Post by Teddy Bear on Dec 4, 2014 17:54:23 GMT
Today the theme is going to be CUTS.
Here, the way the BBC covered George Osborne's Autumn Statement referring to cuts, and in another thread, how the BBC tried to defend the Sun's criticism of itself for failing to come through with promised cuts.
The other irony here is that the BBC presenter likened the cuts to a book by George Orwell - 'The Road to Wigan Pier'. Shows they're familiar with his writings, but I wonder how they think they would fit as The Ministry of Thought in 1984.
I have to say that while Cameron and Osborne both complain about the way the BBC have covered their attempts to balance the books, besides 'stomping their feet', do they have the guts to really do something about properly dealing with this insidious organisation, like ending the licence fee.
I have my doubts!
Here, the way the BBC covered George Osborne's Autumn Statement referring to cuts, and in another thread, how the BBC tried to defend the Sun's criticism of itself for failing to come through with promised cuts.
The other irony here is that the BBC presenter likened the cuts to a book by George Orwell - 'The Road to Wigan Pier'. Shows they're familiar with his writings, but I wonder how they think they would fit as The Ministry of Thought in 1984.
I have to say that while Cameron and Osborne both complain about the way the BBC have covered their attempts to balance the books, besides 'stomping their feet', do they have the guts to really do something about properly dealing with this insidious organisation, like ending the licence fee.
I have my doubts!
Osborne goes to war on the BBC after reporter claims 'utterly terrifying' spending cuts will take Britain back to 1930s squalor
By Matt Chorley, Political Editor for MailOnline
A furious row erupted today between the government and the BBC after a political reporter described planned spending cuts as 'utterly terrifying'.
David Cameron and George Osborne hit back at 'absurd' claims on Radio 4's Today programme that tackling the deficit would take Britain back to the 1930s era of mass unemployment, squalor and poverty.
Mr Osborne condemned the BBC's 'hyperbolic' coverage of spending cuts, after being angered when he woke up to a broadcast by Assistant Political Editor Norman Smith.
The Office for Budget Responsibility yesterday forecast total government spending will fall to just 35.2 per cent of GDP in 2019-20 – the lowest level for 80 years.
Just 40 per cent of the spending cuts needed have been made so far, with the remaining 60 per cent to come in the next five years.
We are facing an extraordinary cavernous financial hole which yesterday's razzmatazz around the politically popular budget rather glossed over
BBC reporter Norman Smith
In a broadcast on Radio 4 at 6.10am, Mr Smith said the OBR's documents read like a 'boom of doom', setting out the 'utterly terrifying' scale of the way spending will have to be 'hacked back' to 1930s levels.
'That is an extraordinary concept. You are back to the land of the Road To Wigan Pier, Mr Smith said.
George Orwell's bleak book, the Road To Wigan Pier, chronicled poverty, hunger and social injustice in the north of England in the 1930s.
He accused Mr Osborne of using positive growth forecasts as a 'fig leaf' to cover his 'embarrassment'.
And he suggested the Chancellor had used the 'razzmatazz' of stamp duty cuts and tax raids on banks and big business to gloss over an 'extraordinary cavernous financial hole'.
Today programme presenter John Humphrys added that someone listening to Mr Osborne's Commons statement yesterday 'did not go away with the sense of doom' Mr Smith had described.
The exchange immediately angered Mr Osborne, who was listening in Number 11 Downing Street.
It is understood Mr Cameron was also made aware of the remarks. The Prime Minister's official spokesman said: 'Characterisations of the Autumn Statement such as a 'book of doom' or 'The Road to Wigan Pier' are hyperbolic descriptions that do not help us have what's important, which is a clear and sensible and measured debate about the decisions that have to be made.'
At 8.10am Mr Osborne clashed with Mr Humphrys live on air. The Chancellor said: 'When I woke up this morning and turned on the Today programme I felt like I was listening to a rewind of a tape from 2010.
'You had BBC correspondents saying Britain is returning to a sort of George Orwell world of The Road to Wigan Pier.'
Mr Osborne repeatedly hit back at Humphrys' 'nonsense' questioning, adding: 'I would have thought the BBC would have learned from the last four years that its totally hyperbolic coverage of spending cuts has not been matched by what has actually happened.
'I had all that when you interviewed me four years, and has the world fallen in? No it hasn't.
'The British economy is growing and the deficit is half what it was when I was doing those interviews.'
A BBC spokesman defended the remarks. 'We're satisfied our coverage has been fair and balanced and we'll continue to ask ministers the questions our audience want answered.'
