It'll be interesting to see if anyone in opposition wants to take another tilt at the issue of the head of the Metropolitan Police being appointed by the home secretary
It happens because there are some national policing functions which are run by the Met, and arguably for those functions that kind of link to the cabinet needs to be maintained, but when it comes to operational, local level policing it creates these kind of issues (if one wanted to get into the conspiracy theories there's the whole issue of Cressida Dick being former MI5 and the propriety of the blurring of those lines)
It's one of those reforms that is obviously necessary, but hard to get any momentum behind because the potential problems are kind of internecine and theoretical, but this gives a clear cut example of a failing that could be used as a political lever
"We'll reform the London Met so that government is held accountable to the same laws as everyone else."
I don't think that's a complicated or controversial message. I do think police reform will end up at the bottom of the priority list if and when the tories are kicked out, though, given the new government would have to tackle the consequences of a decade's worth of austerity and the ongoing issues with Brexit stymying growth.
"We'll reform the London Met so that government is held accountable to the same laws as everyone else."
I don't think that's a complicated or controversial message. I do think police reform will end up at the bottom of the priority list if and when the tories are kicked out, though, given the new government would have to tackle the consequences of a decade's worth of austerity and the ongoing issues with Brexit stymying growth.
It isn't, but in the past there hasn't been an actual example to point to, so the argument centres around: "what if, hypothetically, the cabinet put political pressure on the Met not to investigate certain crimes involving the government", and that had just enough of an air of implausibility to it, and was sufficiently conspiracy theory adjacent, that politicians tended not to be willing to stick their necks out over it. Plus the attack line from government is an easy one: political interference with the police (ironically)
We're now at the point where the Johnson government has sufficiently blown through all the principles of "gentlemanly conduct" that underpins this kind of thing that it's probably now a tractable political issue.
They're not being shy about it at all - they're killing off the BBC in 2027:
The BBC licence fee will be abolished in 2027 and the broadcaster’s funding will be frozen for the next two years, the government has said, in an announcement that will force the broadcaster to close services and make further redundancies.
This is just what the tories do. They underfund, interfere with and destroy public institutions to the point where they're non functional. They then sell them off to their mates for cheap.
This is just what the tories do. They underfund, interfere with and destroy public institutions to the point where they're non functional. They then sell them off to their mates for cheap.
Not just Tories. Modern "conservatism".
"This government thing that works? We're gonna fuck it up to prove it needs to be sold off."
Seen it in public transport and banking locally, and god knows how many different things by Republicans.
Should add that this announcement is all part of 'operation save big dog' and 'operation red meat' - announcing 'populist' rubbish with the sole intention of trying to drum up support for a failed Prime Minister. Other reported policies include using the military to 'crack down' on channel crossings - after all, what could possibly go wrong when using the military for a civil policing task?
"Maybe we should be destroyed: let's check Twitter for your views"
"How the Trans Agenda led to this"
"How the destruction of the BBC is bad for Labour"
Does make you wonder if they might be a little bit more Labour friendly now that is a directly existential issue for them? Probably not.
Not having had an actual "TV" TV for years now I guess the only thing I'll miss about the BBC is it's online news, which dispite it's faults remains one of the better options for a balanced news diet (a sad fact in and of itself).
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Brovid Hasselsmof[Growling historic on the fury road]Registered Userregular
Their nature documents would be a very sad loss. The Planet Earth / Blue Planet / Life of Plants etc shows are worth the TV licence alone imo.
+14
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
an interesting discussion of boris from 2 former conservative members though perhaps not former conservatives (peter oborne and dominic grieve) - https://youtu.be/ITg4bLh9Shs?t=1778 - oborne notable as somebody who has been documenting johnsons serial dishonesty from the beginning and grieve as somebody who was tragically serious about policy and law...!
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jaziekBad at everythingAnd mad about it.Registered Userregular
Does make you wonder if they might be a little bit more Labour friendly now that is a directly existential issue for them? Probably not.
