It just gets more surreal. Anyone catch Mark Wardell’s stomach-churning salutations for the Great Leader on the Ten News? I thought it was really bad even by BBC standards and Wardell even referred to Prudence as “the Saviour of global capitalism”. (This the man who has semi-socialised our banking system!!) As if that were not enough the BBC went on to approvingly quote the EU call for “transparency, accountability, responsibility” in future international financial dealings. Anyone got an update for me on the signing off of the EU annual accounts?
FROM ZERO TO HERO!
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Re: Cameron: I doubt he would have done much better. I think the problem is how Brown (or the beeb) is using this crisis to spin what he’s doing as something extraordinary and guaranteed to work.
Less hubris and more caution please.
“The BBC – Yesterday’s news today”.
John Bosworth | 16.10.08 – 4:03 pm | #
Speaking of the Guardian, and what £3.5B buys you by way of value…
A tale of two news channels
Oct 16 2008: Media Monkey: Why did the BBC miss footage of members of the ‘tapas seven’ at the high court
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/mediamonkeyblog/2008/oct/16/dailyexpress-sundayexpress
It’s in the house rag, so it must be true: ‘hapless BBC hack’ indeed.
Another who needs to watch out or they’ll be off the November party list…
G COOPER & EMIL,
Thankyou for your kind words!
I answered a question from Cockney who I think is a good poster who contributes some great ideas, he didnt like what I had to say and I can understand that BUT that is the nature of this forum isnt it?
Many of my points have been brought up on this very forum so in effect my post was only a reflection of the B-BBC ‘consensus’.
I have learned much from the posters here and am grateful for it, it gives me a wonderful chance to crystalize those hard to catch thoughts that seem to flutter through the mind like some annoying hard to catch butterfly!
My point is that all posters here I think realise just what a valuable asset the B-BBC forum is and just how lucky we are to have it!
Can you imagine such interaction on a BBC site?
We all take things away from this site even when we dont realise it, we argue and disagree, I have clashed with posters like ‘nearly oxfordian’ and come away smarting but I wouldnt have it any other way and even the sharpest exchanges can bring greater knowledge, rarely do you find such a creative experience and I for one am grateful for it. I am often wrong,mistaken but the point is that I have a chance to inject my own thoughts into the debate and that is a great thing.
Three cheers for this site and the posters on it!
Cockney,
Perhaps you miss just how the EU can ruin things here without actually trying or even being noticed.
At the risk of boring the others I will show how my industry is affected.
You may notice more and more foreign trucks on our roads. They are not paying anything towards their “track costs” here (you and everyone else with a car is paying for them ). Yet British trucks have to pay tolls and taxes in every other European country. The senior civil servants say this is due to EU rules.But there are no EU rules which stipulate that foreign trucks are exempt from road charges in the UK. Just the technicalties of how they are charged and any charges must not be discriminatory against them ie; we must not charge them what we do not charge ourselves. So they can be charged, but our civil servants are afraid to do it. Remember this about the EU project-
A Member State Can Discriminate Against Its Own Citizens.
The founding fathers of the Common Market/EEC/EC/EU only had to deal with the original six, and they and every other country are unlikely to have civil servants who dont put the interests of their own country first. Britian though is different, and makes us unsuitable to be in this EU club.
Hmm, so we could charge trucks from an independent Scotland their “track costs” on their way to Hull?
In that case, independence now!
We could, RR, but the first problem is not the EU or Scots, but senior civil servants at Whitehall.
They`re well paid but dont mind you paying even more.
“he didnt like what I had to say and I can understand that”
Apologies for my subsequent flippancy – was having a bad morning.
I didn’t dislike what you had to say or even particularly disagree, i just think that in the current circumstances its hugely easy to slate brown’s actions but less easy to come up with a realistic alternative approach.
I’d thoroughly agree that his largesse with the proceeds of the boom years hasn’t helped the current crisis but i also think we’d still be in a hole even if his economic management had been immaculate. We can’t completely divorce ourselves from the global economy. I also don’t think that letting the market ‘correct’ itself was a realistic option in the circumstances – if a few big banks had gone bust by now we’d have a revolution on our hands.
What is massively irritating about the Beeb’s coverage though is that they’re acting as though the plan is already a success. It’s not. It’s not already a failure either as you seemed to suggest but at the moment nobody knows.
And I share your love of B-BBC. Best website EVER 😀
Thanks for that Cockney, you do seem to inject a caution that I lack and you do think things through before you post wheras I just let loose by riding in with uncut thoughts, Ive always been like that and see no reason to change, as they say, to create fire you have to bash the flints together!
Apparently according to radio 5 live “Gordon Brown predicts that petrol prices will fall” The bloke never ceases to amaze me.
Jon,
What good is cheaper fuel if nobody has a job to go to?
Will McManiac reduce the tax on fuel to promote economic growth? I think not, in fact I think he is going to increase the fuel duty in the near future citing the fall in crude prices, he has to increase taxes now and will look for any excuse to ensure tax revenues keep coming in to fund his lavish state banquet!
It was predicted on this board that the BBC would big up Brown’s utter nonsense statemnt of the bloody obvious over fuel prices.
What next? Gordon says he wants the tide to go out tonight and the BBC will tell us that the sea did indeed retreat.
Oh and on the BBC news they gave Boris Johnson NO mention at all but on ITV news they’ve just shown him signing autographs!!!!
I bet the BBC wouldn’t have missed Ken Livingdead out if he’d been Mayor.
