Category Archives: Scotland

Arts, Culture, Government, Media, Scotland

The monolithic BBC and its privileged position

BBC: SCOTLAND

THE BBC’s new Scottish channel, which launches in February, is designed to offer a platform to new, more diverse voices that collectively should allow the corporation to present a more rounded view of modern Scotland.

The new channel is a tacit admission that BBC Scotland is not, in its present form, capable of meeting the supposed demand for more and better Scottish programming. According to this point of view, a country with exciting and expanding political aspirations deserves a public sector broadcaster with ambitions to match.

The channel is also a belated answer to a question that has, like so many discussions in Scotland, rumbled on unanswered for more than two decades: should there be a dedicated hour-long news programme mixing Scottish news with reporting from the rest of the UK and the world? The answer, at long last, is yes.

This is positive, even if it seems likely that there is a disconnect between the channel’s stated ambitions and the budget it has been given for original programming. The new channel, however, is also a defensive move, designed in part to rebut accusations that the BBC is incorrigibly biased against the ruling Scottish National Party. It has become an unfortunate – and baseless – article of faith in certain nationalist circles that the BBC’s coverage was a major reason why Scotland rejected independence in 2014.

The BBC is controversial precisely because it is Britain’s most powerful media enterprise. So powerful, in fact, that it enjoys a dominant position. Across the United Kingdom, 97 per cent of the population access its services each week. In Scotland the BBC has a 30 per cent share of the television market and nearly 50 per cent of the radio audience. Its website is an increasingly dominant player in digital news, accounting for nearly one in three visits to all news sites in the UK.

OFCOM, which regulates the BBC, is charged with “promoting competition”. Most broadcasters, newspapers and citizens should have an evident interest in this happening. It is not obvious how the BBC’s ever-expanding remit assists this process.

If the BBC restricted its activities to broadcasting, these competition concerns might be less pressing. Increasingly, however, the BBC is a publisher as much as it is a broadcaster. Modest moves to support local newspapers threatened by the BBC’s monolithic and full-spectrum muscle are both insufficient and a step in the wrong direction: self-restraint on the BBC’s part would be more useful than linking to newspapers from its own website. Thanks to – as the corporation says – the “unique” way the BBC is funded, it has a significant advantage over all its rivals. The imposition of what is, in effect, a poll tax gives the BBC a privileged position that is ripe for abuse.

Because the licence fee, which is guaranteed to rise in line with inflation until 2022, is effectively a tax, the BBC feels bound to move beyond any strict or limited definition of what a public sector broadcaster should offer. It is a commercial organisation itself, and a rival to media companies in the private sector.

The BBC argues that it must be popular, in every sense of the word, to justify the licence fee but the more the BBC behaves like other media companies, whether in terms of broadcasting or publishing, the harder that becomes. This is the paradox in which the BBC traps itself: the more it tries to justify its monopoly over the licence fee, the less it does so.

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Architecture, Arts, Culture, Scotland

The V&A Museum of Design

SCOTLAND

DUNDEE’S equivalent of the Pompidou in Paris or Bilbao’s Guggenheim is now on full view. The V&A, designed by Kengo Kuma, is simply staggering.

With its instantly recognisable outline – part sea cliff, part galleon – the £80.4million V&A Museum of Design may soon find itself revered as a global design icon.

Certainly, few who have seen Scotland’s first dedicated design museum are likely to be left unmoved by its dizzyingly ambitious zigzag slabs of rough concrete, described variously as a crash-landed Egyptian pyramid, the ribbed carcass of a beached whale and the ragged remains of a mighty shipwreck. Art in its full splendour and glory.

On display: The £80million museum’s collection is expected to attract 500,000 visitors in its first year.

Following its official opening, the “V&Tay”, as it is ostensibly and affectionately known to its London colleagues, is expected to attract some 500,000 visitors from around the world in its first year alone, generating tens of millions of pounds for the local economy.

Critics may welcome a time when this controversial project starts to pay its way, having been blown off course by years of construction delays and escalating costs before finally anchoring itself at the heart of the city’s £1billion waterfront regeneration.

Since its conception, the original £45million budget has almost doubled and its Japanese architect and designer had been forced to tow his initial plan for a water-bound structure back to dry land.

On the V&A’s opening, however, a preview which was attended by dozens of the world’s media, Mr Kuma pronounced himself satisfied that his vision to create a “living room for the city” had been realised.

The attraction’s galleries showcase 300 objects, including Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Oak Room and the painstakingly reconstructed interior of Miss Cranston’s Ingram Street tearoom which has not been seen for 50 years.

Mr Kuma said: “It is fitting that the restored Oak Room by Charles Rennie Mackintosh is at the heart of this building as I have greatly admired his designs since I was a student.

