Well, the day of the General Election 2015 is upon us and here is a thread that can be used JUST to cover how the rotten BBC covers it. I’m afraid I won’t be around for the next few days due to a family bereavement so will catch up the other side of the Election.

Peston has really outdone himself on the eve of the election….seemingly coming down openly, in a subtle/non-subtle manner, in favour of Labour.

You have to ask why he felt the need to tell us that this is …

An election that really matters

That title indicates he has a view, a view that suggests he thinks one party is the one which will have significant impact on the way your life goes, and the following body  of the article gives a fair indication of what his preferred line might be…and it’s not ‘vote Tory’.  Peston gives us an either/or but it is not hard to guess which way his heart lies and which arguments he finds the more preferable…….

On the EU you can see a gentle nudge towards staying in…..

‘The issues that are on the table are huge, arguably the most important of my political lifetime.

The choice between whether to have a referendum on membership of the European Union (EU) – offered by Tories and UKIP, declined by Labour, LibDem and SNP – is massive.

Leaving the EU would have a profound impact on our economy, immigration and culture. For better or worse it matters.

For what it is worth, the consensus among mainstream economists and leaders of big businesses is that David Cameron’s aim of using the referendum to secure EU reforms is a laudable one.

But they would also argue that the costs of leaving the EU, reformed or not, would be big.’

On the SNP you are led to believe that one party looks to break up the Union and one will defend it….and it is the Tories who are being presented as the ‘enemies’of the SNP whipping up Scottish Nationalism by the BBC today (remarkable that it isn’t the SNP that is whipping up nationalism!  The BBC ignoring or downplaying SNP related violence, intimidation and rampant nationalism in a way that they wouldn’t with UKIP for instance)….

‘Likewise what is going on in Scotland will shape the whole UK…you should ponder which other parties best capture your views about whether the Scots should be ushered towards the exit or urged to stay in the union.’

So to keep the Union together vote Labour!

Then onto Labour itself…the shiny new ‘socialist’ party breaking with the war mongers and false economic prophets of the past (ie Old New Labour) seeking a fairer , more equal society battling the evil money makers….

‘Ed Miliband represents a big break with the New Labour of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, because of his explicit promise of higher taxes on the highest earners and the wealthy, and with his shift to much greater economic interventionism.

Whether you think his mandating of a higher minimum wage, his cap on energy prices, his determination to break-up banks and his raid on non-doms are wealth-destroying meddling or fairness-enhancing reforms, they are not same-old, same-old.’

Then onto the Tories…on the one hand making prudent economic choices…or on the other hand callous, heartless people grinding the poor’s nose in yet more poverty…..the dramatic phrasing of the last sentence indicates how you are supposed to think….

‘Finally even the often sterile debate on how, and how fast. to reduce the gap between taxes and spending – how rapidly to shrink the deficit and start cutting the record national debt – is a big one.

Take just one aspect, the Tories’ plan to reduce welfare bills by a further £12bn.

You can see this as either essential to make the nation’s balance sheet more resistant to inevitable shocks and an imperative to improve work incentives.

Or you can see it as an attack on the poorest and most vulnerable.’

And finally………LOL……

Now even if I were not constrained by BBC impartiality rules, I would not have the chutzpah to tell you how to vote.

But please don’t moan to me that this vote does not matter.

When the party leaders tell you this is the most important election in a generation, for once they are spot on.

Peston has had a bad election with reports and articles that bulge with pro-Labour nuances whilst doing down the Tories.  Peston defends Labour’s economic past suggesting there was no reckless ramping up of debt pre-crash even as John Humphrys said that Miliband must be the ‘last man standing’ who didn’t think that Labour spent wildly and helped make the recession far worse than it could have been.  Peston also suggest that getting the debt down is not important…how times change…..let’s have a look at previous statements made when there wasn’t an election in the offing……

First here’s John Cridland, the CBI director general, said: “Labour has form spending money it does not really have.”

And here’s Peston in 2011 saying pay down the debt…that may take a decade with low growth as a result…but is necessary…and you cannot borrow to run the public finances….

The Future’s Overdrawn

What became clear in 2008 is that we will have to find a way of paying much of that debt back.

That will take at least a decade.

And when we repay debt, we’re spending less. Which means economic activity slows down, growth grinds to a halt.

