It is always apparent that any programme that uses audience participation either in a phone in or like Question Time, actually imports an audience, is vulnerable to those people who under cover of being someone unaffiliated with any agenda are in fact political, big business, religious or other activists or lobbyists peddling their own interests.
With that in mind it should be encumbent on the likes of the BBC to weed out such people if possible….and failing that, they ensure that any guests they have onto any show are there to provide informed comment unadulterated by their politics, comment which informs and educates the listener without them being sandbagged by partisan voices masquerading as the honest truth.
This Friday Nicky Campbell was discussing Jeremy Hunt’s comments that he could not guarantee that all NHS hospitals were completely safe.
Who did Campbell have on as his prime speaker?
Dr John Ashton….the same Dr John Ashton who says ‘ it is a basic human right to belong to a political party but insists his concerns about the bill are based on professional, not personal or political opinion.
He said: “I have always been open about the fact that I have been a member of the Labour party since I was 17. For me it is my values and in my blood.” ‘
The same Dr John Ashton who strongly opposes the Government’s health service reforms:
A LIVERPOOL doctor said it was “outrageous” he had been summoned to a disciplinary hearing for criticising the Health Bill.
Campbell didn’t bother to reveal that link to Labour or his views on the health reforms.
But such links might explain the views he did express on the show:
Private sector values corrode and corrupt public service ethics that were part of the NHS since its inception…the solidarity of the NHS has been torn apart and the workforce alienated.
He believes that Jeremy Hunt is trying to privatise the NHS by the backdoor and that when a caller suggested that Hunt’s comment about not guaranteeing the safety of NHS hospitals was a deliberate policy to undermine the NHS and give him an excuse to privatise it, Ashton said he ‘absolutely agreed with that’.
Funny old world…when Labour were getting a lot of flak for Stafford they were keen to claim that the ‘vicitms’ of that regime were being ‘forgotten’…now all they want to talk about is the politics and the blame that can be piled onto the Tories if possible.
Shame the BBC gives a platform to someone who is so obviously completely opposed to this government in every way when they present him as a impartial commenter…..all the worse on a ‘phone-in’ when we know that many callers are not the disinterested parties that they claim to be and so we need a credible, informed and balanced voice…something that the BBC in this case so obviously failed to provide.
…….and why this site exists.
Not a Nightingale or a Cuckoo but a Merry Seagull (geddit??!!!)
BBC don’t need to import audiences – they can and do just invent them. (Saves the taxi-fares)
Cf Chucklin’ Nikki himself.
Who went from
‘Investigane Lorenzes ferdrutaking zanorayciss?
to
‘Investigane Lorenzes ferdrutaking, sumpeel aresane azrayciss’
in a very short period of time.
So who is it Gameshow?
Sumpeel?
Or just – you.
Still, fair play to the clown, his continuous whoring for wimmin, muzzies, and the ‘Layparee’ has got him another television ‘show’. Called I think, ‘Your Licence Fee, Our Shite Programme’.
As well as not watching it on television, you can also swerve it on Iplayer.
Readers comments after a recent article in the Guardian over the CQC scandal were both revealing and depressing.
Some of the “most recommended” comments promoted a conspiracy theory that the recent spate of bad publicity for the NHS is part of a conservative plot to privatise the health service. Other posts simply stated that it was wrong to criticise the NHS under any circumstances . Many agreed.
A post asking Guardian readers, just how bad does the NHS have to be, how many does it have to kill, before criticism is justified, was met with derision.
It’s all depressingly indicative of how the NHS is a religion to many on the left. It simply cannot do any wrong, no criticism can ever be justified.
Victoria Derbyshire on radio five this morning hosted a phone-in about the mid Staffs NHS scandal (1200 patients killed). Its subject; how are the patients treating the NHS staff. Yes that’s right, patients treating staff, not the other way round.The BBC in full “public service” mode, where public sector organisations are run for the benefit of the staff, not the people they are supposed to serve.
I wonder when Derbyshire will investigate how those who blew the whistle on the appalling mid Staffs scandal have been hounded, threatened and bullied and in some cases forced to move house by a vicious campaign of intimidation, largely orchestrated by Labour activists.
