The Aged P

In an interview BBC Today’s John Humphrys had with Labour politician Harriet Harman the subject of Jimmy Savile came up

Mr. Humphrys added that the BBC has been drawn into a ‘witch-hunt’ over the issue.

An interesting turn of phrase – and it probably reflects the opinion of many within the BBC Establishment….remember Paul Merton and Ian Hislop on “Have I Got News For You” last week? When the topic of Savile and the BBC came up they both spent most of the time prattling on about the hypocrisy of the Mail Online and Merton managed to bring Margaret Thatcher into it.

The joke is that Humphrys, Hislop and Merton are paid a great deal of money to publicly skewer politicians, bankers, celebrities etc. who might have strayed from the straight and narrow – it’s all done from the standpoint of a high moral tone. If Savile had been a catholic priest or a tory politician they would have been having a field day. But the fact is they are paid a great deal of money by the BBC and they just can’t bring themselves to bite the hand that feeds them.

Which is why, Mr. Humphrys, we are all enjoying it so much – it’s schadenfreude – the taking of pleasure from the discomfort of others, the laughter generated when the trousers of a particularly pompous and moralising bore fall to the ground in the midst of a hectoring tirade.

And do you know what gives it an extra bit of spice, Mr Humphrys? It’s the fact that it irritates you, it grates on your sensitivities – and it will be bubbling around for a very long time..

It couldn’t happen to a nicer group of pompous, moralising bores…..

Final proof from the UK Guardian (and BBC) that the cabal of Old Etonian toffs who now hold Britain in an iron grip is ruthlessly implementing its master plan – nothing less than the extermination of the proletariat by starving their children and ensuring the gradual extinction of Socialism’s natural constituency, the working classes.

A sixth of teachers are spending up to £25 a month buying bread, fruit and snacks to feed pupils who turn up to school without having eaten breakfast, according to the findings of a survey.
Almost four out of five teachers reported an increase in the prevalence of pupils arriving at school hungry over the last 12 months.

OMG – there are 438,000 teachers in English state schools – so 17,800 are spending their own money to feed their students. ….and 350,400 of them are reporting that children are coming into school starving.

Is it time, therefore, to grab the red flags, axes and molotov cocktails and surge into the streets, marching behind Polly Toynbee and bob Crowe as they lead crowds of millions into Whitehall, ready to storm the fortress of the Cameron regime?
Not quite because, if you delve a little deeper into the article you will find the numbers are based on a survey……

of 500 UK teachers carried out by food company Kellogg’s

500 – which is 0.11% of all state school teachers in England.

Kellogg’s – a manufacturer of breakfast cereals.

Kellogg’s – whose charitable arm has been organising and funding breakfast clubs in schools since 1998.

Kellogg’s – which almost certainly has a database of names of teachers associated with breakfast clubs..

Hardly a random sample from a disinterested party – but enough to generate several items on various news outlets featuring sad eyed parents and, naturally, Jamie Oliver . Inevitably there was fingerpointing

half of teachers also attributed increased pupil hunger to “financial hardship” caused by government spending cuts, unemployment and rising living costs,

The answer? What else but more government support for breakfast clubs.

However, to be fair to the Guardian and BBC, two thirds of the teachers surveyed blamed “parent apathy”. Many parents are too disorganised to provide a brerakfast for their children, having neither the “time” or the “inclination”.

Note that crucial point. Many kids missed breakfast, not because their parents couldn’t afford to buy food – but because they are too bloody ignorant to make sure their kids eat a breakfast. Ergo the government should reward their ignorance by getting those parents who do provide a breakfast to finance the others via taxation.

The fact is that breakfast clubs, like after school clubs, are essentially child minding tools so that working parents can dump their children so they can go out and earn money. Government subsidies would mean that they get the extra bonus of free child care on top of their earnings.

You can smell the teacher unions involvement in this “campaign” with the mere mention of “cuts”. It’s yet another bogus bit of propaganda using spurious “research” to justify a self fulfilling prophecy – and gain more space at the trough for those associated with such campaigns….

