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
Let's have him stand in for Starmer again at PMQs tomorrow. Would be a hoot...
The government should name Trevor Philips as new BBC DG, give him a licence to clean house and bring back impartiality.
I think that is an excellent idea. I have a huge amount of time for Trevor Philips.
Good afternoon
He is the outstanding political journalist of the media and he would be a perfect fit if he wanted it
Is it really a journalism job, though? I'd have said it was more about management of a big organisation, and he's relatively inexperienced in that area.
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
Your joking....not another one.....
To be fair to Lammy (and I find it remarkable that I am writing that) it would be interesting to see what the rates of incorrect release have been historically. Is this a new thing or is it something that has been going on for ages but has only now caught the imagination of the public/press.
It doesn't make it any less serious, nor does it excuse Lammy per se as the buck stops with him. But it would be interesting to see what the rates of mistaken release were a year ago, 5 years ago and a decade ago.
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
Your joking....not another one.....
Even when things were going well, it was consitently about 1 a week for years;
We didn't care, beause we didn't know, because it wasn't on the news.
Awkward reality is that things will always go wrong. With effort, we can reduce the frequency and impact, but there will always be a hard limit where the financial or other costs of prevention are worse than the harm done by the bad things.
The government should name Trevor Philips as new BBC DG, give him a licence to clean house and bring back impartiality.
I think that is an excellent idea. I have a huge amount of time for Trevor Philips.
Good afternoon
He is the outstanding political journalist of the media and he would be a perfect fit if he wanted it
Is it really a journalism job, though? I'd have said it was more about management of a big organisation, and he's relatively inexperienced in that area.
Errrhhhh head of the Commission for Racial Equality for 4 years and Equality and Human Rights Commission for 5 years not count?
He is much more Labour friendly so not a terrible option for the government.
The government should name Trevor Philips as new BBC DG, give him a licence to clean house and bring back impartiality.
I think that is an excellent idea. I have a huge amount of time for Trevor Philips.
Good afternoon
He is the outstanding political journalist of the media and he would be a perfect fit if he wanted it
Is it really a journalism job, though? I'd have said it was more about management of a big organisation, and he's relatively inexperienced in that area.
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
Your joking....not another one.....
To be fair to Lammy (and I find it remarkable that I am writing that) it would be interesting to see what the rates of incorrect release have been historically. Is this a new thing or is it something that has been going on for ages but has only now caught the imagination of the public/press.
It doesn't make it any less serious, nor does it excuse Lammy per se as the buck stops with him. But it would be interesting to see what the rates of mistaken release were a year ago, 5 years ago and a decade ago.
We are simply doing the plane crashes in USA after Trump did a thing, thing aren't we.
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
Your joking....not another one.....
To be fair to Lammy (and I find it remarkable that I am writing that) it would be interesting to see what the rates of incorrect release have been historically. Is this a new thing or is it something that has been going on for ages but has only now caught the imagination of the public/press.
It doesn't make it any less serious, nor does it excuse Lammy per se as the buck stops with him. But it would be interesting to see what the rates of mistaken release were a year ago, 5 years ago and a decade ago.
The early release scheme almost certainly means more mistaken releases. If you are tearing up the normal procedures and doing everything in a hurry things will go wrong.
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
Your joking....not another one.....
The numbers in 2023 and 2024 were 1.5-2.5 per week, with a rise to 2.5 per week in 2025. Context is that prisoner releases are around 1100 per week (15k per quarter) *.
So error rate has spiked to 0.2% of releases, approx. There's a clear strain, which I put down probably to a system under strain with lots of tactical changes and unusual practices on top.
It's worth a note that the Conservative Government were also involved in a lot of early releases, so there IS something worse under Labour.
You would expect a report on bias in an organisation to be objective, and not itself to be massively biased. That's why I think the BBC board engaging a partisan hack as its bias consultant is a bigger problem than any of the issues he has identified. Any big organisation has issues that get resolved some how, but a leadership guided by consultants not acting in good faith is a leadership seriously adrift, in my view.
The idea that there's a room full of Plato's Philosopher Kings wing to be released upon the world to give us Pure Impartiality is... improbable.
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*.
No but there's already a review process in the BBC for bias, which is dealing with most or all of the genuine issues including the Panorama edit. This process appears to be much more rigorous and objective than Michael Prescott's hatchet job. So why not run with that?
