Post by Teddy Bear on Apr 25, 2012 18:28:20 GMT
The BBC have found a new strategy in pursuing their agenda, in this case promoting the Labour Party while demonizing the Tories.
Newham council have initiated a 'scheme', knowing it is destined for failure, but claiming that because of the 'draconian cuts' imposed by the present government, they had no choice. When you read the article below you will understand the ins and outs a lot better.
This only works when you have the the media on your side to make sure the 'right message' is conveyed. Naturally the BBC is best placed to do that very thing. You will see how they did it below.
Grant Shapps has issued a complaint to the BBC about the way this affair has been handled, and posted a copy of it on the Conservative Home website.
Newham council have initiated a 'scheme', knowing it is destined for failure, but claiming that because of the 'draconian cuts' imposed by the present government, they had no choice. When you read the article below you will understand the ins and outs a lot better.
This only works when you have the the media on your side to make sure the 'right message' is conveyed. Naturally the BBC is best placed to do that very thing. You will see how they did it below.
You'd never know it from the biased BBC, but the housing benefit bill's going UP not DOWN
Listeners to BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme woke up yesterday morning to be told about what sounded a monstrous injustice.
It appeared that, as a result of the Government’s housing benefit reforms, Newham Council in London is trying to banish its ‘most vulnerable and challenged’ families to Stoke-on-Trent.
The interviewer Jim Naughtie wondered aloud whether this was evidence of ‘social cleansing’. Subjected to his most indulgent interviewing techniques, Sir Robin Wales, Labour Mayor of Newham, blamed the Government’s cut in housing benefit to a maximum limit of £21,000 a year per family.
According to Sir Robin, Newham is overflowing with families who cannot find rental accommodation at this price, and the Labour council has therefore regrettably been compelled to ask for help from residents’ associations in other parts of the country, such as Stoke-on-Trent. Mr Naughtie informed us in sepulchral tones that in that city ‘160 miles from London’ there are 73 people chasing every job.
Cruel
The Housing Minister, Grant Shapps, was then interviewed by Mr Naughtie, though he was knocked around the ring rather more vigorously than Sir Robin had been. Fair-minded, neutral listeners were probably left with the impression that the Coalition was unfeeling, even cruel, and that this was one more example of its innate half-wittedness.
They would be wrong. In a way, though, I don’t blame Sir Robin. There are London mayoral and assembly elections next week, and the old rogue is doing whatever he can to boost Labour’s cause in the city by a piece of unabashed scare-mongering. Families on housing benefit, and others who fear they may one day be, will be terrified by the prospect of being transported to Stoke-on-Trent.
But I do blame the BBC for a piece of tendentious journalism. No doubt there are some unfortunate victims of the Government’s housing benefit reforms, but it is absurd to present them in such a pejorative light, and factually incorrect to suggest that there have been savage cuts.
No one questions that there is a housing crisis in this country, especially in London and the South-East.
Too few new houses have been built over the past 20 years, and a net influx of at least two million immigrants over the past decade has only made things much worse.
There is a drastic shortage of social housing.
At the same time, the housing benefit budget virtually doubled between 2000 and 2010. When the Coalition was formed two years ago, it stood at £21 billion.
Under Labour plans it would have risen to £25 billion by 2015, though if the party had been re-elected it would have doubtless pruned that figure.
As it is, the Coalition plans to spend £23 billion on housing benefit in 2015 — a rise of nearly ten per cent in cash terms.
That does not sound very draconian to me. What we have, as Mr Shapps pointed out yesterday, is not a cut, but a cut in a projected increase.
In the severe economic conditions in which we find ourselves it could be reasonably argued that the Coalition should actually be cutting overall housing benefit, but it isn’t.
As part of its attempt to rein in an ever-ballooning budget, it has reasonably decided to set a cap of £21,000 a year (or £400 a week) for a four-bedroom house, and £250 a week for a one-bedroom flat.
Does that seem the moral equivalent of slaying the first born? Not to me. The average household income of a family with two working adults is about £40,000, which after tax and national insurance is some £30,000. Such a family could obviously not afford anything approaching £21,000 a year on rent.
Of course, it goes without saying that there are a few parts of the country where even £21,000 will not get you very far, though it may be doubted whether Newham is one of them. According to Mr Shapps, there are nearly 1,000 rental properties in the borough which fall below the £21,000 cap.
But most of us cannot live exactly where we might like to, and lots of people not in receipt of housing benefit are forced to move to less expensive areas for financial reasons.
Why should we assume that everyone who wants to live in Newham should be able to? I hope I am not being rude to the denizens of that borough when I suggest that there may be more pleasant — as well as cheaper — places to live that are not far away.
And here we really come to the nub of the Today programme’s idiocy — and Sir Robin Wales’s slyness.
