The last one’s overflowing so better have a new one of these…..

Victoria Derbyshire had a caller (24 mins 40 secs), Sonora(spelling?), who relayed to us her tale of woe as she became a victim of the callous Bedroom Tax.

Worth a listen….Sonora lives in Holloway under the care and protection of Labour’s Islington Council…..Derbyshire didn’t listen, didn’t have enough facts and didn’t seem inclined to challenge anything being said….it seemed more like a sympathetic ear and a shoulder to cry on…very nice but not very informative….and all highly political.

It does seem that there is a lot of help, both financial and with the logistics of moving, for example prioritising ‘downsizers’ to find a new home, to cope with paying the ‘Bedroom Tax‘ or to downsize…..this just isn’t made clear at all by Derbyshire…..and what about those families desperate for a bigger home?  Rarely get a mention on the BBC.

Here is some information, from Islington’s website, to help you judge Sonora’s position:
From August 2013, the government will cap the total amount of benefit paid to people of working age who claim out of work benefits.  This will mean a benefit cut for about 900 Islington residents. The cap does not affect people of pension credit age, those claiming working tax credit, war pensions or some people on disability or sickness benefits. 

Where the cap applies, your total household benefits will be capped at:
£350 a week for a single person without dependent children, or whose children who do not live with them

If you rent privately:
Your LHA will be capped at a maximum of:
£255.50 a week if you are estimated to need one bedroom

The Bedroom Tax:
Who is affected?
You may be affected if you:
rent your home from the council, a registered housing association or other registered social landlord

If you have two or more ‘spare’ bedrooms, your Housing Benefit will be cut by 25% of your full rent. In Islington this is equal to £25 a week, on average.

Some options to help you move or stay in your home:
1. Swap homes with someone who needs a bigger home, through a mutual exchange:

Special offer – Swap homes through a mutual exchange and receive £750 for each ‘spare’ room you make available, plus £400 towards moving costs and in some cases money towards renovations and decoration. Terms and conditions apply, please call 020 7527 4140 to find out more.

or
2.  Apply to transfer to a smaller home:

Receive £500 for each ‘spare’ room you give up and £400 towards moving costs.

or
3.  Stay in your current home
If you stay in your current home you will need to pay extra rent to cover the cut in Housing Benefit. It’s important to consider now how you will do this, to avoid getting into arrears with your rent. To pay the shortfall in Housing Benefit you can:

Take in a boarder or lodger
More information about taking in a lodger is available in the Department for Work and Pensions’ fact sheet at the bottom of this page or by contacting the Tenancy Management Adviser at your Area Housing Office. Income from a boarder could affect your other benefits. Contact the Income Maximisation Team

An example of what type of extra income could be available if letting out a room:

Female looking for Double Room Rent up to £ 800 per Month
Joyce is a Basic Member 32 yrs old, Female, Student Moving Date: 30 Nov 2013

Sonora, Victoria’s caller, is single, disabled and unemployed.  She lives in a house with three double bedrooms.  She runs a car.  She actually wants to downsize.

For all its political protests about the Bedroom Tax Islington Council wants you to downsize…it’s just a lovely thing for everyone:

Here are some of her comments:

She lost her job in January.

She owes £4,000….rent, council tax, credit cards….she doesn’t say how much is for rent arrears.

She has heart problems and has fought cancer…and has hip pains.

Because of her health she wants a groundfloor home.

Her present home has three double bedrooms and 3 flights of stairs. ..unsure if she is in a flat…she calls it a ‘house’.

She says she had to choose between paying rent or the Bedroom Tax….later it was a choice between eating or the Bedroom Tax.

Is now in rent arrears and claims she cannot move because of those arrears.  [Islington makes payments to help you move, £400, plus a bonus of up to £750 per room that you free up by moving]

She tells us that she has claimed the Discretionary Payment that covers the Bedroom Tax….but she claimed it late.  [The council sent out letters to all those likely to be effected by the change and told them to prepare early to avoid arrears…she clearly didn’t].

Her Bedroom Tax is £37/week.  [Islington above says the average cut for a home with two extra bedrooms, as she has, is £25/week in total]

She says she gets £71/week in benefits…..from which £15 is for electric, £13 for gas and £12 for council tax….she says she has £10 left for food if she is lucky.  [This clearly doesn’t include housing benefit…which for a single person is capped at £350/week….but the cap may not apply if you are disabled…as she is…she also runs a car….perhaps a ‘Motability’ one?]

