Evan Davis was speaking today to the amiable old fellow Michael Heseltine….the Coalition must have a death wish asking him to review their economic policies….
Davis has his own views on those policies….believing there are no policies at all, the Treasury, George Osborne that is, has given up governing and has surrendered the initiative by collapsing into a ‘defeatist apathetic’ huddle that has lost all hope of finding a way to stimulate growth.
This is the same Davis who tells us frequently that the ‘medicine is killing the patient’….the medicine being Plan A for Austerity.
Impartiality in their DNA? Pull the other one.
Another Davis word of wisdom came when his tongue slipped and the truth came out about Vince Cable’s letter to Cameron concerning growth and policy…Davis was telling us about this letter that Vince Cable leaked….er no, quick retraction by Davis…that Cable wrote and was then leaked (not stolen or hacked…not a political crime?).
We all know Cable is a scheming, devious, untrustworthy politician who would dig up his grand mother and sell her if it got him higher up the greasy pole of government.
Just a shame the BBC continue to put him on a plinth and hero worship him….. on the basis of his duplicitous behaviour in accepting a major position in government and then working continuosly to undermine that government.
Mischief making little fella!
You forgot penis-pierced, shaven-headed, leftie-bent…
I think Alan meant to write “Gimp”, not “Imp”.
I’ve been reading this blog for some months now…all very interesting. I am totally fed up with paying for tv services that don’t reflect my views. Also, I am gay. I haven’t commented ’til now but do you intend to be massively offensive about gay people again? Cos if so I’ll go away and let you be pathetic homophobes on your own.
Pollyanna – if you have been reading this blog for some months you must know that comments like Betty’s are rare and no I don’t like them either and if a commentator uses language I don’t like I just don’t click the ‘like’ button however much I agree with the point they are making.
Fair comment.
That was originally in reply to Polly but also applies to Deborah.
thanks Demon
You’ll find a lot of homophobia here.
An old board favourite, Martin, mentioned rent boys in every post he made, although to the bbbc’s credit he was ticked off for wishing aids on someone.
Y’know what it’s called Jim?
Freedom of speech, you know how it goes, we have all heard it before…”I don’t agree with what you say, but I defend your right to say it”
Have you leftie pillocks forgotten that one, or only use it when it suits?
Yeah, I cringe at some of the posts on here from time to time, but I’m not gonna try to look down from on high at the folk who say them.
This is more or less an unmoderated board, so inevitably people are going to say things you might find uncomfortable. I can’t say I’m enamoured with continued unsolicited references to homosexuals or Muslims, but then I could get upset with unflattering references to Scots too if I wanted to. Welcome to the real world, where people have different opinions to you as to what is offensive. As opposed to the neat and tidy BBC world of correct thinking. There’s an awful lot of things in life to get fits of the vapours over, but frankly most of us have better things to do than leap in to decry them at every opportunity. Occasionally, when things really go over the top, I’ve put in a tut-tut post but by and large, they’re best ignored.
It is far more productive to argue one’s point than to simply cry out, “Please sir, he said ‘poof'”.
The more sucessful the blog the more it attracts trolls etc from Labour/BBC HQ – it is right to leave blog unmoderated but I do think occaisionally revealing the e-mail address of a serial offender would be good idea – not sure their bosses would see the funny side of their non-pc lines.
And if recent cases reported in the papers are anything to go by they’d have their pay cut, be demoted or even get sacked, purely for not toeing the PC line.
What next, the Gulags?
The BBC is nothing but 100% supportive of homosexuals and Muslims so it is not inappropriate for this site to include posters who think this is not the only way of seeing things. I think being gay can lead to different and possibly distorted perspectives in certain areas e.g. some of the gay posters at Harry’s Place give the impression they feel that Islamic culture can’t be all bad when it encourages so much bisexuality, feelings reinforced by regular holidays in places like Morocco or Tunisia. A disproportionate number of trolls on this site seem to be gay and they frequently seem to take the attitude that suspicion of, or hostility to, Islam is irrational. Also people who are critical of the idea of gay marriage are regarded as neanderthalers by virtually all Beeboids: it would be wrong for such PC attitudes to become de rigeur here.
