Paul Dacre accuses the Tories of surrendering to the BBC's worldview

"Today's Tories are obsessed by the BBC. They saw what its attack dogs did to Hague, Duncan Smith and Howard.  Cameron's cuddly blend of eco-politics and work/life balance, his embrace of Polly Toynbee, a columnist who loathes everything Conservatism stands for, but is a totemic figure to the BBC, his sidelining of Thatcherism and his banishing of all talk of lower taxes, lower immigration and euroscepticism are all part of the Tories' blood sacrifice to the BBC god."

Wow!  This is what Paul Dacre, Editor of the Daily Mail, has said in a very public declaration of impatience with Project Cameron (and, perhaps, some disappointment that the Tory leadership is no longer fashioning its agenda for the Daily Mail's consumption?).

ConservativeHome has long noted the Tory leadership's pursuit of Robinson Man and also last week's weak response to the BBC licence fee settlement.

Comments

[Mark McCartney]

A very interesting development. It will be a major blow for Cameron if the Mail declines to support him.

It's an interesting fact that I can think of a growing host of heavyweight press commentators who now regularly attack Cameron and only a handful of second-liners who still support him.

Neil Ferguson's recent faux-favourable comparison of Cameron with Robert Peel must have been made with tongue firmly in cheek. Unlike Cameron Peel had many virtues, but he wrecked his party and consigned himself to the wilderness, on a matter of principle - a concept totally alien to the Boy Wonder,

I suspect that Cameron's future departure will be marked by a near-inaudible "plop"

[HF]

I share Dacre's view of the BBC but not his view of the party.

If Dacre was such a strong Conservative why has he cosied up to Brown?

Why has the Mail grown closer to the Labour Government and at best been neutral in its support for the Conservatives during Nu Labour's time in office?

[Perdix]

I had planned to cancel my subscription to the DM at the end of the month. Now I know I am right to do so.

[John Coles]

Who hasn't thought this? The Conservative party, under Mr Cameron, is scared witless of the BBC and is desperate to be acceptable in the eyes of the Corporation. Hugo Swire is this spineless ambition made flesh
Because of this mindset the party has been dragged into the swamp of the middle ground and is doomed to sink to defeat there.
You may not like either Mr Dacre or the Daily Mail but at least he has summed up all that is wrong with HM Loyal Opposition.
The sooner that effete coterie of old Etonians step down and hand over to men not making obeisance to polls and focus groups, but with right-wing political beliefs, the sooner the chance of victory at the next election. Otherwise, it will be deja vue all over again.

[Esbonio]

Well done for a public figure like Mr Dacre pointing out what so many of us feel. The shame is it is unlikely to make any difference to the Beeb. Abolition is all they will understand.

[sjm]

I understand Mr Dacre is a friend of the Chancellor's. Fair enuff, it is a free country.

And now he's using his position as Editor in Chief of a successful tabloid (ie it dumbs everything down) to attack the Tories.
Fair enuff, it is a free country.

But then my view is that I wouldn't trust a thing the Mail prints, nor its faux-red top attitudes - and I'm entitled to my view, 'cos it is still a free country, just, though I'm no longer sure of that.

[Mark McCartney]

>>Perdix - I had planned to cancel my subscription to the DM at the end of the month. Now I know I am right to do so.<<

I'm sure Mr Dacre will be shaking in his shoes - particularly since you were going to cancel anyway.

And what an admission that you actually read the Mail! Much as I admire the DM's stand on many issues I find it absolutely unacceptable as a serious daily newspaper.

It has to be the Telegraph or the Times. I only read the Mail when I visit the hairdresser,

[Scotty]

I was over the moon when Cameron chose not to "woo" Murdoch or bow to the Telegraph, so I am afraid that the lukewarm reception he has received from the Daily Mail does not bother me.
In fact the assumption that any political leader should be pandering to newspaper editor's or donors regarding party strategy is wrong, it will go down as one of the biggest reasons the present government will be remembered for the headline rather than a lasting legacy.
I think that the Daily Mail & Co will follow the tide of public opinion if they decide they like Cameron. These day's in the 24 hour media circus and the explosion of the internet, they just do not hold the same sway they did even 10 years ago.
Cameron is going to get a lot of warning shots across his bow from editor's and he will be wise to stick to his agenda setting strategy rather than their headline.

