Matthew Parris quoting Samuel Johnson:
Samuel Johnson never spoke truer than when he said that a man is never more innocently employed than in the pursuit of money. The pursuit of principle is an infinitely more corrupting thing.
Not saying Peston is corrupt or anything when he ‘reports’….
The BBC’s Robert Peston pushes Labour’s inequality narrative….along with the NHS, Labour’s central themes in its election campaign….so when the BBC day in day out ‘investigates’ these subjects and keeps them in the public eye and tries to build an atmosphere of ‘you may feel you’re doing OK but you know what…you’re really in terrible straits and heading for disaster’ you might justifiably suspect some ulterior motive.
‘Inequality’ does seem to have become a major issue that the BBC wants to tackle for some reason…Peston making his Labour Party Patsy of the Year bid as he presents …
…a powerful argument for why the widening gap between the rich and poor, in wealth and income, is bad for everyone – even the super wealthy, unless that is they never want to leave their fortified, hermetically sealed, lavishly appointed bunkers.
Here Peston combines his profile rasing exercise with his push for world government….
Why extreme inequality hurts the rich
“We could have developed a vaccine for Ebola years ago if we had chosen to allocate the resources to the appropriate research”.
That is what a senior and respected medical scientist, a man who would be seen as a world authority on such matters, said to me.
So why wasn’t the cure found?
The relevant research didn’t happen because Ebola was seen for a long time to be a disease only of the poor, especially in Africa – and therefore the giant pharmaceutical manufacturers couldn’t see how to make big money out of an Ebola medicine.
Today of course it is clear that Ebola is a global threat – and hence there is a mad rush to find a treatment.
The trouble is that’s nonsense as we’ve shown before....there was no major need for an Ebola vaccine….it has been controlled by simple measures such as isolation and movement restrictions….and in 40 years only 1700 people or so have died from it, around 45 a year. A nasty disease for those who get it but the fact that so few get it and relatively few die suggests that huge investment in producing a cure is not productive when the money could be spent on other illnesses and diseases that kill vastly more people such as malaria….
There were an estimated 627 000 malaria deaths worldwide in 2012
About 3.2 billion people – almost half of the world’s population – are at risk of malaria. In 2013, there were about 198 million malaria cases (with an uncertainty range of 124 million to 283 million) and an estimated 584 000 malaria deaths (with an uncertainty range of 367 000 to 755 000). Increased prevention and control measures have led to a reduction in malaria mortality rates by 47% globally since 2000 and by 54% in the WHO African Region.
Peston isn’t reporting he’s campaigning…
‘….the jaw-dropping pace and scale of how a century of narrowing inequalities has gone into dramatic reverse.
To be clear, Oxfam’s claim today that by 2016 the richest 1% could own as much or the same as the bottom 99% is not wildly implausible.
Trouble is there’s little in the way of real thought, analysis or nuance…he’s just peddling Oxfam’s and Labour’s narrative.
The Spectator has a look under the covers…what Oxfam and the BBC’s Peston don’t want you to know….
What Oxfam doesn’t want you to know: global capitalism means less poverty than ever
The hijacking of Oxfam by the politicised left is nothing short of a tragedy. It’s heartbreaking to see a charity that has built up so much goodwill from so many people being used by activists as a vehicle for global class war. As a result, Oxfam is switching its focus away from global poverty towards something very different: wealth inequality.
It has today come up with some questionable figures suggesting that the richest 1 per cent will soon own over 50 per cent of the wealth.
BBC Radio earlier had someone on from Oxfam saying that the shocking wealth of the 1pc stood alongside the fact that ‘one in nine’ go to bed hungry. Oxfam wants you to believe that the two are somehow linked. There is a link between wealth and global poverty – the more of the former, the less of the latter.
It’s true that one in nine (about 12 per cent) of the world is undernourished. But what Oxfam does not say is that this rate has plummeted since global capitalism really took (i.e., off after the fall of the Berlin Wall). The United Nations has been keeping tabs on this – below (link: pdf).
