. 

Isn’t it time the BBC started taking Scotland seriously?

Pat Kane for The National

THE First Minister took the stage at the Edinburgh Television Festival on Thursday, and sought to insert a new Scots cog in the grinding wheels of the BBC’s Charter Review.

Not easy. Between Alex Salmond and the BBC’s Nick Robinson bumping chests like silverbacks, and Armando Iannucci hymning the “British soft power” of public broadcasting in his Mactaggart lecture, there’s not much media-space left for calm, detailed reform proposals from Scotland.

Yet it’s worth putting Sturgeon’s plan – essentially one more public TV station, and one more public radio station in Scotland, with an implicit argument that the BBC as a whole should move to a federal structure – in an obvious European context.

 The best example is Germany’s system of federalised TV stations. Do a five-minute Wikipedia search on public broadcasters WDR (serving the state of North-Rhine Westphalia), BR (serving the state of Bavaria) and HR (serving Hesse) – then go to their programming pages.

With a population of six million, Hesse has six public radio stations (digital and analogue); the other two lander (between two to three times more populous than Scotland) have 10 each. Each has at least one public broadcast TV channel, and also contribute material to German national (and international) TV.

Whatever way you want to cut that proportionately – and even accepting Germany’s greater prosperity and taxes – there is clearly room, and precedent, for the very basic expansion of Scottish public media services proposed by the Scottish Government.

With BBC3 closing down, we have the broadcast spectrum available. Even accepting budget constraints, surely a merging of BBC Alba with a new Scottish channel is doable? *** And doesn’t it make blinding sense to separate out BBC Radio Scotland into two channels – one for music and sport, one for news, discussion and features – rather than the maddening tone-and-mood changes you hear in a day’s listening?

But here we come to the content question, so lyrically raised by two archetypal ScotLab representatives over the last 24 hours. On STV’s Scotland Tonight on Thursday, Ken Mackintosh MSP asked, with incredulity in his voice, what we would put on an all-Scottish channel – how would it be filled? Just with Scottish stuff?

And on the BBC, Iain Martin MP reminded us that, of course, Scots must have utterly unimpeded access to baking, dancing and time-travelling programmes from the BBC every Saturday night. Otherwise, naturally, a collective nervous breakdown.

We went round the houses on Martin’s point ad nauseaum during the indyref. One look at the average TV diet in Ireland, in a multi-channel and multi-platform age, should answer those anxieties. But Mackintosh’s mild derision over how a Scots TV channel could even be programmed – displaying all the sensitivity to Scottish national ambition so notable in recent ScotLab leadership – is worth a brief answer.

Only one short strapline would be required for a separate and new BBC Scotland TV channel: Taking Scotland Seriously. And that means, by implication, taking more time and going into more depth with Scottish affairs. Does anyone really believe that the 10-minute rammys and point-scoring of the items on the BBC’s Scotland 2015 (or for that matter, STV Scotland Tonight) cover more than a fraction of what each topic deserves?

It’s a paltry response to the active citizenry that has emerged over the last two plebiscites in Scotland. The citizens have responded themselves, of course. Their appetite for a more substantive discussion about Scotland’s past, present and future sustains – via both clicks and pounds – a growing range of alternative digital media (and of course, this paper).

But I don’t know any of the committed enthusiasts in the Scottish alternative sector who wouldn’t welcome a Scots channel that properly served the citizenry. Something that gave crucial areas (like health and medicine, business and the economy, sci-tech and innovation, energy and environment, education at all levels, our global impact on the world) the dedicated screen-time and journalistic/investigative brio they deserved.

Can we imagine some relationship between Scottish civic media and new Scottish public broadcasting channels? Could a percentage of its operations be more like the early years of Channel Four: a television publisher with an explicit remit for diversity of opinion, and a willingness to prototype new hybrid forms of broadcast and digital media? 

