The BBC is keeping itself busy, time waits for no man but if you can rewrite history it doesn’t really matter does it?
The BBC last night had another go at polishing the turd that was Degsy Hatton, expelled from the Labour Party for belonging to the ‘Revolutionary Socialist League’…or Militant Tendency as it had renamed itself….also known as ‘’The Loony Left’…with some justification.
Laurie Taylor (More of whom later) oversaw proceedings on ‘Thinking Allowed’ whilst Diana Frost from Liverpool University helped to delve into the sewers to seek out the truth:
In an environment of mass unemployment in which Liverpool felt abandoned by an indifferent government, the council resolved to join others across the land in refusing to set a budget that would hurt the poorest. It was at first wildly popular, but the scene soon became set for a battle between the city and central government that would shape the future of Liverpool.
Once again Thatcher becomes the villain of the piece nobly resisted by the champions of the poor and downtrodden…Hatton and his Marxist Marauders.
If that wasn’t enough we get a rose tinted look back at the working class, a noble breed, from Paul O’Grady, Lily Savage as you may also know him, who asks…
Whatever happened to the working class? In episode one of a two-part series for BBC One, Paul O’Grady goes on a very personal journey through the history of the British working class to find out how work shaped our communities and what happened when those iconic jobs disappeared
I took one look at the picture of O’Grady dressed as a miner and dismissed this as likely to be the usual anti-Thatcher polemic, maybe with a few jokes from our Lil.
Matt Rudd in the Sunday Times suggested it was more in line with Monty Python’s version of history than say Sir Alan Bullock’s, a rose tinted, nostalgic look back at the working man and woman….life were tough in t’old days lad!
Charles Moore in the Telegraph gives a more robust analysis and it looks like my initial misgivings were correct:
A sentimental view of the working classes
The employers of servants were cruel (“Her Upstairs was never satisfied”). The history of the 1930s was presented solely in terms of the Jarrow March of 1936, when in fact unemployment had been falling for three years. We learnt about the heroic trade union movement, and that the coal miners (“the backbone of British industry”) were the greatest. In the 1970s, we were told, “all the members thought as one”. Then along came “Thatcher” who was “ready to take on the working class”. That was “the beginning of the end”.
Looking up O’Grady on Wikipedia later, I found that he is a classic Left-wing luvvie. Obviously, the BBC would never dream of letting loose a Right-wing entertainer of similar working-class origins on a big programme like this.
Well that’s O’Grady and his version of history…but who else has a finger in this pie?
The BBC, as is often the case, teams up with the Open University in a link with this programme (Check out Harrabin and Dr Joe Smith the climate change advocate and Open University lecturer)…which brings you into the wonderful world of class war and anti-cuts rhetoric.
OU on the BBC: Paul O’Grady’s Working Britain
With links to all sorts of enlightening information, brought to us by the likes of Marxist Dr Jason Toynbee (No relation I believe) and of course the BBC’s own Laurie Taylor….once, still? a Trotskyist member of International Socialist and the irrepressible Owen Jones…and we know what he thinks….because he’s read all the books and regurgitates it ad nauseum so often on the BBC….and not forgetting Professor Kath Woodward who tells us ‘I work on feminist theories and embodiment most recently in the field of sport, especially boxing and have published widely on sex gender, inequalities and the politics of sport
I teach undergraduate and post graduate interdisciplinary social sciences, sociology and supervise PhD students on a range of related topics-diversity, race and gender inequalities, often within the empirical field of sport.’
And then there’s Dr Tracy Kildrick who gives us this:
The riots: poverty cannot be ignored
The sociological discipline has, in large part, been defined by those prepared to take risks and work alongside the poorest and the most marginalised in society.
