Guest Who (and H/T Dover Sentry) brought this to our attention…from the lefty Huffingtion Post:
Jeremy Hunt’s Woolly Answers Over The Tory £8bn NHS Promise Aren’t Going Down Very Well
Health secretary Jeremy Hunt has been accused of “making stuff up” after he seemed unable to explain how the Tory party would meet today’s commitment to invest at least an extra £8 billion a year into the NHS by 2020.
Despite saying the announcement was a “significant moment in the history of the NHS”, Hunt seemed rather hazy about where the £8 billion would actually come from, prompting a BBC Breakfast host to ask “Do you make this stuff up as you go along?”
Asked where the money would be coming from on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, Hunt said, “Well, it’s the right question to ask, because..”
“It’s the obvious question to ask, because you haven’t said so far,” replied presenter Mishal Husain.
So two interviews from the BBC that were the masterclasses into how to present a one-side picture of events have become examples of Tory evasiveness and economic incompetence….whilst Labour, who also haven’t told us how they would fund the NHS, are allowed to get away with murder….as we looked at in a previous post….Just saying you will fund the NHS by raising certain taxes in a policy that most experts think is very doubtful doesn’t in any way mean you have laid out a credible plan to fund the NHS…but the BBC is fully ready to accept Labour’s smoke and mirrors without challenge whilst at the same time tearing into the Tories.
The Huffington Post article demonstrates the power of the BBC to shape the political narrative and limit what information the Public get to hear and by doing that alter their perceptions and, they hope, voting patterns, especially when the BBC’s line on things is taken up by other media outlets and used as a stick to beat the Tories with….note there is no questioning of Labour’s policies in the Huffington Post.
Labour has just announced that it will collect £7.5 billion from tackling tax avoidance…does the BBC challenge that? Does the BBC tell us that Balls is ‘making it up’? Does the BBC go to their normal ‘goto’ guy at the IFS to dig into the fgures? No, No and well yes….Mark Mardell interviews the IFS’s Paul Johnson(6 mins or so in) and they concentrate on the Tory inheritance plans….apparently it will be the richest who get taxed as a result…and get this….that’s bad because it will have a damaging effect on the eocnomy as it will act as a disincentive to earn. Couldn’t make it up could you? It’s now bad to tax the rich.
Then we hear that Labour is to raise (in the news they now say ‘hope to raise’) £7.5 billion from tax avoidance measures…..
Here’s what Johnson said….
I think both main parties are making up numbers here in terms of what they can get from tax avoidance and evasion. The Conservatives are committed to getting £5 billion a year extra;Labour are trumping that by saying £7.5 billion…
It’s almost impossible to know upfront what you can achieve by cracking down on avoidance and evasion.You can do so much that you begin to put off real economic activity… so you do have to be careful about exactly how you do this.
Mardell ignored that completely and moved rapidly on…why does he do that when it is central to Labour’s, as well as Tory, policies…… how Labour will fund the NHS…it claims it will raise £1.1 billion of its £2.5 bn by closing down tax loopholes…..and yet they are just making that up…as well as guessing about the claimed £1.2 billion form the mansion tax. Hunt was roasted by the BBC…and yet Balls is given the red carpet treatment…
Labour to raise £7.5bn from tax avoiders
But will they? Who knows if you get your news from the BBC…will the IFS’s statement make it out into the BBC’s other reporting and analysis? Listen out for it….somehow doubt it will be making as big a headlines as other IFS statements that laid into the Conservatives alone.
And that last sentence from the IFS was interesting…
You can do so much [cracking down on tax avoidance] that you begin to put off real economic activity… so you do have to be careful about exactly how you do this.
So Ed Balls was right in January when he refused to close down non-dom status….but now he’s fully on board that bus it seems…close em down!!! he says.
Think that will be picked up by the BBC when they interview him?
Oh yes and there’s this…
— Stephanie Flanders (@MyStephanomics) April 12, 2015
Sorry that @thesundaytimes follows Mail in raking over Miliband’s past today. We “dated” fleetingly in 2004. V costly few wks, it turns out.
