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BASHING BANKERS – why the BBC does it
Britain’s State broadcaster, the BBC, appears to be on a campaign to demonise well paid bankers. For weeks now, every morning, on its propaganda show (The Today Programme) it mentions them disapprovingly.
It is not hard to understand why. State officials do not want us to blame excessive public spending for the mess we’re in. (It should not surprise us that the BBC’s public-sector journalists rarely if ever mention that State spending is so incontinent that the country is sinking further into debt at a rate of about £14 billion a month. To the public sector 'cuts' are always the problem. Never too much spending.).
Bankers are useful scapegoats, and vilifying them helps to fan the dying embers of the old class struggle, which provides the excuse for State intervention. (Of course, to the nit-picking old Marxists among us, the story doesn’t quite fit. As Dominic Lawson points out, people who work in banks, no matter what their salary, are not capitalists. They are well paid employees. But let’s not split hairs).
This Banker-Bashing, class-struggle stuff is failing to convince listeners. After a BBC official called James Naughtie repeatedly berated an obviously talented banker called Stephen Hester, the BBC received numerous emails from listeners coming to the defence of the banker.
What the listeners know, and what the BBC would rather we didn’t, is that the nature of class struggle has changed. In the old days, socialists told us that the ‘bosses’ were fleecing the workers. But when working people today look in their wage packet and discover, to their dismay, that almost half the money has gone (more than half if you include VAT), they know it isn’t ‘the bosses’, or a few well paid bankers who have taken it. It’s the State. Socialism has been reduced to robbing workers in the private sector to keep the middle-class public-sector gravy train rolling.
There is a new class conflict. Beleaguered, productive tax-producers in the private sector, are lined up against legions of parasitic tax-consumers in the public sector. The BBC is not an impartial voice in this great struggle.
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I've always been somewhat
Submitted by Brian H on Wed, 16/05/2012 - 02:50.
I've always been somewhat reluctant to buy into the adage that a democratic country is doomed as soon as the populace twigs to the fact that it can vote itself spiraling payouts of other people's money, unaware that they are other people's other people.
But the UK is well on its way to making a believer of me.
Yes, I fully agree with you.
Submitted by archibald hunter on Fri, 10/02/2012 - 11:57.
Yes, I fully agree with you. It is socialism that has brought the monetary system close to collapse and socialism that has brought the EU to its knees. The general public have been on a learning curve since the election. I still find it hard to get my head around the sheer scale of the wages paid to people working for the BBC - even very shoddy journalists earn big sums of money, and as for the crew at Springwatch and other programmes, their wages are sky high in comparison with their worthiness. Even more eye opening are the eye watering sums paid out by social security. People whose only aim in life is to sit in front of the TV and watch mindless dross are picking up vast sums of money at the expense of the mugs that go out to work. Why should anyone earning less than £25,000 bother to go out to work - what is the incentive (apart from personal pride). It wouldn't be so bad if the lazy gits that stay at home were occupying their minds with useful stuff - but the opposite is true. We are paying them to be lazy - was that why the Labour party was founded. I was a union rep for a while and I gave up as the only people that came to see me were the lazy and workshy people that wanted an excuse for a few weeks on sick leave and those who wanted something for nothing. The majority of union members got on with their work and never bothered the shop steward - apart from the annual pay round. That was all they were really interested in - and the fact they had somewhere to go if they fell foul of their employer, a sort of insurance policy. Hence, on occasion shop stewards were able to be really useful by taking advantage of the Union legal team and that kind of thing. However, if you were made redundant - bang. That was it, even if you were the local union rep. The union disappeared from your life as fast as you could flick a light switch.
All forms of socialism are in the end self destructive. The unions fell out of favour in the Thatcher era because they became too political - and assumed union members should bow to union leaders political beliefs. Thatcher appealed to many working class people because she brought back a little pride in the concept of nation - and got rid of a lot of bad practise in nationalised industries. In the long term Thatcher was bad for working class people and I'm happy to say I was never persuaded to vote Conservative. Why the railways were split up in the way they were is a case in point. One lot in charge of the track and another to run the trains. In addition, car parks were sold off to private enterprise which must have been a capitalist dream come true, a stretch of tarmac fetching in huge sums of money that is always on the increase and with a captured audience so to speak. Then we had all the property sold off in the privatisations such as hotels and sideings (railways) and sports grounds and gas works for example so that nowadays there is nowhere to store the gas that is waiting to be frakked out of the ground. Very short sighted policies all round and not very good for the country in the long term. Thatcher shied away from the real problems - social security and immigration. Labour likewise ignored them and they are getting bigger problems by the day. I don't know what the solution is but I can see economic woes a plenty in the future - and the people responsible are in denial. Stopping immigration of all kinds would reduce the pressure on the housing market, reduce the escalating social security bill and open up jobs for those looking for them. Sending immigrants home, especially those who have arrived by the back door, would make the situation even better, and coming out of the EU would make it possible for us to refuse to pay social security to all those people claiming EU nationality. It would be an instantaneous boost to the economy and allow house prices to fall to a level that young people can afford. Lets face facts, as it stands now we are likely to get a large number of Greeks come over here as their economy becomes still more problematic, and after that, Italians? Spanish and Portuguese? Hungarians? Where is the money going to come from to pay out all that money. Basically, it means that ordinary folk who have been made redundant will have their benefits capped, even though they have been paying out all their life for just such an eventuality. Was it worth it? No.