Also, wasn’t it only a few weeks ago that another set of gurus were saying that UK kids eat too much?

Interesting story from Guido Fawkes about how last December a journalist tried to get newspapers interested in an article about the BBC pulling the Savile exposure and highlighting some of the issues raised by it

I was told by several of the papers that taste was a factor in their decision but in at least one case the Leveson Inquiry, which was then at its height, was mentioned as being a problem as well. It’s common knowledge that at that time no paper wanted to take on what could turn out to be a controversial story, so they didn’t.”

Remember at the time the odious quartet of Steve Coogan, Max Mosley, Charlotte Church and Hugh Grant were swaggering from studio to studio being celebrated as heroes by fellow showbiz weasels. Who can doubt that in the febrile atmosphere of the moment, if he had been alive and some of his creepy antics reported he would have joined them in their well rehearsed performances of upright citizens hounded by malignant hacks. Indeed Charlotte Church was at it again a few days ago on the ITV chat show hosted by the oily Jonathon Ross, the man who has transformed insincerity into an art form.

Church, who was really there to push her seventh musical comeback, blathered on about being a timid and retiring soul deeply scarred by a vindictive media . But it all sounded a tad self serving in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal.

The fact is these showbiz types need the media to keep their names in the public eye. Hence they are circulating constantly using their latest book, film, play, therap, divorce, rape or arrest as a hook to get their faces in the camera lens. Their publicity drones flood the airwaves with their presence to “maintain the profile”. These dysfunctional , self centred parasites need the oxygen of the media to flourish and survive. Hence the hypocrisy of attitude – they want to control medium by exercising a personal veto on all publicity that is not to their liking.

The Savile /BBC scandal is a timely reminder that the media must not be hamstrung by legislation which restricts their ability to tell us something about the darker side of these glittering stars….

If the award of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to the newly elected Barack Obama was a sick joke the news that this year’s prize is going to the EU reduces the selection process to the level of a meaningless farce. This bureaucratic monstrosity, steeped in corruption and nepotism, subject to no democratic oversight and run by a bunch of second rate jobsworths has no foreign policy credentials and lacks any military capability

“The stabilizing part played by the EU has helped to transform most of Europe from a continent of war to a continent of peace,”

This was the justification that the secretive cabal of Norwegian grandees offered to a bemused world. Perhaps they hired a North Korean hack to compose it for such a Pravdaesque concoction of sycophantic untruths could only be cobbled together by someone well practised in the art of purveying the most audacious of lies with a completely straight face.

That Europe became a continent of peace had nothing to do with the EU and everything to do with NATO – but rest assured the airbrushing out of inconvenient facts is already under way…

Remember how the soon to be installed CEO of “The New York Times” said he knew nothing about widespread long lived rumours of the sexual abuse of underage children committed by one of the BBC’s biggest stars, some of the abuse taking place on BBC premises?

Even when an item on a BBC current affairs programme investigating these rumours was pulled at the last minute…

Even when the go ahead was given a few days later to air a TV special celebrating the star’s life and saying what a wonderful wonderful guy he was…

Well, the plot thickens….

But yesterday Lord Patten – who said he himself first heard about the Savile allegations less than two weeks ago when he read about them in a newspaper – insisted Mr Thompson had been made aware of the Newsnight investigation last December by director of news Helen Boaden.
When asked to confirm that the former director-general knew about the investigation, he said: ‘Yes’.
His comments were later retracted by the BBC Trust, which said he ‘misspoke’ on the matter.

I wonder if any of those brilliant, sophisticated, right on, politically correct lovers of investigative journalism at the NYT will want to have a quiet word with Mr Thompson next time they are sipping their dry martinis?

To understand one of the main reasons why, despite massive spending, British secondary school students are under achieving in comparison with their peers in Eastern Europe and East Asia, look no further than this report in the UK Daily Mail.

