Back in 2013 Afzal Amin told us, courtesy of the ever helpful BBC, that ‘Muslims “are an integral part of this country” and the murder of a solider in Woolwich should not be associated with the entire Islamic community.’
And indeed they are…so integrated in fact that they join forces with the EDL..or at least the good Mr Afzal Amin does…
A key Tory Election candidate was suspended last night after plotting with far-Right extremists to stir up racial hatred in a cynical bid to win votes.
Afzal Amin hatched a scheme to persuade the English Defence League to announce an inflammatory march against a new £18million ‘mega-mosque’. But – as he revealed in secretly filmed footage obtained by The Mail on Sunday – the plan was that the demonstration would never actually go ahead.
And when the phoney rally was called off, the fiercely ambitious Amin, a Muslim, intended to take credit for defusing the situation – winning over voters, and police, in the marginal seat of Dudley North.
‘This is my fantasy. If I could demonstrate to the people in Dudley that I can be a positive voice for community cohesion, for development, for campaigning against the evils and the terrorism and the child grooming and all the rest of it, then that would help me a lot in the forthcoming Election.”
Curiously the BBC don’t seem to have caught up with his latest thinking….maybe if he was a UKIP candidate they would be pumping this out all the time on every channel and every medium….how slow were they to react to the news that a LibDem peer was involved in dodgy dealings?
Still, despite the BBC’s best efforts to crush local news, we’ve got the Midland’s Express and Star to tell us that:
Most of the people arrested after an English Defence League march in Dudley were counter protesters, it has emerged.
Not an angle that gets emphasised by the BBC…especially as the ‘opposition’ is in the form of the fascist UAF…a Unite Union organisation with links to Miliband and whose vice-chair is an extremist Muslim.
Perhaps you have watched or listened to the BBC news recently and thought that there’s a lot of clever presentation but not much substance, altogether too much opinion and ‘interpretation’ in the News.
You may not be alone…even the esteemed Guardian has its doubts about the ‘theatrical’ BBC and I was thinking along similar lines as I heard Jon Pienaar describe Osborne as the ‘craftiest’ of Chancellors and Peston attacking Osbornes’s budget by giving us his emotional interpretation of cuts to welfare…apparently ‘That’ll make the handouts even meaner‘…and he’s eager to use the OBR’s flippant description of the economy post election as a ‘roller coaster’ even though it won’t be….more of a hockey stick…a jolly one perhaps?
Peston says ‘ George Osborne has not given any clue about how which benefits recipients would feel the pain‘ and asks ‘ Can the Chancellor go through a general election without spelling out in more detail precisely which welfare recipients he would make poorer?‘
So Osborne’s policies will be ‘even meaner’ than they are already apparently and full of ‘pain’ for the poor who will be made ‘poorer’.
And let’s not forget Norman Smith and his cry that the economy under the Tories would be ‘utterly terrible’ as it sank into 1930’s like spending levels….or those of the year 2000 when Labour spent at the same rate before going back to their socialist roots and spending all the money and then some.
All too much personal angst and opinion from the BBC employees…not even going to mention Donnison and Bowen!
The Guardian wants more facts and less theatre…the BBC being less careful with the ‘facts’, inclined to spin for an agenda and indulging in theatrics….and tends to use the news to advertise its own upcoming programmes…
You might expect the BBC news to be more analytical and internationalist, and ITV to be more popular and jolly. But, based on Thursday night’s broadcasts, you would be surprised.
Metaphorical flourishes – visually lavish but often simplistic in content – have become a BBC news signature, whereas you feel that, if the prime minister happens to mention Game of Thrones, ITN will still think hard before despatching Brady to a fancy dress shop to choose a costume to wear outside the House of Commons.
The BBC1 news also felt in some ways more populist than its ITN equivalent. While ITN correspondents deliver their reports fairly straight, the BBC’s aim more for operatic notes of tragedy (Keane) and comedy (Peston). The reporter as performer, which you might more logically expect from ITV, is more likely to be found on the other side.
