Ken Livingstone is wrong about whether Nick Griffin should be on Question Time

Image by Rex Chen via Flickr

There's been a lot of noise about the BBC's decision to invite the leader of the BNP onto the Question Time panel.

On this morning's Today Programme on Radio 4, Ken Livingstone argued that there is an increase in the number incidents of racial violence following media coverage of the BNP, and that therefore the BNP should not be allowed any media exposure over and above the bare minimum dictated by law.

But this argument ignores a couple of key points. Whether or not I, or Ken Livingstone, or anyone else, likes it, the BNP is a force in UK politics. Around a million people voted for them in the last European elections. They have two MEPs. By those measures, the BNP is about as representative as the Green Party.

The BNP is a racist party. Its mission statement and constitution are pretty unambiguous about that. And a million British people voted for them: around 3% of the population or 6% of the turnout.

So it seems to me that the real problem isn't that the BNP is racist. The real problem is that a significant number of people in Britain are either racist as well, or ignorant of the true nature of the BNP. Such ignorance is plausible, since the BNP manifesto for the European election is light on topics of race, choosing to focus on subjects like EU withdrawal, keeping the pound, support for the armed forces and keeping Post Offices open. These are things that people support, so it's easy to see how you get to "I voted for the BNP, but I'm not racist".

I don't see that suppressing media coverage of the BNP addresses that problem. In fact, it does the opposite. What is needed is lots of exposure and reasoned debate so that people can understand that there is no ambiguity in the BNP. Its views and policies are fundamentally racist. If you vote for the BNP, you are voting in favour of those racist views.

The BBC are to be saluted for doing the right thing.

What happened to wingers?

When I was about 9, I was playing on the right for my school team. I had no left foot at all (still don't, really, but it was a lot weaker then). I remember having a conversation with my dad about how it would make more sense to play on the left. My argument was that you could cut inside and get the ball in early. His response: don't be silly, if you come inside the full back then you're running into trouble. The wide player's job is to get outside the full back and cross in from behind the defence.

And while there's a lot to like about England's performance last night, they simply didn't get behind Andorra anything like enough. Ashley Young has a lot going for him, but he's a right-footed player playing on the left who didn't look confident going outside a part time full back. And that isn't going to scare any quality defence.

Robbie Keane goes back to Spurs

Well now.

After all the speculation, denials and protestations, Robbie Keane has been sold back to Spurs by Liverpool.

Without getting into the debate about whether he was given a fair crack of the whip, or whether or not he took the chances given to him, I have to say I'm impressed.

Because Rafa is saying, very publicly, that he made a mistake. And he's taken action to rectify it. Given the hullabaloo that surrounded Keane's arrival at Anfield, and the hefty transfer fee that accompanied him, this was a big mistake. And at least Rafa is able to step up, acknowledge that it isn't working, and move on. In my book, that is good management.

Whether or not you agree with the decision is another matter...

Is my mobile good value?

I’m fascinated by the pricing of mobile phones and phone contracts. The mobile business has always been dominated by a small number of providers, who offer suspiciously similar but subtly different price plans, that have always looked to me like they are designed to confuse me. Bundling a handset with my contract confuses this further: of course the handset isn’t “free”, a proportion of my monthly rental is going towards the cost of that. I just don’t know how much, and so I don’t know how much the bundled minutes and texts are actually costing me.

Except on my Three contract. What Three do is they show you the price for the tariff, then itemise the extra cost for the handset. And that means that I can see exactly how much I’m paying for those minutes. And it allows me to make an informed decision about how much the shiny new mobile is worth to me.

In my case, I pay 20 quid for 1100 minutes or texts. Or, to put it another way, less than 2p per minute or text. Just think about that. Less than 2p per minute to make a call, to a landline or a mobile, any time of the day or night. That’s cheaper than my landline provider, who want a connection fee, plus 5p per minute from me during the day, more if I want to call a mobile. Less than 2p per text message, when I’m continually informed by people in the industry that the wholesale cost of sending a message is around 3 euro cents - a little over 2p.

Except, it’s only less than 2p if I actually get round to using all those minutes or texts. And, as the people from Three are already well aware, I don’t. Well, not usually. So, I’m probably paying more like 3 to 4p per minute/text. Even so, that looks like good value. And it’s a good deal for both of us. The operator knows that I’m going to give them at least 20 quid per month for the rest of my contract. And in return for me probably buying more minutes than I need, I get a certain amount of predictability on how much my bill will be. Of course, anything international throws the predictability out of the window, but let’s put that to one side for the moment.

Now, my example may be extreme because I signed on when Three had a promotion, but it’s not massively out of kilter with the rest of the deals out there. Yesterday, for example, I walked past a Vodafone shop and saw a SIM only offer: 600 minutes and unlimited texts for 20 quid a month. So, let’s generalise and say that in bundle deals are around 3-4p per minute or text.

