The purpose of Bryan Appleyard’s article in The Sunday Times on April 23, 2006 was to argue that British television news is dull and lacks substance, whilst in America, anchors have “authority and zest”.

Interestingly, in passing he had this to say as well: -  

[The BBC’s] primary news shows are now unwatchable. Of course, they have long been unwatchable if you object to political bias. The BBC won’t listen, but I’m afraid that the case is unarguable. The corporation is suffused with soft left and hard anti-American prejudices that seep into almost all the news coverage. By the time one gets to Newsnight and sees Gavin Esler treating any old hoodlum or crook with extravagant respect before turning to sneer at some decent American congressman, one can find oneself indulging in that awful, crazed habit of shouting at the TV.  Looking down at the vast BBC newsroom, I once made this point to an executive, who just looked blankly back as if I had unaccountably lapsed into Hungarian. To get her attention, I asked her to tell me which newspapers she could see on the desks. Amid that sea of reporters, only one title was visible — the eccentrically left-leaning Independent. 

Many of us no longer watch or listen to BBC News because of this bias and those of us who still do take what we are told with a pinch of salt.  For a public broadcasting service this is unacceptable. We demand more balance.  A significant proportion of the Licence Fee paying public (almost certainly the majority) is not Soft Left or anti-American or very pro-European Union.  Perhaps the BBC should, before dismissing criticism out of hand, bear in mind that he who pays the piper, calls the tune.

The answer is nothing, save that it does not allow Mr Blair to get on with the important job he has in hand.  In The Daily Telegraph today, Simon Heffer addresses some questions to the Labour MPs who will grant Mr Blair the new powers he desires.  I should like to hear the answers.

An elected House of Lords might prove to be an unmitigated disaster.  In the unlikely event that its political composition was significantly different from the Commons, it should claim to have a mandate to balk any legislation with which it disagreed.  This could result in either deadlock or an unseemly, prolonged scrabble for a compromise that satisfies no one and accords with neither party’s manifesto commitments.  More likely, is that the upper house would more often than not reflect the political composition of its sister house, thereby ensuring that any Government of the day could simply ramrod through its entire legislative programme with little resistance.

The idea that members of the new upper house should be appointed also raises fears, particularly if any political organisation is able to influence the making of any appointment even to the slightest degree. However, if that risk can be eliminated, an appointed House of Lords comprising of the great and the good would be viable, though it would suffer two fatal weaknesses.  Without being elected, it could never possess the authority to stop dead bad or deeply unpopular legislation.  Should it seriously offend the Commons, it could find itself reformed into oblivion. An unelected upper house must be possessed of a weapon by which the Commons can be made to listen, even against its will.  Perhaps that power could be the right to call for a referendum upon the contentious issue at hand.[1]

What we must not forget is that Mr Blair is a man with a mission; a mission to get his way and ensure that his New Labour “legacy” lasts.  What better method than by creating an upper chamber that not only assists him to ramrod through his pet legislation but can balk any attempt to repeal the same by an incoming Government of differing political persuasion?  The current House of Lords and opposition parties must deal with Mr Blair and his plans to re-reform the upper chamber, robustly.

In his article in The Sunday Times today, Rod Liddle rightly rails against The Labour Government’s new proposals concerning rape law.  I have already made my views know regarding this matter in a recent post and previously.  The article deserves to be read in its entirety but Mr Liddle concludes: -

"Now the government wants to have it both ways: it wishes the legal system to assume that actions undertaken by a person who is drunk are in one case the responsibility of the individual who is drunk and in another case — the extremely serious charge of rape — they are not. This makes no sense, either moral, logical or legal.

 

Further, O’Brien’s [Mike O’Brien, the Solicitor General - the Government's second most senior Law Officer] proposed change to the law ignores the probability that people drink alcohol precisely in order to loosen their inhibitions and to enjoy the consequences that come from being in such a state. In other words, the state of dereliction or abandon in which they later find themselves was planned at the beginning of the evening. If this were not the case, why would people drink alcohol? Are we to assume that they drink not realising what is to become of them?

 

Not so long ago Amnesty International carried out a survey which revealed that a substantial minority of the British people thought that in some rape cases women were partially “responsible” for the crime. Again, this strikes me as not entirely stupid — and yet the poll results were greeted with unmitigated horror by Amnesty and indeed the media. The British public needs educating about rape, they all howled. But it does not. People live in the real world, rather than the political world: they know what rape is and the actions which might be taken by women to avoid it.

 

My guess is that they also know that when a woman drunkenly consents to sex it is not the same as rape, and that any later sense of culpability or shame rests in equal proportions upon the shoulders of the man and the woman, however “immoral” either party might consider the act to have been."

These new rape proposals are just the latest evidence of a wider malaise,[1]  but my real concern is how these imbalanced and so often clearly flawed ideas and opinions are fed to us by our “free” pro-Labour media.  We are softened up routinely by a creeping barrage of sympathetic, uncritical media reporting in support of the “new establishment” view.  Opponents of the new “consensus” are given short shrift or disparaged.[2]

A confederacy of disparate single issue pressure groups, united by their belief in the absolute righteousness of their cause, now have the ear of like minded individuals in the Government, the media and beyond.  Unable to forge a society in their image through the ballot box,  they use the media to manipulate the public by misinformation.  Their views are right and ours are wrong: so we need re-education.

The public perceives that it is not being told the truth and distrusts both journalists and politicians alike.  So long as this manipulation continues, politics will continue to be an irrelevance to the majority of people, television viewing figures will continue to fragment in favour of the entertainment channels and newspaper circulations will continue to fall.

There is an opportunity for the Conservatives here.  Over the course of the past ten years or more they have struggled to speak the same language as the electorate.  That language is very simple.  It is based upon common sense and the truth.  It is a language no longer spoken by either the Labour Government or the pro Labour media.  No amount of spin can hide that.