Post by Teddy Bear on Feb 8, 2014 17:05:19 GMT
Listening to Radio 4 in the car around 12:30 today I was unfortunate enough to catch a few minutes of the Now Show. It's what the BBC claim is a comic run through the week's news. The only comical thing about it is the BBC calling it comic. Basically left wing would be comedians are used to convey the usual political bias to the public in a supposed light hearted manner, for what the BBC must regard as subliminal.
It can be heard for the next 7 days via the link above, and it's not necessary to listen to more than a few minutes in to get the 'message'. Just as I reached my destination and shut the radio off I heard one of these 'comedians' saying words to the effect that 'Michael Gove thought he was cleverer than everybody else', which some at least in the audience found funny.
The following 2 articles will explain the particular insidious agenda of the BBC in this example, as well as show a clear example of what the left are trying to achieve generally.
It can be heard for the next 7 days via the link above, and it's not necessary to listen to more than a few minutes in to get the 'message'. Just as I reached my destination and shut the radio off I heard one of these 'comedians' saying words to the effect that 'Michael Gove thought he was cleverer than everybody else', which some at least in the audience found funny.
The following 2 articles will explain the particular insidious agenda of the BBC in this example, as well as show a clear example of what the left are trying to achieve generally.
Why Gove MUST keep on caning the Left
By Simon Heffer
Michael Gove has had yet another tough week as Education Secretary. For daring to dispense with the services of Labour-supporting Baroness Morgan as chairman of Ofsted, he has received relentless vilification from the Left-wing media.
Mr Gove’s allies have made the point that he, and the Tory party, are way, way behind the last Labour government when it comes to appointing cronies to run quangos.
But he is not replacing Lady Morgan at the education inspectorate because he is partisan. He is doing so because state education in this country is in such a mess.
But without removing what Mr Gove has called the ‘Blob’ of Left-wing educational consensus which has brought the state system to its present crisis, he doesn’t have a prayer.
However, there is another more profound reason why the Left are so angry with him. Mr Gove is one of perhaps only three members of the present Cabinet (the others are Iain Duncan Smith in his reforms of welfare, and Environment Secretary Owen Paterson in his challenges to the unbending beliefs of the green lobby) who are determined to take on and break the Leftist, statist culture that so poisons our public policy.
For decades so-called ‘educationists’ have dictated, from an aggressively Left-wing standpoint, the terms of mass education in this country. The result is a system that militates against excellence, suffocates potential, and turns out too many young people unfit to thrive in the modern, ultra-competitive world in which they must find their way.
The products of private and selective schools are more than ever rising to the top in professions and in business. Those with no chance of such an education are condemned to leading unfulfilled lives in which they fail to maximise their potential.
When Mr Gove talks of a nine or ten-hour day for state pupils, and more rigorous teaching in subjects such as English and maths, practices that are normal in public schools — it’s in the hope of avoiding such outcomes. But teachers and their unions absolutely hate it.
They hate it because such ‘traditional’ approaches repudiate all they have argued for since the Sixties, and threatens liberal policies that have brought nothing but decline and failure. But what those progressives hate most is that Mr Gove is challenging the ideological control they’ve had over this most crucial public service, and the way in which they have used education to shape a socialist ‘client state’ of the future.
Mr Gove deserves the unequivocal support of all parents who want the best for their children in his attempts to break this toxic orthodoxy: the very future of our country depends upon his doing so.
If we fail to provide our children with the necessary intellectual tools and self-discipline we betray them.
Low standards can no longer be tolerated. The schools inspectorate must be ruthless in weeding out bad teachers. It needs to be resolute in the face of obstruction from the teaching unions and those Left-wing academics whose discredited theories are finally being put in the dustbin.
Significantly, only last week the Office for National Statistics’ analysis of the 2011 census suggested that 785,000 people speak English so badly that it is likely to handicap their ability to find work. This follows decades of teachers arguing that self-expression of whatever quality is more important than correct grammar, use of words and spelling.
Mr Gove’s free schools do not just break the stranglehold Leftist local authorities have long had on the state system, they also have an ethos of discipline and parental engagement that can only benefit society.
The Left are desperate for this programme not to succeed. Already humiliated over the discrediting of their economic policies and forced to admit that welfarism is causing social dislocation, they cannot afford to be proved wrong on education, too.