An increasingly familiar aspect of the BBC news brand….A report that appeared to be an impressive exclusive – on a gang smuggling illegal immigrants out of the UK so that they can come back in as asylum seekers – proved to be a trail for a documentary immediately following the news. Like some movie trailers, the best bits had been filleted so efficiently that there seemed little point in watching the full documentary.
There is that well known saying that if you ‘Build It And They Will Come’, either Kevin Costner or the Bible, take your pick. Will Hutton has his own version….they are here, and they keep on coming, so build it. But he’s a bit coy about just who ‘they’might be.
The usual figure quoted for the required annual housebuild is around 250,000 per year. In a remarkable coincidence this is near, well, quite a bit lower than, the figure for net immigration which is on an ever increasing surge….300,000 ‘flocking’ here last year.
Any possibility that the need for housing is related to the UK being swamped by immigrants?
Just who is going to pay for these houses and how are they going to pay for them, especially as Hutton thought it should be the Government….us and our taxes in other words?
The Today programme didn’t have time for the hard questions just the lovely touchy feely ‘let’s do something lovely’ narrative that is all the BBC comes up with these days.
In its mission statement, the BBC says that it “exists to serve the public, and its mission is to inform, educate and entertain.” It exists, therefore, to report the news in an impartial manner – not to make the news or to push a particular agenda.
I would contend that the BBC is now working outside its remit. Far from being an impartial spectator to events, it has become an active participant in our national debate, whose influence is unauthorised and unwelcome.
Current and former employees have acknowledged what you might call the “Guardianisation” of the BBC’s editorial line. You only have to consider a range of topics such as climate change, the EU and immigration to see that the BBC treats those who have concerns about such issues with an institutional disdain.
Finally, and most importantly, there is the TV licence fee. This month we had a debate on the decriminalisation of non-payment of the fee in Parliament. This was due to the amendment put down in the House of Lords, which was then supported by five ex-BBC employees parroting the BBC PR machine’s line that this will cost millions of pounds of revenue should decriminalisation be legislated. The debate was riddled with dubious warnings that local radio stations and Cbeebies will have to close if the BBC did not retain the ability to send people to jail for being too poor to pay for their TV licence.
This month has also seen the suspension of the Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson for an alleged fracas with a producer. It has been speculated that the programme’s brand is worth tens of millions of pounds in annual income to the BBC. Should Jeremy Clarkson finally be forced out of the BBC, a reported aim of senior BBC executives, how will that revenue gap be filled?
Remember this: the BBC – thanks to its ex-employees in the Lords – has achieved a delay in possible decriminalisation of non-payment of the licence fee for another two years. On current trends, that will see 100 more people put in prison and over 300,000 citizens criminalised, simply because the BBC judges it to be a price worth paying for the maintenance of their revenue stream.
You really do have to question the moral approach of an organisation that applies such standards to the public they are supposed to be there to serve. It will also be revealing to see how Jeremy Clarkson is dealt with compared with Russell Brand, who in spite of his disgusting behaviour towards Andrew Sachs is now a leading presenter on Comic Relief. Perhaps this is because his extreme Left-leaning views are more palatable to BBC executives.
By leading the debate and setting the political agenda on the decriminalisation of the licence fee, I have set myself on a collision course with the might and influence of a £5 billion worldwide media organisation, which has attacked my family business, falsely reporting “facts” and attributing comments to me which I did not make.
I am fearful of retribution from the BBC after having been picked last week, out of a possible 46 East Midlands Seats, as a focus for the regional news programme in the upcoming election, effectively granting my opponents a disproportionate amount of prime BBC airtime to attack me.
The BBC has a budget more than double the size of the Foreign Office – and is an empire of an organisation. I believe serious questions must be put to the BBC at Charter Renewal about their agenda and their transparency.
