Bbc

Friday

James Forsyth

Fox under pressure

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTOskAPgL9c The Westminster Fox-hounds think they have picked up the scent this morning. Enemies of the Defence Secretary, of whom there are many, are convinced that they’ll be able to bring him to ground over his links to Adam Werrity. Werrity was Fox’s best man and is a good friend of the Defence Secretary. But the problems stem from the fact that Werrity, who holds no official position, was dishing out cards saying he was an “adviser” to Fox, arranging meetings for him and attending diplomatically important events with the Defence Secretary. Fox has tried to kill off this story by asking the permanent secretary to investigate whether he has

Tuesday

Andrew Neil

The full story on NHS spending

I make no apologies for returning to government spending on health. The Tory promise in the election to ring-fence health spending and increase it in real terms every year even during a period of public spending cuts was distinctive and much-touted during the 2010 election campaign. A quick recap: during my extended interview with Health Secretary Andrew Lansley which went out live on the BBC News Channel on Sunday evening, I suggested that higher inflation than anticipated when the health spending promise was given would make it more difficult to meet the Tory promise of real annual rises. Indeed I put to him a projection for real health spending which

Tuesday

Nick Cohen

Chris Patten: a big disappointment all round

Chris Patten has held almost every great and good job the great and the good can offer: Governor of Hong Kong, Companion of Honour, European Commissioner, Chancellor of the University of Oxford and Chairman of the BBC Trust. Only his parents’ decision to send him to a Catholic church will prevent him becoming Archbishop of Canterbury and winning the game of establishment bingo with a full house. Patten features in Peter Oborne and Frances Weaver’s strange polemic against British supporters of the Euro. (Strange because Gordon Brown and the Labour Party stopped Britain joining the Euro so the authors have no crime to accuse the “guilty men” of – other

Tuesday

Freddy Gray

The riots, one month on

A month has passed since the riots, and it still feels as if nobody has grasped what really happened. The media debate has been limited, to say the least: lots of self-appointed community leaders and youth experts talking about giving kids a “voice” or “stake” in society, or calling the likes of David Starkey racist. The BBC “riots debate” last night, featuring Dame Claire Tickell, Liam Nolan, Shaun Bailey and former gang member Sheldon Thomas was particularly frustrating. Every time somebody came close to making a good point – Bailey, for instance, issued strong remarks about the commercialisation and sexualisation of children – someone else would drown it in bien-pensant

Daniel Korski

I spy a BBC bias

With Colonel Gaddafi’s compound lying in ruins and every self-respecting reporter combing through the wreckage, it was only a matter of time before documents of a dictatorship became public. Most explosively, the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen has found letters to and from the Secret Intelligence Service which suggest complicity in extraordinary rendition and, as was suggested on the Today Programme yesterday, an unseemly chuminess with Libya’s spies. If any part of the British state took part in illegal acts – which extraordinary rendition is – then this is a very serious matter. But it should be said no evidence has hitherto been found of this by any number of inquiries. The

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Lady Nicotine and the Fat Wars

Well, whaddyaknow, turns out that a rise in obesity is one of the costs of government-sponsored attempts to make smoking tobacco less appealing. Swings and roundabouts. Acording to Chris Snowdon, a study* published in this week’s British Medical Journal reports that non-smoking women are twice as likely to be obese as smokers and three times as likely to be seriously lardy. True, obesity is not quite as dangerous as smoking but that’s a matter of perspective. If you look at the matter from the Treasury then obesity may well be the greater problem. Since the pressure on health costs can only increase in years to come (that’s one consequence of

Thursday

David Blackburn

Tory backbenchers oppose cuts to the World Service

There is a debate in the Commons this afternoon, urging the government to spare the BBC World Service from cuts. The resistance is being led by Richard Ottaway, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee and author of a report condemning the Foreign Secretary’s decision to cut funding for the service.   Ottaway is likely to be well supported, as the Tory right is exercised by the effect that cuts are having on Britain’s standing in the world. John Whittingdale is on side, and there were plenty of backbenchers (among them, David T.C. Davies and Sam Gyimah – and grandee Lord King) at a recent Westminster event who listened solemnly

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson

John Humphrys makes the case for voting No to AV

Is AV too complex? Ask John Humphrys, who unwittingly made the case against switching system today, in conversation with David Cameron on the Today programme. It became clear that Humphrys believed that everyone’s second preference vote would be counted under AV — and Cameron pounced. Here’s the transcript: DC: If you go to an AV system you start counting some people’s votes more than once. And you end up, in the words of Churchill… JH: No you don’t. It simply isn’t true that you count votes more than once. DC: Yes, you count all the votes. You start eliminating candidates, and you count people’s second preferences. JH: And I have

Friday

Peter Hoskin

Hain puts his foot in it

Crude politics has intruded on the Royal Wedding after all, and all courtesy of Peter Hain. The Shadow Welsh Secretary has complained — on Twitter, naturally — that the BBC’s coverage of the event dwelt too long on David Cameron and Nick Clegg, and ignored Ed Miliband. “BBC airbrushing Labour like the Palace?” he asked leadingly. The Tory minister David Jones has since admonished him, “time, place, Peter.” If Labour have much sense they’ll play this down as efficiently as possible. Miliband, it is true, barely featured in the television coverage — but that’s really beside the point. It is rarely smart politics to take on the Palace at any

