The BBC demands a ‘sustainable recovery’ and never mind what recovery there is now you’d better batten down the hatches because it forecasts a grim, depressing future as austerity really bites…you ain’t seen nothing yet….and welfare cuts are impoverishing the demonised poor.
Remarkable how the BBC have totally ignored the wave of criticism that Miliband received, much from his own side, for his abysmal response to the budget……Pienaar and Co’s only reference to the bad performance was to make the excuse ‘Well it must be difficult for the poor lad‘….strangely the same lame excuse Ed Balls muttered.
Never mind this damning look at Miliband’s robot like performance:
No wonder it seemed familiar! How Ed Miliband’s Budget speech recycled the same soundbites he has used for four years
The BBC weren’t so reluctant to step up the attacks when Grant Shapps published his ‘bingo and beer’ response:
Hardly the biggest story of the day…not a story at all really.
However the BBC clearly thought it was, putting it straight onto the frontpage:
Note also that headline….. ‘Chancellor defends pension overhaul’
He defends it does he? So there is something wrong with the scheme? Perhaps he was just ‘explaining’ it.
And as for beer and bingo being ‘patronising’….tell that to the workers:
Budget 2014: What do workers think?
Seems they liked the budget quite a lot.
Yep……We’ve just had the budget….but the BBC laid the groundwork for their narrative that they created and now intend to use, long before Osborne stood up and made his speech.
The BBC has had to develop a new approach to reporting the economy…just as Miliband had to abandon Plan B and has now adopted his ‘living standards crisis’ spiel now that the various double and triple dip recessions haven’t happened, employment keeps on rising, businesses keep reporting good news and inflation is down, and the recovery looks to be on its way, slowly but surely.
The BBC keeps of course trying to undermine the government, rising employment is a ‘puzzle’, or if not, it is the wrong sort of jobs, or the recovery is fragile….all based on consumer spending and borrowing or spending their savings…though no proof of that is ever given.
The basis for their latest approach….demanding proof of a ‘sustainable recovery’. A bit of an amorphous demand….practically unachievable to prove such a thing, the BBC moving the goalposts that would signify success for Osborne….like Miliband’s ‘living standards crisis’ there would never be enough solid evidence that definitively proved anything…which of course is ideal as they can keep spinning out the talk of a ‘fragile, unsustainable’ recovery forever basically…however successful the economy becomes…..they will, and do, point back to the crash and say ‘You might think you’re doing well…but so did they way back then!’.
The second leg to their campaign to undermine Osborne is to say yes things might be improving, for some, but the future is really grim with 5 more years of austerity piling on the pain…..the country can’t take any more!
However, don’t know about you, but I have yet to meet anyone who is really struggling….or struggling more than they would be under any other government and economic regime…most seemed to have weathered the crash quite well….including the ‘vulnerable’ and the poorest.
Here is Peter Allen from a couple of days ago, doing his dead budget sketch telling us that it’s all ‘deeply depressing’ and that ‘most people would think they have been well and truly clobbered…but they ain’t seen nothing yet’.
He tells us that ‘It’s pretty grim….we’ve got several more years of cuts’……austerity is a ‘nonsense…we can’t go on like this.’
Allen rounds off his chat with economist Sarah Hewin from Standard Chartered Bank with a question…..‘Are others [countries] doing it better than us?’…meaning are they running their economy better…..you might be surprised to hear ther UK isn’t doing very well apparently…even Greece is moving ahead faster than us…..of course it is:
This week’s conclusion of months of talks to release €10bn of aid, and a promised return to international bond markets before May, have done nothing to silence critics who say a third bailout will be needed to address the country’s monumental debt problems.
Good old BBC, always trust it to bring us the full picture.
Later in the programme (2 hrs 45) we are taken to hear the views of those involved with the Community Links charity in Newham….a Labour controlled borough.
Community Links is run by Geraldine Blake….who is according to the Guardian, a ‘leading leftwing thinker’.
The presenter [Leslie Ashmall] starts by telling us that the budget brought no surprises [really?]…there wasn’t much in the budget for the poor of Newham…..just more welfare cuts and more local government cuts…and they hurt here, they really do, she tells us.
So you know where she is coming from…..she had a narrative and stuck to it, encouraging those being interviewed to paint the bleakest picture they could of their lives under the Tory yoke.
They responded well to the prodding….telling us that the poor will be getting poorer, they’ll be on the breadline…there’s no investment and no regeneration in the area.
The presenter didn’t bother to ask if that might have been the Labour controlled council that was responsible for that…they have been in power for decades after all.
Is there anything in the budget for people like this the presenter asks Geraldine Blake who replies……Well there’s a bit of tinkering and tweaking but not really…..this government has very successfully demonised a very vulnerable group in society, tarring them with the same brush as fraudsters and shirkers…what we are seeing is that people are pushed away from the job market, the situation is just appalling…a very bad reflection on how we treat the most vulnerable in society.
Pretty much confirmation that she might well be one of the ‘leading leftwing thinkers’ of legend.