It is reasonable to assume that growth will be as little as 1% in the coming 10 years….which wouldn’t look so bad after a contraction of 6.3% in output during the 2008-09 recession.

 When essential public services start to be financed through borrowing rather than tax, it is immensely difficult to cut the borrowing.

 

And there’s more  of the same from him……the importance of reducing debt and the likelihood of many years of low growth, maybe just 1%, as we battle to get our economy and spending under control…

It has now become widely recognised that perhaps the greatest economic policy failure in the UK, US and eurozone during the 16 boom years before the crash of 2008 was the explosion of borrowing by banks, households, businesses and governments – or, to use the jargon, the unprecedented and massive leveraging up of entire economies.

 That is why getting the debt down to prudent levels is the most important economic challenge of our time.

 So what’s going on? Why are UK debts still going up?
Well partly it’s to do with a phenomenon I’ve discussed here many times, that debt has been shuffled from the private sector to the public sector.
When banks stopped lending, and private-sector spending and investing collapsed, governments continued to spend, even though tax revenues were falling. So public-sector borrowing exploded.
To be clear, if governments had not continued to spend, our recession might well have become something much worse, a 1930s-style depression.
But it is fair to say that a consequence of banks, households and businesses trying to repay their debts has been a big increase in government borrowing.

We haven’t as yet found a way to get the debts down so that we can be confident that our economy’s foundations are solid and sound again.

What it means is that we must brace ourselves for many years of relatively low growth, perhaps 1% versus the 3% of the 16 boom years before the crash, because we no longer have the fuel of borrowing more and more every year.’

How soon we, and Robert Peston, forget.

And what did Stephanie Flanders have to say way back in 2005 about Labour’s economic miracle?  It’s a miracle based upon borrowing and spending…and it couldn’t go on…not only that but productivity, Labour’s latest ‘concern’ in this election, was dire when they were in control…….

On running the rule over Gordon Brown’s economic record

Britain is growing slower than it has in more than a decade. The high street has ground to a halt, and inflation is the highest it has been under Labour.

 When we look back, in a few years’ time, at Brown’s economy, will we still see an economic miracle? Or another old-fashioned spending binge that, sooner or later, had to run dry?

 Our trade gap has widened almost every year since Labour took office.

 Ed Balls was with Gordon Brown every step of the way until he became MP for Normanton in May 2005. I asked him whether he was disappointed by Britain’s continued low productivity and widening trade gap.

 “There’s an ability for people to plan ahead, invest in the future, which we’ve not seen in the last 20 to 30 years.”

 Quite a few people around the country echoed this view – especially the property developers (before the property crash of course….causing the credit crunch). There is just one problem. Businesses are not investing more. They are investing less.

 Total investment as a share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the lowest it has been since those records began in 1965.

 Saved by spending

 The miracle, if there is one, is that we carried on growing. But looking around the country, you see it is a miracle built not on investing, or exporting, but on a miraculous capacity to spend.

 The public spending prop

 What is left of the miracle economy, if you strip out the cheap imports and the consumer spending? What is left is a lot of public spending. The only part of the economy that has grown faster than spending by all of us the past few years has been spending by the government.

In the north-east, one recent estimate puts the public sector of the economy at close to 60%.

 But all of that public spending, sooner or later has to be paid for. Ed Balls denies that Gordon Brown’s decision to move the goal posts on his golden rule this summer has done his reputation real harm.

 What Gordon Brown would like to be his final years as chancellor could be the most testing yet.

‘

And a final thing of note…the BBC is usually keen to tell us that all the rising number of self-employed people isn’t a sign of a healthy economy on the up but an indication of a weak economy in which people are desperate to scrape a living and end up as self-employed as a last resort because there are no jobs out there…..the Guardian in 2006 puts the lie to that when it predicts that maybe a third of workers will be self employed by 2011….

‘Become your own boss. And many of us want to. According to research by Vodafone, the number of UK businesses could rise from 3m to 10m over the next five years. That would mean a third of UK workers running their own business by 2011. The government will have to rethink its view on migrants. Otherwise our hourglass economy will become top heavy, toppling into the North Sea and causing a tsunami that would wipe out Scandinavia.’

Will the BBC, the dominant news broadcaster by far, be the Kingmakers for this election?  Some think they may well be, either by design or happenchance.

