I was listening to the Today programme around 6.45am and caught a remarkably sneering piece by the BBC on how the Conservatives cannot be trusted on tax. The comment that really made my ears prick up was “It takes independent bodies like the Resolution Fundation to tell us how things really are” before going on to play a clip of Osborne saying NO tax increases before the 2010 election and then announcing an increase in VAT shortly thereafter. Mention was made of Brown doing something similar in 2000, but sadly no clip was available. My beef with this is that a/The Resolution Foundation is a body with an activist left wing pro Labour agenda and so cannot possibly be seen as impartial and b/Perhaps the utter mess of the public finances created by labour which Osborne inherited may have contributed to hid decision to raise our VAT to EU average???
STARTING THE WEEK WITH A SNEER…
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The Resolution Foundation may well be ‘independent’ but this also gives the impression of impartiality, which of course is misleading. It is a clever word-trick.
Good point, Bob, well made. That’s really what I was trying to say.
Funny how the BBC archives only contains clips which support an anti-Tory agenda.
I have yet to hear one single clip of Brown’s oft-repeated (mostly in the Commons) ‘End to boom and bust’ which, had he been a Tory chancellor orchestrating the biggest bust the nation’s finances have ever seen, would have been played almost daily – with accompanying giggles and sniggers from our Today hosts.
They had a clip of Kinnock throwing a tantrum on the Today programme, took decades to release it and only did so with Kinnock’s permission. I wonder what else they are hiding.
Funny that as Mad Gordon MacRuin repeated ‘no more boom and bust’ 90-odd times in parliament. Yer’d think just one would have been picked up on mic or camera wouldn’t yer.
We never hear nowadays the oft-repeated NuLabor lie from the likes of Brown, Balls or Mrs Balls that ‘we have repaid debt’ at a time when borrowing was going through the roof to finance Brown’s manic spending/gerrymandering spurt. The spurt which even without the then hidden PFI scams led directly to our meltdown post 2008.
Nor Purnell’s lie on air that the illegal Abrahams donations had been repaid.
one reason for Osborne having to raise more tax than he said he was going to was Golden Broon’s refusal to allow the Tories access to the books. The convention for many elections has been that the opposition parties get to take a discreet look over the government finances to allow them to formulate realistic policy – Brown was the first PM to refuse this, something which gave Labour supporters I know a smug little chuckle at getting one over on the hated Tories.
I vaguely know someone quite senior in the Tory Party who knows what they’re talking about and after the election the reaction to the true state of HMG finances was appalled horror – “if this was a company we’d be prosecuting the directors for trading while insolvent”, leading to all sorts of changes in what they planned to do.
Anyone who thinks voting Labour ever again is a sensible choice needs a spot of education.
Sometime ago I picked up on the BBC’s fondness for quoting the Resolution Foundation. This organisation is rarely off of Newsnight and I wondered why.
So I checked the website and, sure enough, it was far from the impartial body its anodyne sounding name suggests.
This is the usual left-of-centre organisation much favoured by the BBC when seeking seemingly impartial quotes and experts.
Every time I hear a “news item” which begins along the lines of: “A report/survey/scientists have discovered/ a leading charity…”etc, I know what follows is a puff-piece for some quango/fake charity/pressure group who have conducted their “Survey/research/report” which comes to a fairly predictable conclusion.
All that’s then needed is a call to the BBC to arrange a very sympathetic interview and free publicity for the quangocrats.
Did you know that ‘research’ proves that 20% of ‘Britons’ are virtually starving. 33% of children have nothing to eat in the mornings* and that fully 500,000 ‘depend’ on food banks to prevent malnutrition……. I know all those ‘facts’ because the BBC felt fit to publish the claims of single issue pressure groups supported by spurious research.
Virtually every article starting with “A report” or “research” that the BBC publicises has an “approved agenda”. Anybody remember seeing a BBC article based on a report extolling the economic benefits of Shale Gas ‘Fracking’?
http://www.access-sciencejobs.co.uk/articles/230/shale-gas-fracking-lancashire-could-create-50-000-jobs-uk
Nope?
*because the don’t want breakfast.
Just heard the BBC give me the birth weight of the Royal baby as 8lb 6oz.
Let`s hope some Euro blimp from the Liberal Party dobs `em in for not giving us all the weight in the required metric.
Or does that only apply to traders in Sunderland markets then?
God Bless the Metric Martyrs!
3.65 kg
For the metric pedants, it’s 3.65 kg.