The Same Mistakes. Again – politicalbetting.com
The Same Mistakes. Again – politicalbetting.com
What do the BBC, the Met Police, the NHS, the Post Office and the City have in common? No, not the basis for a new competition programme – “Spot The Scandal” – (though if someone wants to “borrow” or “steal” this, remember I’m a litigator, a good one). The answer is this:
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Comments
Hope you're well.
There isn't objectivity in news reporting. Only awareness of one's own biases and a sincere attempt to mitigate them.
Or a blithe lack of it.
NEWS: The UK is no longer sharing intelligence with the US about suspected drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean because it does not want to be complicit in US military strikes and believes the attacks are illegal, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/11/11/politics/uk-suspends-caribbean-intelligence-sharing-us
A headhunter recently rang me about a job with the City of London Police, I am a man in demand.
It's History Repeating - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzLT6_TQmq8
As ever
- talking about being impartial isn't being impartial
- patting youself on the back about how your organisation has a reputation for being impartial, isn't being impartial
- demanding respect for being impartial, isn't being impartial
- Firing CEOs doesn't make you impartial
- Strongly worded statements of "lessons will be learned" doesn't make you impartial.
Being impartial makes you impartial.
Perfection is for the gods alone. But you need to *try* every damn day. Work at it. Think about it.
Do you think you could help them catch up with the Met?
It’s weird, in the past 18 months or so I have been sounded out for jobs working in a regulatory environment (going from poacher to gamekeeper) but all the jobs would mean I’d have to give up PB.
Deal breaker.
- Rory and Alistair: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgk8NjzsgJI
- New Statesman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyiUiNXzAZ0
- The News Agents: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzT7j3FkDO0
- The Rest Is Entertainment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mYnOsiSKao
For betting opportunities, the New Statesman points out that three women being discussed as DG replacement are:https://x.com/bohuslavskakate/status/1988223117421146475
"Orsknefteorgsintez" Oil Refinery, Orsk, Russia.
There's a tension here, becuase the best chance of stopping things like this happening is a combination of more supervision (which costs, and we collectively don't want to pay) and forgiveness (because throwing people to the wolves encourages the coverups).
Engineering has worked that out, and medicine is beginning to get there. But it sticks in the throat.
This is not some staff member within the organisation whistleblowing.
Those who can't see that it's part of a concerted cultural attack by the right just don't want to see.
BBC employees in open revolt about Robbie Gibb on all-staff call this morning. BBC chair Samir Shah said attacks on board members are "disrespectful" and shut down talk of a Conservative coup as "fanciful."
https://x.com/Jake_Kanter/status/1988211648977608829
Astonishing scenes from the @BBCNews meeting with Tim Davie and Samir Shah.
* Chairman said it was disrespectful to suggest board wasn’t upholding BBC values, causing widespread fury
* Explained the week long delay in commenting on @Telegraph leak was because of need to check facts. Telling that to a newsroom where they have to meet hourly deadlines again didn’t land well.
* Interview with Davie and Shah not conducted by any of the BBC presenters, but by head of internal comms
* Newsroom has been told it can use clips on bulletins of Davie praising staff, but none of Samir Shah
* am told mood is sulfurous and mutinous
https://x.com/jonsopel/status/1988249133556121900
Hopefully the Ukrainians can keep chipping away at Russia's oil infrastructure and supply,
Oh absolutely.
And I'd suggest that the best action to take with respect to this is not to try and be more impartial, which is a fool's errand, but to own and admit ones own biases and the journey that led to them.
But that's not a good narrative, especially when you're supposed to be putting a report together in the 'National interest' or running a public service broadcaster...
I suspect the governance arrangements at the BBC were probably okay for the pre-Boris/Trump era but now are utterly naive about the new politics.
Did they say you were a person of interest to them?
And ask you to come in for an interview?
In particular, this: What is needed now is a proper investigation into the concerns raised.
What would that mean ?
The BBC spat seems to me (FWIW) significantly different to "the Met Police, the NHS, the Post Office and the City", in that what is being argued about isn't so much matters of fact, or even criminal malfeasance, as matters of contested political opinion on how a public news operation should be conducted.
