Rainbows only come out in the rain…UKIP maybe onto something:
Evan Davis played this, admittedly very funny, spoof of a shipping forecast (from about 1:26):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVOX_U3s8lQ
Andrew Neil, God bless his little heart, allowed Farage a response…also very funny:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nmXFY8XZtI
This morning the BBC were trumpeting on the radio some research by a think tank called ‘Centre For Cities’ that said London was growing much faster than other UK cities as the much vaunted ‘Recovery’ left them behind as economic also-rans…presumably hinting they were being ignored or abandoned by the Government.
The BBC said it was an independent think tank, but admitted that it had been set up by Labour peer Lord Sainsbury…the man who donated nearly £20 million to Labour.
Apparently…. Centre for Cities was launched in March 2005 as part of IPPR and became independent in November 2007.
So independent of the IPPR now…Labour’s very own think tank?
The Chief Executive of Centre for Cities is……
Alexandra worked as a private secretary for the Permanent Secretary at the former Department for Education and Skills and as a researcher at the Institute for Public Policy Research.
What’s odd, apart from the ‘independent’ label is that after trumpeting this ‘research’ early on in the day, it being the lead story on the news bulletins, it suddenly vanished….almost as if someone responsible had come on shift and pulled the story as headline news….due to it being a Labour Party stunt?
There is no doubt London is massive compared to other regions but this story has been knocking around for a long time now….so why is it being pushed once again…the thought that the Coalition’s ‘Recovery’ is leaving other regions behind? Will Miliband be announcing a new policy on cities in the next few days?
Who knows…at least it seems to have been pulled by the BBC as a lead story…or as a story at all in fact on the radio….after being bombarding us with it early on it vanished.
The story seems to ignore some other truths about ‘the Regions’…the streets may not be paved with gold but things are moving:
Business activity rose at a record rate in the West Midlands in December according to the latest purchasing managers report for Lloyds Bank Commercial Banking. West Midlands private sector companies reported increases for the eighth month in a row with the rate of expansion the strongest in the 16-year-old survey’s history.
This is from Manchester which they tell us is doomed:
Experts said the two per cent growth estimate for 2013 represents some of the strongest figures since the QES began.
Greater Manchester’s economy grew twice as much as predicted in 2013, a study out today reveals.
A total of 623 businesses were quizzed between November 11 and December 4 2013 as part of the QES – the largest of its kind in the country.
The Chamber also said international sales and orders have increased on every measure with manufacturing performing better abroad than in the UK.
So why is the Centre for Cities claiming, and the BBC reporting this:
Manchester ‘underperforming’
The Now Show was a proper lefty rightwing-bashfest on Saturday laying into the rich and privileged:
Toby Young at the Telegraph spotted this and wasn’t impressed:
Perhaps Hound is trying to compete with his fellow NHAP member Marcus Chown who is :
Our own executive committee member Marcus Chown has been named the “most influential tweeter about David Cameron” by academics at Imperial College who’ve created a new index for ranking tweeters.
“I am just pleased to be getting the message out that David Cameron is dismantling our NHS while lying that he isn’t.”
Rufus compounds the alarmist language with a bit of incitement to violent revolution….
Interesting that Hound opts for the National Health Action Party…..a single issue party that ensures he doesn’t have to think very much and come up with any tricky policies for all those other issues…such as the economy, or education, or welfare….which is why the money can’t all be spent on the NHS…despite the vast, vast sums that are already.
Seems that Rufus has some way to go before competing fully with Chown in the Twittersphere as others are also less than impressed with Rufus:
Oh dear…still not top billing even though shit always floats to the top apparently….that’s a joke Rufus….smile…
Ta
Rufus Hound, less better known as Robert James Blair Simpson…educated by the £5,930 a-term Frensham Heights……the same school that Domino Harvey, Bounty Hunter, went to….
She gets my vote..and yes that’s a real photo not a pseud actor/comedian…Rufus not so much.
Ruf likes to think of himself as one of the ‘people’…. not a privately educated, self indulgent, over privileged, over paid, loudmouth playing at politics ….he’s just a chav really…no really…him an’ Owen hang out all the time…baby….
As said ‘The 100 Worst People on Twitter’ aren’t fans……
‘….the grand posturing, ill-judged and out-of-sync opinions, doing a corporate gig to present an award to G4S, deciding to call out the members of a fucking forum, proudly declaring his Lib Dem voting intentions in 2010, getting booed by Keith Lemon – it all adds up to what should’ve been seen as a string of embarrassing failures by a deeply unlikable man, even by comedian standards. As it is, he’ll collect a bigger pay cheque to present something even more low-brow, whilst turning up for an overacted bit-part in the occasional drama to soothe his ego, and there’s nothing you or I can do about it. If we get the television presenters we deserve, then the rapture is fully underway.’