The prospect of Labour ‘stealing’ the election having less seats than the Tories but able to conjure up a majority with a ‘Bauld’ Alliance has been highlighted recently in the Press.  This morning on the Today programme, and elsewhere it seemed that the BBC were countering that suggestion of Labour snatching the election using the rule book but having no legitimacy with fewer actual votes.  I had the impression that the BBC was coming down on the side of Labour.

The normally pro-BBC Cardiff University journalism and media studies unit has come up with a frightening prospect and a warning to journalists…that the Broadcast Media could, by the way they interpret events post-election, influence how the Public perceive the legitimacy of any likely political scenario and annoint the ‘winner’…making themselves the Kingmakers.

How broadcast media could be kingmakers after the election

Depending on the electoral arithmetic, the next 48 hours could be a real test of how broadcast journalists interpret public perceptions towards any post-election coalition deals. If, as polls continue to suggest, a hung parliament is imminent, the debate will almost exclusively focus on which party can (or should) lead a coalition government over the next five years.

How broadcast journalists interpret “public” legitimacy could be crucial in policing the boundaries of negotiations between parties, in the post-election period.

Broadcasters, beware

If the vote is a close as predicted, parties will inevitably squabble between themselves about who “won”. But the public will rely on journalists to mediate. And since TV news remains by far the most widely used source of news for general and detailed information about the election, the impartiality of broadcast journalists will be put under the spotlight.

This puts a huge amount of responsibility on broadcast journalists interpreting the results as they come in, during the early hours of Friday morning. Tired but full of adrenaline, broadcast journalists may well be influenced by the pace of the news cycle and the pressure to call out a “winner”. No doubt many of the partisan newspapers – most of whom have endorsed the Conservative party – will be seeking to sway readers in their Friday and Saturday editions.

As public attitudes are formed over the next 48 hours, broadcast journalists will therefore need to be careful in how they interpret the “public legitimacy” of the election results and any possible coalition deals, in light of their impartiality requirements.

I am absolutely certain that the BBC’s best and brightest will be conscientiously watching every word for a hint of bias, marshalling their thoughts in an impeccably impartial manner to bring us their verdict….not.

The BBC will be ‘celebrating’ VE Day over the next few days and you kind of know the narrative they will be pushing, apparently celebrating the men and women who defeated the Nazis but the real message will be ‘how terrible it all was’ with copious amounts of equivocation and ‘balancing’ the narrative with tales of Allied ‘war crimes’ such as Dresden or Hamburg…..in one interview I heard the BBC managed to find three people from the era who were entirely negative about VE Day and claimed either not to have been excited about the war ending and VE Day, or who said they saw no celebrations…the newspapers must have been reporting from a different London apparently….and h/t Doublethinker, the BBC ran a programme a couple of days ago about VE Day which ended up as a piece of propaganda for the Labour Party…the ‘creators of the NHS’….which is a lie…Labour merely, and reluctantly, implemented plans put in place by a Tory PM and a Liberal, William Beveridge.

The old soldiers, sailors and airmen who made all those sacrifices must wonder if it was all worth it as they look on at an ever more undemocratic European Union that pays lip service to democracy making people vote again and again until they get the ‘right’ result, the import of an ideology into Europe that bears remarkable similarities to Fascism and yet is pandered to by politicians and Media types of all creeds, and the final insult is a British Broadcasting Corporation that besmirches all they achieved and itself supports that ‘fascist’ narrative and helps raise the old spectre of anti-Semitism across Europe once again with its very one sided and unbalanced portrayal of Israel…not that the BBC was held in high esteem during the war….often then thought to be too friendly towards the Nazis if you read the ‘Mass Observation’ reports of the time.

The BBC is infamous for its line that the bombing of Dresden and Hamburg were war crimes….

BBC’s insult to hero pilots: Veterans rage over Dresden coverage that attacks Britain as being ‘worse than the Third Reich’ but ignores RAF’s sacrifice

So in light of that below is a report from the Mail in 1945 that tells of, and celebrates, the massive bombing campaign against Berlin…it makes a fascinating contemporary read….before the BBC has had the chance to rewrite history to suit their own verdict on how the war was won…….

Note just how massive the bombing was, how Berlin was not just a city but a factory for the war effort and how private homes had been turned into mini-factories turning out equipment for the German war machine….and just how much the bombing was deemed to have helped win the war…….

