Remember this recent headline from the BBC?

‘Colossal’ spending cuts to come, warns IFS

When Osborne made his Autumn Statement the BBC went into overdrive to undermine any perceived good news. We know of its blatant comparison of the 1930’s depression to what they predict will be the outcome of his policies but they also hyped the IFS’s ‘revelation’ of those ‘colossal spending cuts’ after the election.

But hang on…isn’t that very old news? Haven’t we known for a long time that the majority of the cuts would come after the 2015 election? So why the hype from the BBC?

This was the New Statesman in 2013:

Austerity after 2015: why the worst is yet to come

This was the BBC itself in March 2013, reporting the IFS’ words….which have a familiar ring to them:

Budget 2013: ‘Cuts deferred’ until after elections

Or this from Politics.co.uk in 2012:

Never-ending austerity? More cuts to come after 2015

Nothing new there then…so why make such a song and dance about these cuts now in the run up to the election as if they are something new and terrible to be inflicted upon us completely unuspecting victims?

The IFS itself seems a bit confused as to what caused the slow reduction in the deficit….this is their analysis:

It is important to understand why the deficit hasn’t fallen. It is emphatically not because the government has failed to impose the intended spending cuts. It is because the economy performed so poorly in the first half of the parliament, hitting revenues very hard.

Oh right….poorly performing economy at the beginning of the Parliament…or is it?  Here is the other explanation…from the IFS in the same analysis by Paul Johnson:

The relatively modest fall over this parliament is largely explained by increased spending on social security, especially pensions.

 

So is it a poorly performing economy or welfare spending caused by low wages, caused by immigration, and pension raises that kept the borrowing figures up?

You might look at Robert Peston’s honest appraisal of our economic situation…..note in particular these words which have long since been forgotten… ‘The clean up will take years. And there is no quick fix…. What became clear in 2008 is that we will have to find a way of paying much of that debt back.

 That will take at least a decade.’

A decade…so by 2018…..as per the latest budget statement.

It is a very enlightening and honest look at the problem and consequences of debt, government spending and how it is funded….unfortunately it is an analysis that the BBC has always ignored, presumably as its diagnosis and prescription are a direct challenge to the BBC’s favoured narrative of high government spending on public services, welfare and infrastructure projects regardless of where the money comes from.

Here are Peston’s thoughts from his book ‘How do we fix this mess?’…..

How do we fix this mess? I don’t know. But don’t stop reading now. Perhaps if we have a clearer understanding of what went wrong, we’ll have a better idea of what needs to be done.

We will be right in the middle of the jungle, observing how bankers, regulators, politicians – and, oh yes, most of us – were by turns greedy, gullible lazy and short-sighted, and how we wilfully refused to see how our improving living standards were not being earned in a sustainable way.

We failed to rise to the challenge of globalisation.

We did not work harder and smarter.

Instead we borrowed.

And now as a nation, we have to pay back much of the debt, which inevitably makes us feel poorer, and will continue to do so for years to come.

The clean up will take years. And there is no quick fix.

We have allowed others, our governments and the so-called authorities, to take us from boom to bust.

I confess, during much of the journey, I had little idea we had taken a wrong turning….but as we headed for the swamp I succeeded in spotting the looming disaster and shouted out a warning: I was largely ignored and was even asked to shut up.

I am not going to pretend there is a road to Shangri-La, where we will suddenly find ourselves becoming richer and richer again.

We tried that road in the late 1990’s and early years of this century, and it was the road to ruin.

Boom and bust will be with us forever.

It was our foolish conviction that the smooth road to sunny uplands would go on forever which got us into such trouble.

The Future’s Overdrawn

Whether we own up to it or not, we can’t go on forever living on China’s credit.

What became clear in 2008 is that we will have to find a way of paying much of that debt back.

That will take at least a decade.

And when we repay debt, we’re spending less. Which means economic activity slows down, growth grinds to a halt.

It is reasonable to assume that growth will be as little as 1% in the coming 10 years….which wouldn’t look so bad after a contraction of 6.3% in output during the 2008-09 recession.

Cuts in public spending, including in benefits and tax credits, were almost certainly inevitable and have indeed followed.

