Judging by today’s Labour love-in at the BBC its going to be a very, very long 5 months or so till the election…..Perhaps we should just take it for granted that the BBC will be biased in Labour’s favour and shut up shop for the duration.
Today was pretty full on and it might indeed take the dedicated forensic skills of Hercule Poirot to untangle the web of intrigue and dodgy reporting emananting from the bowels of the BBC.
On the day that Labour launched its election campaign proper with a major keynote speech from Ed Miliband that was intended to set the tone and the narrative for Labour’s drive to No 10, rather than examine that, the BBC preferred instead to concentrate on discrediting the Tory claim that Labour have £21 bn of unfunded spending plans….essentially dismissing it out of hand.
But hang on…here’s lefty Dan Hodges expressing some scepticism about Labour’s spending ‘plans’….
‘The ordinary voters want a very simple answer to a very simple question: “Where’s the money coming from?”
At the moment they’re not getting it. They’re getting characteristic obfuscation and confusion and contradiction.
As I write, Labour’s line appears to be: “We will spend a lot more money than the Tories. But when the Tories say we will spend a lot more money than them, they are lying”.
The 2015 general election campaign started today. Britain is still waiting to hear from the Labour Party and its leader.
The BBC for a long time ignored commentary by Hodges and the many Labour websites that were highly critical of Miliband especially when the furore over the Unions came up….guess they’re still fighitng shy of bringing such messages to the public notice.
A similar forensic approach by the BBC to Labour’s claim that the Tories are taking us back to 1930’s style poverty is egregiouslyand obviously missing…but then it was the BBC itself that fed the line to Labour with Norman Smith making the highly inflammatory comment that…
“It is utterly terrifying, suggesting that spending will have to be hacked back to the levels of the 1930s as a proportion of GDP.
“That is an extraordinary concept, you’re back to the land of Road to Wigan Pier.”
Let’s remind ourselves exactly what he is talking about….
Labour’s spending as a proportion of GDP in 1998? 36%
The Coalition’s projected spending in 2019-20? 35.2%
In 1998 Labour, using the inherited Tory economic plans, took the economy into surplus with government spending at 36% of GDP…..Labour, and the BBC, now claim that the Tory budget target of 35.2% is ‘utterly terrifying’ and will lead to the road to ruin.
The BBC’s Nick Robinson knows the truth but is being extremely quiet about it saying only this in his latest ‘analysis’:
Now it’s true that the OBR forecast that under Tory plans spending would drop to 1930s levels but there’s one crucial rider – that’s as a share of national income which is, of course, massively higher than back then. What’s more, the share of GDP taken by spending was almost as low in the year 2000 when both Eds worked in the Treasury. As I recall the NHS still existed back then.
Once again, though, what will matter is the impression left with the electorate.
My job in the next few months will be try to separate the facts from the claims and the spin.
Yours will be to decide who, if anyone, you trust more.
A small paragraph at the bottom of an article….and hardly indepth.
Not exactly shouting the truth from the rooftops when the BBC is at the same time making huge waves trying to dismantle the Tory attack on Labour….this being their headlining story right now on their frontpage:
Miliband hits back at spending claim
The BBC could do so much better…it’s not hard…here the Institute of Economic Affairs has a go:
Is George Osborne really returning us to a 1930s government? Accurate comparisons suggest a definite ‘no’
As the Economist has pointed out, spending is not the same as provision of services. According to that paper’s analysis, in 1939 almost half of government spending at 30% of GDP was actually debt interest (14% of GDP). That left 16% of GDP for all other government functions, compared to a 30% of GDP net of debt interest forecast for 2019/20. Far from slashing spending on services to 1930s levels then, state spending excluding debt interest as a proportion of a much larger GDP will be almost double what was seen in 1939 by 2019/20.
The BBC’s lack of interest (listen to that lack of interest in this supposed interview with Miliband (07:50) by Rachel Burden where she ignores all opportunities to nail Miliband…preferring to ask if he thinks he’d make a good PM…what do you reckon he said? Didn’t really need her there for all the use she was….suggesting Labour was in the ‘centre ground’…very suspect when Blair has just made his comments about this criticising Miliband) in analysing the 1930’s claim is all the more surprising when it spent so much time trying to undermine the Tory poster launch which stated that the Tories had cut the deficit in half….the BBC immediately mobilised and told us that the Tories were lying…despite at the launch Cameron openly stating that the deficit cut was as a proportion of GDP.
Here’s Norman Smith in action today…..
Perhaps Norman Smith felt a bit guilty about his earlier slip and decided to do his job properly….
BBC journalist booed during Ed Miliband speech
The BBC’s Norman Smith was heckled as he asked whether Labour was “scaremongering” about the state of the NHS in England.
He was called a “pillock” and told to “go back to London” by members of the audience in Salford.
Ed Miliband told the audience “we will hear people with respect” as he attempted to restore order.
I like a good conspiracy theory …..perhaps Norman and the Labour spinners cooked up a little scenario where Norman could be made to look as if he was not a Labour Party stooge and Miliband statesmanlike and in control. Too cynical?
