Not sure who Jamie ‘with the wobbly eyes’ is but he’s now appeared twice in a couple of days on the BBC….today on ‘Your Call’ (at about 09:10) talking about the work for welfare proposals (or as the BBC says ‘what some people might call slavery’….though only ‘militant’ people would call it that surely?)…..apart from wobbly eyes it seems he has a wobbly backbone when it comes to work….he thinks employers were horrible to him when they wanted him to work outside in the rain and when, shock horror, call the UN Human Rights Rapporteurs, it was cold.
Obviously he’s not keen on the suggestion that he might have to work for his benefits….and nor are any other callers..so far.
I guess it is going to be a long week as the BBC minutely examines every word that the Tories utter for anything that will put the ‘poor and disadvantaged’s’ noses out of joint.
Unfortunately I can’t remember when Jamie appeared last time….Saturday…probably on 5Live?
If anyone knows let me know, I’d be interested to hear again what he said the first time…unfortunately I switched the radio off as I couldn’t stand the whinging any longer.
On 5Live’s Sunday Breakfast the Tory Conference kicked off…..I’m sure the BBC had some positive texts or emails…..but I heard this one read, from ‘Phil’, out at length (08:36):
‘I’m sick of the lie that Labour wrecked the economy when it was Tory voting wideboys in the banks and City accounting firms who dumped all of us so-called hard working people in the bin.
The Tory’s divisive celebrations of Thatcher reminds us the nasty party is back.
The Tory lie that the economic crisis is down to the poor on welfare has become the accepted orthodoxy denying the truth that it was the wrecklessness of the Tory’s rich pals that caused it.’
Good of the BBC to read out what is the new Labour Party ‘line’ of attack…Labour might have been in charge but it was all those Tory bankers what done it.
A little bit of history, context and truth wouldn’t go amiss at the BBC rather than allowing itself to peddle these Labour Party sound bites.
Does Phil mean to say that all those New Labour slap up prawn cocktail soirées with the bankers and big business were a lie…..Blair, Mandelson and Broon were just teasing?
The BBC’s very own Robert Peston thinks memories are too short:
‘What is striking is the human propensity to forget about previous crises and to assume that a new crisis-free era has arrived.
Here is the central paradox of financial history: we know that there will be harmful banking crises every fifty years or so, and lesser market shocks every twenty or thirty years; but we also know that as years go by without such a shock bankers and investors will become unshakeably convinced that there won’t be a crisis in their lifetimes, and will beigin to take evr more dangerous risks.
The challenge for regulators and politicians, in trying to reduce the incidence and severity of future crises is somehow or other to ground the optimism of those who make important decisions on markets in a more realistic view of history and the future.’
So yes bankers were one of the culprits but so was Brown and Labour as the head of the System….he reduced that regulation of risk…the famous ‘light touch’……
…and it was Brown who forgot the history lesson when he told us that there would be ‘No more boom and bust’
Because he forgot that lesson he didn’t believe he had to regulate. And that’s why we’re in this mess now.
It would be handy if the BBC taught its presenters some history …especially when it is their own journalism that has pointed out the fallacy in Labour’s claims to being an economic safe pair of hands.
Even Stephanie Flanders seemed to have forgotten in later years her own take down of Brown’s spendthrift policies and the ragged state of the economy in 2005:
Britain is growing slower than it has in more than a decade. The high street has ground to a halt, and inflation is the highest it has been under Labour.
When we look back, in a few years’ time, at Brown’s economy, will we still see an economic miracle? Or another old-fashioned spending binge that, sooner or later, had to run dry?
The miracle, if there is one, is that we carried on growing. But looking around the country, you see it is a miracle built not on investing, or exporting, but on a miraculous capacity to spend.
The public spending prop
What is left of the miracle economy, if you strip out the cheap imports and the consumer spending? What is left is a lot of public spending. The only part of the economy that has grown faster than spending by all of us the past few years has been spending by the government.
And who can forget these words of wisdom from Labour’s socialist aristocracy:
First of course there’s the most famous one of all from Mandy telling us he was:
“intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich“……..the remark that was seen as maxim for Labour’s embrace of free markets.
and then there’s Brown, Chancellor and PM and his ‘Golden Age’ of Banking:
I congratulate you Lord Mayor and the City of London on these remarkable achievements, an era that history will record as the beginning of a new golden age for the City of London….
… recognising your international success is critical to that of Britain’s overall and considering together the things that we must do…enhancing a risk based regulatory approach..maintaining our competitive tax regime, and having cut our main rate of corporation tax to again the lowest in the G8.
So more risk and lower taxes for Big Business…yes…not at all letting the City and Business rip.
Here’s Brown grooming the City in his 2006 Mansion House speech:
My Lord Mayor, Mr Governor, My Lords, Aldermen, Mr Recorder, Sheriffs, ladies and gentlemen.
Let me start by saying what a privilege it is to address this famous and historic dinner, where business, bankers and ministers come together to celebrate London’s strengths and achievements.
London has enjoyed one of its most successful years ever, for which I congratulate all of you here on your leadership skills and entrepreneurship.
Financial services are now 7 per cent of our economy. Financial and business services as much as 10 per cent. A larger share of our economy than they are in any other major economy, contributing £19 billion of net exports to our balance of payments, a success all the more remarkable because while New York and Tokyo rely for business on their large domestic base, London’s international ranking is founded on a large and expanding global market.
Ed Balls, our new City Minister, will work with you to develop publish and then promote a long term strategy for the development of London’s financial services and promoting our unique advantages and assets. We will set a clear ambition to make Britain the location of choice for headquarters and services, including R&D, for even more of the world’s leading companies.
Mr Lord Mayor ten years ago there were nine separate regulatory bodies for financial services.
To meet the challenge of global markets we created a single unified FSA.
In 2003, just at the time of a previous Mansion House speech, the Worldcom accounting scandal broke. And I will be honest with you, many who advised me including not a few newspapers, favoured a regulatory crackdown.
I believe that we were right not to go down that road which in the United States led to Sarbannes-Oxley, and we were right to build upon our light touch system through the leadership of Sir Callum McCarthy – fair, proportionate, predictable and increasingly risk based.
All very well blaming all those fatcats…but who was in charge of herding them at the time?