But before these cutting-edge matters, there is surely no end of Scottish needs that dedicated Scottish public channels could satisfy. Simply to cover what the French would call our “arts of living” is a task at hand – not just our vibrant art, not just food, drink and recreation, but our sense of history.

That’s not just about putting Tom Devine to service as our Simon Schama, but also televisual history – deploying the Scottish archive we have, using material from both commercial and public resources, to give perspective and context to our sense of ourselves. (BBC4's relationship with its archive is a brilliant template here). 

But, as we fondly plan and scheme, here comes the brick wall. The new Tory culture and media minister, John Whittingdale, made matters abundantly clear in Edinburgh the other day. He regarded a No vote in the referendum as a recommitment to British identity – and, by association, a recommitment to the BBC as the “[UK] national” broadcaster.

I enjoyed the brilliant, likeable – still evidently Glaswegian, but also pretty establishment – Armando Iannucci and his Mactaggart Television Lecture [full text here]. But as you listen, it’s easy to imagine the case for Scottish channels being drowned in the grander storm of liberal-left and conservative UK elites, battling mightily for the “soul of the Beeb”.

That’s what happens when you don’t vote to become a nation-state: all that’s left is supplication and reasoned argument to the centre, most likely resulting in a head-pat and a “terribly sorry”. And there you can bundle up BBC Scotland reform with lots of other devolutionary frustrations. But, of course, there’s more to Scottish media than pining after Pacific Quay with an SBC badge on it.

Isn’t it worth stating the obvious – that the resignation of Police Scotland’s Stephen House has come after many months of detailed, pertinacious reporting (and a few well-timed exposes of Holyrood’s back-stage process) by dogged members of Scotland’s press?

Or to remember the bravery of the young members of National Collective, successfully facing down being sued by Ian Taylor of the Vitol oil group, in response to their article raising questions about his funding of Better Together?

So we bide our time, waiting for the constitutional and structural stars to align, and produce a Scottish public broadcasting culture worthy of the name. But, meantime, let’s make sure we don’t forget to support those whose media activity “afflicts the comfortable, and comforts the afflicted”, as the American muckraker Finley Peter Dunne once put it.

“Team Scotland” does not necessarily equal “Democratic And Self-Aware Scotland”. Top-down institution-building and reform does not solve all problems in our good society. And even as we eat popcorn before the political spectacle of the long break-up of the Union, let us remember that the relationship of media to government should be, to some extent, that of dog to lamp-post. And that this is absolutely fine.

Newsnight debate on Independence - Victorious for YES!

Quite a palaver to do, but I participated in Newsnight's massively expensive (and at times, screamingly camp) exercise in indy referendum politics in September. I was one of the top-table speakers at the event, in front of an audience who would vote on matters at the end of the evening. Talking with the punters before and after was by far the best bit - and as if to prove the Yes campaign's main theory about victory, all that blethering seemed to propel us to a notable victory for Yes, 62% to 38%. 

The full debate is below, but if you just want to see - nay, revel - in the declaration of the vote result itself, the BBC has provided a handy page.

For C4 News: Why Scotland Should Embrace Independence

Sometimes the simplest questions, from the right people, generate something that sounds like definitive - for me at least.

Channel Four News commissioned this (my published piece here), and have set me against Alastair Darling (his piece here). 

It does feel to me, after we've argued the fact-case to a standstill over the last year, that the higher ground has to be taken. That's certainly how my piece came out.

C4 News Website: Why Scotland Should Embrace Independence

Pat Kane

Scotland has an extraordinary opportunity, as a nation of citizens, workers, aspirers, creators and carers, on September 18th 2014. With a simple cross on a ballot paper - in the empty box next to “Yes” - we can begin a powerful, exciting journey into the rest of the 21st century. 

And we can do that under near-perfect conditions - the envy of any other previous country who,  in order to properly connect up democracy and power, has ever sought the full sovereignty of a nation state. 