[Esbonio]

The BBC is a major problem, in fact one of the greatest in terms of getting a right of centre message across to the electorate. However abolishing the BBC (or at least making it impartial) would only be a first step. The culturally marxist metropolitan pc weltanschaung is embedded throughout the establishment and the taxpayer funded strata of the economy. It could take a generation to change all that. The country needs someone of Sir Winston Churchill's or Lady Thatcher's calibre to even contemplate that task let alone start on it.

[Esbonio]

Unrelated perhaps, but I found Mr Dacre's peformance on Desert Island Discs one of the least satisfying of any guest I have ever heard on that programme.

[Mark McCartney]

>>I was over the moon when Cameron chose not to "woo" Murdoch or bow to the Telegraph,<<

You would be. Strangely enough that makes me very happy too.

There are going to be some glum faces around when Dave's new lefty friends in the media let him down, though.

Never mind. Come election day the Telegraph will give its grudging support.

Even if nobody else does.

[realcon]

Farage waits as Daily Mail editor raises Tory concerns

The leader of the UK Independence Party has said he would be willing to meet the editor of the Daily Mail newspaper after Paul Dacre appeared to question the Conservative credentials of David Cameron.

Nigel Farage made his comments on BBC Two's 'Daily Politics' after Mr Dacre was recorded giving a rare public speech, in which he said it remained to be seen whether Mr Cameron was being truly Conservative.

Mr Farage said: "I do not know [Paul Dacre], I have not been invited around there, if he wants me to come round, I certainly will.

"But we do believe in lower taxes, we do believe in selective education, we do believe in national independence in the EU and I think many people think we represent some of the good things that the Conservative Party used to stand for."

He added: "We have been hearing for 30 years British ministers saying they are going to go to the Council of Ministers, saying they are going to renegotiate, saying they are going to reform the EU. We have never reformed the EU.

"The argument is not coming around to the British way of thinking and what we are saying is we should have a different relationship."

Mr Farage concluded: "We are going to do that by divorcing ourselves from central Europe."

In a clip of his speech broadcast on the same programme, Mr Dacre had said in answer to a question on Mr Cameron's leadership of the Conservatives: "The honest answer is it is far too early to say.

"The Mail is a Conservative paper, it would be very surprising if we did not support the Conservatives. Whether the current Conservative Party is Conservative I do not know. We will have to see, won't we?"

[Jaz]

The conservative party today still believes in lower taxes, and does not in any way like Europe.

How people have somehow got this idea is total rubbish. Cameron's PR was meant to convince people that his project wouldn't cut taxes so much so that public services wouldn't be harmed. It turns out that his PR team have been too successful and now everyone things he loves Europe and loves to spend?

It won't be long before Osbourne says, we will cut business tax rates by x%, increase green taxation and Cameron to slam Europe.

[Mark McCartney]

>>Unrelated perhaps, but I found Mr Dacre's peformance on Desert Island Discs one of the least satisfying of any guest I have ever heard on that programme<<

I just checked that out c/o Google. Seems to have been on 3 or 4 years ago. A bit of jazz, a Bing Crosby number and a bunch of popular classics.

Curiously, his #1 choice was a number from Handel's relatively unappreciated oratorio Theodora. Maybe he got free tickets to the Peter Sellars staging at Glyndebourne which I recall was running round about that time.

Presumably it was Mr Dacre's chat rather than his musical selection which you found disappointing?

[Esbonio]

Yes, I think it is fair to say it was the chat although the latter can often be balanced by the music which from memory for me, it did not do.

[steve]

If Mr Dacre is such a pal of Gordon Brown, it seems strange that he described the BBC as cultural Marxists as Brown must have read all of Karl's books and incorporated them into policy.

[Esbonio]

If Brown has read all of Marx's works it may explain his dour demeanour.

[Esbonio]

On the subject of Marx, does anyone have any idea how many members of the Labour Party or the cabinet are former Commies?

[Esbonio]

Sorry, Labour Party should read Labour MPs.

[Andy Stidwill]

Although I agree with many of Dacre's opinions, I don't really like him much because he is not accountable in any way.

