Cameron Condemns 'Whingeing BBC' on Cuts

[Teddy Bear]

Could the political worms be turning? It seems to us here that they have had plenty of ammunition to complain about BBC bias, could it be that they are finally starting to fight back?

There also more on this subject here.

Cameron condemns the whingeing BBC: It's the British Broadcasting Cuts Corporation, he says

David Cameron has hit out at the BBC for whingeing about his Government’s cuts.

The Prime Minister blasted the ‘British Broadcasting Cuts Corporation’ for publicising every reduction in spending without properly explaining why efficiencies were necessary.

Downing Street is understood to be increasingly frustrated with the way the corporation is reporting the Government’s austerity programme.

Mr Cameron made his comment after giving an interview to a BBC reporter on youth unemployment.

The interview took place last week, before his Middle East trip, which was overshadowed by the revelation that he was accompanied by arms dealers and by criticism that the Government was failing to get Britons out of war-torn Libya.

In a parting shot, at the end of the interview, the Premier said this was a ‘good news story’ and the ‘BBCC’ should treat it as such.

The reporter asked him: ‘The BBCC?’, to which Mr Cameron replied: ‘Yes, the British Broadcasting Cuts Corporation.’

Downing Street sources said the Prime Minister has been using the BBCC joke privately for some time.

Mr Cameron believes the corporation is giving too much of a voice to those campaigning against cuts, and is not providing enough balance. Critics say the corporation gives a platform to union leaders and Labour council chiefs who say they are being forced by the Tories to slash front-line services while doing nothing to sack bureaucrats and reduce fat-cat salaries.

The BBC has also allowed scientists to claim cuts would lead to a ‘brain drain’, and police constables to say they would have to sack policemen, risking rises in crime.

One edition of the BBC’s Six O’Clock News carried four separate stories covering the widespread opposition to the Coalition’s planned cuts, and their potentially devastating effect on everything from the Army to the film industry.

Then it reported that the NHS was paying for teenagers suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder to go surfing in Cornwall.
This is the BBCC: On one edition of the Six O'Clock News there were four stories about the opposition to coalition cuts

This is the BBCC: On one edition of the Six O'Clock News there were four stories about the opposition to coalition cuts

There was no suggestion that at a time of national fiscal emergency, this was a luxury which Britain could not afford.

Last year, Mr Cameron’s irritation with the BBC came to the forefront at an EU summit, when he ridiculed a reporter for asking him about cuts while the corporation sent 11 staff to cover the event.

The Prime Minister was in the middle of a battle to get the annual EU budget rise down, and BBC reporters asked the first three questions at his press conference.

When Newsnight political editor Michael Crick asked why he had agreed to a rise of 2.9 per cent for the EU while the public were facing cuts, Mr Cameron pointed out that it was a ‘deliciously’ ironic question just weeks after the BBC had agreed to a six-year licence fee freeze.

He added that there were clearly savings to be made at the BBC.

‘We’re all in this together, including – deliciously – the BBC, who in another negotiation agreed a licence fee freeze for six years. So what is good for the EU is good for the BBC.’

Despite his concerns about the organisation, last month the Prime Minister appointed Craig Oliver, controller of BBC global news, as his head of communications, following the resignation of former News of the World editor Andy Coulson.

[Teddy Bear]

More on how the BBC is brainwashing the public to see the cuts imposed by the present government as an 'evil' action, rather than a necessary move to counteract the foolish overspending of the previous Labour government.

The great cuts lie: Today's march by state sector workers will fuel hysteria that there's a public spending massacre. Nothing is further from the truth

By Stephen Glover
Last updated at 11:20 AM on 26th March 2011

At eleven o’clock this morning, a march organised by the Trades Union Congress will gather on the Victoria Embankment in London.

It will wend its way along the Thames to Parliament Square, snake up Whitehall, pass through Trafalgar Square and on into Piccadilly, and finally end up in Hyde Park for a three-hour rally.

What is billed as The March For The Alternative will almost certainly be the biggest public gathering in London since the Iraq War protest in 2003.

