ANY QUESTIONS

>> Saturday, February 04, 2012


I don't listen to ANY QUESTIONS very often, after all there is only so much BBC that the human spirit can take. However as fate would have it, I did catch this most recent programme. It was from Wirral, so perhaps that was a warning. On the panel were;  Work and Pensions Minister, Maria Miller; Liberal Democrat President, Tim Farron; Shadow Secretary of State, Andy Burnham; and geneticist, Professor Steve Jones. So, that makes THREE to the left and ONE to the moderate right. What could be more balanced?

The first question raised, and I kid you not,was concerning the NOBILITY of Chris Huhne's decision to step down and defend himself against the allegation that he and his wife colluded to pervert the course of justice. There was universal praise for Huhne, with Steve Jones even comparing him to a pearl.

There then followed a discussion of David Lammy and the "smacking" issue. Again the panel were in agreement that smacking your child is basically child abuse, if not savage. Evidently no one on the panel or even in the audience was prepared to say that judicious smacking is a perfectly acceptable part of parenting, all the more surprising when one reflects on the statistic that 55% of parents support it. Oh, and my source is this GUARDIAN poll. Yet in the BBC audience, 100% oppose it. So, the BBC audience is even further to the left than Guardianistas - quite a feat,

The discussion moved on to NHS reform and as you might expect, only Maria Miller was in favour. Burnham, Farron and Jones trotted out every asinine NHS cliche you could imagine. Again the view of the Government was clearly portrayed as a marginalised view with "most" opinion on the panel and in the audiencefavouring just keeping the NHS as it is. Burham was allowed to grandstand.

I lost the will to live at that point and tuned out but one does have to wonder how such an unbalanced and unrepresentative programme can get away with such visceral bias. Or so I think.

9 comments:

cjhartnett 4:23 PM, February 04, 2012  

Luckily Jonathan Dimblebys surveys( and he`s been doing them every week) always suggest that the BBC are right.
Thanks for trying to listen to it though-I saw the list of people on it and wondered what damp stone the Beeb have been baiting.
Couldn`t we just amalgamate the two Dimbly vehicles and create the one lefty charabanc...and at least we could see the show of hands.
Surely the BBC have more Dimblebys in the petridish so these two offshore windbags can write letters to Huhne in prison sometime soon.
Lets hope Dimbly Bros are all legal and above board in terms of how we`re paying them...Sir James Goldsmiths ghost cries out for vengeance!

wild 4:32 PM, February 04, 2012  

I have just read a book by Steve Jones (the usual Welsh miserabilist stuff but full of quirky biological facts) that claimed that Marx was right about nearly everything. I must admit I had to re-read that assertion. Marx was not only as wrong as it is possible to be, on almost any issue you care to mention, his ideas led to death and suffering on an almost unimaginable scale.

Evidently for Steve Jones none of this counts. The little people do not count. The only thing that counts to him is his big fat miserabilist ego.

Labour supporting tit.

robin rose 5:16 PM, February 04, 2012  

I managed about ten minutes of this programme. Farron is one nasty left wing shit, but the final straw was hearing little Andy Burnham boasting that the NHS must stay true to its 1948 origins, as if that was the be all and end all. I expect leftists like him regret the end of rationing too, things were so much better when the state controlled the food supply and gave us little coupons to redeem for our 2 oz of butter. I gave up at that point. Who or what Maria Miller is I couldn't begin to tell you.

Millie Tant 5:40 PM, February 04, 2012  

I intend to listen to it on iPlayer, if only to see whether Steve Jones is as extreme and fanatical an egotist as I have hitherto thought him to be.

Richard Pinder 7:06 PM, February 04, 2012  

<span>

Steve Jones is the most left wing Marxist scientist that the BBC knows of. And that is why the Geneticist was chosen to review the BBCs coverage of Climate Science and not the Professor of Atmospheric Physics at Oxford University, who I suspect is a closet sceptic.
</span>

ian 10:52 PM, February 04, 2012  

The people are to blame for letting the left down!

wild 11:49 PM, February 04, 2012  

Let me guess. He thought they got it "just about right".

My Site (click to edit) 8:49 AM, February 05, 2012  

'<span>Andy Burnham boasting that the NHS must stay true to its 1948 origins'</span>

Not tasked, one presumes, with possible changes since that make the model outdated and unworkable now?

A bit like another entity in the twelvsies internet age.

Luckliy (for) both (they) still get paid no matter what.

robin rose 4:54 PM, February 06, 2012  

Amazingly, no. He felt they gave far too much coverage to "deniers"!

Antony Jay

"But we were not just anti-Macmillan; we were anti-industry, anti-capitalism, anti-advertising, anti-selling, anti-profit, anti-patriotism, anti-monarchy, anti-Empire, anti-police, anti-armed forces, anti-bomb, anti-authority. Almost anything that made the world a freer, safer and more prosperous place, you name it, we were anti it."
Antony Jay, Telegraph, July 2007

Andrew Marr

"..the final answer, frankly, is the vigorous use of state power to coerce and repress. It may be my Presbyterian background, but I firmly believe that repression can be a great, civilising instrument for good. Stamp hard on certain 'natural' beliefs for long enough and you can almost kill them off."
Andrew Marr, The Guardian Feb. 1999

Jeremy Paxman

"But the bigger question is whether the BBC itself has a future. Working for it has always been a bit like living in Stalin’s Russia, with one five-year-plan, one resoundingly empty slogan after another. One BBC, Making it Happen, Creative Futures, they all blur into one great vacuous blur. I can’t even recall what the current one is. Rather like Stalin’s Russia, they express a belief that the system will go on forever."
Jeremy Paxman, The James McTaggart Memorial, 24th August 2007

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