Good point.
“How many does the NHS have to kill before the BBC decide to highlight it?”
Well…Stalin, Pol Pot, Che, Mugabe, Castro?…all of who managed to kill far more; yet still get the BBCs full slavering when it suits them(and it usually does).
Comrades Bower and Nicholson will have the figures, I`m sure…and if the BBCs own Met unit get to certify them, we`ll find the NHS will have already exceeded the deaths in the Soviet gulags and psychiatric wards-who only cared and cured, so unlike the revanchist USA!
Oh to have no brain, and mittens to do my counting….I can now be Albaman, Scott/Dez for one day(which of them is on duty/call at the moment I wonder?).
I’m always fascinated by the NHS privatisation argument. Aside from the drs, nurses etc everything else is private enterprise. Every brick,very inch of cement, every pane of glass, every needle, every pillow, sheet, X-ray machine, scalpel and so forth is supplied by private enterprise along with every pound of wages. It’s all private in reality. The state builds none of those things.
I’ve just read on Guido Fawkes’ blog, and in the National Health Journal that Julie Bailey, founder of the ‘Cure the NHS’ campaign group (which exposed the disaster that was the Mid Staffordshire Foundation Trust), has apparently been forced by ‘local political activists’ to close her business, and move out of town. The final straw may just have been the desecration of her mother’s grave.
Yep – blow the whistle on 1600 unnecessary deaths, and certain ‘local political activists’ will run you and your family out of town (the ambulance driver who wished her a horrible death, on some social media or other, couldn’t possibly be one of those ‘local political activists’, could he ?)….. never mind that her actions may well have saved countless lives from being simply snuffed out by our ‘incredible’ NHS.
This country is fast ‘going to the dogs’….. but that’s a terrible slight on dogs.
And despite quite a number of searches, the article which appeared on National Health Journal yesterday, mysteriously doesn’t seem to have filtered through to the BBC – but no doubt some ‘Defender of the BBC Faith’ will rush to print to point out some obscure source within the BBC wealth of sources which just happens to mention this in the passing – i.e. ‘….nothing to see here, just move on, folks.’
Imagine if an airline crashed 10 planes each year, killing 3,000 passengers in avoidable accidents; after its most disturbing disaster, wiping out 1,200 people, the two managers responsible were promoted to the firm’s top jobs – one as chief executive, the other in charge of safety. Then it was discovered that the company silenced whistleblowers while covering-up serious failings that led to fatalities.
It is fair to assume there would be an immense public outcry. The airline would be grounded, the managers deservedly hounded into prison. Politicians would demand the overhaul of an industry plainly suffering profound structural flaws.
Yet this is precisely the scenario in our hallowed National Health Service …
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/worshipping-the-nhs-costs-lives-8669701.html
And there would have been a Public Inquiry.
Something that the Health Minister at the time of the Stafford outrage (Andy Burnham) repeatedly refused to call
Communists in Cuba and North Korea also tell the people they have the best Health Service in the world.
If political activists attack the families of dead victims, then fear of the Labour party in Britain may become as great as fear of the Communist party in Cuba and North Korea.
Therefore the BBC strategy must be to assist the Labour party in intimidating the British people with a fear of Labour party activists greater than the fear of dying in an NHS hospital.
The promotion of those two from Staffordshire, to the top of the NHS pile is quite a bizarre symptom of the self destructive nature of socialism.
Why did they do it? Was it a secret strategy to destroy the NHS? Who knows?
“I have been a member of the Labour party since I was 17. For me it is my values and in my blood”
There speaks an unused brain, that pays no attention to what is going on, and is uninfluenced by arguments and events. Think back to when you were seventeen…
This is a doctor admitting to being brain-dead. Perhaps he needs striking off. Most people learn…
The phrase “… in my blood” is very interesting too because, if taken literally, it suggests a genetic (and maybe – heaven forbid! – racial) aspect to belief systems. Perhaps those of us of a more conservative disposition simply can’t help it! May God pardon us for inheriting our parents’ genes.