Politicians of all persuasions have tried hard to divorce the riots from any discussion about the current spending cuts. The problems of poverty did not go away under the previous government, but things were slowly improving for those on the lowest incomes. Much of this progress is now in danger of being swept away as those at the bottom face the greatest threat from the cuts instigated by those at the top. Research shows that relative poverty is set to rise over the coming period, making those already poor very vulnerable indeed. Welfare reform is targeting many of the most vulnerable in society, including those on sickness benefits. Cuts in public services are likely to affect the poorest most as they often have little choice but to rely on these services.
Can’t imagine what the conclusions drawn might be from that lot.
This might give us an idea though from Woodward and Taylor:
The poor are other people: Perceptions of poverty on Teesside
The very helpful sociologists have come to do missionary work amongst the poor…only the poor don’t know they’re poor….they only realise it when the kindly sociologists point this out to them….
…and of course, the sociologists tell us, this is why the ‘working class’ support the Coalition’s Dickensian welfare reforms…they just don’t know how poverty stricken they are…they don’t know what’s good for them….and naturally the sociologists can’t find hide nor hair of the scroungers and skivers, the not so disabled disability claimants, the undeserving poor….all a government manufactured PR myth to allow them to victimise and target the poorest in society..
Anyway you get the idea…..academics, in the realm of sociology, hardly likely to be a hot bed of Tea Party reactionaries.
The BBC knows who its friends are.
Laurie Taylor is the link to the next post in which he pops up again. It is a small world when you start probing around inside the belly of the beast.
As everyone here knows, more pits were closed by Labour than by Margaret Thatcher’s government. (One a day under the Harold Wilson Government)
There were 170 pits operating in 1984 and the BBC love to tell you what has happened to them.
Then they don’t mention the following (copied from another site so haven’t verified it)
“Mrgaret Thatchers government inherited a coal industry which had seen productivity collapse by 6 percent in five years , Never the less Thatcher made attempts to rescue pits , in 1981 a subsidy of £50 million was given to industries to SWITCH FROM CHEAP OIL TO EXPENSIVE BRITISH COAL so descrepit had the industry become that taxpayers were paying people to buy British coal.
Thatchers government injected a further £200 million into the industry and companies such as Central Electricity Generating Board were banned from bringing in and 3 million tonnes of coal piled up at Rotterdam at a cost of £30 million to the british taxpayers per year , by then the industry was loosing £1.2 million A DAY interest payments amounted to £467 million for the year and the Ntional Coal Board needed a grant of £875 million from the taxpayers
The Monopolies Cmmission found that 75% of British pits were losing money the reason was obvious by 1984 it cost £44 to mine a metric ton of British coal , America, Australia and South Africa were selling it on the world markets for £32 a metric ton
Tax payers were subsidising the mining industry to the tune of £1.3 BILLION A YEAR and this figure doesn’t include the vast cost to taxpayer funded industries such as STEEL AND ELECTRICITY which were obliged to buy British coal “
(If you look at the dates of closure – Labour closed HALF the pits that were operating in 1997)
don’t trust the BBC, why would they start in 1984? Pits have closed every decade for over 100 years (the peak for South Wales Coal for instance was 1913)
best to use individual mining area figures i.e. Durham (closures since 1953)
Click to access Our_Dwindling.pdf
I grew up on the North West Durham coalfield in the 60s and 70s. Pits were closing right left and centre during the Wilson and Callaghan administrations. I know, I was there and half my family were laid off as a result.
I saw them demolishing the winding gear as I went past on my way to school about the time the Beatles were coming back from Hamburg without so much as a record deal to their name. Surely Mr O’Grady remembers that.
And I think the “she-devil” Thatcher was probably still Margaret Roberts and hadn’t even met Dennis at that point.
By 1984 there was sod all coal industry left in the North East………I know, I was there.
But as usual, the good ole Beeb never lets the truth get in the way of a good polemic.
Driving around the serried council estates with such evocative names as Marx Crescent, Lenin Terrace and Keir Hardie Avenue, where unemployment has become for many a way of life over the last four or five decades, you are struck by how many parked cars there are and how new they are. How every house sports a satellite dish. The pubs and clubs are thronged of a Friday and Saturday night and I’ve yet to see a starving dog or shoeless child.