Back to Miliband’s speech and it was pretty much ignored by the BBC…5Live’s political expert, Jon Pienaar, coming up with the insightful analysis that Miliband was appealing to the ‘grumpy’ people of Britain, those fed up with austerity and the unfairness of it all.
Curiously Pienaar’s use of the word ‘grumpiness’, which wasn’t mentioned by Miliband, rang a bell when I read something from Labour Uncut:
Sound familiar?…In this election Labour will, according to Alexander, engage with “the anger felt by so many in the only way a progressive party can.” In 2010 Labour would deal with “anxiety and anger over bankers’ bonuses, expenses and the recession, a general sense of grumpiness” in, infamously, a “future fair for all.”
So Pienaar is carryng over the words from an election in 2010….but fails entirely to note that Miliband’s pitch is almost exactly the same one that was made in 2010:
Back to the future – Labour set to rerun the 2010 election campaign
Might that be important?
If Labour hasn’t changed its mind over how to win over the electorate, then why should the voters? It may just be that, to paraphrase, if Labour run their traditional campaign they will end up with a traditional result.
So Labour runs the same campaign as in 2010 and may well get the same result…might be something to write home about if you were a political correspondent but Pienaar dealt only in anodyne generalisations, his indepth analysis being that Miliband is just issuing a rallying cry to the troops in this speech.
However as I listened to Miliband I could pick out lots that should be noteworthy and worth a mention…..Miliband refuses to give the public any say on Europe, he refuses to control immigration, he refuses to set out his spending plans…he also told us that the government was failing the youth by not training them in vocational courses….seem to remember it was Labour that insisted 50% of people would go to university…..he told us apprenticeships were down…really? The BBC said not…England apprenticeship vacancies ‘up 24%’, says NAS…or there’s this…
Apprenticeships rise above 500,000
The latest figures show that there are now more than 500,000 apprentices in England, a 14% rise on last year
Miliband’s definition of a ‘fall’ must be different to everyone else’s…just a shame Pienaar doesn’t pick him up on it.
Miliband claimed that youngsters couldn’t afford to go to university and were forced into zero hour contracts…..not true in the slightest….there is a record number of students from low income families at university…..from the Guardian:
Ucas figures show overall admissions in 2014 were at a record 512,400, with 10% rise in candidates from poorer families
And so on and so on…why didn’t Pienaar remark on these things?….I’m no expert, he is, and yet nothing of any consequence from him after the speech….Blair advisor, Matthew Taylor, whom you might think would be slightly biased and who listened at the same time as Pienaar gave an immediate summing up, in fact gave by far the better analysis, and one that seemed quite fair…..seems odd when a supposedly neutral BBC expert can’t give us a fair, unbiased appraisal of a Labour speech but a Labour insider does….though he is ‘new Labour’.
It’s going to be a very, very long run up to the election.
Well done Alan. It’s going to be a long and incredibly irritating election.
I have a feeling that the most important election in a generation will be hijacked by the BBC – the offering from Newsnight tonight was depressingly familiar. Davies (interrupting every 20 seconds – does he realise how differently he treats Tories), the hopelessly shallow Stratton, Maitliss (remember the way she handled the mayoral election and in particular Boris?) then there’ll be the rest of them recruited from the Guardian, the TUC, the Pink un etc etc etc.
Then we got the aforementioned Matthew Taylor for the second time today and someone called Noreena Hertz, passed of as an expert but in reality an activist (nurses pay, Cancel the Debt, IPPR -Tony Blair’s’ Favourite Think-Tank – (IPPR thinktank rapped by charity watchdog for appearing to be close to Labour).
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11321971/IPPR-thinktank-rapped-by-charity-watchdog-for-appearing-to-be-close-to-Labour.html
Oh BTW, just to keep it in the family, Hertz is married to someone called err Danny Cohen (familiar name?), who works as the Director of Television at the errm …BBC.
The BBC is a threat to our democracy. I just do not trust any of them.
Matthew Taylor is the only son of Laurie Taylor of Radio 4’s “Thinking Allowed”. Pure coincidence, of course.
Maybe Danny Cohen could do an Alan Yentob and get tempted in front of the cameras… well, a bit more…. and maybe do a ‘special’ on how women feel about the election? He could perhaps select a representative lady to speak on behalf of the nation’s fairer sex?
Say, perhaps Mrs. Mumsnet.
For…. ‘Balance’.
Ian Katz could at least share the taxi fare.
#88 did you see how when they did that spinny thing UKIP was represented by a cartoon Farage with an opening/closing mouth ie idiot big mouth?
No similar representation of other parties for which the party symbol was used
So utterly fuckin biased. I for one will post everything EVERYTHING I see and hear to be biased until May regardless off how tedious or “irrelevant”.
May the truth be told though the heavens fall
I have attempted to work with, nevertheless it does not is effective in any way.
Jerseys, you are Ed Balls’s speech-writer. I claim my £5.