Well, the BBC response to the Budget has almost been as sneering and begrudging as that of Miliband. I heard Peston earlier today and he was doing all he could to make it all seem a bit of a flop. I also understand that one Labour MP was on BBC Newsnight last evening to inform us that “People can’t be trusted to have their whole pension at once.’ This incredibly patronising comment seems to resonate with so many of the BBC experts as they push the line that we dare not give people choice. I suppose that is inevitable coming from an organisation that itself refuses to give us any choice as to whether we fund it? Thoughts on their coverage?
THE BUDGET – ONE DAY ON!
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To be fair – I heard the interview with Ed Balls at about 7.35am on Today – he did not get an easy ride at all.
Balls is floundering to develop a coherent line of attack. He couldn’t offer any credible alternative. I agree he was shown up.
Both of Labour’s Eds bet everything on double and triple dip recessions, massive unemployment and the deficit going up.
The fact that they have been wholly and completely wrong and been forced to admit things are a lot better than they predicted (and that they have NO idea why) shows that they are utterly incompetent, do not have any grasp of the real economy and are utterly unfit to govern.
They cannot even react to invent a new narrative as they only understand their own theoretical economics, which simply do not work in the real world.
Ed Miliband’s reaction to the budget speech never even mentioned the budget he had just heard and was nothing more than tired, old, hackneyed class-war cliches strung together which failed to represent the real world at all. In 30 years of listening to every budget speech, I have never, ever heard any reply to be so woefully inadequate. It was not even fit for student politics, it was barely even sixth form level stuff. Calling it pathetic would be to complement it.
Even the BBC cannot get around that fact, no matter how hard they try. It seems to me, after four years of faithfully attacking the tories economic plan on behalf of labour, faithfully repeating all the soundbites of “too far too fast”, “savage cuts”, ” bedroom tax”, “cost of living crisis” etc… that the BBC staff themselves are incredibly frustrated that labour have utterly failed to give the BBC a new narrative to attack the current economic successes and this is showing in the interviews with Balls.
Anyone who predicted that the tax and spend changes introduced by the current government would lead to massive increases in unemployment which the private sector could not swallow, and double and triple dip recession, clearly does not understand the economy, and is not fit for government. Hell, they are barely even fit for opposition.
Very low key……I would say on 6pm news it had less airtime than Bob Crow’s death…………that tells me it must be quite effective
And today the news about possible wreckage from the missing jet has knocked the budget off the top spot. Obviously there is not too much they can sensible dispute in the budget.
It’s how a newsroom works.
Apparently.
Ha! Apparently yes indeed.
I posted a comment under the “question” has this story affected you?, on the actual BBC site, and I said, Yes, it has indeed affected me, BECAUSE: All pertinent current UK news has been completely wiped out by a story from the other side of the world which has absolutely nothing to do with the UK. I also mentioned the “Budget” in particular, and asked them had the BBC been unable to find much wrong in the Budget, and so, had decided to bury it rather than have their usual chancers have a good dig at the Budget, obviously ‘cos they could not find many places to dig? They might have tried following the Miliband option to say what was wrong, though I suspect after a look at Guido Fawkes blog they would never, ever, have dared showed their noses. (Nor their ground down teeth)
They are all over the Shapps Bingo and Beer poster as that is Labour’s attack line. I’ve never heard BBC comment on a party poster before – ever.
I have. They condemned Major’s “New Labour, New Danger” devil eyes poster. It turned out to be very prescient.
I thought it was the best and most relevent election campaign poster I had ever seen at the time.
They got quite upset by the ‘Labour isn’t working’ poster and the ‘double whammy’ one.
In fact they get upset nearly every time, as long as it’s a Tory one.
There are inherent dangers in getting a pension pot in one go, least of all is splurging. But that is preferable, to me anyway, than being forced to buy an annuity and, should I die before it pays out, losing it to some spiv corporation.
If people are stupid enough to piss their pension pot up the wall then so be it.
What I would like is the money back that Gordon Brown stole from my pension, turning it from a going concern to 25 years wasted spending.