You can however spot a large number of single Mums with their buns in their ovens and a fag delicately clenched between their bejewelled fingers as they head off to the DHSS of a Monday morning, with their multicultural offspring around them. Peroxide sales have obviously not declined either.
So the Toricutz don’t really seem to be impacting too badly up here.
Comment of the week.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2396358/Socialist-MP-George-Galloway-puts-house-market-1-5million–600-cent-mark-paid-it.html…i must become a marxist and socalist= money money money whooopeee !!!
Don’t judge the OU – or indeed any university – by the output of its Sociology Department. This is common mistake to make.
I did sociology with the OU – that’s where I learned left wing political theory – and that department is inevitably left wing due to the nature of it, but I did other courses including computing and it is not by any means a left wing organisation as far as I’m concerned.
Not strictly true. I found the original Economics courses and Public Administation course were Marxist-oriented. The Sociology course was way left. And the man appointed to head the science stuff was a noted anti-semite. The science stuff I did was very preachy, right-on. As there were so few courses at the start of the OU I had to skip between disciplines to get the credits needed – I remember at the time depairing of the leftie slant and the constant drip-drip-drip of leftie thinking. Marxism infested the OU from Day 1.
A decade later I was involved in organising Government funding for the OU’s first course on microelectronics – a technology that was going to impact us right across the economy – how things worked, how they were made, new types of product, communications. The OU came up with a draft syllabus that yammered on about the threat to jobs, very defensive of the archaic British efforts in computing and special-purpose chips. They had to be kicked into line to produce a course that focussed entirely on how to use microprocessors, few UK colleges ran such courses and there was an urgent need to let UK engineers learn the new stuff. The OU was the only channel I could think of to get the ball rolling. But I got a bit cross with them when they wanted to take the DTI’s quarter-million pounds to design a course with a lot of Luddite content and false analysis of what was really happening in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.
From viewing occasional OU pieces – it still seems a leftie kind of place, but that applies to much of UK academia, of course. And of course he link with the BBC consolidates the leftie slant.
Some years later
O’Grady’s bound to be somewhat biased, he’s from the north after all so he would have seen some of the decline personally. I don’t blame him as much as I blame the BBC for either not giving him proper research tools or giving him a researcher (probably a southern champagne socialist) who was him/herself biased. You have to wonder why they even commissioned a documentary on the working class hosted by a comedian/chat show host. Then again, this is the same broadcaster that presented a ridiculous 9/11 ‘debunking’ documentary hosted by stand-up comic Andrew Maxwell. I mean 9/11 conspiracy theories are bullshit, granted, but once again the BBC seems to think that the best way to counter facile, brainless nonsense is with even more facile, brainless nonsense.
The problem the BBC now faces is that it can no longer hide behind the quality of its drama, comedy, documentaries, or sports coverage to distract people from their biased journalism, since everything else they’re putting out is currently being almost completely shat on as well – see the backlash towards the world championship athletics coverage where they were rooting for the men’s relay team to get away with a blatant infringement so they’d get an undeserved medal.
What do you mean ‘ bound to be biased he is from the north’. Sounds very very elitist to me! I’m from the north and from a working class background, but I despise the way the liberal left have take over our country and wrecked it. Many factors contributed to the UK’s industrial decline. One of the most important was that our unions were led by militants who cared more about their left wing politics than about ensuring that their members had good, well paid jobs.
I never watch any of these BBC ‘documentaries’ because they are so biased to the left’s narrative that they are just propaganda and a way of re-writing history.
As the Labour party’s poll rating decline, and the election looms ever closer, the BBC will move into overdrive trying to persuade the public not to vote Tory. So we can expect to see more and more of this type of rubbish on TV. After all something like this can’t take long to produce , you just need to read the liberal left history book for 10 year olds, and you basically have the script.
