11 Responses to POLLY POLLY…

  1. Jeremy Clarke says:
    August 26, 2011 at 5:40 pm

    Nope, I don’t listen to Polly Toynbee.

    There are plenty of intelligent, well-read, interesting, open-minded, non-dogmatic, non-tribal, balanced, informed, rational, hang-up-free, pragmatic, blue-sky-thinking and left-of-centre commentators out there.

    Polly Toynbee is most certainly not one of them – the BBC loves her because  (a) she used to be one of them, (b) she is revered by many of the Twatterati who work for BBC News and (c) she is a polemicist who makes for good radio drama.

    Public discourse would be improved immeasurably if Polly Rochester stayed in her attic but there is little hope of that in the forseeable future.

    Rant over.

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  2. joseph sanderson says:
    August 26, 2011 at 5:54 pm

    I listened to the programme and clearly Polly had managed to get into a debate that she could not win as she had a very limited knowledge of the subject.

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    • cjhartnett says:
      August 26, 2011 at 6:59 pm

      Jetlag I feared…she was no more ill-informed than usual.
      Which is why the BBC likes her…a wind tunnel for their agenda!

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  4. Louis Robinson says:
    August 26, 2011 at 6:38 pm

    Was that a sigh of exasperation from the interviewer at 5’46”?

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    • hippiepooter says:
      August 26, 2011 at 9:43 pm

      Yes Louis, that’s the way it seemed to me.  Apart from that though, my honest answer to DV’s question is that Justin Webb did not appear to me to be on one side or the other.

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  5. Demon1001 says:
    August 26, 2011 at 9:12 pm

    I listened and thought the interviewer was reasonably even-handed, and that Cohen walked all over toynbee who obviously hadn’t got a clue about it.

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    • hippiepooter says:
      August 26, 2011 at 9:45 pm

      Sir Ron Cohen’s proposal to me sounds like an awful lot of twaddle, but then, its a wee bit beyond my ken, so maybe not?  I thought Polly Tuscany did make some good points which Sir Ron answered well, and as JW said, we’ll have to see how it turns out to see whose right.

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  6. Martin says:
    August 26, 2011 at 10:19 pm

    I might upload 5 minutes of my farting after my curry tonight, which if I do will make more sense than the fat ugly dyke that is Toynbee.

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  7. David Preiser (USA) says:
    August 27, 2011 at 3:14 pm

    Finally got around to listening to this. I don’t know who was worse: Toynbee or Justin Webb.  Toynbee’s opposition to the scheme seemed to be based entirely on an irrelevant Socialist objection and the belief that the people behind the scheme are lying.  Webb took her side almost exclusively, and at one point even dishonestly rephrased one of her attacks, turning one attack into two.

    Toynbee’s primary objection was that nasty accountants and “financiers” would make money on the transactions and paperwork involved in running these schemes and moving the money around.  That’s like saying charities shouldn’t exist at all because nasty bankers make money from processing the charitable donations to the cause.  She took one example where charity foundations were the ones putting up money, and acted as if that discredited the entire concept. But the problem of BBC bias is that Webb didn’t object to that at all, and took it as a valid claim, and only later made a half-hearted attempt to ask if maybe that wouldn’t be the case eventually.

    Then Toynbee said that the Government would end up paying out anyway, even if the targets required by the scheme were not met, which is basically accusing Cohen of being a liar.  Webb also allowed this to stand unchallenged and actually twisted her words and pretended that what she meant was that it was really difficult to quantify results of schemes like this, so there was a danger of the Government having to pay out regardless. That’s not at all what Toynbee said, and if Cohen was allowed to respond to her own attack he might well have been able to defend himself from the accusation that he was a liar and a thief. Instead, Webb rephrased it with the added smokescreen that it’s often hard to figure out if there really are good results.  This means that it’s now two against one, with Cohen having to defend against Webb, while Toynbee sat there and ranted without being challenged at all.

    Then ol’ Justin, genius LSE grad that he is, asked if it wouldn’t be better if the Government just borrowed more money and did the whole thing itself, which wouldn’t allow nasty bankers and accountants and financiers to make money off it – which is exactly the first of Toynbee’s ideological objections to the whole thing.  So the very first attack on Cohen and his scheme becomes the final word, only presented in a new ideological wrapper.

    The only thing that kept me listening the whole way through was waiting to win a bet against myself that neither Toynbee nor Webb would suddenly start objecting to the massive waste of Gordon Brown’s PFIs as well.

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