Dear DCMS

I am a journalist and author, member of the National Union Of Journalists – extraordinary you have not included the union as a body you want to hear from, given that hundreds of us have written books.

• Q1: While acknowledging the effective administration of PLR by the Registrar, the government is now proposing to transfer the statutory function of administering the PLR scheme from the Registrar to another existing public body, effectively abolishing the Registrar as a separate public body. Please provide your views on whether you think the PLR functions should be transferred to another body.

“While acknowledging the effective administration of PLR by the Registrar…” – why did you continue with this sentence, this policy, this consultation after writing those words? How many Quangos or government departments or private companies would merit that start to an opening question? What’s the point? This is fathomlessly silly interference with an organisation for which nobody – including yourselves! – has anything but praise. In your preamble in the consultation you actually state that the Registrar has “successfully kept operating cost below the cap set by Ministers in the first year of the spending review period” and that the Registrar is working with you on further improvements. This is a small expert unit that’s supremely effective by all accounts – and yet you want to transfer “PLR functions into a larger body”. Could you have a think and maybe even let us know when that last proved to be a great idea. Take something that’s small and effective and lose it in a much larger operation. You just know it’ll be a cock-up, don’t you?

• Q2: Following the transfer of functions the government is proposing that a cap on administrative spend will be imposed on the body that takes over the PLR function and has confirmed that the PLR author fund will not be used to pay for the transfer. Do you have any concerns about the impact a transfer of functions from the Registrar will have on PLR rights holders? If so please provide details.

The existing Registrar and staff know what they’re doing and do it well. A new management of the Registrar’s functions will not know what they’re doing because of total absence of experience and… seem likely not to do it well. Should your mad scheme go ahead I’d like to place a bet on when the first press release will be issued apologising for “teething problems”. They will underpay, they will overpay, they will neglect paying altogether. It’s as if you’re reading from a self-help manual titled Things That Work: How To Mess Them Up.

• Q3: Though the government appreciates that it would be appropriate to transfer the PLR function to another copyright payment body, ALCS for example, statutory functions and distribution of associated government funding must be administered by a public body. Consequently the government’s preferred option is to transfer the PLR function to the British Library. Do you anticipate any problems or conflicts of interest in transferring the PLR function to the British Library?

The British Library quite specifically has no function that’s anything like administering PLR. They are being considered for this job for the remarkably feeble reason that they present no legal difficulties – and on the other hand, one gathers, have an empire-building management that seeks to promote itself via the glory of the institution and which doesn’t give a toss about authors’ welfare (strange but true in my experience of arguments over at the copyright law reform consultation). So the “problems” would be that they’re likely to make a complete pig’s ear of it because of administrative inexperience. The “conflicts of interest” would be… that they’re not really interested in doing the job for the benefit of the people who need them to do the job.

Specifically on costs of the proposed move, it must bemuse all onlookers that DCMS has imagined that moving the PLR office from Stockton to London will save money short-term – given current under-budget efficiency versus the costs of upheaval and moving and probable redundancies and probable new equipment – or long-term – given the higher cost of everything in London and especially within a showy, space-wasteful set-up like the British Library which must spend at least as much money on cultural showbiz and general flash as it does on nuts and bolts service. As far as I can tell there’s never been so much as a pot of paint wasted up in Stockton. And then there’s the employment issue and then there’s the infernal issue of centralisation of culture in London.

However, fortunately I have a solution to save face, money, jobs, even prevent the DCMS making a complete public arse of itself for years to come (we’re writers you know, we won’t forget). Do nothing except “rebrand” the PLR Registry in Stockton the British Library PLR Registry. Put a sign up if you must. Adjust the letter-heading as present supplies run out. Then the boss of the BL can write to Stockton once a year (email to save a stamp) and say “How’s it going? Same old same old brilliant I expect?” and that will be that. DCMS gets “one less public body – official” (counting as justification for a policy, eh? real intellectual corker but… whatever floats your rubber duck), BL gets a feather in its cap (“Oh yes we run the PLR scheme you know – how could those crazy authors ever suggest we don’t care about them?”), Stockton holds on to the jobs and its role in keeping the nation’s creative wheels turning (and H McMillan has no need to rotate in his grave after all), there’s no interruption to brilliant normal service to authors, and the whole thing runs under budget as ever which will of course be all down to the fine work of DCMS and you can boast about it in Parliament whenever something else goes awry. All this and you don’t even have to pay me a consultation fee!”

Phil Sutcliffe
Wordsmith
philsutcliffe47@gmail.com

I find it heart-warming that people with the brains to think up stuff like this should still be so diffident about their ideas. In a similar spirit I would like to offer up my own little website for your comments. It’s not going to change the world, as some of these shyly offered Internet standards have undoubtedly done, but it might just change the direction of your thoughts for a minute or two.

I want to know if you get what its all about; if it’s at the right level; if it’s boring and, if so, what I could do to spice it up; and whether you think you’ll ever visit it again.

OK, I’ve asked for it. No swearing, please.

What you realise is that the letterbox is the only point at which someone can intrude, unasked, into another person’s home. And, as such, it takes on an interesting psychological importance. One can’t help thinking that every letterbox reflects the personality of its owner.

