BBC ‘not honest’ about Griffin invite
In an article for this week’s New Statesman magazine, political correspondent James Macintyre reveals that the BBC is not being entirely honest about inviting Nick Griffin on to Question Time.
Macintyre used to work on QT earlier while at the BBC, and says the idea was doing the rounds two years earlier when Nick Griffin had not even been elected as an MEP. The European elections had little to do with their hand-wringing.
He argues:
My objection is that Question Time – unlike Newsnight or Today, where presenters could give Griffin a grilling on immigration – would provide a soft format for him to pontificate on a variety of issues of the day. It is hard not to have a “good” Question Time. Symbolically, Griffin’s appearance (presumably in front of a crowd – in part, at least – infiltrated by cheering BNP members) will mark the arrival of the party into the media mainstream. Question Time is Britain’s most successful current affairs programme.
Its presenter, David Dimbleby, is the best in the business and its production team has sustained the show’s “magic formula”, attracting millions of viewers each week.
He says the Labour party was “pathetically wrong” to consider reversing its “no platform” policy and the Tories and Libdems wrong to play along.
He adds:
Oh, and to those who ask, “Don’t you believe in free speech?” I say of course, but not in engineering an opportunity to incite racial and religious hatred in front of millions of viewers.
Reasons not to care about election night
Conservative Home have a campaign to ‘Save Election Night’, rather than having voting on Thursday and waiting until the next day to count the results.
Counting election results on a Friday, rather than Thursday night, is fine by me – they counted on Friday this year in the county council elections and it was still just as enjoyable watching Labour make gains.
Election counts are great if you win and rubbish if you lose, the timing doesn’t make much of a difference.
I can understand, though, why Tory activists are so keen to have the results counted as soon as possible while some Labour people are like, ‘meh, no harm in waiting til the next day’. But some of the arguments deployed make no sense.
For example, some people seem to think that if the election count is delayed until Friday, then ZaNu Labour will stuff all the ballot boxes to steal the election.
But why would Labour bother to do that, when we could just get Peter Mandelson to use his mind control rays to get the exhausted officials who are doing the counting after having been working all day to ‘accidentally’ count Tory votes for Labour instead?
Watch: Obama’s major speech on health-care
The full text of the speech is here.
Watch: US right-wingers fight over conspiracy
Open borders is the mainstream view
Philippe Legrain, author of Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them, is on the wireless tonight advocating scrapping immigration controls. What puzzles me, though, is the BBC’s description of this position as iconoclastic.
In truth, Philippe’s position is mainstream. What’s odd and extreme is the argument for immigration controls. Look at this from three perspectives.
1. The invisible hand. Perhaps the dominant strain in liberal thinking is the Smithian-Millian argument that liberty promotes aggregate well-being. Immigration controls are a denial of this. They raise the question. If a freedom as basic as the right to work where one chooses diminishes overall well-being, is there a consequentialist argument for any liberties at all? Of course, you can argue that immigration brings negative externalities. But I’m not at all sure these are any greater than the externalities created by many other market transactions.
An attack on the right of immigrants is an attack on the fundamental argument for a market economy. It’s a radical view.
continue reading… »
OMG! Osborne named GQ’s politican of 2009!
GQ Magazine has named George Osborne its Politician of the Year 2009.
Last year, George Osborne seemed to have splashed his way to a watery grave – only to rise up, alive and very much kicking. In October 2008, the shadow chancellor found himself at the nasty eye of a perfect political storm: a shady Russian billionaire, his yacht moored off the coast of Corfu, a feud between two Bullingdon boys (Osborne and Oleg Deripaska’s financial advisor, Nat Rothschild) and – of course – Lord Mandelson. Yet the 38-year-old MP for Tatton did not crumble.
Two decisive strategic moves got Osborne back on an even keel. First, he focused the media and the public’s attention on the scale of the public debt that Brown and Alistair Darling had built up: sure, Labour were spending, but they were spending money that they and we didn’t have, and that our children would one day have to pay back. A year from now, it is almost certain he will be ensconced in the Treasury, his tentacles reaching into every department of state and beyond. Not bad, eh?
Let’s just ignore that little embarrassment over opposing the nationalisation of Northern Rock before accepting it was the inevitable choice to make. I mean, it wasn’t really a big deal was it?