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.
They haven't delegated editorial judgement to an outsider.
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.
I accept the report mentions a couple of genuine failings - the Panorama edit, some of the reporting on Gaza - which are being dealt with through the proper process already. The "partisan stuff' is the problem. Not even because it is partisan - anyone can have a view - but because the board has decided to make it their totem.
The problem is that "The Proper Process" is reactive and after the event.
What is needed is to prevent them happening again. Which means changing behaviour.
I'm not sure what "changing behaviour" would actually mean here. I think there's one with the BBC Arabic service where the journalists over identified with "their people" rather than reporting objectively. That's a specific issue the organisation is dealing with specifically, correctly in my view. The rest? The BBC is responsible for a huge amount of content and the number of incontestably wrong calls identified by the report is tiny. How do you generalise that in organisational, behavioural terms?
The government should name Trevor Philips as new BBC DG, give him a licence to clean house and bring back impartiality.
I think that is an excellent idea. I have a huge amount of time for Trevor Philips.
Good afternoon
He is the outstanding political journalist of the media and he would be a perfect fit if he wanted it
Is it really a journalism job, though? I'd have said it was more about management of a big organisation, and he's relatively inexperienced in that area.
Errrhhhh head of the Commission for Racial Equality for 4 years and Equality and Human Rights Commission for 5 years not count?
I wouldn't describe them as big organisations, certainly not complex ones. Also, was he managing them or overseeing them? Somewhat different.
Sadly it is, without doubt, “an attack by those with an agenda.”
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.
True- though that doesn't mean that the criticisms are wrong, or even silly. (Though some, like the 'where was the balancing documentary on what's bad about Harris?' surely were.)
Yes agreed. The Panorama edit was poor but hardly a 'phone-hacking' level crime. You'd think maybe a retraction and apology would be in order.
I'm reminded of a comment made by a Private Eye hack that many newspaper corrections add to the inaccuracy of the newspaper publishing the correction. (Yes, that seems paradoxical, but consider that the correction will be steered by one participant in the story.)
I suspect that the Prescott report, by highlighting certain imbalances that some people see in BBC coverage, is having much the same effect.
Classic attacking the messenger there. Basically there are far too many people on here who either believe the BBC can do no wrong or, if they do wrong it is only against people you don't like anyway do it doesn’t matter.
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.
Cyclefree lists a bunch of things she's not really going to allow in defence of the BBC. Well that's like charging someone with a crime and then saying we're not allowing any of the usual defences like an alibi, CCTV, DNA evidence, witness statements, lack of motivation or opportunity, etc.
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.
Nah. What Cyclefree highlights is the excuses made by every big organisation when they get caught behaving badly. The fact it happens to be the BBC this time is almost immaterial. She also points out what the issue is with these excuses and how they both fail to divert criticism and also, in most cases, add to the problem.
As I said., this is a classic case of attacking the messenger (whether it is Prescott or Cyclefree) whe you should actually be listening to them.
Why is it that an organisation that was doing this shit more than 40 years ago (on behalf of the Government against the miners) not only has never been held to account properly for it but is still doing it. How many court cases have the BBC lost (or had to payout public money to prevent getting to court) because they don't have proper editorial standards?
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
Your joking....not another one.....
The numbers in 2023 and 2024 were 1.5-2.5 per week, with a rise to 2.5 per week in 2025.
Counts number of weeks in the year on fingers.....50...51....52....250+ divived by 52....
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
Your joking....not another one.....
The numbers in 2023 and 2024 were 1.5-2.5 per week, with a rise to 2.5 per week in 2025. Context is that prisoner releases are around 1100 per week (15k per quarter) *.
So error rate has spiked to 0.2% of releases, approx. There's a clear strain, which I put down probably to a system under strain with lots of tactical changes and unusual practices on top.
It's worth a note that the Conservative Government were also involved in a lot of early releases, so there IS something worse under Labour.
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
Your joking....not another one.....
The numbers in 2023 and 2024 were 1.5-2.5 per week, with a rise to 2.5 per week in 2025.
Checks number of weeks in the year.....
I'm assuming it was 5.2 per week?
Either that or we have an explanation for the dragging out of this year that doesn't involve the psychodrama in the White House.
Edit - don't divide by 52 for 2025, it should be by 45.
The government should name Trevor Philips as new BBC DG, give him a licence to clean house and bring back impartiality.
