• by Sean Hargrave , Staff Writer, August 24, 2018

What on earth is Jeremy Corbyn talking about? His Alternative McTaggart lecture, delivered last night in Edinburgh, was well-trailed in media circles. I wrote yesterday about the proposals to tax the tech giants and distribute the proceeds to independent journalist groups.

If that idea seemed to miss the point that the tech giants send millions of eyeballs to media sites for free, today we have an even more puzzling set of suggestions now the speech has actually been delivered.

The main thrust of is the kind of stuff you expect from the leader of the opposition who, I suspect, is more than happy to call himself a socialist. There's a lot of stuff about British journalists needing to be freed from the yoke of billionaire press barons. No real surprise there. The press barons appear to not particularly like Jeremy Corbyn, and the feeling seems mutual most of the time. Only today, there are yet more allegations that what he said in the past could be construed as anti-semitic. Again, I'm not going to touch it with a barge pole.

At the same time that media barons are inflicting harm on journalists, and the news landscape, we also have the observation that the US tech giants dominate the media far too much. We kind of dealt with this one yesterday. Yes, they dominate digital marketing -- but actually, in the sense that Corbyn is talking about, people reading the news, they actually send millions of viewers to newspaper and magazine sites, completely free of charge. So, this domination argument is a strange one.

However, we've yet to get to the pinnacle of his strangest argument. Corbyn is always about the power of the press being way too high and that power being wielded by media barons is a bad thing. It doesn't quite sit, however, with those same news organisations being choked by US tech giants. Which one is it? Press barons are dominating the news or US tech giants? You can't have it both ways.

It also doesn't sit well with the fact that the BBC is way out ahead as the place that two in three Brits regularly get their news. So we had some crazy suggestions there too, including a publicly elected board that should run the corporation to ensure it isn't controlled by the Government. I would suggest that is one way to make sure politics move to the centre of the corporation rather than the outside.

This leads us to the most bonkers suggestion -- and let's face it, it's up against tough opposition when it comes to Corbyn's plans which look like they are part of some Soviet take over of the people's media. 

He wants to create the British Digital Corporation to commission news stories and online tv content. He even referred to it as "an expanded iPlayer."

Here's the rub, Mr Corbyn: even the left-leaning paper, The Guardian, pointed out that it was hard to see how the proposals for a BDC would differ from the BBC and what it is already doing online.

The reason why is simple. There is no difference. Corbyn has reinvented the BBC, albeit under some form of public citizen control, and has only had the decency to change one of the letters in the acronym.

This all just sounds like the kind of high-level talk that Corbyn supporters get up to when debating the future of something around a dinner party table. It can't possibly be done by business, it has to be done by Government and when it is, there's got to be the chaos of allowing the public to run it. Oh, and it should do exactly what the BBC is already doing.

I think the sooner Corbyn gets back to re-nationalising the railways and utilities, the better. The thoughts he has expressed this week on the media paint him in a very poor light of not knowing what he is talking about.

Reinventing the BBC for the digital era, when it is actually a leader already in digital, is just plain crazy.

If you want to avoid plagiarism taunts, Mr Corbyn, at least change more than one letter in the acronym of the organisation you're "inventing."