Off Topic The Politics Thread

I'm no fan of Mr Brown but look at this!

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Yes Brown did flex the UK credit card but our borrowing has risen and keeps rising under the Tories despite austerity. It's showing no sign of improving which leads to my original point about living beyond our needs. Us (humanity) are exhausting the worlds resources at an alarming rate in this commercialized and very materialistic way of life the West has become used to.

We are engineering our own downfall the way things are going whoever is in power imo!

http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/334/uk-economy/uk-national-debt/

 

The whole point of the BBC is that it doesn't have to compete - that way programmes get made that would never otherwise be commissioned. It's called public service broadcasting because it's for everyone.

The need to attract advertisers makes the output from the commercial channels (in the main) much more predictable and safe, a homogenised and sanitised view of what is 'entertainment' - plus, the BBC not having commercial breaks is one of the things people say they most like about it. Because programmes are made for the viewer, rather than produced to a timetable and containing themes and subjects that advertisers approve of.

Have people really forgotten the complaints on here when our games are moved at short notice because of Sky' profit motives? Or how the financial inequalities of the Premier League have been driven by Sky's pursuit to control our national game?

Commercial television is exactly that, a product, predicated on selling advertising space to make a profit with the viewer seen very much as a commodity to be dismissed when their interests are eclipsed by the financial imperative - that's not to say they don't have their high points, but the output of the BBC is not about money - it's a vast resource of live and archive; television, radio, online services and digital channels covering virtually every conceivable interest - it's something for everybody - free to over 75s (imagine the commercial channels being so accommodating with SkySports and SkyMovies) and for those who do pay, it's about 40p a day, per household.

As an example, if you lose public service from your news, then people like Rupert Murdoch and his shareholders will tell you their version of the news, their agenda will shape the story and they will silence what they prefer you not to hear - which is not terribly good for democracy.

And this 'hard left agenda' really is puerile nonsense - people across the political spectrum claim the BBC is biased - which only goes to illustrate that we see what we want to see. Perhaps we all need to be a bit more open minded?

 

Deregulation happened under Thatcher.

 

Thanks for pointing that out. I'd forgotten.

 

Deluded? Perhaps... but a random selection of opinions from the 'hard left' press suggest otherwise

http://www.economist.com/news/schoo...risis-are-still-being-felt-five-years-article
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...land-chief-says-bosses-paid-higher-price.html

Trotting out party political soundbites doesn't in itself form an argument.

 

One further note of interest:

People are never jailed for non-payment of the licence fee - they can be (and are sometimes) jailed however for refusal or wilful non-payment of any fine that results from prosecution.

Any imposition of a custodial sentence for non-payment of a fine would be heard in a completely new court hearing, quite separate to the TV Licensing prosecution.

Incidentally all the payments from any fines (perhaps somewhat ironically since you seem to be blaming the BBC for these prosecutions) go direct to the government, and not to the BBC.

 

There is absolutely no way a conservative government would have let RBS, Lloyds, BOS, Northern Rock and Halifax crash. This would have led to a run on the solvent banks like HSBC and Barclays and absolute chaos.

Brown acted quickly and decisively for the only time in his life, guaranteed people's savings and staved off a run at NR and RBS.

I wouldn't disagree with anything else thrown at Brown - he's not particularly likeable, but the crash wasn't linked to any particular government (blairite or Tory) policies.

 

And you couldn't find an equally superb one that reveals just how right wing bias the Fleet Street rags are? Perhaps you should dig a bit deeper.

 

Where are the facts on which you base that? Or did you read that in the Telegraph?

 

Brexit 'will blow hole in budget', EU commissioner warns

• 28 June 2017

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Image copyright EPA
Image caption The UK will be taking money from the budget, the EU is warning - at the same time that the bloc will have new outgoings
The UK's departure from the EU will leave a budget shortfall of at least €10bn (£8.8bn; $11.4bn), the budget commissioner has warned.
Günther Oettinger said the bloc must either spend less or find new money to fill the gap, equivalent to an estimated 16% of the entire budget.
Among the options on the table could be less generous payments to farmers or a tax on financial transactions.
"A big country, a net contributor is leaving," Mr Oettinger said.
"That must have consequences."
Mr Oettinger said each euro spent must have a positive impact on people's lives, as he presented a discussion paper on the EU's future.
Negotiations are under way for the UK to leave the EU by the end of March 2019, following last year's referendum vote.
It is not just Brexit giving the EU a budget headache.
"At the same time we need to finance new tasks such as defence, internal security...," Mr Oettinger writes, with regional policy commissioner Corina Cretu, in an EU blog.
"The total gap could therefore be up to twice as much."
The BBC's Europe reporter, Adam Fleming, says the disappearance of Britain's annual rebate will make the budget process simpler.
The rebate, negotiated under former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, is a complex calculation which sees a sizeable proportion of the UK's net contribution to the EU each year returned.
Officials will now consult member states and the European Parliament, our reporter says,
They hope the "Brexit effect" will be clearer by the end of the year and a draft budget for the years 2020 and beyond will be proposed by the middle of next year.