[Esbonio]

Andy

He is accountable if people don't buy his owner's paper.

[steve]

Why do you use the word former, lapsed members until the new dawn is achieved would be a more apt description.

[James]

I too find it rather hard to reconcile Paul Dacre's opposition to BBC style liberalism with his paper's support for Gordon Brown. No matter how infamous the beeb remains for it's institutional leftism, Gordon Brown is the living breathing embodiment of all that right-thinking Daily Mail readers (and editors) should surely detest.

[HF]

But why is Dacre so close to Brown, if he Dacre pleads that he is a Conservative? A very odd way for such a "wonderful leading light of the right" (sic)to behave.

Is it the lure of a peerage? Gosh what a shock!

Maybe that is his Judas payment for attacking the Conservative party?

As to attacking the BBC, is he just supporting Brown who has put a little squeeze on BBC finances and fears a backlash so gets Dacre to lead the assault?

[Perdix]

Mark McCarty 18.59 - bit of a snotty reply to my post if I may say so.In addition to the DM,I subscribe to the Torygraph, The Spectator and Private Eye. In fact while waiting for my wife in the supermarket today I bought The Times and The Guardian (ICM good poll for Tories)! Too much paper!

[Tanuki]

It's really about time we collectively bypassed the cultural marxists and "subsidariat" of the State-run BBC; instead we need to push our message through the likes of Sky and the Daily Mail/Express [which, let's face it, are viewed & read by far more of the swing-voters we really need to win over to our message of lower taxes, less government and individualism]. We should leave the BBC to be watched by the within-the-M25 chatterati, and instead address ouselves to the broad swathe of the country who are feeling the pain of increased council-tax, unremitting stealth-taxes, unreformable last-millennium public services and fear-of-crime.

[Oliver McCarthy]

Nurse! It's time for Mr Dacre's medicine again!

Presumably Cameron is biding his time before his next Daily Male outreach project gets underway. Obviously it will, given time, and then all the supposedly principled ranting from Dacre will fade away. Cameron cannot afford to alienate Dacre's readers, and Dacre cannot afford to either.

On the other hand, the Tories' near silence and total invisibility when it comes to the important issues of the day (i.e. Iraq, Iran, China, the Socialists' destruction of the armed forces, the future of the western world, etc.) is very depressing.

And at a time when Christianity itself is under attack in this country by the State that is supposedly pledged to protect it, and for the first time since King Penda of Mercia met his grisly demise, it's hard to remember that the Tories even exist anymore.

[gabriel]

Hi everybody,

I see you are all very well documented people with clear ideas of what this country should be. We are writting a blog in which, with a bit of humour, we stress the differences between this great country and the rest of the world, specially continental Europe. We discuss silly things like why regulations do not allow you to have switches in your bathroom and more serious things like whether having a National Identity Card is useful or not or whether there should be more disabled facilities in the London Tube. Your contribution to the blog will be most appreciated:

http://ukforbeginners.blogspot.com

I apologise if you feel that with this comment I am only advertising our blog rather than contributing to the discussion.

Many thanks

[Og]

We don't hear nearly enough about King Penda of Mercia nowadays, Oliver. Is his reign still taught in the history syllabus?

[Cardinal Pirelli]

Dacre admires the socialist control-freak europhile Gordon Brown.

I don't trust Dacre as far as I could safely spit him.

[malcolm]

I quite like Dacre for the most part and I'm delighted he's kept the Mail on a similar path to that of his predecessor Sir David English. Some of what he writes is probably true ie The BBC did for our previous three leaders but some like the stuff about Toynbee is completely untrue.
Not sure what motivated him to make this speech as many of the things Cameron is doing such as taking a more realistic view on Iraq will resonate with the Mail.Perhaps it just his frustration at the power of the BBC.
Personally I'm quite glad that Cameron has not followed Blair in cosying up to any of the press barons to date, it's not healthy for democracy. As regards the BBC Cameron knows he has to win an election in the face of a very biased broadcasting institution which is nevetheless still trusted by large sections of the populace. Should we win the next election one would hope that it would not be too long before the BBC was 'reformed' but until then we have to live with it as it is not as we want it to be.

