CentreRight

Newsnight's Editor is taking us for fools

On Monday night I noted the left-wing biases of all four members of Newsnight's new Politics Pen.  Iain Dale followed up my post and called the panel a "downright insult".

Forgive me for returning to this but I've just read the response of Newsnight's Editor Peter Rippon (bio) to the complaints posted by Iain and me and I'm even more annoyed than before.

Here's my fisk of his post:

PR: "There has been some predictable criticism of Newsnight's Politics Pen experiment for being politically biased.

As one commenter said below Mr Rippon's post: "We must try and ignore your sneering dismissal of a very fair criticism as "predictable". Has it not occurred to you that it is predictable because it is obvious?"

PR: "I would urge viewers and critics to at least watch it before rushing to judgement."

I have watched all three Pens broadcast so far and was struck by...

1. The only serious money-saving proposal greeted enthusiastically has been a case for defence cuts and a distancing from America (a modest civil service savings programme was also approved).
2. All four panelists rejected the eminently sensible idea from the TaxPayers' Alliance that Regional Development Agencies be abolished.
3. Three of the four panellists backed HIGHER inheritance tax as proposed by the socialist Fabian Society.
4. The unfunny comedian who recommended euthanasia for everyone aged 78.

PR: "Politics Pen is not a finely politically calibrated panel like Question Time or Any Questions.  It does not need to be because we are trying to do something different."

It is certainly not finely politically calibrated.  We can agree on that (!) but what's this about doing something different?  This Pen/ Panel is passing judgment on the most important political topic of our day - the need to cut public spending and all four panel members have supported - in different ways - the government that let spending run out of control and got us into this mess.

Labour MP Andrew Dismore suspends services to constituents, citing swine flu

His website.

Extraordinary.

Newsnight's 'balanced' panel has four lefties and no righties

Is Newsnight having a laugh?

It has established a Dragons Den-style 'politics pen' to assess candidates for public spending savings.

A reader is appalled at the choice of four pen members...

There's Greg Dyke (former Labour donor)...

Deborah Mattinson (Brown's pollster)...

Digby Jones (former Labour minister)...

and Matthew Taylor (former adviser to Tony Blair).

It would seem that the BBC isn't even trying to demonstrate ideological balance anymore.

"You literally can’t find a journalist to say that Brown isn’t lying when he says spending will rise."

Quote from Fraser Nelson.

How long does Brown intend to carry on digging?

My photograph of a stoopid sign beats Tom Harris MP's photo of a stoopid sign

Over on his blog Tom Harris MP has a photograph of a silly sign from a Virgin train.

I reckon the photo of a sign that I took recently outside London's US Embassy beats his for stupidity...

Apparently you are not allowed to take bombs in with you!

Barack Obama shows that moderation of style is more politically potent than moderation in policy

In today's Times Sarah Vine writes that voters want passion from their politics.  I'd agree with that but Barack Obama has shown us the most important quality that a successful and radical politician needs is civility.

It's true that he has passion and charisma and a brilliant campaigning machine but it is his civility that has persuaded Americans to swallow his policy radicalism.

And, make no mistake, Barack Obama is America's most radical President of modern times.  Yesterday, hardly noticed because of Michael Jackson's death, the House of Representatives approved very radical action on climate change.  Next on Obama's 'to do' list is sweeping health care reform.  He's already increased federal spending in the largest ever fiscal stimulus.  He's already made massive changes to American foreign policy by pursuing direct engagement with the country's 'axis of evil' enemies.

Obama has demonstrated that voters are more persuaded by moderation and reasonableness of character than moderation of policy.  Voters, as Sarah Vine suggests, don't take a lot of interest in policy detail.  Obama won over middle America because of his generosity to opponents, his optimism, his image as a family man.  Republicans have hated this and have gotten more and more heated, more and more angry in the process.  Almost shouting now at the American people they cannot understand that Obama is getting away with enacting 'the Europeanisation of America' (which is what it is).  This heated reaction is compounding Obama's advantage.  Voters see the extreme language and temperament as the most offputting thing of all.

David Cameron has this moderation.  Earlier in the week I was struck by Quentin Letts' remark that Cameron is "not one of life's haters".  My hope is that the Conservative leader will use his Obama-style temperament to persuade Britain that he can be trusted with the radical action that will be necessary to put Britain back on track.

The BBC (like much of the public sector) enjoys private sector pay AND public sector security

Licence to Bill is how The Sun headlines its coverage of the BBC expenses revelations.

