Guest editors
Monday 28 December – Michael Sheen
Tuesday 29 December – Sir Bradley Wiggins
Wednesday 30 December – Miriam González Durántez
Thursday 31 December – David Adjaye
Friday 1 January – Baroness Campbell
Saturday 2 January – Lord Browne
The BBC’s Guest Editors are off and running, actor Michael Sheen being the first one…
Cyclist Sir Bradley Wiggins is to guest edit an edition of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme over the festive period.
Actor Michael Sheen and Miriam González Durántez, a lawyer married to ex-Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, will also take the reins of Today during the week.
The guest editors will be live in the studio and will take responsibility for about half of the programme’s output.
Sir Bradley, who won the 2012 Tour de France, said he wanted to shine a spotlight on “stuff that interests me”.
Lord Browne, the former chief executive of BP, architect David Adjaye, and human rights campaigner Baroness Campbell of Surbiton will also each edit a programme.
Former No 10 adviser Rohan Silva, a tech entrepreneur, will take over the role of business editor across the week.
Sheen (Unicef ambassador) wasn’t exactly controversial despite the Radio Times suggesting he was….though I couldn’t quite make head nor tails of what Sheen’s target was….is he pro foreign aid or against it?…
“A lot of the talk today has been about, ‘Where does charity begin?’,” Sheen said. “Does it begin at home? Why should we be helping children and people from other countries when there’s so much suffering and challenges going on in our own country?
“And it is absolutely true. There is terrible, terrible poverty in this country; there are terrible conditions for certain people. And I can understand why people get so worried about giving money to other countries, but of course 0.7% of the national income goes on foreign aid.
“That is about being a member of the global community, taking that responsibility seriously. 99.3% of course goes on what goes on in this country. And the argument, the false dichotomy of pushing British people against foreigners, or shirkers against strivers, it’s a false argument. And it allows other people who have certain interests to get away with it.
“The argument needs to be, ‘What is our government doing for people in our own country?'” he said.
One moment the argument is a false dichotomy the next it is the argument we should be bashing government with. Maybe I’ve just had too much Christmas spirit.
The other editors are as to be expected….Lord Brown though might provide some headlines as having been part of fracking company Cuadrilla and now at L1 Energy which may well be looking to frack here. Has he been warned off climate change and any pro-fracking material as Quentin Letts was warned to not mention climate change in his Met. Office mockery? I’m sure the Green green ink brigade are poised to flame the BBC should he dare to rock the orthodoxy. Then again if he doesn’t what’s the point of the guest editors who are surely there to provide an antidote to the usual BBC fare we suffer.
And looking at the guest editors isn’t it interesting how all of them are the high and mighty so to speak…even Sir Bradley Wiggins who may provide the ‘common touch’.
Where are the common men and women? They could just as well do what Lord This, Baroness That and the Wife of Nick Clegg could do…..where is the voice of the people? Leave it to the BBC to pick and of course you’d end up with a single mother, a Muslim in a headscarf, a student rioter, a foodbank worker and an immigrant.
Why do you have to be a lord, a lady, a high flying business person or successful actor to get on the BBC as a guest editor? An irony when they spent the whole of the last year talking about the gap between the privileged and the rest of us getting ever wider…the BBC just reinforces that privilege and the entrenched power of the ‘elite’ they pretend to disdain so much.
Isn’t it just the usual tale of a small, self-selected group at the top of the pile, all with the same vested interest, of staying at the top of the pile, patting each other on the back and doing each other favours?
I always thought Nick Robinson was reasonably fair in his reporting, but now he has joined the Today program he has turned into the ‘Anti Tory Attack Dog’ that seems to be the obligatory meme on a daily basis for presenters of this program.