[Justin Hinchcliffe]

Dacre admires the socialist control-freak europhile Gordon Brown.

I don't trust Dacre as far as I could safely spit him.

Posted by: Cardinal Pirelli | January 23, 2007 at 20:57

Hear, hear!

[RedSam]

If the Conservatives have managed to piss off Dacre, maybe you are moving in the right direction!

[Matt Davis]

I never thought that I'd find myself agreeing with Paul Dacre about anything really but on this he is absolutely spot on, unfortunately.

[TomTom]

but RedSam if he is right the 2014 Election might not be one for the Conservative Party at all - after 17 years in the wilderness it might not even exist outside Kensington & Chelsea.

Could be an interesting experiment...

[Alexander Drake]

Nick Cohen's article last Sunday summarised it perfectly:

The shunned journalists of the Telegraph and Mail are close to apoplexy as they see their hopes for a counter-revolution vanishing. Ever since they fell out of love with John Major, they have believed that if only they could stay pure and true, the peculiar British electoral system would one day return a righteously right-wing Conservative party to power. The extinction of a hope that has kept them going for 15 years is sending practical men a little mad...

...Columnists on the Mail say they would rather have Brown than Cameron. None of them seems to realise that hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of previously natural Tories were never going to vote Conservative because the right-wing politics of the Nineties affronted their values.

...The Tories had lost contact with the marketing manager in Bath who gains an almost spiritual satisfaction from buying organic food and recycling her rubbish, the solicitor in Bury who worries about the fate of 16-year-olds in youth prisons and doctors, head teachers, civil servants and NHS administrators in every part of Britain who believe in public service. Cameron understood that without their votes, his party would never regain power. And by 'moving to the centre', he's winning the liberal middle classes back, or at a bare minimum stopping them hating the Tories so deeply that they will vote tactically to keep him out.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1995379,00.html

[Mark McCartney]

Dacre is in a real sense absolutely right, although the "BBC world view" is a symptom as much as a cause of today's quasi-Maxist hegemony.

It doesn't matter how much the Cameron clones huff and puff. Their hero's approach has moved sharply towards the unacceptable face of egalitarianism.

The entire ethos of Thatcherism was meritocratic and totally antagonistic to the quasi-Marxist egalitarian spirit which motivates Cameron.

This is clearly shown in Cameron's use of positive discrimination to impress, not the ordinary voting public, but the chattering classes of the BBC and the Guardian.

So let's hear no more, please, about how Cameron is really Thatcher in drag. He isn't, which is why so many Real Tories dislike him.

[Mark McCartney]

Cohen's article is tripe.

hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of previously natural Tories were never going to vote Conservative because the right-wing politics of the Nineties affronted their values.

And these "natural Tories" were, presumably, previously attracted to the left-wing politics pursued by Thatcher during the '80s?

This guy is having a laugh.

[John Irvine]

"The Tories had lost contact with the marketing manager in Bath who gains an almost spiritual satisfaction from buying organic food and recycling her rubbish"

She'll be in for a shock if she turns up at my ward committee.

I can think of a few things I and my branch collegues would get spiritual satisfaction from, but it's certainly not buying organic food.

As for recycling rubbish we're forced to do that anyway on pain of being fined.

[Michael McGowan]

In which case Alexander, what is the point of voting Tory? Remind me given that Dave will not want to make meaningful improvements to Gordon's tax-and-spend-waste-and-fail dirigiste model if it offends the "values" of those sanctomonious middle class Neo-Puritans (aka "liberals") who see the NHS as the envy of the world; school selection by house price as quite ok; and racycling as an act of spiritual absolution?

[Simon]

I just hope that the Mail follows up Dacre's attack on the BBC ( or it's political bias/interfering) with a lengthy high profile attack. For example:- who edits the news programmes; what political leaning they have; blatent anti-conservative bias ( the reporting of the 2005 Question Time Party Leaders debate). Once again , this shows that 'conservative' leaning papers have to do the job the actual party should be doing!

[Mark McCartney]

Heffer has a superb article praising Dacre's attack on Cameron in the DT this morning.

Seems "Dave" didn't cut such a bella figura with the Barclay Brothers when he made that panic-stricken jaunt to their Channel Island castle in a bit to silence Heffer.

