On the panel were: Dominic Fisher, Chair of the Ladywood constituency Conservative Party, Councillor Paul Tilsley, LibDem Deputy Leader of Birmingham City Council, Jonathan Bartley, Co-Director of the liberal Christian thinktank Ekklesia (and also speaking as a member of the Green Party), and Jack Dromey, Labour MP for Erdington.

How to reform the House of Lords without giving too much power to one party and/or preventing gridlock between two houses?

PT: the problem with an elected upper chamber is if you get it wrong in the electoral cycle you’ll end up with stalemate, but he does think we have to move to an elected Lords.

DF: one of the key things needing changing is the element of patronage in the current system. He wouldn’t want people who ‘feel like they’ve been elected’ – the upper chamber’s role is one of scrutiny, not to vote against the lower house. He would favour some form of pr election, plus some form of appointment by a commission for say five years.

JD: would we have a second chamber at all if we were building a system starting from scratch? Since we’re not, he thinks it should be entirely elected and is opposed to patronage and what it has led to. Any system which continues to have nomination by political parties is prone to corruption. The House of Commons should remain supreme and not be challenged.

JB: agrees wth the others; sings the praises of the approx 200 cross-benchers who are independent of any party – an elected second chamber should not lose this. The coallition agreement to make the House of Lords look like the House of Commons in terms of representation is a mistake.

From the floor: as well as bishops, shouldn’t there be other representitives of ‘organisations’ eg trade unions in there?

Who benefits from the Alternative Vote as proposed in May?

DF: voters will benefit the most – you get to vote with your head and your heart, without needing to vote tactically. He also agrees with the idea of the referendum to decide this, because voters should choose the method of voting, not MPs. He does expect to see more extremes at both ends of both main parties under AV.

PT: not a fan of AV, but that was the best that could be done in the negotiations leading to the coallition agreement; at least every vote would count, which is a start.

JB: voters will benefit. He notes that the BNP and other extreme minority parties oppose AV because they wouldn’t stand a chance under it, whereas with FPTP they do stand a vague chance in some constituencies.

JD: agrees with PT about AV being a poor step; he also thinks the current bill to enable the referendum stinks because of the link with the government’s MP reduction plans. He thinks MPs will have to work harder and not able to take anything for granted, and it will add to the legitimacy of MPs since they’ll be able to say they have the support of 50% of their electorate.

From the floor: is marginalising the minorities actually fair?

Is an elected mayor for Birmingham a good or bad thing for democracy?

PT: one of the problems an independent candidate – even a famous one – would have in standing is being able to mobilise people to shove leaflets through doors, so they don’t stand a chance. He thinks a mayor would be a total disaster for democracy to vest all the power in one person. Stoke-on-Trent is a perfect example of the disaster, as are Doncaster & Hartlepool. The London model of a strategic leader of a regional assembly is totally different from Birmingham and other local authorities. The Birmingham Mail’s failed campaign demonstrated that the people of Birmingham really don’t have an appetite for an elected mayor.

DF: agrees the public has no appetite, but he comments that business is apparently in favour. The test is, does it bring power from Whitehall to the region, or does it actually transfer power from neighbourhoods to the Council House? He thinks the latter, and doesn’t agree with his party on the issue.

JD: thinks it’s particularly silly that the Localism Bill proposes appointing the current council leader as the caretaker mayor until a mayor is properly elected. Again, he thinks it worked in London, but wouldn’t work in Birmingham – but does think we need to have the debate on it. He does think if there was a referendum tomorrow Birmingham would probably vote for a mayor on the basis of a perception that Birmingham doesn’t punch its weight, and predicts that the public might think a mayor would solve that.

From the floor: thinks it would lead to corruption in Birmingham – which is why business is in support, because they’d be able to do dodgy deals…

How representative is Parliament, and what could be done to fix it?

JB: most MPs were opposed by two thirds of their constituents; AV would at least address that. It’s not representitive because it doesn’t represent peoples’ concerns – he thinks AV would broaden that. The last election campaign was a sham, because it focussed on one thing which was not actually relevant anyway. A third of parliamentary seats haven’t changed hands since the Second World war – the whole election is won and lost on a few thousand votes in a few marginal seats, so that’s what the campaign is focussed on.

DF: MPs aren’t representitive on anything – how many creative industries people are in there? The fault of this is not the voting system, but the way parties choose their candidates. He likes Caroline Lucas’ proposals to modernise the way Parliament works, eg electronic voting, to make Parliament more ‘family friendly’.

