BBC Bias on Social Attitudes Report

[Teddy Bear]

My first thought when I saw this headline in the Daily Mail today, was wondering how the BBC would cover this story, seeing it's not their desired view.
Britain turns to conservative values as recession bites: We want the State to stay out of our lives and sympathy for benefit claimants has evaporated

The main revelations from this annual British Social Attitudes report which polled nearly 3,300 people are these

• More than half of us - 54% - think unemployment benefits are too high up from 35% in 1983
  
• Workshy parents are to blame for child poverty, say 63%
  
• Rise of climate change scepticism: 37% say environment threat has been exaggerated - up from 24% a decade ago
  
• Just 29% think same-sex relationships are wrong - down from 46% in 2000
  
• Only 31% want tax rises to pay for health and education, while it was 63% of us in 2002

A couple of things struck me when I read the BBC article on the subject.
First note the headline Britons 'less willing to pay for taxes to help others'

If people no longer believe that paying increased benefits to others who use it to avoid work rather than contribute to society, it has nothing to do with helping others. One could argue that by giving these benefits in the first place we are spiritually harming these people as well as further damaging the society.

Now I'm sure when you will have read the main points of this report above, you will have confirmed to yourselves exactly where you stand on those points - and why. Whatever you think will be for your own good reasons based on your experience and understanding. So why does the BBC think they have to interpret whatever you think for you?

Apparently they have their Home Editor Mark Easton to TELL US

The BBC's Home Editor Mark Easton said it was a move towards "more emphasis on individual responsibility". He said Britons were becoming increasingly "judgmental".

I would say an increase of Britons are exercising better judgement, but I'm certain this is not what he's saying, and where does he get off anyway making these conclusions? WHO THE F*CK IS HE?

The article carries on with Mr Easton told BBC Radio 4's Today programme:
A BBC reporter has not TOLD Radio4 anything, they are reporting what others have told them. This gives him some sort of expert status as if whatever he thinks should mean something.

Without having studied the BBC in greater detail, there is at least one statistic that they decided not to report
Rise of climate change scepticism: 37% say environment threat has been exaggerated - up from 24% a decade ago

That means with all the propaganda the BBC has been doing for the last 10 years, 13% more of the population than there were DON'T BUY IT.

Any wonder they don't want to report it.

[Teddy Bear]

Tom Utley at the Mail reflects on the import of the findings of this report, especially with regard to how disappointed the BBC will feel with it, and also comments on the burning wind turbine we covered here yesterday.

Shouting at the radio - and the day I realised I'm not a lonely outsider in my own country

By Tom Utley

Do you ever feel, in your gloomier moments, that you don’t really belong in modern Britain? Are there times when you worry that your attitudes and instincts have fallen far behind the times, leaving you out of kilter with the great mass of your fellow countrymen? I’ve felt like that at least ten times a week.

I’ve felt it as I’ve driven through a ravishing part of the countryside, when suddenly a vast, menacing wind-farm has loomed over the brow of the next hill. There’s one dominating the skyline above Stirling Castle, where Mary Queen of Scots was crowned, which fair breaks my heart.

Was this desecration of one of the noblest views in these democratic islands really a response to the will of the people? So the authorities would have us believe.

I’ve felt it when I’ve heard MPs of every party, even some of the richest, boasting that they always use the NHS and would never dream of going private. Would their constituents honestly think the worse of them if they took out private health insurance instead of adding to the strains on the NHS?

Clearly, this is what most politicians calculate. But, if so, what a blow to my once firmly-held belief in the fundamental common sense and good nature of the British people.

This same feeling of being the odd man out struck me again yesterday, when Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour was droning on in the background with a report on an architecture prize for a new school in South London.
Suffer

Some woman was telling us what a great shame it was that the Coalition had cut back Ed Balls’s school building programme, claiming that education standards would suffer because it was impossible for children to learn properly in temporary buildings.

There were stacks of statistics and other evidence to prove it, she said, without actually quoting any.

I thought this a highly questionable theory (although the BBC presented it more as a point of information), believing that good teachers mattered far more to a child’s education than modern buildings.

Perhaps I was the only one shouting at the radio that the more money this Government could save, the better for everyone — and that cancelling fancy new construction projects was as good a place as any to start.