The basic condition is that we are thoroughly modern - indeed, via the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment and the innovations of scientific industrialism (from Watt to Clerk Maxwell, from Kelvin to Dolly the sheep’s creator) we are one of the birthplaces of modernity itself. 

There are dark sides to that modernity too. Scots under the Union also participated both in the conceptual forging of an American constitution, and the oppression of its slave populations. The dignity of labour expended by the Scottish working classes was often in the service of, and benefitting from, an iniquitous British Empire (which Scots also administered adroitly when needed).

A future independent Scotland will do well, and maturely, to begin a reckoning with all that. But at the very least, what this history indicates is the sheer preposterousness of the notion that Scotland was ever “too wee and too stupid” to take on the full responsibilities of a fully independent nation-state.  

The behaviour and performance of the revived Scottish Parliament since 1999, even with the hobbled and asymmetrical powers devolved to it, has restored Scots’ faith in their own capacities for government, over a remarkably short period of time. 

Indeed, it is that growing competence than an SNP government - now in a majority second-term, and thus able to bring an independence referendum to being - finds itself using as an argument for full powers. How else to defend our consensus about universalism in public goods and welfare against its unravelling by Westminster, pursued in a cross-party way by both Labour and the Tory Coalition? 

Yet it would be wrong to imagine that Scottish independence is merely about defending social gains and civilities - incidentally, ones that mostly of our Nordic, Scandinavian and European national neighbours would regard as background assumptions. 

It is also about how to gain control of our national resources - human and territorial, cultural and material - such that we properly found this “common weal”, in fiscal and structural ways. But then, just as importantly, to use as a platform for higher aspiration, both domestically and globally. 

Domestically in Scotland, there is much that the full powers of independence needs to address. The macroeconomists can argue on details, but there’s essential agreement: Scotland is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, when not only its standard economic activity is taken into account, but its actual (and potential) energy reserves in renewables, oil and gas. 

Yet Scotland also suffers under extremes poles of inequality between rich and poor that are somewhere in the OECD top ten too, most starkly measured in the Scottish Central Belt's appalling postcode lotteries of life-expectancy. 

If we can act to reduce this misery, by means of a polity that we can control fully, we should. And certainly for those on the left like me in Scotland, any party which contends for power in the first Scottish independent parliament of 2016 will be primarily measured by its effectiveness on this issue. 

Yet the glory of Scottish idealism at the moment finds its wellspring in the thoughts of characters like the late Clydeside radical Jimmy Reid. Jimmy would defend the rights of workers to the nth degree. But he would also gaze at the thousand windows of a Glasgow high-rise, and dream of the undiscovered human potential sitting behind each one. 

There has to be a greatness about the desire for Scottish independence - and that greatness must be rooted in the notion that we can arrange a society here that can maximise human flourishing. 

There are of course big-ticket items in that plan. An independent Scotland free from Trident not only has a few hundred extra million in the state coffers, but has also made a statement about its peace-oriented ambitions to the wider world - an act of “soft power” that could bring benefits, along a range of inputs, to our prosperity.  

An independent Scotland which could harmonise and intergrate its currently scattered functions could embark on innovative new initiatives - policies and institutions to inspire the world. How could we address Scots’ “quality-of-life” agenda by being able to bring back powers over welfare, labour markets and macroeconomics, and weave them in with housing, education or health? 

How could the extraordinary vitality of our artists and creatives benefit from copyright law, public broadcasting and digital policy brought fully under Scottish national control? What might we do with more powers over Scottish landownership, to fuel a community and civic resurgence in Scottish life? The list could easily go on.  

My final message to my fellow Scots - those of all sizes, colours and backgrounds, eligible to vote in the Scottish referendum - is that you should pinch yourselves. You’ve got the chance to stand on this earth and say: I built a better society. I decided to do that, for myself, for my children, for future generations. And all it needed was a cross in the right box. 

Kane vs. McClymont for Guardian Debates: Should Scotland be an independent Country

Somewhat frustrating experience - a 15 minute conversation chopped down into five minutes - but a useful wee exchange with Labour MP Gregg McClymont, for the Guardian's website. 