This must be done without fear of its monolithic PR machine, which wields so much power. “Auntie”, as she was once affectionately known, is no longer with us. Instead we are faced with one of the last vestiges of corporatism, a leviathan that seeks to change our national culture and which holds even our highest elected representatives in contempt. The BBC has shown it is willing to ride roughshod over our democratic processes, so it must be tackled.
Andrew Bridgen is MP for North West Leicestershire
I laughed at that bit about the BBC supposed to be serving the Public…Craig at ‘Is the BBC biased?’ quotes this arrogant gem from a BBC correspondent:
A classic case of BBC bias:
Douglas Fraser used his blog to debate the statistics and the political context, and ended with the following very characteristic bit of BBC reporting – giving the appearance of impartially outlining alternative interpretations but actually strongly steering the reader towards a very particular view point:
‘So why the mismatch between public opinion and political consensus? Perhaps it is merely a desire for a point of difference.
Perhaps it is because it is a less salient issue for Scots: having less experience of ethnic minorities in their neighbourhoods, they care less about it than other issues.
You could argue that MSPs at Holyrood are out of touch, and in an elite which finds immigration useful in providing the low-price labour to support its lifestyle.
Or you could see MSPs as leading public opinion, setting out Scotland’s distinctive attitude to foreigners and incomers, on an evidence base about demographic change with which few others are familiar.
That version of Scotland’s outlook on the world may not be based on public opinion. But it’s a positive story to tell.’
Who needs the opinions of the ignorant and prejudiced ‘Public’ when you’ve got the intellectual and moral leadership of those who have the sacred BBC pay cheque every month to light the way for us, helpfully ‘guiding’ our opinions?
MPs have criticised a “worrying lack of coordination” between five overlapping official inquiries into the so-called Trojan Horse affair.
It was alleged last year extremists had tried to take over several schools in Birmingham to advance radical interpretations of Islam.
A series of official investigations found the claims to be groundless.
That last line is a complete lie.
The BBC has always attempted to portray the Trojan Horse letter as a hoax ( The MCB also takes that line…“a malicious fabrication and completely untrue”), Phil Mackie claiming it was a result of paranoia, racism and Islamophobia, with Mark Easton trying to claim that Islamists taking over and running a school was no different to Catholics running a Faith School and that the parents welcomed such eventualities.
The BBC wants you to believe that there is no threat to your way of life, culture and society from Muslim activists imposing their religion upon you and yours….and the BBC is prepared to tell you lies in order to reassure you that there is nothing to worry about.
The man at the centre of the Trojan Horse plot, Tahir Alam, was also the Muslim Council of Britain official who produced a document in 2007 with a similar intent to the Trojan Horse plot, that is the imposition of Islamic values upon non-Islamic schools. The BBC has never published or linked to this document since the Trojan Horse scandal broke despite its high relevance to the credibility of the Trojan Horse letter’s contents. The fact that the 2007 document provides evidence of intent along similar lines to the Trojan Horse plot and was produced by the same man completely undermines the BBC line, which is why they don’t mention it.
Khalid Mahmood, the Labour MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, said: “Mr Alam … has been planning this for 15 years. He goes around making these schools religious by manipulating governors, and bringing in certain teachers. He was able to hone the [tactics] in Birmingham that he drafted in this report.”
Pretty damning no? Not for the BBC.
And what of that claim in the latest BBC report that ‘A series of official investigations found the claims to be groundless.’?
There is “disturbing” evidence that people with a “shared ideology” were trying to gain control of governing bodies in Birmingham, says Education Secretary Nicky Morgan.
Firstly were claims of extremists trying to take over schools ‘groundless’? No….
The very clear evidence that young people are being encouraged to accept unquestioningly a particular hardline strand of Sunni Islam raises concerns about their vulnerability to radicalisation in the future. I have heard evidence to the effect that there are real fears that their current experiences will make it harder for them to question or challenge radical influences.