Not having had an actual "TV" TV for years now I guess the only thing I'll miss about the BBC is it's online news, which dispite it's faults remains one of the better options for a balanced news diet (a sad fact in and of itself).
lol, good riddance. Call me an accelerationist, whatever. I will shed no tears for an organisation that's done so much damage to the lives of people like me.
Does make you wonder if they might be a little bit more Labour friendly now that is a directly existential issue for them? Probably not.
Not having had an actual "TV" TV for years now I guess the only thing I'll miss about the BBC is it's online news, which dispite it's faults remains one of the better options for a balanced news diet (a sad fact in and of itself).
lol, good riddance. Call me an accelerationist, whatever. I will shed no tears for an organisation that's done so much damage to the lives of people like me.
Yes, I'm sure once news coverage is reduced to the Sun, the Torygraph and the Daily Mail things will get much better. Since less bad is always worse than worst.
+17
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jaziekBad at everythingAnd mad about it.Registered Userregular
Does make you wonder if they might be a little bit more Labour friendly now that is a directly existential issue for them? Probably not.
Not having had an actual "TV" TV for years now I guess the only thing I'll miss about the BBC is it's online news, which dispite it's faults remains one of the better options for a balanced news diet (a sad fact in and of itself).
lol, good riddance. Call me an accelerationist, whatever. I will shed no tears for an organisation that's done so much damage to the lives of people like me.
Yes, I'm sure once news coverage is reduced to the Sun, the Torygraph and the Daily Mail things will get much better. Since less bad is always worse than worst.
The stuff the BBC put out last year about people like me was significantly worse than anything from the Sun or the Mail. The Sun didn't run a story from a known rapist calling for lynching all trans people. The BBC did. Am I supposed to have some reverence for this hallowed british institution just because it's old and nice and polite and made all the TV that everyone loves? I don't.
The BBC cannot now, and never will, make anything "better". It is completely rotten to the core, and there is absolutely nothing you could do short of tearing the whole thing down and starting again that would would fix it. The same is true of every other media outlet in the UK, but I just despise this idea that the BBC is somehow different. It's just nonsense. There's nothing special about it, it's exactly the same revolving door of dickheads as the rest of the british political establishment. One less of these things will make zero difference to anyone.
I seriously don't know how you come away from reading a thing saying "We will platform flat earthers if we think there are enough of them" and think "ah yes, this is a worthwhile thing to keep around".
Does make you wonder if they might be a little bit more Labour friendly now that is a directly existential issue for them? Probably not.
Not having had an actual "TV" TV for years now I guess the only thing I'll miss about the BBC is it's online news, which dispite it's faults remains one of the better options for a balanced news diet (a sad fact in and of itself).
lol, good riddance. Call me an accelerationist, whatever. I will shed no tears for an organisation that's done so much damage to the lives of people like me.
Yes, I'm sure once news coverage is reduced to the Sun, the Torygraph and the Daily Mail things will get much better. Since less bad is always worse than worst.
The BBC cannot now, and never will, make anything "better". It is completely rotten to the core, and there is absolutely nothing you could do short of tearing the whole thing down and starting again that would would fix it. The same is true of every other media outlet in the UK, but I just despise this idea that the BBC is somehow different. It's just nonsense. There's nothing special about it, it's exactly the same revolving door of dickheads as the rest of the british political establishment. One less of these things will make zero difference to anyone.
I seriously don't know how you come away from reading a thing saying "We will platform flat earthers if we think there are enough of them" and think "ah yes, this is a worthwhile thing to keep around".
The BBC World Service (radio) was airing pro-trans broadcasts last year, if nothing else.
"The BBC" is not "BBC News", is the thing, though I acknowledge its awful transphobia. I do think that transphobia seems to be a general problem of a columnist/commentator clique within the UK news industry rather than something unique to the BBC. I think it's potentially more damaging and painful coming from the BBC because it holds itself up as impartial in the way that, for instance, the spectator doesn't.