I think that is an excellent idea. I have a huge amount of time for Trevor Philips.
Good afternoon
He is the outstanding political journalist of the media and he would be a perfect fit if he wanted it
Is it really a journalism job, though? I'd have said it was more about management of a big organisation, and he's relatively inexperienced in that area.
John Tusa would be the man, were he 25 years younger.
We need a Tusa.
One interesting suggestion I have seen raised is Alan Rusbridger, who is 71 - the same as Trevor Phillips.
You would expect a report on bias in an organisation to be objective, and not itself to be massively biased. That's why I think the BBC board engaging a partisan hack as its bias consultant is a bigger problem than any of the issues he has identified. Any big organisation has issues that get resolved some how, but a leadership guided by consultants not acting in good faith is a leadership seriously adrift, in my view.
The idea that there's a room full of Plato's Philosopher Kings wing to be released upon the world to give us Pure Impartiality is... improbable.
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*.
No but there's already a review process in the BBC for bias, which is dealing with most or all of the genuine issues including the Panorama edit. This process appears to be much more rigorous and objective than Michael Prescott's hatchet job. So why not run with that?
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.
They haven't delegated editorial judgement to an outsider.
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.
I accept the report mentions a couple of genuine failings - the Panorama edit, some of the reporting on Gaza - which are being dealt with through the proper process already. The "partisan stuff' is the problem. Not even because it is partisan - anyone can have a view - but because the board has decided to make it their totem.
The problem is that "The Proper Process" is reactive and after the event.
What is needed is to prevent them happening again. Which means changing behaviour.
I'm not sure what "changing behaviour" would actually mean here. I think there's one with the BBC Arabic service where the journalists over identified with "their people" rather than reporting objectively. That's a specific issue the organisation is dealing with specifically, correctly in my view. The rest? The BBC is responsible for a huge amount of content and the number of incontestably wrong calls identified by the report is tiny. How do you generalise that in organisational, behavioural terms?
False claim again. The BBC might be responsible for a "a huge amount of content" but much of that is uncontroversial. We are not really concerned about Eastenders or Traitors. What we are concerned about is that BBC news is regarded as impartial and truthful. A couple of important labels it has lost (if it ever really had them).
The government should name Trevor Philips as new BBC DG, give him a licence to clean house and bring back impartiality.
I think that is an excellent idea. I have a huge amount of time for Trevor Philips.
Good afternoon
He is the outstanding political journalist of the media and he would be a perfect fit if he wanted it
Is it really a journalism job, though? I'd have said it was more about management of a big organisation, and he's relatively inexperienced in that area.
Errrhhhh head of the Commission for Racial Equality for 4 years and Equality and Human Rights Commission for 5 years not count?
He is much more Labour friendly so not a terrible option for the government.
Chair of the EHRC, yes. More impressive than me, undoubtedly.
But an organisation with 218 employees and a budget of £17 million. That's a moderately-sized academy trust. It's not a big organisation.
The BBC has 22000 employees and a budget of about £5 billion.
More importantly, Chair ≠ Chief Executive. Maybe getting Phillips on the board would be a good move- maybe replacing Samir Shah if his head rolls in this fiasco.
But being DG needs a set of experiences that Philips doesn't have.
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
Your joking....not another one.....
To be fair to Lammy (and I find it remarkable that I am writing that) it would be interesting to see what the rates of incorrect release have been historically. Is this a new thing or is it something that has been going on for ages but has only now caught the imagination of the public/press.
It doesn't make it any less serious, nor does it excuse Lammy per se as the buck stops with him. But it would be interesting to see what the rates of mistaken release were a year ago, 5 years ago and a decade ago.
It was 1 a week, now its getting close to 1 a day.
To be fair, I actually don't think the raw number tells us the whole story. If you release somebody 1 day early does that still count, is that the end of the world*? If you are releasing people who still have 4 years to serve or haven't even started their sentence (the other the other week, where somebody thought it was a suspended sentence rather than an actual one), that is a bigger problem. Same with if you are releasing murderers, sex offenders or people who should be being deported (there was definitely an issue I remember under the Tories with that).
* there is some suggestion with the moving of the goal posts over the past few years of how long somebody has to serve as a minimum of their sentence (plus how long they served on remand), I can see how it can become confused.
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
Your joking....not another one.....