Since 2008, the UK’s aggregate debt has been shuffled, not repaid.

The government kept spending to prevent recession turning into an extreme slump while tax revenues were shrinking.

When essential public services start to be financed through borrowing rather than tax, it is immensely difficult to cut the borrowing.

In the past few days, I caught a couple of BBC stories which did little for my blood pressure.

On BBC NI, they ran an item explaining the the “traveller” community was the most discriminated against in Northern Ireland. This was based in feedback from..the travelling community! Honestly, you couldn’t make it up although I suspect the Travellers do.

I then heard another story elsewhere on the BBC network explaining that the Arts Council was DEMANDING that those who it sponsors (with taxpayers money) MUST ensure more racial “diversity” or else funding will be cut. This was portrayed as a “good thing” with no contrary opinion expressed. It appears quality comes second to diversity and the pursuance of inverted racism.

Watching the BBC is not good for your spirit or your health!

Here we go, an overdue Open Thread! BBC went into food bank frenzy yesterday. I was invited into the BBC NI studio to take part in a discussion on such. My view is that Food Banks are street theatre agitprop sponsored by the left. To my amusement, the BBC in Belfast put on a caller from Cheltenham (!) who gave a tale of woe and explained how Food Banks saved his life. The particularity becomes the generality in the eyes of the BBC, as they do everything possible to help Labour. With an improving economy and falling unemployment the Left need SOMETHING to keep the gospel of despair going so welcome to the great Food Bank meme.

Remember this from 2011 when Richard Black tried to persuade us that it was the dumb, ignorant Anglo-Saxons who were climate deniers while the rest of the world wailed as it burned?

The world wide web, where climate change is most vociferously debated, is predominantly an Anglo-Saxon medium.

For we native English speakers who’ve never needed to become fluent in other tongues but speak the language of climate change daily, this raises an intriguing question: is it possible that we’re getting a distorted view of the “climate debate” globally, simply because we’re missing what’s going on elsewhere?

“The weight of this study would suggest that, out of this wide range of factors, the presence of politicians espousing some variation of climate scepticism, the existence of organised interests that feed sceptical coverage, and partisan media receptive to this message, all play a particularly significant role in explaining the greater prevalence of sceptical voices in the print media of the USA and the UK.”

To those who despair of the success of sceptical lobbying, the message is clear: learn one of the languages of Brazil, China or India.

 

 

WUWT suggests he’s wrong…

Climate Change … Who Cares?

Thanks to the blog of the irrepressible Hilary Ostrov, a long-time WUWT commenter, I found out about a poll gone either horribly wrong or totally predictably depending on your point of view. It’s a global poll done by the United Nations, with over six million responses from all over the planet, and guess what?

The revealed truth is that of the sixteen choices given to people regarding what they think are the important issues in their lives, climate change is dead last. Not only that, but in every sub-category, by age, by sex, by education, by country grouping, it’s right down at the bottom of the list. NOBODY thinks it’s important.

Now, people are always saying how the US is some kind of outlier in this regard, because polls in the US always put climate change down at the bottom, whereas polls in Europe generally rate it somewhat higher. But this is a global poll, with people chiming in from all over the planet. The top fifteen countries, in order of the number of people voting, were Mexico, Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Yemen, Philippines, Thailand, Cameroon, United States, Ghana, Rwanda, Brazil, Jordan, and Morocco … so this appears to be truly representative of the world, which is mostly non-industrialized nations.

So the next time someone tries to claim that climate change is “the most important challenge facing the world” … point them to the website of the study, and gently inform them that the rest of the world doesn’t buy that kind of alarmist hogwash for one minute.

 

 

The Media’s hypocrisy is quite stunning, the BBC’s most of all of course as it tells us it holds itself to a higher standard and is the news organisation that sets the standards for the rest of the pack to follow.

Recently they have been shouting a lot about how dishonest politicians are, asking why politicians, especially the Tories, won’t tell us about the true state of the nation’s finances.

Of course, in reality, that is the last thing the BBC wants you to know as it would be hard to justify its barrage of anti-austerity propaganda that it pumps out daily if the economy is ‘utterly terrible’.