That is why Mr Gove must not fail.
It’s not just education: he is trying, as a Conservative, to act upon a philosophy which millions of people voted to support in the last election, and that is to help end the pervasive influence of doctrinaire socialism in all aspects of public life.
Bureaucrats and quangocrats must, in a democracy, yield to the policies of an elected secretary of state, and not persistently try to obstruct them.
If Mr Gove prevails, his success might just persuade some of his weaker-willed colleagues in government to confront the opponents who resist them, and to become, like him, truly radical in their zeal for reform.
By Simon Heffer
Michael Gove has had yet another tough week as Education Secretary. For daring to dispense with the services of Labour-supporting Baroness Morgan as chairman of Ofsted, he has received relentless vilification from the Left-wing media.
Mr Gove’s allies have made the point that he, and the Tory party, are way, way behind the last Labour government when it comes to appointing cronies to run quangos.
But he is not replacing Lady Morgan at the education inspectorate because he is partisan. He is doing so because state education in this country is in such a mess.
But without removing what Mr Gove has called the ‘Blob’ of Left-wing educational consensus which has brought the state system to its present crisis, he doesn’t have a prayer.
However, there is another more profound reason why the Left are so angry with him. Mr Gove is one of perhaps only three members of the present Cabinet (the others are Iain Duncan Smith in his reforms of welfare, and Environment Secretary Owen Paterson in his challenges to the unbending beliefs of the green lobby) who are determined to take on and break the Leftist, statist culture that so poisons our public policy.
For decades so-called ‘educationists’ have dictated, from an aggressively Left-wing standpoint, the terms of mass education in this country. The result is a system that militates against excellence, suffocates potential, and turns out too many young people unfit to thrive in the modern, ultra-competitive world in which they must find their way.
The products of private and selective schools are more than ever rising to the top in professions and in business. Those with no chance of such an education are condemned to leading unfulfilled lives in which they fail to maximise their potential.
When Mr Gove talks of a nine or ten-hour day for state pupils, and more rigorous teaching in subjects such as English and maths, practices that are normal in public schools — it’s in the hope of avoiding such outcomes. But teachers and their unions absolutely hate it.
They hate it because such ‘traditional’ approaches repudiate all they have argued for since the Sixties, and threatens liberal policies that have brought nothing but decline and failure. But what those progressives hate most is that Mr Gove is challenging the ideological control they’ve had over this most crucial public service, and the way in which they have used education to shape a socialist ‘client state’ of the future.
Mr Gove deserves the unequivocal support of all parents who want the best for their children in his attempts to break this toxic orthodoxy: the very future of our country depends upon his doing so.
If we fail to provide our children with the necessary intellectual tools and self-discipline we betray them.
Low standards can no longer be tolerated. The schools inspectorate must be ruthless in weeding out bad teachers. It needs to be resolute in the face of obstruction from the teaching unions and those Left-wing academics whose discredited theories are finally being put in the dustbin.
Significantly, only last week the Office for National Statistics’ analysis of the 2011 census suggested that 785,000 people speak English so badly that it is likely to handicap their ability to find work. This follows decades of teachers arguing that self-expression of whatever quality is more important than correct grammar, use of words and spelling.
Mr Gove’s free schools do not just break the stranglehold Leftist local authorities have long had on the state system, they also have an ethos of discipline and parental engagement that can only benefit society.
The Left are desperate for this programme not to succeed. Already humiliated over the discrediting of their economic policies and forced to admit that welfarism is causing social dislocation, they cannot afford to be proved wrong on education, too.
That is why Mr Gove must not fail.
It’s not just education: he is trying, as a Conservative, to act upon a philosophy which millions of people voted to support in the last election, and that is to help end the pervasive influence of doctrinaire socialism in all aspects of public life.
Bureaucrats and quangocrats must, in a democracy, yield to the policies of an elected secretary of state, and not persistently try to obstruct them.
If Mr Gove prevails, his success might just persuade some of his weaker-willed colleagues in government to confront the opponents who resist them, and to become, like him, truly radical in their zeal for reform.
