Times for discrimination

Perhaps there should be a small graffito on the News International pay-wall: Mac-users not welcome.

The story so far:

Malcolm finds it convenient to pay for one of the Times subscription schemes: it saves a bit of money.

As part of that subscription, Malcolm finds he is entitled to be a "member" of the Times+ scheme. Over a period of many months, he has found that beneficial just the once: getting a discount to the British Library exhibition on Henry VIII.

The present:

It was inevitable, perhaps as an initial "come-on" later to be chargeable, that subscribers should be invited to access the on-line resources of the Times and Sunday Times (soon to disappear behind the pay-wall).

That led to Malcolm reconsidering the "benefits" of this involvement.

Why! here's one! An invitation to download an audiobook:

This month, you can download Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, the huge bestseller that evocatively imagines the story of the girl behind one of Vermeer’s best loved paintings.

Girl with a Pearl Earring is set in seventeenth century Holland and follows the spirited Griet, a girl sent to work in the house of masterful painter Vermeer, inspiring him to produce one of his most magnificent works.

Times+ members can download their free audiobook of Girl with a Peal [sic] Earring, worth £10.99, by clicking on the download links on the right.

Except a large part of the potential invitees are excluded from that offer.

Go two stages further and find this:

WARNING: You are trying to download content for Microsoft Windows Media Player that requires a license. You must use Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, 7 or 8 and make sure ActiveX is enable [sic] in order to download this file.

Now:

• Malcolm, as frequently rehearsed here, is proudly and loudly a Mac-user.

But:

• Microsoft suspended development of Internet Explorer back in mid-2003, with version 5.2.3.

So:

• There is, therefore, no obvious way Malcolm (and other Mac-users) can access this download.

Go to the fountain-head!

Malcolm therefore e-mailed customerservices@timesplus.co.uk.

So far, the only response is an automated one:

Thank you for your email. This has been passed onto the relevant department for their attention. Should your enquiry require an answer you will be contacted within three working days.

Yes, it bloody-well does require an answer.

Added:

Response received:

Unfortunately, the audiobooks in the Culture+ Harper Audio promotion are available exclusively on Windows platforms and devices at the moment.

Despite our best endeavours, we have been unable to secure an alternative solution that will provide the quality and value that we would wish to offer. However, we will continue in our endeavours to find an alternative solution that will support more platforms and will if, and when, we secure this we will heavily advert the fact on the site.

We apologise for the inconvenience.

That makes News International involvement with iPad look iffy.

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The lists, the lists are driving me bleedin' insane!

We'll get to the lists in a while. By way of intro, Malcolm was considering Mick Fealty, Lord of the Manor at Slugger O'Toole, trying to extrapolate from the Willie O'Dea resignation to a metaphysical consideration of how the media mediate (or, in the O'Dea case, how the establishment manage to ignore an imminent train-crash).

Those a whit distant from recent happenings in Caitlín Ní Uallacháin's right little, tight little Three Green Fields might need a quick update.

O'Dea! Oh, dear!

O'Dea (above, right) has been one of the cuter characters in recent Fianna Fáil history. He is, among that mixed bag of intellects, quite a bright guy: a lawyer and accountant. He has lectured at tertiary level, and remains a columnist for several Irish prints. He has been a TD for some three decades, was distinguished as one of Charlie Haughey's intra-party opponents, and has the throat of Limerick politics in a vampire bite.

For the last six years he was Minister of Defence in two Fianna Fáil governments: not in itself a great mark of distinction. O'Dea had done some good work at Education; and might reasonably have expected a better post. After all, Ministry of Defence is hardly the grandest office of state in the Twenty-Six Counties. Still, a FF Cabinet has to be a balance of many regional and ideological conflicting interests: O’Dea happened to tick many boxes. Moreover, the man evidently relished and cavorted in the job.

Then, in a local election campaign, O'Dea confided to a journalist that a prominent Sinn Féin candidate (subsequently re-elected) was involved in the running of a brothel. Ahem!

O'Dea at first denied he had made such an allegation, and swore to the same in an affidavit, only to be confronted with a recording of him doing just that. Oops!

