Went to Madrid this weekend with She Who Must Be Obeyed. Waiting for the flight at City Airport, I bought the Lonely Planet Guide to Spain. Had I considered Greg Hands' superb take-down on the Lonely Planet empire, I would have gone for an alternative tome, but I didn't think. Shame on me.
Tthe book is in many ways very useful, as are all the LPs - that's the problem; if they were just rubbish then they couldn't be written off, but they're not. In any case, it entirely reaffirms the point Greg made about left wingery and our collective ownership of LP (for anyone who missed it, the Beeb bought LP and so we, the taxpayer, now own a string of guidebooks). It does so in two important ways.
First, the book takes a very aggressive line on the People's Party, the main right-wing party in Spain and the Conservative Party's natural ally there. In the "snapshot" section right at the front of the book, a two page text designed to give you an in-brief guide to what's going on in the country at the moment, the guide finds the time to characterise the PP's position on the issues of the day as one of "vitriolic" "hysterics", expressed with "strident" "squealing" (each quote is from one of the four topics addressed in the "snapshot" - all of which, it would seem, the PP is wrong about, from Lonely Planet's perspective). So we, the taxpayer, are subsidising an enterprise that bashes conservatives.
Secondly, and perhaps this is less obviously an issue but it is in my view something that is of concern, the same section of the guide contains statements such as "Spain is no stranger to swindles" and that Spain is "a country accustomed to corruption". These statements and many others may or may not be objectively true, but their delivery by an arm of the British state is entirely inappropriate. Thus that which might be legitimate comment from a guide book becomes quite wrong under Lonely Planet's new position as Britain's in-house, state-owned series of texts.
So state ownership of LP is bad both for us, and for LP itself.
