Hello BBC - Your Team Lost

Winston Churchill once said that he knew very little about economics, but he did know that shooting Montagu Norman would have been a good thing. Churchill had relied heavily on the advice of the then Governor of the Bank of England when he was made Chancellor of the Exchequer by Stanley Baldwin in the latter’s 1924 to 1929 Government. The sentiment concerned one issue.

A most unfortunate juxtaposition

Norman had been highly supportive of returning Sterling to the Gold Standard, and at the pre-World War 1 rate of one pound to 4.86 US Dollars. The obvious problem was that Sterling was by this time worth no more than around $4.40. The initially lauded return to Gold had the effect of increasing the cost of UK exports by around 10%. So those abroad went elsewhere.

Norman and his counterparts from France and Germany then went to the USA to ask if the folks Stateside could perhaps alleviate the situation by a little loosening of monetary policy, which they duly did. From that point, rather a lot of the easier money went on purchasing common stocks, with the result that an overheated stock market crashed in late 1929.

Now, I know very little about the internal machinations of the BBC, but I do know that removing Robbie Gibb - permanently - from the Corporation would be a good thing. Anyone who is comfortable sharing a platform with the luminaries of the so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance, and the rest of the Tufton Street alphabet soup brigade, has no place at our national broadcaster.

Looking at the Beeb’s website this morning, one could be forgiven for concluding that it was the Tories who won last week’s General Election, such is the glaring bias in coverage. The faux “equivalence” is there in the first UK News headline: “Starmer heading to Scotland as Jenrick says Tories failed to deliver”. Who gives a flying foxtrot what Robert bloody Jenrick thinks?

Scroll down a little and it gets worse: “Who could replace Rishi Sunak as party leader?” Only in the sub-heading does the word CONSERVATIVES appear. Default party = Tory party. Scroll down a bit more, to Latest Updates. “A quick guide to the PM who only lasted 45 days” is followed by “A very quick guide to Penny Mordaunt” and “A quick guide to Rishi Sunak”.

Not only are those features about Tories, but the first two lost their seats. And what’s this? “Gloomy in Looe as fishermen reflect on Labour coup”. Tanks on the streets, was it? It didn’t get any better when the Laura Kuenssberg show had its first post-election airing. Jenrick was one of two Tories given a platform. That’s the party with just 121 MPs. As opposed to Labour with 411.

Ed Davey, whose party put on another 61 MPs to reach a record high for them of 72, was greeted by the grudging “Congratulations, I suppose”. Former Chief Prosecutor Nazir Afzal summed it up: “Laura Kuenssberg seems to be finding it hard to be in opposition”. So Jenrick is kicking off the Tory leadership race? Who cares? They’re out of it. Stop promoting them.

Likewise, the effective awarding of a season ticket for Question Time and other shows to Reform UK Oberscheissenführer Nigel “Thirsty” Farage has to stop: his is a fringe party with just five seats. If he and his pals get access, so should the Greens. So they got a lot of votes. So did the Liberals in 1974, and the Liberal-SDP Alliance in 1983. Did the Beeb give them season tickets, too?

Giving the Tories such prominence despite their drubbing last week, and worse, giving a platform to the kinds of Tories who belong firmly in the wacko fringe, is out of order. Questionable displays of “impartiality” - pitting those with comprehensive knowledge of a subject against lobby group activists with bad faith talking points - should also be brought to an end.

That means serving up news and current affairs in a genuinely even-handed manner. No Astroturf lobby groups, especially those who decline to say who funds them. Fact check those known to peddle assertions of dubious veracity. No more Question Time audience plants. And let the Tories run their own leadership contest. They’ve got enough pals in the press as it is.

Robbie Gibb at the BBC was for a time, but not for all time. Order the taxi.

Enjoy your visit to Zelo Street? You can help this truly independent blog carry on talking truth to power, while retaining its sense of humour, by becoming a Patron on Patreon at

https://www.patreon.com/Timfenton

Labour Landslide - Slow Handclap

And so ends the 2024 General Election campaign, the triumphant end point of the mission, so the media narrative goes, to make the Labour Party electable once more, with voters now able to make the positive choice to vote for The Red Team. After all, Labour now had a 170 seat majority, and had won in a landslide. But that electable positive choice was absent elsewhere.