[Centurion]

"Cameron's cuddly blend of eco-politics and work/life balance, his embrace of Polly Toynbee, a columnist who loathes everything Conservatism stands for, but is a totemic figure to the BBC, his sidelining of Thatcherism and his banishing of all talk of lower taxes, lower immigration and euroscepticism are all part of the Tories' blood sacrifice to the BBC god."

And what have they ever given us in return?!

Xerxes: Opting out of the Social Chapter?
Reg: What?
Xerxes: Opting out of the Social Chapter.
Reg: Oh. Yeah, yeah. They did give us that. Uh, that's true. Yeah.
Commando 3: And limit immigration from non-EU countries.
Reg: Yeah. All right. I'll grant you opting out of the Social Chapter and limiting immigration are two policies that Cameron has proposed.
Matthias: And a border police.
Reg: Well, yeah. Obviously a border police. I mean, the border police go without saying, don't they? But apart from the Social Chapter, limiting immgration, and border police--
Commando: Sharing the proceeds of growth between public spending and LOWER TAXES.
Xerxes: Replacing the Human Rights Act.
Commandos: Huh? Heh? Huh...
Commando 2: Streaming and setting.
Commandos: Ohh...
Reg: Yeah, yeah. All right. Fair enough.
Commando 1: And reducing taxes on families and income to offset the rise in environmental taxes.
Commandos: Oh, yes. Yeah...
Francis: Yeah. Yeah, that's something we'd really miss, Reg, under Gordon Brown. Huh.
Commando: Social responsibility.
Loretta: Building more prisons and addressing the causes of crime, broken familes and the like, Reg.
Francis: Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let's face it. They're the only ones who could in a place like this.
Commandos: Hehh, heh. Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh.
Reg: But apart from the border police, the Social Chapter, limiting immigration, lower taxes, replacing the Human Rights Act, streaming and setting, offsetting environmental taxes, social responsibility, more prisons, causes of crime, scrapping NHS targets, and support for marriage, what has David Cameron ever done for us?
Xerxes: Scrap ID cards?
Reg: Shut up!

[Kernal]

Paul Dacre is obviously looking forward to a forth term Labour Government, which is the obvious outcome of encouraging UKIP votes.

Dacre will clearly never be a "Camaroon", along with many grassroot Conservatives, but any realist must accept that the current strategy is working in the polls - and is neccesary.

Neil Kinnock could not rely on the failings of a tired and unpopular goverment to deliver him victory without sufficient change from within his own party, and nor can Cameron and all sensible Conservatives that follow him.

The Conservative Party does not deserve power if they desert a popular (yes popular!!) leader at such a crucial time.......

[Nick Paget-Brown]

Dacre's intervention wasn't very effective if instead of focusing on the BBC and its far too narrow range of political values, he deflected attention from this by speculating about the realtionship between the Daily Mail and the Tory Party.

The BBC is pumped into every home every day. The Daily Mail is not. The BBC's clear anti-Conservative bias needs to be addressed by requiring it to fish in a far larger pool when making important editorial appointments. To achieve that fundamental fairness, we need first to be in power.

However, winning elections, means building coalitions of opinion. The fact that after 3 election defeats we have now realised that keeping the core vote happy is a necessary but not sufficient element for winning office is a welcome sign of progress.

Knee jerk responses are a luxury which newspapers editors can (and probably need to) indulge, but they are not the best way for politicians to get a seriously disillusioned public back on-side.

Let Dacre keep the core vote happy - but not at the expense of giving up on the bigger battle to win votes from elsewhere too. This really would be a present for Gordon Brown and indicate that, like the BBC, we have a rather narrow view of the world.

[Kernal]

Paul Dacre is obviously looking forward to a fourth term Labour Government, which is the obvious outcome of encouraging UKIP votes.

Dacre, Heffer and co (as well as many ‘Grassroot’ Tories ) will clearly never be committed ‘Camaroons’, but the rest of us realists see the current strategy as neccesary, and crucially succeding in the Polls.

Neil Kinnock discovered that it was not sufficient to simply sit back and wait for a tired, divided and deeply unpopular Government to deliver him victory without first changing his own party to suit the current electorate.