Oh I see, so the gays like the Muslims, do they? Gays all being alike, it is quite understandable that they would share these socially dangerous views. Feel free to let us know when you’ve emerged from the 1940’s.
I pointed out a tendency for some gays to have a distorted perspective on Islam. A lot of gays do appear to be highly assertive, vociferous, and as regards posting on blogs, ubiquitous as well, bearing in mind their small numbers in proportion to the rest of the population. Historically, it was perfectly acceptable to say that gays tend to be a bit silly, well into the seventies.
I love ABBA and Kylie am I silly?
Many people feel gay rights have gone too far. So Christian B and B owners and Catholic adoption agencies get hounded and skewered like victims of a new Inquisition. There are lots more B and B’s and lots more adoption agencies – freedom of choice in a free society. But then we have Brighton council, thinking of removing Mr and Mrs from its forms and correspondence, because according to their GLBT ‘scrutiny committee’ (how Orwellian does that sound) it might offend the ‘transgender community’.
Gay militants – and they seem to be the ones that get their way – are the new intolerants, an irony that is totally lost on them and the likes of the PC BBC.
Pollyanna
I too have been reading this blog for some time. I find general of a high standard. I have found some of those who post comments misogynistic and homophobic. Unfortunately if your politics are not that of the ‘illiberal left’ you will find that some of those you ‘consort’ with on the right are what I would describe as the Shire S…s and the Little Englanders. Stick with it and fight the good fight against all the small tediously small minded people on the left and the right.
Davies is certainly not a ‘leftie’! On the contrary is a far right free marketeer, aGlobalist who favours Open borders and who once said that ‘immigrants who are prepared to squash up a bit’ (yes his words) can provid ea solution to ‘London’s demand for cheap labour’.
He is also notorious for defying a trades union picket line and going into work duringa strike at the BBC.
So, unlike ‘phone-hacking’, ‘viewing emails’ doesn’t get you time in front of Leveson, I see….
I tuned into Newsnight yesterday for 10mins. They doing an economic piece ont he back of soem thinktank’s report. What struck me in the part that i watched was the the deliberate ignorance of factors that did not fit the hard-left rhetoric. The theme was how economic growth had benefited the weathy much more than the poor since 2003 and that wages at the lower end had not grown. The obvious reason, of course, is MASS IMMIGRATION, which has supplied a vast tap of cheap labour and driven down wages and forced more into the welfare fishing net.
No mention of it. Head firmly in the sand.
The revival of Heseltine has given Labour yet another excuse to remind us of Mrs Thatcher. And, sure enough, Nick Robinson is doing it as well.
I didn’t know that the useless tories had invited him to comment on their policies, as is outlined above.
Well, if they did, then it comes as no surprise to me. What a bunch of losers.
Another classic Dopey Dave idea?
I was amazed to hear a BBC journo this a.m. saying
‘I’ve read Michael Heseltine’s report and I’ve put a tick by 60 of his recommendations.
I was amazed firstly because a BBC journo had actually bothered reading anything beyond a tweeted summary; and of course that he agreed with so many of the recommendations.
But as I listened on it turned out the agree-er was actually someone from the CBI and not a droid at all.
Normality resumed and the earth started spinning again.
That really is how corrupt they have become.
It struck me that Evan was at a bit of a loss today. There was Heseltine singing the chorus from the statist songbook beloved of Labour (as well as, by no coincidence, Evan and the BBC economics department) and, frankly, there was nothing more for him to do but sit there while Heseltine regurgitated his well-worn corporatist fantasies.