Secondly…did it matter if the letter was a hoax? (and there’s no proof it is…quite the opposite in fact) No…the BBC is trying to distract you…
At the beginning of my investigation, I decided that it was not a priority to establish who wrote the letter or whether it was what it purported to be. It has been suggested that the letter is a hoax or a fake and the content therefore is irrelevant. This approach misses the point. The important issue is not who wrote it or whether it is a genuine extract from a letter between conspirators, but whether the events and behaviours described have actually happened.
Clarke goes on to say that it was evident that events as claimed in the Trojan Horse letter were known by the Council before the letter’s publication…..
It quickly became apparent to me that although there are some factual inaccuracies in the letter, there is also a great deal that is true, some of which had not previously been in the public domain.
There is incontrovertible evidence that both senior officers and elected members of Birmingham City Council were aware of concerns about activities that bear a striking resemblance to those described in the ‘Trojan Horse’ letter, many months before it surfaced.
As a result of the evidence gathered by my investigation, I can conclude that senior officers were aware of practices subsequently referred to in the ‘Trojan Horse’ letter as early as the end of 2012, and discussions on this issue took place between officers and elected members in May 2013. This is some six months prior to the ‘Trojan Horse’ letter being received by the Leader of the Council.
Thirdly…just to emphasise and confirm the evidence of extremist takeover of schools….
There is a disconcerting pattern reaching across a number of the schools I have looked at. This includes the following: the effective take-over of the governing body by like-minded people; nepotism in staff appointments and appointments to the governing body; individuals associated with each other holding teaching posts or being members of the governing body (or both) at a small number of local schools; rapid advancement of new or inexperienced governors to the role of chair; bullying and intimidation of senior teaching staff, and in particular headteachers; previously highly regarded headteachers made subject to criticism and complaint by governing bodies; interference by the governing body in the curriculum and the day-to-day running of the school; the reinforcement of Muslim identity to the exclusion or disparagement of others; the introduction of conservative Islamic practices into school life; a strategy of harassment to oust the headteacher; financial mismanagement; and inappropriate recruitment and promotion procedures for favoured staff.
There is ample evidence that individuals who hold or have held key positions in the schools have a shared ideological basis to their faith. During the investigation I took possession of the contents of a social media discussion between a group of teachers at Park View School that for much of 2013 was called the ‘Park View Brotherhood’. It was initiated and administered by Mr Monzoor Hussain, the Acting Principal, and was joined by influential teachers within the school. The evidence from more than 3,000 messages spread over 130 pages of transcript shows that this group either promoted or failed to challenge views that are grossly intolerant of beliefs and practices other than their own. The all-male group discussions include explicit homophobia; highly offensive comments about British service personnel; a stated ambition to increase segregation in the school; disparagement of strands of Islam; scepticism about the truth of reports of the murder of Lee Rigby and the Boston bombings; and a constant undercurrent of anti-Western, anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiment. Some postings were challenged by the administrator, Mr Hussain, but generally only where criticism was made of other Muslim groups. The numerous endorsements of hyperlinks to extremist speakers betray a collective mind-set that can fairly be described as an intolerant Islamist approach that denies the validity of alternative beliefs, lifestyles and value systems, including within Islam itself.
Conclusions
I neither specifically looked for nor found evidence of terrorism, radicalisation or violent extremism in the schools of concern in Birmingham. However, by reference to the definition of extremism in the Prevent strand of the Government’s counter terrorist strategy, CONTEST, and the spectrum of extremism described by the Prime Minister in his Munich speech in February 2011, I found clear evidence that there are a number of people, associated with each other and in positions of influence in schools and governing bodies, who espouse, endorse or fail to challenge extremist views.
Finally do all the parents welcome the Islamisation of schools if they get good results as claimed by Easton? No…..
It has been suggested to me that the ambition of those involved was only to create high achieving schools reflecting the communities they serve, following the wishes of the majority of parents. I do not agree. On the contrary, while the majority of parents welcome the good academic results that some of these schools produce, they do not demand that their children adhere to conservative religious behaviour at school. Indeed, I received evidence that this would be supported by only a minority of parents. I was told how some of those who claimed most loudly that they were acting for the community either protest alone or co-opt relatives to protest with them. I was also told by many witnesses that the majority do not have the confidence to argue against the articulate and forceful activists who seek to impose their views, for fear of being branded as disloyal to their faith or their community.
