Author Archives: David Vance

This is interesting. Terry Smith on his blog Straight Talking has engaged with someone posting a comment on how the BBC in the interests of “balance” is not helping provide a serious forum to discuss the issue of austerity and cuts. Give it a read!

“Where does Ann Pettifor come from? The information I can find online suggest she has never held a job in the real world by which I mean working in a for profit organisation, and lists amongst her accomplishments being a former advisor to Ken Livingston. Birds of a feather do flock together. She is well known to the BBC staff which is a telling sign, and we are dealing with the full blown champagne socialist with the apartment in W1 and cottage in the country. How convenient to get the BBC car to pick her up from W1, take her to the Newsnight studio and waft her back after she has dispensed wisdom to us about how to solve the debt crisis with such gems as having discovered this new source of money which the rest of us had overlooked-the Bank of England can just lend to the government. Utter buffoonery-you are right, my face does tend to betray my views.

In a previous Newsnight appearance she told us that Keynes’ theories were tried in the Great Depression and so must be employed now, thereby displaying total ignorance of both Keynes and the Great Depression (Keynes’ main works were not published until 1933 and 1936), let alone a total lack of comprehension about what will work now. And described my views that the government is heavily indebted as ‘rubbish’. I can only hope she’s up for round three.

Funnily enough I had a remarkably similar thought about Question Time. The approach seems to be along the lines of saying “Let’s have a vote, who wants more money?” and then when there is a massive majority from the show of hands, or in Question Times’ case the loud applause, assuming that’s the matter resolved. You are right about David Starkey and about Dimbleby-a state broadcaster which was genuinely trying to maintain balance would get rid of him immediately. I watched him in a programme about South America warbling on about how Chile had achieved an economic miracle in spite of the repression of General Pinochet. In reality, Chile owes its economic strength to Pinochet’s reforms, but we’re not allowed to say that as it does not accord with the BBC rewriting of history.

It is essential to see the Augean stables of the BBC cleaned of this bias if viewers are to have any chance of grasping the enormity of the problem we now face. I would be more than willing to take on Balls, Dimbleby and Ann Pettifor together single handed. However, being proved right after the disaster has overwhelmed us will be much less satisfying than getting people to see what’s coming and take some action to prevent or reduce it.”

Wonder WHY the BBC seem a tad reluctant to report this story?

“An emergency medical crew narrowly escaped being lynched this week while responding on the scene of an injurious car accident near Jerusalem, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Friday. The fateful call came on Tuesday; a car carrying a group of Palestinian youths from DNA match found in TA rape case.”

One wonders if the reverse scenario had occurred and Jews had carried out an unprovoked attack against Arabs, such a story would be given prominent coverage…??

Some pithy comments here about the BBC from Christopher Booker..

“Boris Johnson calls for a Tory director-general to knock sense into the BBC. Perhaps he has forgetten that it already has a Tory chairman – that tireless Europhile and global warming zealot, Lord (Chris) Patten.

As a footnote, to illustrate how trivial so much BBC coverage has become, its political correspondent Nick Robinson last week reported David Cameron’s claim to be “winning the debate on the Government deficit”. But I do not recall the BBC telling us that, in March, our public-sector borrowing hit a record £18.2 billion, or £4.5 billion every week. It is not part of the BBC’s “anti-cuts” agenda to tell us that public spending is still hurtling upwards, any more than it tells us about so many other things which do not accord with its deeply skewed world-view.

We do not pay the BBC to have a “line” on pretty well everything it covers, but that is what we get. I fear we can only reciprocate the contempt in which it appears to hold us.”