The numbers in 2023 and 2024 were 1.5-2.5 per week, with a rise to 2.5 per week in 2025. Context is that prisoner releases are around 1100 per week (15k per quarter) *.
So error rate has spiked to 0.2% of releases, approx. There's a clear strain, which I put down probably to a system under strain with lots of tactical changes and unusual practices on top.
It's worth a note that the Conservative Government were also involved in a lot of early releases, so there IS something worse under Labour.
Hopefully the Ukrainians can keep chipping away at Russia's oil infrastructure and supply,
Would any PBer who knows about these things (I think we have a few) care to summarise how significant this sort of repeated attack might be for Russia and Putin?
So: there are two subtly different issues.
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.
The next question is - what proportion of the refining capacity of the affected products* is exportable/exported at the moment?
*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.
I don't think Russia exports that much refined product - mostly the export unrefined crude, that is then refined near to where it's used.
The government should name Trevor Philips as new BBC DG, give him a licence to clean house and bring back impartiality.
Trevor Phillips is in his 70s now. He'd be a perfectly good Chairman, and may have been a DG contender 15 years ago, but I'm not betting on him taking on the DG role at this stage of life.
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
Your joking....not another one.....
The numbers in 2023 and 2024 were 1.5-2.5 per week, with a rise to 2.5 per week in 2025.
Checks number of weeks in the year.....
I'm assuming it was 5.2 per week?
Either that or we have an explanation for the dragging out of this year that doesn't involve the psychodrama in the White House.
Edit - don't divide by 52 for 2025, it should be by 45.
You would expect a report on bias in an organisation to be objective, and not itself to be massively biased. That's why I think the BBC board engaging a partisan hack as its bias consultant is a bigger problem than any of the issues he has identified. Any big organisation has issues that get resolved some how, but a leadership guided by consultants not acting in good faith is a leadership seriously adrift, in my view.
The idea that there's a room full of Plato's Philosopher Kings wing to be released upon the world to give us Pure Impartiality is... improbable.
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*.
No but there's already a review process in the BBC for bias, which is dealing with most or all of the genuine issues including the Panorama edit. This process appears to be much more rigorous and objective than Michael Prescott's hatchet job. So why not run with that?
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.
They haven't delegated editorial judgement to an outsider.
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.
I accept the report mentions a couple of genuine failings - the Panorama edit, some of the reporting on Gaza - which are being dealt with through the proper process already. The "partisan stuff' is the problem. Not even because it is partisan - anyone can have a view - but because the board has decided to make it their totem.
The problem is that "The Proper Process" is reactive and after the event.
What is needed is to prevent them happening again. Which means changing behaviour.
I'm not sure what "changing behaviour" would actually mean here. I think there's one with the BBC Arabic service where the journalists over identified with "their people" rather than reporting objectively. That's a specific issue the organisation is dealing with specifically, correctly in my view. The rest? The BBC is responsible for a huge amount of content and the number of incontestably wrong calls identified by the report is tiny. How do you generalise that in organisational, behavioural terms?
So Prescott thinks for example that the BBC should report more on American politics from a MAGA perspective and thinks the BBC should consult more with the kind of historian who wants the National Trust to shut up about slavery and less with the kind of historian that wants to talk about it. These are editorial viewpoints. What are the behavioural issues for the BBC here?
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
Your joking....not another one.....
To be fair to Lammy (and I find it remarkable that I am writing that) it would be interesting to see what the rates of incorrect release have been historically. Is this a new thing or is it something that has been going on for ages but has only now caught the imagination of the public/press.
It doesn't make it any less serious, nor does it excuse Lammy per se as the buck stops with him. But it would be interesting to see what the rates of mistaken release were a year ago, 5 years ago and a decade ago.
IIRC accidental releases have spiked recently. They used to run at around one a week, but in the last year or two have been running at 4 or 5 a week.
The suggestion that the early release schemes are part of the cause seems plausible. Also the pressure on prison staffing & the increase in recruitment from nations where English is not the first language of the applicants might also be having an effect.
The government should name Trevor Philips as new BBC DG, give him a licence to clean house and bring back impartiality.
I think that is an excellent idea. I have a huge amount of time for Trevor Philips.
Good afternoon
He is the outstanding political journalist of the media and he would be a perfect fit if he wanted it
Is it really a journalism job, though? I'd have said it was more about management of a big organisation, and he's relatively inexperienced in that area.
