baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
I'm not in agreement with Lisa Nandy politically on everything, but this is exactly what needed to be said to Piers Morgan. You can't 'debate' with a hateful moron.

 

version

Well-known member
Please no.

Dominic Cummings’ think tank called for ‘end of BBC in current form’ and creation of Fox News equivalent in UK

Dominic Cummings ran a think tank that called for the end of the BBC “in its current form” and the creation of a UK version of Fox News.

The prime minister’s most senior adviser directed the New Frontiers Foundation when it branded the public broadcaster a “mortal enemy” of the Conservative Party.

In a series of blogs in 2004, the think tank repeatedly attacked the BBC and highlighted the importance of targeting its political coverage during any future EU referendum.

“There are three structural things that the right needs to happen in terms of communications,” the unidentified author wrote in a 17 September 2004 post preserved on the Wayback Machine internet archive.

“1) the undermining of the BBC’s credibility; 2) the creation of a Fox News equivalent / talk radio shows / bloggers etc to shift the centre of gravity; 3) the end of the ban on TV political advertising...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...n-think-tank-new-frontiers-blog-a9296411.html
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
The idea that the BBC is a mortal enemy of the Conservative Party is...insane. Whenever anything controversial happens, It makes Sky News look like a bastion of left wing thought.
 

version

Well-known member
If the Tories keep doing stuff like this, Labour are probably done.

Small music venues to get 50% reduction in business rates

The government has committed to reducing business rates for small and medium-sized music venues in England and Wales for the first time. The 50% reduction available to smaller retailers will be extended to 230 small and medium-sized music venues with a rateable value below £51,000. Independent cinemas will also benefit from the reduction.

The Music Venue Trust estimates that the move will save each site an average of £7,500 a year, and release more than £1.7m back into the grassroots live music sector. Music Venue Trust strategic director Beverley Whitrick said it was a “much needed and long overdue boost".

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2...-venues-to-get-50-reduction-in-business-rates
 

version

Well-known member
I guess it does mean Corbyn was right when he said he won the argument as he's pushed them to the left in some respects and they're investing in things they otherwise wouldn't.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Has anyone seen this film in which a bunch of well-meaning intellectuals create and give too much power to a monstrous creature whose momentum takes them to terrible places they had never imagined, ultimately destroying their credibility and making them unelectable (or something like that)?

 

craner

Beast of Burden
Has anyone seen this film in which a bunch of well-meaning intellectuals create and give too much power to a monstrous creature whose momentum takes them to terrible places they had never imagined, ultimately destroying their credibility and making them unelectable (or something like that)?


This looks incredible!
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
It does look rather promising but I have to admit I only heard of it about five minutes before you did so I can't confirm.
 

version

Well-known member
It’s time to pick a side in Boris Johnson’s war on the media

Boris Johnson is the first party leader of the media age. Winston Churchill and Michael Foot wrote extensively. But Johnson is a journalist. Before he went into politics, producing Tory commentary and editing this magazine were the achievements that defined him.

And yet no modern prime minister has shown a greater determination to limit media scrutiny. Whether it is banning ministers from appearing on the Today programme and Good Morning Britain, or banning them and their special advisers from talking to journalists, Johnson is revealing himself to be a brooding suspicious politician, wholly at odds with his cheeky chappie persona. Even when a terrorist attacked civilians on a London street, ministers were “not available” to speak to the public.

I suspect there is a strong element of projection at play. It is because Johnson was a partisan columnist that he is an enemy of press freedom. He assumes all journalists are like him, and that they will twist, distort and censor accordingly.

You can see the same projection in the policing of his colleagues. Just as a general who has seized power in a military coup keeps a close eye on his army to make sure no one else is thinking of using the same tactics against him, so Johnson is determined his ministers can never dream of repeating his tricks.

Johnson won power by exploiting his mastery of the media, which was so assured journalists referred to him as “Boris” – the readers’ and viewers’ friend. He is making sure that potential rivals in Cabinet do not build an independent base by threatening to fire ministers who talk to journalists.

Johnson appealed over the heads of David Cameron and Theresa May to party members. Naturally, he is making sure Conservative ministers cannot do unto him as he did unto Cameron and May. It is working for now. So successful has Johnson been in diminishing his colleagues, that if the prime minister’s time among us were to end tomorrow, I have no idea who would have the stature and political base to succeed him. There’s only room for one “big beast” in Boris Johnson’s zoo.

If he sees himself in every journalist and politician he meets, is it any wonder he is so paranoid and so determined to prove, that if WH Auden’s bleak description of narcissistic humanity does not apply to everyone, it most certainly applies to him:

‘For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone’
 

version

Well-known member
Has Dominic Cummings overplayed his hand?

When Boris Johnson first approached Dominic Cummings during the Conservative leadership election, the former Vote Leave mastermind played hard to get.

“He said he needed to be in charge of everything,” one source privy to the discussions at the time said.

They were, he joked, his “terrorist demands” of a prime minister-in-waiting who badly needed a heavyweight enforcer. It took several meetings before the men could agree terms.

But despite the promise since Mr Johnson’s emphatic election victory two months ago, ministers have ruefully noted that Mr Cummings has been on the losing side of the most significant domestic arguments that have landed on the prime minister’s desk.

He vehemently opposed giving the go-ahead to the HS2 rail network that he described as a “disaster zone” and was a hawk on allowing the Chinese tech giant Huawei access to the UK’s 5G networks. Yesterday Mr Cummings was pictured entering Downing Street carrying a book called Chinese Spies on the growth of Beijing’s intelligence network.

Meanwhile, his radical plan to slim down the cabinet and create a trade and business ministry has also been ditched.

