Chris Patten is now ensconced as BBC chairman, and – I know from sources – he has already shown that he will defend his new paymaster to the hilt, telling MPs at a briefing meeting on Thursday that he believes that the corporation’s EU coverage is perfectly balanced and does not need to change. Perhaps he should have read this before thus pontificating. The Tory MP Philip Davies, a member of the Commons culture committee (the only member of which opposed Patten’s appointment), has today set out why it was a disgrace:
“He was always going to be a safe pair of hands, he wasn’t going to pose anything radical, he wasn’t going to upset the cosy situtation the BBC finds itself in and he was going to be another cheerleader for the BBC, rather than someone who would be tough on them. Appointing him was a step backwards because whereas the BBC had started to acknowledge that in the past their impartiality on issues like Europe, climate change and the Middle East hasn’t been all it should have been, Lord Patten has made it perfectly clear that he thinks the BBC’s impartiality is beyond reproach…”
Mr Davies neatly sums up all that stinks about the Patten appointment. The Mail on Sunday article in which Mr Davies makes his claims outlines the rat’s nest of interests Lord Patten has, including being a member of the advisory panel of French global warming (let’s-get-as-many-subsidies- as-possible) energy company EDF. Oh, and lest we forget, porky snout-in-trough Patten also has an axe to grind with the EU in the shape of his £100,000 pension he has from his days as a commissioner.
The appointment of Lord Patten to this role confirms to me that the David Cameron administration is probably the most pro-EU ever elected, and that it has no intention whatsoever of reforming the fat, bloated disgracefully biased BBC.
Well, well… wonder if it may get read out on Newswatch… or Mr. Marr’s wonderful buffet of balance.
So far…. first out the traps: The Observer.
Then being commented on by the well-balanced Sandi Toksvig and Simon Hoggart of… well, let’s just say it’s not one of those papers who are trying to be beastly to Mr. Huhne, especially when he is fighting the good fight on climate now his old car keys were snapped up from the wife-swap bowl and he now is a carbon saint.
One appreciates there are only so many luvvies with a book/play/cause to promote each week, but the pool does seem quite limited by the faces one is offered repetitively. Maybe the subject matter helps selection?
And speaking of the vast representation of the viewing public that abounds, is it mandatory for folk who mainly seem indulged for their sexual orientation to twist every story to suit what perhaps be a rather less than nationally obsessed set of views on a broad news day?
Breakfast on BBC One’s run-through of the front pages also began with the Observer (“big profits”) , followed by the Independent on Sunday (“fat cats”) and..well that was it before the paper reviewer’s selection began.
I was just wondering where, how, and who at the BBC has started to acknowledge these impartiality issues. Or does he just mean Mark Thompson’s remark about ‘slight bias to the left detected in the past but it’s all fixed now’?
Not fixed, just that the starboard side has been ballasted with a few old rocks and lumps of granite and decaying concrete. Looks alright from the outside, if a little lower in the water…
…bit like an iceberg, really, the dangerous bit is out of sight.
I agree. Patten is a disgrace and that’s why he has been picked.
Patten didn`t get an interview, but a “confirmation hearing”-his very words!
Think we now have a precedent for any jobs that we care to apply for from now on. None of these criteria and job specs, no racial quotas oe such like. So Nu Labor…I`m worth it…Cheryl says so!
Just grow some jowls and purr a sense of entitlement…fail in any election…hop from lilypad to lilypad, but change nothing or have no effect on anything that comes within peripheral vision…and you too can hog the woolsack at the top of Bush House.
What an oil slick there must be by now over the BBCs jacuzzi…well it`s just a bath, with with all that flatulence and halitosis?…
cj,
“Confirmation hearing “. Did Patten think he was in church ? Well, I suppose the BBC is a kind of religion for some people.
EU pensions are paid on the understanding that the EU can remove this pension, if in the view of the Commission or the Luxembourg Court, they “fail to uphold the interests of the European Communities”. Does any more need to be said about quislings such as Patten, Mandelson etc.?
I read this article last night and found the various connections, including a specific Beeboid one, fascinating (we’ve certainly come across Lord Browne before):
“… Lord Patten’s deputy is Diane Coyle. Ms Coyle, who is paid £77,000 a year, has been a member of the Trust since 2006.