Last month Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith accused the BBC of being 'utterly negative' about the government's flagship welfare reforms, and challenged claims by Today present Mishal Husain that it had been 'dogged' by problems.
According to the OBR, government spending falling to just 35.2 per cent of GDP in 2019-20 marks a dramatic decline from 45.3 per cent in 2009-10, the last year of the Labour government.
In the mid-1970s state spending accounted for almost half of the entire economy.
The Tories and Lib Dems committed in the Coalition to protecting health, schools and foreign aid spending.
It means other departments face much deeper cuts of up to 50 per cent to find the money needed to eradicate the deficit.
The OBR expects NHS spending to rise from £108.4billion this year to £110.2billion in 2019-20.
But spending on unprotected budgets like defence, transport, business and councils will fall from £147.1billion to just £85.6billion.
During the decade to 2020, spending per person on unprotected areas will fall from £3,020 to just £1,290.
Today the Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank said it will mean spending cuts 'on a colossal scale' after the election.
Just £35 billion of the cuts in spending by Whitehall departments have already happened, with £55billion yet to come, the IFS said.
If reductions in departmental spending were to continue at the same pace after the May 2015 election as they have over the past four years, welfare cuts or tax rises worth about £21 billion a year would be needed by 2019/20.
However, it comes at the same time that the Conservatives are committed to income tax cuts worth £7billion.
IFS chief Paul Mr Johnson said that the precise nature of planned cuts to services like local government, defence and transport had not yet been spelt out, and stressed that it would be wrong to describe them as 'unachievable'.
But he said voters would be justified in asking whether the Chancellor was planning 'a fundamental reimagining of the role of the state'.
And he added: 'One thing is for sure. If we move in anything like this direction, whilst continuing to protect health and pensions, the role and shape of the state will have changed beyond recognition.'
The plans set out in the Autumn Statement imply 'a slight increase in the speed of proposed spending cuts after 2015-16', extending the expected period of reductions in state spending for a further year beyond 2017-18, said Mr Johnson.
To achieve the Office for Budget Responsibility's forecast of a budget surplus of GBP23 billion by 2019-20 would require 'spending cuts on a colossal scale ... taking total government spending to its lowest level as a proportion of national income since before the last war', he said.
'There is no spending dividend on the horizon, far from it,' said Mr Johnson. 'There are huge cuts to come. On these plans,whatever way you look at it, we are considerably less than halfway through the cuts.'
Mr Osborne admitted that the next five years will be tough. 'I am the first to say - I will say it again - difficult decisions are going to be required. Government departments are going to have make savings,' he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
'I am not pretending that these are easy decisions or that they have no impact.
'But the alternative of a return to economic chaos, of not getting on top of your debts, of people looking at Britain across the world and saying that is not a country in charge of its own destiny is not a world that I want.'
- Chancellor furious after waking up to 'hyperbolic' broadcast on Radio 4
- Accuses the BBC of claiming the world would 'fall in' in 2010
- Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts sharp falls in spending by 2020
- Assistant Political Editor Norman Smith said OBR report is 'book of doom'
- Likened it to Orwell book The Road To Wigan Pier about 1930s poverty
By Matt Chorley, Political Editor for MailOnline
A furious row erupted today between the government and the BBC after a political reporter described planned spending cuts as 'utterly terrifying'.
David Cameron and George Osborne hit back at 'absurd' claims on Radio 4's Today programme that tackling the deficit would take Britain back to the 1930s era of mass unemployment, squalor and poverty.
Mr Osborne condemned the BBC's 'hyperbolic' coverage of spending cuts, after being angered when he woke up to a broadcast by Assistant Political Editor Norman Smith.
The Office for Budget Responsibility yesterday forecast total government spending will fall to just 35.2 per cent of GDP in 2019-20 – the lowest level for 80 years.
Just 40 per cent of the spending cuts needed have been made so far, with the remaining 60 per cent to come in the next five years.
We are facing an extraordinary cavernous financial hole which yesterday's razzmatazz around the politically popular budget rather glossed over
BBC reporter Norman Smith
In a broadcast on Radio 4 at 6.10am, Mr Smith said the OBR's documents read like a 'boom of doom', setting out the 'utterly terrifying' scale of the way spending will have to be 'hacked back' to 1930s levels.
'That is an extraordinary concept. You are back to the land of the Road To Wigan Pier, Mr Smith said.
George Orwell's bleak book, the Road To Wigan Pier, chronicled poverty, hunger and social injustice in the north of England in the 1930s.
