Author Archives: Alan

Despite the major economic news being manufacturing is growing at its fastest rate in eight months the BBC was pretty much ignoring that and instead is blitzing us with stories about productivity, or the lack of, in the economy and are trying to present it as a result of ‘Austerity’….that’s despite the lack of productivity being a very old story.  Robert Peston was on the R4 news telling us that if we hadn’t had austerity growth would have been 15% higher…and so would wages….a Labour narrative and pure speculation…there is no counterfactual, Peston is claiming something he can’t prove…and therefore should not be saying it.

But who did he get that figure from in the first place?  An economist named John Van Reenen, who was an advisor to the Labour government and has always opposed austerity...even before it began...

Van Reenen, John (2010) Extreme austerity is the wrong medicine British Politics and Policy at LSE (28 Jun 2010)

Here is his thoughts on the Labour economy in 2007…..just before the SHTF….(not saying that he’s a bad economist but he had no idea that the worst recession in one hundred years was about to hit)

Labour’s Economic Legacy

John Van Reenen
The economy is probably the most successful legacy of the Blair years. Ironically, New Labour’s economic policies have been set by his heir, chancellor Gordon Brown.  Blair leaves behind an economy in better shape than any previous Labour leader.

Here we see where Peston gets the figure of 15% from…and it is the worst case scenario…why did he pick that?…

John Van Reenen of the LSE, who also disagreed with austerity, said “UK GDP is about 15% below where we would have expected on pre-crisis trends… Premature austerity has damaged UK welfare and, as I and others argued at the time, delaying consolidation would have left the UK in a much stronger position than it is today.”

 

Note that Peston’s article is one of those rapid rebuttals the BBC issues when things are going pear shaped for Labour…such as one hundred businessmen writing in the Telegraoph that Labour’s economic policies will damage the country just as Miliband is trying to say he is business friendly…

Who to trust – business leaders or economists?

 

Peston says…

On the day that more than 100 past and current business leaders have written to the Telegraph that the “Conservative-led government has been good for business and has pursued policies which have supported investment and job creation”, a survey of academic macro-economists has come up with a different conclusion.

 

Trouble is it wasn’t ‘on the day’...it was last Saturday this poll was released….the letter in the Telegraph appeared on Wednesday.

Here you can see the cogs working and evidence that he is trying to counter the Telegraph letter…

Now to be clear, this is not a scientifically robust poll of those who know best. But nor is the Telegraph’s letter – and those those who took part in the economists’ survey are no less distinguished in their field than the business signatories.

 

Who would I trust?  I’d follow the money and the people who make the money not those who have political axes to grind and don’t dirty their hands actually producing the stuff they talk so knowledgeably about.

Here is Peston’s unemotional report on productivity…

Weep for falling productivity

We should be both grateful and worried that British productivity has been so lousy since the great crash and recession.

Lousy only since the crash?  Hmmm…productivity in the UK in comparison to other countries has always been ‘lousy’…here’s what the IFS says……

The UK–US productivity gap narrowed over the late 1980s and early 1990s but has widened slightly since 2004. In 2008 – the latest year for which international comparisons are available – US worker s were 33% more productive than those in the UK. The UK’s lower level of productivity has contributed to a lower level of GDP per capita. In 2009 GDP per capita, measured in US dollars, was $37,391 in the UK and $46,008 in the US .

GDP was growing under Labour but what was the cause of that?  Was it productivity? or was it merely the huge number of immigrants flooding here increasing GDP but lowering wages and not actually adding to the economy overall?  The London School of Economics tells us that it was not a rise in productivity…..

Since 1997 total GDP growth has been driven mainly by increases in employment and capital (especially information technology) rather than increases in overall efficiency.

Even Peston’s new friend, John Van Reenen, admitted in 2007 that UK productivity was low under Labour…

Gordon Brown and British business leaders alike have jealously eyed the US “productivity miracle” for more than 10 years – after 1995 US output per hour growth doubled compared to the previous 20 years.

The US continues to lead in productivity, the measure of output per employee. According to the Office of National Statistics, GDP per worker in the US was 27% higher than in the UK in 2005.

Yet the UK is showing little sign of catching up.

