Radio 4 | Talking Bollocks

Posts Tagged ‘Radio 4

Nov

Simon Reed – Hypocrite of the week

Categories: News, People, Police and Politics
Tags: Andrew Mitchell, draw a line, Hillsborough Disaster, hypocrite, move on, pleb, Police Federation, Radio 4, resignation, Simon Reed, Today program

Simon Reed – Hypocrite of the Week

This week’s Hypocrite of the Week is Vice Chair of the Police Federation, Simon Reed.

A few weeks ago the former Conservative Chief Whip, Andrew Mitchell and a policeman on duty at Downing Street got into an argument and Mr. Mitchell is accused of calling the bobby a “pleb”. Immediately after, Mitchell apologised, the bobby accepted the apology and the Conservatives leadership called for everyone to draw a line under the incident and move on.

The Police Federation didn’t agree and made sure the subject stayed in the news until, after the leaking of the official police transcript of the conversation, Mr. Mitchel was forced to resign.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4′s Today program on Friday morning Simon Reed was asked about the leaking of the transcript and claimed that we didn’t know if the leak had come from the police. The presenter, Sarah Montague, pointed out that it was an official police transcript and so must have come from the police. She asked whether this sort of thing had to end. Mr. Reed ducked and weaved and moaned that everyone is doing it and it’s unfair to pick on the police and then uttered the words which won his award. He claimed that “Now we need to draw a line, we’ve moved on”.

When Mr. Mitchell called the policeman the pleb two woman police officers had just been shot dead and the role of the police as brave defenders of society was upper most in the public consciousness. In this context a toff calling a brave bobby a pleb seemed grotesque. However, just a little earlier, the Hillsborough Independent Panel had released it’s finding into the Hillsborough Disaster and found that 164 witness statements had been altered by the police and 116 statements unfavourable to the Police had been removed. Put in this light the pleb comment seems like just one part of the discredited British establishment fighting with another.

If we couldn’t draw after Mitchell’s apology then why should we draw a line when we discover yet more illegal activity by the police?

Simon Reed is a hypocrite and should resign.

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Oct

Occupy London – Hypocrisy & detachment of the establishment

By jonesxxx 3 Comments

“You can't wash your hands of the consequence of your actions” - What a hypocrite!

You can’t wash your hands of the consequence of your actions - Mathew Hancock, MP

“You can’t wash your hands of the consequence of your actions” said Mathew Hancock MP this afternoon on Radio 4′s PM program. The topic was the financial crisis but Mr. Hancock was not talking about the bankers, he was talking about the protesters!

Mathew Hancock, Conservative MP for West Suffolk, was interviewed by Eddie Mair along with Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK. Mr. Murphy was sympathetic to the protesters, talked about changing the financial system and got in a plug for his book The Courageous State.

Mr. Hancock was not sympathetic and went on to say some very stupid things. He said that it was fair to ask the protesters what they’re campaigning for and how it should be achieved. He said that it was reasonable that they’ve made their point but that now it is time to look forward to the detail of achieving the world that they want to create.

Mathew Hancock was TALKING BOLLOCKS.

Firstly, the idea that the protesters have made their point and should leave him and his buddies to address the situation is self satisfied tosh! If the protesters just pack up and go home then the bankers and the politicians will merely carry on as usual. The current Conservative pre-occupation with getting out of the EU is evidence that the unfairness of the bailout has slipped right off the governments agenda.

Secondly, the idea that it is not possible to protest unless you have a solution is utter rubbish! It is like the triage nurse at a hospital telling a sick man to go away until he had developed a cure for his ailment.

It is an indication of how out of touch our politicians are that Mr. Hanock expects ordinary men and women to do a better job of running banks than those paid millions for their supposed expertise. It was not the job of ordinary tax payers to keep an eye on the banking industry and we should not expect them to set policy but it is their right to protest and make themselves heard so that those who do have the knowledge and the power can recognise their concerns and adjust policy.

