Normally the BBC settles for merely rewriting the past, or just ignoring whole chunks of it (1997-2010 for instance), but today the Beeb treated us to a glimpse into the future.…apparently the vast majority of the human population will be consigned to the scrap heap living lives of unending poverty and misery whilst a gilded elite exploit us using powerful new technology and reaping all the rewards for themselves…those rewards which shall henceforth only be available to the hereditary class of the super rich who control and own that new technology.
A ‘hereditary class of super rich’ because social mobility is over, not a prediction but a fact apparently….and it is unlikely to ever return. Not only that but living standards have been dropping for decades and there is a staggering, historic rise in inequality as the majority do not share in the wealth generated by growth…in fact we are all getting poorer not just standing still financially.
The Western economic model, Capitalism, has failed (er…China, India, Brazil?….and em..isn’t the UK the 6th biggest economy…with the USA, France, Germany, Japan and China leading the way…seems to me Capitalism works just fine…or at least how it’s meant to work).
The solution to inequality, we’re told. is a global tax on the super-rich.
The solution is to up the taxes so much, to 80% or so, that people are incentivised to work even harder and so earn more…..no, really.
But there’s this warning…if the formal political systems do not provide the answers then the informal political ones will….Occupy is coming to take over Tesco’s in a town near you!
The BBC gave us what it billed as a look at an economic future governed by technology, but was in reality merely an excuse to peddle the Labour Party’s narrative on inequality, social mobility and higher taxes….
‘The Future is not what it used to be’ asks how the work force of the future will be changed by the advancements of technologies. How should governments respond to a jobs market which is hollowing out opportunities for traditional educated professions and how will rewards for innovation and income for labour be distributed without creating a society plagued by endemic inequality?
The programme was based on an intelligent question asking how will technology change the economy and our circumstances. However whilst it did deal with that question it also used the opportunity to hijack the programme for a political rant about inequality and the super rich….the answer being super taxes and redistribution on a grand scale….not just presented as a theory but an urgent necessity based on the ‘fact’ life is now so terrible and only going to get worse.
It started with a clip from Obama on the stump telling us how he has spotted how unfair the world is and how he is aiming to fix it…just vote ‘Obama’!
Not sure why the BBC would think a politician on the stump is someone with a credible, trustworthy message but they did.
We then got onto the real meat…..Stiglitz, Piketty (the new Owen Jones, but more successful) and Diane Coyle (vice, now ‘acting’ apparently, chairman of BBC Trust, part time, on £77,000…but she thinks she can lecture us on inequality…and a business advisor to the Labour Party ).
All three agreed it’s over for us…and only a communistic, Robin Hood type sharing of the spoils will prevent Occupy rampaging across the Western world and turning our pockets out and dishing the contents out to all and sundry.
That was the problem with the programme, being hijacked by the Left, being told that inequality is worse than ever and rising rapidly, that we’re all doomed, that the only remedy is some form of communism.
But just how true is all that?
For a start what is ‘inequality’, just when is too much become too much? Are we really poorer than ever, have we actually gone backwards in our wealth? Has social mobility really ended?
It seems they have conveniently forgotten the past when Rockefeller’s roamed the earth and George Orwell could write Down and Out in London and Paris and The Road to Wigan Pier.
Life to be blunt, was shit for many many people. And not so long ago either. The poorest now live lives inestimably richer than just a few decades ago by comparison.
And wages have risen since the 70’s not fallen as Stiglitz keeps trying to suggest…the fact that the rich may have gotten richer at a higher rate than you and me is neither here nor there to you and me…it makes not one jot of difference to me in my life:
However the final word was probably the most intelligent….and not from the usual suspects of left wing agitators that gave us the above nonsense…the final word was this….
‘People take refuge in strange ideologies when times are difficult, ideologies that don’t make sense but offer a free lunch.’
For some reason I couldn’t help thinking of Old New Labour and Ed Miliband’s populist list of things he’d really love to do if you’d only just vote for him.
Go on, give him a chance, you know it makes sense….the BBC certainly seems to think so.
But before you rush out to vote read this:
Britons happier than before financial crisis as contentment plummets in Europe – OECD
Overall Britain was ranked with Switzerland, Australia, Scandanavia, Canada and New Zealand in the top tier of the OECD’s “How’s Life” study which assesses quality of life across 34 leading countries.
It found that British people enjoy some of the strongest friendship networks and highest levels of income, job security, clean air and water, personal safety and democratic accountability in the OECD.
“In the OECD as a whole, the poor employment situation had a major impact on life satisfaction.
“This trend is not visible in the United Kingdom where, from 2007 to 2012, the percentage of British people declaring being very satisfied with their lives increased from 63 per cent to 64 per cent.”
Forget the old Labour governments we have to look to the future. That’s the Milliband new mantra, the problem is he won’t tell us what that is.
Am I banne from posting?
Again without link
The future is set in stone comrade ,it is the past that keeps changing
But in that past the BBC had previously told us that ,work would become history and history would die.
Their view seems to be based on whatever sci-fi novel is currently popular with adolescent girls
Perhaps they would be better served basing that vision on Mark Adlard’s forgotten ‘T City’ trilogy than the ‘Hunger Games’ .They will at least find themselves accurately depicted in the former
Going by the BBC’s record on forecasting, the question should not be “are they wrong”, but “how wrong will they be”.
Didn`t the Russians used to mock their Communist leaders in saying that the future is set…but it`s the past that is uncertain, dependent on who`s in charge?
That sinister liberal mindset runs throughout all aspects of the BBC…their 1997-2010 black hole is a disgrace, and their double standards of how they treat the seedy Bill Clinton as opposed to Lord Rennard are all too obvious.
Just heard some “Thinking Allowed” crap from some Labour historian re the working classes…patronising shit, but hey-that`s the Jamie Theakston view of the Fred Kites-so Laurie accepts the psychopraxis of the dialectic….anybody here ever met a worker-chappie?
Life Imitates The BBC
“The mass media age may have increased our freedom of speech but our mass-mediated perception of reality has arguably stifled our freedom of thought. In times past people may have known only what was going on in their own neck of the woods but at least they knew it intimately, which perhaps provided some reality check. Also one community was relatively free from the influence of another. Not anymore. Now, thanks to the likes of the BBC you know so much more – and have an opinion on so much more.
Now you know that some brutal murders merit grief on a national scale whilst others deserve barely a passing mention. You know that jumping up and down at rock concerts will help to save the world from poverty. You know that man made global warming is threatening to destroy the planet and it’s all the fault of capitalism. Just like you know that capitalism was virtually brought down on the stroke of midnight in 2000 by something called the Millenium Bug. Older people know that the world was very nearly overwhelmed in the 1970’s by The Next Ice Age. You know that if you have ever stood next to someone smoking a cigarette it might one day kill you. Best of all you know what the most important thing going on in the world at any one time is because it is the thing that headlines the news. Thus has the mass media deluged people’s consciousness with trashy certainties at huge cost to their freedom of spirit.”
http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/07/life_imitates_the_bbc.html
I take comfort from how wrong the BBC has been in the past. Remember the Radio4 trilogy ‘From clogs to clogs’? The analysis, so persuasive at the time (circa 1993), looks pretty hollow now! Predicting the future is usually voided by sudden and unexpected turns in human development.