'Harriet Harman has slammed the Government's plan to use the international aid budget to help pay for the 20,000 Syrian refugees Britain is to accept over the next five years.Yet who was it that first started using the aid budget to support refugees?The policy was introduced in 2009 – by the last Labour government.'
' The idea the Labour Party is blazing a trail for women is one of the biggest jokes in British politicsOn this day in 1975 Margaret Thatcher became the first female leader of the Conservative Party.Yesterday the Labour Party unveiled its response. According to the Guardian "a bright pink minibus of female Labour MPs will tour constituencies to talk to female voters around the kitchen table".A pink bus. To talk to women. Around the kitchen table. In the year 2015. Courtesy of the Labour Party.'
'Harriet Harman: time to consider media ownership cap as low as 15%
Apparently:Shadow culture secretary to say that plurality ensures no private interest can set itself above public interest'
'A media ownership cap as low as 15% across newspapers, broadcasting companies and online sites must be considered to stop companies feeling they are "above the rule of law", according to Harriet Harman.
...
The most fascinating sentence in the whole report was this one:
The Labour frontbencher will call on her Tory counterpart Maria Miller to set up crossparty talks to help push reforms through.
Labour last year proposed a possible 30% limit on ownership within the newspaper industry but suggests that could sit alongside a 15% cap across the media as whole, including "any medium of communication that stands between a creator of content and an audience".'
'News International held 37% of the newspaper market until the closure of the News of the World.'Now can you think of a media organisation that holds an even larger market share in the area of reporting the news?
'Harriet Harman has praised 'heroic' immigrants who claim welfare payments in Britain and use the cash to support families living abroad.
She said the Government should make it easier for them to send the money home and called for tax refunds to encourage more immigrants to follow suit, in particular those who paid for their children to be educated in the Third World.
The Labour Deputy Leader, who is also the party's spokesman on International Development, derided 'those who say we should look after our own first' in the recession and vowed to fight any attempt to cut the £9.4 billion overseas aid budget.'
'For 20 years I was a front man at the BBC, anchoring news and current affairs programmes, so I reckon nobody is better placed than me to answer the question that nags at many of its viewers — is the BBC biased?Sissons when it is published on February 2 by Biteback Publishing at £17.99.
In my view, ‘bias’ is too blunt a word to describe the subtleties of the pervading culture. The better word is a ‘mindset’. At the core of the BBC, in its very DNA, is a way of thinking that is firmly of the Left.
By far the most popular and widely read newspapers at the BBC are The Guardian and The Independent. Producers refer to them routinely for the line to take on running stories, and for inspiration on which items to cover. In the later stages of my career, I lost count of the number of times I asked a producer for a brief on a story, only to be handed a copy of The Guardian and told ‘it’s all in there’.
...
At any given time there is a BBC line on everything of importance, a line usually adopted in the light of which way its senior echelons believe the political wind is blowing. This line is rarely spelled out explicitly, but percolates subtly throughout the organisation.
Whatever the United Nations is associated with is good — it is heresy to question any of its activities. The EU is also a good thing, but not quite as good as the UN. Soaking the rich is good, despite well-founded economic arguments that the more you tax, the less you get. And Government spending is a good thing, although most BBC people prefer to call it investment, in line with New Labour’s terminology.
All green and environmental groups are very good things. Al Gore is a saint. George Bush was a bad thing, and thick into the bargain. Obama was not just the Democratic Party’s candidate for the White House, he was the BBC’s. Blair was good, Brown bad, but the BBC has now lost interest in both.
Trade unions are mostly good things, especially when they are fighting BBC managers. Quangos are also mostly good, and the reports they produce are usually handled uncritically. The Royal Family is a bore. Islam must not be offended at any price, although Christians are fair game because they do nothing about it if they are offended.
...
But whatever your talent, sex or ethnicity, there’s one sure-fire way at a BBC promotions board to ensure you don’t get the job, indeed to bring your career to a grinding halt. And that’s if, when asked which post-war politician you most admire, you reply: ‘Margaret Thatcher’.
...
Complaints from viewers may invariably be met with the BBC’s stock response, ‘We don’t accept that, so get lost’.
...
...just before the 2009 local and European elections, when time was starting to run out for the Brown Government.
I was at Television Centre preparing to anchor the 5pm-6pm news, the centre-piece of which was to be an extended interview that I would conduct with Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Harman.
I did what I have always done before thousands of interviews in my 45 years as a broadcast journalist. I drew up a list of the most important current issues that I felt she needed to be asked about, drafted a few core questions, and scoured the newswires and morning papers for anything I’d missed.
Then it started — a steady stream of email messages from producers telling me what to ask. Three or four of them all wanted to have their say, and they seemed particularly twitchy about Harman being interviewed by me, unsupervised. Most seemed to be fully paid-up members of her fan club.
BBC news producers have a perfect right to try to ensure that a news presenter sticks to their agenda — it is the BBC way. But too many of them are concerned not about what will be the best thing to do journalistically, but about what will best please the news executives on the floors above. The two are not necessarily the same thing.