Similarly the same goes for immigration and Europe…the BBC has hidden the truth about immigration for years, steadfastly refusing to examine it in detail and consistently ignoring the downsides to immigration…only recently having to tackle the subject with any degree of honesty because many politicians have had to at least pay lip service to the concerns of the population about immigration……and forced to do so by one man and his party…Nigel Farage and UKIP.

Now when you hear the BBC moaning about the ‘dishonesty of politicians’ just remember this is the BBC that tried, still tries, to undermine and finish off UKIP as a political force, that tried to shut Farage and UKIP up.

The BBC had no interest in talking about immigration until forced to do so…..and will rapidly revert to that position given half a chance.

Farage forced the pace and set the ball rolling on immigration.

All of which is backed up by this revelation from a BBC insider, an ex-insider, Paul Lambert who has jumped ship to become the communications guru at UKIP and says…..

“Over the past few years I have been following the work of UKIP and Nigel Farage and I feel that he is changing British politics for the better. I am delighted to be able to add my experience to his team. He has been one of the best, most hardworking and most normal political figures I have worked with, and trust me I have seen the lot”.

“UKIP is today the place to be if you want to be a part of a party that is changing the face of British politics for the better, and providing a new, clear and honest voice”.

 

The BBC are being nice to him at present but as one commenter says at Guido it won’t last long…..

Watch the remaining featherbedded stooges turn on him now.

 

The BBC rushed to tell us……

World on course for warmest year

The UK Met Office says the observed temperatures would be highly unlikely without the influence of greenhouse gases produced by humans.

“There is no standstill in global warming.”

 

Not sure the ‘Central England Temperature Anomaly’ can be describes as ‘all of the UK’ let alone ‘The World’….but let’s not be too critical…we’ll leave that to Christopher Booker:

Last week’s claims that 2014 is set to be ‘the hottest year ever’ are frankly a load of nonsense, says Christopher Booker.

Led by the BBC, the usual media suspects were quick to trumpet last week’s claims by the Met Office and the World Meteorological Organisation that 2014 is set to be “the hottest year ever”. It’s funny that the rest of us hadn’t noticed; least of all those citizens of North America and Russia whose lives were lately disrupted by record snowfalls. It is true that the temperature records compiled by the avid warmists of the Met Office and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (the one formerly run by climate activist James Hansen) have managed to show this year squeaking just ahead of 2010 as “the hottest year since records began”. But the much more comprehensive and reliable satellite records agree that 2014 is way down the list, with six of the past 16 years ahead of it.

 

At least there is one real journalist at the BBC who raises a few questions…..

Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past

Britain’s winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives.

“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”

 

The BBC is always busy looking for ‘proof’ of global warming….here they are in Oz in July….

Artificial snow on slopes of hotter Australia

Australia is sometimes the petri dish of climate change – a place where global warming is not just a theoretical concept but a tangible reality.

Oops….just a month later….

Ready, set…snow! Australia blanketed in a winter wonderland as cold front delivers a brisk start to the weekend

And this is from June a month before the BBC paints its picture of doom….which really shows how untrustworthy the BBC is…they knew there was heavy snow in Oz and yet they report ‘artifical snow’ stories….

Best snowfalls in a decade forecast for eastern Australia. Strap yourselves in for the megablizzard

While Australia rejoices in the heaviest June snowfalls this century, with the majority of lifts at all resorts set to open by the weekend, the Kiwis have barely got two snowflakes to rub together.

Of course the late snow on Mt Buller is an entirely new phenomenon isn’t it?…

“Historically speaking though it is not unusual for us to have no snow on Opening Weekend,” says David McNamara from the Victorian ski resort of Mt Buller.

Ahh…an explanation…the reporter is the never-reliable Jon Donnison telling us that the snow is so late and so thin that artificial snow is needed.

Really?  The snow came, in bucket loads, two weeks ‘late’ into the skiing season…..

Experienced weather watchers are calling it the storm of the century. They’re saying it could snow on and off, but mostly on, for the next 10 days.

And now the megablizzard has arrived. The NSW resorts of Thredbo and Perisher received 40cm and 50cm respectively overnight. Hotham, Falls Creek and Mt Buller (pictured below) in Victoria all reported similar totals.

