Category Archives: pro-labour

OBAMANONICS

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It’s the sheer infantilism of it that offends. The BBC glowingly reports that…

US President Barack Obama has said there is an “emerging consensus” that European countries must now focus on growing the State and the number of State workers jobs and growth.

Speaking after the G8 summit of some of the world’s leading economies, he said the US was confident that Europe can meet its challenges. President Obama said leaders had made good progress on a range of issues.

Obama said the meeting had been a success.

Well, when it comes to growth, Obama speaks with authority, having grown US National Debt by 50%. Still, that’s a mere trivial detail for the BBC so moving on…

The BBC’s Paul Adams at Camp David says both that communique and Mr Obama’s speech showed the US and French position had won out over Germany and Britain’s pro-austerity stance.

I wonder what “won over” means, Mr Adams? I heard Merkel state that Greece must honour the financial commitments it has made. Is that an example of a chastised German leader. I think that the BBC is running with the meme that “growth” (uncontrolled State spending, borrowing and taxing”) is the way forward and they will use this to beat poor hapless Cameron over the head between now and 2015. In the meantime, Balls and Miliband are now pretending that Labour did NOT wreck the economy and that “growth” is their favoured policy. This cannot end happily but the BBC are quite prepared to to look under the petticoats of this growth phantasm lest they catch a glimpse of the financial recklessness that dare not speak its name.

THE BOUNTY HUNTER…

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Poor old Labour Peer Lord Ahmed. Having gone a bit under the radar since that unfortunate business when he was  jailed after being caught sending and receiving text messages at the wheel minutes before he was involved in a fatal crash on the M1 – he suddenly pops up again – this time allegedly offering a $10m bounty for the capture of US Presidents Obama and Bush. The BBC does cover this, in it’s on the news site here, but I have to say that I thought it merited a degree of coverage on the Today programme. After all, it’s not everyday that a member of the House of Lords calls for the arrest of US Presidents as war criminals. Sadly, Today had not time for this story although I suppose this is no surprise when it has more important matters to pursue such as Ed Milibands “courageous” call to cap party donations at £5000.  One could be forgiven for thinking that running an in item on Ahmed might be unhelpful to Labour at a time when Ed is showing such statemanship…..

COME DINE WITH ME…

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Well then, it looks like “Red” Ed Miliband and Trade Union baron “Red” Len LcCluskey do enjoy dining together. Yes, the uber militant  Unite Leader McCluskey and Miliband have had 8 meals together since Ed became leader – care of McCluskey and the comrades and the BBC dutifully report this. And then leave it there.

No follow up news items on Today or any other programme as to WHY the Labour leader seems to want to dine on such a frequent basis with a man who hangs a photo of Lenin on his wall. No follow up questioning as to how such meetings could be seen by even the most neutral observer as undermining Miliband’s claims that he is not a puppet of the Unions, the Unions whose activism and votes placed him in his current role.

I am sure some people may share MY view that the Labour Party under Miliband in particular is behaving simply as an extension of the hard left Trade Unions like Unite (the single biggest funder) and yet the BBC seem curiously reluctant to flag this up as an issue worthy of prime time discussion. They are, of course, delighted to question every nuance of where the Conservatives get their money, who Cameron chooses to dine with in Number Ten – and in my view rightly so BUT why the reticence when it comes to Labour? If the Labour Party is an extension of the Trade Union agenda, is the BBC simply the broadcasting wing ?

It seem to me that the lack of independence of Labour from those who fund it (Unions now hand over 90% + of cash and non cash funding) is a genuine news story – every bit as important as what Frances Maude says. But it is not something the BBC seeks to run with for reasons we can but speculate.

STEPHANOMICS?

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Ed Balls’ andLabour’s whole line of attack on Coalition economic policy has been blown outof the water by the IFS ‘Green Budget’ report but strangely enough this is not considered ‘headlinenews’ for the BBC’s economic guru Stephanie Flanders. 


