Quote:ARTICLE 10
Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. this right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or the rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

Daily Mail Wrote:What is particularly concerning is that Richards, a former member of Tony Blair’s policy unit — he also worked for Gordon Brown — has never had a job at the sharp end of business or programme-making.

Yet he stands, incomprehensibly, on the verge of taking over one of our most important public institutions.
His only qualification for the job is, it would appear, his tainted six-year stint at the helm of the bloated and largely toothless Labour-contrived super quango.

And it is a role which has certainly attracted controversy: his cosy relationship with his former political masters once led ex-BBC director-general Greg Dyke to describe Richards as ‘a jumped-up Millbank oik’ (after the former Labour Party headquarters).

Without doubt, his credentials as a New Labour disciple could not be more impeccable.

A graduate from the London School Of Economics, the alma mater of Cherie Blair, he first worked for Blair and Brown in the early Nineties.

Astonishingly, Richards’s apparently undistinguished period in charge of the LSE’s student rag is effectively his only experience of working directly in the media, other than a short stint at a small independent TV production company when he graduated.

After his first spell working for Labour, he was appointed to the senior, if largely pointless, role of Controller of Corporate Strategy by the then BBC boss John Birt — who Blair later appointed his ‘blue-skies thinker’.

On his return to Labour ranks as Mr Blair’s senior adviser for media, telecoms and ‘e-government’ (government information disseminated via the internet), Richards helped draft the 2001 Labour manifesto.
And, in 2003, he was pivotal in writing the Communications Act which dispensed with five separate media regulators to create the vast Ofcom, which controls everything from what we listen to on the radio, to newspaper mergers, the telecoms and postal industries, and what we watch on TV.

Having effectively neatly written his own job description, Richards joined Ofcom in 2005 and a year later was appointed chief executive (what a surprise that the man he replaced, fellow New Labour placeman Stephen Carter, later returned to Downing Street as Gordon Brown’s chief of strategy).

On Richards’s watch, complaints to Ofcom about sex, violence and political bias on TV have soared from 6,375 in 2005, to 24,633 last year. And it is instructive to learn that the quango has not removed a licence from any porn channel since November 2010.

When he took up the role, he bizarrely claimed a £3,000 relocation allowance, despite the fact Downing Street is just over two miles from Ofcom’s grand modernist offices overlooking the Thames.

A spokesman for Richards told me he had made the claim because, while working for No 10, he spent only three days a week in London and the rest working from the then family home in Wales that he shared with his partner Delyth Evans, the mother of his two children, a daughter, 16, and a 15-year-old son.

(Almost inevitably, Welsh-born Miss Evans, who is seven years older, is a fellow former Labour apparatchik who worked as an assistant to Gordon Brown in the early Nineties and, until 2003, was a Labour member of the Welsh Assembly.)

Richards also charged £650 to employ a private agency, Humphrys Education, to find his children places in a London school.

Meanwhile, he has claimed generous expenses of up to £23,376 a year, including £13,000 on oversees trips and £1,787 on ‘hospitality’.

Clearly keen to claim every last penny he could, the man who earns nearly £400,000-a-year of taxpayers’ money also once claimed a £2 credit card booking fee for a flight to Helsinki.

Considering his large salary and Ofcom’s vast remit — it is responsible for more than 250 separate regulatory duties — it would seem highly odd, then, that Richards should feel able to divide his time between a series of other directorships, too.

Among his seven different outside interests — admittedly, all but one of which are unpaid — he is a non-executive director of Thames Water — which pays £42,000 a year for his services. (His other activities broadly involve charities of various kinds.)

However, an Ofcom spokesman said the money Thames Water pays him goes directly to Ofcom.

(08-08-2014 22:23 )eccles Wrote:  Meet the newest member of the Content Committee