Naturally, Osborne’s prestigious award has led to Guido Fawkes ejaculating all over his blog.
Back to GQ Magazine. The award must have come as a shock to industry watchers, what with editor publishing the book: Cameron on Cameron: Conversations with Dylan Jones.
Only earlier this year GQ magazine that Tory politicians dressed better than Labour apparatchiks. David Cameron was named the eighth best-dressed man in Britain.
For Tories, all this hero worship can clearly never be enough when you have a brand to sanitise. We salute Dylan Jones for his perseverance for that safe seat…
Update:
Have just noticed Tara Hamilton-Miller in the Telegraph: How cool are David Cameron’s Conservatives?.
A contender for Commentator of the Year surely?
Why don’t pension critics attack the fat-cats?
The attack on public sector pensions by the TaxPayers Alliance, right-wing newspapers and the more excitable employer organisations is the kind of campaign used by the shrink-the-state US right.
There’s a very clear narrative – public sector pensions are unaffordable, unreformed, out-of-control and provide fat cat pensions. Its aim is to divide less well off people and make them vote for the interests of the rich.
Yet its evidence base continually shifts, with outrageous misrepresentation of statistics and deliberate bending of the truth in an admittedly complex area that very few people understand. The result is that even progressive people accept there is some big problem with public sector pensions that needs resolving.
Today the TUC publishes the first comprehensive rebuttal of the arguments used against public sector pensions and instead shows that for every pound that taxpayers spend on public sector pensions this year, they are giving £2:50 to subsidise the pensions of the richest one per cent who earn more than £150,000.
continue reading… »
Hammond caught out while rubbishing economy
The shadow chancellor Secretary to the Treasury, Tory MP Phil Hammond was caught out over views that the UK economy was about to lose its credit rating.
He said on BBC Newsnight last night:
We need to send a clear signal to the markets. Two of the credit rating agencies have already warned us that the government’s triple A credit rating will be at risk if the next government does not show greater determination than this government has so far demonstrated.
See on BBC iPlayer (14m 50secs in).
But one of the biggest credit ratings agencies, Moodys, today contradicted him:
The UK and Spain are unlikely to lose their top credit ratings even after being ’severely hit’ by the global economic crisis, Moody’s Investor Service said.
“Germany and France, other Aaa-rated countries which had been more affected by the crisis than Moody’s expected, remain ‘resistant,’ Pierre Cailleteau, managing director of sovereign risk at the ratings company, said in a statement today. The U.S. doesn’t face any ‘downward rating pressure’ in the next few years even as its balance sheet expands, Moody’s said.
…
‘Almost all aaa-rated sovereigns have been hit more severely by the global downturn than we expected earlier this year,’ Moody’s said. ‘Nevertheless, all Aaa countries now have stable outlooks, indicating that we do not expect rating downgrades over the near term.’
The BBC anoints David Cameron
James Macintyre writes on his New Statesman blog:
Final proof that my colleague Mehdi is right to deny that the BBC is “left wing” (and that instead, as I have been saying, groupthink has made it fall in love with the Conservative Party) came with Tuesday night’s News at Ten, which was billed as an explainer of the “battle lines” at the next general election.
Both David Cameron and Alistair Darling gave key speeches today about public spending. The Tory leader focused on the issue of curbing subsidised food in Parliament — a genuine disgrace but one that he bizarrely blamed on “Labour”.
The Chancellor outlined the Government’s approach to public spending in future years. Arguably more important. But for some reason, the flagship bulletin decided to lead with the Cameron charm offensive — which admittedly included allowing the political editor, Nick Robinson, to film Cameron putting away a box of cereal at the start of the day — instead.
Green Party wants rethink on prostitution
Green Party leader Caroline Lucas urged her party to re-examine its prostitution policy at a packed fringe meeting in Brighton at the weekend.
Ms Lucas was one of the panel speakers in a rigorous debate calling on party activists to move policy towards a Nordic model of criminalising punters and decriminalising prostitutes.
Currently, the Green Party argues for total decriminalisation of the sex industry similar to the model operating in New Zealand.
Ms Lucas insisted that the current policy was well meaning but, if implemented, would not lead to protecting women who were prostitutes.
More discussion by Natalie Bennett and by Harpymarx
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