Agree with every word. As for the risk of someone pissing their life savings away? So what? It is their money, they worked hard to earn and save it. It is up to them. That is freedom.
I was outraged, (yet not at all surprised), to hear a labour politician say that people should not be trusted with their own money.
And they claim that the tory bingo and beer poster was patronising? Labour really takes the buscuit for patronising condesention.
“…Labour really takes the biscuit for patronising condescension.”
Whilst not forgetting that this was as a result of the cloying political correctness of 13 years of the New Labour project during which we saw over 3000 new criminal offences created in the UK, countless bewildering ‘initiatives’ around airy concepts such as ‘social cohesion’ and, of course, ‘multiculturalism’ (this last one accompanied by a deliberately pro-active New Labour plan to open the floodgates to EU unrestricted immigration whilst other EU nations did precisely the opposite) and the pernicious drip-drip of social engineering – helped along, naturally enough, by their common purpose cheerleaders in the BBC – around many contentious issues of freedom of speech (Blunkett’s ‘blasphemy’ laws spring to mind, created as they were at the behest of his friends in the ‘religion of peace’)…and so it went on. And on.
Sadly this coalition, with its reprehensible ‘nudge unit’ fares little better; they’re all it, in the end.
What the BBC don’t seem to have clicked onto (or if they have they are not reflecting it) is that there is a tax-take benefit in giving everyone the choice over what to do with their pension pots.
IMHO, this change is excellent in that it gives people control over their own money and there is a benefit to the exchequer too. Win Win, but lets not think the benefit is all one way.
The idea being touted by Labour and parroted at every opportunity by the BBC, that someone who has the prudence (not the G Brown sort) and budgetary nous to save throughout their working life for a pension pot, is then going to piss it all up the wall as soon as they retire is not only ludicrous it’s patronising in the extreme.
As ever with Labour/BBC, Nanny State Knows Best.
100% agree. Brown was a liar and a thief who destroyed millions of peoples pensions.
Brown not only robbed all our pension pots through his devious tax raids he also allowed a never ending string of financial services thieves and hedge fund sharks to help themselves to the feast and the nett result has been that thousands of ordinary people have gone into retirement since with a massive hole in their finances as a result of this utter betrayal by Labour. However, Osbourne at long last acts like a Tory and at least sets us free from the annuity sharks but Paxman’s only contribution on Newsnight last night is to sneer at Danny Alexander with an opening question about “have you quantified how big the risk is of people spending all of their fund and falling back on the state ?”
God I hate the F*****g BBC and Labour !
The trouble with the likes of Paxman is that they seem to think that we are all as thick as the average Labour voter who can’t see beyond the next Giro, and that we are incapable of successfully managing our own financial affairs.
My mother suffered terribly at the hands of Browns raids and also the QE which hacked away at the dwindling pension each time.
My mother rarely swears but mention Brown and she turns into an Irish navvy!!!! If MPs of any hue had any balls Brown would be pilloried daily for his down right larceny. Same goes for the BBC which have pushed his ‘reign’ into the black hole of before year zero.
How right you are. I shopped around using a financial adviser for over six months before my 65th birthday to “buy” my annuity. I am in very poor health (diabetes with complications – a progressive disease as the specialist tells me, COPD and other minor stuff) yet the best deal I could get means I will have to live until I am 87 to get my money back. There is absolutely no chance of that. As you say some spiv will be getting the balance of my lifetimes savings and this was amply demonstrated yesterday when billions were wiped off the shares of annuity providers. Their easy ride is coming to an end, thank goodness.
The BBC has been all over rubbishing the Pension changes claiming all sorts of unintended consequences. Not a single word about labour claiming that we cannot be trusted to spend our own money and several labour spokespeople stating that labour should oppose the measures or at least regulate how the money is spent.
This is also (sadly) bad news for UKIP as it does clearly open up clear differences between the tories and labour over a critical economic philosophy.
Labour believe that we are all too thick to spend the money we have spent a lifetime earning and saving for our old age.
The tories TRUST us with our own money.
That is a massive difference between those parties. MASSIVE!
Well I for one will take all my pension out at 65 go to Thailand and spend it on beer and prostitutes. The rest I’ll just waste.