The bedroom tax is a tax that destroys your soul, she says, it’s something you have to use your benefits to pay for. There are no tax credits to help you with that.  There is nothing.

Derbyshire proves that she doesn’t listen saying…..

‘But there is a discretionary payment that can help you…’ [Which she has already said she is claiming]

Sonora agrees…but doesn’t remind Derbyshire that she has claimed it…only saying that the Discretionary Payment will pay for a Bedroom Tax…but if you are on a low income you don’t have the surplus cash to buy things like everyone else (unsure what that has to do with things)…the Bedroom Tax ricochets onto everything she tells us…[clearly not…as hers is now being paid in full].

Derbyshire….’Have you spoken to your local council about that?’

Once again proving she didn’t listen.

Sonora again doesn’t admit she has the Discretionary Payment…..only saying that if you have rent arrears you can’t move house.

She tells us that she totally understands her two ‘colleagues’ who called Victoria earlier….I can only imagine she meant ‘people in similarly distressed circumstances’ and not ‘colleagues’.

She says she wants to downsize to allow a family to move into her big house.

She has been to hospital 3 times in the last week…and it costs a lot in petrol for her car.

Sonora seems to be more a victim of her own failure to apply for the discretionary payment early enough than the Bedroom Tax that she seems intent on damning……also if she had applied to downsize early enough she would have had extra priority, on top of the ‘higher priority’ already given to her:

Apply for a transfer. As an under-occupier you will have a higher priority on the transfer list – plus from January to March 2013 you will be given extra priority for bidding on properties through the Home Connections website.

Derbyshire makes absolutely no effort to correct her phrasing and allows her to continue to call the ‘Spare Room Subsidy Cut’ a Bedroom Tax…..as does Islington Council.[is that legal on official documents? Political?]

As for not being able to move because of rent arrears….that can’t be true…for a start the council would pay her at least £1000, pus £400 costs, to move out….she didn’t say and Derbyshire didn’t ask, how much of her debt was in fact rent arrears.  Surely it is in the council’s interest to help her….a smaller new rent and she can pay off her other rent arrears?

She could easily help herself by taking in a lodger…as one example above shows, that could net £500 or more a month …if she is so desperate,and she says she is ‘broken’….then surely that is a solution…one recommended by the council.

And of course she manages to run a car…in London….where we are told no one really needs a car because of the superb Public Transport.

Derbyshire didn’t seem inclined to challenge any of her claims and as said allowed her to keep saying ‘bedroom tax’ uncorrected and to launch into a tirade against it….despite the fact hers was being fully paid….and that she wanted to downsize and help a family into a proper size home which she didn’t need.

If Derbyshire is going to have on callers like this who give vent to such emotional and ‘heartrending’ tales on what is clearly a highly political subject, and there isn’t one much more political than the ‘bedroom Tax’, then she must challenge the callers on the detail and have the information to hand to question claims being made.

If not, then the call becomes what is essentially a mini political broadcast…and the BBC knows such ‘personal’ stories are all the more effective in pushing a certain narrative, a view of certain subjects and effects, therefore, how people look on government policies….and how they vote.

The BBC’s greatest trick is to make the story ‘personal’…..ignore the millions of immigrants and the effects such a swamping has on a country, but instead, look at one asylum seeker, one immigrant, one Muslim bomber, one Palestinian terrorist…….report their life story, their family, their ‘problems’, their struggles made worse by the ‘West’ and the prejudice and discrimination they have to struggle against…all of which turned them into what they are now….it’s not their fault.

As  said in the ‘Living Room Dialogues on the Middle East‘:

‘An enemy is someone whose story you haven’t heard yet’

The BBC believes if you hear enough sob stories about the ‘Bedroom Tax’ you will come to realise just how pernicious, callous and cruel it really is….and that seems to be their tactic….fill the airwaves with such claims that the ‘Bedroom Tax’ is destroying lives, destroying their ‘souls’…..a campaign by the BBC?  I would say so.  Irresponsible and careless as to effect journalism at best.

ChrisH seems to have taken over the world:

EmersonV says in response to Dominic Sandbrook’s ‘Cold War Britain’:

Just finished watching bbc2 Cold War what a load of lefty crap.

Totally bias view , how the west was so bad and the East was just misunderstood and wouldn’t hurt a fly.

