The BBC have been caught red handed flying the flag for the Reds.

This is an update of this.

The BBC passed off a Socialist Party member, Matt Whale, as an ‘ordinary’ member of the public, albeit unemployed.

In fact he has appeared on 5Live before and as an activist for the Socialist Party. (Thanks to Beeboidal)

The 5Live show’s producer, editor and researcher would have known of Whale’s provenance and clearly decided that it wasn’t relevant to tell listeners that he was an anti capitalist activist.

Essentially we had a spokesman for Labour/Occupy/Communists given a platform to spout his socialist propaganda and to push the Balls’ agenda.

This is the BBC working to undermine the Coalition policies.

This is the BBC no longer reporting the news but trying to shape it and the nation’s political and economic policy.

This is the BBC corrupting Democracy.

Some information from Wikipedia on the Socialist Party:

The Socialist Party is a Trotskyist political party in England and Wales. The Socialist Party was founded in 1991 as Militant Labour, its members having previously been organised as the Militant tendency within the Labour Party.

“Marxist voice of Labour and Youth”.

The Socialist Party’s first issue of 2010, headlined “Rage Against Unemployment” and written by Youth Fight for Jobs national organiser Sean Figg,[10] who took part in the Jarrow March for Jobs, argues that young people are likely to suffer ‘permanent psychological scars’ from unemployment. Figg calls for the right to a “decent job for all”, with a “living wage” of at least £8 an hour, and an end to university fees. Figg demands that the government “bail out young people” as it had the banks, stating that “capitalist politicians” will claim the cost would be ‘too high’.

All that kind of puts a new light on this story from the BBC about the recent ‘Jarrow March’….note Mark Serwotka of the  PCS union being interviewed….the PCS being heavily ‘infiltrated’ by the Socialist Party, and the ‘innocent’ sounding ‘Youth Fight For Jobs’ closely tied to the Socialist party.

‘A group of young unemployed people have begun a walk from Tyne and Wear to London in a recreation of the Jarrow March which took place 75 years ago.

Campaign group Youth Fight for Jobs said it hoped hundreds would take part.

Students and young trade unionists also joined the march.

Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the PCS, said: “Three-quarters of a century on, the young people recreating this famous march are sending an important message that our communities must never again be abandoned to pay for an economic crisis they did not cause.” ‘

The BBC were blasted by Tory Ian Duncan Smith for their insistence that falling unemployment figures  were bad for the economy in some mysterious way….now the Empire is striking back.

The release of the latest borrowing figures ironically (considering they have been calling for more borrowing) led to the BBC having the opportunity to launch a counter attack on the Tories. They also constantly slip in Flander’s question demanding to know why employment is going up in a recession whenever possible.

One of the factors in unemployment falling was that of some people becoming self employed and setting up their own businesses.

Steven Nolan steps up to the plate and set out to do battle with that assertion…that self employment is a proper job, or possible to do.

Nolan brought on a 20 year old called Matt (36 mins in) who has been unemployed for a year and says it is impossible for him to get a job in his area….he could of course just get on his bike as Chinese, Polish and African workers have done and moved to get work…half way around the world in many cases….I know that where I live foreign workers are working a 4 day rota of 12 hours shifts on a farm and then 4 days in a factory…so not just one job but two…and yet the Brits can’t get a job!

Listening to him you get the impression there might be more to ‘Matt’ than meets the eye…he seems to have the patter off, well, pat…and glibly cranks out Labour Party or even Occupy rhetoric….he is almost cast for the part of Labour activist calling a phone in…’authentic working class accent, articulate, unemployed for a long time, ‘can’t afford’ to go to university, angry at bankers and the Tories’.  Perfect….all ‘designed’ to generate as much sympathy as possible?

I’m sure he’s entirely authentic.  I was wrong………

UPDATE:  Thanks to Beeboidal in the comments for digging out this video of young Matt…apparently a member of the Socialist Party….‘A victim of capitalism’s failure Socialist Party member. Hull KR Green Bay and LFC fan’

Funny how the BBC kept that quiet!