More than 100,000 people are expected to join in, and it is possible that anarchist fringe elements will fight running battles with the police, as the Labour leader Ed Miliband conceded yesterday. Whatever happens, tonight’s news bulletins and tomorrow’s newspapers will be full of it.

And we can be sure that the BBC and much of the media will be generally respectful, at any rate towards those who remain well-behaved. The extreme severity of the cuts is now accepted as universally as are the laws of gravity. Even many card-carrying Tories will unthinkingly assume that the marchers have a reasonable case, though they may disapprove of the way in which it is expressed.

No one, or almost no one, will point out the amazing truth, which is that these cuts — variously described as ‘savage’ or ‘draconian’ or, by the TUC, as a ‘massacre’ — are actually comparatively mild. Far from being ‘slashed’, public expenditure at the end of the process in 2014-15 will be a mere three per cent lower in real terms than it was in 2009-10 before the cuts began.

That wasn’t a misprint. Three per cent lower. In 2009-10, government spending was £669 billion. In 2014-15 it is projected to be £647 billion, if you strip out the effects of inflation, or an estimated £764 billion if it is included. Expenditure will be £710 billion in 2011-2012, so in money terms it has already gone up.

It is also undeniably true that cuts to many departments will amount to much more than three per cent, as a result of the Government ‘ring fencing’ expenditure on the NHS and international aid, as well as the effect of steadily increasing interest charges on a national debt that is actually going to get bigger over the next few years.

But the three per cent figure is not what the overexcited and angry marchers will hear from a succession of speakers during the marathon rally in Hyde Park this afternoon, who will include TUC General Secretary, Brendan Barber, as well as Ed Miliband.

The audience will be roused to a state of fury with scare stories about plummeting police numbers and the impending privatisation of the NHS. They will hear about libraries up and down the country closing as a result of wicked Coalition policies, and the hairs on the backs of their necks will bristle as they are told about the inevitable collapse of the welfare state.

How can this be? How can there be such an enormous gulf between the widespread perception that the cuts are going to be horrendous, and the actual truth that they will only amount to a modest three per cent at the end of five years?

The answer has to do with the mendacity of the Labour leadership, the muddle-headedness and bias of the BBC and Leftish newspapers, and the almost complete failure of the Coalition to explain its case and put the cuts in perspective.

Anyone who wants to understand what has happened could do worse than read a brilliantly lucid and illuminating pamphlet written by the economist Tim Morgan, published by the Centre for Policy Studies. Without any polemics, he shows the staggering growth in public expenditure under New Labour while Gordon Brown presided over a boom fuelled by soaring house prices, and he illustrates how relatively limited the cuts really are.

Dr Morgan recounts how in 1999-2000 government spending totalled £343 billion. Had it simply risen with inflation, it would have reached £438 billion by 2009-10. In fact, expenditure that year was £669 billion, an increase in real terms of 53 per cent over a ten-year period during which Gross Domestic Product (i.e. the value of all goods and services produced by the economy) increased by less than 17 per cent.

In other words, Gordon Brown went on a massive bender, splashing out ever larger sums of money on new hospitals and new schools — sometimes to dishearteningly little effect — before producing a final splurge in order to alleviate the worst effects of the recession. During these ten years, the proportion of GDP eaten up by public spending rose from 36 per cent to 48 per cent, the highest ever peace-time figure.

Bingeing on this scale obviously could not go on. Had Labour won the election, it would have had to come up with a programme very like the Coalition’s in order to stave off economic calamity.

What has been represented by the Government’s adversaries in Parliament, the BBC and the trade unions as a dramatic and dangerous change of course is, in fact, no more than a relatively small but firm and determined touch on the financial tiller. In 2015 public spending will in real terms stand where it did in 2008, after some years of Mr Brown’s massive largesse.

According to the Treasury’s own figures, in 2015 spending in real terms on welfare will be 34 per cent higher than it was in 1999-2000. On the NHS it will have gone up 92 per cent, on education 38 per cent, on defence 36 per cent and on pensions 38 per cent. Overall public expenditure will be 48 per cent higher in real terms in 2015 than it was in the year 2000.