 

Peston tells us…

The point is that a big contributor to the absence of any growth at all in output per worker and output per hour is that employment has grown much faster than national income….Lower productivity undermines the competitiveness of British firms in the global economy.

And the absence of productivity growth undermines the ability of British firms to increase our pay.

 

Many issues with that…first…we’ve always been less competitive as the IFS showed and Van Reneen admitted…second Peston claims lack of productivity undermines pay growth and that output per worker and output per hour are the measure of productivity.

Another way of measuring it would be to assess output per pound paid in wages….employers are keeping people in jobs at lower wages…but they are still producing the same amount….for less money…so productivity per pound is probably still good….or else why would employment be rising so fast?  After all employers are not charities they employ someone for a good reason, a reason that will result in profits for the business.

There is no ‘puzzle’ to the apparent lack of productivity…it is just that the wrong measure is being used.

Wages are part of the equation when measuring productivity….maybe not in the textbooks, or in BBC studios, but on the factory floor it is.

One reason wages are so low is because of the mass immigration and flood of cheap labour that means employers don’t have to compete for workers by offering higher wages.

Wonder why Peston doesn’t dwell on that?

The IFS, the BBC’s favourite economics thinktank……

Paul Johnson, Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies.…..was at Oxford with Ed Balls…

Johnson studied PPE at Oxford University between 1985 and 1988, when his tutorial partner at Keble College was Balls. Both got firsts.

He also worked for the Labour government at the…

Department for Education and had three years at the Treasury while Gordon Brown was chancellor.

Just of interest, the BBC’s other goto think tank, the King’s Fund, is headed by Chris Ham…the man who advised Labour on their NHS reforms….so does he have a dog in the fight when he criticises the Coalition’s reforms…reforms which might suggest his own weren’t up to scratch?  I think he might….especially when he gets headlines like this from the BBC...’NHS reorganisation was disastrous, says King’s Fund.’

Never mind…Overall public satisfaction with the NHS increased to 65 per cent in 2014 – the second highest level since the British Social Attitudes survey began in 1983. Dissatisfaction with the service fell to an all-time low of 15 per cent.

Not as if Ham bigs up Labour policies now is it?...“Andy Burnham has set out an ambitious and wide-ranging vision for the NHS and social care. It throws down the gauntlet to the other parties to set out their plans ahead of the general election…His prescription for change is ambitious and his vision of delivering integrated care, co-ordinated around the needs of the individual, will be widely welcomed “

The IFS and the King’s Fund are guaranteed a favourable report from the BBC whenever they utter something but I’m not sure why….they do seem ultimately more Labour friendly than they should be, giving Labour policies far more credence than they merit whilst being highly critical of the government.

The IFS were very quick off the mark to attack the Conservatives over their claim of a £3000 tax hike by Labour and yet the IFS admits it doesn’t know what either party intends….and the figures that are available back up the Tory estimate.  The IFS can certainly say the claim is an estimate but can’t dismiss it using any actual figures…as indeed they weren’t able to merely suggesting the Tory claim was ‘unhelpful’….certainly unhelpful to Labour.

One BBC correspondent tells us that ‘The Office of National Statistics (ONS) released two important sets of data today. The headlines have been grabbed by the better-than-expected GDP numbers and I have no doubt that growth will feature heavily in the political battle of the next few weeks.’

The rising GDP figures did make the headlines….here’s the Telegraph’s...‘UK economy grew at fastest rate for nine years in 2014’  and its opening paragraph…

Quarterly expansion came in at 0.6pc in the last three months of 2014, leading to overall yearly growth reaching the same levels as before the financial crisis in 2006.

 

The BBC saying ‘Yep, incomes are up….but oh so minisculely….only 0.2% more than in 2010’. …or as Robert Peston says….‘Now let’s be clear about this. That is basically a sneeze higher. It is trivial. It’s loose change at the bottom of your purse. But it is higher.’  It takes the BBC half the report before they get to the eyecatching GDP figures and then this was the sole comment…‘It came as figures for economic growth in 2014 were revised upwards to 2.8% and separate indicators suggested economic confidence was at a 12-year high.‘

That’s it, no more to see here, move along says the BBC…..no mention of the economy growing the fastest it has for over 9 years…might be important when talking about ‘living standards’ perhaps.