Cockney | 16.10.08 – 6:02 pm
What is massively irritating about the Beeb’s coverage though is that they’re acting as though the plan is already a success. It’s not. It’s not already a failure either as you seemed to suggest but at the moment nobody knows.
They’re also misrepresenting the US scene, have been doing so for much of the last three weeks, and now making it seem as if we’ve merely followed the Brown Plan. Which is more like what they call an “audible” in US football, rather than an actual plan. Paul Krugman doesn’t agree with me, I admit.
“In comments published before an EU summit in Brussels, Emma Marcegaglia, chairman of the influential employers’ association Confindustria, said Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi should veto measures to combat climate change if necessary.
The EU programme would cost European business more than 180 billion euros (US$245.9 billion) and Italian companies 20 billion to 27 billion euros for a reduction that would be “laughable”, Marcegaglia was quoted as saying in Corriere della Sera. ”
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/50627/story.htm
Laughable is right the Chinese and Indians et al must be estatic. While Europe is in a finacial crises all the socialist elites can do is to speed up the inevitable.
But the politicians in this country are even dafter they want to cut emmisions by 80% and the so-called conservatives like the idiotic Yeo encourage it. Even though there isn’t a shred of evidence for CO2 causing “climate change”.
Click to access Letter%20to%20Tim%20Yeo%20MP%208Jul08.pdf
“Christmas will be green, rather than white this year as changes in the climate mean that leaves are staying on the trees right into the winter.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/10/15/eachristmas115.xml
I didn’t expect this rubbish from the Telegraph.
I have just walked through streets strewn with leaves as the dying leaves are blown across the street with a cold modertae wind. And yesterday I had to scrape the ice of the windscreen. Do these “experts” spend all their time in greenhouses.?
Peston (or more appropriately Pestis) on his blog today has concluded that Brown did save the World, but now there is the recession to deal with. And this has caused the further collapse in the market.
Naturally Pestis is trailing the newly discovered solution cooked up by Comrade Brown, fresh from micturaiting against the wall so many billions of my money that no one has will be able to count it. Plan B (for Brown) – he will be implementing (good Keynsian economics) the utterly discredited notion of ‘buying your way out of a recession’ – “massive public sector spending to stimulate the economy, given that private spend has collapsed”.
Do these idiots ever read a history book – better yet they all lived through the god-awful 70’s so they must know:-
IT DOESN’T WORK
Prudence?
No more Boom and Bust?
Careful steward of finances?
Financial genius?
Worse still is that Pestis is clearly and consistently feeding pure Labour PR propaganda straight into the bloodstream of the economy. The Plague Pestis has spread looks well set to kill the only profitable sector of the British economy.
Anyone for Mandarin lessons?
The BBC has to stop this man from destroying confidence
Just in case some Beeboid thinks I am raving here is the relevant quote
“But they’ve been powerless to prevent the banks contracting the amount of credit they’re providing, which has reduced the ability of companies and individuals to invest and spend, and risks turning an economic slowdown into something rather worse.
That’s why the British government is being forced to think about something new: a substantial and sustained increase in public spending to offset the contraction of spending by the private sector (there may be little point in cutting taxes, since nervous consumers and businesses would probably hoard any extra cash that went into their pockets).
A rise in public spending would increase the burden of public-sector debt, which is already – on one measure – above the government’s self-imposed limit.”
Where does he get this stuff from?
The man is a real best
It’s all too much | 16.10.08 – 9:35 pm |
That brought a tear to my eye from laughing so hard. An increase in public spending? Mr. Brown has already ramped it up to unprecedented levels, especially when one includes the PFI fiddle. I guess that’s how he’s going to “create” a job for that unemployed brick-maker I heard complaining about his lot on the World Service yesterday.
I confess that I lack the gray matter to tackle the bit about not cutting taxes because people will only want to save money if you do.
This reads too much like a sales pitch for what Mr. Brown said yesterday about “having a plan” to create plans to create jobs for people, or to plan for them to plan for a different kind of job. Why, it’s almost as if somebody ran the idea by the Peston a day earlier to see how he’d report it, or gets him to massage the masses the day after.
Do these “experts” spend all their time in greenhouses.?
Jon | 16.10.08 – 8:46 pm | #
I don’t think they get out of London much. And, as I recall, it’s a wee bit warmer there, which possibly explains their confusion when engaging in ‘agree consensus with other enviro analyst mates at the Ivy’ before dashing my taxi back to pen the latest report.
John Bosworth – I didn’t meet them on holiday, I went with them, they being then (and still) good friends. We were in a group of journalists, the collective noun for which I can’t put my finger on, so yes, we were all well aware of the debt owed by the broadcast medie to their print cousins!
This morning the BBC are reporting through clenched teeth that:
“The presidents of the US, France and the European Commission have unveiled plans for a series of summits to discuss the global financial crisis. Speaking before talks at Camp David with Nicolas Sarkozy and Jose Manuel Barroso, George W Bush said it was “essential that we work together”… The Europeans want the meetings to pave the way for talks on an overhaul of the world’s financial regulatory systems.”
But why is Gordon “saviour of the world financial system” Brown not going to be there? Could it be that the Labour spinners and their friends in the BBC have exaggerated the role and influence of Gordon “the man who f*****d up the UK economy” Brown? Could it be that in reality world leaders know that Gordon Brown is a shambling joke of a Prime Minister, a man who got lucky when he inherited a healthy economy and wasted the inheritance on social-engineering and wild public spending?