Of course, hunger is only one of the killers of the world’s poor. How is all of this inequality that Oxfam complains about affecting the others? Answer: global prosperity is being converted into better medicine and healthcare for those who need it the most. Chinese investment in Africa is now a major factor in helping Africans do things for themselves.
Global poverty is falling because people are doing it for themselves – with the helping hand of free trade. Oxfam prefers to think of people as helpless, waiting for its handouts. Its posters reinforce damaging stereotype images (see above), which damage the dignity of Africans as well as belittle their own achievements.
PS And Oxfam is also wrong to scream about an “inequality explosion” – things may have been getting worse for the last two or three years but the longer view is of global inequality falling. (hat tip: John Rentoul).
Then the politicians should abolish the TV licence fee, so that the poor can watch a free freeview, and spend the money on food, instead of visiting a food bank so that the BBC can lavish £89 million pounds a year on its new HQ.
We could have developed a cure for Cancer years ago if we had chosen to allocate the resources to the appropriate research, such as understanding the motives of charities and drug companies who are finically dependent on the lucrative cancer of life extending cancer drugs, cancer. And therefore fearful of the destruction of their existence by a cure, which I have heard has happened again last year, as well as the reason given for a dead body found west of Oxford in the 1990‘s or 1980‘s”.
Oxfam is the same. Every day, you see a starving African in an Advert, and no matter how much you pay, he or she is still starving, day after day, year after year, and all because the rich lefty greaseballs at Oxfam can pay themselves ever more and more money, so that they can film starving Africans, instead of paying to feed them.
But then I don’t think that there has ever been a case of a left-wing charity voluntarily closing down due to success.
Ebola is just the latest fashionable scare story from the lefty charity and media morons, a scare story that seem to be much weaker in substance than Aids, I don’t think anyone in Britain has ever died of it, but thousands die from flu in Britain every year.
Common sense would point to the reason that the richest 1% could not now own as much or the same as the bottom 99% in the foreseeable future is because of the success of China and India, as well as the failing EU, due to the decline of democracy and growing socialism in Europe. And the 20th Century proves that the only successful way to lock a Country into perpetual poverty is to have a perpetual authoritarian socialist government.
The most obvious example of that today, is the contrast in wealth between North and South Korea.
‘And the 20th Century proves that the only successful way to lock a Country into perpetual poverty is to have a perpetual authoritarian socialist government.’
And that’s what the Left are subversively working towards through Agenda 21 and the great ‘climate change’ myth, but on a world scale. They are power-mad ideologists who will shamelessly use anything or anybody to further their cause. They must know, for example, because it is plain for anyone with an ounce of common sense to see, that more and more dependence on ‘renewable energy’ will lead to power shortages and deaths – especially amongst the old and the less well-off. Do they give a shit? No they don’t because they hate mankind anyway and in the meantime, until the world population has virtually culled to the verge of extinction, will always find a way of blaming it on capitalism, aided and abetted by the likes of the BBC. I can only hope these bastards – such as the anti-fracking movement – are held to account when the inevitable hardship and chaos starts in earnest.
Remember what Barroso said about the EU being ‘The blueprint for a future world government’. That’s it in a nutshell.
Typo?
Manking? Do they hate wanking, banking, mankind or all three? 🙂
I see you caught it!
Fertility Rates! Average number of live births per mother in most of Europe and 1st World is around 2. In third world Africa it is around 6. Anyone still wondering why there are so many hungry children in Africa? Endless supply of photo-opportunities for CAFOD, Oxfam, Christian Aid, and the endless industry of do-gooders, NGOs and quangos – “the third economy.”
What happens when you have a real capitalist economy and there is more to life than raising children? The birth rate drops and everyone is better off.
Peston and Oxfam are wicked, every twisted socialist ideal they promote results in the wider redistribution of poverty.
Great piece Alan. BBC collectivist sanctamonious socialist bias in all its bBBC glory.
…….Just think how prosperous the poor could be if the governments shrank, stopped warmongering and interfering, got out of the way and stuck to defense, policing and the fixing the roads……. oops. Drifted off into fantasy land.