Mother hauled before a court for taking her son, 13, out of school to attend her Caribbean wedding
• Frances White refused to pay town hall fine for her son’s 11-day absence
• She had asked Marple Hall School for permission a year in advance
• When headteacher refused, she took her son to St Lucia wedding anyway
• The 31-year-old is due to appear before magistrates next week

An eleven day Caribbean wedding – just one example of how bloated the wedding industry has become. Once, of course, second weddings were fairly discreet affairs, quietly despatched in modest registry offices with no bridal gown or over populated reception. Even first weddings were generally organised within a limited budget so that the balance could help furnish the first home.

But no more of that – modern brides want the gowns and the beanfeast and the furniture and the exotic honeymoon for every one of their weddings and a gargantuan industry has grown to feed those wishes – strange, really, at a time when more than half the couples living together are not married….marriage is dying but weddings are big business…

So Frances wanted her big exotic wedding and she wanted her thirteen year old son to give her away and to create a memorable moment for all involved then she wanted him as part of the honeymoon….want, want, want, want….. then the school had to spoil her dream by pointing out that she could have chosen to get married some time during the thirteen weeks the school was closed.

But, she sobbed, that would be too expensive and it would spoil her dream….so she took her two sons out of school for the eleven days and immediately sent a signal to us all that education is a low priority in her world.

Of course, one can say, the world (especially the UK it seems) is full of people who prefer their gratification instant rather than deferred, so why make a fuss?

The fuss, my friends, is not to do with Frances White who, in every other way, is probably a loving and caring parent – it’s to do with a) the attitude of the Daily Mail and b) the views of those readers who commented.

The Mail reported Frances White as a woman wronged by a jobsworth bureaucracy, a view, unfortunately echoed by the majority of the commentators. If DM readers are representative of Middle England (as it frequently claims) then Middle England puts education fairly low on the agenda when faced with weddings and holidays….in other words, schooling must not interfere with our social life, no way, matey….

The Daily Mail has always been drooling with delight at any report of indiscipline in schools or falling standards of attainment – yet whenever a head excludes a pupil for wearing jewellery or not ignoring proper uniform they publish a picture of some little scrote pretending to be downcast plus “parents” who often look like escapees from the cast of “Shameless”. Anybody with half a brain would realise that the exclusion is the final act of a farce that has been going on for months, a deliberate pushing against the boundaries by families who see education not as the key to aspiration but as a drag on their tribal mores.

Interestingly the DM highlighted this in their piece on the OECD Report

British children’s poor reading skills are said to be partly because they spend too much time on computers rather than reading books, but are also a tragic reflection of the education they have received.
Nor has it helped that the UK has a relatively low proportion of students from disadvantaged backgrounds. And having some of the world’s ‘best-educated’ parents has not improved the standards of Britain’s children – raising serious questions about the effective role of parents in UK schools.

Serious questions indeed – and the lack of parental concern in 21st century Britain is buttressed by the Daily Mail which seeks to undermine any attempt by schools to inculcate into parental minds that, unless we publicly value the process of education we shall slip further and further behind countries like China where parents will make every sacrifice to install a love and respect for learning in their children.

Shame on you, Frances White, for sending a message to your sons that schooling should never be allowed to interfere with social pleasures – and a curse on the morons at the Daily Mai – and it’s readers – for proclaiming Frances White as a martyr.

Much talk this week about London Mayor Boris Johnson’s impact on the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham and speculation about a possible tilt at the leadership some time in the future.

Prime Minister David Cameron is playing a dual game on this. “Friends” are saying that Cameron is extremely “relaxed” about Boris while other political and media surrogates are peddling the line of Boris being great for a laugh but being essentially a “buffoon” no real substance.

Looking at our current collection of so called political “leaders” at present – Cameron, Osborne, Clegg, Milliband, Balls – one might be tempted to paraphrase George II’s alleged remark about General James Wolfe…

“Buffoon is he? Then I hope he will bite some of my other politicians”…….

hhhhmmmm….former BBC Director General Mark Thompson, soon to take up his new job as CEO of the New York Times has just been asked a rather awkward question – how much did he know about the pulling of a BBC programme that investigated allegations that a top BBC star, Jimmy Savile, who died in 2011, was a serial abuser of underage girls.