The Conservative Party do not deserve power if they desert the only popular leader they have had for a Generation at this crucial time. It is the duty of Political Parties to get elected and eject mis-guided Governments, and by stubbornly opposing brave attemps by Cameron and other sensible Conservatives to be in a position to do that is suicide!

But it wouldn’t be the first time…………

[Kernal]

Paul Dacre is obviously looking forward to a fourth term Labour Government, which is the obvious outcome of encouraging UKIP votes.

Dacre, Heffer and co (as well as many ‘Grassroot’ Tories ) will clearly never be committed ‘Camaroons’, but the rest of us realists see the current strategy as neccesary, and crucially succeding in the Polls.

Neil Kinnock discovered that it was not sufficient to simply sit back and wait for a tired, divided and deeply unpopular Government to deliver him victory without first changing his own party to suit the current electorate.

The Conservative Party do not deserve power if they desert the only popular leader they have had for a Generation at this crucial time. It is the duty of Political Parties to get elected and eject mis-guided Governments, and by stubbornly opposing brave attemps by Cameron and other sensible Conservatives to be in a position to do that is suicide!

But it wouldn’t be the first time…………

[SimonNewman]

Been reading Dacre's speech:
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Media/documents/2007/01/23/CudlippDacre.pdf
It's very clearly about the BBC, not the Conservatives (except tangentially, ie how the BBC have 'broken' the Conservattives):

"Now, I’m not really worried about this. The Conservatives can look after themselves.
What really disturbs me is that the BBC is, in every corpuscle of its corporate body,
against the values of conservatism, with a small “c”, which, I would argue, just
happen to be the values held by millions of Britons.
Thus it exercises a kind of “cultural Marxism” in which it tries to undermine that
conservative society by turning all its values on their heads."

Can't see anything there to disagree with...
http://conservativehome.blogs.com/platform/2006/10/dr_simon_newman.html

[SimonNewman]

Kernal at 14:21:

"The Conservative Party does not deserve power if they desert a popular (yes popular!!) leader at such a crucial time......."

I don't think it's about 'deserting' Cameron, rather about looking for a bit of "And Theory", rather than pure focus on never being outflanked to the left. There's not much point going so far left that Labour can outflank us on the right and get the centrist vote, while the right-wing vote stay home.

[malcolm]

I've just read the speech too and I think you're right Simon. Dacres real target is the BBC and not our party. He's probably right ,because it is trusted by most people the BBC probably has far more influence than any newspaper publisher. Even 'though the Mail almost alone of national newspapers has maintained a healthy circulation I think its ability to influence electoral intentions has declined in the last 20 years. As Dacre himself said on election night 1997 'these are our f******* readers voting Labour!'.
I can't quite understand why he's a mate of Browns 'though. Browns' legacy as a competent chancellor is rapidly falling apart.Helped I hope by Jeff Randalls programme entitled 'Where's My Pension Gone' which I would urge readers to watch on ITV tomorrow at 9pm.

[SimonNewman]

Malcolm:
"I've just read the speech too and I think you're right Simon. Dacres real target is the BBC and not our party. He's probably right ,because it is trusted by most people the BBC probably has far more influence than any newspaper publisher."

Yes - people know the Daily Mail is right-wing and the Mirror left-wing, but incredible numbers of ordinary Britons still seem prepared to believe that the BBC is 'trustworthy', ie impartial. For me, I certainly grew up just assuming the BBC was impartial, and it wasn't really until watching the blatant right-wing bias of the US Fox News on Sky that I recognised how the BBC uses exactly the same tricks, such as burying disfavoured stories, exalting favoured ones, and framing questions to suit its own stance. That's the big benefit of a diverse media; with another point of reference you can triangulate and work out where things really are.

[Gwendolyn]

Mike Smithson in Politicalbetting has a marvellous rebuttal of the Hefferlump article today.

I get quite depressed by the savaging of Cameron on this site until I count the posts and remind myself that it is a few, posting a lot, and mostly not following the normal courtesies of debate. I get the sense, also noted by PB posters, that there is not the same interest in ConHome since Doughty Street appeared, so there is a suspicion of being flung the occasional often UKIP bone to chew on to keep us quiet. I know my time line is one hour adrift from English time but mostly it seems there is nothing on this site until the afternoon, often with the promise there might be something at 4 pm! The written word should still have some primacy in debate, we don't all necessarily want to watch talking heads.