It’s interesting the BBC starts the report by saying ‘The Conservatives and Lib Dems have heralded pre-election figures‘ rather than reporting that ‘The Office of National Statistics says…..’...kind of makes it look like the BBC is trying to say the Coalition is hyping the figures.

Peston also says...’It has been a recovery much slower than in any recession since 1945, but it is now reasonable to say that living standards are back to where they were at the time of the last election.’

He does the usual BBC thing as another BBC correspondent does...’taking five years to recover standards of living is a very slow recovery’  missing out the very important context for that…..from the BBC’s favourite economics guru, Paul Johnson of the IFS…..

In fairness we should remind ourselves of the scale of the task the Government took on. The deficit (that is, the amount the Government spends in a year minus the amount it raises) reached £157 billion in 2009/10 as a result of the deepest recession in around 100 years. It is still hovering around £100 billion this year.

Yes…..hard to forget ‘the deepest recession in around 100 years’ surely?  Maybe that’s why it took so much more time to get over it.  Important no?…especially when they quote Balls saying …‘ speaking at a campaign event in Swindon, said Conservatives were “telling people you have never had it so good” despite it being the “slowest recovery for 100 years”.’

Why quote one and not the other?  They are linked.

Peston goes on to say…‘The politically resonant number published today is that real household disposable income per head on 31 December 2014 was 0.19% higher than it was at the end of May 2010.’

So the ‘politically resonant figure’ is…‘household disposable income’.…why then does the BBC continue to quote Labour’s £1600 fall  in income figure rather than the Tory £900 rise in income….it is the Tory figure that is based upon disposable income after all…or as the BBC dismissively puts it…‘Mr Osborne’s favourite measure of standards of living: Real Household Disposable Income (RHDI) per capita.’   Labour base their figure on ‘real wages’ that doesn’t take into account how much cash actually ends up in a person’s hand at the end of the week including all income from other sources such as tax credits and welfare and is therefore not a true indicator of people’s income and not an indicator of their living standards.

The BBC trying its best to downplay any ‘good news’ that might make the Government’s economic policies look successful….whilst neglecting to challenge Labour claims in the same ‘ridiculous’ way.

We’ve had Norman Smith declaring the Tory economy as ‘utterly terrifying’ and forecasting something of an Orwellian ‘Wigan Pier’ type future for the country and now we have Evan Davis declaring that Tory comments on Labour’s plans to raise £3000 worth of taxes from every family over 5 yearswere ‘ridiculous’.

But are they?  The IFS within hours of the Tory claim leapt into action to denounce it just as they did the Tory pledge to cut welfare by £12 bn…looking at the IFS website it is hard to find anything similarly critical of Labour….but, as the BBC insists, they are ‘independent’.

If Labour were to make no cuts and borrowed nothing then to clear the £70 billion deficit it would cost around £3,000 per household over the course of 5 years.

The Today programme  (around 06:10) was going to investigate the Tory claim in a measured and indepth way, or so I thought.  What they actually gave us, and described as a ‘tough interview by Evan’, was a clip of Evan Davis berating Grant Shapps and doing his usual trick of preventing any answer to develop by interrupting with claims that ‘It’s ridiculous’. Justin Webb told us that ‘Evan gets very upset about the figures when he thinks they are being misused…..and quite right too!’  No bias there then.

And that was that…the BBC’s most prestigious news and current affairs programme resorts to low abuse and playing clips that don’t explain anything but are purely there for the entertainment and amusement of the ‘Hampstead lefties’ ensconced at the BBC and the Guardian.

But who is being ‘ridiculous’?

Are the Tories right…at least in making the assumptions it does?

Here the one reliable journalist at the BBC agrees that Labour will have a £30 billion blackhole in their economic plans……

‘Andrew Neil: You would borrow more, wouldn’t you?

Andrew Neil: To bridge the deficit you have to borrow more. You’re going to borrow £30 billion a year simply to pay for public investment. That’s part of what you’re going to do – correct?

Lucy Powell: We are going to balance the books by the current expenditure by end of the Parliament.