Ashmall’s response…‘Yes, I’ve certainly met very many miserable people today.’
The BBC…never mind the millions who might benefit from the budget….just concentrate on the few who may, or may not benefit.
I’m just waiting for the grasping greedy Tories to force people of working age who are unemployed, to draw down their pensions at the earliest time and to spend it at the same rate pro rata as benefits payment, on pain of being deprived of all government support.
It would follow years of governments attacking those people who had done the right thing and put something by for a rainy day, basically they steal those savings, while fully supporting the feckless who have spent every penny they have.
IMHO the government should be supporting everyone who has paid into the damn corrupt system and not just the terminally stupid, who never bother to work, or can’t manage to save a bean!
“The BBC demands a ‘sustainable recovery’ and never mind what recovery there is now you’d better batten down the hatches because it forecasts a grim, depressing future as austerity really bites…you ain’t seen nothing yet….and welfare cuts are impoverishing the demonised poor.”
In a post that as usual, is full of links to other sources, it is interesting that Alan has presented no evidence to support his opening statement.
“However, don’t know about you, but I have yet to meet anyone who is really struggling….or struggling more than they would be under any other government and economic regime…most seemed to have weathered the crash quite well….including the ‘vulnerable’ and the poorest.”
What sheltered circles you must live in as you watch and listen to the BBC you “hate” so much and pontificate on how those you do not know are coping. You do realise that from the governments own figures the latest budget will leave the least well paid some £800 per annum worse off.
That Alan is not a “might” or a “may” but an inconvenient fact that you ignore.
“You do realise that from the governments own figures the latest budget will leave the least well paid some £800 per annum worse off.”
Since you’re so keen on Alan posting links to support his statements, care to do the same for the above ?
You asked:
Click to access budget_2014_distributional_analysis.pdf
Page 15, Chart 2.H
If you are referring to chart 2.H in that paper (the only one which even comes close to your number, from a quick scrutiny of the paper) then you really should read things better before jumping in with the tackety boots.
That chart, if you read para 2:16, refers to the position since budget 2010, and does NOT refer to changes only in the 2014 budget. In addition, it includes such niceties as changes in “benefits in kind from public services, such as health and education”. Right – last time I looked, education is paid for by local authorities, and their budget usage is the choice of the local authority, not central government.
And para 2:17 states:
“This analysis is broader than the
decile analysis presented above . It
includes benefits in kind from public services, such as health and education, and therefore provides the fullest assessment of the effects of all government interventions that have a direct impact on households.”
So you accept that your original statement “You do realise that from the governments own figures the latest budget will leave the least well paid some £800 per annum worse off.” is just untrue.
Good.
As for the assessment of how much central government budget figures will affect local government education expenditure per capita may just be a tad fanciful. And it probably won’t directly affect by one penny the actual income or expenditure of the poorest in our society.
Did the Conservatives (or the Coalition) cut Bingo and Beer tax? They did. Certainly the BBC admitted that Bingo is enjoyed by many people – indeed they started the news item with that acknowledgement. But then my local news went out into the street and found people who did not look like Conservative voters (if one can assume such a thing) and everyone of them said what an insult it was to working class people. I can read and Grant Schapp’s response never mentions the working class. It is the BBC who is assuming that it is the working class that play bingo and drink beer.
Absolutely correct, Deborah, and typical of the BBC to promulgate such a myth. This was a web document, it never was a poster, and was never ‘withdrawn’ as some tried to claim – and which was not factually corrected, at least initially, by the oh-so-neutral BBC, of course.
It plainly talks only about ‘hardworking people’. Labour has been trying very hard to ‘own’ that phrase recently, and to beat the current government round the head with it.
Why should ‘hardworking’ apply to only those sections of the public which Labour considers to be their natural supporters ?
‘It is the BBC who is assuming that it is the working class that play bingo and drink beer.’
I am amazed that modern day pols and tribal media still engage in these daft focus group-generated categorisations and designations, especially after this classic outing where reality bites an overpromoted member of the ‘elite’ hard… Wicked… or, WKD…
i have this nightmare about 3 times a week,maybe 4,i have been to the doctor about it,nothing he can do about it apart from telling me not worry to much,what is your nightmare my doctor asked,i replied i wake up in a deep sweat and labour have just been elected as the new goverment in 2015.that should be a scary prospect to all of us,remember the last time they was in power,mass immigration ,open borders for the islamists to flood in and turn every big city in to jihadi centrals and the horrors of mass paedophile grooming rings grabbing are children off the streets to be forcing them into sexual slavery,what is the prescription to end this coming nightmare.keep labour out of power even it it means swopping your ukip to vote to keep the torys in for another 5 years,the alternative to that is this is 5 years of more nightmares under a labour goverment,
A sustainable recovery when the Tories are in office is one where everybody ends up as rich as the people that work for the BBC.
A sustainable recover when Labour is in power is one where the BBC can find at least one person to appear on a vox pox from just outside labour party HQ who will claim they are no worse off than they were a year ago.