I'd be interested in Cyclefree expanding on this.
Remarkable. Putin will have traded the rubble of Pokrovsk (perhaps temporarily) for a working economy able to support military activity.
Fair trade, says Ukraine.
In the real world, you get biases. It's a bit like working with a mill or lathe. Nothing is perfectly true. But with clever techniques, you can used a lathe to make *a more accurate lathe*.
..as the media and political environment has moved rightward, the BBC is still in its usual bland, mushy central position, with its boring set of dispositions- but it seems more left wing by default. It hasn’t moved- the environment has and continues to do so. But the biggest sin the BBC has in my experience, is that the BBC isn’t that political at all, that it doesn’t have enough truly political people of any type. It should have more arch liberals, conservatives, socialists- so long as they can and are willing to think critically. Instead, it too often chooses not to think at all, because it’s easier, and safer- the intellectual crouch position. But that is precisely because it has been so terrified by the criticism it receives. The safe place for output is the stodgy and inoffensive, the twee and the banal. Is it institutionally biased? No. Is it institutionally unimaginative and insufficiently curious to all radical political ideas? Yes. Is it now institutionally risk averse? Yes..
I think it's fine having those of strong political opinions involved, as long as they are entirely open about them, and that they are intellectually honest about how they approach (eg) news stories.
In the Met, that's covering up/ignoring racism and other crimes.
In the NHS, that's covering up/ignoring poor healthcare
In the Post Office that's covering up/ignoring the fact they were persecuting the innocent
In the City that's covering up/ignoring the fact that they were fucking up. Repeatedly.
In the BBC that's....
As any good carpenter will tell you, if you treat a rotted wooden window early enough, you just have to chisel out a small section, replace, glue, sand, paint. If you wait until the whole window is rotten....
The other really interesting bit in the last couple of days is the European and Middle East operations of Lukoil and Rosneft being either taken over or nationalised by the countries in which they operate, depriving the companies of a significant flow of hard currency.
How did it miss OFSTED out of that first line?
I would normally expect it to be an inane whitewash.
But maybe I'm cynical having worked in education all these years.
Her career is now effectively over. ..
https://x.com/halbritz/status/1988214146878292129
I suspect that the Prescott report, by highlighting certain imbalances that some people see in BBC coverage, is having much the same effect.
The guy imprisoned for 15 years for seditious conspiracy, pardoned by Trump.
Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes announced yesterday on Gateway Pundit that he's relaunching the group, saying he wanted to let Trump know that “we're ready to serve, encourage him to do that, call us up as a militia."
https://x.com/ElizLanders/status/1987936388654743808
On top of this, there's another issue: Russia's oil fields are reliant on Western equipment to fight the decline curves. There really are no Russian or Chinese alternatives to Schlumberger and Halliburton. Which means Russian oil production - even before the strikes - is probably going to be dropping at 5% or so per year.
And now the Russian government is attempting to 'buck the market' by ordering companies not to raise the price of oil to consumers, which never works well.
That would be an advantage given how useless they proved on 6th Jan.
The Ukrainians would mow them down before they had advanced very far.
Win/win.
In the end, you can only do what we all can do: keep you family close, tell them that you love them, and do the best you can with the time remaining. If it helps, a lot of people do a lot less.
George Floyd died in a conflict with a police officer. One death.
PEPFAR has saved more than 25 million lives so far, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa. More than 25 million lives.
What is the appropriate news balance between these two? Twenty-five million to one might be excessive, but spending more time and space on the first than the second seems irrational, to put it gently.
(Those who want to try this test out can begin with simple searches on news organization. I'd particularly be interested in what any of you find at the BBC.)
You what?
You are just another bunch of apologists for your own special interests and it is amusing that you end up using many of the excuses Cyclefree highlights in her excellent article.
First, there is the impact on Russian domestic supplies of gasoline, kerosene and diesel that are used in the civilian and military economies. These are being badly affected by the refinery strikes. The best estimate (before last night's attacks) is that 38% of Russian refining capacity is offline. Now, there will be some slack in the system, so that doesn't mean production is down quite as much. But it is a massive number, and if it were to get any bigger, then ordinary Russians would suddenly find getting petrol increasingly difficult and expensive.