Andrew Neil: And borrow £30 billion  a year for public investment

In 2010 Miliband was proposing a 50-50 split between raising taxes and spending cuts….

I’m told that the new Labour leader – who taught economics at Harvard during his sabbatical in 2003-2004 and chaired the Treasury’s Council of Economic Advisers for a year upon his return to the UK – is considering switching to a 1:1 (or 50 per cent to 50 per cent) ratio of spending cuts to tax rises, as advocated by Balls during the leadership campaign.

The IFS in 2014 was telling us that the state of the deficit means we will have to have….

  £70 billion of tax increases or spending cuts over the course of the next Parliament if the Government are going to balance the books.

The IFS admits that Labour may be looking at having to borrow up to that £30 billion to avoid making some cuts…

Ed Balls has said he wants to balance the books by then on current spending. That allows him more wiggle room – about £28 billion of it.

So that leaves £42 billion to find from cuts or taxes for Labour on the IFS figures…..and a 50-50 split would be £21 billion in extra taxes….which is higher than the Tories predict for Labour at £15 bn…but the IFS now claims….

So on the face of it Labour might need a fiscal tightening of just over £18 billion by 2017–18…Obviously, such a tightening – if half is to come from tax rises – would imply a net tax rise of around £9 billion in 2017–18 (and not the £15 billion the Conservatives suggest).

The IFS forgets the previous ‘fiscal tightening’ of £7.5 billion they mention earlier in their statement…taking it to nearly £26 billion…and a tax rise of not £9bn but £13 billion or so, nearer the £15 billion the Tories suggest….so one time the IFS predicts the tax rise would need be £21 billion, then their figures suggest £13 billion…but they claim it’s nearer £9 billion….who is guessing what?

Looks more like the IFS figures don’t add up than the Tories….the IFS rushed out their statement within hours of the Conservative claim and that being the case seems more politically motivated than based on sound number crunching…..paradoxically the IFS in their opening statement made clear that around £21 billion in tax take over 5 years was in fact what the Tories predicted…

The Conservative Party have claimed that under Labour there would be a £3,028 tax rise for every working household. This calculation assumes that Labour would increase taxes on working households by £7.5 billion in 2016–17 and £15 billion from 2017–18 onwards, with the £3,028 being the average tax rise cumulated over all years through to 2019–20.

So the Tory figures match the IFS’s…..or the IFS figures that you have to dig for in other IFS comments but which they don’t admit as their own estimate in their latest rebuttal.

Having denounced the Tories for ‘guesswork’ the IFS goes into detail about Labour’s policies in order to ‘prove’ the Tories wrong…but then they say this…..,

It is also not entirely clear – at least to us – when Labour would want to achieve current budget balance.

There is real uncertainty about what path the Labour party want to follow for the public finances. The Conservatives have been clearer about what they want to achieve, but they have not been clear about how they would achieve it.

There is little value in bandying around numbers which suggest either party would increases taxes by an average of £3,000 for each working household. We don’t know what they will do after the election. But neither of the two main parties has said anything to suggest that is what they are planning.

 

So..’It is also not entirely clear – at least to us …There is real uncertainty about what path the Labour party want… We don’t know what they will do after the election’. ……and yet they can still ‘disprove’ the Tory claim and ‘prove’ the Labour case!

The Tory figures are indeed ‘guesswork’ but based upon the information that is out there and what Miliband and co, and indeed the IFS, have said……the IFS seemed altogether too eager to undermine the claim and the BBC all too eager to jump on the bandwagon.

What is the price of betrayal these days?  It used to be 30 pieces of silver when the religious took to persecuting a man they didn’t like.

The Church Of England seems to have forgotten its origins, its history and its own religious principles when it makes completely spurious allegations about someone it wants to turn into a hate figure because of his politics.

Simon Heffer defends his friend Enoch Powell from a completely unfounded allegation by a Bishop of the Church of England who should know better.

What is also of interest is that Heffer tells of a previous false allegation made against Powell, this time by the BBC…how times change…or not.

For decades, Enoch Powell has long been a bug-bear of the liberal Establishment.

He has been demonised not least because to attack his memory is a quick and effective way for them to score points by setting out their own political correctness.