I managed to bat away most of the stuff suggested to me, and the way the interview might go took shape in my mind. Then, half an hour before transmission, a producer arrived with a list of questions for Harriet Harman emailed in by viewers.
This was news to me, but I had no choice in the matter because they had already been set up with captions, and it was my job simply to put them to her. After that, if there was time — and the interview was to run to no more than eight minutes — I could put some questions of my own.
I was asked what I had in mind, and I said that I was going to ask her about a row brewing in the morning papers about Gordon Brown not inviting the Queen to the 65th anniversary commemoration of D-Day. The response shocked me. I was told this was not a topic worth raising because it was ‘only a campaign being run by the Daily Mail’.
I have no doubt that if it had been the lead in The Guardian or The Independent, I would have been instructed to nail Ms Harman to the wall. I did ask the question, and she, clearly uncomfortable, promised a statement when she had found out all the facts.'
'4. Brown often swore about having to meet foreign dignitaries. "'Why the fuck are you making me do this?' he would complain to [Tom Fletcher, his foreign policy adviser] before almost every such meeting," Seldon and Lodge writeWhy should Gordon Brown have got it, he never seemed to get it
Polite chap wasn't he, must be the influence of his upbringing as a son of the manse...
6. Ed Balls is reported to have said: "Every appointment that Gordon has ever made on his own has been a disaster." Seldon and Lodge quote this in relation to the appointment of Stephen Carter to Downing Street.
Was Ed Balls appointed by Gordon Brown?
7. Brown is not able to read newsprint easily. According to Seldon and Lodge, he has to rely on others to keep him informed about what's in the papers.
So at one point we had a blind Home Secretary and a one-eyed poor sighted Chancellor...
8. Brown tried to get parliament to vote for 42-day pre-charge detention to please the Murdoch press, his colleagues believe. "Blair made it very clear to Gordon that he had to come across as tough; the News International people would worry if he was not. That is why he did 42 days," Balls told the authors.
This is the man of principles is it?
9. When Brown met Obama in Downing Street before Obama was elected president, Brown's sons were brought in to extend the length of the meeting because Brown wanted to keep Obama in No 10 for as long as possible.
How pathetic...
10. When Harriet Harman stood in for Brown during the summer holidays in 2008, she was overheard telling a cabinet colleague: "I don't know how Gordon manages to make this job seem so difficult."
Harriet Harman the perfect advertisement for sexual discrimination against women
26. Brown stopped speaking to Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, towards the end of his premiership because he thought King was taking a political stance in the argument about deficit reduction.
Another example of Gordon Brown's famed maturity...
27. Nick Macpherson, the permanent secretary to the Treasury, despaired of Brown's refusal to accept the need for a tougher stance on reducing the deficit. "He just doesn't get it," Macpherson often told colleagues.'
'George Osborne is facing a formal investigation by the equalities watchdog to establish whether the Treasury fulfilled its statutory duty to assess the impact of the spending review on women, disabled and ethnic minority people.'did not surprise me. Labour knew they would be out of office soon and so left behind all sorts of traps for the incoming government. The fact that the Conservatives have to govern in a coalition with the LibDems means that they cannot repeal these pieces of legislation as easily as they otherwise might thus the impeccably left-of-centre, but statutorily reinforced Equality and Human Rights Commission announced today that it would launch a formal assessment into the Treasury's conduct prior to the spending review last month:
"Under the public sector equality duties, covering race, gender and disability, the Treasury, like all public bodies, has a legal duty to pay 'due regard' to equality and consider any disproportionate impact on protected groups when making decisions, including decisions about the budget. Where decisions are found to have a disproportionate impact on a particular group protected by the legislation, public bodies must consider what actions can be taken to avoid, mitigate or justify that impact."
'A spokesman said: “There are still strong feelings in many parts of the country about events during Margaret Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister and Cllr Anderson has expressed her feelings.”
Council leader Paul Watson, leader of the Labour group, said: "It was an entirely personal comment that was attributed to her." '
'In her speech, Ms Harman said many people who voted Lib Dem in May "believed that they were a progressive anti-Tory party".
She said they "woke up" after the coalition deal to see Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg with Tory prime minister David Cameron in the rose garden of Number 10 Downing Street.
The deputy Labour leader said there was "incredulity" at seeing Mr Alexander, a Scottish MP, becoming "the front-man for the Tory cuts".
"Now, many of us in the Labour Party are conservationists - and we all love the red squirrel," Ms Harman said.
"But there is one ginger rodent which we never want to see again - Danny Alexander."'
'What was it that we're supposed to be annoyed about? She said something to him, and he then interrupted IDS, but you can't say that one led to the other. All David Dimbleby does on that show is interupt and challenge the speakers - that's what he's there for. He does it to everyone - well, to all the politicians anyway, he usually gives journos and business types an easier ride.
By the way, Dimbleby is not employed by the BBC, he's always been a freelancer.'