However, it was another of Mr. Hancok’s statements that really angered me but first let me tell you about another Radio 4 program over the weekend. In BBC Radio 4′s, The Bottom Line on Saturday Evan Davis interviewed the chairman of a boutique merchant bank, the chief executive of a financial advisory firm and the chief executive of a savings and investment group. When these men tried to dismiss the accusations that the bankers were to blame for the financial crisis Mr. Davis got fairly miffed and stated that just prior to the credit crunch, after a boom which had run on for ten years (and was therefore due to bust), a major bank had lent £40 for every £1 it had in deposits. This meant that if the value of its investments were to fall by just 2% the bank would be insolvent. This is incompetence and complacency on a massive scale. Further, at the same time, while the economy was booming, the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, was running a deficit. (If you can’t repay debt in the good times then when can you?)

This evening on PM, Mr. Hancock said that the protesters outside St. Paul’s had caused the cathedral to close, losing the church around £20,000 a day, that actions have consequences and “You can’t wash your hands of the consequence of your actions”!

According to Wikipedia, before becoming an MP, Mr. Hanock was an economist at the Bank of England, specialising in the housing market. It is further testament to his utter hypocrisy that he can utter such statements without a hint of irony. This out of touch pillock is quite content to let the politicians and bankers destroy a whole industry then walk away with fat bonuses yet has the gall to accuse others of not taking responsibility for their actions.

Even now, the bankers do not understand that they only have jobs because they were bailed out by ordinary citizens, such as those spending their nights outside St. Paul’s.

Something’s gotta change.

Oct

Tories given easy ride at conference

By jonesxxx Leave a Comment

Categories: Con/Lib Coalition, Conservative, democracy, Media, News and Politics
Tags: “will say”, BBC, Boris Johnston, channel 4, collusion, conference, credit card debt, david cameron, escort, got off light, Kenneth Clarke, News, news media, politicians, poor judgement, Radio 4, reporting the future, speech, the media, Theresa May, Tories

No make that "help" the unemployed

I dislike the way that the news media have been reporting the future as it represents collusion between the politicians and the media. The politicians want their message on morning news programs and the news programs want to report it so a draft of the speech is handed over. Some may think that the difference of a few hours makes no odds but it can have odd repercussions.

The Tories had their conference up in Manchester this week and this morning BBC Radio 4 reported that Prime Minister David Cameron “will say” that we should all pay off our credit card debt. I remember thinking that this did not sound like a good idea as it would reduce demand even further.

This evening Channel 4 main news was that David Cameron had not said that we should all pay off our credit card debt – he’d changed his speech. Big news? Well, I guess the original statement was poor judgement on Mr. Cameron’s part but you can hardly blame him for changing it when it received a negative reaction. What do we expect if we are going to use the medai as a proof reading service for politicians speeches? It should be obvious that reporting drafts merely gives politicians the ability to correct poor judgement.

Also this week we had the supposed “clash” between Secretary of State for Justice Kenneth Clarke and the Home Secretary Theresa May. Theresa pointed out that a court ruling relating to immigration referenced the defendants ownership of a cat and Clarke expressed scepticism that this was a decisive factor. Was this really the biggest news so far at the Conservative conference? If it was then the big news should really have been that there was nothing happening at the conference.

I guess it was bigger than yesterdays story which was that David Cameron appeared to be accompanied by a different female escort each time he was seen at the conference and I was amused to hear on the radio that Boris Johnston is always escorted around at conference to try to keep him out of trouble.

Seems that the Tories have got an easy ride due to a poor performance by the media.

Feb

Democracy in the Arab world – Everyone’s a winner

By jonesxxx Leave a Comment

She wont vote for militant Islam

This evening BBC Radio 4′s Moral Maze is discussing the unrest in Egypt. I usually find this program to irritating to listen to. The panelist seem to consider that it is their soul objective to be obnoxious and insulting to the “witnesses”.

In describing tonight’s program the BBC web site asks: “Is it morally justifiable to tolerate or support unpleasant, authoritarian, undemocratic regimes because we feel the likely alternatives might prove worse for the citizens of Egypt.”