Once again the BBC cannot be trusted to report on Muslim issues with any integrity and honesty.
The BBC, Mark Easton in particular, likes to dispel any idea that British people are British, that there is any such thing as a British identity….they tell us that we are a nation of immigrants…because of course it suits their narrative on immigration now, somehow, not sure how though, even if we were a nation of immigrants how could the UK carry on absorbing 300,000 new immigrants every year? The basic logistical difficulties alone would crush the country never mind the social and cultural problems that would ensue….are ensuing.
The BBC takes an entirely different slant on a DNA study of the population of Britain to that taken by the Telegraph…
Geneticist Professor Sir Walter Bodmer of Oxford University said: “What it shows is the extraordinary stability of the British population. Britain hasn’t changed much since 600AD.
“When we plotted the genetics on a map we got this fantastic parallel between areas and genetic similarity.
“It was an extraordinary result, one which was much more than I expected. We see areas like Devon and Cornwall where the difference lies directly on the boundary.”
Professor Mark Robinson, of Oxford University’s department of archaeology added: “The genetic make-up we see is really one of perhaps 1400 years ago.”
Here is the Telegraph’s line on the Celts…
The findings also showed that there is not a single ‘Celtic’ genetic group. In fact the Celtic parts of the UK (Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and Cornwall) are among the most different from each other genetically.
That was it…literally a line whereas the BBC decided that that was to be the main thrust of their report…
The BBC constantly tries to rewrite history and wipe out 1400 years of your cultural and social heritage, your national identity, in pursuit of their own multi-cultural and diversity based, pro-immigration agenda….which is one reason when they report on the cultural vandalism, the destruction of the Assyrian history by ISIS, which they tell us is so crucially important to the local’s identity, I always laugh at the BBC’s hypocrisy. Labour’s attempt to ethnically cleanse Britain of its native population doesn’t bother the BBC at all.
Funny how the BBC has lost interest in the Israeli election now that the Left has been crushed….oh..not quite lost interest…this is the story on the front page…
The White House expresses “deep concern” over “divisive rhetoric” in Israel’s election, and reiterates US support for Palestinian statehood.
Those terrible ‘Nazi’ Israelis….and can’t go without a mention of the Palestinians.
And elsewhere…from before the election result was known…..Jeremy Bowen obviously doesn’t think that the BBC provides him with a suitably big enough audience for his talents…and so he peddles his genius at the New Statesman as well…
The piece is as negative about Israel as you could be without doing a Mel Gibson and puts the blame for any and every breakdown in peace negotiations at Israel’s door.
Bowen paints Netanyahu as the nearest thing to a Nazi as you can get, relying on far right religious fanatics and racist Jews for his mandate….no doubt Bowen is kept up to date on the issues by his leftwing Israeli friends….
When I woke on the morning after the election [1996] everything had changed. The exit polls were wrong. Some of my leftist Israeli friends grumbled that they had gone to bed with Peres and woken up with Netanyahu.
Bowen’s leftist friends must have woken up with yet another grumble this morning.
Bowen’s article seems to be just one long attack on Israel trawling through history for any point, however small, that can be used to criticise Israel and portray them as the aggressors and Palestinians as the eternal victims.
Here is a map Bowen kindly provides us with…not bothering to mention why changes to areas of control have changed…such as a 70 year war against Israel by the Muslim countries that surround it resulting in Israel ‘winning’ those areas..whose fault is that?
Bowen uses a curious phrase…….
During the 1948 war that led to Israel’s independence…during Israel’s independence war (the Palestinians’ Naqba, or “catastrophe”)
Israel’s ‘war of independence’? That sounds like Israel launched a war doesn’t it? As I understand it, and I think the history books show, the Muslim countries surrounding Israel launched the war against Israel not the other way round….and then they did it again, and again, and again….and maintain support for the Palestinian war of terror against Israel.