For me the bigger issues about the BBC and how it uses licence fee payers' money have been highlighted by David Elstein - former CEO of Channel 5.  In yesterday's Times David Elstein noted how the BBC showers politicians and other influentials with "lunches, dinners, receptions and — above all — events" as it seeks to maintain monopoly control of licence fee revenue.  Read his full piece here and listen to him again on Radio 4 this morning noting how BBC execs enjoy private sector pay AND public sector security.

Questions that won't (but should) be at the heart of the Iraq Inquiry

They were proposed by Fraser Nelson in today's News of the World:

1. Why were so many troops withdrawn so early after the invasion, and did military commanders protest?
2. Whose idea was it to turn a blind eye to the Shi’ite dead squads taking over Basra police?
3. Can we list the requests for funding – equipment, men - that were made and then denied?
4. If the job is done in Barsa, why have we handed over to Americans?
5. How much do we increase the defence budget by, to make sure we’re never as underresourced again?

My guess is that they won't be central to an Inquiry.  I'd also like to see a whole series of questions on British attitudes to the surge.  Why did the British government (and all of Britain's political parties) prefer the Baker-Hamilton plan and its engagement with Tehran to General Petraeus' surge policy (the policy chosen by Bush)?

I don't much care if the Iraq war was "illegal"

I do care if it was moral.

Labour's Lord Soley explained the dangers of getting obsessed with international law yesterday:

"I would say to lawyers: beware of sounding like the medieval theologians who kept arguing about how many angels can stand on the head of a pin when you are dealing with some of the most brutal dictators. I say to the lawyers that one of the lessons we have to learn from situations like this is that we have yet to find effective ways of dealing with this deadly combination of extreme dictators, failing states and weapons of mass destruction. I say to the lawyers that if their argument had prevailed in the past then Pol Pot would still be running Cambodia, because the Vietnamese illegally removed him; Idi Amin would still be running Uganda, because the Tanzanians illegally removed him; and East Pakistan would still be running what is now Bangladesh, because the Indians illegally removed it.

As I have pointed out here before, one of the most important interventions of all time was particularly important to this House—the 19th-century intervention by the British, using the Royal Navy, to stop the transatlantic slave trade. Captains of Royal Navy vessels were successfully sued in court cases in this House for arresting slave traders on the high seas and for entering the ports of other countries and burning the empty slave boats. All the usual complaints were around saying that we should not do it. Why? In the Times at that period you could read about the cause to bring our British sailors home because they were dying of tropical fevers and so on and it was felt that it was not a war for us. Slavery was normal. Trading slaves was normal. It became abnormal because we made it so, even though it was fully lawful at the time.

People have to be very careful in that if they get the balance of morality and law wrong, they could end up defending the indefensible for legal reasons. I have made this argument before. The lawyers today are very much in the position of lawyers in the 1950s and 1960s who argued that if a man beat his wife and kids in the street he could be arrested but if he did it in his own home he could not be touched. That is what we do in international affairs. The Treaty of Westphalia means that the nation state is still the dominant idea of the day. So if Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait, we will have him, but if he gases his own people we will let him get on with it."

Another disastrous week for Labour

A week ago Brown managed to survive as Labour leader but it's all been downhill since. His attempt to portray David Cameron as Mr 10% Cuts has been disowned by The Sun as "dishonest" and by The Guardian's Jackie Ashley as teenage politics. Then, yesterday, the Mail described Gordon Brown's Iraq Inquiry as "a joke" in a full front page splash. Also yesterday, the public sector workers union, Unison, suspended donations to constituency Labour parties.  Dave Prentis received a standing ovation from his union members' conference when he launched a stinging attack on Gordon Brown's policies.  “Our members are tired of feeding the hand that bites them,” he said.

Video below:

The Telegraph and Labour

Those who think The Telegraph can get too close to the Labour Party will be interested in this news recorded by PoliticsHome:

Nick Griffin has named his two rottweiler dogs as Anne and Frank

I read this paragraph about Nick Griffin in yesterday's Sunday Times and re-read it with astonishment and disgust:

"These days he lives at an isolated stone farmhouse in the Welsh hills, about 10 miles from Welshpool. The two-acre property is guarded by security cameras, burglar alarms and two rottweilers named – with gloating insensitivity – Anne and Frank, after one of the most renowned Jewish victims of Nazi Germany."

Allister Heath's daily economic wisdom is now online

Sundays have never been quite the same since the demise of The Business.  The pink-coloured newspaper had the best editorial pages of any UK newspaper but not enough of my fellow Britons thought that was enough and the newspaper closed.