Asking Heseltine to opine on economic matters is the same as asking Milburn to opine on social mobility or Will Hutton on “fair pay” in the public sector: it’s a semi-suicide note (and a breathtaking sign of stupidity and incompetence) from the CINOs at the top of this government. Heseltine was at pains to note that his report was done personally for Osborne and not for the Treasury. Accordingly, Evan’s bollocking of the Treasury – although fully justified in general terms – was misdirected.
FWIW when I was an undergraduate at the LSE in the early 60s, in our applied economics tutorials our group closely examined aspects of British economic policy which included the Beeching cuts and regional economic policy. We concluded – and our supervisors appeared to agree – that the Beeching cuts were a short-term (and long-term damaging) method of stemming the huge subsidies to British Rail. More to the point, we also concluded that the UK’s regional economic policies had resulted in almost complete failure to achieve their targets and that the principles on which that policy was based were probably rubbish. Remember this was from a group of students who – in macroeconomics – were taught only from the book of Keynes and that, generally speaking, the interference of the enlightened state was always force for good.
I can’t blame the BBC for featuring Heseltine’s statist and corporatist crapola: it’s genuine news and an insight into Osborne’s mindset (we already knew Heseltine’s). I suspect though that had Osborne chosen Lord Young to undertake the Heseltine inquiry (the conclusions of which would probably have been markedly different from Heseltine’s) the report would have sunk without trace like this one.
Has the comment review function on this site been withdrawn? It’s certainly stopped working on my Firefox browser
BTW, as uncle bup’s comment shows, adopting Heseltine’s recommendations will fast forward the UK to a stitch up between big corporate (ie the membership of the CBI) and the well-known economic geniuses who are the apparatchiks and nomenklatura of local and regional government. Apparently, for Heseltine the economic model for the UK is a more benign and less centralist USSR. Meanwhile his EU fanaticism is only partially hidden by a mask of “localism”. Remember that he is still an unapologetic enthusiast for dumping sterling and adopting the euro.
What Heseltine is suggesting has all the rotting fish stench of the disbanded Regionalisation Developement Agencies which, in England, just happened (by chance of course) to comply with the EU’s aim of breaking down National Boundaries by creating “Regions” within Countries and along their boundaries creating Regions crossing National Borders thereby eliminating them.
Heseltine, being a rampant Europhile, is obvioulsy attempting to resurrect the system which previously proved a complete waste of money and was therefore abandonned. The whole idea behind the scheme was to use it as a method of linking the Regions financially more closely with Brussels and thereby bypassing National Governments when it came to funding. This would, of course, by handing more power to the Brussels Politburo, satisfy Heseltine’s rampant EU fanaticism.
And alot of Regional Development agencies channelled their ‘investment’ into the public sector.
Funny they should do that under a labour government.
Another of John Prescott’s triumphs.
There were many.
How apt that the Resurrection Men at the BBC chose to dig up Tarzan(the BBC like a cartoon don`t they?) on Hallowe`en!
Poor old fool sums up Powells saying that all politicians lives end in failure.
Heseltine is a ghost from way back dusted off to remind us of that axiom.
Still-not squatting over us threateningly like Prescott…poor Tracey Temple!
Well said!
Hutton, Milburn, Warnock, Furedi….need we name them all?
The BBCs speed dial for any combination of pantomine horse-bit like one of Gramscis horse and buggy that the BBC requires for display and dressage when “fairness” “equality” “diversity” “tolerance” and “social cohesion” need to be trotted around old Billy Cottons circus ring.
Heseltine died in Venice !997 really, much as Elvis died in the Army-just Prescotts see saw partner for the rest of us to note the “balance”.
Heseltine was just a glorified gardener for Toxteth and Gateshead after riots…his Garden Cities and Millennium Domes stand monument to his glorious publicly funded failures from 1980 to the present day.
Still he has a lovely arboreum, so is a Renaissance Man as well as being Thatchers slippery bath mat…so he`ll be forever loved at the BBC.
Don’t forget to blame Islam for this.
What do you know about Islam’s involvement? Are you a racist as well as as all the other “ists” that you are?