Biased BBC’s Alan notes;


“Balls claims that Osborne’s economic policies have cut growth and increasedborrowing because of that. The IFS report resoundingly shatters that delusion saying that Labour wouldhave caused borrowing to skyrocket by an extra £200bn in 7 years:

‘In a blow to shadow chancellor Ed Balls, the IFS undermined Labour’s argumentthat cutting ‘too far and too fast’ has driven up borrowing by choking offgrowth. The watchdog said that under the plan proposed by former Labour ChancellorAlistair Darling before the General Election, the deficit would be £76 billionin 2016-17 rather than the £24 billion currently forecast. In total, a Labour government that followed Mr Darling’s plan would haveborrowed around £200 billion more over the seven year period than planned bythe Coalition.’

But what does the BBC tell us in the shape of Stephanie Flander’s‘Steph’n’Nonsense’ blog? She fails to mention Labour’s extra £200bn borrowing at all though she does deignto tell us that perhaps the extra Coalition borrowing is not caused by theausterity policy….but this is merely ‘a small poke in the eye’ forBalls…not headline stuff!

‘Is Ed Balls right to blame the government for this poor performance? The IFSdoesn’t answer this directly. Labour would say that the extra tax rises and spending cuts introduced by thecoalition have been a waste of time – indeed, may even have hurt borrowing bytanking the recovery. There’s a complicated answer to that question in this report, but the bottomline is that the IFS does not really buy the Ed Balls version of reality. The think tank does not think the extra borrowing has been caused by the extraausterity, or not very much of it. Not a great headline, perhaps – but another small poke in the eye for Ed Ballsfrom the guild of independent economists.’

A major plank of Labour’s attack is torpedoed and Flander’s thinks this is notheadline news…in fact not news at all…as she doesn’t mention the £200 bn albatross. However credit where credit is due…she does reveal this!

‘Kevin Daly from Goldman Sachs noted recently, the official story that we havepermanently lost at least 7-8% of our national output in this crisis impliesthat the past few years have done more lasting damage to our economic potentialthan either World War II or the Great Depression.’

‘More lasting damage than WWII or the Great Depression’! And note the weasel phrase ‘past few years’…..the Coalition has been in powerfor nearly 2 years…is she suggesting that they are to blame?

She seems reluctant to state the unvarnished truth, namely that economic stabilityand potential has been destroyed by Gordon Brown and his team of Treasuryadvisers….that is Ed Balls and Ed Miliband….currently the two main playersin the Labour Party car crash now….and of course both ex boy friends of theBBC’s very own Stephanie Flanders.

This (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16829768)is the official BBC report on the Green Budget…and is intent on claiming theIFS supports Ball’s policies of more borrowing and ‘stimulus’…and of coursefails to mention all the above.

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LABOUR 1 CITY O

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Oh my. BBC favourite Chuka Umunna seemed almost embarrassed when the issue of RBS CEO Stephen Hester’s rejection of the Bonus to which he was contractually entitled was introduced as “Labour 1, City 0.” The BBC has done everything possible to portray this decision by Mr Hester as some sort of “victory” for Miliband – remarkable when one considers which political party put in place the circumstances which lead to the Bonus concerned! Umunna advances the current war on capitalism and the BBC does nor challenge his spurious commentary. For example, towards the end of the interview, he moans about “other” public sector workers having to take a cut.What about this then, BBC? Some bonus payments more equal than others, perhaps?

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HANG THE BANKERS?

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The BBC narrative is clear. Bankers were solely responsible for the global financial crisis. Go a little deeper and the narrative refines itself even more alarmingly; Capitalism was solely responsible for the global financial crisis. If only the State could control things. Next, seize on every opportunity to nail this in the public psyche. Take this current onslaught against RBS Chairman Stephen Hester. His crime has been to abide by his contract – a contract put in place under the gaze of a Labour Government. Now, the BBC allows Labour spokesman Chuka Umunna to rage against the sheer iniquity of what HIS party facilitated in the first place! Mike Cunningham, one of my fellow writers over on A Tangled Web, tackles the issue here.

