The BBC and the Cuts: I recommend legislation to keep them honest

I avoided coverage of the “cuts” yesterday, for many reasons. First, I knew they wouldn’t go far enough (why are we getting rid of only one in ten civil servants? – I’m sure half of them could be turfed off the gravy train without anyone noticing). 

Second, those repulsive knuckle-draggers on the Labour benches remind me of a group of moronic yobs who, having set fire to a building for fun, hang around to attack the fire brigade when it turns up to deal with the blaze. Shame on them all.

Third, I couldn’t bear the thought of Osbourne lying through his teeth about “fairness”. The main beneficiaries of Labour’s time in power – its bloated client state and the degenerate gamblers who ran our banks – will emerge from this with barely a scratch: it’s the utterly blameless, hard-working, tax-paying majority and their children who will have to foot the bill for Gordon Brown’s criminal  profligacy.

Fourth, I knew that, if I heard Osbourne yet again boasting about increasing the amount of money British taxpayers will be paying in “bungs” to exotic Third World kleptocracies, our TV set might very well end up in the middle of the road.

But the fifth and main reason for hiding out in Kew Gardens was the sure and certain knowledge that the BBC would be fulfilling its traditional role as Her Majesty’s Unofficial Opposition to the cuts. The Beeb’s coverage during the past six months has been a disgrace: biased, witless and unrelentingly delusional. Pity it couldn’t muster that sort of energy and focus during Labour’s reign of terror.

Mark Thompson recently claimed that the BBC was no longer “massively left-wing”. This is the best joke of the year so far (apart from Ed Miliband’s “election”.) The BBC’s view of the cuts is simple – well, retarded, to be honest: any reduction in public spending is wrong and unnecessary and is being done solely to satisfy the Tories’ traditional hatred of public services and the poor.

In case I was being “unfair” (Heaven forfend!) I have just watched a few minutes of BBC News. The first headline was about the IFS claiming the cuts were “regressive” (the new buzz-term – I think it means that some less well-off people will be even less well-off, which is sort of what happens when a country has to pay £120,000,000  every day just to service the interest on the tab that a socialist government has run up).

It then  went on to tell us that the 19% reduction figure in public spending was WRONG (not sure which one). They then whizzed up to everyone’s current favourite basket-case city (they’ve twigged that our sympathy for the Socialist Republics of Liverpool and Newcastle evaporated years ago). Sheffield has three times as many public sector employees as manufacturing workers these days. The three interviewees were evidently supposed to attack the Tory butchers - but two of them refused to. The cuts were necessary, they said. The reporter sounded astonished.

I’ve long harboured a dream that one day we will see legislation passed stating that any publicly-funded television or radio interviewer or correspondent or programme editor who enthusiastically champions the case for extra public spending, or attacks “vicious Tory cuts”, via their choice of language, or propagandist presentation of pseudo-facts, or choice of interviewees, will have 0.25% of their annual salary sequestered by the Treasury each time they commit the offense, with the money being spent on the cause they’re  so keen to champion (i.e. if they blatantly attack “the cuts” four hundred times in the course of a year, they will earn no money.) 

If they whine about attempts to cut down on the number of immigrants entering Britain, or moves to repatriate asylum seekers, a would-be immigrant or asylum-seeker will be sent to live with them for an indefinite period, at their expense. If they sneer at Eurosceptics, they will pay an extra 5p in the £ in income tax, which will be used to offset Britain’s grotesque annual payment to the EU. And if they sneer at Climate Change skeptics, the government will stick one of Chris Huhne’s stupid, noisy, ugly, pointless wind turbines in their suburban back garden. 

That should keep ‘em honest for a bit!

Broadcasters who benefit from the public purse really need to be regularly reminded that their endless advocacy of public spending increases comes across as outrageous special pleading on their own behalf – and that it really is time they recognised that we all, left-wingers and right-wingers, public and private sector workers, pay the license fee.