You know what angers me? The way in which the BBC seems institutionally incapable of reporting on current Labour woes without referencing things back to the period when the Conservatives were in power. We saw it yesterday when Gordon told us that he had “saved the world”. Bang on cue a clip of Mrs Thatcher declaring “We are a grandmother.” Today we seek the Pound sink to an alarmingly low rate against the Euro as the financial markets cast judgement on our future economic prospects and yet the BBC manages to push the line that the weakness of sterling is actually great news for exporters and that the Pound was weaker against the Deutschmark in 1995 (under the Tories). WHY is is so hard for the BBC to report a story on the state of our economy without trying to ameliorate the state it is in by pointless historical references? I know they want to Save Gordon, their socialists comrade, but it makes the value of their reporting even more worthless than our national currency has become under the Great Leader.
Yes, if weakness in a currency were such a good thing, Zimbabwe would be going through an economic miracle.
Funny how the BBC reports the slightest temporary drop in the US dollar as the end of the capitalist system as we know it.
The German Finance Minister, Peer Steinbruck, has said that Brown’s “fiscal stimulus” will be ineffective and is a panic measure. It will be interesting to see how the BBC report this exceptional attack on Brown !
“Great news for exporters”
Which exporters are these then? We don’t make things anymore. Exports are yet another of Brown’s non-existent divisions being moved around the map in the Downing Street bunker whilst his (and our) nemesis closes in.
Brave Sir Robin,
So true.
I remember when the Conservatives were in office and unemployment was rising.
We never heard the end of redundancies in this company and that company every single news bulletin
What I object to even more than the BBC’s famous left wing bias is the complete and utter failure of BBC news to tell people the things they want to know.
An example: for weeks now my wife and I have sat in front of the news where Peston et al have been predicting the closure of Woolworths.
On each and every occasion my wife has asked ‘why? What went wrong?’ before embarking on a prolonged nostalgia trip on the wonder of woolies in her childhood.
Apart from once, when they had on a stupid, smug woman who opined that Woolworths ‘didn’t know what kind of company it wanted to be’, the BBC has consistently refused to examine the reasons for Woolworths going bust – as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a company that charges less than its rivals to go bust in times when everyone’s feeling the pinch!
Eventually, I got so fed up with the BBC failing to tell me what had gone wrong with Woolies that I phoned the company and asked.
After allaying natural suspicions that I might be a hated journalist etc, I finally got through to a straight-up bloke who explained that when Woolworths was spun off from Kingfisher about seven years ago, the retail business and the shop freeholds weren’t sold together. That meant the retail biz kept getting upward rent reviews on all its stores – something that totally crippled the business.
Okay, so that might be only half the story. And it comes from someone in the company management, who’s hardly unbiased.
But it’s a heck of a lot more plausible and informative than anything on the BBC news.
Caveman 11.10
That’s true. The worst offender as I recall was in fact ITN, who used to run a “Week’s Major Job Losses” (flashing red dots on a map) followed by “Major Job Gains” (flashing green) at the end of the Sunday News At Ten in the early 1980s – 5,000 lost here, 1,500 here, 2,000 gained there. The idiots then would do a “Net” result based on these figures (almost always a negative result). Only major losses and gains counted, you see. 10,000 gains among 200 smaller new high tech companies didn’t come into it, it was the 5,000 lost when a couple of heavy industry plants closed that mattered to them. Even then by about 1985 they stopped running the feature (rather suspiciously) when even by their own warped criteria the job figures began to look positive.
Needless to say, many of the producers in Independent Television back then now occupy high positions in the BBC – Greg Dyke was only the biggest of these particular fish.
For the record – and as you’ll never see facts like this broadcast on the Beeb – sterling has reached its lowest ever level.
The Bank of England’s trade weighted currency index, which compares the pound against a basket of the currencies of its trading partners, has hit record lows several times over the last few days (check it out e.g. here.)
So rather than focusing on one currency chosen at random, the BBC would have been more accurate to report that Labour’s dismal handling of the British economy has seen the pound plunge to unprecedented lows – even lower than when we crashed out of the ERM all those years ago.
David 10.26
Posted by a commenter on CIF, taken from a local website:
“…the number of people working in manufacturing industry in the Vale of Leven is no more than 500. This is approximately the same number of people as were employed in manufacturing in the Vale in the 1780’s, immediately prior to the explosive growth of the textile industry in the Valley. There is a very obvious difference, of course, and that is that the population of the Vale was then about 2,500 – and had been about 600 only 30-40 years previously – while just now it is about 25,000.”
Scary.
Just had the misfortune to listen to a BBC corrsepondent (didn’t catch the name) on the Simon Mayo show telling us how the pitiful reduction in VAT was actually a good thing. Apparently we can save up all those pennies and shillings we save and spend them on………..a cup of coffee that we may not have normally gone out and bought!
No bias in today’s Daily Politics then?! Appearance of 4 Labour MPs (2 in the studio, 2 on film), 1 Liberal and let’s guess how many Conservatives – yes, correct, zero.
Andrew Neil normally interrupts and sneers at a Conservative before they have finished their first sentence and at increasing rates thereafter. Today, a Home Office Minister, invited on to talk about knife crime, got a gentle chat with Neil. She was hopeless, not even knowing the penalties for carrying a knife, but Neil ignored the ignorance. Then came a gentle chat with Denis McShane, the BBC’s favourite Europhile, who seems to have changed his mind over the Euro since Brown’s statement. Was this picked up on? Of course not. McShane blustered but was allowed to get away with it.
Mr Neil’s attempts to not show bias (I’m trying to be fair) do seem invariably to result in the appearance of disproportionate bias against the Conservatives.
DV
“. . by pointless historical references”
No, not at all pointless, if the object of introducing these references is to imply that things are bad now but they were so much worse under the Tories.
The looney lefties at the BBC are always gibbering on about their posh coffees and croissants. Out in the real world, we survive on more modest grub. The BBC will be saying “let them eat cake” meanwhile the recession continues to get worse.
This could be bad news for beeboids though. Is Cocaine and a teenage rent boy paid in Euro’s or pounds?
Here is an interesting article from May in which Mr Brown advised us all that he is the man to save the country, some of his comments are rather revealing about the man himself, also revealing is what he missed in his analysis of what areas needed monitoring:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7401846.stm
http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?sortBy=2&forumID=4787&edition=2&ttl=20081211202532&#paginator
From October 11th 2007 we have the following:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7037962.stm
And my personal fav:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7024635.stm
And still the BBC advises us that no-one saw this recession coming !!!!!!
yes, the weak pound is only a boon to exporters if we have some things to export.
The weak pound is definitely a net worry, not just in itself but because of the wider symptomatic malaise it indicates in our economy.
However, I don’t find the historical references pointless – they both seem to provide good context actually; Thatcher’s “grandmother” remark is as legendary as Brown’s remark will soon become. And bear in mind, a “record low” against the euro is only a record low since 1999 when the single currency was created. Comparisons against the old DM are a bit of a misnomer however as the DM was the strongest currency to enter the euro.
Brave Sir Robin – good point re ITN. The problem with the MSM is the endemic liberal bias.
Correction: Gordon said he had “saved the world banking system” not the world. The Stupid Tory party were so busy laughing they didn’t even listen to what he was saying!