After all the years Paul Mason worked for the BBC has the Tory Party just woken up to the fact he is somewhat left of left? Just why did the ‘impartial’ BBC employ him when he was so obviously way off any norm?
“The fact that the Labour Party is now getting its advice from Yanis Varoufakis and the revolutionary Marxist broadcaster Paul Mason does not suggest to me that they’ve got an answer to economic security. Presumably they chose those two because Chairman Mao was dead and Mickey Mouse was busy.”
Business Insider have unearthed a 1987 ITN clip of a dashing Paul Mason handing out the Workers’ Power newspaper and talking about “building revolutionary politics within the Labour Party”. Workers’ Power were a militant Trotskyist entryist group which infiltrated Labour in the eighties when Mason was working as a music teacher – his economics is all self-taught. The same year Mason was distributing their material, they published a pamphlet commemorating the Russian revolution and praising Lenin. It has taken nearly thirty years to achieve his entryist ambitions, now finally Labour’s Shadow Chancellor has signed him up to help with Labour’s economic policy…
It was a youthful indiscretion which the BBC was happy to overlook, just as they take a similar understanding view of any of their staff who dabbled with the National Front or BNP when young and naive.
Rob, LOL !! Spot on !
Hey where did my post go?
Blame the Royal Mail !
Ha. I was just about to reply to your missing post, thoughtful. It was going to be a bit of advice on maybe this not being the best website to make those kind of sweeping comments on.
Anyway, if we were to be tarred with the same brush as every bad gentile…..you get the picture I’m sure.
Just look up Arthur Zimmermann.
The ‘they’re not all like that’ arguement has been freely deployed by every leftie seeking to defend their Islamic favourites.
I said nothing untrue much of it from personal experience with the Orthodox and the reform most of whom I got on with quite well.
Thoughtful:
“The ‘they’re not all like that’ argument has been freely deployed by every leftie seeking to defend their Islamic favourites.”
I’m sure it has, but whereas this website is not tolerant of jewish/zionist criticism (you didn’t get the whiff of JIDF when you registered?), it is probably one of the best websites to vent about muslims! Can’t be all things to all men.
I’m not defending anyone. My God, no one needs a nincompoop like me to shield them. I take back my gentile brush comment – it was patronising.
Preferred the still in that it looks like he needed help in reading it.
Soon as he opens his gob with his Fred Dibnah impression, he just comes across as another student lefty…and that`s all he is.
Fred Dibnah. Now there is a blast from the past. How the hell did he get on the BBC in the first place and where is he now ?
Fred Dibnah sadly died of cancer in 2004.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Dibnah
Fred Dibnah was a star in a fading firmament. He was OLD Labour and certainly believed in hard work and being paid properly for your skills.
No problem with that.
What he would think of the current crop of fey elitists is open to conjecture.
I never knew or cared about Dibnah’s politics. He was an engaging, informative and infectiously enthusiastic presenter.
Yes, he was, and he is sadly missed, as is his genre of televisual documentary. I suspect he would not be best pleased at the shenanigans now masquerading as ‘entertainment’.
A week does not pass in which I do not dig out one of my Dibnah CDs. I always find that Fred makes me want to get off my fat arse and do something constructive. My favourite is the episode where Fred decides to sink a mine shaft in his back garden and measures the height of his garden above the river using a bow and arrow. He was a clever, entertaining and resourceful man.
If, as has been reported, Paul Mason has no official economics qualifications and is self-taught, then how on earth did the BBC employ him as economics editor in the first place?
Goodness me, they’ll be appointing the head of a ballet company as Director-General next.
The BBC has form in this respect. One example would be the Tomorrow’s World team. Apart from only a few of the long list of them over the years having science-based degrees (Zoology mostly, only a couple with Chemistry or Physics), the rest on the list had degrees in English, Drama, and suchlike, with even the reputable James Burke only having read Middle English.
Noticeable that the R4 ‘Toady’ programme without the slightest hint of irony, referred to Osborne’s jibe describing Mason as “the former Channel 4 economics editor” Oh, the refined art of omission. . .