She had recently worked with Lord Browne on his 11-month higher education funding review.
The pair struck up a friendship during this time and it has now come to light that Coyle, whose husband Rory Cellan Jones is BBC technology correspondent, has a significant link to Lord Patten herself.
Coyle and Lord Patten are both members of the five-strong EDF energy stakeholder advisory panel, which pays them each up to £40,000 a year.
The panel meets every three months to advise the energy giant on its business strategy. … ”
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1387228/The-curious-links-BBC-s-new-chairman-Chris-Patten-ex-BP-boss-interviewed-job.html#ixzz1MQAD6nxt
The establishment has a huge sense of entitlement. They always have and always will. Patten is just another one of them and only a foolish man would have expected anyone better from the farce of the appointment of BBC chairman
These people are seriously rich and collect pay packets throughout their lives. Advisory fees, directorships, pensions etc etc.They regard this as their right.
It is a world remote from our lives and actually unreal. It exists because we allow it to do so. We are raising families, trying to survive and do the best we can. This world of theirs is as remote as the world of the aristocrats of pre revolutionary France was from the people of France.
What they have in common is their greed and their unshakeable belief that they have the right to govern and control.
What they do not have is any genuine affection for us and for their country.This land means little to them
We have always known this in our hearts and as long as we could prosper a little and our land and our way of life stayed inviolate we tolerated them.
But things are different now. We all know it but they do not. It is our duty to treat the Pattens of this country with scorn until we can hold them to account.
You’re right about collecting the pay packets. It mentions in the article about Patten being on some board or other which meets twice a year and for which it is thought he gets paid £50,000. No wonder he looks such a sleek and smiling fat cat.
An excellent post, dave s. Written from the heart. Rapacious slugs like Patten & his ilk care only for what their country can do for them. Shameless. If their day of judgement ever comes, the Tower of London will have to be the height of a Canary Wharf skyscraper to house them all.
Then let’s stop paying the licence fee.
dave s,
Superb post !
In the mid19th Century the (tiny) civil service was famously corrupt, inefficient and was used blatantly as outdoor relief for the more useless members of the (then) ruling class. The Northcote-Trevelyan reforms of the 1850’s began the start of the “golden age” of the civil service delivering (ultimately) (according to this website http://www.civilservant.org.uk/reformwhat.shtml ) a civil service appointed on merit through open competition, rather than patronage, with the following core values: Integrity Honesty Objectivity and Impartiality – including political impartiality.[my bold]
Well, those aspirations, those standards are now part of our history. Appointments to quangos, “independent” review bodies, the BBC Trust etc etc are mired in moral corruption and “impartiality” is the last thing we get. Accordingly, someone in the new administration turned over a stone and of the multitude of creepy-crawlies blinking in the light of day, the Patten insect was selected for the latest sinecure. Patten is a politician who has never avoided jumping on the latest PC bandwagon (pro-EU where maintaining receipt of his EU pension ensures his toeing the Brussels line under any circumstance you care to mention; anti-Israel; AGW fanatic). Incredibly (or maybe not incredibly at all) his record of political opportunism is claimed to translate in some mysterious way into a qualification to assure the punters that the BBC will be “impartial”. If it weren’t so disgusting it would be laughable.
Self-referential I know but on this January 2010 thread at B-BBC http://biasedbbc.tv/2010/01/daves-big-fan-of-bbc.html I commented about the prospects were Cameron to come to power:
Get used to it: if and when Cameron becomes PM nothing will change. The licence fee will stay; the BBC will remain a bastion of bien pensant clap-trap; the warmists will dominate both energy policy and spending “to combat climate change”; Black’s, Harrabin’s and Shukman’s jobs will remain safe. On other fronts, our sovereignty (such as it is) will continue to drain away to Brussels; our “education” system will continue to go down the tubes etc etc.
Seems I was right.
Has Patten ever had a proper job ?
This is just another example of someone who cannot separate the orchestras and documentaries and costume dramas and news personalities of a bygone age from today’s biased News department. Attack the latter and they’re really defending the rest of it.