Ed Balls’ andLabour’s whole line of attack on Coalition economic policy has been blown outof the water by the IFS ‘Green Budget’ report but strangely enough this is not considered ‘headlinenews’ for the BBC’s economic guru Stephanie Flanders.
Biased BBC’s Alan notes;
“Balls claims that Osborne’s economic policies have cut growth and increasedborrowing because of that. The IFS report resoundingly shatters that delusion saying that Labour wouldhave caused borrowing to skyrocket by an extra £200bn in 7 years:
‘In a blow to shadow chancellor Ed Balls, the IFS undermined Labour’s argumentthat cutting ‘too far and too fast’ has driven up borrowing by choking offgrowth. The watchdog said that under the plan proposed by former Labour ChancellorAlistair Darling before the General Election, the deficit would be £76 billionin 2016-17 rather than the £24 billion currently forecast. In total, a Labour government that followed Mr Darling’s plan would haveborrowed around £200 billion more over the seven year period than planned bythe Coalition.’
But what does the BBC tell us in the shape of Stephanie Flander’s‘Steph’n’Nonsense’ blog? She fails to mention Labour’s extra £200bn borrowing at all though she does deignto tell us that perhaps the extra Coalition borrowing is not caused by theausterity policy….but this is merely ‘a small poke in the eye’ forBalls…not headline stuff!
‘Is Ed Balls right to blame the government for this poor performance? The IFSdoesn’t answer this directly. Labour would say that the extra tax rises and spending cuts introduced by thecoalition have been a waste of time – indeed, may even have hurt borrowing bytanking the recovery. There’s a complicated answer to that question in this report, but the bottomline is that the IFS does not really buy the Ed Balls version of reality. The think tank does not think the extra borrowing has been caused by the extraausterity, or not very much of it. Not a great headline, perhaps – but another small poke in the eye for Ed Ballsfrom the guild of independent economists.’
A major plank of Labour’s attack is torpedoed and Flander’s thinks this is notheadline news…in fact not news at all…as she doesn’t mention the £200 bn albatross. However credit where credit is due…she does reveal this!
‘Kevin Daly from Goldman Sachs noted recently, the official story that we havepermanently lost at least 7-8% of our national output in this crisis impliesthat the past few years have done more lasting damage to our economic potentialthan either World War II or the Great Depression.’
‘More lasting damage than WWII or the Great Depression’! And note the weasel phrase ‘past few years’…..the Coalition has been in powerfor nearly 2 years…is she suggesting that they are to blame?
She seems reluctant to state the unvarnished truth, namely that economic stabilityand potential has been destroyed by Gordon Brown and his team of Treasuryadvisers….that is Ed Balls and Ed Miliband….currently the two main playersin the Labour Party car crash now….and of course both ex boy friends of theBBC’s very own Stephanie Flanders.
This (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16829768)is the official BBC report on the Green Budget…and is intent on claiming theIFS supports Ball’s policies of more borrowing and ‘stimulus’…and of coursefails to mention all the above.
This is also a poke in the eye for “Two Eds” Flanders, as she’s previously been saying that Balls is right.
BBC’s in-house so-called economics expert holed below the waterline, Costa Concordia-style, DV. Behind that PR-puff “steely-gaze” photo of Steph is a second-rate brain with first rate family and personal connections. You wonder why the bBC appointed her. Loyalty to the last governments policies on a plate, I guess.
Had the report backed Liebore you just know it WOULD have been headline news
Stephanondescript, Stephandnonsense, Stephanohope, Stephinanity – I could go on, but I’m sure others will think of more apt epithets.
She’s Stephinitely useless and Stephinitely labour.
I`m pretty sure that Steph, Black, Bowen etc dress up and play at being “The Cabinet”, when not having to read their scripts to the rest of us.
Why else would they have this certain air of privilege and entltlement?…and do they really think that anyone of us defers to their “expertise”?
Global warming or Cameron in Brussels…congestion charges for Manchester or braying on about “Plan B” as they`re told to, by Millbank.
On any great issue of the day they are WRONG…even a chimp with a dreidel would get it right more often than the BBCs perpetual, preppy Shadow cabinet.
Still they practice on us and we pay them for their eternal End of the Peer Show….preferably Shirley Williams!
Any coincidental resemblance to facts or truth is unintentional!
. . . and from the “Conservatives”? Nothing! They and their LibDem friends are content to let this poisonous crap flow into the public domain without a squeak. A word from Conservative HQ would be welcome to the effect that maybe, just maybe, Flanders’ “explanation” concerning our economic/financial position might be a tad misleading, not to say, completely, utterly and delusionally wrong.
Flanders is not unintelligent and she knows her economics. I would hesitate to fault her on her technical ability. However, incompetence is one thing; deliberate skewing of the facts and their implications (by omission and commission) because it suits her – and her employer’s – political preferences is quite another.
But this is the BBC, the gold-standard shysters of western broadcasting. Maybe the Conservatives are not surprised at the BBC’s “impartial” spivvery. After all, Cameron – whatever else he may be – is a spiv first and foremost and “honour amongst thieves” still applies in the political class.
Does make you wonder why the Tories don’t monitor the BBC output and log everything (like Craig used to do) to make sure the BBC twats really are impartial.
Of course we know the BBC are not impartial and they peddle a lie that they balance their output because they don’t keep records, so how can they balance something without having proper documented proof and analysis?
Is Steph intelligent ? Well it depends on what you mean by it. Steph sadly was brought up in the age of dumbed down GCSEs and then degrees where the marks were given for regurgitating what was in your textbooks. Independant thought didn’t get you many marks and most certainly wasn’t encouraged. Thus Steph repeats what she has been told without question. You could see this in here coverage at the start of the Euro crisis when she told us how the entire crisis had been solved as she had just been to a EU press conference that told her so. She couldn’t ever bring herself to question that because in her mind why would anyone ever tell her something that wasn’t true.
I had the bad luck to spend a fair chunk of last week in meetings with various types of “Stephs” although they were less connected so had to work in various parts of the public sector. In all cases they believed anything they had been previously told and had a supreme confidence in themselves even though it was quite obvious to all they didn’t know squat about what we were talking about.
I think we can take it that she’s intelligent. Moreover, she’s had the best education money and connections can buy. Unfortunately, a “good” education these days does not inoculate you (did it ever?) from the intellectual disease of bien pensant trendy left-wingery. Steph, before her time at the BBC, worked at the FT (the Guardian on pink paper) and was speech writer and adviser to Obama-appointee Larry Summers. She’s everything the BBC loves in an employee: educated in a private school, well connected, left wing, descended from lefties (Claude Cockburn), unmarried mother. Her pedigree (except for the unmarried mother bit) is congruent with Peston’s. She’s is the epitome of BBC desirability: not Moslem, obviously, but who knows what the future will bring?
Stephanie Flanders has an appalling track record in predicting the economy but that does not seem to bother the BBC.
In fact I saw someone point out that only last May Floundering Flanders had said that the Greek bailout was going well. To which the BBC replied by going well Stephanie did not mean going well!
Quite how they will get around her claim from a while back of “Greece will get nowhere near defeat” I do not know.
Have the BBC ever mentioned Stephanie Flanders’ past dalliances with the two Eds? If a Sky News economics correspondent had in the past dated George Osborne do you think the BBC would mention it?
I follow the economics of notayesmanseconomics who has been excellent on developments on the Euro in particular. However I noticed today that he appears not to think much of the latest Stephanomics output.
“There is some very muddled thinking on #QE and bond yields exhibited today by the BBC’s Stephanomics blog #gfc2”
@notayesmansecon