Last December, the matter came to Court. The affidavit stood. Then O'Dea had to make a crawling apology, a specious excuse, and cough up a six-figure sum (according to the Sunday Times). Ouch!

Finally, the Opposition made an issue of the matter. Part of the delay is that Dáil Éireann has become a part-time legislature: part because nobody in the small world of Irish politics likes to stir noxious turds, lest they come back to haunt.

Last week, under pressure from Fine Gael (getting under the bar five seconds before Labour), the Cowen Government went for a vote-of-confidence. The government scraped home on the Ceann Comhairle's casting vote. Half a dozen TD's managed to absent themselves: Trevor Sargent of the Greens managed to be pre-booked for an unmissable engagement ... at an organic food fair. Indeed. Sargent's inability to attend could be typical of the Green point-of-view: they felt they had been "bounced" into the vote-of-confidence by Cowen.

O'Dea then resigned. There remains considerable contention about whether he walked, was pushed, or if indeed the Greens gave an ultimatum. If so, for once, the Greens were less of their usual “more of a dirty yellow colour” (© The Goon Show).

Listing to lunacy

None of that is directly relevant to Malcolm's other thought. This emerged from Fealty's philosophising about how the media, by inclusion, omission or emphasis, mediate the public agenda.

There is little new, or particularly profound in this. The mediaeval illiterate peasant was constrained to a horizon bounded by local gossip, the local parish priest's semi-literate theology, and the occasional passing pedlar. As information sources have grown exponentially, we increasingly and necessarily impose filters for ourselves. So we choose our sources by interest, by prejudice and by habit: Fox News or Russia Today, the Irish Times or the Miami Herald, Gay News or L'Osservatore Romano. Only one of which will have addressed the O'Dea business.

Malcolm, inevitably, found himself further trivialising the argument by considering the media's mania for lists. This is the particular unique-selling-point of the arts and entertainment pages, ultimately reduced to that inevitable five-star ranking.

At the eggheaded end, the likes of the Times Literary Supplement each Thursday not only reviews but fails to do so. This prescribes the scope of what literature is "acceptable" to that particular periodical and its adherents. That matters little, since there are other competing outlets, though it is clear that certain writers are "established" by being featured in those pages, while others are excluded. Reviews are inevitably nuanced: very few say"must read" and equally few are stinkers — though, last week, Heather O'Donoghue's magisterial belittling of Robert Ferguson was a gem.

At the popular="pop" end, the need to encapsulate creates more serious problems.

At its best, such an approach can be a classic: Walter Kerr's 1951 put down, for the New York Herald Tribune, of John Van Druten's I Am a Camera ("Me no Leica") being the gold standard, as acerbic as anything from Dorothy Parker. The effect of Kerr's cryptic comment depends considerably on the reader recognising that I am a Camera is adapted from Christopher Isherwood's Berlin experiences. And, in turn, went on to be the basis for the phenomenon that was the musical and film Cabaret): thus producing the curious sequence of a decent pair of books provoking a mediocre stage adaptation and a great movie:



But those lists!

Yeah, well take the nadir achieved by Rachel Campbell-Johnson doing the "New Shows" for the Playlist supplement of last Saturday's Times. This is a page headlined by Henry Moore at Tate Britain, with Ron Arad featured further down page. We are also invited to consider posters from the wartime Ministry of Food, at the Imperial War Museum, and the Design Awards at the Design Museum. To this mish-mash, Campbell-Johnson appends a side bar of her "Critic's Choice". To achieve the full depth of the bizarre, these are worth taking in the reverse order established by Miss World competitions:
5. Dexter Dalwood's paintings and collages ... exploring the concept of "history painting" at Tate St Ives;
4. "Rembrandt in Focus", which sounds like making a commercial for a brand of make-up, but is a single portrait of Catrina Hooghsaet [left] on loan from Penrhyn Castle, together with etchings at the National Museum of Wales;
3. A major show of more than 120 images spanning the 70-year career of Irving Penn , at the National Portrait Gallery;
2. We are invited to Gaze into the giddily decorative surfaces of some of the best-known works of Chris Ofill (yes: the elephant turd man) at Tate Modern; and ...
1. Work by the the Armenian immigrant whose paintings were as powerful and important as he was mysterious. That's the typographic-disaster-waiting-to-happen, Arshile Gorky ("crazy guy! crazy name!" © Glenda Slagg), also at Tate Modern. Why is Malcolm unimpressed by this one, when opposite is a full page advertisement for a Times+ "exclusive private view" at £10 a ticket?