"Media under Indy": prez to Scotsman conference & Scotsman essay

This is a mole I've been trying to whack for years... But below are my various contributions to the Scotsman's "Future of the Media in Scotland" event, both the article for the paper and presentation on the day of the event.

More than it just being a great selection of speakers, I really enjoyed the mix of ages, stages, genders and competences. Great old tales of past media mingled with stories of kids teaching their mums about iPad usage; patient explorations of media regulation battled with breathless accounts of media market explosions (and implosions).

I certainly drew the long-straw in being asked to imagine "The Future of Media in An Independent Scotland", and I hope it's at least provocative enough to fuel debate and thought, to which I'm happy to respond at length here. And to be a bit YesScotland about it all... it did feel like there was more than enough enterprise, experience and wisdom to be able to build some kind of solution for the "public good" of news media, out of the reformist prospect of Scottish independence. 

A useful hashtag for the event exists at #scotmedia, and there'll be link updates to other material anon posted here. In the meantime, read Moray MacDonald's excellent business overviews (article and slides), and Peter Geoghegan's scene-setter.

In terms of research for these pieces, I've also been collecting useful links on my "future of journalism" tag at Delicious for a few years now. And I must pay tribute to two particular sources: Matthew Ingram's archive at Paid Content, and Emily Bell and Clay Shirky's brilliant and challenging "Post-Industrial Journalism" paper. 

Direct mail me at playethical at gmail dot com. - PK

Pat Kane presentation at "The Future of Media in Scotland" event, National Galleries, Edinburgh, 9 April 2013. 

MEDIA UNDER INDY from theplayethic

Pat Kane: Shock of the new for news

Published in The Scotsman on Tuesday 2 April 2013

To think about the future of the media in Scotland is both a daunting and an exciting task.

 But in this space, let me just pluck out a particular crisis – one that flashes at the meeting point between constitutional and political change, and the structures, economics and cultures of Scots media.

Firstly, we must recognise that Scotland is in a historically bizarre situation. A momentous challenge of democracy and citizenship is rising before us – the independence referendum – while large areas of the non-state media, which crucially enable or inform such a process, are in near or actual collapse.

Our local agenda is meeting a global meltdown. The old financial arrangement that supported the jobs of professional journalism – getting money from objects sold over a counter, as well as cash from advertising (display and classified), all of which paying for a precious zone of editorial freedom – has been largely disassembled by the open web.

With everyone a publisher (or everyone’s publishing copyable), newspapers can’t charge for the scarcity of their content. And vast networks such as Google and Facebook now connect advertiser and consumer directly, without needing to go through a slab of paper (or increasingly, even a news website or app).

Though online paywalls with varying degrees of severity are now rising across the industry, and there are faint hopes that new mobile info-devices might kickstart revenue streams again, the short-term economics look grim. This year’s US Pew Internet survey of the press (generally applicable here too) noted that for every $1 of internet revenue gained, $16 of print revenue was lost. Whether in Galveston, Gloucester or Glasgow, that’s an economic upheaval which will have incalculable consequences.

The core question is: do we regard journalism in the same way as, say, education or health – that is, as a necessary input to a healthy, empowered and progressive society? If we do, then, as the American academic Robert McChesney succinctly says, “journalism needs an institutional structure that comports with its status as a public good”.

Last week, Peter Geoghegan cited the Scandinavian tradition of state subsidy of minor commercial newspapers in regions. But McChesney’s brilliant new book, Digital Disconnect, makes the point that even the United States had effective state newspaper subsidies for a centuries – via low postal rates – long before the commercial model of the 20th century.

This was rooted in the Founding Fathers’ passionate belief that a free press was the foundation of a healthy democracy. Thomas Jefferson asserted that “the basis of our governments being the opinions of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right” – that right being the “full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers”.