 

I see the cap on pay rise for emergency services has been voted down by the Tories and DUP. Who in their right mind will choose a career in this field. Will we have to rely on more nurses coming into the NHS from EU countries? ......wait a minute is Brexit going on? Surely 350 million a week could help toward lifting the 1% pay cap for nurses whom we all rely on at some point in our lives. Doh silly me I'm supposed to forget about that blatant lie !

 

Did you see the debate? Even left wing commentators were admitting the audience was skewed.

 

Magnificent post .

 

You tried to use the actions of the audience at the recording of this programme as evidence and justification for a point of view you'd like to see people agree with - namely breaking up the national public service broadcaster, the BBC, and (therefore) creating a news vacuum that would be filled by the likes of Sky, Fox, CNN, Al Jazeera and Russia Today.

I've already explained that the audience wasn't picked by the BBC. It commissioned a company called ComRes to do it, and the brief was for impartiality and a balanced representation of supporters of the political parties appearing. ComRes has admitted it failed to meet the brief by not managing to achieve that despite its best efforts. Yet you continue to try and present it as evidence of BBC bias when it was not.

Most British people love the BBC and just do not feel the same way about it that you and Rupert Murdoch do.

 

For many years the BBC has been a left wing 'yogurt knitting' organization. Their political correctness and their over-sensitivity attitude actually make it more divisive. People don't get jobs at the BBC on merit but if they tick the right boxes.
I won't get too political over a sensitive incident that happened recently but their handling of the situation was quite disturbing.
They should stick to their fantastic drama's and programs and leave their political agendas out of things.

 

I get the feeling you're also trying to prove your point by citing the actions of others. Just because ComRes picked a partisan audience (and by association, put the BBC under what you feel is undue accusations of bias because they didn't distance themselves from the audience in any way) doesn't actually mean anything. What you need to do is to look at the actions of the BBC themselves.

Nick Robinson, despite his previous connections with the Tories, was for years presenting BBC Politics with a left-leaning slant.

Five Live have some obviously left-wing voters amongst their staff, who struggle to maintain any impartiality, evidenced by the way they will always present political news ("The PM today said x, and here's a Labour minister telling you why they are wrong"), Nicky Campbell has always been like that.

Look at recent events. Whilst the PM was at Armed Forces Day honouring the troops, Corbyn was getting down with the kids at Glastonbury. Guess which one got far more coverage? And more favourable coverage? Yep - the multi-millionaire, stood on a stage in a multi-millionaire's field, telling the middle class kids whose parents are well off enough to send them to watch other multi-millionaires, that capitalism has failed them. And that there's no need to pack up their tent, they can just leave it there.

There are many other examples of how politics is presented. Marr always pushes the Tory buttons harder than he does any other party, and not just because they are in power, I suspect. Across the board, they have always questioned the viability of Tory policies far more than they do Labour ones. There was very little discussion on how the scrapping of tuition fees was going to be paid for, for example - a perfect example of deliberately missing an own goal.

I agree with you that I don't think it's right to pick on the BBC for the audience ComRes selected. But that does NOT mean that they aren't biased. Remember, they are public sector employees, and all in Unions. Frankly, I'd be more surprised if they weren't biased towards Labour.

 

Nick Robinson, despite his previous connections with the Tories, was for years presenting BBC Politics with a left-leaning slant.

Five Live have some obviously left-wing voters amongst their staff, who struggle to maintain any impartiality, evidenced by the way they will always present political news ("The PM today said x, and here's a Labour minister telling you why they are wrong"),

These are perfect examples of how people only perceive bias against their own personal views. If you listen carefully, you will find that when a Labour MP is quoted criticising the government, it will be followed by a repudiation from a government spokesman. This is what the BBC is obliged to do.

The ridiculous Sun article that Col posted a link to includes the following line:

Paul Mason, turns out to have been a far-left fanatic all along.

Well, yes he is a raging leftie it seems, but you wouldn't have realised that when he was on Newsnight, because he was required to be impartial. I recall being quite shocked when he 'came out' after leaving the BBC. It's revealing that even the Sun themselves use the phrase 'turns out to have been'. They didn't realise either.

 

The sheer hypocrisy of Tory MPs praising the emergency services all over Twitter and in the MSM and then cheering their success at defeating the amendment to lift the 1% pay cap tells you all you need to know about this government.

A craven £1bn bribe to keep them in power but a continuing real-terms pay cut for some of the most valuable contributors to our society.

Did it make the front page of the 'hard left' leaning BBC news website? Here's the link... see if you can find it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news

 

I like your post. I tend to agree with all of it, I think. My only purpose in this specific discussion was to show that it wasn't correct to use the example of that audience to show that the BBC is biased and therefore worthy of being broken up. No more, no less.

I've got no problem with a robust discussion backed up by facts or evidence. These times, above all times, we're bombarded on all sides by lies, and beliefs dressed up as factual truths, repeated time and time again as a drip-drip-drip form of propaganda. I hate that.

 

I didn't vote Conservative or Labour in the election. However, I see the bias in the reporting.