The Today programme can always be relied on to enrage those of us who demand impartial reporting. A Biased BBC reader was listening on Monday 16th July and what he heard provoked this response;
“Firstly there was a piece from a WPC who has conducted a survey into allegedly low morale of women police officers for the ‘Independent Police Commission’. Then an interview with the Commission’s Chairman, Lord Stephens. Not a mention of the fact that this ‘Commission’ is in fact a Labour Party front. Any innocent listener would have assumed it was a pukka Government enquiry.
Secondly, a discussion between two dudes at the Hyde Park Concert on how unreasonable it was for the organisers to have switched off Paul McCartney and Bruce Springsteen when they went over time. No recognition of the fact that a lot of people live around Hyde Park. Also, using a clip from Boris condemning the switch off when the Mayor had nothing to do with it, it was a requirement of the licensing authority which was the City of Westminster. Such ignorance by Today researchers”
The Independent Police Commission, not to be confused with the similarly named Independent Police Complaints Commission. Coincidence?
If you go to the website
http://independentpolicecommission.org.uk/
you are advised “The Labour Party will place cookies on your computer” They will ruddy not.
The website ownership is credited as
Promoted by and on behalf of the Labour Party at One Brewer’s Green, London SW1H 0RH.
A shameless Labour propaganda site. Remind me the meaning of the word “Independent”? Socialists can’t help lying. It’s in their genes.
As this letter in today’s Telegraph notes, the concert started late. Had Springsteen started on time (punctuality is, after all, the politeness of princes but not, it seems, of uber-working class socialists with guitars) he could have completed the concert within the constraints imposed by the regulations. But, I forget, in celeb-world reasonable regulations – let alone good manners – are only meant to be observed by the “little people”.
Springsteen is “the voice of the working class” according to my American friends. Yet in England, safe from the prying eyes of his duped fans, he displays all the signs of being yet another champagne socialist.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1386741/Bruce-Springsteen-watches-daughter-Jessica-Windsor-Horse-Show.html
I have no objection to his money, his lifestyle, his aspirations – he is by all accounts a huge talent – but don’t give us the “man of the people” crap.
Like other members of that overrated bunch of preening narcissists that make up pop royalty, he and Macca are untouchable. McCartney is another hugely talented individual (I submit THE most talented of his generation) but he has broken the law (dope) and been seditious (overtly supported Irish rebels.) Yet in spite of these crimes, the British state awarded him a knighthood. Meanwhile somewhere in England, a quiet public servant has ignored.
Pop singers/entertainers not matter how talented should not be above the law and we should see that Springsteen calling the UK “a police state” just because he can’t keep to the terms of a simple contract and read his very expensive watch is a supreme act of self-importance.
The sentence I hate most in life is: “Do you know who I am?”
He’s also a tax dodging hypocrite…
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Bruce Springsteen pays over $138,000 a year in taxes for his three-acre home in Colts Neck, New Jersey. He owns another 200 adjoining acres. But because he has a part-time farmer come and grow a few tomatoes (organic, of course) and has horses, his tax bill on the remaining 200 acres is just $4,639 bucks. Do the math. By being a fake farmer, the working-class zero Springsteen is making a mint by robbing New Jersey of the antipoverty program funds he says they desperately need.
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http://www.humanevents.com/2012/03/12/bruce-springsteen-a-taxdodging-farmer/
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/brent-bozell/2012/03/17/bozell-column-hard-rocking-hypocrisy
http://www.glennbeck.com/2012/03/15/jason-mattera-hollywood-hypocrites/
His daughter rides horses, and IIRC she has participated in some showjumping competitions in New Jersey. Are you suggesting they should give up the property on their horses so he pays more taxes so he seems more authentic?
Please, do not let the fact that he’s actually paying full taxes for one of his properties cloud your opinion that he’s a tax dodger, when he could actually do the same trick that he’s doing in his second property by “growing some organic tomatoes”.
…and yet he CHOOSES to designate a large tract of land as ‘farmland’ – solely to avoid the full tax rate, when he can clearly afford to pay the full amount. He’s a tax dodger, plain and simple.
…he needn’t give up the land – just pay what’s owed. Like he says – the rich should pay their fair share. It’s not about being ‘authentic’, it’s about being consistent with your principles.
There was a strangely muted Shami on Today this morning, discussing the shameless hijacking of, what the Americans would recognise as freedoms guaranteed to them – but not us – by the First Amendment. Even Humphrys was surprised, first by the assiduous and self-serving justification for suppression of free speech by Lord Caborn and then by Shami’s complacency.
Shami opined to the effect that, since it’s the Olympics we’re talking about, it’s not the law itself which is abhorrent but only the way it’s applied and since the regulations don’t actually shut down the Commons everything’s OK. All agreed that it’s quite acceptable to pass what is, in effect, an enabling act in favour of LOCOG so that 20 (and diminishing) per cent of the gross waste of resources splurged on this fest for obsessives can be raised from the private sector.
Once again, Today didn’t feel the need to invite to the studio somebody who might be genuinely (and rightly) indignant about this. But, again, it’s only the “little people” – Londoners generally, taxpayers and small business people – who are paying the real price of London 2012 (there- I’ve said it – sue me!). If only we could say that it was just Moslems and/or asylum rapists who were adversely affected: you wouldn’t be able to tear Shami away from the microphone.
Yes, Shami was really weird this morning – it was as if “they had got to her”.
As you say, even Humphries seemed a little nonplussed by her compliant attitude.
I think we do also need to make mention of the indulgent story which followed immediately after Shami in their much-vaunted 8.20 slot – about how someone with too much spare time on his hands and “comedian and former guest editor of the Today programme Stewart Lee” [alarm bells now sounding] made a journey on a pedalo in the shape of a swan up various waterways through south-east England to the Olympic village in east London. I can’t quite remember exactly what point they were trying to make by doing that, but their natural conversation along the way centred on how people had been displaced to make way for the Olympics and how the famoulsy crystal-clear River Lea had been polluted as a result of the Olympics. By the tone of Sarah Montague’s voice before and after I got the impression we were meant to think this was a lovable story.
I will not be watching anything, buying anything or endorsing anything to do with a quadrennial sporting event taking place in the UK capital this year.
I am afraid that if I do, I may be breaching copyright. I suggest that everyone else does likewise, and that we boycott the unbelievably greedy and selfish corporate interests who feel that their placing their logo on something, gives them the right to become dictators and remove our freedom of expression!!!
Don’t get me wrong, I am fully in favour of free market capitalism and competition, but we are getting a fascist corporatist state at this rate.
Here is a post on the Free Society site which Shami should have been quoting verbatim on Today. She didn’t and, as Mark above comments, apropos of her willingness to go along with the Olympics Enabling Act 2006, it’s almost as if she’d been “got at” this morning.
Actually, I don’t think she was “got at”. Shami’s and Liberty’s devotion to “freedom” is nuanced and leans steeply to the left. It seems to me that, as long as the heavy-handedness of bureaucracy (of LOCOG, for instance) doesn’t damage or isn’t aimed at the left’s interests, who cares? Not Shami obviously.