JD: thinks things have moved in the right direction in terms of the powers of backbenchers, but Select Committees are still nowhere near as powerful as eg Congressional Committees in the USA. He thinks it’s wrong that parliament has become dominated by the professional middle classes and the professional political classes, and wants to see more car workers and care workers in Parliament.

Should we make more use of referendums for important issues?

DF: we’ve never had that tradition. He thinks it’s wrong, and capital punishment is the classic example – predictions are a majority of the public would vote for it, and that would lead to so many disastrous miscarriages of justice.

PT: thinks capital punishment is a red-herring – ‘personally i’m a fan of democracy’. Switzerland demonstrates the increased political engagement of the people there, where they have a referendum culture.

JD: thinks democracy needs reinvigorating by making representatives more accountable to people, rather than moving to a referendum culture. He notes some of the ugly xenophobic outcomes of the Swiss referendum culture.

JB: agrees with a greater use of referendums. He notes that a referendum on Iraq would have said no. (Does he like referendums so long as they come out with the right result?!). He thinks there’s a big problem with the way that elections are run on manifestos that most people probably don’t agree with most of the contents of, and thinks increased referendums would introduce more honesty to political campaigning.

From the floor: Swiss referendums are polarised yes / no questions – what about multichoice? Who and how would it be decided what becomes a referendum issue? How many people voting in a referendum have properly studied the issues anyway?

Amazingly it seemed that all four members of the panel agreed with each on about 80% of the issues during the evening!

It had a good innings – nobody can complain about a run of 856 years and it being curtailed; I remember when plans to demolish the 1960′s market and shopping centre area were being consulted on how most of the traders predicted the market wouldn’t survive, but – the soul having been ripped out of the place notwithstanding – most of the stalls made it through that redevelopment.

Then there are the current fears that the move of the Wholesale Markets from right next to the Bullring Market will cause major hassle – Jon Bounds has commented on the silliness of the image of traders wheeling trolleys full of cabbages half way across town half way through the trading day, but there’s the very real concern of how produce will be then transported, coupled with the new uncertainty surrounding when the move will actually happen.

But to me, what has finally killed the market is the combination of the serious drop in quality of the produce on sale, combined with the scourge of the man from the weights and the measures, the Poundabowl.

Now don’t get me entirely wrong – where the typical shopper might think more in terms of a number of items rather than a weight of items, there’s nothing wrong with it; but it still makes price comparisons difficult, because you don’t know how much you’re getting for your pound from different traders – you may well even be getting a different amount from the same trader each time you buy!

Until recently, produce from the market always tended to have what supermarket fruit and veg well and truly lacked – flavour. I still remember like it was yesterday my reintroduction to the market (after being horrified by reading Felicity Lawrence’s supermarket exposé, Not on the Label) and rediscovering that an onion is an actual real vegetable with a texture and a flavour, rather than some white thing which goes in the dinner for I’m-not-really-sure-what-it’s-adding. The market produce was the blemished, funny shaped stuff which the supermarket bland-o-matic rejected as being Not Possible To Bland.

But of late I’ve noticed that the flavour is less noticeably different from the supermarket, but more critically, the quality has gone right down the pan. It’s no use buying four or five peppers for a pound rather than three or four peppers for £1.50 if you only get to actually use two of them because the rest have become a putrifying blob of mush after a couple of days. I already decided a couple of weeks ago to stop getting my onions from the market because basically half of them were rotten even on the day I bought them.

Today, when I went to my usual stall for getting peppers, I was saddened to see they too have gone over to poundabowl. Rather than hand-picking the precise peppers I wanted (ie, the ones which looked the least off) I would have been forced to accept the ones in the bowl. I usually get a mix of colours, but these bowls were all monochrome – when I asked the assistant for a mix, her reply was “no, I’m not allowed to do that”. So I walked away and found another stall.

The other stall was also poundabowl, but at least when I asked if he could do a mix he said yes. When I checked in the bag to see how mixed he’d done it (just one red to five greens – I wanted three reds and three greens), I saw that two of the peppers were a putrifying blob of mush already.

If I can’t even rely on what I buy being of merchantable quality on the day I buy it, I’m not sure I can be bothered going all the way down there to buy in the first place. So for that reason, I’m out.

