Discussion topic suggestion

An interesting piece has appeared in your favourite newspaper the Daily Mail today concerning today's TUC march in London:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1370064/STEPHEN-GLOVER-Todays-march-state-sector-workers-fuel-hysteria-theres-public-spending-massacre.html

Ignoring the whys, wherefores, rights and wrongs of the march and the reasons behind it, this article points some accusatory fingers at the BBC (my italics):

"How can this be? How can there be such an enormous gulf between the widespread perception that the cuts are going to be horrendous, and the actual truth that they will only amount to a modest three per cent at the end of five years? The answer has to do with the mendacity of the Labour leadership, the muddle-headedness and bias of the BBC and Leftish newspapers, and the almost complete failure of the Coalition to explain its case and put the cuts in perspective."

"What has been represented by the Government’s adversaries in Parliament, the BBC and the trade unions as a dramatic and dangerous change of course is, in fact, no more than a relatively small but firm and determined touch on the financial tiller. In 2015 public spending will in real terms stand where it did in 2008, after some years of Mr Brown’s massive largesse."

"We can all quarrel about the nature of individual cuts. What we cannot respectably do is to pretend that overall reductions represent an unprecedentedly swingeing attack on the public sector that will take us back to year zero. And yet this is what the BBC has been pretending almost from the day the Coalition was formed. The ‘British Broadcasting Cuts Corporation’, as David Cameron likes to call it, has repeatedly made the highly questionable assertion that the cuts are the biggest for nearly a century."

"Almost every day the BBC blitzes us with heart-rending tales of new job losses in the public sector, not infrequently based on town hall or trade union surveys. Needless to say, there are many fewer stories about the tens of thousands of jobs being created in the private sector. Nor does the BBC often mention that the very same private sector had to make far more swingeing and painful cuts to workforce numbers at the height of the banking crisis two years ago."

"But aren’t many of them desirable savings? Like its in-house newspaper The Guardian (which yesterday ran an idiotic six-page supplement about ‘British society facing death by a thousand cuts’), the BBC seems to be intellectually incapable of grasping that Labour’s decade-long orgy of spending produced waste on a gargantuan scale."

"For the BBC, cuts are an everyday obsession, whereas egregious examples of government waste are a much more occasional interest. The problem, I’m afraid, is that the Coalition has utterly failed to convey to the British people the extent of the squandering of public money that took place under New Labour."

 

You will understand that I find some pleasant irony that the bastion of the Jeremy Vine Show - the Daily Mail - has taken to bite the hand that it feeds. Errr... that doesn't sound right, but I'm sure you know what I mean.

 

So, here is your script for Ken's show on Monday morning...

 

"We read in the Daily Mail on Saturday of the BBC's obsession and bias concerning the coalition government's spending cuts, so we look today at the BBC itself and discuss the bias that appears in most of its news-based broadcasts."

 

You will, of course, put the argument that the BBC is not biased (which, when you think about it, is a biased viewpoint) and if your listeners agree with you then it could put any myth about BBC bias to rest for a long time. However, if you allow those of us that consider the bias to be endemic to put our views without being ignored or cut off then it should make for a lively discussion. Somehow I don't think you will handle the criticism very well, but let's see if we can raise your blood pressure to that of some of your listeners.

 

I'd listen to this, and so I look forward to your show on Monday. I'm switching to 6 Music from April 4th so it would be only fair, I feel, for you to discuss something that would be of interest to me in our last week together, don't you?