Monthly Archives: March 2015

Now there was me complaining that the BBC were ignoring UKIP. I wish to apologise… 🙂

Election 2015: Why is UKIP off to a slow start?

This is a candidate who has to win on 7 May. If he fails to become the next MP for South Thanet he has said he will quit as leader. Yet I have seen no door-knocking. Our cameras have not been told of any public event, yet. We have had two poster-unveiling ceremonies with impromptu leader interviews. He arrives, he speaks, he answers questions, then he leaves.

Couldn’t ask fairer than that, eh?

VOTE LABOUR

The IFS, the BBC’s favourite economics thinktank……

Paul Johnson, Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies.…..was at Oxford with Ed Balls…

Johnson studied PPE at Oxford University between 1985 and 1988, when his tutorial partner at Keble College was Balls. Both got firsts.

He also worked for the Labour government at the…

Department for Education and had three years at the Treasury while Gordon Brown was chancellor.

Just of interest, the BBC’s other goto think tank, the King’s Fund, is headed by Chris Ham…the man who advised Labour on their NHS reforms….so does he have a dog in the fight when he criticises the Coalition’s reforms…reforms which might suggest his own weren’t up to scratch?  I think he might….especially when he gets headlines like this from the BBC...’NHS reorganisation was disastrous, says King’s Fund.’

Never mind…Overall public satisfaction with the NHS increased to 65 per cent in 2014 – the second highest level since the British Social Attitudes survey began in 1983. Dissatisfaction with the service fell to an all-time low of 15 per cent.

Not as if Ham bigs up Labour policies now is it?...“Andy Burnham has set out an ambitious and wide-ranging vision for the NHS and social care. It throws down the gauntlet to the other parties to set out their plans ahead of the general election…His prescription for change is ambitious and his vision of delivering integrated care, co-ordinated around the needs of the individual, will be widely welcomed “

The IFS and the King’s Fund are guaranteed a favourable report from the BBC whenever they utter something but I’m not sure why….they do seem ultimately more Labour friendly than they should be, giving Labour policies far more credence than they merit whilst being highly critical of the government.

The IFS were very quick off the mark to attack the Conservatives over their claim of a £3000 tax hike by Labour and yet the IFS admits it doesn’t know what either party intends….and the figures that are available back up the Tory estimate.  The IFS can certainly say the claim is an estimate but can’t dismiss it using any actual figures…as indeed they weren’t able to merely suggesting the Tory claim was ‘unhelpful’….certainly unhelpful to Labour.

One BBC correspondent tells us that ‘The Office of National Statistics (ONS) released two important sets of data today. The headlines have been grabbed by the better-than-expected GDP numbers and I have no doubt that growth will feature heavily in the political battle of the next few weeks.’

The rising GDP figures did make the headlines….here’s the Telegraph’s...‘UK economy grew at fastest rate for nine years in 2014’  and its opening paragraph…

Quarterly expansion came in at 0.6pc in the last three months of 2014, leading to overall yearly growth reaching the same levels as before the financial crisis in 2006.

 

The BBC saying ‘Yep, incomes are up….but oh so minisculely….only 0.2% more than in 2010’. …or as Robert Peston says….‘Now let’s be clear about this. That is basically a sneeze higher. It is trivial. It’s loose change at the bottom of your purse. But it is higher.’  It takes the BBC half the report before they get to the eyecatching GDP figures and then this was the sole comment…‘It came as figures for economic growth in 2014 were revised upwards to 2.8% and separate indicators suggested economic confidence was at a 12-year high.‘

That’s it, no more to see here, move along says the BBC…..no mention of the economy growing the fastest it has for over 9 years…might be important when talking about ‘living standards’ perhaps.

It’s interesting the BBC starts the report by saying ‘The Conservatives and Lib Dems have heralded pre-election figures‘ rather than reporting that ‘The Office of National Statistics says…..’...kind of makes it look like the BBC is trying to say the Coalition is hyping the figures.

Peston also says...’It has been a recovery much slower than in any recession since 1945, but it is now reasonable to say that living standards are back to where they were at the time of the last election.’

He does the usual BBC thing as another BBC correspondent does...’taking five years to recover standards of living is a very slow recovery’  missing out the very important context for that…..from the BBC’s favourite economics guru, Paul Johnson of the IFS…..