A spokesman for Thredbo confirmed to news.com.au that as of about 3.30pm, 80cm of snow had now fallen in the past 24 hours.

“It’s an incredible amount for June, I’m not sure it’s a record, but it has set us up for the rest of the season,” he said.

The official Australian ski season started two weeks ago but up till yesterday then, there had been a desperately thin snow base with only a lift or two turning at the NSW resorts of Perisher and Thredbo. Victorian resorts, which are a little lower than their NSW counterparts, had nothing but grass.

That all started to change yesterday and after a brief lull in the early morning hours, the storm appears to be intensifying now.

Here’s what a user called “Snowblowa” said on the forums on leading snow industry website ski.com.au:

“Seriously when was the last time we were looking at a potential 100cm event to kick off the season properly with potential mega follow up?!!!!!!! We gotta savour this, it’s gunna be awesome, we might be saying in five years “remember late June in 2014”. Besides, we are so over due, last few years in General have been pretty average.”

 

So let’s see…that’s deep snow and lots of it.

The BBC is obviously trying hard here…they even drag in Al Gore who tells us he isn’t impressed by Oz PM Tony Abbot who is somewhat sceptical about the extent of the threat that is global warming….that’ll be the Al Gore who made a video with copious ‘errors’ in it that misled viewers about climate change and had to be ‘corrected’….and the same Al Gore who has massive investements in green technology companies reliant on the climate change bandwagon to keep rolling and bringing in the dollars.

Funny old world when a man who expressed so much contempt for the Westminster ‘gang’ as he calls them, now seeks to rejoin as an MP despite, apparently, the fact that the “writing is on the wall for Westminster”.….what’s more curious is that the BBC don’t seem to notice this hypocrisy in their grand analysis…nor do they notice that when the Slippery Salmond says:

“We won’t have any deal with the Tories – they are not trusted by the people of Scotland” he said.

…the truth is the Tories are just as ‘trusted’ as the SNP…..

At the 2010 General Election, the SNP polled 19.9 per cent and won 491,386 votes, while the Conservative Party polled 16.7 per cent and won 412,855 votes. Yet it is the SNP that has been allowed to set the agenda in Scotland, and to call the shots on the possible future of the Union, while the Conservatives have been painted as pariahs, and deemed about as welcome in Scotland as a nationwide dose of the clap.

 

 

But then the BBC has always had a soft spot for anyone who wants to destroy the United Kingdom…be it Communists, Muslim fundamentalists, Brussels Bureaucrats or the SNP.

Alright folks, the weekend beckons and time for a fresh one of these Open Threads. Enjoy and detail the bias!

Apologies, no time to do this justice but here’s some rough workings to get your teeth into….

Labour’s spending as a proportion of GDP in 1998?  36%

The Coalition’s projected spending in 2019-20?        35.2%

Hardly an enormous difference and yet apparently ‘utterly terrifying’ according to the BBC.

There is an election coming and the BBC has been running a campaign to disparage everything the government does.

The BBC has been extraordinarily critical, not to say dishonest, in its reporting of the Autumn Statement…..telling us we are heading back to a 1930’s depression era economy.

The BBC’s Norman Smith saying:

“While there was a lot of enthusiasm on the Conservative benches and political joy at a lot of the popular measures, when you sit down and read the Office for Budget Responsibility report it reads like a book of doom.

“It is utterly terrifying, suggesting that spending will have to be hacked back to the levels of the 1930s as a proportion of GDP.

“That is an extraordinary concept, you’re back to the land of Road to Wigan Pier.”

I wonder where the Beeboids steal their ideas from…could it be the newspaper they read such as the Guardian in 2011?:

Today the book seems curiously relevant to our own distressed times. An Old Etonian prime minister, in a cabinet stuffed with public school boys, has embarked upon the most radical reduction of public spending in generations, making cuts that have prompted robust criticism of their pace and scale. North and south are pulling apart once more – not yet to the extent where Orwell could describe his journey as if “venturing among savages”, but getting there.

 

Here is a verdict on Orwell’s book….and probably one that could be recycled for the BBC’s reporting…an enormous pile of piffle…..

