• Panorama-gate

We may never know why the Panorama team decided that it was such a good idea to edit Trump’s long and rambling speech in January 2021 just before the Capitol riots in order to suggest that two remarks made about fifty minutes apart were all in the same sentence. Senior heads have rolled and the organisation is in the throes of a new PR crisis. This is on top of some recent ones which ran the whole spectrum from Gaza to Glastonbury.

What particularly sets this one apart is that it’s resulted in the President of the USA threatening to sue the corporation for $1bn. This conveniently round number seems these days to be the standard opening gambit in any US-based lawsuit.

Editing quotes or footage is a delicate business. I need to do it a lot and the first rule is always that you don’t make the person appear to be saying something different. I remember back at school a teacher making this point, citing the example of a comment that the producers of a film had edited down from “if you decide go to see this movie then you need your head examining” to “go to see this movie.” What happened here seems little different.

The fact that it was broadcast only a week of so before the ’24 presidential election seems to eliminate any defence that it wasn’t political. Nor could it have possibly have been a mistake. This sort of thing doesn’t happen by accident. Many people would, or should, have signed this off. Several of them are probably still in post.

There was a lot of coverage of those riots, during and afterwards, and I can’t now separate what I saw at the time from what I watched later. The point was that many believed that this was kind of what Trump meant, either because they love him or because they hate him (indifference seems not to be an emotion he evokes). It kind of fitted – he was outrageous; this was an outrageous event.

This came, you will recall, at the end of a period of wrangling over the 2020 election result that at times descended into high farce. For many, the former President calling on people to storm the Capitol was all more of the same. However, as we now know, this wasn’t exactly what he said.

• Defensive

The BBC has been on the back foot for years. The root of this is the licence fee which has long been accepted by all (and still is my many) as a fair way of paying for broadcasting without adverts. For a long time, there was no real standard against which the BBC could be judged, ITV aside.

Then along came the likes of Sky and the numerous digital channels which followed in its wake. Many of these have asked why people have no real choice about paying the licence fee. (I read somewhere that someone successfully defended a prosecution as he was able to demonstrate that he’s fixed his TV so it couldn’t receive BBC channels. This seems like rather a desperate meaure and not one many would want to try, or know how to do. In these days of multiple devices, it’s also probably impossible.)

The problem the BBC has its obligation to be impartial. This can be defined in many ways and, in any case, assumes that there is one objective truth on each issue that can always be cited. There often isn’t. Many of its competitiors and other news sources make no claim to impartiality. On panel shows and the like this can easily be addressed by having all of the main views represented and – a rather harder task, as I know from personal experience – giving them all more or less equal time to speak.

This falls to pieces, however, when it’s just the voice of the BBC speaking. Extra caution must surely be observed regarding this obligation: not, as seemed to be the case here, less caution. The enemies have been circling for years, with Trump as their cheer-leader. The BBC then proceeds to hand him a gift like this. Dear, oh dear.

• Trust

Despite this, the BBC remains a very trusted brand. A YouGov survey conducted in June 2025 (after the Panorama programme was broadcast but before the crisis was exposed), as reported in The Guardian, puts it the top of all the main sources of news by this measure.

Note the position of local newspapers in fifth place. This may be because they often cover issues which are essentially factual and so trust doesn’t really figure. Many also describe themselves as “newspapers of record”. This serves both to explain the almost complete absence of opinion articles (which can be hard to write and can be legally problematic) and also to re-inforce the idea that what you read may not be very interesting, but at least it’s true. They are, the inference runs, acting as the community’s minute-takers.

Another reason might be that the decline in local papers means that many areas are served by only one (if that). A statement made in a local paper may therefore be hard to refute unless you’re prepared to research the matter youself, which most people aren’t. It would be interesting to see figures for towns or areas with these colour-coded depending on how many newspapers or other news sources existed.

• Mixing

I think that Penny Post is trusted. I hope it is as that’s one of our aims. Another is to be entertaining. This may involve describing an issue in a way that’s other than the “newspaper of record” approach. This sometimes involves analogies, references to parallel cases and apparent digressions. Ironies, humour and paradoxes can also be found in the most unexpected places. The trick is to explain an often complex story or issue in a way that offers fresh insights or perspectives but without ignoring some points of view or twisting others. If that’s pulled off, then job done.

It also involves mixing reporting and comment. There’s a convention that says these should be separate but it’s not one we follow. I think it more honest to make any preferences on a matter clear than to use omission to tilt the story in a particular direction. I have no particular target in mind here as I think that’s inherent in all reporting. In a report of, say, a meeting, you’ll inevitably miss a lot out.

What you’re left with may or may not be an accurate summary. If it isn’t, this could be due to poor editing, deliberate slanting or to a subconscious and/or institutional bias. It’s the last of these that the BBC stands accused of.