ChrisH replies:

Can`t say I agree.
It was pretty balanced to me….Sanbrooke was ironic, but pretty fair I`d say.
And I normally detest most BBC stuff.

Remarkable how a programme can get so many different takes on it (Perhaps different episodes…this Guardian take is for the first episiode)…for the Guardian, in the shape of stereotypical Guardianista, John Crace (more usually concerned with Cameron’s doings) comes up with a third interpretation:

Throughout this first part, the Soviets were depicted as the baddies. Which they were, of course, but Sandbrook rather glossed over the fact that the US and Britain were no angels in the cold war stand-off themselves.

Which is the complete reverse of what EmersonV says.

Crace then goes on to generate excuses for the Communist sympathisers in Britain…just a sign of the times and although recognising ‘Commies’ as ‘baddies’ seems rather put out that Communists are looked upon in such a light.

Naturally the Daily Mail gets a poke along the way:

It also felt rather simplistic of Sandbrook – shades of the Daily Mail’s The Man Who Hated Britain headline – to present every British communist sympathiser in the late 1940s and early 1950s as either deluded fools or traitors. Most of these people had become communists in the 1930s at precisely the time that so many others of the British establishment were advocating the appeasement of Hitler. Ending up on the right side of history can be as much a matter of timing as of morality.

Communist spies weren’t traitors or immoral, they were unlucky,  it was just a case of bad timing…if Ed Miliband had been in power then they would have been heroes?

Crace ponders whether the BBC may have fixed their programme not to upset the Americans:

In the years before the Soviets acquired the atom bomb, there were plenty of hawks in the US who were pressing for a preemptive strike on the Soviets. But of this we heard nothing. I did wonder if the BBC had made its own preemptive deal with the US History Channel and had adjusted its content accordingly.

Perhaps we will have to watch all three episodes to get the overall drift of the programme.

I haven’t watched Sandbrook’s programme myself yet…but taking a quick look….it didn’t take long to find fault with the Guardian’s analysis….John Crace claiming:

‘It took Sandbrook the best part of 50 minutes of an hour’s programme to mention the threat of nuclear armageddon – surely one of the most defining features of the cold war – then maybe it was just another of his idiosyncrasies.’

Wonder which film Crace was watching……as 1 minute and 30 seconds in Sandbrook tells us that Britain was ‘living everyday in the shadow of armageddon’…backed up with a clip of a nuclear explosion.

ChrisH also scores with his complaint that the BBC are ramming Dr Who down our throats…an assessment Gillian Reynolds in the Telegraph agrees with:

The BBC’s self-promotion is driving me barmy

Gillian Reynolds’s week in radio was marred by the BBC’s constant self-congratulatory promotion of Doctor Who

Stand back. I am incandescent with rage, totally fed up with the BBC selling me itself. Children in Need I can just about understand. But Doctor Who? Good grief, it’s only a TV programme. Yes, yes, it’s probably the BBC’s biggest worldwide brand but does every network have to drench us in endless publicity for it? And another thing, why are promotions for programmes presented as if they are news on Radio 4’s Today? It happened again yesterday. This time I’ve had enough.

This of course is standard practice on the BBC…to trail a future programme in the News..often a Panorama, Horizon or Newsnight investigation (such as they are ) but other programmes frequently get a plug masquerading as news.

No advertising on the BBC is there?  Not for Channel 4 or Sky programmes anyway.

As noted in the previous post the BBC made a curious omission in their programme about the Kennedy assassination…..forgetting to mention that Oswald was a Communist…whilst also making less than subtle intimations that seemed intended to suggest the Republicans may have shot Kennedy.

Perhaps they should have read the BBC’s own report from the time by Peter Watson:  

(Text Version here)

The BBC’s attitude towards all things American (B.O. besides) today is probably neatly summed up by this appraisal of other American’s view of Texas as judged by Peter Watson at the time, too big, too brash, too rich,  too successful:

Then there is this from the BBC:

Minsk’s fond memories of Lee Harvey Oswald

Mystery and infamy surround Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who shot US President John F Kennedy in Dallas, 50 years ago. So it’s odd to visit a city where people remember him clearly and fondly – and refuse to believe he is guilty.

…..it was somewhat unnerving to hear so many good things about a person whose name is associated with one of the most infamous acts of our era.

I met one of Oswald’s former workmates, Vladimir Zhidovich, at a local cafe. He, like everyone else, told me how Oswald was a “good guy” and he couldn’t imagine him a murderer.