But now, joy of joys, I discover that I’m not nearly such an eccentric stranger in my own land and times as I was beginning to fear. On the contrary, my views about almost every subject under the sun are slap, bang in the mainstream of popular opinion. And far from slipping out of fashion, they’re becoming more generally accepted with every passing year. Reader, I belong!

I’m indebted for this revelation to the latest British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey, the Government’s massive annual focus-group, whose findings for 2010 are published this week.

This wonderfully cheering document has fully restored my faith in my fellow countrymen’s deep-down intelligence and common sense, and their refusal to be bamboozled by cant.

The picture it paints of the real Britain is about as far removed as it’s possible to imagine from the fantasy version accepted by every mainstream political party and promoted tirelessly by the BBC and the Left-wing media.

Take climate change. For David Cameron, it was an article of faith from the start that the Conservatives’ chances of election would be greatly improved if they adopted the radical policies espoused by the environmentalist lobby. In his view, this was an essential part of his party’s make-over, vital to his popular appeal.

Hence the windmill on his roof and his jetting off to a Norwegian glacier to be photographed hugging a husky. Hence, too, the slogan that gave him so much pride and pleasure: ‘Vote blue, go green.’

Labour and the Lib-Dems were the same, fiercely competing with each other to be seen as greener-than-thou, in the apparent belief that this would play a treat with the electorate.
Sceptics

Turn to the BSA, however, and you’ll see what the voters were really thinking during election year. It shows that while the political parties were turning ever greener, the people they were fighting to represent were growing increasingly sceptical of the claims of the man-made climate change lobby.

In the year 2000, only 24 per cent believed environmental threats were being exaggerated. Just ten years on, the figure is up to 37  per cent. Yes, we sceptics are still in the minority, but the wind is blowing our way.

Incidentally, the non-metaphorical wind was blowing so hard yesterday that wind turbines all over Scotland and the North had to be switched off.

Truly, the more we see alternative energy working in practice (or, rather, not working), the more fatuous and wasteful it seems. Doesn’t this go at least a little way towards explaining the public’s growing disenchantment?

Where green taxes are concerned, the shift in public opinion is just as pronounced. A decade ago, 31 per cent backed them to combat climate change. Last year, that minority had shrunk to a mere 22 per cent. Yet this doesn’t seem to stop my old schoolmate, that prize ass Chris Huhne, from piling them on. But then when have the Lib Dems, wrapped up in their self-righteous certainties, ever cared a hoot about what the rest of us may think?

It’s the same story with health policy. Over the years, I’ve heard it said a million times that the British people are unshakeably attached to current funding model of the NHS. So often, indeed, that I myself had almost come to believe that most of the public had a visceral horror of the idea of turning to anyone but the state for their medical needs.

Mr Cameron clearly thought much the same, when he made it a central plank of his election manifesto that the Tories would ring-fence spending on the NHS and fight to their last breath to defend it from the taint of privatisation.

But look at the survey findings. Only 24 per cent say that paying for private healthcare is wrong — down from 38 per cent in 1999. This is a huge drop in just a decade, representing a revolutionary shift from faith in the power of the state to self-reliance.
Fiddled

That shift is even more marked in the numbers who believe taxes should rise to pay for health and education. As recently as 2002, 63  per cent said they should. By last year, the figure had more than halved to 31 per cent.

Many put this down to the recession. But can’t it equally be attributed to the experience of the boom years, when Labour poured untold billions of our money into hospitals and schools, to almost negligible effect? Indeed, when it comes to education, the popular perception — as opposed to the fantasy peddled by the fiddled exam grades — is that standards have fallen, not risen.

On social problems, too, the BSA shows attitudes wildly at variance with the official line plugged so remorselessly by the political Establishment.
The number who believe taxes should rise to pay for education has almost halved

The number who believe taxes should rise to pay for education has almost halved

Apparently, most of us don’t believe that ‘society is to blame’ for child poverty. A whacking 75 per cent put it down to parents’ drug and alcohol problems, with more than half also blaming family breakdown — and a remarkable 63 per cent attributing it to parents’ unwillingness to work.