A BBC economics correspondent going out with a Labour economics adviser….why would that be important….especially as later reporting from Flanders was consistently backing Labour’s Plan B and urging the government to borrow more and spend on infrastructure? Is it just a matter of the Mail ‘raking over Miliband’s past’ or is there some real dirt to find?
Please sign this petition to abolish the TV licence. Over 102,000 have already signed in a week.
https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/end-the-bbc-licence-fee.
Willingly signed…
Signed it the other day.
I like it when the BBC cover tax avoidance.
They always seem to forget about getting caught out themselves advising their “stars” on how to avoid tax, oh and the NI contributions by the employer and employee if it was pay to an employee rather than a company.
Where the wife works, in the public sector but with a funded pension scheme, all her pension contributions are treated as a salary sacrifice , which means she and the employer do not pay any NI contributions on the amount.
FOI request about to go to the BBC asking how they treat “salary sacrifice”
– Where will Beeboids find the money to finance themselves for this?
“EXCLUSIVE: BBC blows £200,000 a WEEK on hotels for staff.”
http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/569870/BBC-spends-200k-each-week-hotels
News 24 ,creaming their nickers with a multi orgasim , over Hilary going to run for President . She must be a shoo in , for them I guess .
Tax evasion is illegal and always has been. Tax avoidance is, by definition, legal. It’s simply a way of using legal measures to minimise one’s tax liability.
“Cracking down” on tax avoidance probably sounds impressive to the cretins who get their newspaper headlines read to them by the beebyanka, over a bowl of rice krispies, but what it actually means is changing the law, to make illegal something that was perfectly legal a second before. The fact is that tax avoidance itself can’t be made illegal, because it is axiomatically legal. All Miliband can do is criminalise instances of behaviour which have hitherto been legal.
The Milibands avoided tax and they did so legally, but Miliband Minor should not be allowed to get away with his double standards.
Tax avoidance, in the meantime, will always remain legal, because it automatically is, however far stupid governments shift the goalposts.
Vague law is bad law. And provides acres of exciteable coverage based on planted ‘PR as news’ to keep the masses confused and in line.
Tax evasion vs. avoidance doesn’t seem that vague, yet is being treated by cynical pols and their media parrots ( or is it the other way around?) as if they are one in the same, despite all of them, and us, doing the legal version all the time in some form.
That the BBC leads the charge in helping cynical opportunists muddy such waters shows their value in educating and informing on anything.
And I’d say getting screwed by a national broadcaster into buying skewed editorial in favour of a failed political philosophy is going to be costly for more than a few weeks, as it happens.
The best way to reduce tax avoidance is to simplify the tax laws cutting out all sorts of allowances “if you do this” in return for a lower %age take on the big taxes.
We all know who it was who made tax fiendishly complicated during his time as Chancellor and then Prime Minister, but by making it complicated you can raise a bit here and there (why do you have to pay tax on an insurance policy, because you want to fly somewhere etc.) without having to change income tax, which having promised not to, restricts your room for manoeuvre.
To bring it home to those who do not really understand the difference between avoidance and evasion just ask “Do you have any ISAs?” If the answer is yes, you tell them that they are a tax avoider!
The Labour party.
The party that gave RoP Pakistani immigrants , the right to gang rape tens of thousands of working class girls, for votes.
For over a decade, the Labour government, and in particular, Home Secretaries, turned a blind eye to the greatest “war crime” a government has committed against its own vulnerable young girls.
There is no parallel in hostory of such an event, and yet to my, and national shame, the country is prepared to vote in these bastards.
I don’t normally agree with Red Ed, but he has some very noble things to say about democracy and the media, such as:
‘The concentration of media power in too few hands is damaging to our democracy’.
and
‘No media company should have so much power that those who run it believe themselves about the rule of law’.
http://order-order.com/2015/04/13/watch-ed-begs-labour-members-not-to-boo-journalists/#_@/yXe-nCjJazfxiA
As Guido Fawkes observes:
‘Presumably it means Labour will break up the BBC…’
Ed mate, come out and say you’ll privatize the BBC, and I’ll go against everything I hold sacred, and vote for you on May 7th!