Any way one addresses it, there's a fair bit of mediation being done there.

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Things one wishes had gone unsaid (number 992)

The BBC reports:

A Briton has died following flash floods on the Portuguese island of Madeira, the Foreign Office has said.
At least 40 people have been killed in the floods, and more than 120 others hurt - a "small number" British.

The accompanying video is pretty spectacular too:

This should be compared with page vi of the Retirement Special supplement to today's Sunday Times property porn supplement:

Madeira ... retains a genteel, Edwardian air ... this is still a haven of rhododendron bushes and golf courses, with a wonderful year-round climate: a real plus. Its hilly topography is a minus.

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A news-worthy détente?

Mary Fitzgerald, last Thursday, put up a neat piece in the Irish Times:

Eurosceptic line of Irish editions of UK papers more muted this time around

That must be a harbinger of numerous academic studies. Fitzgerald looked back:

In the postmortems that followed last year’s No vote in the Lisbon Treaty referendum, the Government and several Yes campaigners were quick to seize on what they considered to be the nefarious role played by Irish editions of British newspapers noted for their Eurosceptic editorial slant.

According to some, it was not only the Sun “wot won” it for the No side, but its sister titles in Rupert Murdoch’s News International stable. These included the Sunday Times and News of the World, with a little help from the Irish edition of the Daily Mail.

Certainly the hysteria this time round has been moderated, even though the essential postures have not changed. Witness Gerald Scarfe for last week's Sunday Times, Irish edition (above, left)

The rest of Fitzgerald's piece identifies Declan Ganley's gross misrepresentation of the position of the Financial Times and, to a lesser extent, of the implicit stance of Murdoch's Wall Street Journal. Cool and clear, the article is well worth the trip, and rightly is an Editor's Choice for the week.

What the journos had spotted was strident English-based Europhobia was not going to work this iteration. The electorate were in a chastened, more receptive mood. Opposition parties (excepting Sinn Féin) were actively, even aggressively on board, while last outing they had been prepared to leave the running to a labouring Fianna Fáil (and didn't Bertie and Co. gripe about that). The "No" campaign, and not just Ganley, went stratospheric: when some jokester used Photoshop to parody Cóir's efforts (see right), many could hardly tell the difference.

Trust Nigel Farage and his UKIPpers to make matters worse. Using funds (intended to support political parties) provided by the European Parliament to produce and distribute leaflets to every Irish home was definitely not a good idea. Nor was it diplomatic to deploy an image of a turkey (left): the memory of Dustin's Eurovision performance still rankles. UKIP MEPs were lucky to be called nothing worse than "racists".

Ireland is a mature nation, and tolerates a great deal of outside "advice". Ireland is also less than three human generations of age, so 1922 and all that is still a sore topic. Anglo-Irish relations are going to be long troubled (at least from the Irish point-of-view) by the "previous", all the way back to 1169. A Thatcher-admiring ex- City broker, turned MEP for South-East England, was bound to incense (Farage was lucky nobody spotted that Strongbow was also a Kentish Man). Farage was so successful that the dung fell alike on Declan Ganley. Ganley (who was a late-comer this time) found himself summarily discounted, unfairly, as another "English" interloper.

Now that the argy-bargy ought to be over, those same UK papers will be turning their "minds" to the Conservative Conference. It will be interesting to see what their Irish editions say about Cameron's predicament, now the Referendum result has dished his previous position. Sphere: Related Content

The eternal truths


Day after day, the financial pages of the heavier end of the the British press drum out the message:

Reduce corporation tax!

