BBC more out of touch with ordinary people than Nicholas Winterton
And I thought Nicholas Winterton was out of touch with ordinary working people!
Never fear, Nick, the BBC’s outdone you. Here’s the BBC News tonight (from 6 mins 45 secs in) commenting on Geoffrey Howe’s approach to post-recession fiscal management in 1981:
Then he planned to tighten the budget even as the country was coming out of recession.
And this was the reaction: a letter from the Times from 364 economists arguing he was doing the wrong thing. The eminent list of academics included Professor King, now Governor of the Bank of England.
History proved Geoffrey Howe to be more right than they were.
You fucking what? Try telling that to people who needed a job in the 1980s.
(Source: ONS, from here)
By my reckoning this makes the BBC more out of touch with ordinary people than Nicholas Winterton by a scale of 3.3 million: 1 train carriage.
Tom’s right. The BBC is biased.
Personally, I don’t think the BBC is strictly biased.
I think it suffers from a severe level of incompetence and timidity induced by the fear of its own shadow…a fear instilled in it by the right.
The BBC is full of lazy journalists who repeat whatever comes to them via the wire services. The corporation is understaffed and ill-equipped to deal with controversial topics, especially when the topic in question is the economy.
I’ve said it before on here (last month!) Howe’s 1981 budget Did Not Work.
Not only did it lead to three million unemployed but (like I said):
Howe and the Tories have since claimed the 364 economists were wrong and he was right, “sowing the seeds for economic recovery”. In fact recovery was flimsy and insofar as it marked a ‘turning point’ was due of something the 364 economists could not have known: to wit, the Treasury, in defiance Tory monetarist orthodoxy of the time, was relaxing monetary policy.
Would it work now? No.
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2009/11/2010-vs-1981.html
Does the BBC have, as often claimed, ‘a left wing bias’? No.
http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2009/08/mehdi-hasan-bbc-wing-bias-corporation
(the Andrew Neil 2005 quote is particularly fruity, imagine a BBC presenter putting forward a radical left equivalent; the Daily Mail and the Tories would go berserk)
Economics correspondents tend to be right-wingers. News broadcasts on BBC1 seem to be stripped bare of complexity rather than trying to explain things.
Paul S
Wasn’t being completely serious.
Thanks to all others
Got to go out. Back later.
btw
Sunny’s emailed to say he’s taking this post over to LibCon, so Vinny especially may want to put his (good) comment over there for wider readership. I’m out all day – see you later.
Its worth pointing out that the actual unemployment rate (insofar as there is such a thing) was far higher than three million… so… yeah.
I saw the exact same bulletin and nearly choked on my pork pie. This was the parting line in a bulletin about the fact that economists were split on how to deal with the crisis, cut now or cut later.