One aspect which would be a huge loss is that the BBC operates as de facto subsidy for UK artists, performers, and related professions. Many people have careers because the BBC commissioned or hired them, or just gave them access to an audience, in circumstances where it's unlikely that a purely commercially focused broadcaster or other media organisation would.
As a result, there's a whole ecosystem and industry around media in various forms that probably wouldn't exist if the BBC wasn't there as a platform for that output.
Some of that activity goes on to become valuable export activity. Some of it makes for UK performers becoming megastars earning huge amounts of money abroad and paying UK taxes. Not all of it does, but you can't get those outcomes without investment in the sector as a whole. The Tory line of treating it like a business and effectively saying "fund the parts that make money and don't fund the parts that don't" is as simplistic and wrongheaded as an MBA saying they'll only spend on R&D if it's guaranteed to lead to a commercially viable product.
The government has also voiced it's displeasure at channel 4 so they're accelerating their plans to destroy anything that holds them to account.
The Tory press has also been running articles about how the BBC won't stop until Boris is toppled.
Conveniently ignoring that it was ITV and The Mirror that broke all the parties in lockdown stories.
Nadine Dorrie was saying that her constituents only tell her how great a job Boris is doing with vaccine rollouts and such. They're just lying see you next Tuesdays. Could you imagine if you were actually held to account for lying in such a prominent position? As someone pointed out earlier, you can't even call someone out for lying in Parliament.
The BBC is popular, but they'll attack it the same way they do the NHS, which is by nebulously taking about "waste" and taxpayer value for money
This works because it isn't necessary to identify any waste in particular, you can do it just by throwing around numbers which sound incomprehensibly large to the general public absent context
It also gives them a means to attack things that don't affect a majority or a significant number of people, like minority language provision, or educational programming aligned to school or undergraduate teaching programmes. Often this is plain old right-wing wedge issue stuff, but it's also precisely the kind of things that the BBC exists to do, because it has cultural value but wouldn't be provided by commercial entities.
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jaziekBad at everythingAnd mad about it.Registered Userregular
On what planet is that actually true.
The bbc has been a tory mouthpiece for well over a decade.
What I can't get my head around with the argument that the BBC is worth defending or saving is just...
How do you imagine that the BBC gets any better? When both major parties are staunchly against spending anything on public services, and very much committed to fighting an endless culture war?
What does a good BBC even look like? When do you want to go back to when there was some actual set of principles or standards that was adhered to? I don't think that was ever the case, and I think most of it is just nostalgia.
The bbc has been a tory mouthpiece for well over a decade.
There is a difference between being constrained into "Both Sides"-ing an issue and being a Conservative mouthpiece.
They tend to cover the latest stupid bullshit that Tories are pushing rather than being used to initiate it. In your environment where you have a bunch of tabloids to initiate the issue that is a bit of a moot point though.
The bbc has been a tory mouthpiece for well over a decade.
There is a difference between being constrained into "Both Sides"-ing an issue and being a Conservative mouthpiece.
They tend to cover the latest stupid bullshit that Tories are pushing rather than being used to initiate it. In your environment where you have a bunch of tabloids to initiate the issue that is a bit of a moot point though.
If you're going to print outright lies as being the other "side" of an issue alongside the truth, and frame the two as equal, then no, there really is no difference.
when you run a story about migrants drowning in the channel, choosing to feature both sides of the debate on whether it's good to let foreigners drown actually, is not a neutral position.
No, it's the definition of "balanced". That's where media consistently keeps fucking up.
Neutral is reporting the truth, without bias, including calling out bad faith.
Balanced is giving equal weight to both sides even when one side is acting in bad faith.
Still better than the alternative (as we see with FOX News), but not good.
That definition of balanced falsely implies that there are exactly two sides to every issue.
Some issues only have one side. Some issues have many (more than two) sides.
But this idea of "balance" comes with and from a two-party system. But it is not reflective of reality.
That's the problem. If there's not two sides, "balanced media" allow the disaffected side (almost always conservatives) to make one up.