Anything you read is going to have a bias of some kind due to the human factor. After all, journalists are human – well some of them are. A lot of copy, but not this copy, is written by AI bots. These may be pretty good at summarising a long document, or even a particular issue that’s covered in a range of sources. Inferences may, however, be less reliable.

If any part of the process is flawed this may be because AI has learned from the internet, most articles in which are not objective while some are plain wrong. If we aren’t impartial then it’s perhaps unreasonable to expect anything that learns from us to be either. Also – for the moment at least – most of the internet has been written by humans.

Of course, the time will come, and it may not be that far off, when the majority of the internet hasn’t been written by humans but by AI, so that it’s essentially learning from itself and re-inforcing prejudices it’s already acquired. A number of models, few of them good, follow from this development. Or the programming may not be that good; or it’s been deliberately skewed by bad actors.

So we come back again to the three reasons why human journalism can be wrong – incompetence, deception or conditioning. Viewed in this light, perhaps we hacks are not so different from Roger and Rachel the AI bots after all…

• And finally…

• I’m not normally drawn to reality TV shows but someone whose opiniuon I trust advised my watching Celebrity Traitors. What a delight it was. There are probably few people in the country who don’t know the premise but, in summary, it’s a kind of thought experiment in which sixteen honest people have to expose three people who’re anything but. The audience knows who’s in which camp but the honest (“Faithful”) contestants don’t. Most of the contestants were known to me but three really stood out.

The first was singer-songwriter Cat Burns, one of the traitors. She was super-cool throughout and everyone loved her. She also was adept at deflecting suspicious about her manner by citing a mild autism which made it hard for her to engage easily in group discussions. No one challenged her on this point: a sign of the times, perhaps. She played her part superbly.

As did Alan Carr, another traitor and the eventual winner. I’ve never been a fan of camp and innuendo-laden comedy, which the few clips I’ve seen of him suggest that he specialises in. On the programme, however, he came across as funny, warm and thoughtful. All the other contestents also loved him, perhaps explaining why he made it to end.

Most impressive, however, was Joe Marler, someone who due to my total lack of interest in rugby I’d never heard of. Once he’d got over his man-mountain and gruff rough-diamond persona in the first couple of episodes, his observations were the most perceptive and he was only caught out near the end by a piece of double- or triple-bluff psychology that could have backfired on anyone.

• Our Prime Minster seems to have a number of enemies at present, many of whom seem uncomfortably close to home. Take your pick from the wide coverage of recent attempts to unseat him, or brief against his enemies, or not, or brief against him, or not. Pride of place in the headline stakes has to be “Kier and loathing”, a line I’d dearly like to claim as my own but which has to be attributed to The Week.

• I’m reading a number of books simultaneously at present: that’s to say, not at the same time with different eyes but alternating according to my mood. These include Jerusalem by Simon Sebag Montefiore (which can only be read in small chunks, so detailed is it); The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton (which does pretty much what it says on the cover); A Perfect Spy by John le Carré (which several friends say is his best, though a hundred pages in, I can’t see it); A History of the World in Fifty Lies by Natasha Tidd (which makes ideal dip-in, dip-out reading); and Rhyme and Reason by Mark Forsyth (which looks at English poetry from the middle ages to whenever it finishes – and without once mentioning Shakespeare).

It’s the last one that’s most held my attention. I love an iambic pentameter and this book explains some reasons why this form works so well. It also looks at the reasons why much poetry was written. The idea of not mentioning the bard is, I think, inspired (and, I’m told, explained in the appendix). It’s good that other poets get a bit more time in the sunlight as he does tend to hog it a bit. 

During his life, Shakespeare wasn’t seen as that exceptional. Now he is widely regarded, perhaps even by the French, as the greatest writer of all time. Reading a book with the assumption that he never existed calls to mind the thought experiment – that phrase again – I felt when watching Yesterday, the engaging film in which a musician wakes up after a road accident to find himself in a world identical in all respects except that The Beatles had never existed.

• I know very little about crypto currency, nor the ethics that determines presidential pardons in the USA, but Trump’s expunging of the charges against Changpeng Zhao, the convicted crypto-billionaire, marked a new low, according to various US publications as quoted in The Week. If you can present every judicial verdict with which you don’t agree as being politically motivated, as he does, then every such decision is probably both swift and easy. The accusations that Zhao’s company “is helping put billions into the Trump family coffers” obviously has nothing to do with it…

Across the area

• Merging the councils

Those following the proposed merger of West Berkshire, the Vale of White Horse and South Oxfordshire as Ridgeway will be aware that the time has now come for a bit more insight. Attention now needs to turn to some of the details of the scheme – assuming the government approves it, of course. 