Now aren’t we in the same moment of constitutional fervour? One would presume that our commitment to “the right of full information” would be no less than these 18th century citizen-farmers. And although as a Yes supporter, I believe that we should opt for the maximum available national tools to reshape and reform Scotland, a No vote may yet result in the Scottish lion being thrown the bone of a devolved media, broadcasting and fiscal environment.

If so, can we begin to imagine policies in Scotland that can secure those Jeffersonian rights – policies that accept the civic but economically disruptive power of the open web, but which also ward against the fear that public subsidy equals state control? And which also, incidentally, find a way for journalists to be paid to do what we want them to do – which is, generally, to fulfill the old dictum that “journalism is about writing something that someone somewhere doesn’t want written”.

McChesney’s American-flavoured solution is radical, but worth a moment’s consideration: he calls it the “citizenship news voucher”. Every adult gets a voucher, allowing them to donate money to any non-profit news medium of their choice, whether via their tax return or a separate form. (McChesney suggests $200 (£130) per head for the US. In our environment, where state investment in public media is much larger, we could establish a rate by perhaps looking at some proportion of the existing license fee, as the radical republican Dan Hind suggests.)

You can apportion elements of your voucher to as many outfits as you choose, but the outfits must be specified as not-for-profit, producing exclusively media content, and unable to accept advertising (though they could accept donations or foundations). As a media outfit, you’d qualify only if you reached a certain level of voucher commitments, showing that there’s a tangible community of interest out there.

McChesney suggests that this could start to pay for those aspects of journalistic practice that serve the public good. But it would do so with more liberality and diversity than a state news service could do – and it would recognise both the civic benefits of an open web, but also how much it destroys the old economic viabilities of the press.

This leaves commercial publishers to pursue whatever strategies they need, to get at whatever monies are out there – whether peddling celebrity piffle for free (like the Mail Online), or providing mission-critical services available by subscription (like the FT or the Wall Street Journal).

Still worried, in our Leveson climate, about the link between state subsidy and state control of media? McChesney cites respected global democracy indexes, like Freedom House and the Economist’s, that proceed from a centrist or even right-wing locus. The countries they score at the highest end of the democratic scale are all ones which apply some kind of public subsidy scheme to the free press (the US is at the bottom end of each table).

Now, is all this just a shiny idea taken off some American academic’s shelf with no purchase in the real world of an imploding Scottish media? Let me give you two brief instances which may give this proposal – or at least the wider field of how we might secure the public good of journalism – some urgency.

The well-known cybernat site Wings Over Scotland managed something extraordinary the other week. Through a crowd-funding platform, it raised over £30,000 to support his media monitoring and original reportage (from an independence perspective). Wings’ founder, the Rev Stuart Campbell, has the ambition to create a Daily Record for the Yes campaign. No matter what you think of that goal, it’s a tangible example of how it’s possible for light-cost digital operators, with a clear idea of their community, to successfully appeal to them for financial commitment.

Is it beyond our wit to imagine more infrastructural and fiscal measures, to make sustainable and diverse this relationship between citizenship and digital media?

The other grand discussion I’m involved with at the moment is the Open Sessions, exploring the future of Creative Scotland, meeting artist communities all over the country. The outcome of this is as genuinely open as its title. But some of the issues about the “arms-length” principle of public arts subsidy – the need for the state to cope with the potential of “creative disloyalty”, as former Scottish Arts Council head Richard Holloway put it, of the artist and maker – seem to me to be directly relevant to a discussion about the future of news media.

Whatever emerges from our CSOpen discussions, it must at the very least respond to the subtle question of how a small nation might guarantee a healthy diversity of attitudes and practices.

Like an NHS, or an Open University, we should be open to visionary institutional reform as one of the outcomes of our momentous national decision. Thinking anew about how we secure the conditions of a free press for a healthy democracy – whether it’s McChesney’s scheme or anothers’ – should be one of those reformist ambitions. The “channel of the public papers” should have its constitutional moment again, this time in Scotland.

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