Although the BBC pulled the programme their rivals at ITV aired a more extensive exposure a few days ago which has forced the BBC onto the back foot.
Thompson claims he had nothing to do with cancelling the Newsnight piece and was totally unaware of the rumours about Savile that had been circulating around the BBC for many years.

After Savile died on October 29 last year, Newsnight spent six weeks investigating allegations that he abused pupils from Duncroft school in Surrey at the height of his fame in the 1970s.
BBC journalists spoke to ten women who claimed they had been abused or had knowledge of abuse at the school, which shut in 1980.
But the investigation was never aired after Peter Rippon, editor of Newsnight, decided to abandon the broadcast in December, shortly before the BBC broadcast three tributes to Savile over Christmas.
After it was dropped, an angry BBC journalist is said to have cornered Mr Thompson at a Christmas drinks party in London to complain.

Thompson got the job at the NYT because of his reputation as a smooth operator with his finger on the pulse of his organisation – yet he claims to be totally oblivious of the implications for the BBC of the Savile programme being pulled.

That’s OK then…..

Sombre words of warning from the former Auditor General of Scotland, Bob Black and, more surprisingly, from the leader of the Scottish Labour Party, Johann Lamont. Although addressed to Alex Salmond and his SNP government in Scotland the message they convey should resonate not only across the border with England but even further afield in Europe and the USA.

Black called for a debate ‘as a society’ on spending plans for universal services, which in Scotland include free prescriptions and a council tax freeze. ‘We do have to revisit it. Every pound that goes on free services, such as bus passes for well-off older people, is not there to do other things,’ he said.

Lamont followed the same path

‘someone always pays in the end’ for universal services. She added: ‘I believe our resources must go to those in greatest need.

‘If we wish to continue some policies as they are then they come with a cost which has to be paid for either through increased taxation, direct charges or cuts elsewhere. If we do not confront these hard decisions soon, then the choice will be taken from us when we will be left with little options.’

In other words this is a debate that must be held at an adult level.

‘We need to get to a place where we can talk about these things quite frankly and openly, tolerate differences of opinion being expressed, and then allow the politicians to absorb that information, take it forward and develop the policies.

This would be a bitter pill for Salmond and the SNP tp swallow because their chip on the shoulder nationalist rhetoric has never been rooted in economic reality. Instead they have encouraged Scots to fall for the oldest confidence trick in the book – the free lunch.

Not that the Cameron/Clegg coalition in England is much better. For all the talk of “cuts” the fact is that government expenditure in the UK is increasing and will continue to increase over the next few years – but the increase will be a tad less than it would have been if Labour had been re-elected in 2010.

Moreover, although budgets have been reduced across several areas, Cameron has ring fenced spending in the NHS – the biggest “universal free service” of all – as well as pleasing the Guardianistas by protecting the overseas aid budget. In addition, of course, he and his government have dared not grasp the nettle of free bus passes and heating allowances for all old age pensioners, including those who holiday with Saga and overcrowd weekday golf courses.

But it’s not just politicians who have to face up to reality – it is also we the people. As Black has said there must be a “frank and open debate” with no histrionics, no bloody shrouds being waved by producer interest groups like doctors, teachers and local government workers, no sob stories commissioned by the BBC.

The tragedy is that none of the major UK political parties dares to ask the public to face the facts. Like the BBC over Jimmy Savile, our political elite prefers to pretend the problem doesn’t exist and, if they go ostrich, it will go away.

What an opportunity for UKIP to campaign on cold hard facts…..

Sorry but we can no longer afford to pay out so much money for benefits, “free” healthcare, protected public sector pensions, overseas aid, free bus passes for pensioners, arts subsidies etc etc. We believe it is immoral to pass on massive debts to our children and grandchildren. So this is what we promise. If you elect us we will reduce taxation but, in return, you must expect to pay a contribution for public services that were once “free”

I think such a manifesto might not be a political suicide note. Maybe, at last, we, the electorate, want to be treated, for the first time in decades , as adults….