Author Archives: David Vance

OUR SICKLY NHS

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Working in the NHS is clearly the world’s toughest job (!) and it’s not surprising that sickness rates are vastly above those of the private sector. Ahem. Listen to this interview. Boorman is hopeless but Humphyrs clearly holds back. Repeat after me – the NHS is the envy of the world. The third world.

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ARMS WARS

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Right, been away all day and just back in at B-BBC central. Did you catch this item that the BBC ran this morning on how UK arms are used when exported? The narrative was simple – it is wrong for the UK to export arms components if these are used to fight terrorists. Roger Berry MP was visceral in his misrepresentation of how Israel and Sri Lanka used the weapons supplied. Loved his repetition of the “occupied territories” mantra during the interview, wonder had he a little keyiffeh on when being interviewed? The BBC might have provided us with a little background on Mr Berry, and in particular his call back in March to ban all arms exports to Israel. He’s just one more Jew-hater and given a free run by Today. At no time did the BBC interview ask Mr Berry how Israel or indeed Sri Lanka can fight against Jihadists that deliberately shelter amongst civilians? This was an exercise in bashing those Nations that FIGHT terrorism rather than appeasing it.

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IN THE HUDSON…

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The Hudson and Pepperdine, to be precise. I was alerted by an intrepid B-BBC reader to this “comedy” on R4 this afternoon. It’s all about global warming and is full on propaganda mode. Laugh? I nearly paid my license fee. I couldn’t get past the first 8 minutes. I dare you to listen.

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STUDENT GRANT IN THE RED

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Did you catch this interview on Today which debates the claim that the average student leaves University with £23,000 debt. The discussion was between one of the architects of the student loan system Nicholas Barr from the LSE and NUS President Wes Streeting.

The interview manages to entirely miss the essential fact that a Labour government, ideologically driven by radical egalitarianism, is pushing far too many young people into debt in the first place by encouraging them to go to University when other avenues may be more appropriate for them. Streeting managed a get a sly dig in at the Conservatives and of course there was the usual class warfare angle from Student Grant. It’s sad to see the important area of university education used as just one more battle-field by the radical left since this now means that a degree is increasingly worthless, that the chance of an academically bright kid from a working class background getting into a University is reduced, and that Universities themselves have become bastions of left wing orthodoxy. Labour must be pleased that they have gotten away with this and all the BBC wants to talk about is the level of debt and terms of repayment. Based on this interview, so long as a graduate avoids work for 25 years, all will be well!

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THE BEAT SURRENDER

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It must be awful to be a UK military family listening to the BBC for news of the campaign in Afghanistan. Radio Taliban would be less depressing than the State Broadcaster. The meme concerning Afghanistan has now morphed into the same one that prevailed when we were in Iraq. The cause is hopeless, we cannot win, UK lives are being sacrificed for no reason, we must get out. It’s defeatism, of course, and it is something the BBC excels at promoting. This morning Today was cultivating the idea that there is electoral corruption in parts of Afghanistan. Surely not! Listen, there is PLENTY of electoral corruption in the UK and we have a government that bribes, lies and cheats to try and buy votes here so the BBC need not travel half ways around the world if it wants to locate such behaviour! Heaven forbid that we have not created a functioning Jeffersonian democracy in Afghanistan. (Who cares? We should be there to kill Islamic terrorists and prevent AQ reorganising – end of story.)

But, of course, the BBC is doing this to ensure that the results of the Afghanistan election are seen to be compromised. In this way, those British soldiers who lose their lives trying to bring freedom and democracy to this distant land can be seen to have died in vain. However I was thinking that given how many millions gave their lives to defeat the Nazis in WW2, and when we now look at the corruption of the EU, the same argument that BBC seek to employ in Afghanistan could be equally applied here. Human beings will often behave corruptly, that does not mean it is wrong to try and do what is right.

Iraq was the bad war. We were berated by the likes of the BBC for years that we had to get out of Iraq. And now we are out, the spotlight of defeatism switches to Afghanistan. The BBC seems to take an editorial line derived from John Lennon’s “Imagine” – nice tune, nothing to do with reality. Was there ever a war of which the BBC approved? Maybe that waged by the IRA against the UK? Thoughts?

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OPEN THREAD

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Well, a brand new week and a brand new open thread. Off you go…..

(Going forward, I will try to pick out some of the excellent observations in these threads and give them much greater publicity.)

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SHILLING FOR THE NHS…

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The BBC is obsessive on the need to tell us how wonderful the NHS is as a health-care system. It does so as a not so subtle battering ram to force the Conservatives into wasting the same huge sums of OUR taxes on it as has Labour when they come to power. This is all about positioning for future years. You can understand why the BBC admires huge taxpayer funded monopolies. Anyway, I listened to this “debate” this morning on Today.

At first I thought it actually was going to be a real debate. Leading cancer specialist Karol Sikora suggest that the NHS is “doomed” and he was on to debate this with Dr Michael Dixon who is Chairman of the NHS alliance. However it turns out that Dr Sikora was simply pointing out that the demographics that support the funding of the NHS are unsustainable, a very fair point. Dr Dixon simply ignored this economic reality, as one would expect from an NHS apologist. Dr Sikora went on to praise much that is good in the NHS, including the “jewel in the crown” – the GP service. Sorry, but I don’t think the GP service is anything of the sort. If you are unlucky enough to need a GP after hours, at weekends, or on bank holidays you will find such reality rather different. Labour has put in place with GP’s perhaps the most anti-patient contract one could devise, though GP’s are richly rewarded! Why can’t the BBC allow someone on who believes that socialised healthcare provision is morally wrong, financially unaffordable and anachronistic in the 21st Century? Perhaps the analogy to State Broadcasting is too close for comfort?

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ON TOUR WITH THE QUEEN

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I caught Kwame Kwei-Armah being interviewed on the BBC this morning concerning his documentary “On Tour with the Queen. The former Casualty actor and much loved neo political commentator was able to tell us that Australia did not want Her Majesty as Head of State, and it showed a clip of him being interviewed on Jamaican radio laughing uproariously at the suggestion by a caller that Independence has been a disaster for Jamaica and it would be much better off as a British dependency. The hosts on the BBC joined in the chuckling. You can tell why the BBC loves Kwame.

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JUST ANOTHER MANIC MONDAY

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What better way for the brave little class warriors at the BBC to start the week but by giving an easy canter to the hard-left Compass group’s lunatic suggestion that we need a “High Pay” Commission. In essence, Compass want Government to determine an upper limit on what we can earn and on the level of financial bonus we receive. The Compass spokesman got away with the canard that “greed” caused the economic recession and also with the suggestion that the “Low Pay” Commission brought in during 1997 has been a success. All nonsense and economically illiterate, of course, but since the BBC was unable to find anyone with an alternative point of view I guess listeners will be left with the impression that Compass wanted.

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THOSE CONSERVATIVE SHIAS

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I was reading this BBC report on the law that has been just passed in Afghanistan that will allow a man to starve his wife to death if she does not agree to have sex with him. According to the State Broadcaster “Mr Karzai is selling out Afghan women for the sake of conservative Shia support at next week’s presidential election.” Let us be clear; there is nothing that is any way “conservative” about the dark ages pathology of Shia Islam and whilst the BBC never miss the chance to couple the word “conservative”to any depraved cause, we should not let it pass unchallenged.

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