Biased BBC contributor Alan bravely visits the BBC’s print arm aka The Guardian.
“The BBC ‘in print’, ie The Guardian, does have a cartoon section…..though they call it ‘Comment is Free’…and being highly educated sophisticates for them a thousand words are better than a line drawing to arrange and display your finest thoughts for public consumption and adulation.
You could I suppose, if you were being mean, compare it to the freak shows in the American travelling circuses where people came to gawk at the odd creatures that put themselves on display. It’s always good for a laugh to peruse the CiF section…hopefully its not catching……or compare its ruminations to the fetid swamp gas that belches up out of the ground amusing and intriguing them with dancing ‘fairy lights’ or ‘will-o- the wisps’ before overcoming unwary travellers with the stench of rotting delusions.
Behavioural psychologists must have a field day between CiF and the stories in the Daily Mail that examine the rich variety of the human condition. CiF is gloriously irony free and demonstrates the complete isolation from the real world of most of its contributors.
Polly Toynbee is the Grand Dame of course and is allowed to pen her stuff on the main stage of the real paper…..but not only that…there are occasions when she is freed from the constraints of the printed page and the limitations that places upon her….especially the one that allowed her time to think ( assuming she does put some thought into it…scary though if she does) before pressing the ‘send’ button….however she freed herself from these constraints and went free range this morning giving her mouth a chance to outrun what little brain she possibly has as she leapt from the printed page onto the squawk box and R4’s ‘Today’ discussing the Queen’s Speech and of course the Coalition’s lack of a ‘plan for growth’.
Not to bore you with the ins and outs I’ll go straight for the kill….Toynbee’s solution to growth…..borrow oodles and oodles of money, spend it on stuff and then we’ll have growth to spend on more stuff….because spending on stuff generates growth of the economy.
Not sure how building a school on borrowed money generates growth…..it gives a builder a job….but his wages are paid for by borrowing…and that has to be paid back with interest…so how is that growth? Is that adding wealth to the economy? No.
Only exports generate real growth…ie new income….a closed economy merely circulates the same money and ‘stuff’.
And of course buying lots of ‘stuff’ is an evil Guardianistas and the BBC denounce as ‘Consumerism.’
Happily today we have a prime example of the attitude that prevails amongst the chattering classes who look down upon the rest of us…..
By Suzanne Moore in CiF:
‘It is all rather like fashion advice: just buy the timeless classic, don’t Primark yourself up. The ambition is to have less, just as it is to be thin. Excess is somehow trashy.
Those who cannot filter out what is important cannot afford professional declutterers. They cannot work out which stuff of all the stuff they have needs to be kept. They slide into chaos, trying to fill the emotional void but it cannot be plugged by any amount of material possessions. The categories between what is rubbish and what isn’t have broken down. Their stories revolt and fascinate us because we glimpse ourselves in these dysfunctional relationships to things. Even broken things. In times of austerity we sneer at those who have too much. Although all they have is rubbish.’
Isn’t that gloriously snobbish and elitist….and what you hear in between the lines whenever one of the BBC brigade sneer at the ‘dark side of consumerism’…..ie you and me buying the same stuff as them only cheaper….we’re trashy, too stupid to know better, dysfunctional with emotional needs we try to meet by buying cheap T-shirts from Primark or TK Maxx….but we make great TV for the chattering classes to sneer at in times of austerity….I’m sure Toynbee is ‘in this together’ with us.”
If only one had bought one really super quality, classy pair of sports shoe (trainer to you mate) one wouldn’t need to keep on yearning for the next ‘blingtastic’ Nike model…..and we’d have no more riots!
You don’t see rich people rioting after all do you…that’s because they buy quality first….and make it last.
Wonder what Toynbee does with all that money she earns from sitting on her backside pumping out Marxist tripe if she doesn’t spend it? “
And if it`s not the Guardian providing zombie brain smoothies for the BBC, then it`s the parody of news that is Jon Snows Jobbie on Channel 4.
Tonight the weird woman on there asked the police minister about-get this-the “unexpectedly high turnout” of people marching to save the pension, the NHS, the squonk or whatever else needs saving this evening.
When even Michael Crick says at the front of the piece that it was sparsely attended…when this “big issue” barely scrapes in before 5.30 on Eddie Mairs show on Radio4…and when the BBC aren`t trilling about the spirit of White Lion Square re-enacted by the “nationwide protests”, then ,safe to say,it was a very damp squib.
Now-where is that wonderful speech by Michael Gove today where private school heroes like Penney, Marr and Thompson among many others get namechecks in proving the excellence and challenging nature of being privately-educated.
Seems not to have got a mention tonight on the BBC…any idea why folks?
‘asked the police minister about-get this-the “unexpectedly high turnout” of people marching …
When even Michael Crick says at the front of the piece that it was sparsely attended’
Sounds like a ‘media’ version of the QI elves klaxon is needed too, where what they would like to be the facts are made up by them to become ‘news’.
The Guardian – the thinking man’s Beano.
Enough of that. The Beano was great.
Those perhaps looking for a silver lining to this seemingly interminable recession might consider the diminishing public sector jobs pages in the Guardian; there were only two pages compared to the usual ‘War and Peace’ tome of yesteryear with some of the following posts on offer (preferably, the adverts stated, to ethnic minorities and members from the gay/lesbian/transgender community):
Community Hate Crime Officer – east London (17, 000pa!)