Lefty’s are always telling us that Mrs T ‘stole’ our school milk, yet it was Wilson who stopped school milk to senior pupils back in 1968, Mrs T just finished what he started.
Of course the lie has stuck and Mrs T is always branded the milk snatcher by dumb leftys.
Read any biography – the reason was that cuts had to be made after Labour (sound familiar) and after exhaustive efforts this was felt to be the least worst. Here is Wikipedia
——-
The Conservative party under Edward Heath won the 1970 general election, and Thatcher was subsequently appointed to the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Education and Science. During her first months in office she attracted public attention as a result of the administration’s attempts to cut spending. She gave priority to academic needs in schools.[47] She imposed public expenditure cuts on the state education system, resulting in the abolition of free milk for schoolchildren aged seven to eleven.[48] She held that few children would suffer if schools were charged for milk, but she agreed to provide younger children with a third of a pint daily, for nutritional purposes.[48] Cabinet papers later revealed that she opposed the policy but had been forced into it by the Treasury.[49] Her decision provoked a storm of protest from Labour and the press.[50] leading to the moniker “Margaret Thatcher, Milk Snatcher”.[48][51] She reportedly considered leaving politics in the aftermath and would later write in her autobiography: “I learned a valuable lesson [from the experience]. I had incurred the maximum of political odium for the minimum of political benefit.”
School milk tasted like horsepiss, I for one was glad when it stopped.
Renee Short accused Mrs Thatcher of taking the milk “from the very mouths of the children” as Education Secretary but, as you say, it was under another Short, Edward, that the milk had been taken away from older children.
The irony being that pre-Thatcher the leftist elite despised industry for exploiting the masses; look at Kes, Our Day Out etc for popular culture references. Now they hark back to factories and pits with dewy-eyed nostalgia.
They are, and always have been, full of shit.
Interesting take on how the “liberal” fascists fell out of love with the white working class…………
http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2012/08/12/the-white-working-class-and-the-british-elite-from-the-salt-of-the-earth-to-the-scum-of-the-earth/
I haven’t been back to Liverpool in twenty-four years, but I knew the place pretty well in the Hatton days (when he was only the deputy leader of the council, but nobody ever heard from the leader).
It was pretty clear in Liverpool, in the early eighties, that Hatton’s lot recognised only one kind of worker: either you “worked” for the political machine, or you didn’t work. Hatton and the comrades would have been happy for every private enterprise in the city to go bust and did their damnedest to make that happen. The councillors in control of the council even encouraged the city’s schoolteachers to strike against the council.
The militant tendency also had links to organised crime in Liverpool (as did the labour party more generally) and repeatedly helped to orchestrate publicity campaigns for hoodlums whom the beastly capitalist courts had convicted of armed robbery.
The first sign I saw that Liverpudlians, including the ones who spent their evenings spraying graffitti, were seeing through the Hattonistas, was a wall, just off Church Street, where the militant tendency had sprayed “Free Dennis Kelly” and somebody had added “with every gallon”.
Scouse wit at its best. In the sixties on a board outside a church was the slogan ‘What will YOU do when Jesus returns?’
Underneath was scrawled ‘Move St.John to outside right’
trouble is,if ed milliband shifts to the right just before the election to win back the working class vote he might as well join the conservative party,if anybody thinks that david cameron is right wing well they have been well and truly conned,
Don’t ever forget Dopey Dave wants 80 million islamic Turks to have unfettered access across a borderless EU!
Crumbs, I haven’t said that for ages, suddenly feel much better now it’s off my chest.
The trolls are quiet today. Probably holding the morning strategy meeting at al beeba HQ, deciding on new ID’s, and attack strategies.
Who was on duty on the nightshift I wonder?
They give the impression of not being very bright as their strategies can normally be detected right away. However, they may have have a sleeper lurking, waiting for the right moment to reveal their true colours. I have my suspicion of one person already, but I’m clearly paranoid. 😉