Another delightful example of Quangos pricing out businesses is this - http://www.hotprospects.org.uk/. To my shame the company I work for is developing this site and the whole thing stinks.
The East Midlands has countless recruitment agencies so why the need for a government agency to do pretty much the same thing?
To be fair, isn't the "propaganda" an example of government persuading rather than regulating? Something that someone of libertarian/small government tendancies should be for?
Isn't a well informed citizenry a good thing?
Two things shock me about the whole BBC Jam thing.
Firstly, the knock-on effect isn't actually "the BBC wasted some money", this will put some people out of business. 50% of the content for BBC Jam was being *commissioned* by the BBC from independent web agencies and producers, who are now facing losing swathes of their expected cash-flow. Bigger businesses have complained to the EU and put the thing to a halt, but it isn't the BBC that will suffer, it will be small educational web start-ups that were guaranteed 50% of the output.
Secondly, the thing that makes me want to throw my laptop against the wall is that even launching the thing in the first place was regulatory torture, and less than 4 years ago the government were claiming they had the right regulatory balance between the BBC and the market - http://www.culture.gov.uk/
Refere...dcms04_2003.htm
Either the govmt messed up, the BBC didn't stick to their promises, or the bigger fish in the private sector didn't fancy smaller companies getting the business. But, whichever way it is, a heap of money wasted, and now we go through the regulatory research / report cycle again, and the end result is that kids have less material to learn with to improve their skills to fuel the economy in the future.
Glass House- great name btw
Propaganda vs informed citizenry. Yes interesting.
I'm all in favour of informd citizenry, but we do have the press, including all the many excellent specialist blogs that have sprung up.
And from the COI films through to the current torrent of government eco advertising, I've yet to be convinced that much of it is "objective".
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