The problem with tonight’s BBC News at Ten
The Tories are doing their best to push the government into a corner tonight over claims of cuts of ten per cent in spending.
That what’s is being discussed is a leak of Treasury civil service advice to ministers – rather than a leak of ministers’ views – is somewhat being obscured.
But the BBC’s report this evening on the 10pm news on this matter unfortunately went wildly off beam. At the end of the main item on the “10 per cent” story Nick Robinson entered into one of those “there was more bad news for the PM tonight” type riffs with, surprise surprise, a Daily Mail story – this time one reporting that a government minister had employed an illegal immigrant as a housekeeper.
It is a classic dog-whistle for the Daily Mail. Even better for Mail and its relentlessly reactionary agenda (given free publicity on the BBC news at ten) the minister, Baroness Scotland, is black.
Scotland says she did not know that the housekeeper was here illegally. I can’t see anything anywhere that so far contradicts what she says.
“She hired Ms Tapui in good faith and saw documents which led her to believe that Ms Tapui was entitled to work in this country,” her spokesman says. “At no stage prior to the matter being raised did Baroness Scotland believe there was any question over Ms Tapui’s entitlement to work.” Scotland in fact paid tax and national insurance on the employee’s wages.
More to the point, the story has nothing to do with the item about Treasury advice to ministers about the economy. Zero. Yet it was thrown into the package to completely explicitly reinforce the narrative of the beleagured PM. Anything that fits this narrative is fair game, regardless of its relative weight or its source.
According to the BBC’s website, “The BBC’s Political Editor Nick Robinson said the disclosures would be embarrassing for Mr Brown, given Baroness Scotland’s seniority and ministerial responsibilities.”
He was hardly going to say anything else. If he’d said that the story was relatively small then there would have been no basis for gratuitously building it up in the main political item – and overall lead item – on the BBC Ten O’Clock News. All the BBC did by flinging the Baroness Scotland story into the main news report tonight was to build up the storyline of endless bad news for the PM, irrespective of any particular story’s individual merit.
Alastair Campbell writes in tomorrow’s New Statesman that many in the media are guided by their view that Cameron has already won. “Anything that points in that direction is news,” he writes. “Anything that doesn’t, isn’t”.
The BBC’s report tonight was an example of just that approach.
WTF? Are you really trying to say that the Attorney General breaking a law she has been making a big deal of strengthening is not a huge story? That it is only in the Mail because she is black? You do understand what an Attorney General is, don’t you?
This would not be acceptable in any front-bench MP or Peer in any party. That she is in government and in that position only makes it worse. She should have resigned as soon as she knew. That she did not just show how a corrupt Labour Party has debased government.
Whatever she thought about Ms Tapui’s status is utterly irrelevant. The standard her own government put in place is that she has to see and take copies of documents. It is clear-cut. Unless she can produce those copies (and she has not yet, so I doubt she can) then she has broken the law.
I don’t think it matters that Baroness Scotland is black, in fact I don’t think it is mentioned on The Mail website. I can only assume that you just needed a semi-coded way of saying “they are racists”. This may have some merit but you are just using it to diminish the story. Nice try.
It does matter that she seemingly broke the law and that she just so happens to be Attorney General. Someone who you would think would know about laws. Especially a law that, unless I am mistaken, she was involved in drafting. A law that requires people to view and copy documentation. A law that has a fine of £10K.
I do agree with the general thrust of the article, the media narrative being against Brown at the minute. I think it has been this way since last August. Talking of media narratives, here’s another one I think this also feeds in to, “One rule for them and One rule for us”
This is hillarious, not because of the content which I broadly agree with, but because this has been happening for about 15 years only the Labout Party has been the beneficiary. Now you’re on the receiving end and you don’t seem to like it and start screaming ‘that’s not fair’.