The man who was responsible in large part for those great editorials was Allister Heath and he has been editing City AM for the last couple of years.

City AM's website has been pretty awful but it's now been upgraded and Allister's 'Editor's Letter' can now be read via this link.  Do add it to your favourites.  Alongside John Redwood and Andrew Lilico he is one of the most interesting economic commentators we have.

Here are quotations from his most recent three 'letters':

Wednesday: "The next bank that runs into trouble must be allowed to go bust; the perception that all the top institutions are too big to fail needs to be eradicated. Any future intervention must be limited to preventing systemic meltdown. It must also be made clear to the banks that next time bondholders as well as shareholders will be wiped out. With credit default swaps (CDS) markets becoming less opaque, the argument that the failure of a mid-ranking institution would take down the whole financial system is becoming far less plausible. It is imperative to create as much transparency about counterparties and risk as possible; that way failures could be managed without the kind of collective nervous breakdown we saw after Lehman Brothers last year."

Thursday: "Both Tories and Labour would cut real spending by the same overall amount, though the Tories would shield the NHS and foreign aid in return for deeper cuts elsewhere. I wish the Tories would contemplate more drastic cuts, but that is not the point. There is currently no clear blue waters between the parties. The debate would be greatly enriched if everybody were to acknowledge this."

Friday: "Anybody hoping for a sharp upturn in property prices will be bitterly disappointed. There is a large overhang of homes waiting to hit the markets when conditions recover. We won’t be returning to the ultra-loose conditions that fuelled the bubble, not least because so many lenders have permanently quit. And with the UK crippled by Gordon Brown’s higher taxes, bloated government, high costs and general mismanagement, net migration is unlikely to be as high in the years to come."

'Brownaldo'

I'm not happy at Gordon Brown being compared to my footballing hero but I can see the point of this Guardian 'LiveDraw' and Brownaldo not being a team player, given to petulance and refusing to come off the pitch...

Telegraph profited by at least £300,000 from expenses-gate

Catching up with some reading I note this from Peter Wilby's Guardian column:

"The Telegraph group, by my calculations, probably sold an average 60,000 full-price papers a day (including Sundays) that it would not otherwise have sold, taking into account that, on previous market trends, circulation might have dropped. The group may already have netted, on a conservative estimate, an extra £600,000 in sales revenue. Even if it paid £300,000 for the MPs' files - some accounts put the figure much lower - it is handsomely in profit, without allowing for enhanced advertising."

The Telegraph will, of course, hope that many of its extra readers stay with the newspaper in the months ahead.  My guess is that the effect on Telegraph revenues will be much greater than £300,000 when Editor Will Lewis does his end-of-year sums.

If Frank Field doesn't become Speaker...

...he might be a good Tory Health Minister.  He's just written "ministers should only be promoted because they start delivering more services with a smaller budget."  Amen.

It looks like Brown will survive (at least for now)

The ConHome swing-o-meter has moved decisively towards Brown staying as PM tonight.

I've just watched thirty minutes of BBC News 24 and the rebellion is petering out.

David Sheerman MP abandoned his call for a secret ballot of Labour MPs on Gordon Brown's future.

Tom Harris MP, who criticised the Prime Minister in the Parliamentary Labour Party meeting, acknowledged the mood of the meeting was in favour of Brown and promised that tonight would be his final evening of speaking out.

Geraldine Smith MP told Jon Sopel that Hazel Blears was criticised for 'rocking the boat'.

And as I've already Twittered: "BBC says Kinnock has given speech that rallied Labour MPs behind Brown- Kinnock remains the gift that keeps on giving (to the Conservatives)."

The upheaval of reshuffling

As Gordon Brown completes ANOTHER reshuffle, this from an anonymous civil servant:

"Between him and Tony, this Department has had three Secretaries of State, four Ministers for Housing and Planning, two Parliamentary Under Secretaries of State and a new Janitor in the past 28 months. Not only is that the opposite of stability, but it wastes time and effort, because we have to prepare briefing for whatever new drooling idiot gets wheeled into place for the time being. And once we’ve knocked the basics of their own policy into their heads and can start trying to move things on with policy discussions that don’t require plastic scissors, glue and glitter they’re here just long enough to make wide-ranging decisions that their inevitable successor won’t like or understand. So out comes the glitter, safety scissors and glue and off we go on the merry-go-round one more time."

A request to the BBC to provide an accurate label for the BNP

A little earlier I complained about the BNP being described as "Far Right".  I've drafted a letter to send to the BBC.  Before I zip it off I'd be grateful for redrafting suggestions...