In fairness we should remind ourselves of the scale of the task the Government took on. The deficit (that is, the amount the Government spends in a year minus the amount it raises) reached £157 billion in 2009/10 as a result of the deepest recession in around 100 years. It is still hovering around £100 billion this year.

Yes…..hard to forget ‘the deepest recession in around 100 years’ surely?  Maybe that’s why it took so much more time to get over it.  Important no?…especially when they quote Balls saying …‘ speaking at a campaign event in Swindon, said Conservatives were “telling people you have never had it so good” despite it being the “slowest recovery for 100 years”.’

Why quote one and not the other?  They are linked.

Peston goes on to say…‘The politically resonant number published today is that real household disposable income per head on 31 December 2014 was 0.19% higher than it was at the end of May 2010.’

So the ‘politically resonant figure’ is…‘household disposable income’.…why then does the BBC continue to quote Labour’s £1600 fall  in income figure rather than the Tory £900 rise in income….it is the Tory figure that is based upon disposable income after all…or as the BBC dismissively puts it…‘Mr Osborne’s favourite measure of standards of living: Real Household Disposable Income (RHDI) per capita.’   Labour base their figure on ‘real wages’ that doesn’t take into account how much cash actually ends up in a person’s hand at the end of the week including all income from other sources such as tax credits and welfare and is therefore not a true indicator of people’s income and not an indicator of their living standards.

The BBC trying its best to downplay any ‘good news’ that might make the Government’s economic policies look successful….whilst neglecting to challenge Labour claims in the same ‘ridiculous’ way.

Each morning, just after 6.30am, the Today programme trails the political agenda for the rest of the day. I notice that this seems to be restricted to the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrats. Given the UKIP are showing a poll rating double that of the LibDems, don’t you think this is unfair? It’s as if the BBC want to cut off any oxygen of supply to Farage and his colleagues.

I enjoyed this.

It’s the BBC’s rightwing bias that is the threat to democracy and journalism

So says the BBC’s much loved “pundit” Owen Jones, aged 13 and three quarters.

You would need a heart of stone not to laugh.

The UK’s economy grew at a faster pace than initially estimated last year, revised official figures show. The economy grew by 0.6% in the final three months of 2014, up from the previous estimate of 0.5%, the Office for National Statistics said. The unexpected increase meant growth for the year was 2.8%, higher than the earlier estimate of 2.6%.

Then this…

But shadow chancellor Ed Balls, speaking at a campaign event in Swindon, said Conservatives were “telling people you have never had it so good” despite it being the “slowest recovery for 100 years”. “This is a government which has presided over five years when wages have not kept pace with rising prices and family bills,” he said.

Just like Balls, the BBC is desperate to thrown as much cold water on the good economic news. It has the power to impose its own narrative and I suggest that without the BBC, Miliband would be languishing in the polls.

We’ve had Norman Smith declaring the Tory economy as ‘utterly terrifying’ and forecasting something of an Orwellian ‘Wigan Pier’ type future for the country and now we have Evan Davis declaring that Tory comments on Labour’s plans to raise £3000 worth of taxes from every family over 5 yearswere ‘ridiculous’.

But are they?  The IFS within hours of the Tory claim leapt into action to denounce it just as they did the Tory pledge to cut welfare by £12 bn…looking at the IFS website it is hard to find anything similarly critical of Labour….but, as the BBC insists, they are ‘independent’.

If Labour were to make no cuts and borrowed nothing then to clear the £70 billion deficit it would cost around £3,000 per household over the course of 5 years.

The Today programme  (around 06:10) was going to investigate the Tory claim in a measured and indepth way, or so I thought.  What they actually gave us, and described as a ‘tough interview by Evan’, was a clip of Evan Davis berating Grant Shapps and doing his usual trick of preventing any answer to develop by interrupting with claims that ‘It’s ridiculous’. Justin Webb told us that ‘Evan gets very upset about the figures when he thinks they are being misused…..and quite right too!’  No bias there then.

And that was that…the BBC’s most prestigious news and current affairs programme resorts to low abuse and playing clips that don’t explain anything but are purely there for the entertainment and amusement of the ‘Hampstead lefties’ ensconced at the BBC and the Guardian.

But who is being ‘ridiculous’?

Are the Tories right…at least in making the assumptions it does?