Mr Woodnote again, this time on New Street, Birmingham

http://www.myspace.com/mrwoodnote

http://www.andygaylejazz.co.uk/

http://www.myspace.com/davidlloydhenry

Five key points which emerged for me were:

The days of the global media corporation are over

In the olden days, the media industry was dominated by just a handful of ‘boulder’companies – such as News International, CNN, Associated Newspapers, Guardian Media Group, the BBC, etc. When Channel 4 launched, and when Eddie Shah launched the Today newspaper they were big, national events, because there were so few other media brands. Today, all new media companies are ‘pebble’ companies – small start-ups, with small costs & consequently small profits. New digital television stations come and go almost unnoticed; for most people literally unnoticed, as most people rarely update the channel lists on their televisions / set top boxes. There will be no more new boulder companies.

The paradox of the media industries in free-fall

The media industries – especially those of journalism and of music – are in free fall; profits for record companies and newspaper companies are plumetting, as people turn their backs on their offerings. The paradox of this is that now there is more music, and more journalism (and yes, some blogging should be counted as journalism) around now than ever before. It’s not ‘media’ itself that’s in crisis, but the notion of making a lot of money out of creating media. The ability for media customers to get their media for free (whether via piracy or legitimately) is only part of the story – media creators now take their product to market themselves, bypassing the middleman who used to pay for the creation of the media product, and accordingly take a cut of the price of the product. When you can create your album in your home studio and distribute it across the internet yourself, what value is the record company adding?

For creativity to thrive, experimentation needs to embrace the possibility of failure

This is clearly an obvious statement when written down like that; as with most obvious statements it never occurs to anybody until they see it written down. Common sense, innit? In the olden days, the music business was just that – a business. Record companies invested in artists, and took risks. Sure, manufactured pop has been with us since the beginning of popular music, and the number of experimental pieces even getting in to the hit parade, let alone topping it, can be counted on your hands. But in the olden days record companies used a bulk of the profits they made from chart-topping artists to subsidise artists which were unlikely to be vast earners, because they recognised that a healthy diversity of available music was good for society, good for their own portfolios – and consequently good for their own ultimate balance sheets. Similarly in newspapers, press barons of old saw newspaper proprietorship almost as a civic, philanthropic, duty – they didn’t want their newspapers to make losses, but conversely saw the provision of news and information as having primacy over the provision of profit.

In the modern era, with the boulder media companies, media businesses have become media industries – no longer do they invest in new, experimental talent, no longer do they take risks; by focussing solely on maximising profits they have lost the souls of their industries, with the consequence that their customers are deserting them in droves. Pebble companies are in the best position to experiment – such as BooneOakley, having made their whole website as a series of YouTube videos!

Quality, not quantity

Question – was it worth £6bn to make the Eurostar train journey between London and Paris 40 minutes faster, cutting the travel from 2 hours 55 minutes to 2 hours 15 minutes? Would that money have been better spent on improving the user experience, so passengers didn’t notice the drudgery of spending three hours on a train? First class carriages (with the food and drink to match) throughout the whole train? More cheaper fares (or more cheap first class upgrades)? Does three hours even feel like a long time to spend on a train to Paris anyway?

Don’t underestimate the propensity of users to re-purpose things

There are plenty of objects on Twitter, such as Tower Bridge. It’s cute – it posts a message every time it lifts, and then when it drops again. But what started off as a cute gimmick has actually turned into something useful – if you live in London & need to travel around the area, it’s actually a bit of an inconvenience when the bridge lifts, because it holds up your travel – but if you know it’s lifting, you can re-route your journey. Which people in London are increasingly doing.

Other themes

• The current creative revolution will be as economically & socially disruptive as the industrial revolution – and we’re woefully unprepared for it. Our education system does not encourage creative thinking, significantly unchanged as it has been for the last 200 years.
• The physical space will always matter for making connexions – we should be using the digital space to feed the physical space.
• Always design a thing by considering it in its wider context – a chair within a room, a room within a building, a building on a street, etc.

And finally…

…can you remember a world before smartphones?

Unlike parking on yellow lines or overstaying in parking bays – which are now civil offences – parking on the pavement is still actually illegal.

Not only this, it is downright antisocial – the weight puts extra strain on pavement masonry which is designed to carry pedestrians, not cars, invariably a car parked on the pavement forces people with pushchairs or those in wheelchairs to step into the oncoming traffic on the road to get around the car, an in the very worst instances – such as the one pictured here – completely obstruct the paths of blind people, and worst of all here, even obstructing the blind pedestrian from being able to cross a junction in safety because the car is parked on the tactile paving which the blind use to tell they are at a junction.