Jack Hilton, the man who set him [Orwell] on the road to Wigan, hated the book, judging it a failure and falling out with the author. “So George went to Wigan and he might have stayed at home. He wasted money, energy and wrote piffle,” was his damning verdict.

 

Evan Davis (Labour) on Newsnight tells us that:

“You have to go back to the depression of the 1930s to find a crisis comparable to the one we are in — it is one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences.”

 

Now that’s just nonsense…and highly political.

For a start Orwell wrote ‘The Road To Wigan Pier’ in 1937…so about a period before 1937…and the OBR quote the BBC refers to actually says we could have spending as a ratio of GDP at a level equivalent to that in 1938  and certainly not the depression era of the early 1930’s which the BBC is linking to….

Government consumption of goods and services falls to its lowest share of GDP since at least 1948 – when comparable National Accounts data begins – and since 1938 using a historical dataset compiled by the Bank of England

 

But note this:

The UK’s National Accounts data have been revised substantially since our March forecast. In addition to the usual annual revisions process, the ONS has implemented the 2010 European System of Accounts (ESA10). The main consequence has been to increase the measured size of the economy. Relative to the data available at the time of our March forecast, nominal GDP in 2013 has been revised up by 6 per cent (around £90 billion)

 

So we are not comparing like with like….the GDP figure has been inflated by new accounting rules from Europe and so any cut in spending as a ratio of GDP will look worse.

Not only that but in 1998 Labour took us to similar low levels of spending….the OBR says…

As Chart 1.1 illustrates, total public spending is now projected to fall to 35.2 per cent of GDP in 2019-20

 

Labour’s spending in 1998 was 36%…a 0.8% difference then….hardly a massive difference….was that ‘utterly terrifying’ in 1998?

The BBC has been telling us that the Tories must answer the important, critical, question about how they will find the cuts, or savings, in government spending…apparently ‘critics’ and ‘people’ were asking this question….hmmm…does the BBC mean ‘Labour’ are asking the question and the BBC is doing Labour’s dirty work for them?…..however when it comes to Labour they actually praise Ed Ball’s refusal to answer claiming that he is intent on analysing the situation and will not be rushed into making a judgement…in other words he hasn’t got a plan and certainly doesn’t intend to let the Public know about one if he did have any thoughts on the subject….

The OBR report is more honest about what the parties say…curious the BBC missed this bit:

The recovery now looks stronger, with real GDP regaining its pre-recession peak in the third quarter of 2013, three quarters earlier than in the previous vintage of data.
The Conservatives have said they would look to cut welfare spending by more, so that they could cut public services by less. And the Liberal Democrats have said that they would be willing to borrow more to finance capital spending that would increase growth, and also to increase taxes on the relatively well-off. Labour has said that it would “balance the books and deliver a surplus on the current budget and falling national debt in the next Parliament. How fast we can go will depend on the state of the economy and the public finances we inherit.”

 

Now the BBC’s Adam Parsons told us that Labour had in fact, if you look closely, announced more plans to make cuts than the Tories….but he failed to lay out exactly what they were….and the OBR clearly doesn’t agree with the BBC on that.

The BBC doesn’t bother with this from the OBR:

On our central forecast, the Coalition Government is on track to meet its fiscal mandate – to borrow only what it needs to pay for investment, adjusting for the state of the economy, at the end of the five-year forecast – with £50.6 billion to spare. This implies an 80 per cent probability of success given the accuracy of past forecasts

 

The Telegraph does a fine job in critiquing the BBC’s coverage…Danny Cohen will be upset:

Once again, the BBC shows its true colours

Licence fee payers deserve better than the preposterous partisan bias of the BBC

David Cameron attacks BBC over ‘Wigan Pier’ cuts coverage

David Cameron’s spokesman says BBC coverage likening cuts programme to Depression-era Britain was ‘hyperbolic’

Tories at war with ‘biased BBC’

David Cameron and George Osborne furious over Autumn Statement coverage which they claim contained ‘systematic exaggeration’

Is Britain back on the Road to Wigan Pier?

As sparks fly between ministers and the BBC, the former mining town is yet to forgive George Orwell