"Dear Mr X,

On this morning's Today programme John Humphrys referred to the British National Party as "Far Right".  Mr Humphrys is far from the only journalist who does this.  The Daily Telegraph, for example, has used the term in recent weeks.

I would like the BBC to consider adopting editorial guidelines that more accurately describe the BNP.  You are rightly sensitive to how 'extremist Islamic groups' are labelled.  It is also important that the BNP is labelled in a way that does not misrepresent its underlying beliefs and does not inaccurately link them in any way to parties of the centre right.

In some ways their professed patriotism might put them on the traditional right of the political spectrum although it is, of course, true that many on the Left also love their country.  I would argue, however, that many of their policies come from a Left-wing, big state mindset.  This partly explains their success in traditionally Labour areas.  I think, for example, of the BNP's support for high rates of taxation on higher income earners, their support for nationalising strategically important economic assets and also their protectionist policies on trade.

The BNP might be better described as an ultra-nationalist party although I agree that that does not capture the full range of the party's beliefs.

I'm grateful for you considering this matter.

Tim Montgomerie,
Editor of ConservativeHome.com"

The BNP is not the "Far Right"

In an interview with Nick Griffin, BNP leader, the Today programme's John Humphrys called the BNP a "far right" party.  It is not.  It is "Labour With Racism", as Lord Tebbit memorably said recently.  I fear the BNP may be here for a few years now.  The BBC needs to find a more accurate way of describing them.

Labour's contempt for the defence of Britain

Liam Fox highlighted the fact yesterday that Britain has had four defence secretaries in four years and this letter to The Times from the former Chief of the General Staff says it all:

"Sir, I do not care what reasons John Hutton can produce for resigning the key office of Secretary of State for Defence — family reasons, no longer intending to pursue a political career, sending an indirect signal to Gordon Brown — but to do so at this moment must constitute nothing short of dereliction of duty under fire.

After all, there is a serious war to be fought in Afghanistan; numbers of our Armed Forces are dying in carrying out their duty; and there are appalling equipment and funding problems to be urgently resolved. His departure, after such a short time in an office, which he was widely reported as wanting, can but impair the Ministry of Defence’s machinery and ability properly to defend the realm.

When a First Sea Lord once resigned in wartime, the prime minister at the time signalled him: “In the name of the King I command you to return to your post.” What a pity that the present Prime Minister does not have the authority to do the same thing and must connive at letting down the country and its Armed Forces so badly.

Field Marshal Lord Bramall."

And in other news... UK economy to contract by 4.3% in 2009

Reacting to the latest ONS data which shows the UK economy is contracting more quickly than expected, Andrew Lilico, Chief Economist of Policy Exchange has sent me this:

"A likely implication of these figures (if verfied by the ONS in its final evaluation) would be that the UK would very probably contract by more than 4.3% in 2009 - worse even than in 1946 (the first year GDP figures were officially produced)."

China continues to deny the Tiananmen Square massacre...

...We must not forget it. I was a student at the time of the massacre. This image will never, ever leave my mind:

> William Inboden: China's Tiananmen Square cover-up won't last forever:

"This week much of the world remembers the Tiananmen Square massacre from twenty years ago. Unfortunately this remembrance will not take place where it matters most: in China itself. To be sure, those Chinese citizens whose family members or friends were killed on June 3 and 4, or imprisoned or exiled thereafter, have not forgotten. But the Chinese government continues to deny that it murdered hundreds if not thousands of its citizens, bans public discussion of the protests, and suppresses independent information sources such as internet sites, international media, even Twitter (!) that might mention it. The official denial and censorship has largely served the government's purpose: most Chinese people are unaware of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and those comparative few who do know of it are coerced into silence."

Who will be Labour's Crispin Blunt?

Do you remember Crispin Blunt MP appearing on BBC News at 10pm on election day 2003 calling for Iain Duncan Smith to go?  Blunt was ahead of his time but will a Labour big wig put their head above the parapet at 10pm tonight and call on Brown to go?  And if they do... who will it be?

Underneath the smart suit is the same extreme message

I've written for the Yorkshire Post today about the NothingBritish.com campaign about the BNP:

"Lots of Britons are genuinely concerned about immigration. They are concerned that the Government has lost control of our borders. I share those concerns. I would vote for policies that deliver much stricter immigration controls but I'd never support the BNP. There is an ocean of difference between the perfectly respectable view that immigration is too high and the BNP's hateful view that non-whites should be shown the door regardless of how long they have lived here."