I've invented a new game. It's called 'Six Degrees of Shami Chakrabarti'
It links together Sally Morgan and Philip Seymour Hoffman
Rod Liddle
Can someone please explain to me why the BBC newsreaders were not wearing black armbands last weekend when reporting the tragic story of Sally Morgan being given the boot from Ofsted? In all other manners the coverage was adequately respectful and the reporters, rightly, allowed their anguish to bleed through the fraying bandage of impartiality. Not enough, mind – I could have done with some real weeping and tearing at the hair: how could this brilliant and exciting woman be so traduced? The Tories are trying to take over everything! You’d have thought they’d won an election, or something. How dare they.
I wonder which public institution will be the next grateful harbour for Baroness Morgan? You can bet your life she will wash up somewhere, almost certainly without the sort of process you or I would have to go through to get a job. You might have thought there would be an opening at the Environment Agency, what with its chaotic response to the recent inclement weather — but no, Baron Smith, another Labour peer, is clinging on to his job, despite admitting that the East Anglian coastline will soon begin somewhere near Sudbury. But there are an almost infinite number of other quangos and public bodies and charidees for which the only qualifications needed are to have amenable, centre-left opinions and to have friends in think tanks and the like.
The BBC itself, for example, might be a good place for Sally — now that Caroline Thomson, the former somewhat tarnished ‘Chief Operating Officer’, has left to run the English National Ballet. Didn’t know Caroline could dance, did you? On the head of a pin, reader, on the head of a pin. Ms Thomson is also known as Lady Liddle, through her marriage to that New Labour scullion or eminence Roger (now Lord) Liddle. No relation, I hasten to add. I mean no relation to me — obviously Lord and Lady Liddle are related, they’re married. Almost every public job in the country is occupied by this sort of person, each of them occupying several berths in multifarious institutions which largely depend upon your wallet to exist. I invented a game you can play based upon these monkeys, the people who run everything. It’s called ‘Six Degrees of Shami Chakrabarti’, and what you do is pick a quango or public institution at random, and then pick a name from the board of that institution at random and see how many moves it takes to get you to Shami Chakrabarti. It’s usually a lowish number, like one or two. Sally Morgan to Shami you can do in two moves: Sally’s married to the barrister John Lyons, former chair of Liberty, of which organisation Shami is the current director. Bingo. There are probably about 50 other routes. These are the people who run us: agreeable people with civilised views, as they would see them, usually — although not always — public-school-educated, faux leftish and unelected.
Watching the news these last few days, one other thought occurred. Aside from the shocking news of Sally Morgan’s defenestration, the other story to dominate the headlines was the death of an actor familiar, I would have thought, to a very small minority of viewers and listeners. Philip Seymour Hoffman was found dead in his apartment with a syringe of skag hanging out of his arm. This is undoubtedly very sad, but the coverage afforded his rather sordid demise was out of all proportion to his popularity. I suppose the average cinema-goer may vaguely recall the chap from the most recent instalment of The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, in which his billing in the cast was somewhere around about number 13. Or perhaps from his performance in one edition of the Mission Impossible franchise, where he ranked second to Tom Cruise.
But I do not think that either of these films are why Hoffman was afforded such a send-off from the British media, and in particular from the BBC. We were told, at every available moment, that he was the ‘finest character actor’ of his generation — and what this means, I suspect, is that he was in the sort of films that people who work for the BBC like to watch. Dialogue-heavy, slightly off-kilter films, such as those directed by Joel and Ethan Coen and Paul Thomas Anderson. Films which do not do terribly good business at the box office but which with-it middle-class people who wear black and work in the media rather enjoy.
People like me, as it happens — I enjoy all those films too and, with the exception of Mission Impossible and The Hunger Games, have seen almost every film Hoffman has been in. But I was reminded a little of the death of Lou Reed — a musician who, again, I’ve always liked, because I am one of these people I’m talking about — whose resonance with the British consciousness lasted for about six weeks in 1972 after the release of the single ‘Walk on the Wild Side’. Lou was somebody revered by the artsy types who work in the media, and especially the BBC, but had no real impact beyond this rather arrogant clique which thinks that the stuff it likes is hugely important. (And I bet Sally Morgan’s got Lou’s album Transformer.) Can you imagine the BBC going overboard if Jean-Claude van Damme suddenly died, or even Will Ferrell? I’m telling you, if the Coen brothers suddenly peg out it’ll be like Mandela all over again.