These figures do not remotely bear out the generally accepted fiction, to which the audience in Hyde Park will doubtless all subscribe to the last man and woman, that the Tories are merrily shrinking the state as fast as they possibly can. The size of the state which the Coalition has in mind for 2015 will be the same size as Gordon Brown was nurturing in 2008 before the balloon went up.

I do not doubt that there will be some pain. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are being lost in the public sector, though often by natural wastage rather than through redundancies. Some sectors such as the police and local councils are being hit hard, though, as Dr Morgan argues, it is a fallacy to suppose that a 10 per cent reduction in headcount ineluctably leads to a ten per cent fall in the standard of service. It doesn’t — or it shouldn’t.

Nor do I pretend that all the cuts have been applied equitably or sensibly. Cuts to higher education have been drastic, and it now seems certain that students in most universities will have to pay fees of £9,000 a year rather than the current £3,000 — an enormous increase which will burden many of them with debt repayments for much of their working lives.

I also happen to believe that, particularly when we are engaged in a new war in Libya, it is unwise to cut back the defence budget so sharply that for several years we will not even possess a single aircraft carrier. An increase, at the same time, in international aid by 50 per cent to £12.6 billion in 2015 seems indefensible.

We can all quarrel about the nature of individual cuts. What we cannot respectably do is to pretend that overall reductions represent an unprecedentedly swingeing attack on the public sector that will take us back to year zero.

And yet this is what the BBC has been pretending almost from the day the Coalition was formed. The ‘British Broadcasting Cuts Corporation’, as David Cameron likes to call it, has repeatedly made the highly questionable assertion that the cuts are the biggest for nearly a century.

Almost every day the BBC blitzes us with heart-rending tales of new job losses in the public sector, not infrequently based on town hall or trade union surveys. Needless to say, there are many fewer stories about the tens of thousands of jobs being created in the private sector. Nor does the BBC often mention that the very same private sector had to make far more swingeing and painful cuts to workforce numbers at the height of the banking crisis two years ago.

Cuts are almost always described as ‘cuts’ and very rarely as ‘savings’. When one BBC news bulletin was recently rash enough to call them ‘savings’, the Labour Party created a terrible hullabaloo, since which time the Corporation has reverted to referring to them as ‘cuts’.

But aren’t many of them desirable savings? Like its in-house newspaper The Guardian (which yesterday ran an idiotic six-page supplement about ‘British society facing death by a thousand cuts’), the BBC seems to be intellectually incapable of grasping that Labour’s decade-long orgy of spending produced waste on a gargantuan scale.

The kind of waste, for example, that Sir Philip Green unearthed in his Efficiency Review of government expenditure last autumn. He discovered that 71,000 public sector employees have unmonitored ‘procurement cards’ on which they can each spend up to £1,000 per month (for items such as office supplies and travel), and that government typically ‘allows expenditure of up to £1,000 without monitoring or authorisation’.

The BBC did not get very worked up about that, or by the astronomical salaries that spread throughout the public sector — not least in the BBC itself — during New Labour’s blowout. Yesterday’s Mail revealed how Professor Patricia Broadfoot, Vice-Chancellor of the little-known Gloucestershire University, was paid £494,000 last year as her humble little institution spiralled into debt.

For the BBC, cuts are an everyday obsession, whereas egregious examples of government waste are a much more occasional interest. The problem, I’m afraid, is that the Coalition has utterly failed to convey to the British people the extent of the squandering of public money that took place under New Labour.

And it has also failed — disastrously, I would submit — in countering the BBC’s daily narrative of unprecedentedly savage cuts. Why this should be so remains something of a mystery. Are ministers happily indulging the wild forecasts of a public sector meltdown in the belief that they will be able to take the credit when catastrophe is averted?

If so, it is a dangerous policy. The cuts are really only about to kick in, and the BBC is merely limbering up. The TUC and other vested interests will scream ever louder, assisted by a cynical and mendacious Labour leadership, whose chief economic spokesman, Ed Balls, was Gordon Brown’s Rasputin throughout the binge years.

Today’s March For The Alternative (ill-named, because there is no alternative) will only be the start of it. Coalition ministers must not continue to sit on their hands, too easily distracted by comparatively unimportant issues. The programme of deficit reduction may be relatively modest, but if it should falter economic disaster will ensue.