Like as someone mentioned earlier, flat earthers. If conservatives took that up as a serious position, even if it's not fully in the affirmative, and more a "just asking questions, what do we really know?" position, "balanced" media would turn themselves into knots to try to give them a decent amount of time.
Whereas neutral media would go "these people are crazy".
Posts
It’s disgusting that the police are saying no no we can’t investigate there isn’t enough evidence.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
"Any other leader would be 20 points ahead" crowds' eyeballs now spinning like fruit machine reels as they look for the exits with increasing anxiety.
EVERYBODY WANTS TO SIT IN THE BIG CHAIR, MEG!
It happens because there are some national policing functions which are run by the Met, and arguably for those functions that kind of link to the cabinet needs to be maintained, but when it comes to operational, local level policing it creates these kind of issues (if one wanted to get into the conspiracy theories there's the whole issue of Cressida Dick being former MI5 and the propriety of the blurring of those lines)
It's one of those reforms that is obviously necessary, but hard to get any momentum behind because the potential problems are kind of internecine and theoretical, but this gives a clear cut example of a failing that could be used as a political lever
I don't think that's a complicated or controversial message. I do think police reform will end up at the bottom of the priority list if and when the tories are kicked out, though, given the new government would have to tackle the consequences of a decade's worth of austerity and the ongoing issues with Brexit stymying growth.
It isn't, but in the past there hasn't been an actual example to point to, so the argument centres around: "what if, hypothetically, the cabinet put political pressure on the Met not to investigate certain crimes involving the government", and that had just enough of an air of implausibility to it, and was sufficiently conspiracy theory adjacent, that politicians tended not to be willing to stick their necks out over it. Plus the attack line from government is an easy one: political interference with the police (ironically)
We're now at the point where the Johnson government has sufficiently blown through all the principles of "gentlemanly conduct" that underpins this kind of thing that it's probably now a tractable political issue.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
They never have been, so why start now?
"But ignoring the rules isn't supposed to harm us!"
Seems to be suggesting the intention is to defund and privatise it completely at that time
This is just what the tories do. They underfund, interfere with and destroy public institutions to the point where they're non functional. They then sell them off to their mates for cheap.
Not just Tories. Modern "conservatism".
"This government thing that works? We're gonna fuck it up to prove it needs to be sold off."
Seen it in public transport and banking locally, and god knows how many different things by Republicans.
"Maybe we should be destroyed: let's check Twitter for your views"
"How the Trans Agenda led to this"
"How the destruction of the BBC is bad for Labour"
Not having had an actual "TV" TV for years now I guess the only thing I'll miss about the BBC is it's online news, which dispite it's faults remains one of the better options for a balanced news diet (a sad fact in and of itself).
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2022/01/13/bbc-flat-earthers-trans-rights/ "Balance"
lol, good riddance. Call me an accelerationist, whatever. I will shed no tears for an organisation that's done so much damage to the lives of people like me.
Yeah, if there wasn't an ongoing omnishambles I can't imagine them having the brass neck to try and push this.
Yes, I'm sure once news coverage is reduced to the Sun, the Torygraph and the Daily Mail things will get much better. Since less bad is always worse than worst.
The stuff the BBC put out last year about people like me was significantly worse than anything from the Sun or the Mail. The Sun didn't run a story from a known rapist calling for lynching all trans people. The BBC did. Am I supposed to have some reverence for this hallowed british institution just because it's old and nice and polite and made all the TV that everyone loves? I don't.
The BBC cannot now, and never will, make anything "better". It is completely rotten to the core, and there is absolutely nothing you could do short of tearing the whole thing down and starting again that would would fix it. The same is true of every other media outlet in the UK, but I just despise this idea that the BBC is somehow different. It's just nonsense. There's nothing special about it, it's exactly the same revolving door of dickheads as the rest of the british political establishment. One less of these things will make zero difference to anyone.
I seriously don't know how you come away from reading a thing saying "We will platform flat earthers if we think there are enough of them" and think "ah yes, this is a worthwhile thing to keep around".
The BBC World Service (radio) was airing pro-trans broadcasts last year, if nothing else.
