This month, BT launched a very expensive-sounding TV station. BT Sport's ads practically reek of eau de chequebook, as they list all the on-screen talent that has already been signed up: Michael Owen, David Ginola, Martina Navratilova, Lawrence Dallaglio, Clare Balding … on the list goes, like Top Trumps on steroids.
Then there's the £152m for exclusive coverage of the rugby premiership, £736m for 38 football Premier League matches and a vast TV studio in the Olympic Park. Totting up the bill for all this across BT's channels, sportswriters arrive at a round figure of "a billion-pound gamble". But chuck in other sporting rights, presenters' fees, staffing and a marketing blitz, and the sum is surely higher still.
The same BT was last month hauled over the coals for its part in what is fast turning out to be a fiasco: providing rural Britain with decen tbroadband. This is another billion-pound job: around £1.2bn of public money will be sunk into the project and most will be handed to BT to ensure it makes an "acceptable return" on the job. Except that the telecoms giant's definition of an acceptable return is murky to officials in local government, central government and the state auditors – and has been found to include millions in overcharging of the public.
With one hand, a £25bn company is taking more than a billion off taxpayers, to provide a public good. With the other hand, it's splashing out a billion – and further inflating football's Premier-League bubble. And in that ugly symmetry is a lot that's rotten with big corporates in Britain, and how lightly Westminster lets them off the hook.
But let's go back to broadband. From economists to politicians, everyone agrees that fast internet access is as essential as roads, rail and airports to a modern economy. Whether it's a studio editing films, a company storing files in the cloud, or a care-home warden wanting medical advice on a resident, everyone needs decent internet connection. That's also true if the UK is ever to develop an economic model that isn't obsessed with London.
Yet for swaths of rural Britain and for some deprived urban pockets, the internet is slow to non-existent. Peter Cochrane, former chief technology officer with BT, reckons he has been to Greek islands and parts of Colombia with faster broadband than villages a few miles outside Norwich. This connective dearth is all the more aggravating for city dwellers whose commutes to work are regularly disrupted by roadworks to put down fibre-optic broadband cable.
Given that everyone agrees that getting Britain online is a public good, what do those giants at the Department for Culture do? Why, award juicy subsidies to private companies to bribe them to do the work.
Source: The Guardian