What better way for some mischievous Leftist priest to damage Enoch further than by linking him with the current rash of stories about child abuse?

In 1998, just after Enoch died, the BBC broadcast a programme in which they railed at Enoch for his hypocrisy. They said this scourge of mass immigration had visited the West Indies in 1953 to recruit black labour for the NHS. I was told of the story before the programme was broadcast and informed its researcher that Enoch had never been to the West Indies in his life. I was told, effectively, that I was lying, and it was broadcast.

A black clergywoman, then resident in London, talked at length of Enoch having recruited her as a nurse. The story was rubbish.

Detailed investigation by the BBC complaints department found that the woman had been recruited after a visit to her island by Jack Profumo, not Enoch Powell at all, and the Corporation was forced to make a grovelling on-air apology in peak time.

I have long dreamt of the day when ignorant politicians and Establishment figures would stop manipulating Enoch’s memory for their own advantage. But I never thought I would hear of bishops of the Church of England doing it.

The allegations are a monstrous lie. That the lie appears to have been retailed by a priest is beyond contempt.

There must be an investigation and, for all the distress this outrage has caused, there must be a reckoning.

And had to laugh at this from another source…

On becoming Minister of Health in 1960, Enoch Powell agreed that there were risks of rigidity in a great, but centralised, service. He saw three trends running side by side: the growth of community care and after-care of the sick, relieving the hospital; the development of preventive and remedial measures; and the more intensive and efficient use of hospital accommodation. He wanted fewer beds in newer hospitals. The three separate financial systems for hospitals, local health authorities and general practice were a great weakness. The BMJ wished his stay in the Ministry long enough for the provision of effective remedies.  When in due course he moved from the Ministry, he was one of the few ministers whose departure was a source of ‘deep regret’ to the profession.

Isn’t what Powell wanted for the health service exactly what is being enacted now with great opposition from the very same ‘profession’?

Also of interest is that in 1959 there were 191,000 nurses in England and Wales for a population of around 48 million (251 patients per nurse) whilst today, in England alone, there are over 350,000 for a population of 54 million (154 patients per nurse)….Wales has 84,000 nurses.  The budget for the NHS in 1948 was £9 billion in todays money….the NHS now costs over £100 bn.    Seems we forget just how good times have become.

Not BBC bias per se but evidence of the hypocrisy and attempts to use race as an issue to silence people that is so redolent of the left…..including the BBC….for example the BBC’s Phil Mackie trying to claim that the fuss over the Trojan Horse plot was all about racism, Islamophobia and paranoia.

Labour MP Simon Danczuk seems to be of like mind when votes are at stake and his principles go out the window…..

Mrs Danczuk isn’t the only one to display her boobs in public…hubby does too having reported Katie Hopkins to the police for linking Pakistani men to the Rochdale abuse….after he raised a Pakistani flag in Rochdale for some reason…..perhaps he should turn himself in to the police…if only for hypocrisy after having said this….

It was a tough subject for politicians and authorities to address, because most of the perpetrators were of Pakistani origin, and the victims predominantly white. Danczuk made headlines by saying it would be “daft” to ignore the “race element” of the case. In the car, he explains why:

“I’ve only ever said a very small minority of people in the Asian community have a very unhealthy view of women… It’s a complex jigsaw, and ethnicity is just one of the pieces. Class is a major factor, night-time economy is a factor, in terms of this type of on-street grooming, not sexual abuse per se.

“One reason to raise it is so we know how to combat it. The political reason is because it takes the wind out of the sails of the extreme right, because you’ve got a mainstream politician talking about it; you don’t rely on the EDL or the BNP talking about it.”

 

‘Daft to ignore the race element’?….but he wants to lock up those who mention it….whilst himself playing the race card to win votes by pandering to Pakistani ‘nationalism’…and why are British people of Pakistani heritage flying a foreign flag?

Simon Danczuk….George Galloway mark II?

Listening to the news on R4 and there was no mention of the Front National in the French elections…a following report on the Today programme eventually mentioned them and I got the impression that they had received a drubbing from the French electorate, especially when the correspondent told us that the voters had ‘united to keep them out’ then continuing with the claim that ‘it was a good night’…no mention was made of how well the FN had actually done.