Why have a “guest” editor at all? What exactly do they contribute? If they just regurgitate the Narrative – which in my experience they do (cf the consistent absence of any SJW outrage around this time of year) – what’s the point? I would have suggested a public vote to choose the guest editor but, since the process would be organised by the BBC and the outcome accordingly would be as skewed as every other “unbiased” selection process controlled from W1A, we’d just get another on-message luvvie at the editorial desk.
“Maybe I’ve just had too much Christmas spirit.”
If you believe the following Alan, you have had too much.
“what’s the point of the guest editors who are surely there to provide an antidote to the usual BBC fare we suffer.”
The BBC will be cherry-picking their output more carefully than ever before.
The pending Licence agreement is a very strong inducement for even more bias.
The EU referendum is also dear to the hearts of most Islamic Al-Beeb staff.
Staff who, you can safely bet everything you own, will be 100% impartially behind the remain in EU camp.
Staff who will leave no stone unturned, and produce anybody and anything vile from under the stones where they currently live, to reinforce the pro EU position.
The anti EU position, I hear you ask, well keep asking because there will be nothing neutral, impartial, even-handed or fair from Islamic Al-Beeb on this subject.
You are mistaken . The BBC is not pandering to the elite it professes to despise. It is giving a platform to members of the elite that think in the approved liberal left manner. The liberal left are now the establishment and views which don’t conform with the establishment view are given no air time on the BBC and if they do somehow or others get aired, they are mercilessly ridiculed. It is a certainty that no one with any views that are considered by the BBC to be right of centre would ever be invited to edit the programme.
Probably worth a trawl to see who the previous “guest editors” were-probably a barometer of how low the cultural life is getting, and how narrow the “pool of opinions” are as the years go by.
I`m guessing that “S`Bradli” represents the working class boy made good-the Paul Weller/Joey Barton…isn`t it nice to give the working class oik a voice slot? And NO-not Tyson Fury either, gypsy king or not.
Next up-the ethnic cultural icon who married well-Yoko, Mrs Clooney, Cherie or Cleggs EU owing wife…let`s be thankful that it`s not Vicky Pryce…well not THIS time anyway.
Next-human rights EU suckup-lefty lawyer like Shami, Imran Khan or anybody who`s represented an Assange or Snowden…but NOT a Blackwood or a Tony Martin…NEVER!
Next-establishment toady who presents as a rebel-usually Howard Davies, Richard Branson-the Ludovic Kennedy slot for State trustie who spits his rollie over Etons wall when no-ones looking-that`ll be John Browne for being rumbled as gay and with fingers in the houseboy-sorry till!
This will be David Laws next year…but let Browne be THAT archetype this year.
Could go on-but WGAF(not flying…just plodding to irrelevan…zzzzz
A “foodbank worker”? you say.
I say “Foodwank burqa”…and thank Stanley Unwin for the idea!
chrisH , Stanley Unwin ! RIP ! If he were alive today, he would be taking the piss big time !
“That is about being a member of the global community, taking that responsibility seriously. 99.3% of course goes on what goes on in this country. And the argument, the false dichotomy of pushing British people against foreigners, or shirkers against strivers, it’s a false argument. And it allows other people who have certain interests to get away with it.
Foreign aid is 0.7% of GDP. Gross Domestic Product (£1.5 trillion) is not income, so 99.3% does not ‘go on what goes on this country’ i.e. it is not spending.
Here is income:
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/mar/21/budget-2014-tax-spending-visualised
i.e. £648 billion. 0.7% of that would be £4.5 billion. Or looking at it another way the £11 billion aid budget is actually 1.69%.
But as Sheen is trying to establish a moral argument here it’s worth pointing out he has conveniently forgotten (or, judging by what he says above, simply does not understand) that we are effectively having to borrow the £11 billion-plus we are annually donating to other countries and our annual debt interest now stands at £53 billion. Where is the morality in burdening future generations with his and fellow virtue-signallers’ largesse/re-distributionist ideology?
false dichotomy….false argument – yes indeed, Mr Sheen, very false.
In fact, just another day of peddling falsehoods at the BBC.