Socialism BBC style? The road to serfdom………… Or a well paid bureauc*$t’s lifestyle if you’re a wrong ‘un.
The double standards of the BBC, Oxfam and their like is breathtaking.
Whilst in hock to the environmental movement – or, rather, being very much part of it – and the anti-science of ‘climate change’, they bleat about the West’s reluctance to help cure disease in the ‘developing world’ (not true anyway) but then see criticism of the environmental lobby as beyond their remit because it’s only ever a force for good, right?
So when you look at the origins of the ban on DDT, which by now would have saved tens of millions of lives from malaria, you will not hear a single bleat because it featured none other than the great Gaia of environmentalism herself, Rachel Carson, and the barmy, anti-science, anti-mankind hysterical rantings in her notorious book, Silent Spring:
‘DDT was thought to be a miracle pesticide and was eventually used on over 300 agricultural products. By the late 1950s over half a pound per person was sprayed in the United States. Then in 1962 Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, sprang onto the scene. It claimed that bird’s egg shells were thinning (especially those of birds such as the eagle) and other environmental problems were arising as a result of pesticides such as DDT. Because of pesticides and air and water pollution, which were also rampant, the environmental movement was born. In 1970 the Environmental Protection Agency was created. It banned DDT’s use in the United States.
Environmentalists pushing for a DDT ban seemed to have won. Other countries also banned it and some developing countries, threatened with a cut off of their economic aid, also quit using it.
But some humanitarians were upset. They claimed the ban was a death sentence to millions of people. And they had statistics. In Sri Lanka, the country’s malaria burden shrunk from 2.8 million cases in the 1940s to just 17 in 1965, due to the use of DDT. Five years after the country stopped using DDT, the number of cases had risen to 500,000. In the 1980’s Madagascar stopped using DDT and immediately had an epidemic of malaria, resulting in the death of more than 100,000 people. The humanitarians’ rage over the ban was summed up by Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park. One of his characters in the novel State of Fear says that banning DDT was “arguably the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century” and that the ban “killed more than Hitler.”
http://www.scienceheroes.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=309&Itemid=263
At this point it might be worth remembering that Mr Peston is a well-known propagandist for Common Purpose…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7929210.stm
http://www.cpexposed.com/latest-news/bbc-spends-massive-%C3%A2%C2%A3158100-common-purpose-political-training
The inequality campaign is the same in US. Journalists must have had some type of major international meeting to plan their propaganda campaign.
“Inequality problem” is code talk for their promotion of a socialist police state. Thats why the same people who promote “an inequality problem” are the same ones who promote laws taxing the middle class. Socialists always view the middle class as the enemy and a threat to their power. Undermining the middle class via increased taxation is their real goal.
The DDT situation is an ongoing major scandal. Why is nothing being heard of it? Is big pharma suppressing the topic? What the hell is going on?
Isn’t Peston’s father a Labour peer?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Peston,_Baron_Peston
No bearing at all, of course. Merely a qualification for BBC employment.
As is for all of them, Mark Pougatch, leaving bbc sport moving to ITV to replace Adrian Child’s, is married to Lady Victoria Scott, daughter of the 5th Earl of Eldon. He himself is the grandson of White Russian aristocracy who fled the Commies. Yep, yet another of our ruling beeboid elite whose ‘English’ qualification is rather short of an English family tree.
Ever wondered why they all support multi-Kulti ?
Peston is Economics Editor. There’s something of a pattern. Peter Jay, a former Economics Editor, was the son of two Labour politicians and married Jim Callaghan’s daughter, now Baroness Jay. Callaghan made him Ambassador To Washington before the BBC spotted his potential.
Another former Economics Editor, Stephanie Flanders, used to work for Bill Clinton.
Stephanie Flanders, used to work for Bill Clinton.
… Oh, not to mention she dated both Ed Miliband And Ed Balls.
Seems she got an ‘Ed start in her career.
Twitter ye not, as Frankie H might have said, had he lived to see social media.
God, to be f***** by one of them is unfortunate! to be had by both…..simply beyond the pail. The things a women has to do to get on in London these days.