In busy residential streets, built before the mass ownership of cars and therefore too narrow to safely take legal parking on both sides of the road, this is bad enough, but it’s often accepted by many that a certain level of give and take is needed, so long as the driver still parks with due consideration for pedestrians of all mobility abilities. I’m not going to claim to be innocent of ever having put my wheels on the kerb’s edge in such situations.

However this road is not a street with people living there parking on it – it’s an access road to the blocks of flats either side, to the canal below, and to the footbridge to the other side of the canal. Until recently, parking was not permitted at all, as it was a private access road patrolled by clampers; nobody living there parks there, because everybody who does live there has their own parking spaces. Since the road ceased to be private and the clampers moved out, it has become a magnet for drivers all over the city who are too tight-wadded to pay for their parking like everybody else has to. They have a legal right to park there – for the time being – but no moral right, and certainly they have no right to park in an illegal and antisocial manner obstructing the way for residents and transiting pedestrians alike.

So I wonder if the radio station BRMB approves of its staff parking their cars – with the company logo plastered all over it – in such a way?

artsfest 2009 from simon gray on Vimeo.

Although the festival has been going for years, it’s only the last two years that I’ve been able to get to any of it; most years of its life it has clashed with me being away for that weekend on some committee meeting or other.

The last few years there have always been mutterings that the event was to be cancelled – 2007 was rumoured to have been the last one whilst it was taking place, but unexpectedly good reviews and turnout led to 2008′s event being hastily confirmed.

The two years – this year and last year – that I have managed to get to any of it I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen, but there’s the rub; at the end both years I’ve felt I’ve seen barely any of what’s been going on, whilst spending a large amount of the day wandering around looking for something to see. As a big arts festival, my experience of it has it hasn’t felt terribly user friendly – especially as a city centre resident (admittedly not a key demographic in the target audience) where the temptation to simply go home during a gap and come out again later is all too great.

With a new cabinet member in charge of the city’s leisure and culture portfolio, rumours have inevitably sprung up again about the festival’s future. Artfest 2010 is guaranteed, but beyond that the whole offering is up for review. I have to say that I like what I read of Councillor Mullaney’s ideas:

“Under Ray Hassall [Mullaney’s predecessor] it became much more populist and it pulls the punters in.  Everyone likes it, and the venues sell a lot of tickets off the back of it, so from that point of view you have to ask, ‘how can you get rid of it.’

“But we are in the process of getting our ideas together for more niche festivals.  We’ve got to mix the populist with the more offbeat and quirky, so we’ll be having a brainstorm over the next few weeks”.

If the plan is to have more variety, and more stuff of a niche flavour (aka, more events where people can listen to the kind of music I make!), then it certainly gets my vote.

But what of the main event itself? Here’s my plan for a better, more usable Artsfest main event:

Scale back, and make the most of what remains.

Artsfest’s biggest claim – literally hundreds of shows over two and a half days – is for me the biggest usability flaw. At almost all of the performing arts venues during the whole weekend, most performers played for at most 30 minutes, to be followed by a gap of at least 30 minutes before the next act. If you were at the Fountain Stage having just seen one band, it’s a big ask to expect you to walk all the way over to the Flapper or the City Inn Cafe for another band just for the sake of 30 minutes – it might not look very far on the map but there’s a fair amount of upping and downing to be done, especially if you’ve got a whole family in tow – which will be quite annoying if you get there and find they’re not to your taste, or if you don’t want to move you’ve got to hang around for half an hour for the next act where you are, again annoying if they turn out to be rubbish and you’ve missed something better somewhere else because of it. And the Jewellery Quarter, I’m afraid, is just too far away to expect people to walk to from a festival based mostly in the city centre – though it will of course make an excellent venue for some of the niche mini-festivals Martin is talking about.

So consider having fewer acts perform for longer sets, and cut down the time between sets – it really shouldn’t take longer than 15 minutes to have a handover for all but the most complicated of acts, especially on the professionally stage managed bigger stages. Give the audience a reason to stay where they are, a reason to move to a different venue if there’s something they want to see next there, and a worthwhile reason to move to a different venue if their current choice turns out to be a dud.

Theme the programme better

I mean ‘programme’ in both senses of the word – both the programme of events, and the physical printed brochure which tells you what’s on where and when.

An eclectic mix is all very well and is often thought to encourage discovery, but in practice it’s just irritating. Beyond the high profile Centenary Square main stage events in the evening – Hip-Hop RnB on Friday night (this year and last year quite sparsely attended, so consider this as part of the scaleback), Classical Fantasia on Saturday night, and Kerrangfest on Sunday night, and the location-specific things such as the dance tent and the art exhibition, most of the acts by genre are all over the place – so if you want to see some folk music, you might have to go to the Fountain Stage at 1:00, then to the Flapper at 3:00, the City Inn Cafe at 3:45, and the Prince of Wales at 4:00.