(I am for brevity, describing the last two councils collectively as Vox. They have for so long behaved as one entity – sharing a CEO, offices, a comms team and even a local plan – that to regard them as separate is a bit misleading.)

Over the last half a century or so, the general trend has been for political units to split, not merge. The USSR, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Brexit have all demonstrated this. The only merger I can think of took place in Germany in the 1990s. This might therefore provide some historical lessons.

Obviously, German re-unification and the proposed creation of Ridgeway, or the many other new council structures in England, are not on the same scale. These authorities have not for forty-plus years denied each other’s existance nor tried to shoot those who crossed the frontier. None the less, one has to find comparisons where one can.

Firstly, German re-unification was primarily an act of political will, led by Helmut Kohl. An opportunity had presented itself. His party was unpopular and an election was looming. An opportunistic move to bring about what had been a general, if largely theoretical, article of faith among many Germans, was siezed upon.

As our Hamburg correspond Owen Jones suggests, “the western sharks moved into the ex-GDR in force. Within about five years, the country had been economically pillaged – and nobody lifted a finger to stop it, or at least to apply the brakes. The East Germans woke up to find that the promised dream of freedom, prosperity and Coca Cola for everyone had gone up in a puff of smoke. Instead, they were faced with huge unemployment, widespread loss of homes and property and increasing poverty.”

The question some are asking with regard to local government is whether the whole thing is just a political decision under the guise of saving money and increasing accountability but actually doing the opposite. Savings rarely appear within the promised time-scale, or at all; while fewer councillors and more distant decision-making seems to threaten a democratic deficit.

Both of these problems would apply even if WBC merged with Swindon, or Reading and Wokingham, or the Isle of Man, or Madagascar. Also, many accept that unitary councils like WBC are too small. There are over 300 councils in England and one wonders whether – will all due respect to the hard-working staff – it’s possible for each of them, often in isolation, effectively to combat the far larger resources that utility companies, large developers and indeed the government itself can bring to bear on them. Perhaps larger is better, even with less representation.

The government wants to find all possible means either to force councils to spend less or to blame them, rather than itself, when they fail to do so. In Germany, however, the hoped-for economic benefits were slow in arriving and, in many parts of the east, have not done so yet.

One of the advantages of increasing size is economies of scale. In Germany, there were problems in getting several organisations, including the Police, to merge effectively, but that was something that political steam-rollering eventually solved. In WBC and Vox the more minor and prosaic issues of common waste and highways provisions, to pick but two, have the potential to torpedo proposed cost savings.

These are underpinned by the perhaps more serious obstacle of legal contracts. Different authorities have often very different long-term deals for these services. Some have plenty of time yet to run, others need imminent re-negotiation. (There are also similar but less serious divergencies, such as with leisure services, that will create problems as well).

The problem appears to be that the government has insisted that the re-tendering process take place as if the re-organisation weren’t happening. This is plainly bonkers. Secondary legislation or ministerial directives could and should be used to ensure that any planned savings could be realised by extending contracts based on custom or terminating others earlier. Are WBC and Vox lobbying for this to happen?

Not to do this risks some new council areas having different providers for these services. As well as removing any promised economies, it also makes the matter of reporting problems vastly more complex. To a large extent it also destroys one of the main reasons for merging the councils at all.

There’s also the question of union representation, Vox, for instance, recognises UNISON. WBC currently doesn’t. Spoiler alert, but there will be redundancies. A masssive employment-tribunal verdict was what forced Birminham into declaring an S-114 (bankruptcy) notice. Just saying…

This and other related matters were looked at by WBC’s Resources and Place Scrutiny Committee on 10 November. There was not a lot of time for the points to be considered before the Executive decided the matter two days later – click here to see the video of the meeting – but it’s to be hoped that the concerns will be borne in mind as the plan takes shape (if it does – that’s up to the government).

At the Executive meeting, WBC’s leader Jeff Brooks paid tribute to the officers who had produced this document which was, as he said, a year ago no more than idea. This work was done, he pointed out, “in addition to their day jobs – extra homework.” The same sentiments are probably being exprerssed up and down the country as similar decisions (and there are a lot of them) are made elsewhere.

Questions still, however, remain as to whether this (or any other) merger will produce the hoped-for results. One of the attractions is that Vox (because of not providing social-care and children’s services) has a big heap of cash reserves whereas WBC (which does provide these) doesn’t. Germany was similar in that the west had the money, though dissimilar in that it could re-shape the east in its own image, and did so. To quote our Hamburg correspondent, “there were also a lot of babies thrown out with the bathwater,  for example the excellent social care structures for both pre-school children and the elderly in the GDR.”