As we parted, he asked a favour. If I ever go to Texas, he asked, would I lay some flowers on Oswald’s grave, from him and the other colleagues at the radio factory?

I still haven’t made up my mind what to do

Yep…that’ll go down well in the US….a BBC journo laying flowers on the grave of a man who killed their president.

A bit of ping pong between the BBC bias sites……here is a look at the BBC’s revisionist view of history by ‘Is the BBC biased?’s’ Craig based on comments kicked off by JonT on this site:

BBC exclusive: Kennedy was shot by a right-wing Republican

Several commenters at Biased BBC have been pointing an accusing finger at a BBC documentary broadcast last night on BBC Two, as part of the corporation’s build-up to the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy this week.Here are the exchanges at B-BBC:

JonT says: November 17, 2013 at 7:23 pm.  Just watched a documentary on BBC2 about the Kennedy assassination. Three times they they stated that Texas was an evil ‘right wing republican state’ but not once did they deign to mention that Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist. Watch this in ignorance and you could believe that JFK was murdered at the behest of the republican party…incredible.

Craig says:

Surely it couldn’t be true that the programme completely failed to mention Lee Harvey Oswald’s extensively documented communist activities (and his time in the Soviet Union), could it? That would be genuinely extraordinary.

Well, genuinely extraordinary it is because – as the commenters at B-BBC said – there was not a whiff of any of that. Not a whiff.

So, imagine (if you can) that you’re a school pupil watching this programme for the first time and trying to learn about the assassination of JFK.

If you’re that school pupil, you will not learn from this programme that Oswald – the prime suspect – was a communist. 

Can anyone defend this ten-year old BBC documentary? I’d love to hear such a defence.

Pretty hard to defend I would have thought.

The Telegraph wonders about….

The baffling recovery of Teflon Labour and Unpopular Ed

Politics sometimes throws up great mysteries. Why does public spending always rise and never fall? How did Gordon Brown ever become Prime Minister? Why is David Cameron still clinging to his pledge on overseas aid?

Nothing, however, is quite so head-scratching at the moment as the success of the Labour Party. The Tories are certainly puzzled – and terrified – by it. So are plenty of Labour people, many of whom can’t quite believe that things are going so well for Her Majesty’s Opposition. On current trends, it is entirely rational to expect that it will be returned with an overall majority in 2015, or will at least finish as the largest party, and that Ed Miliband will become prime minister.

The reason is simple….the BBC runs cover for Labour.

Those responsible for thirteen years of mis-manangement and the destruction of the economy have been written out of history…..or if forced to mention any of that, the word ‘Labour’ won’t be.

Only this morning on Today we had a woman talking about the death of her mother in Mid-Staffs…she blamed the staff, the management and,  she said, ‘it went all the way up to Whitehall’.   Humphrys completely ignored the ‘Whitehall’ responsibility and didn’t ask her why she thought that.

The BBC has covered up Labour’s deliberate and highly dangerous immigration policy…..not just covered up the Macchiavellian thinking behind it (to ‘brown’ the population and ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’…regardless of the effects on the working class in the housing and jobs market) but went on to promote it as a positive benefit for the Nation.

The BBC has relentlessly attacked the government’s economic policy….actually promoting Labour’s own ‘Plan B’…..and even as a recovery is in sight they denounce it as ‘the wrong sort of recovery’.

It has relentlessly attacked the government’s welfare reforms, going so far as to adopt Labour’s preferred language such as the dreaded ‘Bedroom Tax’.

It has relentlessly attacked reform to the NHS….whilst, as said, hiding Labour’s deadly record whilst in charge.

It has relentlessly defended Ed Miliband…..covering up his knowledge and complicity in the Unite vote rigging, and launching an all out attack on the Daily Mail when it criticised the thoughts of Father Ralph….even now bringing Ed on to Desert Island Discs to try to humanise his image, no doubt with heart warming tales of his ‘Dad’ and family life.

It has relentlessly backed his ‘Price freeze on energy’ without a rigorous challenge and examination of his claims….he claimed there is a failure of the Market and competition…only to go himself to a smaller company to make savings….as did  hundreds of thousands of other people….the market wasn’t failing…it was just people not doing their research combined with apathy.

Cameron himself must carry a lot of the blame….for he bowed to BBC pressure and remodelled his policies to suit the progressive left.

