HELP!

The United Kingdom’s small to medium sized businesses (SME’S) are the backbone of our economy. They generate almost 50% of our GDP, and employ millions of people in genuinely wealth-creating jobs (Unlike the State sector, for instance). Yet I picked up this casual report on the Beeb that says more and more of these businesses are planning to take an extra break over Christmas purely to try and save money. The benign report finishes by reassuring us that government “has announced new measures to help small firms in the pre-Budget report, including the ability to spread tax bills, and increased access to loans.” Yes, but the government has also delighted in tangling small business up in endless Brownian-generated expensive bureaucracy; the government has systematically raised taxation on small business; the government has imposed expensive liabilities on small business via its ludicrous “equality” agenda. I’d like the BBC to report the ENTIRE picture as to what Mr Broon has done to our SME’s, not this sanitised version.

THE BBC AND THE ENVY OF THE WORLD

OK then, let me be clear about this from the start. I am all in favour of incompetent business being punished since that is the essence of the free market, as the strong and efficient prosper and the weak and unprofessional fall away. So in that regard I welcome the investigation the BBC has conducted into the private ambulance operator in Birmingham uncovering totally unacceptable practices.

But there is something about this that bothers me and it lies in the almost malicious glee with which the BBC “uncovers” this failure in the private sector. If you read through this you will come to the curious line from Sam Oestreicher, of the militant health union Unison, who says that privatising services was “always going to cause problems. Private sector providers, their priority is profit not the patient. We are seeing the growth of an uncontrolled and unregulated industry as far as the NHS is concerned.” My question is given the horrendous numbers of patients who die in our NHS wards across the UK, having acquired infection in the filthy wards, why does the BBC not investigate how public sector standards kill more than even Islamic terrorists could dream? I’ll tell you why; the BBC shows an underlying contempt for private enterprise and instead likes to prop up thoroughly discredited NHS standards such as those extolled by Mr Oestreicher.

THE DETROIT SPINNERS.

Caught an item on Today this morning concerning the ailing fortunes of the US automobile giants who have their collective begging bowl out for further $$$billions from the US government. The BBC’s take focused around the fact that these companies would need to be making much “greener” and more “energy efficient” vehicles in the future if they were they to get such a cash bail out from the incoming Obama regime. There are several points about this I wanted to make.

1. The item before this talked about the dramatic fall in fuel prices. The irony seemed lost on the BBC.

2. The item entirely ignored the devastating impact that trade union practises have had on these manufacturers. The United Auto Workers Union, in particular, has financially crippled these manufacturers. The BBC ignores this inconvenient truth.

3. Is it not counter intuitive to suggest that these large manufacturers are deliberately ignoring a major profit opportunity in producing these “green” vehicles? Might it be that the demand the BBC and left-wing US politicians drone on about might not actually be that significant?

If you want to understand what is happening to the Detroit car manufacturers, don’t listen to the BBC spinners.

MARXISM IS BACK.

I see the BBC reports that Marxism is resurgent in Germany. (I suppose that makes a change from certain other toxic ideologies that Germans have also been attracted in the past…) You can sense Beeb hearts swelling with pride when they repeat that “Globalisation, which is implicit in capitalism, not only destroys the heritage and tradition but it is incredibly unstable, it operates through a series of crises, and I think this has been recognised to be the end of this particular era.” Cue the Red Flag? I also love the way the BBC editorialises that “Marxist economic philosophy – and in particular its Russian Leninist version – fell out of favour with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. “Oh really? I was just wondering where in the world it has EVER been successful?