The Telegraph has a different take on things….

Sunday’s vote was also triumph for the anti-immigration and Eurosceptic Front National, which is all but certain to see a big jump in its total number of councillors, from only two. “The historic fact of tonight is the arrival of the Front National … its score in the second round means that Ms Le Pen’s strategy to try to build a grassroots army of local officials to shore up her ambitions for the French presidency is firmly on track.

Manuel Valls, the prime minister, said that the Front National’s gains in the local elections were a sign of lasting upheaval in the French political landscape.

And did the French electorate ‘unite to keep them out’ as the BBC claims?...

As ever in France’s two-round elections, voters from left and right united in round two to keep the National Front from power, our correspondents adds.

Like that ‘as ever’.

The Telegraph thinks its the way the elections are run that accounts for the eventual outcome……

Marine le Pen’s Front National would, due to unfavourable electoral arithmetic, fail to win any departments but can claim a breakthrough because it will now have councillors across France. “This will be the base for the great victories of tomorrow,” said Ms Le Pen.

 

The BBC being very selective with the truth…..just as it did with UKIP when it had an overwhelming vote in eleections….the BBC mentioning the lower polling Greens but not UKIP in their reports.

The BBC et al have long tried to avoid the obvious link between Islam and Jihad, proclaiming Islam to be a religion of peace and as noted on this site, under the BBC’s ‘rules’ Muhammed would not have been a Muslim…

According to the BBC’s narrative Muhammed would not be a Muslim as his whirlwind and extremely violent campaign across the Middle East to impose Islam upon the land and its peoples has remarkable similarities to the ISIS blitz….and as we know, ISIS are not ‘real Muslims’.

 

But this rule doesn’t just apply to Muslims apparently…the Guardian has decided that Jesus was not a Christian…

Christianity didn’t begin until a century after the crucifixion; Jesus and all his apostles died Jews.

So Christ wasn’t a Christian? He didn’t follow his own teachings then…ones that presumably were ‘Christian’ because Christ begat them?

In this case the ‘insurgents’ are Fox News and a film made by Bill O’Reilly…..the problem apparently is that O’Reilly doesn’t relate the ‘facts’…his film just isn’t ‘history’.

And the Bible and the Koran are history?

Funny how the Guardian is suddenly fascinated by the contents of a religion and its history when the rightwing Fox News is involved but when Muslim terrorists are involved and claim religious sanction for their actions the Guardian et al suddenly lose interest in the facts and history of the religion…such as ISIS being the modern equivalent of Muhammed blitzing the Middle East and doing a bit of head chopping on the way…or that indeed the religion does obligate Muslims to go on Jihad to ‘defend’ other Muslims and their lands from the Infidel.

Before Naughtie’s hatchet job on Cameron he tried slipping the scalpel into Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt at 08:10.

Naughtie begins by telling us that the NHS and its future is at the heart of the General Election….which is why it important that news organisations like the BBC get their facts straight.

But do they?

Naughtie claims that the Kings Fund has said that the ‘government has produced an NHS that has run out of money and was operating at the limits of its abilities.’

The government produced an NHS? Aren’t the problems in the NHS due to an aging population, a population that is rapidly increasing due to Labour’s immigration policy, ever more expensive drugs and the increasing availability of modern, complex and expensive medical procedures that the Public demand?

The government hasn’t just maintained NHS funding but increased it…..so I can’t quite see how Naughtie can characterise this as the government’s fault per se.

Naughtie claims that the money has ‘been wasted on a vast reorganisation of the NHS.’

Hunt tells him that the reforms, as said by the King’s Fund, save £1.5 billion per year.

Naughtie says that ‘There’s no argument about the numbers’…despite him previously claiming there were no savings only ‘money wasted’ and then ignores his own statement and claims that ‘the idea that the reforms have saved money is an idea that most people in the NHS do not accept…the costs of reorganisation are very, very high indeed!’

So despite Hunt and the King’s Fund saying that the reforms save money, and Naughtie agreeing that there’s no argument about the numbers, he then completely dismisses that and goes on to claim that the costs are enormous.

