The BBC are very, very selective in reporting critical comments about Party leaders.
Today they have relentlessly been ‘reporting’ the words of Sir Richard Shirreff about Cameron….
Downing Street has rejected claims by a former senior army officer that the UK has become “irrelevant” in attempts to resolve the conflict in Ukraine.
Sir Richard Shirreff, until last year a top Nato commander in Europe, suggested the UK was a “bit player” in Europe’s “most serious crisis” for 50 years.
Curious that when Miliband is criticised in just as dramatic tones by a major business leader the BBC didn’t bother reporting that at all on the radio, I heard not a word…and buried what they couldn’t justifiably ignore in another completely different report…..
General election 2015: Labour promises ‘no PM pictures’
The Telegraph trumpets the story though…
Boots boss: Ed Miliband would be a ‘catastrophe’ for Britain
A Labour government under Ed Miliband would be a “catastrophe” for Britain, the head of one of the UK’s biggest businesses warns.
In a significant blow to Labour’s general election campaign, Stefano Pessina, the boss of Boots, says Mr Miliband’s plan for power is “not helpful for business, not helpful for the country and in the end it probably won’t be helpful for them”.
Under Mr Miliband’s leadership, Labour has pledged a series of reforms that have prompted accusations that it is “anti-business”. The party has campaigned against high levels of executive pay, described capitalists as “predatory”, announced plans to restore the 50p top rate of income tax, pledged a “mansion tax” on homes worth more than £2 million and promised to freeze energy companies’ prices for 20 months.
In an interview with The Telegraph, Mr Pessina said: “If they acted as they speak, it would be a catastrophe.”
A major criticism of Miliband’s business strategy and the BBC buries it.
And only starts to report it as headline news as a stand alone story when Miliband launches an attack on his critics…
And
In yet another pro-Labour report the BBC doesn’t ask if Milband has the right policies but asks instead if the boss of Boots was right to criticise Labour…
And the BBC has twisted what Pessina said claiming it was all about tax rather than Labour’s a general approach to business…its anti-business approach…
The company’s Italian-born chief executive Stefano Pessina caused Labour fury by criticising the party’s tax plans as being a threat to business growth.
But in attacking Labour’s business credentials, he has been accused of being a tax-exile, living a life of luxury in Monaco.
Mr Pessina had criticised Labour’s policies on taxing the wealthy, like the mansion tax and higher income tax.
The BBC admits…
His intervention is a serious blow for Mr Miliband’s election strategy with three months left until polling day.
A ‘serious blow’ to Miliband’s election strategy?……So why did they attempt to hide and downplay what Pessina said? Why did they only start to report the story in full when Labour had its counter-attack strategy in place?
Why is the BBC twisting what Pessina said and claiming it was all about tax….could it be that tax and ‘Big Business’ is one of Labour’s favourite election themes? But as said that wasn’t the main drift of Pessina’s criticism.
Then the BBC tries to suggest that this is a plot…
So, has Boots declared war on the Labour Party? There’s certainly been a high profile alliance between Boots and the Conservative-led coalition.
The government has put £25m in taxpayers’ money into a new enterprise zone on surplus land at Boots’ huge industrial campus at Beeston, on the edge of Nottingham.
‘Pay a fair share’
Could that kind of co-operation explain the anti-Labour comments?
In other words….the BBC is suggesting there is no basis for the criticism and it is a political attack by a Tory friendly business. No analysis of Labour’s business policies and whether they merit criticism though. Curious…as that is the real basis of the story.
So partisan politics or just good business?
Perhaps we will hear more from the BBC on this story from the Telegraph…
Fifteen of Tony Blair’s business backers go cool on Ed Miliband
Fifteen business leaders who endorsed Tony Blair’s Labour party before the 2005 election have moved to distance themselves from Ed Miliband, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.
The news demonstrates starkly how some of the businessmen courted by Labour leader Tony Blair in the last decade appear to have fallen out of love with the Labour party.
Are they all ‘in league’ and intriguing with the Tory Party?
The closest the BBC come to looking at this is a Labour friendly report on the words of Lord Levy who brushes aside most criticism….but again a major business figure makes a scathing attack on Labour and doesn’t get a stand alone story unlike the good Sir Sherriff…all the more surprising as his words undermine Labour’s primary narrative that they will be the party that brings back the growth that brings in taxes that will reduce the deficit…
“As a business person I’m frightened of an environment where there isn’t sufficient emphasis put on growing the economy to grow tax receipts to spend more money.”