My answer is simple: NO! No because it is wrong to support unpleasant, authoritarian, undemocratic regimes. NO because we cannot know what the alternative will be. And NO because we have experience of what happens when revolution finally breaks out in countries where the West has connived to suppress democracy. i.e. the people despise the West along with the dictator which they have just thrown off.

The classic example of this is Iran. In 1953 the democratically elected government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown in a coup d’état instigated by the United States and the United Kingdom. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was installed as Shāh and propped up by the United States until the revolution in 1977.

From what I have read the revolution was initially backed by a secular movement but militant Islamists used the chance to grab power. Secular Iranians tried to resist but were crushed by the new regime of Ayatollah Khomeini. They could have received help from the West but having been responsible for 20 years of their repression we were not trusted and there followed a caustic division between Iran and the West that lasts ’till this day. That is an example of what happens when we support unpleasant, authoritarian, undemocratic regimes because we feel the likely alternatives might prove worse.

We should support the people of Egypt in ejecting their dictator. If they then elect an authoritarian Islamist government then more fool them. At least the responsibility will not be ours and when they are finally in a position to reject authoritarianism we will be in a position to help.

More optimistically I believe that Egyptians will have learned from the experiences of Iran and Afghanistan and will reject outright Islamist rule though Islamists may have some role in a coalition. It is possible that Egypt could finally break the curse that has afflicted the Arab world for decades and start to modernise.

Imagine a middle east of modern democratic countries right on the border of the largest trading block in the world. I am talking of the European Union. While the world obsesses over whether China will supplant America as the largest economy in the world they overlook the fact that the EU has an economy larger than both. With the Arab world modernising trade would take off and this would be great news for Arabs and Europeans.

The financial crisis has caused market uncertainty and companies have been nervous about initiating capital projects. Investors are also unenthusiastic as many assets appear overpriced; there is even talk of a Chinese asset bubble. Consequently some sectors, such as insurance, are awash with capital.

If democracy were to blossom then this capital could find it’s way to infrastructure projects in the Arab world. There was speculation in The Economist in 2009 of solar powered electricity generation in the Sahara with the electricity transported to Europe across the Mediterranean. That is not going to happen while the region is ruled by unstable dictators.

Lastly consider the effect on the Arab / Israeli conflict. Today the subtext of much of Israel’s argument is that the Palestinians are just Arabs who are used to being oppressed and the Palestinians are no worse off than citizens of other Arab countries.

Imagine if Israel were surrounded by thriving democracies. Israel would be forced to confront it’s oppressive and racist policies toward the Palestinians. Could The United States continue to support the siege of Gaza or the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians? Shame on them if they did.

Jan

Choose debt?

By jonesxxx Leave a Comment

Categories: Commerce, Economics, Finance, News and Politics
Tags: Argentina, bankers, banks, BBC, capitalist, choose debt, debt, EU, experts, financial crisis, Greece, Iceland, ireland, liquidity, loans, pension funds, Radio 4, renumeration, repay, resources, salary, The Economist, The World Tonight, working people, write off

Choose Debt

I just caught the end of The World Tonight a serious pontificating BBC Radio 4 program where the “expert” said that everyone is treating the financial crisis as a crisis of liquidity whereas in reality it is a crisis of debt. I’m no expert on this but Wikipedia defines Market liquidity as “an asset’s ability to be sold without causing a significant movement in the price and with minimum loss of value” and Accounting Liquidity as “a measure of the ability of a debtor to pay his debts as and when they fall due.”

I think that what the guy was getting at is that the great and the good thought that if we print more money then we can introduce liquidity and buy the distressed debt. Yeh, great, but all that achieves is that some other sucker (the tax payer) owns the debt.

The Economist this week mentioned again that all that has really occurred since the financial crisis is that the private debt which the banks owned has become public debt.

So in the opinion of both BBC expert and The Economist the debt has not gone away. The BBC expert said that some countries (implicitly Greece and Ireland) do not have the resources to repay their debt and merely giving them loans from the EU does not change this.

I believe that free market capitalist theory says that when the debtor cannot repay then the debt is written off and the lenders lose their money. It is easy to scoff that the money is lent by a lot of rich institutions but we must remember that in many cases these institutions are the pension funds of ordinary working people.