There will be cases of hardship as a result of the cuts, but the myth of their unparalleled severity must be nailed. The proper response to the TUC rabble-rousers in Hyde Park this afternoon is that when the savings have been achieved in 2015 we will only be back to where we were in 2008. If there is any room for doubt, it should be about whether the Coalition’s plans actually go far enough.

[Teddy Bear]

Peter Hitchens in the Mail today also remarks on the BBC coverage of the demonstrations without even an attempt to balance their bias. It's worth looking at the pictures on the Mail webpage to see what these pig-ignorant rioters get up to, who appear to use any excuse to create mayhem and damage with the full blessing of the BBC.

The biased BBC... marching alongside their anti-cut allies

By PETER HITCHENS

As usual, they didn’t even know they were doing it, but the BBC took sides on the TUC protest, even before it had begun. The Corporation and the TUC instinctively recognise each other as allies. Both depend on public money.

This helps to explain the Corporation’s spasm of blatant partiality this weekend. It began with a bizarre report on Friday night on Newsnight. Reporter Anna Adams provided minutes of free publicity to protest group UK Uncut, whose spokeswoman was identified only by her Christian name, Lucy.

Here’s a sample: ‘UK Uncut is a new kid on the block. They only got together after the Chancellor’s Budget cuts last year but they’ve already got quite a following. They are a social media success story and more than 1,000 of them will be out tomorrow. They think that’s more than enough to close down shops and banks.’
Protests in London

Attack: A policeman who had paint hurled in his face by protestors

So what are their policies? Where do they get their funds? Are they linked to any political organisation? No idea. Nobody asked. Ms Adams then asked the mysterious Lucy: ‘So what’s to stop hooligans or hardline protesters who really have no care for your cause joining in and making this something that it shouldn’t really be?’

Lucy completely failed to answer this question (and it was not pressed). She was too busy making banners and using the BBC to speak her mind, uninterrupted.

She did say: ‘I am concerned that the police will react with violence against protesters in the way that we saw at the student demonstrations before Christmas. But it’s up to us to be there on the streets and saying that the banks should be paying for the crisis, tax-avoiders should be paying their fair share. That’s what we want to do.’
Protestors in London

'Curious anxiety': Radio 4 Today presenter Evan Davis stressed that trouble on the streets shouldn't reflect on the protest as a whole

The report concluded with some editorialising about undercover policing: ‘It must be necessary, proportional and lawful, and that’s something that many activists would seriously question.’ No doubt activists would question it, and others too. But by ending her account in this way, the reporter appeared to endorse this view. That is not her job. The Corporation went back into action yesterday, on the Radio 4 Today programme.

The atmosphere of much of its coverage was what might have been found in a Left-wing London household as Granny got out her old Aldermaston marching shoes, the head of the household dusted off his anti-Thatcher placards and the children dressed excitedly for their first demo.

There was a curious anxiety on the programme to say that the march was a ‘family event’. Presenter Evan Davis then stressed that trouble on the streets shouldn’t reflect on the protest as a whole.

At 8.35 Mr Davis said: ‘100,000 people expected to turn up, coaches are heading for London, even as we speak!’ He then interviewed Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, who warned that the march ‘could I’m afraid move from being a family event into something darker’. Mr Davis hurriedly added: ‘Not organised by the TUC though. The TUC bit will be very peaceful.’

Why did he feel it necessary to say this?

The programme ended with a jokey item in which Guardian writer Zoe Williams and advertising man Jason Berry chatted about march placard slogans. Mr Berry suggested one: ‘The real deficit is in between your ears, Mr Osborne.’

Presenter Justin Webb laughed.

There was nobody present to say: ‘Actually, I don’t support this demonstration.’ The whole programme seemed to have identified with the event. Mr Webb said: ‘I remember my mum used to go on CND marches.’

But apparently she didn’t like the way they were covered.

Mr Webb’s Ban-the-Bomb mum wouldn’t have had any complaints about the BBC’s coverage of yesterday’s events. But millions of people who pay heavy taxes on small incomes to keep the public sector afloat, and who also finance the Corporation, have much to complain about. Will anybody ever listen?