He accused Mr Osborne of using positive growth forecasts as a 'fig leaf' to cover his 'embarrassment'.
And he suggested the Chancellor had used the 'razzmatazz' of stamp duty cuts and tax raids on banks and big business to gloss over an 'extraordinary cavernous financial hole'.
Today programme presenter John Humphrys added that someone listening to Mr Osborne's Commons statement yesterday 'did not go away with the sense of doom' Mr Smith had described.
ROAD TO WIGAN PIER: ORWELL'S GRIM ACCOUNT OF 1930'S NORTH
In early 1936, George Orwell spent three months travelling through Yorkshire and Lancashire, chronicling life in areas of mass unemployment, poverty and hunger.
His experience became The Road To Wigan Pier, published in 1937 to a chorus of disapproval from the Left, who claimed he had betrayed the working class.
He stayed in grim lodgings, was given 'disgusting' food, spoke to the poor and revealed details of the life of squalor. He complained bitterly about being 'terribly cold'.
It included describing life in a coal, housing shortages and the spread of malnutrition and hunger.
He said of Sheffield: 'It seems to me, by daylight, one of the most appalling places I have ever seen.'
Spotting a young, pale woman struggling in a Wigan street, he wrote: 'I thought how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling in the gutter in a back alley in Wigan, in the bitter cold, prodding a stick up a blocked drain.'
Walking the Leeds and Liverpool canal he described a 'frightful landscape of slagheaps and belching chimneys. A few rats running through the snow, very tame, presumably weak with hunger'.
The second part of the book was a discussion about how socialism could improve living conditions, and his own middle class life.
Wigan pier did not actually exist. Orwell tried to find it but it was no longer there.
In early 1936, George Orwell spent three months travelling through Yorkshire and Lancashire, chronicling life in areas of mass unemployment, poverty and hunger.
His experience became The Road To Wigan Pier, published in 1937 to a chorus of disapproval from the Left, who claimed he had betrayed the working class.
He stayed in grim lodgings, was given 'disgusting' food, spoke to the poor and revealed details of the life of squalor. He complained bitterly about being 'terribly cold'.
It included describing life in a coal, housing shortages and the spread of malnutrition and hunger.
He said of Sheffield: 'It seems to me, by daylight, one of the most appalling places I have ever seen.'
Spotting a young, pale woman struggling in a Wigan street, he wrote: 'I thought how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling in the gutter in a back alley in Wigan, in the bitter cold, prodding a stick up a blocked drain.'
Walking the Leeds and Liverpool canal he described a 'frightful landscape of slagheaps and belching chimneys. A few rats running through the snow, very tame, presumably weak with hunger'.
The second part of the book was a discussion about how socialism could improve living conditions, and his own middle class life.
Wigan pier did not actually exist. Orwell tried to find it but it was no longer there.
It is understood Mr Cameron was also made aware of the remarks. The Prime Minister's official spokesman said: 'Characterisations of the Autumn Statement such as a 'book of doom' or 'The Road to Wigan Pier' are hyperbolic descriptions that do not help us have what's important, which is a clear and sensible and measured debate about the decisions that have to be made.'
At 8.10am Mr Osborne clashed with Mr Humphrys live on air. The Chancellor said: 'When I woke up this morning and turned on the Today programme I felt like I was listening to a rewind of a tape from 2010.
'You had BBC correspondents saying Britain is returning to a sort of George Orwell world of The Road to Wigan Pier.'
Mr Osborne repeatedly hit back at Humphrys' 'nonsense' questioning, adding: 'I would have thought the BBC would have learned from the last four years that its totally hyperbolic coverage of spending cuts has not been matched by what has actually happened.
'I had all that when you interviewed me four years, and has the world fallen in? No it hasn't.
'The British economy is growing and the deficit is half what it was when I was doing those interviews.'
A BBC spokesman defended the remarks. 'We're satisfied our coverage has been fair and balanced and we'll continue to ask ministers the questions our audience want answered.'
Last month Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith accused the BBC of being 'utterly negative' about the government's flagship welfare reforms, and challenged claims by Today present Mishal Husain that it had been 'dogged' by problems.
According to the OBR, government spending falling to just 35.2 per cent of GDP in 2019-20 marks a dramatic decline from 45.3 per cent in 2009-10, the last year of the Labour government.
In the mid-1970s state spending accounted for almost half of the entire economy.
The Tories and Lib Dems committed in the Coalition to protecting health, schools and foreign aid spending.
It means other departments face much deeper cuts of up to 50 per cent to find the money needed to eradicate the deficit.