So what is to be done?

I have heard that Argentina defaulted on its debt in 2002 yet my recollection is that The Economist has had some good things to say about its economy recently. Iceland also hit troubled times and let its investors face write offs yet an Economist article on Ireland cagily suggested that Ireland could learn a thing or two from the way Iceland handled its crisis.

It seems that all the “experts” are suggesting that the debts be written off. Yes, the lenders (read your pension funds and rich bastards) will lose out in the short term but perhaps this is no worse than dragging the problem out for years and arriving at the same conclusion years later.

So why are the debt not being written off? In whose interest is it to maintain bad debt on a companies book?

Ah yes, The Bankers. It is in the interest of the bankers to pretend that the idiotic loans which they made will eventually come good because it make the banks balance sheet look better and therefore gives the CEO some leverage in bumping up his already considerable salary.

Jan

CPS prosecute man for warning drivers of speed gun

By jonesxxx 2 Comments

Prosecuted for flashing his lights

Open Email to Keir Starmer via CPS web site

Sir,

I just heard on Radio 4 that the CPS have prosecuted a driver ( Michael Thompson ) who flashed his lights to warn motorists of a mobile police speed gun. They charged him with wilfully obstructing a police officer in the course of her duties.

This is an outrageous infringement of civil liberties. The speed gun is to catch people who are actually speeding NOT people who may be INTENDING to speed. By flashing his lights Mr Thompson could not have affected anyone who was actually speeding.

More and more the police are taking authoritarian stances and feeling that they are entitled to harass individuals. Often this takes the form of stopping ordinary people taking photographs in public by pretending that there is some terrorism threat.

From the point of view of the general public this clashes dreadfully with the police inability to prosecute their own officers even when they have been photographed in the act of assaulting a member of the public.

I have been critical of police tactics at various demonstrations but had been sympathetic during the recent student demonstrations because of the obvious violent intent of some demonstrators (fire extinguishers etc).

However, incidence such as the prosecution of Mr. Thompson, merely reinforce the negative image of the police as an oppressive organisation who take advantage of their position and are unaccountable to anybody.

I suggest that you remember that you are British officers in a country with a long tradition of civil liberty and not mindless officials from some soviet satellite state.

Stop harassing ordinary people and start effectively disciplining your own officers.

Regards

______________________________________________________________________________

I understand from this What’s On Xiamen that the presiding magistrate was Jean Ellerton of Grimsby Magistrates Court.

Why not email them and register your disgust? You could use the text above as a template.

Dec

Edengate – did God overreact?

By jonesxxx 3 Comments

Categories: religion and Theology
Tags: adam, Apple, BBC, Christians, Church, edengate, eve, festive, fruit, garden of eden, Genesis, overreacted, Radio 4, serpent, snake, The Bible, tree of knowledge

Should they have got off with a warning?

BBC Radio 4 and World Service are now broadcasting a lot of Christians singing in Church and a vicar reciting bits of The Bible. To give us a sort of festive feel I expect.

However, rather than selecting the story of the birth of Jesus which one might think appropriate for the time of year the vicar has told us of Adam and Eve. I quote from the good book (for those that came in late, God said don’t east the fruit, a snake told Eve she could eat it so she did, Eve then told Adam to eat and so he did. God has now discovered that they have been eating his magic fruit)

3:14 And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.

3:15 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

3:16 Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

3:17 And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;

3:18 Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;

3:19 In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

The vicar finished off with “Praise be to God”.

Praise be indeed. How very festive. Personally I think that God overreacted. If he’d asked me I would have advised him to give them a warning and move the fruit trees away so that they couldn’t be tempted again. Or take it away completely. Put it somewhere else. On Jupiter maybe. That’s how I would have designed the universe. Put all the things that you don’t want near each other a long way away from each other so to speak.

Better still, if he’d used a bit of psychology he could have given them all some kind of magic temporary illness and then said: “Ha! Ha! I warned you? But oh no, you’d rather listen to snakes than the Lord thy God. Now look at you.”