John Tusa would be the man, were he 25 years younger.
We need a Tusa.
One interesting suggestion I have seen raised is Alan Rusbridger, who is 71 - the same as Trevor Phillips.
Whilst we all entertain our head canons about who would be good if we were appointing the DG, according to the New Statesman (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyiUiNXzAZ0), the three people (all women: Alex is girl Alex not boy Alex) being considered are:
Alex Mahon (who has just left Channel 4 as as chief executive)
Charlotte Moore (ex BBC controller of BBC 1)
Jay Hunt (also formerly of the BBC)
Although as The Rest Is Entertainment (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mYnOsiSKao) points out, it's a shitty job and nobody really wants it, so it'll go to whoever is highest on a long list who says "yes"
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
Your joking....not another one.....
To be fair to Lammy (and I find it remarkable that I am writing that) it would be interesting to see what the rates of incorrect release have been historically. Is this a new thing or is it something that has been going on for ages but has only now caught the imagination of the public/press.
It doesn't make it any less serious, nor does it excuse Lammy per se as the buck stops with him. But it would be interesting to see what the rates of mistaken release were a year ago, 5 years ago and a decade ago.
We are simply doing the plane crashes in USA after Trump did a thing, thing aren't we.
That was a great example of the phenomenon, where something becomes newsworthy because it’s newsworthy, even though the actual rate of plane crashes was lower than average for the first few months of this year.
The incorrect prisoner releases, on the other hand, does actually appear to have become more of a problem this year than in the past.
You would expect a report on bias in an organisation to be objective, and not itself to be massively biased. That's why I think the BBC board engaging a partisan hack as its bias consultant is a bigger problem than any of the issues he has identified. Any big organisation has issues that get resolved some how, but a leadership guided by consultants not acting in good faith is a leadership seriously adrift, in my view.
The idea that there's a room full of Plato's Philosopher Kings wing to be released upon the world to give us Pure Impartiality is... improbable.
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*.
No but there's already a review process in the BBC for bias, which is dealing with most or all of the genuine issues including the Panorama edit. This process appears to be much more rigorous and objective than Michael Prescott's hatchet job. So why not run with that?
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.
They haven't delegated editorial judgement to an outsider.
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.
I accept the report mentions a couple of genuine failings - the Panorama edit, some of the reporting on Gaza - which are being dealt with through the proper process already. The "partisan stuff' is the problem. Not even because it is partisan - anyone can have a view - but because the board has decided to make it their totem.
The problem is that "The Proper Process" is reactive and after the event.
What is needed is to prevent them happening again. Which means changing behaviour.
I'm not sure what "changing behaviour" would actually mean here. I think there's one with the BBC Arabic service where the journalists over identified with "their people" rather than reporting objectively. That's a specific issue the organisation is dealing with specifically, correctly in my view. The rest? The BBC is responsible for a huge amount of content and the number of incontestably wrong calls identified by the report is tiny. How do you generalise that in organisational, behavioural terms?
False claim again. The BBC might be responsible for a "a huge amount of content" but much of that is uncontroversial. We are not really concerned about Eastenders or Traitors. What we are concerned about is that BBC news is regarded as impartial and truthful. A couple of important labels it has lost (if it ever really had them).
The latest TRIP has Alistair Campbell bemoaning this as an unwarranted agenda-driven attack on the BBC. I think it clearly is but that's quite some irony in the messenger there.
I think (?) Campbell is arguing that having Gibb on the board is like having Campbell on the board - ie completely unacceptable.
Unstupid question. Why are Labour doing this? Genuine change of mind? Incoherence?
It's a large issue to the women involved but not so large as to shift the dial on the polls. Of all the Hail Mary plays, this is not the one I would have picked.
The government should name Trevor Philips as new BBC DG, give him a licence to clean house and bring back impartiality.
I think that is an excellent idea. I have a huge amount of time for Trevor Philips.
Good afternoon
He is the outstanding political journalist of the media and he would be a perfect fit if he wanted it
Is it really a journalism job, though? I'd have said it was more about management of a big organisation, and he's relatively inexperienced in that area.
He definitely shows signs of enjoying the sound of his own opinions. Not sure if that’s what the BBC needs atm unless they want a noisy reactionary ‘common sense’ rebrand. Of course lots of PBers would like that but that’s not the same thing.