New and electable leader secures for Labour ...

It was left to master pollster John Curtice to bring Labour cheerleaders the bad news: “Actually, but for the rise of the Labour Party in Scotland... we would be reporting that basically Labour’s vote has not changed from what it was in 2019”. In fact, the party garnered fewer votes than in 2019.

You remember 2019? Labour allegedly in the grip of “trots”, beset by claims of institutional anti-Semitism, when rather a lot of people within the party, it has since been alleged, either didn’t bother to campaign for its then leader, or tried their damnedest to throw the contest. Yes, totally unelectable Labour scored more votes than new and totally different Labour.

How such a thing could happen, and with such a different result, is down to the Tory vote collapsing - and the First Past The Post voting system. Labour’s vote share was up on 2019, but turnout was, shamefully, lower at something like 60%. The “Landslide on 34%” has now incurred the displeasure of the Daily Mail, calling it a “Loveless landslide”. There will be more of that.

And while the Tories were duly turfed out, Labour’s stance on the Gaza conflict, Starmer’s clumsy mention of “returning people to Bangladesh”, its below shitty treatment of former leader Jeremy Corbyn, and equally shitty treatment of some of its candidates deserve analysis, as does the patently ridiculous behaviour of some of those client journalists out there.

Corbyn stood as an independent. Labour’s choice of Praful Nargund was staggeringly arrogant: here was someone who had made a lot of money in the healthcare business. A series of party luminaries let it be known that they were campaigning against Jezza. And then came the superior insights of the New Statesman magazine, starting with pundit Rachel Cunliffe.

Here was her schtick, delivered on live TV: “I have always found the argument that Jeremy Corbyn is such a prominent local figure, that he would be able to mount a strong, independent campaign. That has never really chimed with my experience living in the constituency. He certainly wasn’t particularly active in the time that I was there”. Would a Tweet/X/Whatever extolling the analysis of Ben Walker and Finn McRedmond add more?

... fewer votes than his predecessor. Who won his seat, thanks

It certainly would. “A few weeks ago Novara Media tried to claim that Labour's 14-point lead over Jeremy Corbyn in this seat was a narrow gap. It really isn't. But it has narrowed slightly”. Get sneering! Nose a little higher in the air, eh? Corbyn won, with a majority of more than 7,000. The Staggers? Meet the new client journalists, not so different from the old client journalists.

The new authoritarian Labour Party had other problems, too. In Chingford and Woodford Green, the cynical last-minute sidelining of Faiza Shaheen, on whom Keir Starmer had showered so much praise, resulted in her running as an independent, the anti-Tory vote splitting, and Iain Duncan Cough living to fight another day. And no, it was not Ms Shaheen’s fault. It was Labour’s.

Had the ousting not taken place, she would have won. Who did the ousting? The newly authoritarian Labour Party. For party loyalist Jonathan Ashworth, it got much worse: he lost his seat to a pro-Palestinian independent. Wes Streeting came close as Leanne Mohamad got within 530 votes of dispatching him. He described the campaign as “ugly”.

Which is an interesting way of saying “I nearly got humiliated by one of those Scary Muslims™”. How “ugly” is it for tens of thousands of Gazans to be randomly blown to pieces, Wes? Streeting, whose reputation at this blog was shredded when he failed to call out Tom Harwood’s lying on Question Time, needs to ask himself why he nearly lost, which he may not.

Starmer himself experienced a fall in vote share and number of votes cast for him. He also had to contend with a significant independent campaign from Andrew Feinstein. Labour lost Dewsbury and Batley to an independent by almost 7,000 votes. They lost Blackburn. They kicked out and then patronised Jo Bird, who has came second in Birkenhead for the Greens.