There are the wide and generous ones, for example, that open easily, positively welcoming your missive to float on to the doormat. Their owners are clearly lovely people – or perhaps just the gullible type who take in and are taken in by everything.

Some residents, though, have equipped themselves with tiny, doll-sized flaps that force you to fold even a modest leaflet in half. These remind me of the pursed-up mouths of the disapproving spinsters you expect to find in a Victorian novel but not in 21st century West London.

Worse still, letterboxes both wide and narrow may have a defensive screen of bristles around their inner side, which traps your offering and turns it into something resembling a reluctant child’s homework before it ever hits the mat. The bristles are, I think, meant to stop draughts. Draughts? Through a letterbox? Just how sensitive can you get?

But of course every post person’s deepest hatred is reserved for the kind of letterbox that betrays its owner as not merely judgemental or over-sensitive but as a paranoid sadist. I am speaking of the dread spring-loaded letterbox. The springs of these devices are nicely adjusted to trap the fingers; their flap is honed to an edge that will remove a layer of skin thick enough to be painful but thin enough to prevent you calling your lawyer. Someone with a letterbox like this clearly hates the world and exacts a price when it tries to communicate.

So what kind of letterbox do you have? Have I made you feel bad about yourself? On enraged with me? Perhaps I have just sent you scurrying off to the hardware shop for the sort of letterbox that says what a great human being you really are.

So it’s a surprise to find him making a common mistake in a statement he issued about the recent ‘smearmail’ scandal that has engulfed Gordon Brown’s office.

His words:

What happened constituted a clear and serious breach of the Code of Conduct for Special Advisers. It cannot and has not been tolerated.

What’s happened here?

Sir Gus has tried to shorten his statement by making the word ‘tolerated’ do double duty, once with ‘be’ in the present tense and once with it in the perfect tense. Nothing wrong with that, except that readers have been short-changed in the verb department, which could leave them feeling slightly uncomfortable.

It should be possible to unpick the compressed sentence

It cannot and has not been tolerated.

into two separate sentences:

It cannot be tolerated.
It has not been tolerated.

But the ‘be’ is missing, leaving readers to ask subconsciously, as they scan the the first three words, ‘cannot what?’

The moral for us all: compression is good, but make sure you are still making sense. If Sir Gus had said

It cannot be and has not been tolerated.

he would have avoided the feeling of awkwardness that always comes from a failure of logic.

Perhaps the revised, ‘correct’ version sounds a bit pedantic, though. It might have been simpler and more forceful to say

It cannot be tolerated. It has not been.

What do you think?

The best thing a bit of Latin does is help you realise the full underlying meaning of words. So imperative, for example, doesn’t just mean very important, it means so damned important that the emperor (imperator) himself will not be best pleased if you don’t see to it right now. Gives an otherwise ordinary word a lot more flavour.

And bear-trap words like solipsistic. Piece of cake with a bit of Latin. The sol part means ‘only’ and the ips bit means ‘itself’. So someone who is solipsistic thinks only of himself (or herself, but I find it tends to be blokes).

Most wanted picture: Boris in a toga.

In children’s books, for example, of which I have written a few, word counts are sometimes strictly limited because the words have to fit round pictures whose size and position have already been fixed by a designer.

One gets cunning at shortening sentences without losing their meaning. An apparently short and direct sentence like

A camera has a lens that makes an image.

can be made even shorter by using the possessive case to remove both a verb and a subordinate clause:

A camera’s lens makes an image.

or shorter still by using the fact that in English you are allowed to turn almost any noun into an adjective:

A camera lens makes an image.

These changes have reduced 40 characters to 29 with very little loss of meaning. It’s true that the lens, not the camera, is now the subject of the sentence, but this makes little difference in practice when there is an accompanying image.

Tricks like this can make the difference between saying what you want to say or having to change the whole thing and say something different.

Not that I’m setting myself up as some kind of expert. It’s easy to get labelled as an idle, grumpy old charlatan who just sits back and spots everyone else’s mistakes. But the label is wrong: inside that unsmiling exterior is a heart of gold. Pure gold, because someone else’s mistake can be your improvement, your way to communicate better.

Here’s today’s example. It’s quite a subtle mistake, but the effect is to make the gears of communication grate instead of changing smoothly.

Unlike some parts of the UK there are plenty of NHS Dentists in
the London Borough of Hounslow.

OK at first sight, perhaps. But because it doesn’t fit the expected form

Unlike A, B is…

in which one thing is compared directly with another, it trips the reader ever so slightly.

Does this matter? Well, it’s a bit like your bank manager having a tiny coffee stain on her shirt. A detail, but makes you wonder about her competence. Even the smallest glitch in your flow of words reduces the value of your most important asset – trust.

So what should this say? It’s very easy to put it right. Just follow the formula.

Unlike some parts of the UK, the London Borough of Hounslow
has plenty of NHS dentists.

This is not just a style thing. It’s about making your writing completely transparent, a sheet of glass through which your reader can see your meaning without even realising the glass is there. And you don’t have to be Tolstoy: it’s largely a matter of following some boring old rules. And perhaps listening to some of your grumpier critics.