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ATTACK!

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Ed Miliband must be delighted with his pals at the BBC this morning.

They have been leading all their news items this morning with the results of a Labour Party survey which claims to show that the evil Coalition is behind a sharp rise in the cost of council services for elderly and disabled people. Nothing to to with the efficacy of Councils, of course, who are sitting on top of BILLIONS in their reserves, also unreported by the BBC. Quite why a Labour press release justifies being lead story is beyond me but I suppose it conforms to the narrative.

As an extra follow up, we also had the ghost of Geoffrey Howe being asked to explain why he thought that the Government regenerating Liverpool back in 1981 was like making “water flow uphill”. Now, there is little that I found to admire in Chancellor Howe, but it seems to me that his assessment of Liverpool back then was pretty accurate. Of course the Government DID introduce Enterprise Zones and the like but the BBC was more interested in portraying the evil Conservatives led by…gasp..THATCHER…as being detached from the north of England.

From 1981 to the end of 2011, the drumbeat of the BBC is the same.

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JUST ANOTHER BIASED MONDAY

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Question to start the week. How often can you get the term “Bad for Britain” and the word “isolated” into a news programme? The answer is, lots, based on this morning’s Today programme. Did you catch it? Even by BBC standards, this was visceral hostility towards the Conservative Party. At one point, a trailer for a later story asked “Is the Coalition doomed?”. We had David Miliband on to offer us his wisdom here – lunatic as ever – meanwhile John Humphyrs got stuck into Danny Alexander here….and Nick Robinson joined in the fray. The BBC has rarely been as one-sided as it has been on the coverage of this story since Cameron refused to grovel to Merkozy. I suppose the Euromillions the BBC receives explains some of the visceral hatred towards Cameron and those evil “Eurosceptics.” I have to declare my bias now and say I would love to see this Coalition fall, for there to be an election right now, and for a Conservative/UKIP coalition to replace what we have. Can you IMAGINE the BBC response to that eventuality? The BBC is doing everything possible to triangulate Cameron to ensure he does NOTHING more to placate the “Eurosceptics” and instead embarks on a series of appeasements to the Lib-Dems. This is politics the BBC is playing, not impartially reporting the news. It is agenda setting, pro-Labour and slavishly pro EU.

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HOW THE WEST WENT BUST….

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An astounding piece of pro-Labour propaganda from Robert Peston, says Biased BBC contributor Alan

‘The Party’s Over:How the West Went Bust ‘
In a one hour programme describing how we ended up bust and bankrupt Peston does not mention ‘Labour’ by name once…even more remarkably the man who was Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister in Labour’s 13 year Great Leap Backward, Gordon Brown, also remains unmentioned. Who does Peston conclude is to blame for the present little economic difficulty we find ourselves in? Peston reveals the culprits, not Blair, not Brown, not George Bush, not the corrupt and unworkable European Union but that old BBC enemy Mrs Thatcher, with Cold War Hero Ronald Reagan thrown in for good measure.

 ‘Thatcher and Reagan introduced a new global economy that lead to the great unravelling we’re experiencing now.’

Curious really when you read what Stephanie Flanders wrote in 2005 about Brown’s stewardship….

 ‘Britain is growing slower than it has in more than a decade. The high street has ground to a halt, and inflation is the highest it has been under Labour. When we look back, in a few years’ time, at Brown’s economy, will we still see an economic miracle? Or another old-fashioned spending binge that, sooner or later, had to run dry? What is left of the miracle economy, if you strip out the cheap imports and the consumer spending? What is left is a lot of public spending. The only part of the economy that has grown faster than spending by all of us the past few years has been spending by the government.’

and read this for good measure….

(Blair) ‘painted us a rosy picture of a Britain at home in its own skin. Part right. But it can hardly be entirely true of a country with the worst cancer survival rates in Western Europe, where young people cannot afford homes, pensioners have taken a severe financial battering while multimillionaires are created overnight and violent crime is rampant on sink estates where the law surrendered years ago.’

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