“In the Oak Room, people will feel his sensibility and respect for nature, and hopefully connect it with our design for V&A Dundee. I hope the museum can change the city and become its centre of gravity.”

He said the magisterial light-filled atrium with its sweeping staircase and waves of oak panel boards was a nod to Mackintosh, who was deeply influenced by oriental art and design.

Mr Kuma said: “When I saw [Mackintosh’s] buildings as a student I was very surprised at how Japanese they were. Japanese quality, [and] Japanese sensitivity exist in his designs.”

Everywhere in the museum, glimpses of the Tay can be caught through small windows, while the hall and stairs glint with fossilised coral set into limestone flooring.

Complementing his daring design are the – often quirky – exhibits of the Scottish Design Galleries, from the so-called Valkyrie tiara, created by Cartier using more than 2,500 diamonds for Mary Crewe-Milnes, Duchess of Roxburghe, in 1935, to cutting-edge environmental material crafted from the fibres of stinging nettles by Dundee-based firm Halley Stevensons for Glasgow backpack-maker Trakke.

There is also some hand-coloured Beano artwork for a Dennis the Menace cartoon strip from 1960.

Also in the collection is the largest remaining fragment of the Titanic – part of a door from the first-class lounge of the liner – and a costume worn by Natalie Portman’s character, Padmé Amidala, in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, which was created by Trisha Biggar, the Glasgow designer.

A full-sized clay model Jaguar car sits between the entrants to the permanent collection and the opening touring show, Ocean Liners: Speed and Style, which tells the story of Scotland’s role in the golden age of cruise liners.

V&A Dundee’s director, Philip Long, said “it was with some emotion” that he was finally able to unveil the museum and that the challenges that beset the huge project had been overcome, more than a decade after it was originally proposed.

Another V&A director, Dr Tristram Hunt, said Ocean Liners: Speed and Style could “not be a more appropriate inaugural exhibition for Mr Kuma’s amphibious, semi-nautical, wonderful museum that is so successfully reconnecting the city with its historic waterfront”.

Dundee City Council leader John Alexander told invited guests to the first viewing of the museum that he felt a “tremendous sense of pride” in the building.

He said: “There’s a fire in the bellies of Dundonians that wasn’t there ten years ago. Dundee is leading the charge in cultural-led regeneration.”

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Arts, Canada, History, Scotland

Fallen idol: Canadians tear down statue of Scots founder

SIR JOHN A MACDONALD

HE was the revered founding father of the Canadian nation.

Coming from humble beginnings in Scotland, he would go on to bring together the British Colonies under one rule.

But now a statue of politician Sir John A Macdonald has been torn down by protesters over his treatment of indigenous tribes.

Macdonald was Canada’s first and one of the country’s most highly regarded Prime Ministers, his family having emigrated in 1820 to what is today Ontario.

As well as being Prime Minister for 19 years, the Glasgow-born politician was a dominant figure in the confederation, which brought together the various British colonies such as Nova Scotia to establish the collective new nation of Canada.

But his treatment of indigenous tribes, specifically the children of the Esquimalt and Songhees tribes, has caused a Canadian city to pull down his statue.

The Mayor of Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, has divided the Canadian nation over the move.

Mayor Lisa helps said: “We do not propose to erase history but rather to take the time through the process of truth-telling and reconciliation as part of the Witness Reconciliation Program to tell this complex and painful chapter of Canadian history in a thoughtful way.”

The statue which was removed for storage within the last few days has seen protesters both for and against its removal airing their views.

Those in favour of keeping the statue claim that Mayor Helps is trying to rewrite history with the removal of the monument.

One protester remarked: “Mayor Lisa Helps, in a final act of cowardice on this issue, is removing the statue under cover of darkness.”

Another said: “If you want to see what a traitor looks like here it is. Lisa Helps, Mayor of Victoria, is taking down [the] statue of Sir John A Macdonald to protect the feelings of Indians.”

The statue is to be replaced with a plaque which reads: “In 2017, the City of Victoria began a journey of Truth and Reconciliation with the Lekwungen peoples, the Songhees nd Esquimalt Nations, on whose territories the city stands.”

Macdonald was the architect of the Indian residential school system. The schools were part of a system that is “best described as a cultural genocide” according to a report by the board which is overseeing the reconciliation work with the indigenous inhabitants.

The schools would separate children from their families in an attempt to suppress their culture.

Mayor Helps said: “John A Macdonald was a key architect of the Indian Residential School system.

“In 1879 he said, ‘When the school is on the reserve, the child lives with its parents, who are savages, and though he may learn to read and write, his habits and training mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write.

“It has been impressed upon myself that Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence’.”

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