Calling for a ceasefire in Gaza is not anti-Semitic, or indeed anti-Israel. Labour could have done that and headed off all the grief. Instead, a large part of their core vote has been alienated. On the other side of politics, the far right now has a presence in Parliament, given yet more airtime yesterday evening by the BBC, which really has had a dreadful election.

Relying on Tory collapse in order to win cannot be repeated. Realisation has dawned that Labour is beatable. Slow handclap, authoritarians.

Enjoy your visit to Zelo Street? You can help this truly independent blog carry on talking truth to power, while retaining its sense of humour, by becoming a Patron on Patreon at

https://www.patreon.com/Timfenton

Election Day Press Shame

The day has finally dawned, when, if the latest poll is to be believed, Labour will sweep to a tally of well over 400 MPs, with the Tories facing something between annihilation and wipeout. The conclusion to the election campaign is as obvious now as it has been since Rishi Sunak went to see Brian in late May, his pals bet on the election date, and Labour were thereby alerted.

Turnout looks as if it may be on the high side: good. Sunak might, just might, provide the ultimate Portillo moment of the night as it looks possible that he could lose his seat. Five-figure Tory majorities are set to fall across the country, with at least one poll suggesting that Esther McVey in true blue Tatton could be a casualty. The Tories may end up with fewer than 100 seats.

If The Blue Team does worse even than that low bar, we could be looking at their being replaced as the official opposition by the Lib Dems. All of the foregoing is shaping up to provide excellent spectator sport after polls close at 2200 hours. But for one group of observers, there is a fear and foreboding in the air. They are the right-leaning part of our free and fearless press.

While the Murdoch Sun has done a screeching U-Turn during the week, going from attacking Labour to telling their remaining readers that Keir Starmer and his pals are actually the winning team, and the Sunday Times has also backed The Red Team, the daily title under the editorship of the deeply unpleasant Tony Gallagher has gone into fence-sitting mode.

Not so the Daily Brexit, still called the Express, which is pleading with any readers not yet asleep to back the Tories. The increasingly desperate and downmarket Telegraph has invented a Labour council tax raid. The Mail is trying to get readers not to back Reform UK. It is in a blind panic.

“Soaring taxes [no citation], uncontrolled immigration [no citation] … rampant wokery [meaningless drivel], betrayal of women’s rights [should be right up the Mail’s street, then], Net Zero mania [there is no mania], weaker defence [no citation], surrender of our Brexit freedoms [what ‘Brexit freedoms’ would those be, then?] - and votes at 16 to ‘rig’ future elections [is that in the Labour manifesto? I blinked and missed it]” And the “Supermajority” crap, too.

As well as the blatantly dishonest “You can stop it”. Right now, those Daily Mail readers with whom the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre had his imaginary “conversations” are queuing up at polling stations to vote out his preferred party of Government. After 14 years of ineptitude, corruption, waste, cronyism, cruelty, gaslighting, dishonesty, and rampant self-interest.

But what frightens the press more is that they have thus far failed to coax any assurance out of the Starmer team that there will be no return to Part 2 of the Leveson Inquiry, and the associated prospect of properly independent press regulation. No assurance that the press will be able to carry on behaving as badly as they see fit. Hence the panic, more lying, and scare stories.

Because a Government with a three-figure majority need not fear what all those obscenely overmonied hacks and pundits do in their efforts to derail whatever agenda is put before Parliament. If Labour triggers Leveson 2, not all the press lobbying in the Western world will stop it. Seeing what the press got up to for all those years will begin to turn the public’s heads. Good.

Worse for the press, the proliferation of poverty, those thousands of food banks, many working full time and still unable to make ends meet, will count against them. Why buy a paper when those who contribute to its production have so little understanding of how difficult life is for those hardworking people whom they claim to champion? They don’t care. Like the Tories.

The voters listened to the press, and their pals in all those Astroturf lobby groups. It got them a country that is in serious decline, a health service that is on its knees, roads that are literally falling apart, public transport that is either absent or expensive, a Police service that is mostly ineffective, and all they see is rich people filling their pockets. Then they see the press.

A press supporting more cruelty and more poverty. Don’t forget to vote.

