COULSON – MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

The BBC has been to the fore over many months to try and get the head of Andy Coulson – Cameron’s spinmeister. The Today programme has never missed the opportunity to sink the knife in. So I am sure there are celebrations at the Beeb that Coulson has resigned today. First Postman Pat (BBC meme – one of the good guys) and now Andy Coulson (BBC meme – forces of darkness) – it’s been a busy week!

PLETT THE IMPARTIAL

I thought that this was a good catch by a B-BBC reader on one of our favourites, the pouting Barbara Plett.

Visit Barbara Plett’s statement in the fifth paragraph here to the effect that Middle East peace talks ended with “Israel’s refusal to reinstate a partial moratorium on construction”. I thought that Netanyahu had offered a three month extension but that the Palestinians had pulled-out (in addition to refusing to negotiate over the major part of the previous 10 month period). If I’m right, then it’s bad faith on the part of Plett and her employers as well as bad faith on the part of the Palestinians who had had no problems in negotiating with Olmert, irrespective of there being no freeze!

THAT BIASED BBC EXPERIENCE!

One of the joys of editing this blog is the frequent emails I receive from so many readers. I do try to respond to as many as possible although  sometimes this can be tricky if I am away from BBBC central, as has been the case for most of this past week. Thank you all for the great and frequent contributions made publicly and sometimes privately. I wish I had more time to focus on this but as Booker T put it, Time is tight! Here is a guest article submitted by Clameur de Haro for which I am indebted.

Financial Crisis Flavoured With Pesto Sauce
One should by now, I suppose, be resigned to the inevitability of any so-called investigative documentary produced by the BBC depicting a predominantly one-sided and partisan account of its subject-matter. In that negative sense at least, Robert Peston’s documentary “Britain’s Banks – Too Big To Save?”, which aired on BBC on Tuesday evening of this week, did not disappoint: because it maintained, for this viewer, the Corporation’s lamentable standards for that depressing genre, and in a number of areas. 
Few readers will fail to recollect, particularly during Gordon Brown’s reign at the Treasury but persisting through his disastrous premiership, Peston’s seeming uncanny closeness and access to Brown and the claque surrounding him, which manifested itself in a number of apparent journalistic coups either presenting, or at least sympathetic to, the Brownian position. And surprise, surprise – conspicuous by its almost complete absence in Tuesday night’s programme was any disinterested assessment of what part might have been played by Brown and his government, if not in directly causing, then certainly in at least exacerbating the effect in Britain, of the financial crisis of 2008.
Whether its was the programme’s intention to deflect any examination of Brownian culpability by naked pandering to populist banker-bashing prejudice in explicitly attributing virtually all blame to the usual “excessive risk-taking by bankers solely in pursuit of bonuses” mantra is a moot point: but a signal disregard of the extent of any governmental contribution was certainly the most egregious effect.