Meanwhile, 54 per cent think unemployment benefits are too high — up from just 35  per cent in 1983. Yet only last week, George Osborne surrendered to the Lib Dems’ demand that Jobseekers’ Allowance should increase by 5.2 per cent — more than five times as much as a front-line soldiers’ pay.

As he studies this portrait of the real Britain, shouldn’t Mr Cameron reflect that if only he’d presented a truly conservative manifesto to the country, he might have won an overall majority?

Mind you, there’s one BSA finding that doesn’t surprise me in the least: in 1997, 73  per cent of Britons aged 18-35 turned out to vote in the general election. Last year, the figure was down to 47 per cent. But then who can blame those who didn’t bother, when there’s not a single party in the land that speaks for the real Britain?

[Teddy Bear]

Another analysis of the way the BBC has distorted this report, compared to the report itself. This time by Professor Philip Booth writing in The Commentator

BBC Misrepresents National Social Survey

The BBC’s coverage of the National Social Survey shows the BBC at its very worst. It has completely misrepresented the survey to promote its own political worldview that we are becoming more selfish and less concerned about others.

The headline it used on the front page of its website is: “UK less willing to help others”. I have just read the survey and, in 227 pages, I cannot find any reference to whether people are less willing to help others.

It would seem that what the BBC means is that we are less willing to pay taxes for redistribution and public services. This could be for one of several reasons:

1. With government spending over half of national income, people wish to re-balance their spending away from collectively provided goods and redistribution;

2. With government spending over half of national income and income inequality widening, people believe that more government spending is not the answer;

3. People wish the government to spend less but wish to help others more through their personal initiative;

4. People believe that the less-well-off are responsible for their own problems to a greater extent;

5. People are more selfish.

In fact, there is no evidence in the report, whatsoever – as far as I can see – for proposition five, which the BBC suggests is the case. There is a lot of evidence that people are motivated in their answers by two and four and possibly number one. Issues to do with three (and five) are simply not covered.

Page thirty-six of the report (table A.1) does indeed suggest that fewer people over time wish to pay more taxes for public services and redistribution – this is not surprising given how far taxes have risen and does not at all indicate that people are less willing to help others.

Indeed, the answer to this question does not even demonstrate that people are less willing to pay high taxes now than ten years ago, given that the question is being asked at a time when taxes are much higher than they were then.

The explanation is possibly provided by table A.2. Fewer people believe that current benefit levels cause hardship and more people believe that benefit levels discourage people from finding jobs.

So, there we have it, it is quite clear that the people surveyed actually believe that increased benefits do not help people. It is not that people do not want to help, it is that people believe that benefits do not provide that help. Perhaps people have a more realistic view of the problems in the benefits system than the BBC news editors.

Exactly the same issues arise with the question of whether people are willing to pay more taxes for the sake of the environment. The proportion who are willing to do so has fallen by between a third and a half (depending on the group of respondents) but interestingly, the proportion who are willing to accept a cut in their standard of living to help the environment has fallen by only a quarter.

There would seem to be one logical explanation here.

Firstly, people believe that taxes are relatively less effective in terms of the ability to help the environment, as compared with other measures, than they used to believe.

Secondly, if people have made more sacrifices (in terms of both higher taxes and cuts in living standards) over the last ten years, more people are likely to believe that they have made the “optimal” degree of sacrifice and would not wish to make further sacrifices.

However, maybe we should not try too hard to produce strictly logical interpretations of these surveys. The questions on education produce some interesting material. Only eight per cent of respondents believe that parents should not have the basic right to choose their children’s school, yet eight-five per cent believe that parents should send their children to the nearest state school!

Interestingly, the survey commentary suggests that the middle class might be more in favour of school choice because the research they cite suggests that the middle class gain most from school choice. In fact, where proper school choice exists (rather than limited options being provided amongst state schools) the evidence strongly suggests that it is the less-well-off who gain most.

This is no excuse though, for the BBC leading its coverage by using a headline that reflects its prejudices but that relates to an issue that is not addressed in the survey. Rowan Williams, having seen the BBC coverage, will now be off like a rocket as he seeks to pontificate about how capitalism is making us more selfish.

Prof. Philip Booth is the Editorial and Programme Director and the Institute of Economic Affairs in London.