He says it is impossible to get a job, there are businesses collapsing left right and centre….he can’t risk coming out of university with 50-60 grand debt and no job…it’s like a mortgage…can’t risk that without a job.

He goes on…the real issue, the core is the bankers and speculators who made this crisis and aren’t being made to pay for it….their money should be taken to be invested in youth jobs instead of hoarding it for the rich….we have a lost generation and a government of rich people who don’t know what it’s like to be poor.

Nolan agrees….no one should have to have that much debt and no job…and that banks ‘hoarding’ money is wrong.

Nolan’s attitude is a big problem…it is an attitude prevalent throughout the BBC…and one resulting from journalistic laziness and one might suspect preconceived notions.

The idea that Student debt is a problem is an astonishingly common assertion both by students and BBC presenters.

It is also completely wrong.

The BBC website explains it quite clearly should anyone (including BBC staff) be bothered to read it……under the new system you in fact will pay less than under the old one…not only that but if you earn under £21,000, or are not earning at all, you pay nothing back….not only that but the amount paid back is not dependent on how much you borrow…..you pay back an amount dependent on your earnings alone…..so even with £60,000 debt you will pay no more than someone with a £30,000 debt….and after 30 years all debt is written off.

It’s a bargain and simple…anyone who doesn’t understand the system perhaps should not be considering going to university…or preaching nonsense on the radio.

Victoria Derbyshire practically joined up with the student protestors last year in their protest against tuition fees….but made only a very weak and short explanation of the fee system to the students.

The old lefty of ‘Wake Up To Money’ (Andrew Verity I believe) last Thursday argued against the tuition fees and insisted they were an albatross around young people’s necks….Martin Lewis, financial expert, came onto Shelagh Fogarty’s show and did battle with him as he repeated his mantra of doom on that programme…unfortunately just timed out on the useless BBC iPlayer.

So student fees aren’t really a problem…accept for the country that has to pay  off all the ones that aren’t repaid eventually.

As for Nolan agreeing that banks ‘hoard’ money…do they? What was the problem with banks? It was reckless lending and not having sufficient capital in reserve to back that lending up. Now they are required by the regulators to hold sufficient reserves and control their lending.

Today on ‘Wake Up To Money’  (27 minutes) we had a KPMG representative on to talk about the banks…their profits being down 17% on last year.

He stated that the reasons for lower profits are…too tight a regulatory environment…at the wrong time…he said the regulations to curb the credit boom should have been put in place in 2005/06 (note sharp intake of BBC breath…2005 was Team GB time! Embarrassing!) and now is the wrong time to tighten credit and limit lending. (note Flander’s 2005 assessment of the Brown policies  Testing the Miracle)

The banks are required now to hold large amounts of capital, which comes from the funds that normally would be used for lending to businesses and for mortgages. 

You can’t have it both ways…you can have Gordon Brown’s high risk based financial system or you can have a careful, safe and steady, risk free lending environment which limits growth at a sustainable level.

Which one? The BBC have plumped for Labour’s choice….that of Brown’s protégé, Ed Balls, who is going for the spend, spend, spend option.

Guess they never learn….Evan Davis insists that ‘Austerity is killing the patient’….clever boy that.

says the Sunday Times.

THE BBC is to be forced to promote British citizenship and a sense of community under a new royal charter to be unveiled this week.It will redefine the purpose of the BBC, entrusting it with a far wider brief than its established mission to “inform, educate and entertain”.

You might think that I’d be cheering. I don’t know what the opinion of my co-bloggers will be on this issue, but speaking for myself, I think this new charter is a bad move. We shall be doing well if nothing worse happens as a result of it than it being ignored and laughed at; a slightly more probable result is that the BBC will become more PC.