Catch syphilis and go mad. That’s the spririt.
‘Spririt’?
Tsk. Benny Hill racism in this day and age…
I’m already mad I might has well have the disease and the fun to go with it
The silence that befell the opposition benches during the budget speech yesterday really said it all and to be fair, this was commented upon by Nick Robinson (I think it was) in his report last night.
Fact is, it was an extremely effective budget statement and there isn’t a great deal in there for Labour to criticise hence the trouble they and their media cohorts are having today.
Sky says bluntly that the Labour response in the House was really lame :
http://news.sky.com/story/1228606/budget-2014-bad-day-in-the-office-for-miliband
Nick Robinson may have made a similar comment – but that is certainly not reflected in most of the stuff I heard on the BBC – or on their website.
I look at it this way: If they kick Miliband out of the Labour party he could always get a job as DG of the BBC. He’d fit right in.
I look at it this way – If they kick Miliband out of the Labour party he could always get a job as DG of the BBC. He’d fit right in.
Well he would have fitted in well flanders, even when she had balls in her mouth at the same time.
Mili couldn’t run a party in a brewery.
Yes but that isn’t a serious problem for the role of DG of the BBC. You just have to keep on persecuting old ladies whilst raking in the LF and opening the doors to any Labour politician and other liberal leftie who wants to ram more propaganda down our throats.
The fact that Osbornes Budget was way aver their soundbite-sized heads rather floored both the BBC and their political wing that is New Labour.
Hence Milibands hopeless response and the likes of Evan Davis sniffing Twitter for hope of something…but a bit too complex and mathematical for them still.
Hence Martha Kearneys problem on the World At One…poor Miffy thought it all might be going a bit fast for them….lack of consensual consultation maybe?
It was sinking even as she said it…but I imagine that all her muffins (even the top ones) will now grab this one until somebody explains it all further!
Pensions are so next year-dignitas and wrinklies….hence no clues there at Young Labour or the BBC.
As St Liam of Burnage once sang….”they`re gonna live forever”…and until they get a more articulate hymn to their show pony privileged vacuities…they`ll not “go there” re pensions or annuities….eugh, smells of wee and mothballs!
F off BBC!
Sadly the Tory on the Daily Brillo was a bit lame today. She missed the opportunity to put both Labour and the BBC right
Asked by Jo Coburn why wages have been falling since 2010, ‘since the coalition came to power’, she wrongly pointed out that they’d been falling since the crash. What she should have said (and it is something that the BBC are aware of – Coburn’s question was disingenuous) that earnings have been falling since 2004. She might have asked Coburn why she implied that 2010 was the starting point for the fall? She could also have asked Labour’s limp Leslie what Labour did about it? and more importantly asked what happened around 2004 that distorted Labour supply and demand in Britain and hit the British working man and woman.
She was equally lame in her response to Brillo’s question about the relative depth of the recession in Britain and his echoing of the Balls position that our recovery is a poor one. She could have replied by telling Brillo that Britain’s economy was in retreat and had been wrecked by the time the financial crisis hit. The ship was already holed and that’s what made Britain’s relative position to other economies so much worse.
And she could have reminded Brillo that the incompetent Brown once said the strength of its currency is a reflection of the strength of its economy and of then what happened to the £ – devalued against world currencies, including the struggling Euro, by 25% (by 31.7% against the Dollar at one point).
Brown Balls and Miliband might get away with saying it was a world crisis or it started in America, the money markets prove otherwise. Not that you’ll hear Labour leaders challenged on this on the BBC, BTW
The likes of Neil, Halligan and Jeff Randall must despair at the quality of politico that they get asked to question.
Any one of those three would be a far better Governor or Chancellor( and certainly better than the pondlife at the Treasury like Alexander)…
PM on Thursday and the BBC are still trying hard to rubbish the budget with lots of scaremongering about people blowing their pension pots in almighty splurge, and of course, the Bingo and Beer poster showing the Tories are essentially toffs and the rest of us working folks who like a pint and Bingo. Just like E Miliband who claims to understand us- my arse in working class vernacular!