Enjoy your visit to Zelo Street? You can help this truly independent blog carry on talking truth to power, while retaining its sense of humour, by becoming a Patron on Patreon at

https://www.patreon.com/Timfenton

Behold The New Entitled Elite

One word that endures, whoever is in power, is Entitlement. It was on display throughout the tenure of disgraced former alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson; this, sadly, continued through the blessedly brief interregnum of batshit and utterly inept Liz Truss, and has been maintained by the self-promoting failure that is Rishi Sunak.

The New Elite 1 - Luke Akehurst ...

What has become clear, furthermore, is that, in its own way, entitlement will be the name of the game for Labour when, as now seems inevitable, the Party clears out the Tories tomorrow and takes power for the first time since 2010. The new entitled elite will not be Something In The City, and nor will they have a berth in or near 55 Tufton Street. But they will still be entitled.

And they will still be elite, although in a different way. Not for the up-and-coming Labour entitled elite the moonlighting on Gammon Broadcasting™ News (“Bacon’s News Channel”). Not for them the column in the Mail, Telegraph, Express, or indeed the Spectator, the latter’s summer parties about to become a sad irrelevance, and deservedly so.

No, the new Entitled Elite of Labour will show their entitlement through their hold on power, on the party, controlling who is in, who is out, who is to be praised, and who has incurred their displeasure. Availability of directorships is out. Ennoblement may only be temporary, unlike the Tories. Seats in the Commons, SpAd appointments, vacancies for backroom plotters, are in.

They will be featured in the Guardian (BTDTGTTS), or in some cases, they already have been, such is the swaggering confidence bordering on downright arrogance. We’ve seen Spreadsheet Shitlord Extraordinaire Luke “Arthur Putey” Akehurst described in almost fawning terms - “Really Nice Guy” - before he was imposed on the constituency of North Durham.

Also given a fawning write-up in the same paper has been Morgan McSweeney, readers told how he is supposedly considering only allowing sitting MPs to vote on a new Labour leader, should the need arise between General Elections. Which sounds like a reduction in democracy. So does the implication that General Election manifestos be effectively imposed.

... The New Elite 2 - Morgan McSweeney

He, the Guardian feature suggests, will be entitled to A Big Job, come the expected victory. After all, he and Uncool Hand Luke stayed and fought the dastardly Rotten Lefties™. One sincerely hopes that staying and fighting also included backing the party in the 2017 and 2019 General Elections. Because it is all too clear that some others did not. And that is beyond unforgivable.

This may induce in some readers a sense of Déjà Vu, that we have been here before. So we have. It was a baffling attribute of the New Labour project that the control freakery extended to imposing Their Selected People on electorates such as those in Wales, and Greater London.

Hence the digging in of heels to stop Rhodri Morgan becoming First Minister of Wales. This did not go well, Ron Davies embroiled in a scandal, and Alun Michael departing before a no confidence vote. Also not going well was Frank Dobson’s candidacy for Mayor of London. After Ken Livingstone left Labour and stood as an independent, he won. Dobson came third, behind Tory hopeful “Shagger” Norris. Control freakery has a record of not working.

What is also clear is that the new Entitled Elite has no problem with the bouts of flat-out lying that have come with Starmer’s leadership. The current leader made all manner of promises to get the job, and has since reneged on every one of them. But this does not concern the new Entitled Elite, for the same reason that right-wing lobbyists don’t care that they lied too.

That reason is that, as with Vote Leave and subsequent Brexit negotiations, too many people in that party bubble see it all as a game. Lying to secure the EU referendum vote? It’s only a game, we won, you lost, tee hee hee. So it is with the new Entitled Elite. Candidates kicked out in favour of loyal bag carriers? We won, you lost, tee hee hee. But here a problem enters.

It’s not a game for tens of millions of screwed over voters. Just a thought.

Enjoy your visit to Zelo Street? You can help this truly independent blog carry on talking truth to power, while retaining its sense of humour, by becoming a Patron on Patreon at

https://www.patreon.com/Timfenton