How RAF’s awe­some bomb­ing of Ber­lin ended in …

45,000 TONS OF VIC­TORY

• BY OUR DE­FENCE COR­RE­SPON­DENT

Some 850 bombers did not come home

THE last bomb has fallen on Ber­lin. Pathfinder crews of the RAF have planted their last zig-zag trail of sky­mark­ers across Europe to guide the bomber streams to Hitler’s cap­i­tal.

The flak guns, hun­dreds of them, that gir­dled the city with a cur­tain of steel have ceased to bark. Grop­ing search­lights have been turned out for the last time.

As news of these tremen­dous truths came from the loud­speak­ers in RAF messes at scores of iso­lated air­fields, our bomber crews could be ex­cused a feel­ing of ju­bi­la­tion. To many of them the news had a poignant per­sonal mean­ing.

Their minds went back to nights of high ad­ven­ture and ter­ri­ble dan­ger high over the nerve cen­tre of the Re­ich — nights of un­be­liev­able ack-ack fire, with Nazi fight­ers ly­ing in am­bush, friends go­ing down in flames, aw­ful mo­ments as search­lights found their mark and nerve-rack­ing anx­i­ety as bombers limped home with en­gines knocked out and petrol tanks drained too soon.

For these young men, old be­fore their time, the cap­ture of Ber­lin was a mo­ment of per­sonal tri­umph.

Without their help — they and the com­rades who never re­turned — the Ger­man cap­i­tal might still be fly­ing the Swastika.

They are the sol­diers who fought their Ber­lin bat­tle thou­sands of feet above the Earth, months be­fore even the Nor­mandy beach-head was es­tab­lished.

Al­ready the Rus­sians, first to reach Ber­lin by land, have paid trib­ute to the fruits of Bomber Com­mand’s courage.

It is not the phys­i­cal pos­ses­sion of Ber­lin’s rav­aged streets that is so im­por­tant. What the ex­perts want to find out from in­spec­tion of the de­bris and anal­y­sis of the fac­tory timesheets is the pre­cise ex­tent to which our strate­gic bomb­ing aided the land armies on both Eastern and Western fronts by cut­ting off en­emy sup­plies.

Their re­port will be the de­fin­i­tive text­book of strate­gic bomb­ing, des­tined to be­come a clas­sic among the man­u­als of mil­i­tary sci­ence. For, apart from its many great war fac­to­ries, this city of 4,400,000 peo­ple was the world’s cap­i­tal of home work­ing.

Un­der the Nazi’s vast dis­per­sal plan, hun­dreds of pri­vate Ber­lin homes be­came minia­ture fac­to­ries. The Ger­mans have a word for it –—Heimar­belt. It means ‘ in­dus­trial home­work’. Lathes and benches were set up in din­ing rooms and bed­rooms.

One trav­eller has de­scribed his amaze­ment when, pass­ing along a Ber­lin street dur­ing an RAF raid, the wall of a pri­vate house col­lapsed to re­veal a work­man’s bench in the liv­ing room.

Bomber Com­mand has been ham­mer­ing at Ber­lin since Au­gust 25, 1940, when twin-en­gined air­craft dropped 22 tons of bombs. But the Bat­tle of Ber­lin proper did not be­gin un­til the night of Novem­ber 18, 1943, when 444 bombers went out and dumped 1,594 tons among the city’s fac­to­ries.

Since the war started, Bomber Com­mand has blasted and burned Ber­lin with close on 45,000 tons of in­cen­di­aries and high- ex­plo­sive bombs. There have been 22 ma­jor raids of 500 tons and over.

The Bat­tle of Ber­lin proper lasted four months, dur­ing which more than 30,000 tons were show­ered on the city, most of them in 13 mon­u­men­tal at­tacks.

Ber­lin­ers had their worst night on Fe­bru­ary 15, 1944, when Air Chief Mar­shal Sir Arthur Har­ris sent 750 planes car­ry­ing 2,500 tons.

When the bat­tle ended, 326 fac­to­ries had been de­stroyed or dam­aged, in­clud­ing five clas­si­fied as ‘pri­or­ity one plus’.

The ef­fects of this con­tin­u­ous blitz­ing spread through Ger­many’s war econ­omy like the ev­er­widen­ing rip­ples of a pond into which a peb­ble has been tossed.