I can only conclude that the Budget must have been brilliant and that Labour HQ ,after E Miliband’s lame performance yesterday , sent up distress flares and the BBC is riding to the rescue.
The thought of people being able to decide what they want and how to spend their own money, is just as outrageous to the BBC, as it is to Labour. After all if we could choose how to spend our own money, we might choose not to pay the BBC’s poll tax.
Labour and their ‘luvvy’ followers and activists are out in force, the only thing they have to go on in their attempts to claim a budget omnishambles, is a perceived slight on the working classes.
Labour and the BBC accuse the Tories of patronising the poor while failing to grasp the irony that they in their actions are patronising the very people that they have self-importantly appointed themselves as spokesmen for.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danhodges/100264591/labours-fury-stop-patronising-the-working-class-grant-shapps-thats-our-job/
The tax on pension funds implemented in 1997 by Brown was actually Ed Ball’s idea. Credit where credit is due – he was a halfwit then and clearly nothing has changed
At the time there was almost no opposition to it in the HoC as it didn’t affect MPs or Public Sector pensions. So the outcome was people working in private industry had their pension destroyed and their taxes increased to pay for Public Sector pensions.
Yet more coverage on ‘PM’ tonight of the ‘patronising’ Tory ‘advert’ about beer and bingo and a masterclass in sleight-of-tongue deviousness to boot.
This is what the advert said: ‘Bingo! Cutting the bingo tax and beer duty to help hardworking people do more of the things they enjoy.’
So when the BBC ventured to get some vox pops reaction at a bingo hall in Peterborough, the question they actually asked was ‘Do you think it was patronising of the Tory Party to suggest working class people will have more money tp spend on beer and bingo?’
Spot the difference.
To quote Tony Hall (see earlier ‘Does Bull**** Have a Hallmark?’ thread): ‘‘Nothing makes the case for the BBC more eloquently than what we do in news.’
Exactly, Tony. Exactly. You think you’re a clever bunch of devious bastards. We know you’re a bunch of devious bastards and not very clever at all.
Beeboids talking about being patronising: HA!
Puritanical leftist Beeboid, Norman Smith, tries for Lamborghini smear (top Beeboid anti-Tory propaganda story):-
“Minister” [or Beeboid, Norman Smith], “fuels pension debate with Lamborghini comment”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-26649162
OR-
Beeboids’ and Smith’s (and Harrabin’s) preferred form of transport:-
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2545481/Hugh-Bonneville-casts-aside-lime-green-safety-wear-rides-bike-new-BBC-comedy-series.html
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/01/24/article-2545481-1AEC506D00000578-792_306x603.jpg
£Ramadan gold rush: It’s that time of year when the Arab plutocracy descends on austerity London to party and spend. And their shopping sprees are more blingtastic than ever”
By TOM RAWSTORNE.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2166706/Ramadan-gold-rush-Time-year-Arab-plutocracy-descends-austerity-London-party-spend.html#ixzz2wXOuLZz1
And when their Muslim brothers in Pakistan/Bangladesh/Syria/Palestine/Afghanistan/Yemen/Somalia/Libya/Sudan/Iraq etc. need aid…………that’s the Infidel’s responsibility.
Peter Brookes cartoon ‘Times’:-
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/article2481811.ece#tab-4
Of course the BBC are against the idea that retirees should have the choice to invest their money as they like and not as the government directs. If that idea catches on the next thing you know, the government will be handing back the licence fee and telling viewers to subscribe for the services they want to watch.
Ha!
Now ask the BBC how much they are in favour of telling the recipients of benefits how that benefit money should be spent.
I can’t begin to imagine their response, nor that of the Labour Party, in particular, Twatson.
I remember in the late 60’s Barbra Castle dreaming up a scheme where for every extra £40 put into the OAP you would receive an extra 6d ( 2.5 new pence ) per week. And the unions, labour supporters were ecstatic claiming this would end poverty in old age.
Now some pratt on newsnight actually said we the people cannot be trusted with our money. This just shows how we the public are seen by labour behind our backs as bigots ( remember Rochdale ) and uneducated. Patronising bastards.