It tells the story of a pirate radio station in the North Sea, presumably based on the real-life Radio Caroline, which was closed down by the authorities in 1967.
Anyone under the age of 40 who watches this superficial film should not imagine that it is remotely historical. For example, whenever there are scenes of young people partying or listening to pop songs, there are invariably a number of black people intermingling on terms of perfect intimacy and equality with whites. The suggestion is that Britain in the 1960s was a well integrated society without any racial tensions. It wasn't.
An even more blatant rewriting of history in the film has a Conservative government closing down the pirate radio stations when it was, in fact, a Labour government under Harold Wilson that did it. The minister responsible in the film is a repressed and highly unpleasant Tory toff with more than a passing resemblance to Hitler, played by Kenneth Branagh. Mr Curtis's wholly inaccurate cultural message is that nasty Tories were trying to spoil the enjoyment of a joyful, colour-blind England.
I don't expect historical accuracy at the cineplex, but this is extreme even by Hollywood's standards. Making the Conservative Party the villain of this story is like making the Republican Party the racist enforcers in a tale set in 1950s Alabama. Not only was Wilson in power at the time, but Radio Caroline regularly attacked the Labour Party. The Tories not only failed to lead the charge against the pirates, but some of them bought ads on the offshore stations (as did some Scottish Nationalists). There certainly were Conservatives who opposed the broadcasters—one Tory MP accused them of "providing what people want," which sounds good to me but he intended it as an insult—but it was Labour that pushed through the Marine Broadcasting Offenses Act of 1967, which barred British citizens from aiding the pirates in various ways, most notably by advertising on their shows. (Contrary to the report quoted above, Radio Caroline didn't close down that year, but it was crippled considerably.)
If Curtis had set his movie during the second wave of British pirate radio, when hundreds of urban stations playing reggae and R&B cropped up in the '80s, he could have cast the Thatcherites as villains without abusing history. (Margaret Thatcher may have championed individual initiative in her speeches, but when people pooled their pennies to start stations without the state's permission, she cracked down.) But that would entail giving up his Swinging Sixties setting and soundtrack. So he rewrote the past instead.
SELF-PROMOTION: I wrote a column about media mergers this week for the Reason website. Also, my brief review of the Firesign Theater box set Box of Danger, originally published in the April Reason, is now online.
It's an ad for Enron -- entitled "Metalman" -- that ran not long before the company's implosion -- probably some time in 2000. As you'll see, it's a man encased in a confining suit of metal, hobbling his way across tableaus of 90s go-go capitalism, mainly, mostly set in Asia. As pure ad making, it's good stuff. But I always remembered it because it so boldly and expressively captured the ethos of that moment -- old, slow, regulation, limits giving way to new, unbounded, deregulated, liberated. 'Metalman' is the old sclerotic, regulated past falling behind in the deregulated, faster, freer, richer, better world.
Knowing, as we soon would, that Enron was a colossal scam adds some zing to the morality tale. But this sort of deregulatory chic wasn't confined to Enron. And it played a sizable role in bringing us where we are today.
Marshall is onto something, but he's missing an important piece of the puzzle: In the real world, as opposed to the ad world, Enron didn't embrace deregulation. It was happy to roll back the regulatory burden when that helped the business's bottom line, but—like many other companies—it was just as quick to lobby for limits when that looked like it would boost profits. As Jerry Taylor pointed out in The Wall Street Journal seven years ago,
Since ending the legally protected franchises that utilities had on those services was a prerequisite for Enron's strategy, the company lobbied aggressively for competition and "consumer choice" for gas and electricity services.
But while donning the garb of Ronald Reagan on the one hand, the company was donning the mantle of Ralph Nader when it came to the transmission and distribution side of the energy business. Enron, you see, was worried that the incumbent utilities would either under-price the non-utility competitors that Enron wanted on their trading floors or, alternatively, would charge such high prices for access to their transmission systems that non-utility gas and electricity providers would be unable to effectively compete for business.
So Enron insisted that electric utilities be forced by law to get out of the generation business, that strict price controls be set for the rates charged for access to the various transmission grids, and that the day-to-day operation of the electricity distribution systems be handed over to state officials who were directed to govern those systems at the behest of the system's "stakeholders" (read: Enron and friends). So Reaganite competition, according to Enron, required new micromanagerial rules about industrial organization and the de-facto nationalization of the transmission systems by officials who'd have to answer to Enron.
Taylor also notes the company's support for energy subsidies, carbon controls, and various taxes, as well as its ability to preach the exact opposite of its usual policy preferences in a few jurisdictions where it managed to buy its own transmission systems. This sort of political capitalism may have "played a sizable role in bringing us where we are today." But if you call it "deregulatory," you're buying too much of what Enron was selling. The ethos was much more complicated than that.
Leftists and liberals have a word for polluters who pose as careful environmental stewards: greenwashing. We need a similar word for times when the eager beneficiaries of the corporate state pose as free-market entrepreneurs. A word, that is, for propaganda like the Enron ad.