What standard has the BBC’s election coverage reached? Hard to really tell accurately as no one can watch it 24/7…of the bits I have caught some has been good, some questionable either for competence or bias, some is outright bias. However now that the Tory manifesto has been released into the wild we can at least get a feeling for the coverage overall….and it seems to be pretty much what we have come to expect from the BBC….Labour gets a positive spin and a less than rigorous going over whilst the Tory policies get forensically examined and torn apart. Pienaar used to specialise in this approach telling us there may be some problems with Labour policies but you know what, they could work and they sound good, whereas the Tories’ are pretty well unworkable and ill-thought out.
As mentioned in a previous post we’ve had Kuenssberg explaining away Labour’s nationalisation as ‘buying assets’ and so essentially costless, today we had Nicky Campbell telling us that ‘many people are worried about immigration’….what the BBC concerned about immigration????…hold on, don’t be daft…Campbell finishes with….‘they are worried about immigration being stopped…because the NHS will grind to a halt.’
Campbell went along with all the critics of the government…and all the callers were critics, Campbell had to ‘assure’ us that this was just how things were and make a plea for Tory supporters to call in. Of course that should mean he would be sure to be even more rigorous in challenging callers…but no, he at best nodded in agreement and at worst fully agreed and even added his two penneth worth as above. No challenge to the woman who criticised Tory care povision and went on to say all care homes should be closed as that would free up 60,000 nurses for the NHS…Campbell seemed to see no problem there as he treated her as if she was speaking complete common sense.
Then we had the actual manifesto launch with the big talking point being the sale of homes to pay for care. On World at One Martha Kearney mentioned a couple of times that ‘people are calling the policy a ‘dementia tax’…er…just who are these people? Oh….yes…it was Jeremy Corbyn. So the BBC picks up a highly perjorative and loaded phrase that’s been ‘weaponised’ by Labour in order to demonise the Tories and the BBC tries to get it into common usage by repeating it again and again. This is the BBC that supposedly doesn’t use words or phrases that are obviously highly political and which they claim can mean different things to different people. The BBC that doesn’t like to use the word ‘terrorism’ if it can help it but does like to use the term ‘bedroom tax’ and now ‘dementia tax’….guess their principles go out the window when it is a word that can be used to attack the ‘Right’.
And why did the BBC bring in Andrew Dilnot? He was on just about every programme throughout the day giving us the benefit of his wisdom. He is highly political and has his own agenda to sell in regard to how social care is paid for……you can see how the Left enjoyed his intervention as illustrated by the Guardian
Tory social care plans will leave people helpless, says former adviser
Andrew Dilnot, who reviewed social care for coalition, expresses alarm at proposal that will mean elderly are ‘completely on their own’
Of course they are not completely on their own…they do not have to sell their house whilst alive and if they use up all but £100,000 worth of their home’s value the state then picks up the rest of the bill….and so if you have less than £100,000 in your home’s value, or rent, you pay nothing.
He thinks the Tory proposal is unfair and there should be a universal spread of the cost through out society, rich and poor to pay…pay somehow…in the programme I heard him suggest we pay by getting insurance cover…but previously he has suggested higher taxes…..both systems mean the poorest will have to cough up more money they can ill afford…how exactly is that fairer than having the most wealthy pay for their own care as much as possible?
What we don’t hear much of on the BBC is that the previous cap on what a care patient could keep of the value of their house was around £23,000…that is, any value above that could be used to pay for care…and note that cap was going to be raised to £118,000 anyway by 2020….so pretty much as May proposes now….you will be able to keep 4 times the value of what you can now….or more if the costs do not actually use up all the value.
Dilnot’s logic seems somewhat skewed and not thought through….but nice of the BBC to give such a critic of the Tory position such a big platform to strut his stuff.