Yesterday Ed Miliband launched Labour’s comeback with a raft of proposals to bring riches and a sense of fair play back to Britain. A Plan C rather than Plan B, as he seems to have dumped most of what Balls proposes….lowering taxes and spending more.
This was a major speech from Miliband but it raised hardly a ripple on the BBC news front.
There is this but it hardly bothers to go into any depth on the matter…except for one telling insight from Iain Watson, BBC political correspondent:
‘Ed Miliband unveils ‘predistribution’ plan to fix economy….this is the bit Labour aren’t saying too much about at the moment – it is also means putting more pressure on employers to pay higher wages.’
Why is that the sole intelligent comment by the BBC? Such a policy is major game changer with huge implications for the economy…and yet…hardly a squeak out of the BBC.
The fact that this article received around 800 comments should suggest a level of interest that the BBC is not reflecting in its coverage.
This is Nick Robinson’s, the BBC’s senior political correspondent, offering:
‘Predistribution: The Labour leader’s latest Big Idea
The Labour leader’s latest Big Idea may not be catchy but it is interesting’
So Miliband’s ‘Big Idea’ is merely ‘interesting‘? Not interesting enough to actually examine it and what it actually means for business…which is essentially that if taxes stay the same higher wages will be paid by the businesses rather than ‘subsidised’ as they are now by big business and the highest earners in the country in the form of tax credits. Wage costs for small and medium businesses will skyrocket…and many will go out of business.
In effect they will be paying the price of the Labour Party funnelling funds into its own election campaign….ala Gordon Brown…and using them to buy votes by ‘funding’ the NHS or schools…but it is smoke and mirrors….it is a stealth tax on smaller businesses that is at present ‘paid’ by big business and the ‘fatcats’.
You can see why the BBC don’t want to look too closely at that proposal….it is in effect a huge tax increase…hardly something to encoursge business growth and a successful economy.
It didn’t even merit a mention on the Today programme…allegedly Britain’s premier political programme.
Here’s the full text of Ed Miliband’s speech at the Stock Exchange, in which he introduces a new idea to British politics: ‘predistribution’.
Here is some of that speech as given to the New Statesman in which he puts the boot into Brown, and of course Brown’s protégé Balls:
‘Ed Miliband: It would be “politically crackers” to spend like the last Labour government The comeback interview.
The next Labour government is going to take over in very different circumstances and is going to have to have a very different prospectus than the last.
And if we came along and said ‘look, we can just carry on like the last Labour government did’ – I mean it’s politically crackers to do that, because we wouldn’t win the election and we wouldn’t deserve to win the election. We can’t say: ‘Look, we just want to sort of carry on where we left off, you know, the electorate was wrong, we were right, thanks very much…” It’s not realistic.
Ed Balls is not going to go to the Labour party conference and say, ‘It’s going to be the old model where we have economic growth and then we’ll use lots of that money to spend lots, to spend billions of pounds.’It’s not realistic and it’s not credible.’
Here is a final rather interesting comment from Miliband:
‘Just as the pre-war consensus could not solve the problems Britain faced in 1945.
Just as the postwar consensus could not solve the problems of the late 1970s.
So the ideas of the last three decades will not solve the central economic challenges we face.
Instead we need a new agenda.
An agenda sufficient to the scale of the challenge, and to the demand of the British people for change.‘
The postwar consensus could not solve the problems of the late 70’s? We need a new agenda? Sounds an awful lot like he accepts Thatcherism was necessary to put Britain back on it’s feet.
Funny he should say that because just as the BBC ignore the present Labour Party they continue to harp back to the Thatcher era…..in The Reunion they delve into the Poll Tax Riots….
This week’s edition of ‘The Reunion’ covers the story of the Poll Tax, with contributions from:
* Kenneth Baker, Minister of Local Government and later Environment Secretary
* Chris Brearley, Civil Servant (Department of the Environment) who was part of the team devising and implementing the tax
* David Magor, then assistant Treasurer, Oxford City Council, who had to collect the tax
* Danny Burns, organiser of the Bristol Anti-Poll Tax protest
* Chris Moyers, founder of a protest group in Edinburgh against the Scottish Poll Tax.
Note the cast of players from the time.
Kenneth Baker, Tory, is vastly outnumbered. Two of the players being ‘neutral’ planners or administrators but who can be relied on to relate tales of woe in the process of introducing the Poll Tax whilst that last two are protestors against the Poll Tax….Baker is left basically alone to ‘defend’ the Poll tax…and even he isn’t too keen to do that…so it was all down to the evil Thatcher.
And apparently this was the final nail in the coffin of ‘Thatcher’s Britain’…..a term used as abuse rather than a mere descriptive.
You may think that such a tale is of interest from a historical point of view…and indeed it is, having different voices from the various ‘camps’ speaking.
If left at that it could have slipped under the radar but naturally, this being the BBC, every programme has a message…this one about what we can learn from the past to use in the here and now…..
Apart from the ‘fact’ that Thatcher was a symbol of the Rich attacking the Poor, the Big Message is that people can FIGHT BACK…and it looks like we are heading for another ‘Poll Tax’ with changes to social security and the introduction of Universal Credits….there is potential for disaster.
So listen up boys and girls, dust off the scaffold poles, dig out your balaclavas, get out your superglue, prepare for battle….stay tuned in for more guidance from your friendly caring BBC.
Not saying of course that the BBC would ever dream of inciting riots and civil disobedience in order to confront government policies that the old Marxists of the BBC find unpalatable but it does look that way doesn’t it?
The BBC practically ignore the Official Opposition’s major relaunch speech but take a leap into the past, a leap over 13 years of disastrous Labour misrule, continuing its obsession with all things Thatcher as if just the mention of her name will act as a sort of voodoo talisman to ward off present day Toryism and bring people out onto the streets in the hope of ousting Cameron as they claim to have ousted Thatcher.
Programmes like this are a prime example of why the BBC should be reformed so that it is the face of ‘responsible broadcasting’ or it is stripped of its license to print money and made to go out into the world and earn its living. Tunes might suddenly Change when They have to reflect real life and the real views of people on the street who then have the option of not ‘buying’ their politicised bilge.