Second, there is the impact on Russian sales abroad due to pipelines being blown up. This is probably a smaller issue in the short term, because Russia had lots of foreign reserves it can use. But over time it adds up. At some point those dry up, and that will severely hamper Russia's ability to buy the things it needs to keep fighting.
I reckon the former issue is probably the bigger short term one. Because rising fuel prices can really screw over a lot of people, especially with winter coming.
Although many of those brief candles seem to be very well lit.
That would seem like all left-wing bias is removed at a stroke.
P.S. Geoff Norcott and Jim Davidson as the new presenters of Strictly.
I have no problem with Prescott having a personal view of how he would like stories to be reported but it's concerning the BBC board have delegated overall editorial judgement to an outsider with an agenda.
*refineries don't turn Generic Crude oil into a complete range of products. They turn a specific type of crude (usually) into a specific list of products.
He wrote a report/memo on editorial judgement. Which, in among the partisan stuff, deals with a number of objective failures in meetings standards.
Which is why people resigned.
The sane approach is to prevent the same shit happening again.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/11/11/politics/hegseth-women-naval-commander-ousted
..Ranked the top officer for promotion in her cohort, she received a Purple Heart after being injured in an IED attack during a combat tour in Iraq. She then became the first woman to serve with SEAL Team Six in the role of troop commander, one of several senior positions within the squadrons that make up the elite naval unit.
A formal ceremony marking her new position was planned for July. Invitations went out two months in advance.
But just two weeks before the ceremony, her command was abruptly canceled with little explanation, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation. The decision didn’t come through formal channels but by a series of phone calls from the Pentagon, one of the sources said. The circumstances were unusual and seemed designed to omit a paper trail, according to multiple sources.
Under the Navy’s “up or out” policy, with no command slot to take, the officer’s more than two-decade military career was effectively over..
And at the heart of it is the licence fee. If I want to watch GB news I still have to pay the BBC. So while I am happy for GB news to be Reform TV, the BBC has to be more neutral. And its bloody hard.
But @Cyclefree's point is about the response to criticism. And its this that is so familiar to all the other scandals.
BREAKING:
David Lammy admits that another prisoner may have been released in error **last week** on November 3. The prison service is investigating. Amazingly it doesn't actually know if the prisoner is still at large
Russian economic stress doesn't seem yet to have shown up where I'd expect it to. Reported inflation is high (8%) but hardly at hyperinflationary levels (and trending down with 16% interest rates). The currency has been remarkably stable over the medium-term.
I appreciate there will be a tipping point, and all of the above can be managed via central bank policy/reserves until they can't. But I'd personally temper my expectations of said tipping point being reached over this winter.
Bigger picture, I'm not sure Putin has a good "out" anymore. He hoped that Trump would be that, but he has been unable or unwilling to force a Putin-acceptable peace (/capitulation) on Ukraine. I fail to see a scenario where the next US President is more more favourable to Russian interests.
In the second category are also the Russian-owned facilities abroad which have stopped sending money back because of sanctions.
The economic squeeze is as you say secondary at the moment, but the faster they go bankrupt the quicker the war ends. It will happen slowly and then all at once.
Could be a tight race between Seamus Milne and Alaatair Campbell?
Schlumberger and Haliburton have always been very careful about which tools they let into Chinese and Russian territory because they are so concerned about this.
Just because @Cyclefree has listed them in a pre-emptive strike, it doesn't invalidate genuinely important points. Indeed most of her headlines have some validity in this case.
Most of all this was without doubt: 3. An attack by those with an agenda.
He is the outstanding political journalist of the media and he would be a perfect fit if he wanted it
What is needed is to prevent them happening again. Which means changing behaviour.
Sorry, Timmy, you can't use "The Dog Ate My Homework" as an excuse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srWdFKi50us
(Crater on the beach not the target?)
They will get better refined - probably in weeks.