That can’t happen with Ridgeway, if it comes to pass, as these are statutory responsibilities. None the less, at some point (not too far distant) any extra reserves will be eaten up by these costs. Then what?

As for the democratic deficit, the comparison between Germany and Ridgeway pretty much vanishes – but not quite. Any change is likely to lead to scepticism and often to real problems. In 1990s Germany, there were some mutterings in the west that the Berlin wall was perhaps not such a bad idea given the costs of the merger. The recent rise of the right-wing AfD has, according to Owen Jones, contributed to “a disillusioned society that is ripe for the simplistic neo-fascist arguments of the AfD, which is now the most popular political party in many regions of the old GDR.”

This point may not apply in the proposed Ridgeway where the inhabitants of WBC and Vox are demograpically quite similar, but it might do elsewhere. Anything that risks making local democracy seem less effective and more centralised – which the government’s re-organisation plans can be accused of – risks giving ammunition to those who wish to exploit it. We have a party in England that’s poised to pounce on this.

All that said, I think that given the imperfect world, and given that change of some kind will happen, Ridgeway is the best option.

The ball is now in the government’s court – not only to make the decisions on these and many other proposals, with or without a German comparison in mind but also to reform council finances. If I could pick two things, they would be (a) regulating (and enforcing) the charges that private children’s homes charge local councils; and (b) dealing with the even bigger elephant which is the off-balance SEND costs.

Without this, many councils will be as broke as many parts of eastern Germany were, and are. The reasons might be different but the political consequences could be the same. AfD and Reform are both banging on the door. If the government has any solution to the massive mess into which local-council finances have got into, this reorganisation is the opportunity to show it. If not, face the consequences…

• Financial matters

At the meeting of WBC’s Executive on 6 November, WBC’s financial situation was discussed. There was a certain amount of the obligatory political knockabout but we’ll leave that to one side. Whichever party was in control in the past, or now, the result would be much the same.

There are two big problems: adult social care and children’s services, which between them account for about 64% of the council’s expenditure. In 2016-17, they accounted for 44%.

Social-care portfolio holder Patrick Clark pointed out that the quarterly budget defecit of £3.7m was largely a result of not being able to make the hoped-for savings with the care homes and the resource centres. The rest of the overspend, about £1.2m, is he explained a consequence of having a “needs-led” budget.

In other words, if someone requires help, WBC must provide it. As he pointed out, “it’s difficult to know the number of people that will come to us and the extent of the support they will need.” With single care packages costing as much as £700,000 a year, there’s no reason why the same sort of overspecnd won’t be seen in future quarters. The Council has recently hired a consultant to tighten up procurement with the external companies.

For children’s services, the situation’s even worse. Portfolio holder Heather Codling said that “in 2022/3 the cost of running children’s services was just over £11m, and this year we budgeted for £19.8m but Q2 projection is for this to be £21.4m.”  Children with particularly complex needs can be costing £1m a year each. If more of these cases emerge, as has happened in the recent past, the costs will rise and it’s very hard to see what any council can do to stop it.

She also referred to the “difficult unregulated market” in which some providers of care services are making “huge profits”. Indeed, it’s a seller’s market in many ways. Providers of children’s and adult care, school transport and many other services know that the councils have to provide these and in some cases behave accordingly.

Finance portfolio holder Iain Cottingham “acknowledged this report highlights a significant overspend forecast for the end of the financial year.” He outlined several methods to help combat this, including setting up a spending panel, keeping an even closer eye on recruitment and looking for further efficiencies in all parts of the budget.

The backdrop, however, is rising costs: the most expensive SEND packages have, he said, risen by 165% in the last few years. These are only rendered manageable at all because they’re kept off municipal balance sheets. This nettle was to have been grasped in April 2026 but has now been kicked down the road by two years: at which point another reason may be found to delay it further. I wish I could do that with my bills.

He also referred to using “transformation funding” to help create a new children’s commissioning function. This refers to the government’s loosening of the finacial rules which enables money to be borrowed and used, not only for capital expenditure as was the previous rule, but this more general area of “transformation”. The money needs to be paid back, of course.

In his summing up, Council Leader Jeff Brooks echoed all these points, admitting that “the Council’s budget remains under pressure”. WBC was not, he stressed, the only one in this boat, pointing out that on that very day Leicester City Council had announced an overspend of £90m, mainly due to these same two areas. As a former PM remarked fifteen years ago, “we’re all in this together.”

The government has some very serious decisions to make about all this. There are three choices: sell the idea that we’ll all have to pay more for these services through local or national tax; find ways, through regulation or competition, to reduce their cost; or not provide some of them to the same level as currently, or at all. None of these will be easy or, in the first and third cases, popular. The alternative is more of the same overspend every quarter, at every council.