Another firm moves its HQ to Ireland to benefit from the lower corporation tax!

A typical story is that of Shire:

The FTSE-100 company said it was applying to a court to create a new holding company incorporated in tax-haven Jersey and would become tax resident in Ireland, where corporate tax rates are less than half those in the UK.

The 22-year-old biopharmaceutical firm whose key products include a treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), said its headquarters would remain in Basingstoke and it did not plan to cut or relocate any UK jobs.

But its board of directors will hold meetings in its Dublin office once the tax residence move gets court approval.

Most importantly, the move means it will be subject to an official corporate tax rate of 12.5%, compared with 28% in the UK.

This weekend the Sunday Times was at it again, with a new twist (taxes and not paying them are a Big Thing for the Murdoch Media):

Bosses' tax threat at No 10 summit
SOME of the biggest names in British business have told Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling that Britain risks a corporate exodus if Treasury tax proposals on foreign earnings go ahead.

The warning was delivered at Downing Street 10 days ago by a delegation from the Multinational Chairmen’s Group, a secretive body that brings together leaders of some of the most powerful companies in the world ...

Those involved in the discussion say the foreign-dividend proposals have given a hard edge to general discontent over UK corporate taxation.

In recent weeks two leading companies, Shire Pharmaceuticals, a FTSE 100 drugs group, and United Business Media, a media and conventions group, have decided to shift their tax domiciles from the UK to Ireland. There were rumours last week that another FTSE 100 group was on the verge of leaving.

The not-so-subtle hint about "another FTSE 100 group" was merely a taster for a Times story on Tuesday:

One of the most prominent players in the Lloyd’s insurance market is considering shifting its corporate headquarters outside the UK, the latest in a string of City businesses angered by unpopular tax proposals from the Treasury. Brit Insurance, the reinsurance broker valued at £800 million in London, is investigating whether jurisdictions such as Dublin or Geneva are more tax-efficient than the UK, which is increasingly seen as operating a business-unfriendly regime.

Several other companies, including Sir Martin Sorrell’s WPP Group, have said they are considering such a move ...

Naughty Malcolm.
Naughty, naughty Malcolm:
you forget that the great and the good
have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders,
to avoid paying tax.

As in the Shire case:

"Shire has concluded that its business and its shareholders would be better served by having an international holding company with a group structure that is designed to help protect the group's taxation position, and better facilitate the group's financial management."

A Shire spokeswoman stressed it was not stopping UK tax payments outright.

"We will not pay corporation tax in the UK but will continue to pay tax in the UK on our UK business," she said.

Don't we "little people" yearn for that choice "not to pay"?

In any case, too many "British" companies have already decided that they should enjoy the benefits, but shirk any commitment to Britain:

a National Audit Office study has revealed that almost one third of the UK's 700 biggest businesses pay no corporation tax whatsoever - not one penny. A further third of these businesses pay less than £10m a year in corporation tax, the main levy on UK company profits.

Intriguingly, almost 70 per cent of all UK corporation tax in the 2005/6 financial year was paid by just 50 companies, the report showed. While Britain's banks stumped up £7.5bn in corporation taxes, the alcohol and tobacco industries coughed up next to nothing. While oil and gas companies shelled out close to £7bn, the mega-bucks property sector paid just a few hundred million.

There are armies of accountants in the City of London trained in the dark arts of tax minimisation. But it's not all about offshore accounts in the British Virgin Islands or Bermuda. For the modern multinational, it is remarkably easy to make a large tax bill simply disappear - through entirely legitimate means.

Malcolm would insert a small aide-memoire here, from last August, for that reference others may be trying to recall:

Leona Helmsley, the cutthroat hotel magnate whose title as the “queen of mean” was sealed during a tax evasion case in which she was quoted as snarling “only little people pay taxes,” died Monday at age 87.

Helmsley (right) embezzled $1.2M of tax money by claiming personal expenses on the firm: everything from renovating her Connecticut estate to paying for her knickers. She, eventually, went to jail for 21 months of a four-year term. Even then she cheated: much of her "community service" was done by her employees.