The Telegraph brings some much needed balance and informed comment to the debate…as Pessina is not British, has never lived in Britain and Boots pays more tax now that under Labour…..
These attacks against Stefano Pessina are unfair and must end
It is at times like this that one realises just how absurd much of the anti-business rhetoric in this country has become. The attacks in recent days by Labour and Liberal Democrat politicians on Stefano Pessina, one of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs, were as nonsensical as they were indefensible.
In 2013-14 UK cash taxes paid by Alliance Boots were more than 50pc higher than the amount paid in 2006-07, its last year as a UK-based publicly listed company. This was true even though corporation tax rates have been slashed by George Osborne, and even though the firm was loaded with debt when it underwent its buyout, reducing its tax liabilities.
Alliance Boots paid cash taxes of £141m in 2013-14, up £27m on the previous year. Its UK corporation tax bill totalled £90m, up from £64m the previous year. The total amount of tax paid by the company or collected by it on behalf of its employees reached £550m; the company was placed 19th out of 103 large companies in a survey by PwC ranking firms by their total tax contribution.
Pessina, who is Italian-born, has never lived here, so how on Earth could anybody believe that he should be paying his taxes here?
The point here is that Alliance Boots, as it was then called, was always a pan-European firm with Italian roots, not a British one. Its successor is now a completely global enterprise, with operations in 25 countries and an astonishing 370,000 employees (of which just 70,000 are in the UK).
Its owners are perfectly entitled to base its group headquarters wherever they see fit.
But despite its global reach, the firm has spent a fortune in the UK in recent years: £1.2bn over the past eight years on its 2,500 UK stores, and injecting a similar amount into its pension fund. It has backed the Nottingham Enterprise Zone. Many of the top executives at Walgreens Boots Alliance are now British.
Pessina’s involvement in Britain has been hugely positive for this country, for the retail and pharmaceutical industries, for jobs and, yes, for our tax base. The attacks against him are unfounded, unfair and must stop.
Shame our publicly funded broadcaster and the dominant news service can’t bring us such information that completely undermines Labour’s attack on Pessina as a ‘tax exile’ whose company’s HQ was taken to Switzerland to avoid tax…..that’ll be Pessina, who is not a tax exile as he’s not British, and Boots which pays more tax than ever.
Good old BBC, the most trusted broadcaster in the world…god knows what the others are like……maybe like the left wing NBC?….
Not a great deal of outrage from the Left about this….wonder what would have happened if Fox News had had, not its news anchor star, but merely a guest ‘expert’ on who said something stupid…say about Birmingham?
We’re lucky to have the BBC.
Lucky indeed.
“So, has Boots declared war on the Labour Party? There’s certainly been a high profile alliance between Boots and the Conservative-led coalition”
So… Inference, allusion, speculation and conflation in a whole thesaurus’ worth of almost, but not quite, accusation saying what might suit the PR agency of a party it supports at the expense of others.
Such things usually exercise certain circling commenters. There is one currently on station, too.
‘Sir Richard Shirreff, until last year a top Nato commander in Europe, suggested the UK was a “bit player” in Europe’s “most serious crisis” for 50 years’
So where’s the bad news BBC? Let’s be clear – there is NATO and there is the EU and they are supposed to be two different clubs. It is the Franco-German EU axis that wants to go meddling in the Ukraine – let them pick up the pieces. Britain would do very well to keep out of it.
We should see through BBC efforts on behalf of the EU to embroil us in this. Putin is far from being our most pressing danger.
Don’t poke the bear.
The ever reasonable Lord Mandelson is being given considerable airtime on BBC TV and radio (a long interview this am) in a blatant attempt to disguise the Labour party’s anti-business shift to the left. No equivalent figure from the Tory side has been interviewed. If business has a gripe with the Tories it’s over the EU referendum – so where is Lord Heseltine of Kenneth Clarke to balance this bias?
This, for me, is one of the major problems with fixed term parliaments in that whilst the parties have been in election mode since the start of the year none of the media have.
This allows the BBC and others to effectively do as they will for 4 months till parliament is dissolved sometime in April, at which point they must offer some form of impartiality to their reporting.