So instead consider theming the whole festival according to venue – for the smaller acts off the main stages, dedicate, say, the Prince of Wales to folk music, the Flapper to experimental, and the beach to the rock bands. Or at the very least, if you – or the venue operators – don’t want to have the same kind of thing in a single venue for the whole weekend, allocate half a day for each genre for each venue, so people at least have a good run at being able to listen to the kind of thing they want to listen to rather than having to spend more time walking around than actually being in an audience. Trust the audience to go off and make discoveries for themselves, rather than trying to force them to discover.

The printed brochure itself also needs more work to make it more user-friendly. As it has stood in the past, it is laid out in a grid with time vertically, and venue horizontally. This layout works well when you’re dealing with a handful of venues, but when you’ve got over 20 venues, that just doesn’t work. People walking around on the day might think “oo, I wonder what’s going on at Centenary Square right now” and have a look in the brochure (or simply walk over there), but people who are trying to plan their day are more interested in what kind of thing they want to see than where they might see it – you don’t think to yourself “yes, I’ll spend the morning on the beach (regardless of what’s on there), then the afternoon at the Fountain, a spot of food at the Flapper, and finish the day in Centenary Square”. With this many venues, the audience member wants to see first and foremost what kinds of things are on where, and go to the venue where it’s happening accordingly.

So for next year consider printing the brochure so the horizontal grid is by theme rather than by venue – at least for the smaller venues. This should be made easier if the venues themselves are themed, and you can still have an index at the back sorted by venue.

Have more variety

This might seem a strange comment given the eclectic mix on offer, but actually, Artsfest has always felt like primarily a music festival, with other things tacked on to the side. Visual art, dance, theatre, spoken word (though there were a reasonable number of poets on offer), film, and crafts are very much sideshows to the music festival – in fact craft is barely evident at all.

Consider marketing more proactively to practitioners of the other artforms to get them to take part, and consider limiting the number of slots and venues allocated to music in order to make space for dance and theatre. Except World music; considering Birmingham’s reputation as a multicultural city, World music was barely in evidence beyond the Sampad Info-fusion performance (at the top and tail of my video) on Friday night.

Make it easier and more open to participate

The deadline for applying to be a part of Artsfest is the 30th of April. For a festival which happens in September, this is ridiculous.

I appreciate (I have, after all, organised festivals myself) that the small team organising Artsfest have a lot of work in actually sifting through the applications, running a selection process, and then putting together a timetable, and I appreciate that certain things need to be confirmed well in advance. But if all you want to do is put on a 15 minute demo of Tai Chi on the Hall of Memory performance space, you shouldn’t need to have decided to do that five months in advance. Craft artists especially are not accustomed to booking a stall on a craft fair more than couple of months in advance (and there’s often still space to book the week before); maybe that accounts for the lack of craft participants? Having such an early deadline also removes the spontaneity which is a fundamental part of the fun of any festival.

Consider having two application deadlines – the early one for key events and complicated performances, and a later one for smaller events, performances, and activities. Let the timetable evolve through the planning process rather than first getting in all your applications, choosing which to accept, and then trying to do the timetable all at once. If you go with the suggestion to theme venues, the timetable work should be made easier. And set aside space on the timetable – and even set aside one or two spaces on the site – where people can literally just turn up on the day and ask “is there anywhere I can do a juggling demo?”

Is it at the correct time in the year?

This is perhaps my most controversial suggestion about the event.

The timing of Artsfest is the big finale to the city’s summer programme of events – and it is most definitely a Good Thing to have a big celebratory finale of some sort.

But timing Artsfest for the first / second week in September effectively cuts out a lot of potential participants – schools will only just be back (some of them still not back), and the colleges – Birmingham Conservatoire, Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, Birmingham School of Speech and Drama etc aren’t back at all. It does seem quite a shame that students at our three high profile, nationally and internationally respected higher education institutions for the arts are effectively cut out of the event.

Keep something for the big summer finale, please, but consider moving Artfest to earlier in the year – maybe have it as the big launch for the city’s summer events programme to open up the pool of particpants. This suggestion may appear to conflict with the suggestion to scale back – but don’t forget, the overall suggestion is to also have more mini-festivals throughout the year.