Next on the BBC: those wicked Tory cuts in full

Next on the BBC: those wicked Tory cuts in full

This morning’s edition of You Couldn’t Make It Up comes courtesy of The Guardian, which reports that the Labour Party is unhappy about the BBC’s biased coverage of the ‘cuts’.

That makes two of us. You can’t turn on the BBC without being force-fed lurid details of the apocalypse about to befall us because of the Coalition’s attempts to tackle the massive budget deficit bequeathed by the last government.

If you believe everything you hear on the Beeb, by this time next year there won’t be a hospital left open in Britain, the schools will all have been boarded up and the streets will be overrun with old age pensioners begging for a crust after being evicted from their council day centres — probably at gunpoint.

Biased: Labour leader Ed Miliband (left) complained to the Beeb about their use of the word 'savings' about the cuts imposed by George Osbourne, right

Furthermore, we will all be murdered in our beds because every last policeman will have been made redundant.

The Corporation’s news and current affairs shows have become a rolling open-mic karaoke for a procession of aggrieved trades unionists and special interest groups.

There’s rarely any attempt to put the need for economies into any kind of context.

 

 

Occasionally, presenters pluck up the independence to point out meekly that perhaps the mess we find ourselves in can be traced back to Gordon Brown’s cynical profligacy — and that even if Labour had won the last election there would have had to be some serious belt-tightening.

'Bitter old leftie' Polly Toynbee, former social affairs editor at the BBC, was chosen as a commentator on welfare reform

But in that event, whichever Labour stooge happens to be on hand is simply allowed to get away with muttering something about ‘too deep, too fast’ and wailing that the wicked ‘Tory-led’ Government is ideologically bent on crucifying the ‘most vulnerable in society’.

Apparently, however, even this uninterrupted diet of public sector propaganda from a publicly-funded institution allegedly committed to ‘impartiality’ isn’t enough for Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.

Labour has lodged a formal complaint with the BBC about the language used to describe the Government’s austerity measures.

Ed Miliband’s spin doctors are apoplectic over the use of the term ‘savings’ instead of ‘cuts’. They are particularly annoyed about the BBC’s London outlet — Network South East or whatever it calls itself this week — which stands accused of bowing to Conservative pressure to soften its coverage of the cutbacks.

They’re obviously not watching the same programme as all the rest of us. BBC’s London news operation is obsessed with the ‘cuts’, to the exclusion of virtually everything else.

For instance, the other night I compared ITV’s offering, London Tonight, with its BBC rival.

London Tonight was leading with a strong human interest story about the couple who committed suicide in a car after meeting on the internet. It was the kind of thing you’d read in the newspapers. The ‘cuts’ were mentioned, in passing, about halfway through the bulletin.

Over on the BBC, it was ‘cuts, cuts, cuts’ all the way, with a series of live outside broadcasts from assorted Town Halls announcing their budgets for the coming year.

A typical crowd of unwashed Socialist Workers Party headbangers bouncing up and down in front of Haringey Civic Centre was treated with all the reverence and excitement accorded to pro-democracy demonstrators in Libya.