The BBC are being highly misleading in their reports of what the Scottish Conservative leader, Ruth Davidson, said today about government restrictions to welfare for families with more than two children. Davidson said, in an interview with Emma Barnett on 5 Live [12:12], that she thought the rules on welfare were entirely right but if on implementation they were found not to work as intended then she was prepared to see them reviewed.
The following BBC news bulletin immediately reported this as Davidson saying she was ‘open to seeing the rules reviewed’ without any qualification that she believed the rules as they stood were fine until proven otherwise…this gives the impression that she thinks that the rules are in fact wrong and need revision already…that just isn’t the case.
This is the BBC trying to spin the impression that even the Scottish Tory leader is against the ‘controversial’ rules and they must change.
Even in the web report the BBC continues to massage her words…
Rape clause: Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson ‘open to review’
Speaking to BBC Radio 5 live’s Emma Barnett, Ms Davidson said she would be willing to examine whether there were “better ways of doing it” if it was felt to be necessary.
Only later admitting that she said she was open to reviewing the rules if, once implemented, ‘there are issues with that’……..
“In terms of how that works on the ground, if there are issues with that, then I am completely open – if there are better ways of doing it – to reviewing that.”
So why try to give the impression, and indeed make out absolutely in its other reports, that Davidson thinks the rules are already in need of review?
Have to say Barnett was pretty useless in the interview failing on several occasions to understand what was being said even as Davidson gave clear, coherent and reasoned aswers to her questions.
Davidson wanted a higher percentage of immigrants who came to the UK to head towards Scotland, more of the brightest and best. Barnett just couldn’t work that out..how can Davidson get more immigrants when the Tories were promising to lower immigration? Simple…Scotland gets only 4% of the total immigrants to the UK…Davidson merely said that she wanted a higher percentage of that total, even if a lower total, to head towards Scotland. Now a mere 4% of 300,000 or so, perhaps later maybe say 10% of 30,000…it’s a percentage thing not a pure numbers argument. Davidson merely questioned why Scotland attracted fewer than its fair share of the brightest and best. Simple, you’d have thought.
Then there was child poverty…welfare is not devolved so Barnett wanted to blame the UK government for higher child poverty in Scotland…Davidson said that all things being equal it then must be the educational and economic policies of the SNP that caused the higher poverty in Scotland…which is a fair and reasonable assessment….and yet Barnett just couldn’t undertand that argument.
So three major arguments Barnett couldn’t understand despite Davidson making her case quite plain and simple. Guess Barnett just didn’t want to understand…despite Davidson repeating her arguments several times….oh and Barnett told us that the ‘so-called bedroom tax’ was a bad thing. No bias there then. At one point Davidson noted that Barnett seemed to be reading off a Labour Party press release…Barnett quite discomfitted…as she’d been caught bang to rights really….it did indeed sound just like that.
Barnett was based in Edinburgh in the Elephant House cafe where JK Rowling wrote her fantasy fiction about magic and mystery….how very apt for a BBC fantasy politics production.
“Misleading in their reports” you say, about our trusted national broadcaster?
These seem to fall under the BBC’s new time honoured practice of context-shaping editing for effect or ‘whattheymighthavesaidism’:
https://bbcwatch.org/2017/05/11/bbc-news-inaccurately-rewords-the-archbishop-of-canterbury/
It is many things, but trustworthy news reporting it is not.
The simple truth is that the bBBC engaged in their trick of twisting what Ruth Davidson actually said into their version of what they would have liked her to have said by leaving out the parts which didn’t suit their agenda.
They might think that what they did is very clever but where I come from what they are doing is lying by omission and, however the bBBC and their acolytes might try to spin it, the simple fact is that it is still deliberately lying to the public.
As I understand it, family benefits are to be limited to two children, unless a third child is the result of rape. Are the Scots Nazis implying that a child of rape should not get family benefits? Of course not, they are just grandstanding, puffed up with faux outrage, aided and abetted by the BBC, the house broadcaster of the Left.
It’s not just the Gnats. Labour and the Lib Dems climbed on board this outrage bus before the local elections and it looks like UK BBC have fallen into line, since BBC Scotland on its own clearly didn’t have the desired effect.
Of course, what it’s about is that these parties think the taxpayer should pay for however many children you want. It is of course open to the Gnats to use their new powers to compensate for the loss of benefits if they feel so strongly about it, but curiously they’ve declined to do so.
I wonder why nobody has asked them if they want to have the Rape Clause removed completely to see what their answer would be? My guess is that they would have to answer ‘Yes’. That would then beg the question that in that case do they think that a woman who becomes pregnant as a result of being raped should not receive any benefits for the resulting child? It would be interesting to find out what their answers to that would be.
Surely just another example that the bBC’s aversion to the Conservatives is a truly United Kingdom phenomenon and not just centred on England.
Amongst other names they are also known as the “republican guard”
ps Good sign that the bBC are worried following the surge in support for the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party!
And who exactly is Emma Barnett, anyway? Is she just another of the BBC’s Bimbo Brigade, all wet behind the ears and not a lot in between?
I notice that on the day that nominations closed for the General Election, the BBC had an article analysing the nominations. Did it tell us how many candidates are standing for each party? Nope. Except that they think the Conservatives have a total of 506 candidates.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2017-39888208
No, the only thing they are interested in is the proportion of each party’s candidates who are female.
Damned if you don’t…
When the Government consulted on the much needed new restrictions, they received representations from charities, pressure groups and activists that it would be wrong to penalise families (women) whose family exceeded two, in the even that the child was born out of a rape.
The government considered these representations and agreed with them. And the same people complained that the Tories had introduced a hated rape clause.
…and damned if you do!