Here the one reliable journalist at the BBC agrees that Labour will have a £30 billion blackhole in their economic plans……

‘Andrew Neil: You would borrow more, wouldn’t you?

Andrew Neil: To bridge the deficit you have to borrow more. You’re going to borrow £30 billion a year simply to pay for public investment. That’s part of what you’re going to do – correct?

Lucy Powell: We are going to balance the books by the current expenditure by end of the Parliament.

Andrew Neil: And borrow £30 billion  a year for public investment

In 2010 Miliband was proposing a 50-50 split between raising taxes and spending cuts….

I’m told that the new Labour leader – who taught economics at Harvard during his sabbatical in 2003-2004 and chaired the Treasury’s Council of Economic Advisers for a year upon his return to the UK – is considering switching to a 1:1 (or 50 per cent to 50 per cent) ratio of spending cuts to tax rises, as advocated by Balls during the leadership campaign.

The IFS in 2014 was telling us that the state of the deficit means we will have to have….

  £70 billion of tax increases or spending cuts over the course of the next Parliament if the Government are going to balance the books.

The IFS admits that Labour may be looking at having to borrow up to that £30 billion to avoid making some cuts…

Ed Balls has said he wants to balance the books by then on current spending. That allows him more wiggle room – about £28 billion of it.

So that leaves £42 billion to find from cuts or taxes for Labour on the IFS figures…..and a 50-50 split would be £21 billion in extra taxes….which is higher than the Tories predict for Labour at £15 bn…but the IFS now claims….

So on the face of it Labour might need a fiscal tightening of just over £18 billion by 2017–18…Obviously, such a tightening – if half is to come from tax rises – would imply a net tax rise of around £9 billion in 2017–18 (and not the £15 billion the Conservatives suggest).

The IFS forgets the previous ‘fiscal tightening’ of £7.5 billion they mention earlier in their statement…taking it to nearly £26 billion…and a tax rise of not £9bn but £13 billion or so, nearer the £15 billion the Tories suggest….so one time the IFS predicts the tax rise would need be £21 billion, then their figures suggest £13 billion…but they claim it’s nearer £9 billion….who is guessing what?

Looks more like the IFS figures don’t add up than the Tories….the IFS rushed out their statement within hours of the Conservative claim and that being the case seems more politically motivated than based on sound number crunching…..paradoxically the IFS in their opening statement made clear that around £21 billion in tax take over 5 years was in fact what the Tories predicted…

The Conservative Party have claimed that under Labour there would be a £3,028 tax rise for every working household. This calculation assumes that Labour would increase taxes on working households by £7.5 billion in 2016–17 and £15 billion from 2017–18 onwards, with the £3,028 being the average tax rise cumulated over all years through to 2019–20.

So the Tory figures match the IFS’s…..or the IFS figures that you have to dig for in other IFS comments but which they don’t admit as their own estimate in their latest rebuttal.

Having denounced the Tories for ‘guesswork’ the IFS goes into detail about Labour’s policies in order to ‘prove’ the Tories wrong…but then they say this…..,

It is also not entirely clear – at least to us – when Labour would want to achieve current budget balance.

There is real uncertainty about what path the Labour party want to follow for the public finances. The Conservatives have been clearer about what they want to achieve, but they have not been clear about how they would achieve it.

There is little value in bandying around numbers which suggest either party would increases taxes by an average of £3,000 for each working household. We don’t know what they will do after the election. But neither of the two main parties has said anything to suggest that is what they are planning.

 

So..’It is also not entirely clear – at least to us …There is real uncertainty about what path the Labour party want… We don’t know what they will do after the election’. ……and yet they can still ‘disprove’ the Tory claim and ‘prove’ the Labour case!

The Tory figures are indeed ‘guesswork’ but based upon the information that is out there and what Miliband and co, and indeed the IFS, have said……the IFS seemed altogether too eager to undermine the claim and the BBC all too eager to jump on the bandwagon.

What is the price of betrayal these days?  It used to be 30 pieces of silver when the religious took to persecuting a man they didn’t like.

The Church Of England seems to have forgotten its origins, its history and its own religious principles when it makes completely spurious allegations about someone it wants to turn into a hate figure because of his politics.

Simon Heffer defends his friend Enoch Powell from a completely unfounded allegation by a Bishop of the Church of England who should know better.

What is also of interest is that Heffer tells of a previous false allegation made against Powell, this time by the BBC…how times change…or not.