The OBR expects NHS spending to rise from £108.4billion this year to £110.2billion in 2019-20.
But spending on unprotected budgets like defence, transport, business and councils will fall from £147.1billion to just £85.6billion.
BBC REPORTER WHO HAS CLASHED WITH NUMBER 10 BEFORE
Norman Smith has form for falling out with the Tories. Two years ago he clashed with Number 10 spin chief Craig Oliver, in a video which was leaked online.
Mr Oliver, who replaced Andy Coulson when he resigned over the phone hacking scandal last year, is a former BBC executive.
He berated Mr Smith in Downing Street about his 'partial' coverage of a row involving then-Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, and his handling of Ruper Murdoch's bid to buy BSkyB.
Mr Oliver said he had been 'shocked' by an item on the Six O'Clock News and expected later bulletins to be 'more balanced'.
Mr Smith, who describes himself as a 'minor ballet bore and owner of mad spaniel', started his career in local newspapers in Birmingham and Bristol before joining the BBC as a local radio reporter.
He became Chief Political Correspondent for the BBC News channel in 2011, and was promoted to Assistant Political Editor earlier this year.
Norman Smith has form for falling out with the Tories. Two years ago he clashed with Number 10 spin chief Craig Oliver, in a video which was leaked online.
Mr Oliver, who replaced Andy Coulson when he resigned over the phone hacking scandal last year, is a former BBC executive.
He berated Mr Smith in Downing Street about his 'partial' coverage of a row involving then-Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, and his handling of Ruper Murdoch's bid to buy BSkyB.
Mr Oliver said he had been 'shocked' by an item on the Six O'Clock News and expected later bulletins to be 'more balanced'.
Mr Smith, who describes himself as a 'minor ballet bore and owner of mad spaniel', started his career in local newspapers in Birmingham and Bristol before joining the BBC as a local radio reporter.
He became Chief Political Correspondent for the BBC News channel in 2011, and was promoted to Assistant Political Editor earlier this year.
Today the Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank said it will mean spending cuts 'on a colossal scale' after the election.
Just £35 billion of the cuts in spending by Whitehall departments have already happened, with £55billion yet to come, the IFS said.
If reductions in departmental spending were to continue at the same pace after the May 2015 election as they have over the past four years, welfare cuts or tax rises worth about £21 billion a year would be needed by 2019/20.
However, it comes at the same time that the Conservatives are committed to income tax cuts worth £7billion.
IFS chief Paul Mr Johnson said that the precise nature of planned cuts to services like local government, defence and transport had not yet been spelt out, and stressed that it would be wrong to describe them as 'unachievable'.
But he said voters would be justified in asking whether the Chancellor was planning 'a fundamental reimagining of the role of the state'.
And he added: 'One thing is for sure. If we move in anything like this direction, whilst continuing to protect health and pensions, the role and shape of the state will have changed beyond recognition.'
The plans set out in the Autumn Statement imply 'a slight increase in the speed of proposed spending cuts after 2015-16', extending the expected period of reductions in state spending for a further year beyond 2017-18, said Mr Johnson.
To achieve the Office for Budget Responsibility's forecast of a budget surplus of GBP23 billion by 2019-20 would require 'spending cuts on a colossal scale ... taking total government spending to its lowest level as a proportion of national income since before the last war', he said.
'There is no spending dividend on the horizon, far from it,' said Mr Johnson. 'There are huge cuts to come. On these plans,whatever way you look at it, we are considerably less than halfway through the cuts.'
Mr Osborne admitted that the next five years will be tough. 'I am the first to say - I will say it again - difficult decisions are going to be required. Government departments are going to have make savings,' he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
'I am not pretending that these are easy decisions or that they have no impact.
'But the alternative of a return to economic chaos, of not getting on top of your debts, of people looking at Britain across the world and saying that is not a country in charge of its own destiny is not a world that I want.'
'IT IS UTTERLY TERRIFYING': BBC BROADCAST WHICH ANGERED OSBORNE
NORMAN SMITH: 'I think it was a hugely politically astute autumn statement but I do think we could probably do with administering ourselves a few Alka-Seltzer this morning because there's a real feeling of the morning after the night before.
'And while there was a lot of enthusiasm on the Conservative benches and political joy at a lot of the popular measures – you know the stamp duty, the Google tax, the tax on non-doms, cheaper air travel for children, handing back VAT to hospices.
'All are very politically popular, easy to sell on the doorstep.
'When you sit down and read the Office of Budget Responsibility report it reads frankly like a book of doom.