When she died, she charmingly left her little dog, "Trouble", $12M.

There was nothing for two grand-children, though.

She died lonely; she died alone: but she died rich.
And that's what really matters, yes?

Compared to machinations like these,
decent whoring looks a respectable business.

In all the Gaderene rush to set up shop in Dublin, never, not once, does the accompanying article comment on the other side of the equation:

VAT in Ireland is 21%.

But only the "little people" pay VAT. Sphere: Related Content

More reasons to be depressed ...

Malcolm was about to suggest the most depressing aspect of the weekend was the non-election. Not because it didn't happen, but because of the reaction thereto. Then he came across something far worse...

The Fourth Estate has had an easy couple of weeks fanning the flames. All the "news" they could be bothered with was within drooling distance of their first-string of journos. Column inches -- nay, yards -- came cheap and ready to hand. Commentators didn't even need to get brains into second gear. Now they will have to work a bit harder for their thousands a week.

No, that wasn't it: Malcolm has gone on record several times to say it wouldn't happen. He preened with a smidgen of smugness when all was revealed. What grated was something both more trivial and more serious:

• Mr Osborne accused the Prime Minister of lying when he claims to be entirely focused on running the country and says he will have “bottled” it if he doesn’t ... [The Times]
• Why Brown bottled it: Six point Tory lead in the marginals ... [The Spectator]
• "... if he [Brown] calls an election in October he will have given us more advanced warning than any recent opposition, and if he doesn't, he has completely bottled it." [Telegraph].

All of those originate from the fertile and inventive mind of one George Osborne, public schoolboy and Magdalen, Oxford, scholarship winner. No dimbo, he. Heir to a baronetcy, too. A bulwark of respectability. With the mouth of a street-corner yobbo at closing time.

Does this enlighten us about the nature of the Notting Hill boys? Indeed, more than they would wish. Is it of a kind with the recent publicity of their Black-and-White Ball? Does it raise the standard of political debate?

Yukkh.

No, that's not Malcolm's main grief. He turns instead to the Sunday Times. News section:

• Page 9: "the model Caprice", in backless dress with full cleavage;
• Page 14: royal girlfriend in bikini, a leg-shot;
• Page 15: illustrated item discussing a "breast re-augmentation"

Right, that sets the pace. Malcolm moves on to the News Review:

• Page 2: head-to knee half-page illustration of "Carla Bruni, the model who had an affair with Mick Jagger" with low-cut neckline, and high-cut skirt.
• Page 3: half-page colour illustration of lady losing her knickers while skirt is blown up, helpfully captioned "The sexual stereotypes typified by this picture are only reinforced by the plethora of books on the Mars and Venus theme."
• Page 10: quarter-page photograph of lady in strapless gown, astide shoulders of male, lifting up her skirt beyond the thighs.

It's in the In Gear ["Cars: Gadgets: Adventure"] supplement, that is to say "toys-for-the-boys", supplement that the full horror is developed:

• Page 3:"Cameron Diaz in the notorious hair gel scene from There's Something About Mary";
• Page 10: Full page, hands-on-hips, of "the female Ironman world champion";
• Page 16 and 17: "Swish those PC cobwebs away", illustrated, inevitably, by the ultimate cliché of the full-length , bending-over, saucy French maid.

And so on, ad nauseam and reductio ad absurdum.

All this, Malcolm recalls, is the "serious" end of the newspaper market, although it clearly is where the Sun's best get their overtime (Malcolm's schoolgirl daughter obtained work-experience at Wapping: she spent a day or two Photoshop-ing the glamour).

And let's not forget Billie Piper in her slinky scanties on many of the bus-shelters of Britain.

Malcolm is no prude: he does have a sense of propriety. The kind of material, sexist but barely [sic] salacious, assiduously peddled by the Sunday Times, is nothing more or less than Tom Lehrer's

Smut! (I love it)
Ah, the adventures of a slut,
Oh I'm a market they can't glut
I don't know what
Compares with smut.

And, Malcolm proposes, any product which needs cheesecake to sell it is typically in terminal decline.

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