Here is what the King’s Fund says (Odd how one thing the Fund says is the gold standard, the next it’s rubbish depending on whether it supports Naughtie’s view or not)…

The government estimates the total cost of the reforms to be in the region of £1.5 billion – mainly consisting of the financial costs of closing down abolished organisations, setting up new ones and making redundancy payments. But it is argued that this has been offset by cumulative financial savings from abolishing a managerial tier of the NHS and cutting the number of commissioning staff of nearly £5 billion over the parliament (and an estimated £1.5 billion per year thereafter).

Others have queried these estimates of both the costs (too small) and the savings (too big). And while estimating a net financial benefit from the reforms, the National Audit Office has questioned the detail of the government’s cost estimates.

As finances have tightened, the NHS has done well to generally maintain increasing trends in workloads. It is not surprising then that the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics suggest productivity across the NHS in the UK (not just England) for the three years 2010 to 2012 has improved by 1.6 per cent per year. This is more than the long-run average of 0.7 per cent – but is much lower than the 3 per cent to 4 per cent per year needed to close the funding gap.

 

So he King’s Fund admits that the ONS says that there is a net benefit and that productivity has also increased.

But it also says this revealing statement….

Even with the net financial benefit, such organisational restructuring and reviewing of central budgets did not require the total reform or an act of parliament – the squeeze on funding would have been enough to ensure this would happen.

So the organisational restructuring and review of budgets would still have had to have happened due to the financial constraints….so there was no escape from them reform or no reform.

It is also notable that the NHS has the second highest approval rating in its history from the Public…that’s despite what Naughtie claims to be a very, very expensive and vast reform of the NHS.

It seems that Naughtie had his agenda and stuck to it regardless of the facts….so on the subject of the NHS, at the heart of the General Election, we get absolute rubbish from one of the BBC’s top interviewers on its premier news programme.

Might as well have Clarkson on the show punching those he disapproves of and raving about those he likes….about as informative as Naughtie and vastly more entertaining.

Jim Naughtie has run the BBC rule over the Labour and Conservative leaders to see how they measure up.

Any guesses?

Here’s the Miliband run down…..though not running him down in the slightest.  It takes 4 minutes before Naughtie can find anything critical to say of Miliband and then it’s only to ask if he is a bit indecisive…the answer of course being absolutely not…it’s a sign of intellect and considered thought.  The only other critical word that Naughtie could come up with was ‘defensive’…but then again is that critical or was it intended to give the impression of Miliband being under unwarranted and unfair pressure from attacks on him by his opponents?

The first part of the piece was in fact not really about Miliband but about his family and background…adding, as Naughtie might have said, ’emotional colour’ to the story, value added sympathy for Miliband.  We heard of him being steeped in the leftwing politics of his family which almost had the flavour of a crusade…and we had a clip of Ralph Miliband attacking the vested interests of politicians, the military and big business….so trying to link father and son’s ideologies despite Miliband trying to distance himself from that in his attack on the Daily Mail.

Naughtie suggests that this might seem like a sort of privileged background but, Naughtie tells us, Miliband had to read up on the politics, argue his position and trade ideas…going to Oxford University as his father wanted….so a good, obedient boy doing his duty to his father….and one who is up for a political argument….has Naughtie moulded that to fit in with Miliband’s claim that he is up for the fight?

All the people brought on to discuss Miliband praise him or at least have nothing negative to say…Damien McBride suggests that Miliband was a fish out of water in the Brown camp….alluding to Miliband claiming to be a new kind of politician?  We know of course, because the BBC tells us, that we all hate the ‘old politics’, so Miliband must be a breath of fresh air!

We hear that Miliband is not a fan of the ‘dark arts’ of politics or the Media gladhanding…neither is he a fan of shortermism in politics….and indeed yes, he’s a different kind of politician..one that wants to think about the world.

Tessa Jowell, a supporter of David Miliband, didn’t say why she didn’t support Ed but told us that David only wishes Ed well…so that’s alright then, despite all the backstabbing the love’s still there…David forgives, so should you.

Jowell later tells us that Miliband is resilient, calm under fire and has his own brand of authority and that people see through the attacks on his personality.