It links together Sally Morgan and Philip Seymour Hoffman
Rod Liddle
Can someone please explain to me why the BBC newsreaders were not wearing black armbands last weekend when reporting the tragic story of Sally Morgan being given the boot from Ofsted? In all other manners the coverage was adequately respectful and the reporters, rightly, allowed their anguish to bleed through the fraying bandage of impartiality. Not enough, mind – I could have done with some real weeping and tearing at the hair: how could this brilliant and exciting woman be so traduced? The Tories are trying to take over everything! You’d have thought they’d won an election, or something. How dare they.
I wonder which public institution will be the next grateful harbour for Baroness Morgan? You can bet your life she will wash up somewhere, almost certainly without the sort of process you or I would have to go through to get a job. You might have thought there would be an opening at the Environment Agency, what with its chaotic response to the recent inclement weather — but no, Baron Smith, another Labour peer, is clinging on to his job, despite admitting that the East Anglian coastline will soon begin somewhere near Sudbury. But there are an almost infinite number of other quangos and public bodies and charidees for which the only qualifications needed are to have amenable, centre-left opinions and to have friends in think tanks and the like.
The BBC itself, for example, might be a good place for Sally — now that Caroline Thomson, the former somewhat tarnished ‘Chief Operating Officer’, has left to run the English National Ballet. Didn’t know Caroline could dance, did you? On the head of a pin, reader, on the head of a pin. Ms Thomson is also known as Lady Liddle, through her marriage to that New Labour scullion or eminence Roger (now Lord) Liddle. No relation, I hasten to add. I mean no relation to me — obviously Lord and Lady Liddle are related, they’re married. Almost every public job in the country is occupied by this sort of person, each of them occupying several berths in multifarious institutions which largely depend upon your wallet to exist. I invented a game you can play based upon these monkeys, the people who run everything. It’s called ‘Six Degrees of Shami Chakrabarti’, and what you do is pick a quango or public institution at random, and then pick a name from the board of that institution at random and see how many moves it takes to get you to Shami Chakrabarti. It’s usually a lowish number, like one or two. Sally Morgan to Shami you can do in two moves: Sally’s married to the barrister John Lyons, former chair of Liberty, of which organisation Shami is the current director. Bingo. There are probably about 50 other routes. These are the people who run us: agreeable people with civilised views, as they would see them, usually — although not always — public-school-educated, faux leftish and unelected.
Watching the news these last few days, one other thought occurred. Aside from the shocking news of Sally Morgan’s defenestration, the other story to dominate the headlines was the death of an actor familiar, I would have thought, to a very small minority of viewers and listeners. Philip Seymour Hoffman was found dead in his apartment with a syringe of skag hanging out of his arm. This is undoubtedly very sad, but the coverage afforded his rather sordid demise was out of all proportion to his popularity. I suppose the average cinema-goer may vaguely recall the chap from the most recent instalment of The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, in which his billing in the cast was somewhere around about number 13. Or perhaps from his performance in one edition of the Mission Impossible franchise, where he ranked second to Tom Cruise.
But I do not think that either of these films are why Hoffman was afforded such a send-off from the British media, and in particular from the BBC. We were told, at every available moment, that he was the ‘finest character actor’ of his generation — and what this means, I suspect, is that he was in the sort of films that people who work for the BBC like to watch. Dialogue-heavy, slightly off-kilter films, such as those directed by Joel and Ethan Coen and Paul Thomas Anderson. Films which do not do terribly good business at the box office but which with-it middle-class people who wear black and work in the media rather enjoy.
People like me, as it happens — I enjoy all those films too and, with the exception of Mission Impossible and The Hunger Games, have seen almost every film Hoffman has been in. But I was reminded a little of the death of Lou Reed — a musician who, again, I’ve always liked, because I am one of these people I’m talking about — whose resonance with the British consciousness lasted for about six weeks in 1972 after the release of the single ‘Walk on the Wild Side’. Lou was somebody revered by the artsy types who work in the media, and especially the BBC, but had no real impact beyond this rather arrogant clique which thinks that the stuff it likes is hugely important. (And I bet Sally Morgan’s got Lou’s album Transformer.) Can you imagine the BBC going overboard if Jean-Claude van Damme suddenly died, or even Will Ferrell? I’m telling you, if the Coen brothers suddenly peg out it’ll be like Mandela all over again.