I did wonder what Newsnight would make of Milibandism (30 mins) as they had Rafael Behr, the New Statesman’s political editor, on to explain the new political force in the land and the ideas behind it.

What I saw was a slick, well produced party political broadcast….and I’m sure it will be immortalized on You Tube as such…..Behr did manage to get a dig in at Cameron…though sacrificing Brown to do so by saying that next to Thatcher and Blair others like Brown, Major and Cameron are intellectual also-rans……(possibly true)

Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your outlook, what happened next was what could well be the future for Milibandism….a polished presentation followed by a shambolic reality….as indeed admitted by Behr when he said the best thing that could happen to the Tories might be to lose the next election and allow Miliband to win….when the wheels will fall off his bandwagon.

After the film was shown it was back to the studio and Rafael Behr was up against Phil Collins, a speech writer for Blair and now writing for The Times….with Paxman sitting back with a grin on his face letting them set to.

Behr put up a weak defense of ‘Milibandism’, which is odd as he has written a long article in the Staggers about it and produced this lovely film…so had time to think about it and work out a good line…..unfortunately he couldn’t and as mentioned, seemed to doubt Milibandism could even work on the ground….saying he could end up in No. 10 by accident rather than it being his policies winning the vote.

Collins, despite his past associations, put the boot in completely destroying Labour’s, Miliband’s, approach…..saying he had no policies….he said the problem with the Left is that they have no answer to what ‘they’ are for now…..asking ‘What are you for if you don’t have the money to spend?’…..Miliband has no policies on schools, the NHS, crime or welfare…..and he has no policy to reform the State.

Behr himself damns Miliband by replying that Miliband thinks voters aren’t concerned with that…..in other words Miliband is going for shallow, eye catching policies that don’t have any substance rather than committing to the boring, grown up statesmanlike policies that deal with real problems such as the way government actually works and structural problems such as the shape of the NHS and welfare….let’s face it even his own MP’s don’t think he is a man of substance:

So how did Newsnight do? The film was as I said a bit of a classic, and one Labourites will no doubt link to at every chance…however the actual policies of Miliband got a sound kicking from Collins…and by Behr himself ironically as he was battered into submission by Collins.

Paxman didn’t feel the need to intervene…which was fair enough…the discussion seemed pretty comprehensive with only the occasional nudge from him……

However as the film will have a separate life of its own and is so pro-Miliband, and produced by  someone who is so clearly of the ‘Left’,  it was probably an error of judgement for a politically neutral BBC to  air such a one sided film that promoted Miliband and his ideas so slickly.

All good fun…but how often do you hear that type of critical analysis by Collins of Miliband’s ‘policies’ from BBC journos?  What we get from John Pienaar is ‘the boy done good…he’s making the narrative’…but little, if any,  examination of the substance.

The BBC hasn’t been very pro-active in examining Labour’s claims about the so called ‘Living standard’s crisis’ but at least someone is having a go…..and it’s not Tory Central Office…..

Rafael Behr, political editor of the New Statesman examines ‘Milibandism’.…but along the way he mentions this…leading in with a quote from Miliband’s conference speech…..

“For generations in Britain, when the economy grew, the majority got better off. And then somewhere along the way that vital link between the growing wealth of the country and your family finances was broken,” he said.

Average wages began stagnating around 2003, even as the economy looked buoyant in national statistics. For many households, there has been a relative decline in income, which was masked by Treasury tax credits and rising personal debt. Benefits (a substantial portion of which goes to people in work) and credit cards covered up for the systemic failure of our economic model. Those at the top of the income scale were spared the squeeze as the proceeds of growth flowed upwards to a narrow wealthy elite.

So…hang on…..Labour’s new line of attack, now that Plan B has been quietly binned, is the ‘Living standards crisis’…..the ever growing gap between average wages and prices and the highest earners…..caused by the Coalition’s policies.

Doesn’t Behr blow that line of attack apart by saying such a gap began in 2003 under Labour….‘Average wages began stagnating around 2003‘…..hidden by massive state spending and borrowing?

Will the BBC Newsnight team pick up on that as they interview Behr or is it just a PR exercise for the Chosen One?

In which I take seriously the idea that Milibandism is a thing: http://t.co/fJtvzCg2St (Thought experiment continues on Newsnight tonight)

— Rafael Behr (@rafaelbehr) November 20, 2013

The BBC is on board….spreading the word….and the word is ‘Milibandism’.

Another interesting few words from ex-Beeboid Roger Mosey:

I can say what I think now, too, which is cheering after 30-odd years of friendly corralling by BBC minders.

Deviation from past orthodoxy is as welcome to some former colleagues as a cat bringing in a mangled sparrow but there was plenty of support, too, including some from unexpected internal sources. The brickbats seemed to be about the principle of criticising the BBC rather than the argument itself. So let me be clear: I believe wholeheartedly in the BBC. But it’s daft to assume you can only be counted as a supporter if you think the corporation should expand still further or that it should have the whole licence fee for ever.

Sounds familiar….they just hate the criticism…however justified.

What does Robert Peston mean?  And who are these political activists?

The Co-op Group has told me: “Given the serious and wide-ranging allegations, Co-op Group has started a fact-finding process to find any inappropriate behaviour and will take action accordingly.”