For decades, Enoch Powell has long been a bug-bear of the liberal Establishment.

He has been demonised not least because to attack his memory is a quick and effective way for them to score points by setting out their own political correctness.

What better way for some mischievous Leftist priest to damage Enoch further than by linking him with the current rash of stories about child abuse?

In 1998, just after Enoch died, the BBC broadcast a programme in which they railed at Enoch for his hypocrisy. They said this scourge of mass immigration had visited the West Indies in 1953 to recruit black labour for the NHS. I was told of the story before the programme was broadcast and informed its researcher that Enoch had never been to the West Indies in his life. I was told, effectively, that I was lying, and it was broadcast.

A black clergywoman, then resident in London, talked at length of Enoch having recruited her as a nurse. The story was rubbish.

Detailed investigation by the BBC complaints department found that the woman had been recruited after a visit to her island by Jack Profumo, not Enoch Powell at all, and the Corporation was forced to make a grovelling on-air apology in peak time.

I have long dreamt of the day when ignorant politicians and Establishment figures would stop manipulating Enoch’s memory for their own advantage. But I never thought I would hear of bishops of the Church of England doing it.

The allegations are a monstrous lie. That the lie appears to have been retailed by a priest is beyond contempt.

There must be an investigation and, for all the distress this outrage has caused, there must be a reckoning.

And had to laugh at this from another source…

On becoming Minister of Health in 1960, Enoch Powell agreed that there were risks of rigidity in a great, but centralised, service. He saw three trends running side by side: the growth of community care and after-care of the sick, relieving the hospital; the development of preventive and remedial measures; and the more intensive and efficient use of hospital accommodation. He wanted fewer beds in newer hospitals. The three separate financial systems for hospitals, local health authorities and general practice were a great weakness. The BMJ wished his stay in the Ministry long enough for the provision of effective remedies.  When in due course he moved from the Ministry, he was one of the few ministers whose departure was a source of ‘deep regret’ to the profession.

Isn’t what Powell wanted for the health service exactly what is being enacted now with great opposition from the very same ‘profession’?

Also of interest is that in 1959 there were 191,000 nurses in England and Wales for a population of around 48 million (251 patients per nurse) whilst today, in England alone, there are over 350,000 for a population of 54 million (154 patients per nurse)….Wales has 84,000 nurses.  The budget for the NHS in 1948 was £9 billion in todays money….the NHS now costs over £100 bn.    Seems we forget just how good times have become.

Not BBC bias per se but evidence of the hypocrisy and attempts to use race as an issue to silence people that is so redolent of the left…..including the BBC….for example the BBC’s Phil Mackie trying to claim that the fuss over the Trojan Horse plot was all about racism, Islamophobia and paranoia.

Labour MP Simon Danczuk seems to be of like mind when votes are at stake and his principles go out the window…..

Mrs Danczuk isn’t the only one to display her boobs in public…hubby does too having reported Katie Hopkins to the police for linking Pakistani men to the Rochdale abuse….after he raised a Pakistani flag in Rochdale for some reason…..perhaps he should turn himself in to the police…if only for hypocrisy after having said this….

It was a tough subject for politicians and authorities to address, because most of the perpetrators were of Pakistani origin, and the victims predominantly white. Danczuk made headlines by saying it would be “daft” to ignore the “race element” of the case. In the car, he explains why:

“I’ve only ever said a very small minority of people in the Asian community have a very unhealthy view of women… It’s a complex jigsaw, and ethnicity is just one of the pieces. Class is a major factor, night-time economy is a factor, in terms of this type of on-street grooming, not sexual abuse per se.

“One reason to raise it is so we know how to combat it. The political reason is because it takes the wind out of the sails of the extreme right, because you’ve got a mainstream politician talking about it; you don’t rely on the EDL or the BNP talking about it.”

 

‘Daft to ignore the race element’?….but he wants to lock up those who mention it….whilst himself playing the race card to win votes by pandering to Pakistani ‘nationalism’…and why are British people of Pakistani heritage flying a foreign flag?

Simon Danczuk….George Galloway mark II?

Well, Parliament has been dissolved and the Election is on. The BBC start their coverage on the Today programme by going to Newcastle, a Labour redoubt.  Where to tomorrow? Liverpool perhaps? Maybe Rotherham …well then again, maybe not there #awkward.