The government should name Trevor Philips as new BBC DG, give him a licence to clean house and bring back impartiality.
I think that is an excellent idea. I have a huge amount of time for Trevor Philips.
Good afternoon
He is the outstanding political journalist of the media and he would be a perfect fit if he wanted it
Is it really a journalism job, though? I'd have said it was more about management of a big organisation, and he's relatively inexperienced in that area.
John Tusa would be the man, were he 25 years younger.
We need a Tusa.
One interesting suggestion I have seen raised is Alan Rusbridger, who is 71 - the same as Trevor Phillips.
These just aren't serious options. The BBC has big challenges in terms of purpose, maintaining reach among younger people, addressing journalistic quality and so on. These people being named have certain merits but are yesterday's men who aren't sensibly going to be doing an incredibly demanding job deep into their 70s.
Sadly it is, without doubt, “an attack by those with an agenda.”
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.
True- though that doesn't mean that the criticisms are wrong, or even silly. (Though some, like the 'where was the balancing documentary on what's bad about Harris?' surely were.)
Yes agreed. The Panorama edit was poor but hardly a 'phone-hacking' level crime. You'd think maybe a retraction and apology would be in order.
I'm reminded of a comment made by a Private Eye hack that many newspaper corrections add to the inaccuracy of the newspaper publishing the correction. (Yes, that seems paradoxical, but consider that the correction will be steered by one participant in the story.)
I suspect that the Prescott report, by highlighting certain imbalances that some people see in BBC coverage, is having much the same effect.
Classic attacking the messenger there. Basically there are far too many people on here who either believe the BBC can do no wrong or, if they do wrong it is only against people you don't like anyway do it doesn’t matter.
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.
Cyclefree lists a bunch of things she's not really going to allow in defence of the BBC. Well that's like charging someone with a crime and then saying we're not allowing any of the usual defences like an alibi, CCTV, DNA evidence, witness statements, lack of motivation or opportunity, etc.
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.
The so-called defences, that @Cyclefree are disallowing, are the generic bullshit reactions of organisations trying to shrug off problems.
Sorry, Timmy, you can't use "The Dog Ate My Homework" as an excuse.
@Benpointer is I am sorry to say talking nonsense because he has done what so many organisations do: formed his opinion (a right wing attack) without any regard to the underlying facts relevant to the criticisms. Also he thinks only an employee can be a whistleblower. Not true.
What I have set out are not in any sense "defences". They are the very common reactions to criticisms. They are hopeless. The best defence is evidence which shows the criticism to be wrong. That is precisely what the BBC is not doing. It is being its own worst enemy by not engaging properly with the criticisms and either accepting them, where valid, and putting matters right or explaining why they are wrong. It is a great pity.
As for having an agenda: all whistleblowers and complainants have an agenda. But an investigator who allows that agenda to stop them investigating properly is a very bad one indeed. An organisation who does that is an organisation in denial. That is their agenda and it is a harmful one.
I cannot assess the validity of the Prescott criticisms. Some seem a little overblown; others much more serious. The Trump Panorama one seems to my mind less serious than some of the others. The conflict of interest determining how women's rights should be discussed is much more serious both because it has been longer lasting but also because such conflicts are always by definition more serious and harder to resolve. It is notable that it is the one area which the BBC and many of its defenders have ignored in their responses. What's the agenda there?
I wrote this as a critical friend. It pains me to see organisations make such a hash of their responses to problems like this. It is not hard to get it right. It is so easy to get it wrong and it shouldn't be because so much should have been learnt from others. And there are lots of people who could help them get it right professionally. But too many organisations are too arrogant, stupid or panicky to realise that they need help. And so we see the shitshow we've been seeing in the last few days.
And those who will do anything to destroy the best of the BBC will get their chance. It is so important to distinguish between the destroyers and critical friends. The BBC needs critical friends right now. The John Simpsons and others are not being critical friends. They are reinforcing the impression of an arrogant aloof organisation which thinks it knows best. It is a great pity.
Somebody has set up a petition to prevent the BBC using TV licence money to fund legal defence if Mr Trump does sue them.
This seems a good time as any to pass a Bill stating that the British courts shall not process libel/defamation/slander/whatever claims from non-British citizens/nationals/residents/whatever. If he wants to sue in the UK he can buy a house here and pay British income tax. I'm sure he's got a bob or two.
