Victoria Derbyshire interviews the new General Secretary of the TUC, Frances O’Grady.
However it wasn’t so much an interview as a chance to bang the drum for Labour Party policies in what was in effect a half hour party political broadcast.
O’Grady was pitching the Labour line that government cuts are slowing the economy, increasing unemployment, reducing tax revenues and therefore forcing the government to borrow more.
No questions from Derbyshire…or none that she considered she really wanted answering, and no other person on to dispute what O’Grady was saying.
So here’s a quick corrective….So far the government hasn’t cut spending overall which is why it is having to keep borrowing…. unemployment is going down….I think 800,000 jobs have been created in the private sector…far more than lost in the pubic sector….and government fiscal responsibility means that the money we do borrow is at far cheaper rates than we would get under a profligate Labour government who wish to borrow even more…with no idea how to pay it off.
No sign of any thoughts along those lines from Derbyshire….her sole concern was that the TUC had been ineffective in forcing the government to stop the so called cuts in government overall spending.
She seemed quite keen to encourage further strike action…Derbyshire seems quite a fan of such actions…no student protest is complete without her and the 5Live broadcast team.
‘You need to go on strike to get the government to change their mind!’
I took that to be an instruction from Derbyshire…I could be wrong…but I doubt it.
I think Derbyshire is trying to re-imagine her student days which she utterly wasted by swotting hard and helping orphans when she should have been rabble rousing and bringing down governments ….now she encourages others to rabble rouse and bring down governments.
The ‘callers’ to the show must have been handpicked ‘onside’ cheerleaders for the cause…..they didn’t exactly cause O’Grady any problems…
Caller 1. ‘I agree with everything you say’.
Caller 2. ‘I agree with everything you say but when are we going to have a general strike?’
Caller 3. ‘I agree with everything you say but you haven’t done much to help Remploy workers?’
Which gives O’Grady the chance to say that Unions are not as powerful as they should be because of oppressive government anti-union legislation (which allows them to kick disabled workers onto the scrapheap.)and that this needs to be repealed and for more people to join the Unions. All in all hardly a balanced or very informative piece being purely from O’Grady’s point of view.
Remarkable that Derbyshire is so unwilling to ask any difficult questions or demand any actual answers to ones she does ask. An obvious question is why should the Unions have any political clout at all in a democracy? Why can a Union Baron, or Baroness, take his membership for granted along with ‘their’ money and hand it all over to a political party. Where is the democracy in what is essentially mob rule?….and that’s assuming that the 6.5 million union members actually support Labour or the policies the unions want to be implemented…which I doubt severely….At least half must be Sun readers.
No such questions from Derbyshire…..the whole show was basically turned over to O’Grady and quite probably broke every rule in the BBC Charter.
Anyone make an educated guess how much Victoria Derbyshire is paid to front this first year undergraduate debating society?
£200,000 a year, according to a line in a Daily Mail article, and she flies from Heathrow to Salford to host her live show.
Amazing how much being a zombie lefty pays.
If the Tories won’t act to stop this abuse of our Tax, then no one will. Honestly, how does she and Bacon in particular get away with it? At least Gameshow makes a little effort to challenge.
Victoria Derbyshire is a [tax payer funded] public sector worker supporting public sector unions. She knows the script and sticks to it. Morality has nothing to do with it.
I’ll take a shot in the dark that Ms VD didn’t point out that one reason for the unions falling influence was the death of just about every industry where they managed to gain a foothold.
And then there’s the Murdoch thing. The BBC was shocked – shocked! – to hear (goofy and untrustworthy) allegations that News Intl was trying to influence government policy. So why so relaxed about a clear minority of the public openly demanding the right to dictate government policy?
The TUC is the Racoon City of politics, full to the brim with public-sector time-servers, clock watchers and whiners. Now it turns out that the public servants will only serve the public providing the public votes the right way, otherwise all bets are off.
Ah! the glorious Ms VD. She didn’t swot. in university. She barely passed university, if indeed she was even admitted to one in the first place. I still haven’t forgotten the “rape, serious rape” controversy that she managed to create all by herself with Ken Clarke as her unwitting prop.
Also, don’t forget that she also stole her current partner from a fellow Beeboid radio presenter.
Last week, I challenged her on Twitter to follow J. Simpson’s tax avoidance admission & admit to tax avoidance by publishing her tax returns. She retweeted my tweet & got some of her lapdog followers to come after me. So, it’s ok for these scumbags to ask politicians tough questions. But they won’t answer any even when they are paid by public money.
I will say that having seen her on ITV, she’s definitely got the perfect face for radio !
As Derbyshire was dealing with a union leftie, she could have asked a few questions from a right-wing point of view – you know, balance and all that. So, for example, where Alan makes the point ‘I think 800,000 jobs have been created in the private sector…far more than lost in the pubic sector’ she could have asked, ‘Isn’t that proof the government’s strategy is working?’ or ‘Are you concerned that 75% of the new jobs created over the past 15 years have been taken by immigrants?’
The reason she didn’t is…. we all know. Relentless anti-government, pro-Labour broadcasting, because they can.
It sounds a particularly brazen BBC effort … no doubt the Union woman in question has been scheduled for Radio ” All Day Woman’s Hour” 4 … super leftist & female : just their sort of chick .
Union membership has declined consistently since the mid-70s.
Union membership is 22% or so of the total workforce
In the private sector union membership is around 10% and in the public sector around 65%.
60% or so of all union members are public sector.
Of course the TUC don’t want government spending cuts.
There is the basic trade union and political alliance betweeen the BBC-NUJ and the TUC, of course.
Here’s a little task for someone: on the next BBC strike day, count how many members of staff take a “personal day” off.
Did our Vicky ask her guest about the fact that she ought to be elected to her new post at the TUC but, it seems, she was the only candidate?
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/04/18/tuc-general-secretary-brendan-barber-retire-2012_n_1433591.html
‘Brendan Barber is to retire later this year after ten years as leader of the TUC…….His successor will be elected at the 2012 Congress in September.’
However the brothers and sisters have agreed to forgo all that bothersome democracy.
Reminds me of how Gordon Brown was unveiled as Labour leader.
What a good omen!
‘….and quite probably broke every rule in the BBC Charter.’
And I think that she probably did so a fortnight ago, the day the LIBOR thing broke.
She encouraged listeners to come on to the show and declare that they would close their Barclays accounts, prodded and cajoled them to commit while asking the (leading) question, where can you find a bank you can trust these days? And lo! it came to pass that a caller rang up with the (seeemingly desired for) answer…the Cooperative Bank – much favoured this week by Miliband. The Co-op is of course a party within the Labour Party. It got me asking where she banked.
The following week she had some of those callers back to ask them whether they had carried out their promise to close their Barclays account.
Sedition, BBC style. All of which is being echoed by Newsnight’s resident Trot, Paul Mason, this evening.
The boundaries between journalism and activism no longer exist in the BBC
We are all free to move our bank account if we don’t like the way the bank does business. I want to move my license fee from the BBC to another broadcaster, for the same reason. Hows about that then, Vicky?