Bugger. You brought me down to your level. I would have thought better of you Nicked, at least until the other day.
Off on Savile’s Travels again? Or is it safe now the BBC have made less of the story than the far minor thing about what a minister may have said to a policeperson.
Is that really you, Nicked? Full marks for brevity. Less than zero for originality. Are you getting stale, too many ‘assignments’? Put your feet up, old son. Do a bit of reading. Never mind Gramsci’s prison offerings, have you read Dick Clement’s & Ian La Frenais’ ‘Porridge’ notebooks? Full of scintillating insights into incarceration, class struggle, cultural ‘hegemony’, ‘false consciousness’ & human nature. Give it a go. Might freshen up that normally razor-sharp mind of yours.
Nicky rimus why all the hate you know you really should get help all that bitterness and powerlessness can only lead to you something stupid in the shed !! which would make your beloved BBC’s man crush Eddie so unhappy !
Heck-has the rain brought out ALL the Beebs ciphers at one and the same time?
Conveniently, they’ve all been travelling for the last week or two, but probably think it’s safe now as the Savile furore has died down so they’ve come back en masse.
Savile’s Travels was never busier.
Did anyone hear the earlier ‘Today’ piece on the new Taxpayers Alliance report on trade union funding?
That’s right the one that isn’t mentioned on the BBC website.
There was a disgraceful interview by Justin Webb when the introduction was so cursory and uninformative that it did not mention the report and thus the reason for the interview.
Then a fight was set up between a Taxpayer Alliance (TA) person and a gabby trade unionist. The TA spokesman was talked over by Webb and walked over by the carefully picked trade unionist.
That is a standard BBC practice in relation to trade union matters – never a straight interview with the person generating the story always a studio cat fight, usually with Mark Serwotka or a clone of his.
Have a look at the report on £113 million of your money, at least, paid to the brothers:
http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/home/2012/10/taxpayers-fund-trade-unions-tune-113-million.html
These interruptions really Do need to be counted.
Compare and contrast Chris Graylings treatment by Martha Kearney, as opposed to Rachel Reeves(World at One, (31/10/12).
How the hell do Labour get away with their opportunism, after what they did in Europe until 2010….but if we knew no better, we`d think that Labour fought for Britain and the BBC have often wondered about how come we pay the EU so ?
For Gods sake-set up a Norman Tebbit School, and pay him whatever he likes, so he can train a few Tories up before his wisdom and tactics are lost…or else we`ll be left with the likes of Grayling and May…and then the One Party Superstate of the BBC/Labour desired by their puppetmasters in Brussels.
We`ll be begging for the EDL by then, at this rate!
Wake up England!
The fact this report from a rather minor think tank on a very marginal issue of interest only to right wing types appeared on Today rather undermines your accusation if left wing bias. Agenda setting innit.
No such thing as agenda setting. The agenda sets itself Nicked Emus said so.
Marginal? I doubt you have read it. Every other new Labour think tank report or poll gets acres of coverage on the BBC news website and this one is vastly more thorough than theirs.
My point is plain in relation to ‘Today’ – it was obvious the staff did not want to run with the story and made certain the TA person was sandwiched between a trade unionist and the interviewer, and duly squashed.
Hi Jimmy nice to see you back you old labour voter! got over the last few weeks have we ? great well back the the grind stone young man as Nick-ers has been stealing a march on you he has been here grabbing anything he can cherry pick and using any grammar Nazi tactic going , you must do better Jimmy and savill ???soz save the BBC !
‘Only of interst to right wing types’.
Stuff the taxpayer, then.
Yes, indeed: there might still be a special constable on Anglesey who hasn’t been asked for his views on Gategate.
Meanwhile, in the real world, £100 million is considered to be quite a lot of cash to spend on paying Fred Kite and Millie Tant not to work.
But it’s the Tories who are out of touch!
I live on Anglesey and they are all special up here on craggy island !