But hey, these are views ‘not their own’ so just roll with it folks!
Still no new general thread so :-
Remember Storm Desmond?
Of course you remember, plenty of Global Warming mileage for Islamic Al-Beeb after Desmond.
Islamic Al-Beeb reports today that the current flood causing storm has been named Frank.
Doubtless more Climate Change propaganda to accompany Frank together with Labour lies about flood defence spending.
Desmond – problem, Frank – problem, it seems that Climate Change is not caused by human activity, it is caused by men. We should have known this years ago.
Desmond and Frank are two of the twenty one storm names suggested by ‘members ot the public’. Ten of the names are male and eleven are female. The storms are named in alphabetical order. Will the arrival of Storm Imogen and Storm Wendy indicate that climate change has been caused by women?
Will we get a Storm Mohammed?
Not a particularly inclusive list of storm names is it? by normal BBC standards I think it would have been denounced as racist and the compiler burned at the stake. My guess is there was much hand wringing and anguish over inclusivity vs a reluctance to associate anything negative with the ongoing cultural enrichment of our society.
For storm read wet and windy, starting to get sucked into the hype myself.
Caitlyn is on the way.
Apparently.
At least, that is what the storm is demanding it is now called. Bruce was too Antipodeanist.
We have that storm right now Lobster, right across Europe and Scandinavia…Sweden devastated….Belgium heavy damage….France facing pockets of fierce damage…the authorities struggling to cope…….
This is a concern, indeed. The Met Office say they have names to cover about six years of storms, so I’m afraid the likelihood is that they intend foisting that one, and other ethnic names upon us. Unless, that is, we all campaign to put a stop to the propagandist tom-foolery of naming perfectly ordinary rainstorms. Any sane government would have nipped the idea in the bud before it started but, unfortunately, we have a dimwit PR man in charge.
There will never be a Storm Mohammed or Aamina because, as the Al-Beeb is always pointing out to us, Islam is a nation of peace and to call a storm by an Muslim name would not only be insensitive (Muslim-named storms would never damage anything) but also racist and just, oh so wrong!
Will the arrival of Storm Imogen and Storm Wendy indicate that climate change has been caused by women?
By ‘climate change’ do you mean the phenomenon formerly known as man-made global warming?
Whatever, where’s the proven scientific link with CO2 emissions?
‘In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term predictions of future climate states is not possible’. IPCC 2001 Working Group 1 Report.
The BBC and Today Show FaceBook feeds suggest they are truly smitten with young Mike. Like, truly, madly deeply…smitten.
What it was that first attracted him to them… who can say?
Maybe they have a common purpose? (and it ain’t making entertainment)
Excellent article by Philip Johnson in tomorrow’s Telegraph:-
“It’s not mean-spirited to think aid cash would be better spent at home
The actor Michael Sheen has a typical Left-wing viewpoint that ignores Right-wing generosity….”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/12071872/Its-not-mean-spirited-to-think-aid-cash-would-be-better-spent-at-home.html?utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook
Guest editors or not, Toady was in its usual groove this morning of a procession of self interest groups demanding more taxpayers money for their causes.
Yep, in the bBBC land of money trees, there’s no problem that cannot be solved with an extremely large extra wad of your cash.
By the sheerest of sheer coincidences, look what arrived i my in-box just now:
https://www.change.org/p/welsh-government-stop-housing-homeless-teenagers-in-unsuitable-bed-and-breakfast-accommodation?
To be fair, he is talking about the ‘Welsh’ government. Be interesting how the BBC reports this, or doesn’t, in what it has space for and what not…
http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/trust-upholds-complaint-against-bbc-news-over-inaccurate-tweet
Virtue signallers the lot of them . It would be good to hear a real alternative voice to that of the liberal establishment but that establishment is now so fearful of ideas that it cannot entertain it.
2016 is the year when the liberal fantasy finally implodes or explodes according to your taste.