You can even trace part of the en­emy’s re­cent dis­as­trous oil short­age to the de­struc­tion of elec­tri­cal en­gi­neer­ing plants dur­ing the air Bat­tle of Ber­lin.

Heavy elec­tri­cal equip­ment needed for the com­ple­tion of some of the en­emy’s syn­thetic oil plants never ar­rived, and those plants failed to go into pro­duc­tion.

So, when you see pic­tures of Red Army troops plant­ing the Rus­sian flag on Ber­lin’s bomb- scarred chan­cel­leries, give a cheer for the RAF fly­ers who made pos­si­ble that sym­bolic act of con­quest.

Also cheer the ‘erks’ — or air­crafts­men — who sent out our Lan­cast­ers, Hal­i­faxes and Stir­lings with en­gines run­ning smoothly and gad­gets work­ing right.

And do not for­get the boffins who gave our bombers their ‘magic eye’ radar and de­vised ways of fox­ing the Luft­waffe night fight­ers.

In all, Bomber Com­mand has flown well over 20,000 sor­ties against Ber­lin.

The cost has not been light. More than 850 bombers did not get back. The rate of loss for the whole of Bomber Com­mand’s other op­er­a­tions is just half that fig­ure.

I see the BBC leads its new bulletin the day before the General Election with an anti-UKIP story. It’s been quite remarkable to see how the State Broadcaster has done everything possible to marginalise the Party that won the European poll just last year. Anyway, here’s an Open Thread for you.

So, Labour’s Lucy Powell states live on radio that Labour’s 2015 general election pledges are carved in stone, but nonetheless breakable! Awkward? Fear not…

The good old BBC runs with her “denial” of that which she plainly said! It seems those “world class journalists” are prepared to give her a pass EVEN though she wasn’t misquoted in any way!

A glimpse of the future……Ed Miliband issues his new set of pledges that he promises to implement in government

Ed Miliband on the Today programme yesterday told us that ‘Trust is a huge issue’…so much so he set out his promises to the nation literally carved in stone…and has constantly attacked David Cameron as someone who can’t be trusted to fulfill his election pledges.

Such a massive emphasis on his determination to carry out his own promises must surely mean any deviation from that would be headline news….trust in politicians apparently being the big, raging question on everyone’s lips if you believe the BBC.

How then when in a BBC interview Miliband’s chief political strategist tells us this….

‘I don’t think anyone is suggesting that the fact that he’s carved them in stone means he’s absolutely not going to break them or anything like that’

…..does the BBC essentially ignore that ‘bombshell’ comment when they spent days wittering in about Cameron’s ‘brainfade’ and yesterday filled the airwaves with the mutterings of a loose-lipped LibDem who told us the shattering news that Cameron may think he won’t get a full majority?

You have to look fairly hard to find the story about this on the website…not on the frontpage, not on the UK page, but it is tucked away on the Election page…..what is on the frontpage is this…a story from 1892 no less….

How a gingerbread biscuit took out the prime minister

Nick Robinson fails to mention the comment in this piece in which he says ‘So, what is obsessing politicians of all parties behind-the-scenes is the debate about what a legitimate government would look like. ‘…...you might think a man who wants to be PM who makes promises, and promises to keep those promises, might not seem legitimate should he take office with votes he received on the basis of those promises…so why does Robinson not raise the issue?…..after all he has Tweeted cynically on the comments…

This cheered me up. @LucyMPowell on Edstone – fact promises “carved into stone” doesn’t mean “absolutely not going to break them”. Really?!!

— Nick Robinson (@bbcnickrobinson) May 5, 2015

As polling day approaches, it strikes me that the BBC has dropped any pretence of balance. It wants Miliband into 10 Downing Street and the propaganda machine is pumping out as much Pro Ed material as possible. It has sought to blame down the #Milistone farce from yesterday – even though The Guardian itself expressed disbelief in the limestone folly – and instead has led the news today with the Clegg attack line that Cameron told him in a private conversation that he did not belief that the Conservatives can win a majority. Meanwhile, Miliband keeps pretending that he CAN win a majority and Andrew Neill apart, the BBC complies with the fantasy. Until Friday.

Great to see Nick Robinson starting the final week of the election with such a balanced headline.