I guess he would have had to reverse the effects of the magic fruit too but….Oh, well…obviously I’d need more detailed information to say exactly what God should have done in the circumstances and he didn’t ask me anyway but I still think he overreacted.

	Snake	Eve	Adam	General	Comments
Cursed above all cattle	Y				Bad
Cursed above every beast of field	Y				Bad
Forced to move on belly	Y				Bad
Eat dust all days of life	Y				Bad
Snake / Woman Enmity	Y	Y			Inconvenient
Snake seed / woman seed enmity	Y	Y			Inconvenient
Bruised head	Y				Bad
Sorrow & conception multiplied		Y			Bad
Children brought fourth in sorrow		Y			Bad
Desire husband		Y			Personal preference
Ruled over by husband		Y			Bad
Not eat of it (the tree of knowledge)			Y		This is odd as they were not allowed to do this anyway and now it only applies to Adam.
Ground cursed			Y	Y	Bad
All eating in sorrow			Y		Bad
Land to bring fourth thorns & thistles			Y	Y	Bad
Eat herbs			Y		Good
East bread in sweat of face			Y		Bad
Mortality			Y		Bad

Dec

Men who think that they’re right

By jonesxxx Leave a Comment

The Cardinal

Being down with flu gives one a perfect excuse to not wash and watch television all day. This morning I watched The Cardinal an American film made in 1963 and directed by Otto Preminger and staring Tom Tryon and Carol Lynley.

The title sequence included fantastic cinematography showing, what I assume to be, parts of The Vatican. Leading on from there were some pretty bizarre scenes of priests laying around prostrate in full regalia and behaving in a manner bordering on the homo-erotic.
After this things settled down a bit and becomes more mainstream. An individualistic American priest travels in Rome, Ireland, Vienna and The United States and pushes the Vatican to do the right thing. In the U.S. he stands up for a black priest who’s flock face racism from white catholics. In Vienna he presses the local Catholic bishops to resist Hitler.

Considering the dubious reputation of The Catholic Church’s regarding Nazism and racism this film struck me as propaganda.

Interestingly Otto Preminger was a Jew who faced racism at the hands of Catholicism in Vienna when a boy. Wikipedia states that Preminger was born in what is now the Ukraine and his family fled to Austria when the first world war began. Wikipedia states that his school insisted on teaching him “Catholic dogma” and that his Catholic classmates teased him. Preminger’s father was later offered a prestigious job but told he could take it only if he converted to Catholicism. The father rejected conversion but received the position anyway.

This evening the news reports that Pope Benedict XVI has recorded a Christmas message to be broadcast on BBC Radio 4′s Thought For The Day on Christmas Eve.

I find this quite provocative.

I find it provocative because it follows The Pope’s announcement of a new “Apostolic Constitution” to provide a legal framework for the many thousands of Anglicans and former Anglicans who are unhappy with Anglican policy toward homosexuals to convert to Catholicism. It is also provocative because, Queen Elizabeth II is the head of The Church of England and traditionally makes a speech on Christmas Day.

We should remember that the leaders of all religions are self appointed. They are men who think they are right and that everyone should do what they say. Considering the bad press that Catholicism has received regarding rampant and unrepentant child abuse this year I think this blatant empire building is ill timed and demonstrates that religions dignitaries have no more claim to morality that the rest of us.

As a good agnostic I am fairly tolerant of all manner of religious idiocy but religions poaching followers can easily lead to real confrontation. I often find it useful to reverse an argument or situation to getter a better handle on it. HOw would it be if The Queen did a Christmas message on 104.5 FM Roma and announced a scheme for Catholics who a unhappy with their kids being abused by Catholic priests to convert to The Church of England?

With the situation in Ireland still fragile we do not need some bloody German stirring up sectarian antagonism.

Listen to the Pope’s Christmas Eve message on Thought For The Day

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Talking Bollocks

Posts Tagged ‘Radio 4

Simon Reed – Hypocrite of the week

Occupy London – Hypocrisy & detachment of the establishment

Tories given easy ride at conference

Democracy in the Arab world – Everyone’s a winner

Choose debt?

Edengate – did God overreact?

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