The BBC are effectively getting all their messages in upfront, but even they must be wondering whether they are flogging a dead horse in their support of Miliband.
You have forgotten to apologise over your vile posts about the identity of the Glasgow Bin driver.
We are waiting.
Who is your post addressed to?
The thread order makes it look as though it has been addressed to me, but I never posted on this subject.
Who ‘you’ are as an individual, and what you stand behind on a personal basis likely does not matter to the ‘we’ in question.
They have driven by, and collateral damage is deemed acceptable.
Yes I though wtf ? when I read this from Glasgowbinliner ? even more stupid is the posts were about some fictitious person because the council issued a cover up so now we know who the real guy is and no one said anything ‘vile’ about him so this post by glasbuttwiner is lies
Listening to the 1pm News on Radio 4 Saturday lunchtime where Ed’s big speech on the off shore financial institutions was highlighted – the speech where Ed is supposed to be looking ‘strong’ as he warns these organisations that they will have 6 months post election to get their houses in order. Has Ed (or the BBC that reports it) stopped to question what effect his meddling might have on these institutions and as a knock on effect on the UK in general. We know that his threats to freeze fuel costs have left them artificially high and the last estimate I saw that we are all paying about £100 more per year because of Ed Miliband. Going after these off shore funds may well send them elsewhere and should he come into power (G-d forbid) it will mean he will have to borrow even more money and as a tax payer I really resent my taxes paying for interest on money for him to fritter away.
Don`t call the Millipeed “Ed” as if he is some sort of cuddly toy , he is “The Evil Marxist Millipeed” , who will take England back to the “Dark Ages”.
Quite right, Deborah, what makes him think that all tax-efficient jurisdictions are british “controlled”? If you had arrangements set up in one of these jurisdictions, why wouldn’t you just move your funds to a different non-british location?
In 1973, Denis Healy boasted that he would .tax the rich until the pips squeak’. In 1976, he was forced to invite in the IMF after the country went broke. Miliband gives every appearance of being ready to do the same. Nevertheless, you can eventually recover from an economic collapse; but we’d never recover from being swamped with foreigners. A socialist collapse might be the least worst option, if it stirred the sleeping giant.
The BBC ‘reports’ the ‘news’ in twitter:
“Miliband stance ‘not anti-business’ http://t.co/mJNbU3DLNr”
That… is it.
So it’s settled.
Oh, BBC Politics squeezes a wee bit more out….:
“Labour leader Ed Miliband is not anti-business and firms will become “more reassured” about his stance by the… http://t.co/yyvLbREfMV”
Hate to break it to you bbc, but twitter has 140 characters. Sticking what suits at the front or in quotes and claiming context lies after the link… pretty scummy.
Interesting those two links go to the same place.
A source close to the BBC might also wonder what it is about such editorial finesse that first attracted Labour peers to join their BBC colleagues in ensuring the licence gravy train funding stays enforced by criminal law.
I have never believed a word that Mandelson has ever said, and I am not going to start now.
http://www.wnd.com/2015/02/u-k-affirms-ban-on-pro-israel-activists/
I too noted that the BBC are happy to dish the dirt on Cameron-a lightweight in Europe and all that.
Whereas the stuff about Miliband KNOWING that the economy was going to tank in 2008(and so he urged Brown to get the election done asap in Oct 2007)
And GIVING his landlord a Muslim prayer mat to use as a cover rug for some stain he left on his hosts carpet…
well, such things seem not to bother the BBC.
That would be binned under tittle tattle and unparliamentary guff.
But if its Nigel-and the (admittedly) useless PM-well it becomes “The Agenda” does it not?
Thanks a lot Brianfor the great hint, possibly non-developers just like me must be able to move this down: )This is absolutely vital for any multi-international internet site in terms of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION.
my shortest comment in months,i despise,cameron,clegg and millband,give nigel farage a chance as pm.
As a world figure Cameron is a lightweight, having surrendered to the BBC agenda and ditched conservative values, and indeed British values. As a political lightweight he relies less on a sensible defence policy backed by diplomacy but on street mobs, like the UAF, who endorse his policies with their disgraceful behaviour at Oxford against Marine le Pen. No doubt his thugs will participate whenever an alternative to free speech and debate arises during the election campaign