And the board has also launched a “root and branch review of the democratic structure of the organisation, because we need to modernise to make sure the interests of all members are properly represented in the oversight of business activities”.

In other words, the new management of Co-op Group is concerned to reform a governance system that allowed a small number of activists in the political wing of Co-op Group to control the group’s commercial activities.

The less than reverend Paul Flowers was a Labour Party politico…..his appointment was fixed by those activists?

Did Labour hijack the Co-op?  Maybe that’s why the Co-op ‘supports’ Labour.

Nice if you can hijack a commercial enterprise and use its funds to pay for your Party’s political campaigning.

Is that not headline news or worth an indepth investigation?  Guess not.

Just like Falkirk, and all the rest of the selection processes that Unite tried to rig….or Miliband’s energy freeze policy, or his apprenticeship scheme, or his living wage……none given the comprehensive stress testing that the BBC gives to the Tory policies.

Guido links to Charles Moore in the Spectator who is less than impressed with the BBC’s coverage of all things Labour…and Peston in particular:

There has naturally been plenty of unfavorable comment on how the Revd Paul Flowers, the ‘crystal Methodist’, was allowed by the Financial Services Authority to become chairman of the Co-op Bank. But the story does not reflect very well on the media either. If you look at Robert Peston’s BBC blog on the subject, for instance, there is a lot of ‘I am told’ and ‘according to the Manchester Evening News’.

Is there no one in the BBC’s enormous staff who could have done a bit of work years ago on the Revd Mr Flowers?

Like Falkirk and Grangemouth (see last week’s Notes), this is a story about the inner working of the Labour movement. It is grimy in its details. It may even require leaving London and going somewhere in the north to discover the facts. I suppose that is too much to ask. But if it had been a story about Tory corruption of a bank, I feel Mr Peston and co would have been in more of a hurry to find out about it.

I put this at the bottom of the last post but thinking about it it deserves its own post.

The BBC has put this headline on its frontpage:

David Cameron follows ‘high-class escorts’ on Twitter

and look….way, way down at the bottom after the BBC has headlined the story:

The site speculated that the Prime Minister – or more likely, an aide – might have been looking for the Carlton Club, a private members club for supporters of the Conservative Party…..’which bills itself as the “oldest and most important of all Conservative clubs”.

So a complete non-story….but too good a chance not to smear the PM on the frontpage of one of the world’s biggest news broadcasters.

What were they thinking?  Is it student rag week at the BBC?

Compare though the curious lack of BBC interest in this from Guido about a Labour MP (Thanks Uncle bup):

Jack Dromey’s Porn Favourites

This is Santiago Rodriguez  preforming a sex act on porn star Daemon Sadi. On the 14 November @blackgaycocks tweeted a link to their “pumped raw and creamed” photoshoot on specialist publication website BigBlackGayCocks.net. Intriguingly this tweet was ‘favourited’ by the Shadow Minister of State for Policing, Labour MP Jack Dromey who is better known as Mr Harriet Harman.

Can’t find any BBC report on this (Got to be one somewhere surely!?)

Student loans to Bulgarians and Romanians frozen

Loans to students from the two countries frozen after “suspicious” surge in the number enrolling at British colleges

Definitely no BBC report on this:

When it comes to Europe, we’ve been mugged

I’m seething. But not half as angry as my constituent.

Her daughter had studied hard and been accepted by a good university. She had just started life as a fresher. Mum was so proud, busying herself with the sort of things that proud mums do when their daughter goes off to university.

No one imagined that that that irksome delay with the Student Loan whatsit was anything to fret about.

Because my constituent, and her family, had lived for a while in Germany, the Student Loan Company wanted more details. How long had she lived in Germany? Was she normally resident here?

Spend two minutes talking to my constituent, and it is perfectly obvious she – and her daughter – are as British as a post box.

But it is ticking the boxes on the application form that counts. And because she had lived in Germany for a short time, her application for a student loan was rejected. Despite a very understanding Vice Chancellor, she has now had to drop out of university.

Try to imagine how that family in Clacton might now feel, when they read that student loans to Bulgarians and Romanians have just been suspended.

However the BBC weren’t always so slow on examining student loan disasters….from 2010:

Firm ‘confident’ no repeat on student loan delays

Boryana Dimitrova, applying from Bulgaria, told the BBC she had had to send an identity document three times before the company managed to locate it – despite it having acknowledged receiving a form sent in the same envelope.

Great that we pay for foreign students, whom many of which no doubt, won’t pay back the loan….but also that the BBC covers up once again the EU free for all….free that is except for you and me who pays for it….and positively seeks out foreign hard luck stories, no doubt to make us think we are all one big happy European family.

The BBC does have time for this though…..a full report on a bit of banter at PMQs:

Cameron’s Commons drugs ‘banter’ angers MP Meacher

The second most important political story on the BBC website!

Oh and this is even more important…on the frontpage:

David Cameron follows ‘high-class escorts’ on Twitter

oh look….way, way down at the bottom after the BBC has headlined the story:

The site speculated that the Prime Minister – or more likely, an aide – might have been looking for the Carlton Club, a private members club for supporters of the Conservative Party…..’which bills itself as the “oldest and most important of all Conservative clubs”.

So another non-story….but too good a chance not to smear the PM on the frontpage of one of the world’s biggest news broadcasters.

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.