Naughtie says the polls might suggest otherwise but the reply is that his stance on some subjects has caught people’s imagination…the attacks on Murdoch and the Mail and the price freeze on energy for instance.

Naughtie asks if the Public will decide where to place their vote based on ideas and not the man.

Despite that Naughtie then goes on to ask, considering that politics is a tough business, has Miliband got what it takes?

The answer naturally enough was yes, Miliband is absolutely tough enough!

All in all an easy going, sympathetic assessment of Miliband with little of note to say in a critical vein…nothing about Syria or the Unions or the total lack of credibility of his major policy announcements from the energy price freeze to pre-distribution or his latest idea to cap the profits of private companies working for the NHS….an impossible task….just ask those who seek to tax Amazon and Co….and nothing about the serious ructions in the Labour Party about his leadership, and no mention that Europe is just as contentious inside Labour as inside the Tory Party.

David Cameron had in contrast a much rougher ride from Naughtie (08:44) who derided Cameron, his upbringing, his personality and his policies, and the people who came on to discuss Cameron were mostly lukewarm, damning in their faint praise or hostile to him whilst Miliband’s were all on-board and on-message.

Naughtie began by saying that the ‘some might say’ overprivileged Cameron was a pragmatist and not an ideologue…but it wasn’t a good pragmitism..it was based upon Cameron’s lack of believe in anything.  This set the scene for the rest of the piece in which Naughtie constructed the case against Cameron to prove Naughtie’s initial claim.

Naughtie asks Andrew Mitchell ‘Of whom is [Cameron] a son?’

Mitchell suggests MacMillan as a possibility…Naughtie claims that many in the Tory party would regard MacMillan as a man who believed in nothing and just wanted to keep the show on the road…remarkable that Naughtie has that to hand….perhaps he already knew ‘MacMillan’ might be the reply to his question about Cameron being the ‘son of’…and had his putdown ready as he asks ‘Is that Cameron’s essence?’

We are told by Naughtie that Cameron harks back to the era of MacMillan who was a man of the ‘regiment, the gentleman’s club and the grouse moor but who liked his politics stripped of ideology.’ Another put down and an allusion to Cameron’s alleged distance from real life.

The Tory Party is divided we are told….and reluctant to support a man who will not fight a battle of beliefs.

Naughtie asks if Cameron cares about what his backbenchers think…we hear not.  Naughtie has his cue and takes that not caring about what the backbenchers might think to Cameron not caring about anything and says that ‘not caring’ is a badge politicians don’t like to wear but it is inescapable that Cameron likes to glide above the fight…..Naughtie then claiming Cameron doesn’t care…..suggesting an aloof aristo out of touch with the world and the people….hmmm…a Labour message.

We hear that it is inevitable that Cameron carries the stamp of his Etonian school days and that his critics see him as a Flashman character…cue helpful clip of what the BBC believes is such an attitude.

We then hear, after being told that Cameron likes to dodge a fight about his ideals, that he is too aggressive and relishes a fight.

Then it’s rapidly on to his management style or lack of…apparently Downing Street is not a perfectly tuned machine, it’s run on instinct and depends on last minute decisions rather than considered and measured thought….more short term reactionism than long term planning.

Naughtie happily accepts that description and then claims that such a way of running things has consequences…such as the apparently disastrous NHS reforms that Downing Street didn’t seem to be in charge of…Cameron is not a good manager and didn’t realise what was going in…really? or is that just a BBC fantasy?

Cameron, we are told, is distant, ramshackle and lazy in his approach to government.

Naughtie slams him with a sly comment that ‘no one doubts his cleverness’ and goes on to describe the Tory Party as completely split and unmanageable….no mention of Labour’s own internal squabbles in Miliband’s hagiography which are just as serious.

Naughtie then goes back to his original contention, now ‘proved’, that Cameron is more a pragmatist than a man with any beliefs.

Pretty damning for Cameron whilst Miliband gets away without a mark on him.  Miliband is thoughtful, longterm, and has an ideology that he believes in and will fight for…Cameron is a failure as prime minister, a charlatan just looking to stay in power and willing to do and say anything and adopt any short term policy to do so.  Business as usual from the BBC.