Why would Bowen like to portray Israel as the war monger? And why mention the so-called ‘Naqba’, a Palestinian term that is designed to be highly loaded politically?
Bowen likes to think Israel is ‘merely shipping’…..that it will disappear back into the sands of the Middle East as it did once before…
In 1997, just before the state of Israel celebrated its 50th anniversary, I asked two elderly Palestinian men in Jerusalem for their view of the past half-century. They shrugged. Israel was strong. But look back at history, one of them said. The Crusaders were strong, too, and controlled Jerusalem for more than a century. But, he said, we got rid of them.
Shame the BBC doesn’t itself admit that that is the real aim of the Palestinians…the ethnic cleansing of the Jews from Israel.
The BBC on the news and on its web report refer to Bosnians killed at Sebrenica as ‘Muslims’.
Serbian police have arrested seven men accused of taking part in the slaughter of over 1,000 Muslims at a warehouse on the outskirts of Srebrenica.
The seven are among the first to be arrested by Serbia for carrying out the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995, Serbian and Bosnian prosecutors say.
Curious how eager the BBC is to mention the fact that the victims were Muslim. More often than not the BBC goes to great lengths to avoid mentioning the fact that people are Muslim or any link to Islam…if they have committed a crime or terrorist act.
When Muslims are victims the BBC emphasises the religion despite it having nothing to do with the issue in this case….the people were killed not because they were Muslim but because they were Bosnian and not Serbian.
They were ‘Bosnians’. Their religion was irrelevant.
The BBC yet again dances to the Muslim extremist’s tune by reporting this in a way that suggests the victims were killed because of their Muslim religion, a narratve that the extremists use to recruit more Muslims to their Cause.
The fact that the report later uses ‘Bosnian’ as the identifying description indicates the irrelevance of the ‘Muslim’ label.
About 8,000 Bosnian men and boys were killed in Srebrenica over three days, the worst atrocity on European soil since the Holocaust.
Here is something of interest from the now departed Stephanie Flanders in 2010 in one of her more impartial moments when she wasn’t urging Osborne to borrow and spend more as ‘interest rates are at a record low’ and pressing the virtues of ‘Plan B’ upon him….why do we have so much debt?…one reason is that Labour increased government spending [but not income] by 26% in 6 years……and to add insult to injury the borrowed money ‘went out the door’…it was squandered by inefficiency….
Are we all making too much fuss about the Spending Review? Nick Clegg thinks so. He likes to point out that, even with all the cuts we will see unveiled tomorrow by the chancellor, total public spending in 2014-15 will only be back to where it was, as a share of the economy, in 2006-7. At the end of the Parliament, the government will be spending £41bn more, in cash terms, than it is today.
That doesn’t sound so bad. How, you might ask, can it possibly take the deepest and most prolonged spending cuts since World War II, simply to take government spending back to where it was four years ago?
The answer, as a certain meerkat would say, is “simples”. All you need is the largest, most sustained increase in public spending for over 50 years, the deepest recession in more than 70 years, and the first decline in Britain’s nominal GDP since records began.
Pressure on government spending since WWII has been relentlessly upward. As we get richer, we demand more of the kinds of things that government provides, and the cost of those things often rises faster than the economy.
It takes a very determined government – taking some very tough decisions – to fight that upward pressure for any length of time. You’ll note that the Thatcher era barely registers on the chart [of government spending].
Why did spending rise so fast? About half of it was due to the recession. But, as Tim Morgan points out in a paper for the Centre for Policy Studies, spending in 2006-7 was already 26% higher, in real terms, than it had been in 1999-2000. That was Labour’s promised investment in public services.
Maybe public services did not feel 26% better. But all that means is that it was spent inefficiently, and/or prices and wages in the public sector rose much faster than the economy overall (which they surely did). The money definitely went out the door.
Then the recession came, with a real decline in GDP of 6% between the spring of 2008 and the autumn of 2009. We have had recessions before, of course, but few that deep, and none, in modern times, that was accompanied by an annual decline in the cash value of GDP.