Nasty
He and his cronies must have had a good laugh as they tried to come up with the name of a city with low growth, high unemployment and a poor image, which is a long way from London. Stoke-on-Trent was an inspired choice. If he’d had his wits about him, Mr Naughtie would have asked Sir Robin: why Stoke?
There are plenty of more agreeable places very much closer to London where it is possible to rent a property for £21,000 a year or £400 a week.
I don’t want to be nasty about Stoke, which may well have its hidden charms, but you get the point. With next week’s elections in mind, Sir Robin Wales (who, perhaps oddly, turns out to be Scottish) dangles the supposed horrors of Stoke in front of voters, and the BBC, eager to portray the allegedly dire effects of cuts, joins in the charade.
There are no cuts to the housing benefit budget, only cuts to the projected increase. I should like to place a dunce’s hat on Mr Naughtie’s head and make him repeat that three times a day.
It may also astonish him and his BBC colleagues to learn that overall there has been no cut in public spending, though, of course, some individual departments have suffered.
Harsh
According to the independent Office for Budget Responsibility, government expenditure rose by 1.5 per cent in real terms in 2010, by 0.3 per cent in 2011, and is predicted to increase by 0.5 per cent this year.
How depressing that, when this Government is struggling to reduce the enormous Budget deficit left by Labour, supposedly intelligent and well-informed people should give the impression that there have been harsh cuts to housing benefit.
With black propaganda on this scale, I sometimes wonder whether it will ever be possible for a democratically elected Tory-led government to reduce the deficit so that we can at least dream of one day living within our means. We expect politicians to bend the facts, but the BBC is supposed to be the fount of objective truth.
Most inhabitants of the real world think that £21,000 is a very fair upper limit for an annual household rental.
In parts of Central London it will not be enough, but in most of the country it is far from ungenerous.
To suggest otherwise is a piece of economic madness, and an affront to millions of ordinary hard-working people.
Listeners to BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme woke up yesterday morning to be told about what sounded a monstrous injustice.
It appeared that, as a result of the Government’s housing benefit reforms, Newham Council in London is trying to banish its ‘most vulnerable and challenged’ families to Stoke-on-Trent.
The interviewer Jim Naughtie wondered aloud whether this was evidence of ‘social cleansing’. Subjected to his most indulgent interviewing techniques, Sir Robin Wales, Labour Mayor of Newham, blamed the Government’s cut in housing benefit to a maximum limit of £21,000 a year per family.
According to Sir Robin, Newham is overflowing with families who cannot find rental accommodation at this price, and the Labour council has therefore regrettably been compelled to ask for help from residents’ associations in other parts of the country, such as Stoke-on-Trent. Mr Naughtie informed us in sepulchral tones that in that city ‘160 miles from London’ there are 73 people chasing every job.
Cruel
The Housing Minister, Grant Shapps, was then interviewed by Mr Naughtie, though he was knocked around the ring rather more vigorously than Sir Robin had been. Fair-minded, neutral listeners were probably left with the impression that the Coalition was unfeeling, even cruel, and that this was one more example of its innate half-wittedness.
They would be wrong. In a way, though, I don’t blame Sir Robin. There are London mayoral and assembly elections next week, and the old rogue is doing whatever he can to boost Labour’s cause in the city by a piece of unabashed scare-mongering. Families on housing benefit, and others who fear they may one day be, will be terrified by the prospect of being transported to Stoke-on-Trent.
But I do blame the BBC for a piece of tendentious journalism. No doubt there are some unfortunate victims of the Government’s housing benefit reforms, but it is absurd to present them in such a pejorative light, and factually incorrect to suggest that there have been savage cuts.
No one questions that there is a housing crisis in this country, especially in London and the South-East.
Too few new houses have been built over the past 20 years, and a net influx of at least two million immigrants over the past decade has only made things much worse.
There is a drastic shortage of social housing.
At the same time, the housing benefit budget virtually doubled between 2000 and 2010. When the Coalition was formed two years ago, it stood at £21 billion.
Under Labour plans it would have risen to £25 billion by 2015, though if the party had been re-elected it would have doubtless pruned that figure.
As it is, the Coalition plans to spend £23 billion on housing benefit in 2015 — a rise of nearly ten per cent in cash terms.
That does not sound very draconian to me. What we have, as Mr Shapps pointed out yesterday, is not a cut, but a cut in a projected increase.
In the severe economic conditions in which we find ourselves it could be reasonably argued that the Coalition should actually be cutting overall housing benefit, but it isn’t.
As part of its attempt to rein in an ever-ballooning budget, it has reasonably decided to set a cap of £21,000 a year (or £400 a week) for a four-bedroom house, and £250 a week for a one-bedroom flat.