When you sit down and read the Office of Budget Responsibility report it reads frankly like a book of doom
'It is utterly terrifying. It is suggesting that spending will have to be hacked back to the levels of the 1930s in terms of as a proportion of GDP.
'That is an extraordinary concept. You are back to the land of the Road To Wigan Pier. And the scale of cuts detailed in the book it's suggesting in the non-protected departments, so those unlike health and overseas aid etc.
'They are going to face cuts of roughly another third. They have already faced a third so by 2020 they will have been cut back by nearly two thirds which you have to question whether that is achievable.
'And we are told 60 per cent of the cuts are still to come and this is in a context when you look at the pay side of the equation all the suggestions are that pay may not be back to pre-crash levels by 2020.
'So we are facing an extraordinary cavernous financial hole which to some extent yesterday's razzmatazz around the politically popular budget rather glossed over.'
JOHN HUMPHREYS: 'Well that's the point. If you listen to the Chancellor yesterday you did not go away with the sense of doom you have just described having read the OBR report.'
NORMAN SMITH: 'There was a slightly Brown-esque moment I thought when the Chancellor came to read out the deficit figures. He cantered over the figures for the next two years when the deficit is going up, and then he plummeted on the figures by 2020 when things get better. He is clinging to these forecasts in five years' time to sort of divert from the hulking great mountain of pain we have got to climb up.
'The difficulty we have got it seems to me is these forecasts are fine and dandy but we all know, we have been here many times before, they are usually wrong.
'And chancellors invariably seize on these forecasts as a sort of fiscal fig leaf to cover up the sort of embarrassment they face now.
'And there are massive uncertainties some of the proposals the Chancellor outlined, for example the Google Tax, is that really going to claw in money?
'Are companies like Google going to be so easy to get money out of. Are wages actually going to pick up, the OBR has revised wage growth down. Is productivity going to pick up?
'There has to be huge, huge question marks about whether we are indeed by 2020 going to be moving out of the red and into the black as the Chancellor says.'
NORMAN SMITH: 'I think it was a hugely politically astute autumn statement but I do think we could probably do with administering ourselves a few Alka-Seltzer this morning because there's a real feeling of the morning after the night before.
'And while there was a lot of enthusiasm on the Conservative benches and political joy at a lot of the popular measures – you know the stamp duty, the Google tax, the tax on non-doms, cheaper air travel for children, handing back VAT to hospices.
'All are very politically popular, easy to sell on the doorstep.
'When you sit down and read the Office of Budget Responsibility report it reads frankly like a book of doom.
When you sit down and read the Office of Budget Responsibility report it reads frankly like a book of doom
'It is utterly terrifying. It is suggesting that spending will have to be hacked back to the levels of the 1930s in terms of as a proportion of GDP.
'That is an extraordinary concept. You are back to the land of the Road To Wigan Pier. And the scale of cuts detailed in the book it's suggesting in the non-protected departments, so those unlike health and overseas aid etc.
'They are going to face cuts of roughly another third. They have already faced a third so by 2020 they will have been cut back by nearly two thirds which you have to question whether that is achievable.
'And we are told 60 per cent of the cuts are still to come and this is in a context when you look at the pay side of the equation all the suggestions are that pay may not be back to pre-crash levels by 2020.
'So we are facing an extraordinary cavernous financial hole which to some extent yesterday's razzmatazz around the politically popular budget rather glossed over.'
JOHN HUMPHREYS: 'Well that's the point. If you listen to the Chancellor yesterday you did not go away with the sense of doom you have just described having read the OBR report.'
NORMAN SMITH: 'There was a slightly Brown-esque moment I thought when the Chancellor came to read out the deficit figures. He cantered over the figures for the next two years when the deficit is going up, and then he plummeted on the figures by 2020 when things get better. He is clinging to these forecasts in five years' time to sort of divert from the hulking great mountain of pain we have got to climb up.
'The difficulty we have got it seems to me is these forecasts are fine and dandy but we all know, we have been here many times before, they are usually wrong.
'And chancellors invariably seize on these forecasts as a sort of fiscal fig leaf to cover up the sort of embarrassment they face now.
'And there are massive uncertainties some of the proposals the Chancellor outlined, for example the Google Tax, is that really going to claw in money?
'Are companies like Google going to be so easy to get money out of. Are wages actually going to pick up, the OBR has revised wage growth down. Is productivity going to pick up?
'There has to be huge, huge question marks about whether we are indeed by 2020 going to be moving out of the red and into the black as the Chancellor says.'