One aspect which would be a huge loss is that the BBC operates as de facto subsidy for UK artists, performers, and related professions. Many people have careers because the BBC commissioned or hired them, or just gave them access to an audience, in circumstances where it's unlikely that a purely commercially focused broadcaster or other media organisation would.
As a result, there's a whole ecosystem and industry around media in various forms that probably wouldn't exist if the BBC wasn't there as a platform for that output.
Some of that activity goes on to become valuable export activity. Some of it makes for UK performers becoming megastars earning huge amounts of money abroad and paying UK taxes. Not all of it does, but you can't get those outcomes without investment in the sector as a whole. The Tory line of treating it like a business and effectively saying "fund the parts that make money and don't fund the parts that don't" is as simplistic and wrongheaded as an MBA saying they'll only spend on R&D if it's guaranteed to lead to a commercially viable product.
The government has also voiced it's displeasure at channel 4 so they're accelerating their plans to destroy anything that holds them to account.
The Tory press has also been running articles about how the BBC won't stop until Boris is toppled.
Conveniently ignoring that it was ITV and The Mirror that broke all the parties in lockdown stories.
Nadine Dorrie was saying that her constituents only tell her how great a job Boris is doing with vaccine rollouts and such. They're just lying see you next Tuesdays. Could you imagine if you were actually held to account for lying in such a prominent position? As someone pointed out earlier, you can't even call someone out for lying in Parliament.
Whatever replaces them will not be an improvement.
This works because it isn't necessary to identify any waste in particular, you can do it just by throwing around numbers which sound incomprehensibly large to the general public absent context
It also gives them a means to attack things that don't affect a majority or a significant number of people, like minority language provision, or educational programming aligned to school or undergraduate teaching programmes. Often this is plain old right-wing wedge issue stuff, but it's also precisely the kind of things that the BBC exists to do, because it has cultural value but wouldn't be provided by commercial entities.
The bbc has been a tory mouthpiece for well over a decade.
What I can't get my head around with the argument that the BBC is worth defending or saving is just...
How do you imagine that the BBC gets any better? When both major parties are staunchly against spending anything on public services, and very much committed to fighting an endless culture war?
What does a good BBC even look like? When do you want to go back to when there was some actual set of principles or standards that was adhered to? I don't think that was ever the case, and I think most of it is just nostalgia.
There is a difference between being constrained into "Both Sides"-ing an issue and being a Conservative mouthpiece.
They tend to cover the latest stupid bullshit that Tories are pushing rather than being used to initiate it. In your environment where you have a bunch of tabloids to initiate the issue that is a bit of a moot point though.
If you're going to print outright lies as being the other "side" of an issue alongside the truth, and frame the two as equal, then no, there really is no difference.
when you run a story about migrants drowning in the channel, choosing to feature both sides of the debate on whether it's good to let foreigners drown actually, is not a neutral position.
No, it's the definition of "balanced". That's where media consistently keeps fucking up.
Neutral is reporting the truth, without bias, including calling out bad faith.
Balanced is giving equal weight to both sides even when one side is acting in bad faith.
Still better than the alternative (as we see with FOX News), but not good.
The BBC is not BBC News, over 98% of BBC spend is not news content.
Just look at Laura kuenssberg persistently and uncritically repeating tory attack lines
Or when she ran a spoiler interview with Aaron Banks to spike another journalist's story.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
That definition of balanced falsely implies that there are exactly two sides to every issue.
Some issues only have one side. Some issues have many (more than two) sides.
But this idea of "balance" comes with and from a two-party system. But it is not reflective of reality.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
That's the problem. If there's not two sides, "balanced media" allow the disaffected side (almost always conservatives) to make one up.
Like as someone mentioned earlier, flat earthers. If conservatives took that up as a serious position, even if it's not fully in the affirmative, and more a "just asking questions, what do we really know?" position, "balanced" media would turn themselves into knots to try to give them a decent amount of time.
Whereas neutral media would go "these people are crazy".