Having said that his lies about the EU referendum, lies that still roll off his tongue, his profligacy with aid money, his posturing on immigration, but above all his failure to make so many lower income people believe he has policies that include them and will improve their lives, all add up to a serious failure to ‘connect’ and a subsequent massive lack of support in certain areas.

Miliband makes huge promises that are just crowd pleasing, populist soundbites….he either can’t or won’t deliver on those promises when the time comes….but the BBC gives him enormous positive coverage and headlines that have a ‘feel good’ appeal but an enormous lack of substance.

The BBC is selling Hope to the masses for Miliband, hoping that that will translate into votes.

Much as they did for Obama.

And look where the USA is now.

Just how did that hopey dopey thing work out for ya?

They just can’t help themselves.

The BBC love-in with Obama continues despite Guantanamo, drones, failed foreign policy, massive, inappropriate surveillance and lies about, well lots and lots of stuff.

Naughtie on Today (08:25 ish) was going over the Gettysburgh Address by Lincoln.

For some unknown reason we were suddenly treated to the comparison of Lincoln to another ‘gangling lawyer’….and a soundbite of the sainted Obama.

The ‘Legacy’ is safe in BBC hands…they’ve just got to keep polishing it.

From the Telegraph:

There’s an interview with Sir Richard Eyre, the director of a new musical (he prefers “a play with songs”) in this week’s Sunday Times (£)

“I never understand politicians – they could buy themselves, for such a small price, the silence of a swathe of articulate, prominent, celebrated people who give them a hard time.”

And you thought the Lefty Bien Pensant cared about the Plebs….Such integrity, so in touch with the Working Class!

The BBC is giving Ed Miliband a massive platform to shape the public’s perception of him…he is to appear on Desert Island Discs.

No doubt we will have heart warming tales of his family life…in particular his father.

Any doubt that this is the BBC’s attempt to limit the damage that the Mail’s report about Ralph Miliband’s Marxism and the influence on his son may have had.

A Labour Party political broadcast?  Having said that Cameron did appear on DID in 2006.

Shame the BBC ignore the real politics going on:

When Ed Miliband condemned Unite’s “machine politics” in Falkirk, did he forget his office had signed-off on their tactics?

So now we know: Ed Miliband struck a deal that allowed Unite to rig the Falkirk selection

Labour ‘approved’ Unite’s Falkirk skulduggery, says report. So much for Miliband’s ‘new politics’

As the Falkirk scandal spreads, Labour insiders are saying: you can’t trust Ed Miliband

The BBC has a look at claims that Balls is a ‘nightmare….but it is a shallow report with no analysis and fails to examine any deeper the ructions in the Labour Party as Dan Hodges reports:

“I just don’t trust Ed Miliband  to have my back”.

It’s also reflected in the culture of his personal office. “It’s a vipers’ nest” said one veteran. “The worst environment I’ve ever worked in”, said another. It’s a culture that hasn’t grown up by accident. “He’s basically got a group of courtiers around him”, one shadow cabinet member told me. “No one trusts each other. But that comes from the top.”

or this:

INSIDE: Labour’s head office in “chaos” as Livermore begins his first day in charge

Hold the front page…another grand idea as to why Global Warming has paused.

We were first told they had no idea why there has been a long, long pause in global warming.

“We don’t really know yet what the explanation is for the slowdown,” said Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of economics.

In August the BBC told us that:

Global warming slowdown linked to cooler Pacific waters

So ocean cooling caused the pause?

No, no, no….

Roger Harrabin claimed it was ocean warming that ‘hid’ the warming and caused extreme storms:

‘We’ve been dumping our problems into the oceans’ …… ‘global warming has paused on land but the oceans have continued to warm and we’re not going to get away with it forever.’

roger harrabin ‏@RHarrabin 11 Nov Rising sea levels and warmer seas will create conditions for ever-stronger tropical storms.

Now the latest big idea….one which pulls the rug from Harrabin’s ‘ocean warming’….they ‘forgot’ temperature rises elsewhere:

Exposed: The myth of the global warming ‘pause’

Failure to record temperature rises in the Arctic explains apparent ‘flatlining’, study finds, undermining sceptics’ argument that climate change has stopped

Two university scientists have found that the “pause” or “hiatus” in global temperatures can be largely explained by a failure of climate researchers to record the dramatic rise in Arctic temperatures over the past decade or more.

So if there was global warming all along Harrabin’s claim, and all those scientist’s,  that it was Ocean warming that ‘absorbed’ the warmth was so much tosh.

Have to rewrite the script.

Believe