If the government follows through on this spending review, public spending in 2014-15 will be 4% lower, in real terms than it is today – but account for roughly the same share of the economy as it was spending in 2005-6.
It is about reversing a small-ish part of the relentless upward march in government spending since WWII. The fact that it should take such a gargantuan effort to achieve even this merely demonstrates quite how relentless that upward march can be, in a rich but now ageing modern economy.
The BBC doesn’t seem to do ‘history’ anymore…at least where Labour’s part in wrecking the economy lies. If any Tory politician raises the matter of Labour’s responsibility for the economy and the subsequent austerity measures to put it back on track they are quickly slapped down by the BBC presenter who tells them that they have been in power for 5 years and can’t blame Labour anymore as if the consequences of one of the deepest and longest recessions can suddenly vanish after a set date.
Even Labour friendly voices admit Labour’s role in the crash….last week on 5Live one (can’t remember who) frightened the presenter by saying Labour had helped cause the recession by failing to regulate the banks and financial institutions….how often, if ever, do you hear a BBC presenter referring to Brown’s ill-judged light touch regulatory regime in a similar tone?
Didn’t hold out much hope for a balanced view of the budget from Pienaar when he said this last night…
‘They don’t come any craftier than Osborne’
A fairly derogatory way of describing Osborne from the BBC’s finest… just a touch ‘loaded’.
Pienaar has consistently claimed that Osborne is the most ‘political’ of Chancellor’s…..on what basis I don’t know as all Chancellors are political. Even today after the budget Pienaar was still making that claim…and yet Osborne is a politician, his job is to be ‘political’…politics is after all about providing what the ‘People’ want and getting their vote to implement those policies.
It is disengenuous to try to fault Osborne for being political when that is the job.
Having said that just how political was the ‘crafty’Osborne? He had around £6 billion extra to play with and yet he refused to use it to make short term ‘political’ pre-election give-aways. Listening to one business leader he claimed that Osborne’s budget was good for business and highly responsible in not using that £6bn on such populist give-aways.
Osborne has after all presided over the hugely unpopular and difficult Austerity and made the very controversial move to lower the higher rate of tax as well as huge welfare cuts amongst other ‘controversial’ savings in government spending……hardly policies designed to win easy votes….Osborne adopted policies that he knew would cause a measure of uproar.
Pienaar is totally wrong about Osborne creating a Budget for purely political purposes, and in fact, Osborne has put the interests of the country ahead of his Party and its election chances when you consider the economic measures he has implemented over the last 5 years.
Pienaar has always had a soft spot for Miliband and rarely has a critical word to say about him or his policies, Pienaar often claiming it is Miliband leading the way and forcing the narrative.
The BBC is still pushing the ‘government spending will be back to the 1930’s level’ spin that we heard last year when Norman Smith claimed that the Tory spending levels looked ‘utterly terrifying’, taking us back to conditions like those written about by Orwell in his book ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’
In 2019/20 spending will grow in line with the growth of the economy – bringing state spending as a share of national income to the same level as in 2000, the chancellor told MPs.
The BBC’s Robert Peston said this was a move aimed at neutralising Labour’s claim that the Conservatives would cut spending to 1930s levels.
No attempt to put the figures into context…such as GDP being far higher now, so the same percentage of GDP actually means far more money.
Peston looks like he is trying to claim Osborne’s statement was pure spin aimed at neutralisng Labour’s claim….it is of course based on fact, Labour’s spending was as near as damn it to that level in 1999-2000….
Labour’s spending as a proportion of GDP in 1999-2000? 36%
The Coalition’s projected spending in 2019-20? 35.2%
Son of a Labour peer, Peston prefers to spin this by claiming Osborne is spinning, just as Pienaar does, and with Norman ‘utterly terrifying’ Smith on the same bandwagon Miliband is getting plenty of BBC subsidised propaganda handed to him on a plate.
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