Unstupid question. Why are Labour doing this? Genuine change of mind? Incoherence?
It's a large issue to the women involved but not so large as to shift the dial on the polls. Of all the Hail Mary plays, this is not the one I would have picked.
Absolute sheer panic that they're going to be 5th in the polls next time around....
The BBC Trump stitch up isn't the only one in recent past. In fact far worse was the one on Carl Benjamin (not my kind of person) as the big series to kick of BBC Verify .
They got all sorts of basic easily verifable facts wrong about him e.g. banned from YouTube*, but the centre piece was they used an interview with a "concerned citizen" that was the local Green party councillor who was allowed to make all sorts of claims about his activities in Totnes. Except they were basically all false. Talking about how he had regularly been in Totnes running his hate rallies. It appears he went once when standing for UKIP in the Euros and did a sort of Change My Mind thing, and that is the only time he has done "a rally".
* which would be rather odd has has a whole series of YouTube channels under his media "empire".
You would expect a report on bias in an organisation to be objective, and not itself to be massively biased. That's why I think the BBC board engaging a partisan hack as its bias consultant is a bigger problem than any of the issues he has identified. Any big organisation has issues that get resolved some how, but a leadership guided by consultants not acting in good faith is a leadership seriously adrift, in my view.
The idea that there's a room full of Plato's Philosopher Kings wing to be released upon the world to give us Pure Impartiality is... improbable.
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*.
No but there's already a review process in the BBC for bias, which is dealing with most or all of the genuine issues including the Panorama edit. This process appears to be much more rigorous and objective than Michael Prescott's hatchet job. So why not run with that?
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.
They haven't delegated editorial judgement to an outsider.
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.
I accept the report mentions a couple of genuine failings - the Panorama edit, some of the reporting on Gaza - which are being dealt with through the proper process already. The "partisan stuff' is the problem. Not even because it is partisan - anyone can have a view - but because the board has decided to make it their totem.
The problem is that "The Proper Process" is reactive and after the event.
What is needed is to prevent them happening again. Which means changing behaviour.
I'm not sure what "changing behaviour" would actually mean here. I think there's one with the BBC Arabic service where the journalists over identified with "their people" rather than reporting objectively. That's a specific issue the organisation is dealing with specifically, correctly in my view. The rest? The BBC is responsible for a huge amount of content and the number of incontestably wrong calls identified by the report is tiny. How do you generalise that in organisational, behavioural terms?
False claim again. The BBC might be responsible for a "a huge amount of content" but much of that is uncontroversial. We are not really concerned about Eastenders or Traitors. What we are concerned about is that BBC news is regarded as impartial and truthful. A couple of important labels it has lost (if it ever really had them).
Which easily available general coverage news source would you trust more than the BBC?
In some three months, the Ukrainians have greatly reduced the Russian options for selling their crude oil to international sellers - the remaining options now being heavily hit - whilst very significantly reducing Russia's ability to refine or store crude oil. At the same time, the Ukrainians have been systematically destroying the abilty for Moscow especially to maintain electricity and heating going in to winter, to the point where another big push and what was already teetering through inadequate maintainence (often linked to corruption) will collpase.
Remarkable. Putin will have traded the rubble of Pokrovsk (perhaps temporarily) for a working economy able to support military activity.
Fair trade, says Ukraine.
This is a crucially important point that I think is underappreciated. Russia is dependent on oil exports to pay for things. The army gets first dibs on oil, the civilian economy second, and only after that do they get to sell oil abroad. So, every time an oil pipeline goes boom, and cuts 50k barrels a day from Russian production, that's $5m a day they've lost.
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.
I think the likes of Schlumberger (now SLB) are still operating in Russia, albeit they've reduced their presence. It's an example of an area where sanctions could be tightened further.
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.
Both Russia and CHina have spent decades in industrial espiionage getting the technology for modern oil exploration. Particularly things like Deep directional resistivity (which is about as close to magic as I have ever seen in science). Only a few years ago one of the DDR well placement specialists I had been working with for several years was caught red handed collecting information on new tool updates and algorithms and passing them back to China.
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.
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
Lammy isn't very good with releasing the right prisoner. He let out rapist Joseph McCann to rape again in 2019.
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
Your joking....not another one.....
The numbers in 2023 and 2024 were 1.5-2.5 per week, with a rise to 2.5 per week in 2025. Context is that prisoner releases are around 1100 per week (15k per quarter) *.