Don’t think that I don’t see the problem this new Charter is trying to overcome. In September 2004, after the BBC had displayed its usual reluctance to call anyone a terrorist even after the slaughter of children at Beslan, I wrote:

… unlike Reuters et al the BBC is paid for by a compulsory tax on the British people. It goes out under the name of my country. Come charter renewal time, the domestic BBC justifies the license fee by saying that we, the British people, are getting a public good (“The public interest must remain at the heart of all the BBC does.” – Michael Grade, Chairman.) Likewise the BBC World Service, funded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the same Vote as the British Council, explicitly presents itself as bringing a benefit to Britain and the world.

But there is no more rock-bottom public good or benefit than not being randomly murdered. The BBC is obliged by its Charter and accompanying agreement to show “due impartiality” between political opinions but this is specifically stated not to mean “detachment from fundamental democratic principles.” The BBC has no more right to be impartial between a victim of terrorism and a terrorist than it has the right to be impartial between a rape victim and a rapist. (Although it must be careful to respect the right to a fair trial of those accused of rape, terrorism or any other crime.)

This website is devoted to uncovering cases where the BBC expresses an improper partiality between parties and ideologies within the covenant, so to speak, and cases where it displays an improper impartiality between those within and those without.

And in January 2005, after the BBC pandered to conspiracy theories about the tsunami, I wrote:

No media service, not even a privately-funded one, should be indifferent to these kind of values. A tax-funded media service in a democracy cannot be, unless it wishes to deny its own justification for existence…..

…if the maintenance of liberal values in Britain and the world matters, that objective being what the BBC claims it is for, then you don’t play neutral to the most basic liberal value of all, the right to continue living without being blown up at random. If neutrality is possible or desirable, why is the BBC not neutral about ordinary British murders?

…

Because, and never mind the name of this blog, in that sense it has no business being unbiased.

So why do I think this well-intentioned new Charter is a bad idea? Because I remember the National Curriculum. It was one of the most instructive episodes in modern British politics. Forgive me for quoting myself yet again; this family of issues is something I’ve thought about many times and I haven’t the time to keep thinking up new ways to say the same thing. Last November I wrote about why you should never, ever have a national curriculum:

She [Margaret Thatcher] was enraged by excessively trendy schools churning out PC semi-literates who knew about whale song but not Waterloo. “I’m not having this,” she said to her officials, “Get out there and make me a national curriculum.” She imagined it as being written on one side of a piece of paper: reading, writing, ‘rithmetic. A key point was always to include major kings-n-battles. Stories of spectacular historical ignorance on the part of schoolchildren were a major factor motivating supporters of the national curriculum.

Inevitably, this mildly repressive tool turned in her hand. Sure as eggs is eggs the national curriculum was taken over by the educational establishment, made monstrously detailed, and suffused with its values. Thatcher herself later admitted that the nationalisation of the curriculum was one of her biggest mistakes.

And sure as eggs is eggs the BBC establishment will take over all these new “purposes for the BBC” listed in the new Charter. The Sunday Times article lists these new objectives as including:

promoting education, “stimulating creativity”, “representing the UK, its nations and regions”, and “bringing the UK to the world and the world to the UK”.

Amuse yourself in thinking up ways to make these rather nebulous objectives into tools for expanding the BBC bubble.

Personally, I think the BBC ought to be privatised tomorrow. (Don’t worry, lurking Beebfolk, this needn’t mean melting down all the master tapes of the David Attenborough wildlife documentaries, like you always hint it will. You could even keep the name “BBC”, like they kept the names “British Gas” and “British Airways.”) If, for some strange reason, it is thought best not to feature the immediate launch of a “Tell Sid” advertising campaign for shares in BBC Plc as the centrepiece of tomorrow’s White Paper, the next best thing would be to persuade the BBC to act in the the spirit of the Charter it already has.

UPDATE: Stephen Pollard looks at the other theme of the White Paper, the replacement of the BBC Governors with a “BBC Trust”, promoted by Tessa Jowell as “the voice of the licence-fee payer.” Pollard writes:

Forgive me for spoiling the party in White City, but I have an alternative suggestion — a more direct means by which my views and interests can be expressed.