We can revert to that specific point in a few paragraphs’ time. For the moment, it will do no harm to pinpoint some of the programme’s other shortcomings.
Generally, the overall tone was none-too-subtly characterised by some obvious cinematic tricks – firstly, discussing complicated financial derivative instruments against the visual backdrop of Peston betting at a racecourse, and secondly, recounting the post-2000 rise in the size of banks’ balance sheets against the visual backdrop of champagne being poured into glasses. Heaven forbid that we might not get the message the programme was so visibly desperate to convey – it’s all just toffs gambling wot caused it all, innit? 
There was precious little, if any, mention of the origins of the sub-prime crisis: yet, as most interested students and serious commentators are aware, its roots were planted by Democratic administrations in the US. They it was who forced lenders, on pain of severe legal and regulatory sanctions, to extend credit to manifestly credit-unworthy borrowers in furtherance of political correctness-inspired perceptions of unfairly disadvantaged minorities: they it was who encouraged the deterioration in credit quality of the resultant expansion of sub-prime lending by their implicit federal guarantees to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, allowing them to source funding at cheaper rates than their commercial competitors. 
The role of the principal rating agencies in their assessment of mortgage-backed securities and their derivative instruments was barely referenced at all. Several academic papers, however, demonstrate how the agencies’ miscalculated (because of relying on probabilities based on historical data) predictions of future delinquency and default rates, which failed to factor in the new dynamic of sub-prime and non-prime lending, assigned wholly and unrealistically optimistic ratings to many of the innovative structures created.
The effect of changes in accounting standards on the valuation of banks’ investments didn’t figure noticeably in the narrative. Yet many interested students and serious commentators have long recognised the impact on balance sheets and leveraging which was caused by investments being allowed to be carried on balance sheets at often-inflated and always-volatile market value rather than the lower of market value or cost.
In fairness, there was reference to both the role of the Greenspan-led Federal Reserve in wrongly responding to previous crises by lowering interest rates and expanding the money supply: and to the degree of internal flexibility and autonomy in risk-rating their lending exposures allowed to banks under the Basel II financial regulatory regime, which coincided with the build-up to the crisis breaking.   
Needless to say, though, it was overwhelmingly bankers’ wilful and reckless short-termism in pursuit of individual bonuses that made up Peston’s case, with the backdrop of Lehman Brothers’ London office much in evidence. But strangely, Peston omitted to mention that a majority of Lehman bonuses were actually paid in the form of deferred Lehman stock, and with a vesting period as long as 5 years. That’s not exactly short-termist.               
It’s nevertheless undeniable, for all this, that yes, the financial services industry was at fault (or more accurately, the proportionately small number of relevant employees in the risk-taking areas and their supervisors). But – and it’s a very large but – the argument remains, uncongenial and inconvenient though it might have been for Peston to contemplate it, never mind admit it, that the Brown/Darling chancellorships bear a considerable responsibility. And this was hardly addressed at all.   
The regulatory regime that proved so ineffectual in the UK was the specific creation of Brown and Ed Balls in 1997. Many have argued persuasively that Brown wanted to remove overall systemic prudential oversight and regulation from the Bank of England, so that the Bank would have no mandate to warn of systemic risk when his always-planned, recklessly-profligate, and ultimately disastrous expansion of public spending, masked cynically by his equally disastrous indulgence of a hyper-expansion of personal debt to give the masses the illusion of prosperity, eventually became apparent.
The result was a Bank of England restricted to managing inflation and interest rates through a Monetary Policy Committee nominated by Brown: a fiscal policy in effect untrammelled and unchallenged through its residing in Brown and his partisan political coterie in the Treasury: and an Financial Services Authority obliged by Brown to concentrate its regulation on an individual institution-by-institution basis, and on such weighty issues as how long call centres took to answer incoming calls, rather than on the stresses building up in the entire system.
The resultant accident waiting to happen was compounded when Darling, with Brown tweaking his puppet-strings, decided to rescue Northern Rock. The Crock wasn’t in any way systemically pivotal at the time, and to allow its flawed funding model to send it under would have reinforced the concept of moral hazard and possibly sent out a signal that might have partially alleviated the catastrophes of one year later, particularly in the equally badly run HBOS. But the Crock was saved with taxpayers’ money solely to avoid the political fallout to Brown and Labour from the collapse of its mortgage business and the consequent job losses in one of Labour’s electoral heartlands.
Brown it was too who hoodwinked a not then grievously-exposed Lloyds TSB into taking over, quickly and, as it later transpired, with insufficient due diligence, the wreck that was Asda Salesman Hornby’s HBOS, and Brown also who, until 2007, was tribally exulting the successes of a Scottish bank to all and sundry. It’s very arguable that, but for the malign influence of Brown, the regulatory regime might well have been better positioned to mitigate the scale of the damage. It’s noticeable that, in both Canada and Australia, the extent of the crisis was comparatively muted. 
Yet this absolutely fundamental question as to the extent of the crisis in Britain, as distinct from other countries, was largely ignored by the programme. That its central conclusion – in future, banks might be too big to bail out and also too big to fail – might be countered by a better governmental regulatory structure than that which Brown designed and presided over, didn’t come into it.
But then again, this is Robert Peston and the BBC we’re talking about, isn’t it?         

THAT JOHNSON STATEMENT

Wonder how the BBC will handle the announcement from Alan Johnson that he is dramatically stepping down from his senior front bench job? He cites reasons in his personal life but there are no more details. Johnson is a BBC favourite so I assume there will be gnashing of teeth at this sudden news? For a while, I got the impression the BBC saw his as the successor to Gordon – before Red Ed assumed the throne.

TERRY JONES BANNED – BUT ON TODAY!

My goodness, has the Coalition taken umbrage against ageing Monty Python stars? Phew, no, not THAT Terry Jones but rather the US Pastor guy who had threatened to burn the Koran on the last anniversary of 9/11, to the chagrin of many. In my view, Jones is a nutter but in a democracy we must be tolerant of all views. I wondered what you thought of John Humphyrs interview with Jones this morning? I wonder would an Islamic Mullah be afforded the same questioning>

WARSI ON THE WAR PATH!

Wonder what you make of the BBC’s coverage here on Baroness Warsi’s accusation that Islamophobia is acceptable in the UK? I notice that they ask for Muslims opinions of this at the bottom of the article. Perhaps they could also ask for the those who have victims of Islamic terrorism in the UK to venture their opinion? Perhaps they could also ask for those families who have had their teenage girls abused by Muslim gangs to also comment? But no. Warsi is right to speak against bigorty BUT she is simultaneously ignoring the menace that some within Islam represent. Last week, she had a go at “right wing” Conservatives, now the Baroness sounds like an apologist for Islamic separatism from the State.Cameron really can pick them, and of course the BBC laps it all up.

NEO-PURITANISM ON THE LICENSE FEE

Another malevolent aspect of the BBC is what I call the ratchet effect. In essence, the BBC uses its media bully pulpit to force political debate ever leftwards. There’s a good example of this on Today this morning in the prime time 8.10am slot. The issue being discussed is the proposal by government to introduce minimum prices for alcohol in England and Wales. Now those of us who are more libertarian minded may conclude that it is no business of Government to be interfering in the free market and setting prices but obviously the BBC is in favour of such overt authoritarianism. So listen to the “debate” it frames between Sir Ian Gilmore (in favour of government setting such minimum prices but they must be higher than currently prescribed) and Gavin Partington from the Wine and Spirits Trade Association. I felt really sorry for Mr Partington who was sneered at by the BBC presenter and interrupted by the execrable Gilmore. The Coalition may be moving to accommodate the BBCA agenda on this issue, but instantly the BBC ratchets it further to the left. Government control of beer and spirits? Yes, but it needs to be higher..always greater..always MORE.