Does that seem the moral equivalent of slaying the first born? Not to me. The average household income of a family with two working adults is about £40,000, which after tax and national insurance is some £30,000. Such a family could obviously not afford anything approaching £21,000 a year on rent.
Of course, it goes without saying that there are a few parts of the country where even £21,000 will not get you very far, though it may be doubted whether Newham is one of them. According to Mr Shapps, there are nearly 1,000 rental properties in the borough which fall below the £21,000 cap.
But most of us cannot live exactly where we might like to, and lots of people not in receipt of housing benefit are forced to move to less expensive areas for financial reasons.
Why should we assume that everyone who wants to live in Newham should be able to? I hope I am not being rude to the denizens of that borough when I suggest that there may be more pleasant — as well as cheaper — places to live that are not far away.
And here we really come to the nub of the Today programme’s idiocy — and Sir Robin Wales’s slyness.
Nasty
He and his cronies must have had a good laugh as they tried to come up with the name of a city with low growth, high unemployment and a poor image, which is a long way from London. Stoke-on-Trent was an inspired choice. If he’d had his wits about him, Mr Naughtie would have asked Sir Robin: why Stoke?
There are plenty of more agreeable places very much closer to London where it is possible to rent a property for £21,000 a year or £400 a week.
I don’t want to be nasty about Stoke, which may well have its hidden charms, but you get the point. With next week’s elections in mind, Sir Robin Wales (who, perhaps oddly, turns out to be Scottish) dangles the supposed horrors of Stoke in front of voters, and the BBC, eager to portray the allegedly dire effects of cuts, joins in the charade.
There are no cuts to the housing benefit budget, only cuts to the projected increase. I should like to place a dunce’s hat on Mr Naughtie’s head and make him repeat that three times a day.
It may also astonish him and his BBC colleagues to learn that overall there has been no cut in public spending, though, of course, some individual departments have suffered.
Harsh
According to the independent Office for Budget Responsibility, government expenditure rose by 1.5 per cent in real terms in 2010, by 0.3 per cent in 2011, and is predicted to increase by 0.5 per cent this year.
How depressing that, when this Government is struggling to reduce the enormous Budget deficit left by Labour, supposedly intelligent and well-informed people should give the impression that there have been harsh cuts to housing benefit.
With black propaganda on this scale, I sometimes wonder whether it will ever be possible for a democratically elected Tory-led government to reduce the deficit so that we can at least dream of one day living within our means. We expect politicians to bend the facts, but the BBC is supposed to be the fount of objective truth.
Most inhabitants of the real world think that £21,000 is a very fair upper limit for an annual household rental.
In parts of Central London it will not be enough, but in most of the country it is far from ungenerous.
To suggest otherwise is a piece of economic madness, and an affront to millions of ordinary hard-working people.
Grant Shapps has issued a complaint to the BBC about the way this affair has been handled, and posted a copy of it on the Conservative Home website.
Shapps complains to BBC over Newham coverage
The Housing Minister Grant Shapps has sent the following letter to Helen Boaden the Director of News for the BBC.
The Housing Minister Grant Shapps has sent the following letter to Helen Boaden the Director of News for the BBC.
"I wanted to write to you to raise my genuine concern about the way the BBC has chosen to handle and report the story about Newham’s letter on housing benefits today.
I know the BBC prides itself on being a news organisation that the public values and trusts so I was surprised that such an unbalanced story was aired with such prominence before the veracity of what l consider politically motivated claims made by Newham Council were fully checked out.
Your decision to lead on this story today is politically questionable and may be causing real alarm and distress to Newham social tenants. The local and London Mayoral pre-election Purdah period is always a time of heightened political sensitivity and this type of one-sided reporting can only serve to undermine the BBC’s reputation for political impartiality and objectivity.
The BBC should be looking to make every effort to consider the full picture by contacting all parties concerned well in advance so it can check the credibility of the claims being made before deciding to run a controversial story like this.
As it was the Government was only approached at nearly midnight last night to bid for a Minister to go on the Today Progralnme to respond to the claims. That is hardly fair warning and not a serious attempt to engage. It could even be construed as a deliberate attempt to empty chair or catch the government on the hop to cause a media furore. As l understand it Stoke Council was not contacted at all.
At best this episode indicates that the BBC has been hoodwìnked by politically driven scaremongering and at worst claims of complicity could be made. In the interests of transparency can you please clarify the following points:
Why did the Today Programme choose to wait until nearly midnight before contacting the government for a response?
When was the BBC first contacted by Newham council with this story?
Why did the BBC not go to Newham or Stoke to check out the veracity of the story?
Does the BBC think its coverage of this story is Consistent with its own election guidelines?
Given the widespread coverage this has caused I plan to place this letter in the public domain.
I look forward to receiving your swift response."