Better Red Than Tory

Consider this from Corbyn’s manifesto…

Labour will halt the NHS “Sustainability and Transformation Plans” which are looking at closing health services across England and ask local health groups to redraw the plans with a focus on patient need rather than available finances.

Corbyn is suggesting there will be absolutely no limit to spending on the NHS.  Any criticism from the BBC for that completely fanciful, not to mention dishonest and misleading, promise?  No.  A statement entirely in line with Labour’s philosophy…spend, spend, spend to buy votes regardless of the cost and the fact there is no money and that future generations will be paying for this largesse one way or the other…through higher taxes or austerity….been there, still doing that, due to the last Labour mis-government.

Ever get the impression that the BBC is playing  down Corbyn’s radical politics, his links to terrorism and anti-Semitism and the ruinous reality of his manifesto which seems to get a by from the BBC’s fact-checkers and is presented as if there was nothing at all really controversial in there….many of its promises actually getting promoted as being quite a good thing in fact and a rear-guard action seems to be being mounted to defend Corbyn and undermine attacks on him.

We are told that claims Corbyn will drag us back to the 70’s is so much nonsense from the right-wing Press and the Tory Party…and you know what, weren’t the 70’s in fact glorious, culturally inventive and significant…wasn’t it the period of civil disobedience when the People took power? [Hint hint….oh…er…not you nasty populist Brexiteers…you can bugger off!  Violent Occupiers, terrorists and radicals only thankyou]…and it was so much better.  This romancing of the 70’s, on the Today programme, was undoubtedly meant to illustrate that not only would going back to the 70’s be harmless but Commissar Corbyn would actually lead a people’s revolution, not only tranforming and energising the economy, politics and society but the Arts and the cultural world as well…brilliant!

The News Quiz curiously also came up with a similar line [any institutional editorial direction going on?] and then went on to blatantly provide what was a party political broadcast on behalf of Labour cheerleading Corbyn’s policies whilst slagging off the Tories.

May has come in for mass criticism and mocking for her ‘soft’ interview on the One Show and yet that was a BBC interview…so whose fault is it if there was little rigour…in fact there were some probing, political questions….the critics just chose to ignore them, and that was not the purpose of the interview anyway…it was a ‘get to know the person’ job.  We constantly hear that May is ducking questions and yet she will face the Public on Question Time and there will be many ‘hard’ interviews in the course of the next few weeks.  Having Corbyn and May lob questions at each other serves little purpose other than what would be a circus entertainment.  May would proobably wipe the floor with Corbyn anyway.

Emma Barnett brought on Harry Fletcher who once worked on Corbyn’s campaign team…she introduced him as having left that team because of the chaos it was in.  You may have thought you’d be getting an expose of the Corbyn chaos….but not a bit of it because this was not at all true.  Fletcher told us he left because he was working as an unpaid volunteer and he was offered a paid job elsewhere.  He went on to say that Corbyn’s policies were pretty good and that he would be voting for him.  So yet more pro-Corbyn cheerleading slipped in under the radar.  Barnett then read out [to prove how much of a fearless journo she is] an email she’d received from a pro-Corbyn supporter who complained of  BBC ‘bias’ putting on such a critic of Corbyn.  Barnett said it was a good day when she was attacked by both sides….she then knew she was doing something right.  Well no, not really…this was a very obvious pro-Corbyn piece, policies great, will vote for him… so just because a Corbynista claims bias where there is none [none that is anti-Corbyn that is] doesn’t mean she has it right…it just means the Corbynista is an idiot or is part of the Corbynista’s campaign to intimidate the BBC with a barrage of complaints….a useful idiot.

What about the railways and renationalisation?  The BBC is actually pretty keen and sees little problem…

Renationalising actually happens from time to time anyway. The East Coast Main Line spent several years in public ownership after it was handed back to the government by National Express in 2009, before being privatised again in 2015.

It performed pretty well in public hands. It paid nearly £1bn in fees to the government and still managed to make a profit for the Treasury, while carrying more passengers and getting good passenger satisfaction scores. So there is some evidence that repeating that exercise each time a current rail franchise expires could work.

However all is definitely not what we are being told….the past is buried, the present is not understood and the future is a political football.  But more of that in the next post as this post is long enough.