[John Irvine]

"Mike Smithson in Politicalbetting has a marvellous rebuttal of the Hefferlump article today."

Isn't he a Liberal Democrat?

Your insolent rudeness about Simon Heffer speaks for itself.

[esbonio]

Simon Newman wrote "I certainly grew up just assuming the BBC was impartial". You surprise me given your usual perspicacity.

I remember as a young child the constant TV news coverage by both the BBC and ITV of the war in Vietnam. I was too young at the time to know if it was biased or not but subsequent history and makes me wonder if the MSM had an impartial agenda at that time. Later on I got the distisnct impression that the BBC bent over backwards to portray the USSR in as "balanced" a way possible (a bit like its coverage of Cuba today). Then of course there was the daily dose of the Morning Star on the today programme's review of the papers. And we should not forget the mind bedningly sympatheic treatment of the unions during the 70s. Which brings us to the Thatcher and Reagan years. Compare Maggie's teatment with
the BBC's initial love in with New Labour. The story goes on and on.

[Simon Newman]

"You surprise me given your usual perspicacity."

Heh - I've only been a Conservative since late 2005, you know. :)

Call me gullible, but the BBC always said it was impartial, and we really had nothing to compare it to, and if you discount foreign news channels we still don't. ITV followed its lead, and Channel 4 was more left-wing. I suppose though the first crack in the edifice of thought-control started when Labour were elected, and it became obvious that the BBC were treating the Labour government very differently from the previous Conservative government.

[Simon Newman]

The other thing was that I grew up in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, back then the BBC wasn't particularly supportive of the IRA. That changed after 1992 when Gerry Adams lost his west Belfast seat and Sinn Fein/IRA revised their strategy, with more emphasis on propagandising the British media. In school in Northern Ireland in the '80s I was well to the left of most people around me and I guess my views didn't differ that much from what the BBC seemed to present at the time.

[Michael McGowan]

For at least 10 years, the BBC has gone out of its way to treat Sinn Fein/IRA with kid gloves and to stigmatise all Ulster Protestants as reactionary bigots. It would seem judging by other threads that this stance is now shared by some "modernising"/One Nation Conservatives!

[matt wright]

I never thought Id say this but the DM has been becoming more and more unpleasant in its approach and attitude for a while. I used to read it but now find it very odd. Its the sort of a paper that pretends to care about values while slagging people off and reducing everything to the lowest common denominator. Add to this occasionally quite bizzare articles that make the nuttiest conspiracy theorists look normal. The DT, in a different way, also seems to be going off the rails as well.

[Gwendolyn]

Mr. Irvine. I was pleased to see that the Editor had deleted the first part of your post, since I had been considering the libellous nature of it, but I was sorry he did not take the opportunity to remind you that on this site personal attacks on posters are not allowed. Simon Heffer as a paid hack is fair game in my view in that he spends a great deal of time savaging the leader of our party out of pique, a leader it should be remembered who was voted in by a resounding majority. Since Heffer openly supports the UKIP party (particularly speaking for it in Bromley) I am not sure where the difference lies between Mr. McCartney advising members of ConHome to read Heffer's article, and my suggestion that members look at Mr. Smithson's rebuttal in PB - and yes he is a LibDem. I did not coin the word 'Hefferlump', it is used all the time in the workplace by those who think he goes over the top or indeed by others who have some affection for him; it is also worth remembering that not long ago one of his offerings proved too much for his own paper and was spiked.

[KEVIN COCHRANE]

Paul Dacre takes the fascist Rothermere shilling and in return injects poison into the bloodstream of this country. Jews, Blacks, Single Mothers, Gays, Lesbians - all feature on his hate list.

Read any Mail editorial from the 20's to now and the vicious thread of hate runs throughout. Dacre's editorship maintains the Mail's proud record of anti-semitism, bigotry and misogyny.

Dacre's bilious hatred of the BBC stems from his fascist uber-worldview and antipathy to a more generous,compassionate Britain.