Things get interesting when we consider the out-of-bundle rates, or what you’ll pay on PAYG. These rates are at least four or five times the in-bundle rates. Ouch. So, either, the operators are gouging me if I go over my inclusive allowance, not to mention all their PAYG customers, or the in-bundle rates are very cheap.

I have no inside knowledge of how much it costs an operator to provide the service, but if I had to guess, I’d say that the answer to the above is somewhere in between. If I used all my minutes every month, then I suspect I wouldn’t look like a very good customer. I strongly doubt that the operator would be losing money servicing me, but they won’t be making the huge margins that their shareholders have come to expect.

I’m interested to see how the headline price for a contract will change over the next couple of years - my guess is that we will move from the 30-35 pound level that seems to be the norm currently to a 20-25 pound level. What I’m not so sure about is whether we’ll see handsets, or inclusive minutes, or both, compromised to achieve that.

But for now, while I despair at the packaging and marketing , I think that (contract) mobile price plans generally represent decent value. What do you think?

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This post also appears on Mobile Industry Review

Why is mobile email still not right?

I became aware of Nokia’s latest email offering recently, and being both an email junkie and S60 phone user I quickly installed it and had a play with it. I was intending to write a full review for this article, but I found that I kept wanting to talk about Nokia email in the context of mobile email in general, so I decided instead to write about mobile email in general. Thoughts on the Nokia offering will come later…

I can’t remember how long I have had email on my phone and/or PDA. I’m pretty sure it was no later than 1997, and definitely by 1999 I had more than one working solution. Back then, operators had dial-up numbers to send SMS, so it was a simple (!) matter of connecting my mail server to a modem and sending the text of the messages in SMS. Admittedly, it was a bit Heath Robinson, but it did work. It certainly wasn’t a mass market solution though.

Then, around about 2000, the operators in the UK all launched their own email services. You got your very own @operator.net email address, together with all the instructions you needed to configure the email client on your phone. Fantastic. Millions of pounds were spent on building those services, which, by and large, completely failed to enthuse the market. I think it’s fair to say that all of those services flopped. There were several reasons for that:

• Getting a new email address is inconvenient - people already have email addresses and want to be able to use those.
  
• Forwarding mail from my email account to my mobile email is a bit of a hassle
• And when I read the forwarded email on my handset, I still have to process the mail on my PC when I get back to it
• If I send a mail from my mobile, it would have the @operator.net address rather than my “real” address
• Of course, all this assumes that I manage to configure GPRS (or WAP dial-up, remember that?) and the email client on my phone
• Data wasn’t cheap back then

So, you had people like me running my own mail server smugly getting email on my phone, and the rest of the world getting along quite happily without it, thank you.

Fast forward to today, and no self-respecting email junkie is seen in public without their Blackberry. If you want your email on the go, the answer’s Blackberry. Now that the Blackberry is firmly entrenched in the corporate email space, it is trying to make the transition into the consumer space. Time will tell if it will be successful, but I have my doubts. These doubts come from the device - I just don’t believe enough people will be willing to swap their Nokia, Sony Ericsson or Samsung for a Blackberry. Those three are massive consumer brands, and even before you consider the camera and music functions that we all need on our phones these days, branding alone puts RIM on the back foot. They’re also on the back foot because unless you have a corporate email server with Blackberry, you don’t get the seamless experience: you have to read the email on the device and on your PC.

To be fair, this last point breaks a lot of so-called consumer email solutions, not just Blackberry. And it arises because the mobile operator is collecting the email from my ISP and offering a separate service. The best solution from that point of view is Gmail - you can read, process, delete an email on the mobile client and never have to see it on the PC. Which is what I want. There are other drawbacks to Gmail, but they have this point nailed.

For some reason, we instinctively look to our mobile providers for mobile email. But there’s another player; the email provider. Google offers me the best access to the email because they’re the email provider, and mobile is another channel to stand alongside web and PC client access. So why aren’t more ISPs offering mobility as an add on to their offering? There’s no simple answer to that, but I think a lot of things that have previously held ISPs back on mobile are changing - most notably the availability of free or cheap data bundles. The really interesting opportunity is for the guys who have both ISP and mobile businesses (for example Virgin, CPW, Orange in the UK) to tightly bundle the two and create a genuinely compelling mobile email story. (As an aside, if anyone from one of these companies is reading this and wants to discuss further with me, get in touch).

To come back to what prompted this article, there is also a third player here, the handset manufacturer. The mobile application sits on the handset, so there is an opportunity for the manufacturer to provide a higher value service. It’s a fine line, because there’s a big difference between shifting consumer electronics and running consumer services, as even Apple found out recently, and also because the operators may not take kindly to being reduced to a bit part in this scenario.

Nokia’s service is positioned as a beta, and that’s how I found it. It isn’t good enough right now for my day-to-day email requirements, but it is a promising sign of intent.

I’m really optimistic that somewhere between the mobile operator, the ISP, and the handset manufacturers, we’ll see some excellent mobile email offerings in the next 18 months or so.