The civil service, well used to political zealots, has also seen off his attempts to bring “weirdos and misfits” into Whitehall, pointing out — respectfully — that even the prime minister’s chief of staff could not recruit civil servants.

He even failed in his more modest proposal to rearrange the Downing Street office space when Mr Johnson decided that he didn’t want to leave his study to become part of a Nasa-style mission control centre.

It has led those, who at first feared Mr Cummings as an almost Rasputin-like power behind Mr Johnson’s throne, to question just how far his writ runs.

As one senior government figure put it: “Whenever you get a new team of aides in Downing Street they want to exert their influence. But after a while things always settle down and the normal structures of government reassert themselves.”

Each of the decisions that has gone against Mr Cummings has had a different rationale but they speak to a broader issue that faces prime ministers who are urged to support radical reform.

In the case of HS2 Mr Johnson was persuaded to support the scheme over Mr Cummings’s objections for several reasons.

He was under intense lobbying pressure from Andy Street, the Conservative mayor of the West Midlands who is facing re-election in May. Then a series of big businesses, including HSBC, which had relocated large parts of its operations to Birmingham on the promise of the line, threatened to speak out if the plug were pulled.

Meanwhile Savid Javid, the chancellor, warned that pulling the project would cost billions of pounds in sunk costs and could not be easily replaced by smaller, more effective rail projects. The decision has yet to be announced — but Mr Cummings’s objections have been over-ruled.

Political considerations also torpedoed Mr Cummings’s plans to reshape Whitehall.

He wanted to reduce the size of the cabinet as well as abolishing the culture and international development departments and merging the business and trade portfolios under one minister.

But the original proposal has now been massively scaled back after whips warned Mr Johnson that a smaller cabinet would reduce his power of patronage and create unnecessary enemies from sacked cabinet ministers on the back benches.

At the same time when Sir Mark Sedwill, the cabinet secretary, established a high-powered team of civil servants to work through Mr Cummings’s “machinery of government changes” the plan was swiftly reassessed.

“It quickly became clear that all our energy was going to be spent moving people around rather than getting on and doing things,” said one adviser.

Other eye-catching initiatives have also fallen flat.

A leaked proposal to move Tory HQ to the north of England was disowned and a ban on ministers from the “people’s government” sipping “champagne with billionaires” at Davos was ignored by Mr Javid. Plans to force the House of Lords to relocate to York have also gone quiet.

At the same time Mr Cummings has got much of the blame for Downing Street’s aggressive media strategy in which ministers have been banned from Today on BBC Radio 4 and newspaper journalists barred from official briefings.

His handling — and the subsequent briefing — of the sacking of the government’s climate tsar Claire O’Neill is also seen to have badly misfired. She chose to use Today to take her revenge, accusing Mr Johnson of “not getting” climate change on the day the prime minister was due to launch COP26.

Some ministerial aides have speculated that, with Brexit now done, the frustrations of government may sooner rather than later cause Mr Cummings to reassess his position.

But those close to him deny this. They say his reforming zeal is undimmed even if it is not always shared by his boss.

They point to his time in the Department for Education working for Michael Gove when he was never happier than engaging in trench warfare with the parts of the media, the educational establishment and quite often Downing Street.

As one put it, in the kind of emotive language favoured by Mr Cummings himself: “Whitehall is littered with the bodies of those who have underestimated Dom.”

Chinese whispers

Mr Cummings has told advisers to read books by Silicon Valley tech bosses. Now weeks after Mr Johnson gave the go-ahead to Huawei to take a stake in Britain’s 5G network he appears to have espionage on his mind.

He walked into Downing Street yesterday with a copy of Chinese Spies — a book on Beijing’s intelligence services by Roger Faligot. But Mr Cummings — who opposed the Huawei decision — may find solace in its conclusions. A Times review suggested it showed China’s spies were too devious for their own good. “In their constant quest to discover the imagined layers of meaning . . . the spooks may be tying themselves in knots,” Roger Boyes wrote.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Richard Burgeon:
Today I'm announcing my plan for a Labour Peace Pledge.

This will change Labour's constitution so our Party never again backs military action abroad without the explicit backing of party members, except in a national emergency or where there's UN backing.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Richard Burgeon:
Today I'm announcing my plan for a Labour Peace Pledge.

This will change Labour's constitution so our Party never again backs military action abroad without the explicit backing of party members, except in a national emergency or where there's UN backing.

Them pink-faced men on Question Time who hounded Corbyn about whether he would press the button and unleash a thermonuclear war will LOVE this one. Maybe they will explode themselves?

Probably not a vote winner, but the right thing to do.

That said, it would have been fairly easy to spin the dodgy dossier that lead to the 2003 Iraq War as a national emergency.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Them pink-faced men on Question Time who hounded Corbyn about whether he would press the button and unleash a thermonuclear war will LOVE this one. Maybe they will explode themselves?

Probably not a vote winner, but the right thing to do.

That said, it would have been fairly easy to spin the dodgy dossier that lead to the 2003 Iraq War as a national emergency.

No it isn't. It's assuming that the Labour Party members (on £3 a month or whatever it is) have a better handle of national security issues than people whose actual job it is to think about this stuff, full time, read security briefings etc. It's idiotic and a pretty naked play to the " any military action ever is bad" biases of these cretins.

Moreover, as you say, will give the stories a stick to beat Labour with for the next 5 years.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
One of the many, many, many stupid things about this idea is that it assumes our information environment is in some way sensible, not dysfucntional, toxic and churning out industrial quantities of disinformation every day. Which would of course get loads worse if ever this crackpot idea got implemented. It wont't be but still.
 
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