Wednesday

Tom Giles

Through a different camera: the source of Melanie Phillips’ discontent

It is unfortunate that Melanie Phillips based her allegations of BBC bias in its reporting of Israeli actions on a video by CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America), and not on the original programme as broadcast.  The CAMERA video is a misrepresentation of Jane Corbin’s Panorama ‘A Walk in the Park’.   Following a complaint from CAMERA, this Panorama was thoroughly investigated for any evidence of bias and/or inaccuracy by both the Editorial Complaints Unit (ECU) of the BBC and the Editorial Standards Committee (ESC) of the BBC Trust. In both cases, the film was completely exonerated and no bias found. The ECU is entirely independent

Saturday

Kate Chisholm

Expert witness

Recent events in Egypt have exposed not just the chasms in our understanding of what’s been going on in the countries of the Middle East, but also the effects of changes in how the BBC is spending the licence fee on reporting ‘fast-breaking’ stories. Recent events in Egypt have exposed not just the chasms in our understanding of what’s been going on in the countries of the Middle East, but also the effects of changes in how the BBC is spending the licence fee on reporting ‘fast-breaking’ stories. Instead of ‘stringers’ in the field, kept ticking over in foreign parts on a modest retaining fee to become deeply versed in

Saturday

Kate Chisholm

Save the World Service

All this talk about cuts might not be such a bad thing, if it forces us to think about what really should not be left to rot and wither away for lack of funding. Take the BBC’s World Service. Do we really need it in these post-imperial times? After all, it was set up in 1932 so that the King could keep in touch with his subjects, day and night, around the globe, wherever they might be. Those first broadcasts rather touchingly suggested that the King and his representatives in Whitehall actually cared about what happened to the peoples of Togo, Tanganyika and Christchurch, NZ. But, as The King’s Speech

Wednesday

Daniel Korski

Al-Jazeera is not a new BBC World Service

Egypt has made al-Jazeera English. The Qatari satellite channel has been the “go-to” channel; it has had more reporters on the ground than the BBC and CNN; and it has used technology in ways that make Western media look like they belong to a different era. Newspapers from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal have talked about the channel’s role in the protests. And all this despite its broadcasts being banned in Ben Ali’s Tunisia and blocked in Egypt. Facing these constraints, the TV channel switched to social media like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Its website posted Live Messages — audio messages recorded from phone calls placed

Saturday

Kate Chisholm

Writerly magic

A frock that shocks, a terror-filled red coat and diamonds of seductive power are all promised next week in an alluring late-night series on Radio 3 (produced by Duncan Minshull). Listener, They Wore It gives us five 15-minute essays about clothes. Not a subject I would normally bother with, never being someone noted for my sartorial elegance or originality. But by chance I opened up one of the preview discs and was hooked immediately. The novelist Tracy Chevalier is talking about the impact on her teenage self of Guy de Maupassant’s short story ‘The Necklace’. Chevalier based an entire novel on a pearl necklace so she knows the value of

Saturday

Kate Chisholm

Single vision

There’s been much grumbling in the shires about Radio 3’s 12-day Mozart marathon. There’s been much grumbling in the shires about Radio 3’s 12-day Mozart marathon. Why burden us with so much baroque? Where do you go if you can’t abide all those notes? But actually there’s something wonderfully cleansing about knowing that what you’re going to hear at any time of day or night on the music station is bound to have a K number attached to it. It’s like going on a diet after too many mince pies and brandy butter. Hearing nothing but Mozart is certainly a test of the composer’s mettle, but as the Bach and

Monday

James Forsyth

A day of gaffes

You really couldn’t make this up: it wasn’t Michael Moore’s PPS who was on the World at One resigning but someone impersonating him. The actual PPS, Michael Crockart, is still trying to make up his mind. I suggest that he doesn’t try and call in to a radio show to announce his decision. (Who would have thought we have lived to see the day when Lib Dem PPSs have impersonators?)   One has to feel sorry for Radio 4 today. It had the whole Jeremy Hunt business this morning on the Today Programme and Start the Week, and now it’s other flagship news programme has been very publicly duped.  

Saturday

James Delingpole

Tendentious drivel

It told the story of two best mates, Frankie and Peter, serving in an unidentified northern regiment in Afghanistan where Peter quickly discovers he can’t cope under fire — and as a punishment is made the unit’s ‘camp bitch’ by the sadistic Lance Corporal Buckley (Mackenzie Crook). ‘Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.’ So I suppose you could argue that  Jimmy McGovern was merely following the fine tradition of Robert Browning when he wrote his drama about cowardice, bullying and murder among British soldiers on the frontline in Afghanistan. But I wouldn’t. I think Accused (BBC1, Monday) was despicable:

Friday

Peter Hoskin

Strike out

Spark up those Roman candles, the firefighters have called off their strike for today and tomorrow. According to the general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU), it’s all because “we’ve listened to the concerns about public safety and we were extremely concerned about the capabilities of the private contractors being brought in to cover our strike” – which is awfully thoughtful of them, considering that they previously stoked those “concerns about public safety” by threatening to strike over Bonfire Night. Oh, and they appear to have won some concessions too: the London Fire Brigade will no longer sack any firefighters who refuse to accept contracts that include the disputed

Friday

Alex Massie

Dimbleby Fail

I didn’t watch Question Time last night, but there seems to be some stushie over David Dimbleby’s refusal to allow Nicola Sturgeon to talk about fiscal autonomy. “This is for a UK audience!” squawked our host, shutting down any discussion of a matter that, whatever he may believe (if he knows anything about the subject) is not in fact of merely local, tartan interest.  I don’t quite agree with everything Joan McAlpine writes here but many of her points are well-made. Dimbleby’s attitude – assuming it has been reported correctly – reflects a London-based parochialism that does neither him nor the Corporation any credit. This is not a Scotland vs