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?
I heard poor Jamie this morning on the radio. Apparently Asda had made him go outside in the rain and cold to collect shopping trollies, and had been generally mean to him, and him having a wonky eye and everything. He left after three months so that we could pay for his existence over the next six years. I just assumed that he was a brilliant piece of Conservative black propaganda, but on reflection, they are not good enough to come up with this.
‘..assumed that he was a brilliant piece of Conservative black propaganda*, but on reflection, they are not good enough to come up with this.’
True dat.
But pants though they are, as elections appear on the far horizon, the BBC’s naked engineering Ed into Charter payback position is getting a bit dire too given the alternative he, Ed, Harriet, etc represent.
*It would be good to get back the LBC Extra Bedroom Subsidy genius whose grown kids could not be expected to make the 2 mile journey back home after the weekly party night, requiring Dad’s crib to have full guest facilities.
I think Jamie was on with Nolan on Friday or Saturday night. In his first appearance he said Asda got shot of him because he went to lunch and no-one would cover for him and when he came back an hour later he got the blame for the chaos.
It seems that was the reason for him not being kept on after his trial period. Apparently.
Then tough he could have postponed his lunch a while like I would and have had to do on many occasions but no the self obsessed creep just sodded off and left everyone else suffer! I have worked with people like that before last Time was at R.A.F Valley with some weapons grade lazy useless types who doubled others workload and would run off to the union if some one even so much as asks them to do their job !
Lunch is for wimps!
Nope just for those who have the time !
Busy lad…3 appearances on the Beeb….he was on 5Live saturday morning as well…no wonder he can’t find the time or energy to work with all his showbiz commitments.
Make everyone self employed (or rather employed by the businesses they own like at the BBC) that would sort everyone out.
It is the responsibility of the bus driver to avoid the holes in the road. If he drives down one he only has himself to blame!
Brown, instead of driving the bus went upstairs for cocktails on the top deck and left a badger driving the bus.
The bankers may have dug a big hole in the road but Brown set the speed of the bus, chose the wrong driver and neglected his duty. He is to blame for the crisis.
Even if, and it’s a superbus sized if, Brown was driving with due care and attention he was in charge at the time and the responsibility was his.
The Tories nor their supporters, for all their faults, were not to blame one bit.
Except that the repair of the roads is the responsibility of local government (the state) and if you do drive into a hole in the road which damages your vehicle or injures you, then you can claim compensation from the council.
Yebbut!
There are pot holes and there are pot holes.
There’s the sort the council don’t bother to fill, the small sort that are around the corner and knack your wheels or tyres if you hit them hard enough. They are the unexpected bumps along the way – which is why you don’t drive around blind corners at a speed that means you can’t avoid obstacles you can’t see until the last minute.
There’s the sizable ones that you can see coming but, because there’s traffic coming you can’t swing out to avoid them. So you slow down to minimise the impact.
Yes the government should fill them in – we pay enough taxes after all, but the little buggers are still avoidable.
Then there are the massive great big holes that have signs for a mile or two before them warning that they are there and, when you reach them, you would have to be a compete brain dead idiot or suicidal to drive into them.
Guess which one was the last crisis.
And what BBC-NUJ is still not keen to mention:-
“BUDGET 2012: Revealed – How we lost out on £9 BILLION by Gordon Brown selling gold on the cheap”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2118319/Budget-2012-How-lost-9BILLION-Gordon-Brown-selling-gold-cheap.html
That’s a lot of money.
Albeit just two and a bit years compelled propping up FOI lawyers, generous pensions, payoffs, sidelines, etc.
And it seems Gordo is being paid his cut by those who profited at our expense with endless ‘engagements’ via the tax-efficient instrument only a BBC consultant or our Luce could approve of.
Wouldn’t mind being a fly on the wall if it turns out karma does have a good memory and wicked sense of justice.
your call if your a leftie is dominated by middle class socalist workers party types day in day ,you know who they are even when they come on different names,the posh sounding whining voices give it away whether it is jamie,timothy,benjamin or tristan.
There’s an interesting and accurate explanation about the bank crashes in the book “Making it happen”. Mainly lax regulation (cheers, Cyclops Brown), along with lax auditting (cheers again, Cyclops Brown) and ultimately the belief that the financial markets were going to grow forever (“No more boom & bust”, followed by “I saved the world”, cheers yet again Cyclops Brown)…
Funnily, though I may be mistaken here, I though Mrs T and the tories weren’t in power when this giga-shambles took place.
Just a thought – is there such a thing as a Twitter storm? I’d like to think that in the event of b-bbc asking for people to tweet in a question or email, then a little bit of scripting can hit them with half a million messages all asking the same question (i.e. a not “on message” question). It’d be difficult to explain that one away.
‘Ed Balls, our new City Minister, will work with you to develop publish and then promote a long term strategy….’
One can imagine a lone bell eerily starting to chime, lightning lighting up the night beyond the curtains, a distant clap of thunder, the candles in the vast dining room flickering wildly as those words left Brown’s lips….
Most of these posts avoid the title!
I think most people here would applaud the unemployed being made to work especially after they have been claiming for a number of years.
Personally I’d like to see a realistic amount paid to those people who actually pay for the damn party, and for that to quickly diminish over time, such that after 5 years there is no money paid. That should be ample time for even the most workshy to find a job if they really want one.
However allowing the utterly incompetent junior civil service decide on who does and who does not have their benefit is sheer incompetence on the part of the government. It just goes to show that they are completely out of touch with the reality, and even when the horror stories reach their ears.
So we hear stories of people attending job interviews instead of pointless ones at the job centre having their benefits stopped for 4 weeks because attending an interview is not a good enough excuse !
People just 5 minutes late for an interview, someone failing to look for work on Christmas day, or failing to look for work in the media prescribed by the apparatchiks.
Anyone connected to reality would realise that giving public servants power is only going to end in tears. History is littered with examples of petty bureaucrats misusing the powers given to them, in some cases so badly that the powers had to be taken away from them.
Now the death penalty has been abolished in the UK many decades ago, and also in the EU. The first article in the Human rights act is the right to life, the second, a right not to be tortured.
How many people reading this could exist without any money for 3 months – and continue to pay the bills which continue to mount up?
How long would it be before you either starve to death or turned to crime to stay alive?
Whilst there might be a case to end the lives of people who have committed horrendous crimes, these are people who have committed no crime at all, and yet they are sentenced to death. Not by a judge, but by a junior apparatchik in isolation, making some very dodgy decisions indeed, and without oversight, or accountability.
Now many people would argue that there has to be some kind of ultimate sanction, but to illustrate just how many people are being considered for the benefits to be suspended, it has gone from a reasonable 5000 per month to a jaw dropping 130 000 per month!
Not even the most rabid Tory supporter could possibly justify this figure, it illustrates that the reality of the situation is that reasonable people are having their benefits suspended purely so the rich can have lower tax rates.
I do wonder why the BBC haven’t really covered this because they really should have done.
Meanwhile the elephant in the room goes unnoticed and unremarked upon.
Immigrants have taken more than 75% of the new jobs created over the last 15 years. As long as mass immigration continues, the country will be running to stand still on unemployment.
Yeah, but where’s the bias?
Yay! A new name in the drive-by, one-liner frame. If one inspiring fond memories. And this site cannot but benefit for yet more hall monitors.
It’s as if it is now deemed safe to through open the bunker door after a dark period.
‘throw’, of course.
Got away with that one for longer than I anticipated.