These are not of course the opinions of management.
Rufus has delusions of grandeur…
Trouble is Henry V isn’t what the People need, it’s the BBC, the Voice of the People….but it’s failed them in their hour of need….some are very concerned it has abandoned their cause…apparently…..
Marcus Chown being a supporter of, a worker for, the NHAP….their ‘Twitter Lead’…whatever that is…presumably twitter propagandist.
It’s that right wing, Tory supporting BBC again….good of them to allow so many left wing comedians to dominate the airwaves though.
Well folks, a new week dawns. And the BBC is meticulous as ever in making sure that EVERY Conservative announcement is balanced with a Labour statement. Hence Cameron’s “bonfire of regulations” for small business is balanced by Chukas “let’ set up a new quango”. Anyhoo, the day beckons me and I bid you adieu and leave this new open thread for you to complete!
Via ‘Is the BBC biased’:
In my 12 years with BBC News, I worked for many of the people who, for the past quarter century, have decided what the BBC broadcasts. Three of them went on to become Director-General. Almost without exception, they were decent, honest and fair, thoroughly convinced of their own political even-handedness. So why have they apparently been incapable of recognising, let alone addressing, the corporation’s rampant left-wing bias?
Unless the Right can think of ways of making the BBC’s feedback loops work effectively, or the BBC spontaneously recognises its responsibilities to license-fee payers who don’t share its equalitarian instincts, Europe’s most significant left-liberal broadcaster will continue – shamelessly – to dress to the left.
That last paragraph gets to the crux of the problem….it’s OK if they’re left wing as long as there are processes in place that prevent that from colouring the BBC’s output with a pinkish tinge…unfortunately any such processes which the BBC might have in place are completely inadequate and ineffective, probably because those overseeing the processes are themselves of the same mindset…..the output is irrevocably left wing, Labour supporting.
You only had to look at Justin Webb’s reaction to criticism of the BBC recently to realise the problem…..they just don’t accept that they are doing anything wrong.
It doesn’t help of course that the BBC Trust is on the inside and sees its job more to protect the BBC than to scrutinise, check and moderate any such tendencies.
As mentioned before we are often told that there is no such thing as the ‘British Identity’…no such thing formed by 2000 years of history, of culture, of traditions, language, industrial and scientific innovation as well as the new political ideas that spring from all that…such as liberty, freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of association, democracy…never mind the humour and way of looking at the world.
In the course of the debate about what British identity is, the multicultural argument has been championed particularly vocally and been given prominence, especially by the BBC. The multiculturalist position is one that essentially wishes to reduce British identity to being, by definition, diversity. In other words, that multiculturalism is the very essence of Britishness.
Under this view British identity becomes simply the sum total of a cacophony of a vast host of other often divergent cultures from around the world.
“The one aspect of our national story that people seem to be scared of is a discussion of England and Englishness.
“I think it is born out of a misplaced paranoia and a desire not to offend.
With that in mind here is one to watch from the British Broadcasting Corporation, starts tomorrow:
Series 2 Episode 1 of 5
Bettany Hughes examines changing ideas of liberty by allowing a neuroscientist to take control of her brain and by perusing the pornography of the French Revolution.
The Ideas That Make Us is a Radio 4 series which reveals the history of the most influential ideas in the story of civilisation, ideas which continue to affect us all today.
In this ‘archaeology of philosophy’, the award-winning historian and broadcaster Bettany Hughes begins each programme with the first, extant evidence of a single word-idea in Ancient Greek culture and travels both forwards and backwards in time, investigating how these ideas have been moulded by history and have shaped the human experience. In the first programme of this series, Bettany examines changing ideas of liberty with neuroscientist Professor Patrick Haggard, classicist Professor Paul Cartledge, historian Dr. Stephen Pigney and Ruth Porter from the Institute of Economic Affairs.
Other ideas examined in this series are comedy, hospitality, wisdom and peace.
The BBC is so anti-capitalist it is trying to wipe out private companies…by taking over the world once more….
The accusations have been made in written submissions to a Culture, Media and Sport Committee review into the “future of the BBC”, ahead of the government reconsidering the licence fee in 2016.