Ethnic Minorities Awareness Fundraiser – Brighton (part time, pro rata 14, 000)
Both public sector local authority jobs I hasten to add. Charming know that tax payers’ money is being put to good use!
If the Tories restricted the adverts to inner-city jobcentres, they could bring down the Guardian, save tax payers money and improve the quality of public service staff.
oh contrar as the biggest supplier of corderoy strides in east london i need the gruniard for my very existance smelling misteaks leftinn solid arity
CIF isn’t all bad, after all I was a regular poster there in the Blair Brown days (as a right wing troll apparently :-))
I still pop in now and again to wind them up.
Lucky you SpanOwls, i used to ‘contribute’ to CIF as Alfredthegreat, but, alas, the moderators must have tired of my baiting of Toynbee, ‘mud-hut’ Monbiot et al, so, no more fun there. However, reading some of Toynbee’s scrawlings lately, she gets a lot of flack from posters now, maybe some of the Grauns’ readers are stirring awake?
I’m sure you are aware there is a blog called CiFWatch. But in case you aren’t, it’s a sobering place to visit. Puts the bbc/guardian malignancy in perspective; particularly the guardian obsession with the Israel and it’s efforts to assist in its destruction.
I purchase the Guardian every day. Today they ran with an article about the lack of housing in London and how people are living in sheds.
Nowhere in the article did it state just which section of the population this is rife amongst, but a clue could be found when they found the wife of a Pakistani man who came to England a few years ago as a student and who was currently out looking for work. She was left in the shed with her baby and had to communicate through an interpreter.
Just think if the political elites had the BAlls to deport these free-loaders then at a stroke they would sort out the housing problem, the NHS problem, the Jobs problem and in one case the grooming problem.
Yet anybody who thinks like me is deemed a racist by the likes of the bBC.
“..but a clue could be found when they found the wife of a Pakistani man who came to England a few years ago as a student and who was currently out looking for work. She was left in the shed with her baby and had to communicate through an interpreter.”
There are certain parts of this that might explain this poor unfortunate woman and child’s predicament.
Her husband was here as a “student”. Now was this as a genuine student or concocted visa approval made on the basis of some slight of hand trick by a relative? Really an open meal ticket into the underground “ask-no-questions” cheap, illegal, labour market so favoured by some of our newly acquired citizens.
On the question of the housing arrangements of the wife and child; were they put in the shed because female=untrustworthy, non-entity as per certain religious beliefs? The text seems to indicate that he had housing and she didn’t. So did he have so much distrust/regard for her that she was only allowed into “his” abode during his presence?
So many questions, so few answers. One is left to ponder the predicament through Western eyes without sufficient information as to the cultural background of this little fable.
In Swindon it is only safe to put up a shed without planning permission if you are classed as an ethnic. These sheds are essential as hidden homes for the huge number of illegal immigrants. Selfishness makes left-wing white people prefer people who make them fell superior such as ethnics, so if you disagree with them on this issue then you are a racist.
I don’t mind the Guardian. If some people want to use the proceeds of a used car magazine and other commercial interests to push their politics then that’s their business.
If only the BBC did the same.
I actually take note of when the CiF regulars kick back, and it is happening more and more.
Such as the famous 10:10 No Pressure video, which the Graun was promoting and got slammed over, and suddenly had to pull a ‘comments are now closed’ when they could no longer cope with moderating out every other one looking a bit ‘comment macht frei’.
The BBC, of course, sailed on regardless, calling the outrage (I’d say pretty genuine for once) as ‘split’, using that special Flandersesque maths they deploy when things need ‘interpreting’ to a comfort zone.
There have also been a few politically, when some of the Graun girls start committing their virginity to the JFK-in-waiting that is Mr. Miliband. Some of the women, too. Credulity can be stretched only so far.
The Guardian campaigns against tax avoidance by Big (boo!) Business, yet is itself owned by a “tax efficient” company in the Cayman Islands. But for that it would have gone bust years ago, since it’s losing £1 million a week.
It might well have gone bust in the 1980s but for Mrs Thatcher’s trade union reforms which put the print unions out of business. I guess you win some and you lose some.
Mind you, but for Mrs Thatcher’s reforms, The Independent, home to the disgusting Johann Harri, would never have existed in the first place.
A pity Toynbee and her ilk weren’t advocating restraint when Blair and Brown were letting the banks loose with unprecedented levels of credit which fuelled the biggest consumer boom in our history, and which got us into this mess in the first place.
Correct JFish, not a dicky-bird out of the upper class bitch, and anyone who did complain was squealed at. What on earth goes on in her brain? Then again she failed the 11plus and was booted out of Uni because she was useless. Poor little rich girl. See why i was booted off of CIF.
Ah yes1 The time of self-certifying 125% mortgages.
Austin Mitchell scoffing at Boris winning last Saturday.
Mandelson wanting us to join Eurozone Plus as soon as possible on Monday.
Livingstone on Tuesday.
Vaz on Wednesday
Hodge today.
It`s as if Labour have never left office-and it`s as if there were no public sector cock-ups, defence and IT scandals, balls-up pensions, constitutional outrages and incompetences…EVER…when this fragrant lot of prep school perps had their greasy hands on the nub of the nation(oo er!)
Let alone illegal crims walking free and unaccounted for, dodgy mortgages and Dome/passports scandals, lost tax discs, 10p rates of tax., cuts to single parents, illegal wars, deaths of civil servants…..
“Was it all so simple then-or has “time” rewritten every line?”
“Time?.”..HA!
What about hundreds of true british soilders dead.