The commercial station is supported by its parent company Global Radio, which has used a separate submission to claim the BBC has “abandoned” its distinctiveness in order to focus on gaining peak-time audiences, making it “poor value for money”.
The BBC is up to its old tricks….’educating’ us on the delights of immigration…but oh so subtly.
Yesterday we had ‘Reimagining the City’…
Musician Soweto Kinch offers a different vision of a city he’s loved all his life – Birmingham.
It is in fact a good listen, if you can get over the fact that confusingly he sounds just like Lenny Henry. However the subtext is obvious….. immigrants are loveable and British….you have nothing to fear from immigration. This of course is a rather rose tinted view of things that neglects the hard nosed political issues….such as religion and race. Sure immigrants bring with them music, food and other different experiences to enhance our appreciation of life and it’s a delight I’m sure to have all these new cultural imports….but you can’t just look at the good and sweep the bad, sometimes the very bad, consequences under the carpet….Islamic terrorism for instance and the riots of 2011…kicked off on racial grounds.
We are told how important identity is…and how that identity is formed by the community around you….something that the Left always denies of course when it suits…then there is no ‘British’ identity…there is no such thing as a ‘British person’ shaped and formed by the culture, society and history…..when of course there is…a very individual British identity. If there is no ‘British’ identity then you can’t complain that Britishness is being lost as the land is colonised by mass immigration.
A slightly less subtle, but still coming from a tangent, is a programme about immigration to Germany….clearly meant to ‘inform’ the so-called debate here…..
We are told that without immigration the Germans will die out and the country will become an empty, economic wasteland.
No alarmism there then on behalf of the immigration lobby by the BBC.
It is odd how immigration is all one way from the BBC’s point of view…it is all one big rosy picture of a beneficial inflow of people…no reference to the massive downsides that also come with all these mass, uncontrolled immigration.
John Laurenson explores the flaw at the heart of the German economic miracle…. the Fatherland can make the euros but it can’t make the babies.
Business leaders and some politicians say the current high-level of immigration into their country is a God-send for Germany.
What might raise eyebrows but doesn’t?
The UK will have the biggest population in Europe by 2050…and immigration of course means emigration from somewhere…all those ‘highly trained, expensively trained professionals’ that are boosting our economy or the NHS are being plundered from developing nations….they are hit by a double whammy…the costs of training are lost…and then the people and their skills are lost to their own community.
Poland for instance is now suffering a labour shortage. Who are they going to import?
The Sunday Times tells us that the government’s apprenticeship scheme is being exploited by foreigners so rather than Brits getting the training and the jobs as intended we are paying for unskilled people from abroad to come ere and yet again take their jobs.
Where’s the outrage at this exploitation of the scheme that is supposed to help get Brits onto that icon of the left..the social mobility ladder? That ladder that we are told, again and again by Poly Toynbee sound alikes, has been pulled out from under the working class.
The Sunday Times last week told us that migrant voters are being recruited to ‘rise up against the Tories’.
Did you see that story on the BBC? No of course not.
They are sending letters to Polish migrants stating: “This may be your last chance to vote in Britain” and “Your future and that of your family, community and friends may depend on it”.
We always knew that Labour imported a new voting base…and indeed African newspapers even urged immigrants to vote Labour. One reason for allowing in so many East Europeans unnecessarily early was to allow time for them to become UK citizens and therefore entitled to vote…the fact that as Europeans they were likely to vote to stay in Europe in any likely referendum, and for Labour in a national election, must have been a big consideration in Labour’s thoughts.
Apparently 450,000 Poles in the UK are entitled to vote.
Turn out at these European elections is often small…so mobilising even a small number of pro-voters can swing, or steal, the election and therefore have an enormous impact on British policies and sovereignty.
You might have an argument to say that in effect Britain has been politically taken over by European or other growing communities who don’t necessarily have any loyalty to Britain.
But the BBC makes no investigation of that aspect of immigration…preferring instead to tell us that economically we are all better off…despite study after study suggesting that isn’t true…and ignoring the fact that most Brits and indeed many immigrants themselves think immigration is too high.
Your Country Needs You…just which country?
Had to turn off the radio yesterday….seconds into ‘Saturday Live’ and being told we were going to be treated to a Dutch environmentalist who tackles Japanese whalers, a descendant of a former slave owning family, a Romanian gentleman lost in London for 4 days and worst of all…the inheritance tracks of Cdr Chris Hadfield…haven’t we had enough of him?
Is there no ‘Top Gear’ for the radio?