So error rate has spiked to 0.2% of releases, approx. There's a clear strain, which I put down probably to a system under strain with lots of tactical changes and unusual practices on top.
It's worth a note that the Conservative Government were also involved in a lot of early releases, so there IS something worse under Labour.
You would expect a report on bias in an organisation to be objective, and not itself to be massively biased. That's why I think the BBC board engaging a partisan hack as its bias consultant is a bigger problem than any of the issues he has identified. Any big organisation has issues that get resolved some how, but a leadership guided by consultants not acting in good faith is a leadership seriously adrift, in my view.
The idea that there's a room full of Plato's Philosopher Kings wing to be released upon the world to give us Pure Impartiality is... improbable.
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*.
No but there's already a review process in the BBC for bias, which is dealing with most or all of the genuine issues including the Panorama edit. This process appears to be much more rigorous and objective than Michael Prescott's hatchet job. So why not run with that?
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.
They haven't delegated editorial judgement to an outsider.
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.
I accept the report mentions a couple of genuine failings - the Panorama edit, some of the reporting on Gaza - which are being dealt with through the proper process already. The "partisan stuff' is the problem. Not even because it is partisan - anyone can have a view - but because the board has decided to make it their totem.
The problem is that "The Proper Process" is reactive and after the event.
What is needed is to prevent them happening again. Which means changing behaviour.
I'm not sure what "changing behaviour" would actually mean here. I think there's one with the BBC Arabic service where the journalists over identified with "their people" rather than reporting objectively. That's a specific issue the organisation is dealing with specifically, correctly in my view. The rest? The BBC is responsible for a huge amount of content and the number of incontestably wrong calls identified by the report is tiny. How do you generalise that in organisational, behavioural terms?
False claim again. The BBC might be responsible for a "a huge amount of content" but much of that is uncontroversial. We are not really concerned about Eastenders or Traitors. What we are concerned about is that BBC news is regarded as impartial and truthful. A couple of important labels it has lost (if it ever really had them).
Which easily available general coverage news source would you trust more than the BBC?
Reuters? AP Press? The legacy media (ouch!) no longer employ their own journalists, they pick up feeds from news agencies/twitter/whatevs, add their own special sauce, and retransmit. If I ran the BBC, I would expand its funding dramatically to employ journalists, not newsreaders/commentariat. Then spend money to bring production back inhouse instead of contracting-out. Then sort out who is the DG.
Somebody has set up a petition to prevent the BBC using TV licence money to fund legal defence if Mr Trump does sue them.
This seems a good time as any to pass a Bill stating that the British courts shall not process libel/defamation/slander/whatever claims from non-British citizens/nationals/residents/whatever. If he wants to sue in the UK he can buy a house here and pay British income tax. I'm sure he's got a bob or two.
English* libel tourism has been an open scandal for decades.
You would expect a report on bias in an organisation to be objective, and not itself to be massively biased. That's why I think the BBC board engaging a partisan hack as its bias consultant is a bigger problem than any of the issues he has identified. Any big organisation has issues that get resolved some how, but a leadership guided by consultants not acting in good faith is a leadership seriously adrift, in my view.
The idea that there's a room full of Plato's Philosopher Kings wing to be released upon the world to give us Pure Impartiality is... improbable.
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*.
No but there's already a review process in the BBC for bias, which is dealing with most or all of the genuine issues including the Panorama edit. This process appears to be much more rigorous and objective than Michael Prescott's hatchet job. So why not run with that?
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.
They haven't delegated editorial judgement to an outsider.
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.
I accept the report mentions a couple of genuine failings - the Panorama edit, some of the reporting on Gaza - which are being dealt with through the proper process already. The "partisan stuff' is the problem. Not even because it is partisan - anyone can have a view - but because the board has decided to make it their totem.
The problem is that "The Proper Process" is reactive and after the event.
What is needed is to prevent them happening again. Which means changing behaviour.
I'm not sure what "changing behaviour" would actually mean here. I think there's one with the BBC Arabic service where the journalists over identified with "their people" rather than reporting objectively. That's a specific issue the organisation is dealing with specifically, correctly in my view. The rest? The BBC is responsible for a huge amount of content and the number of incontestably wrong calls identified by the report is tiny. How do you generalise that in organisational, behavioural terms?
False claim again. The BBC might be responsible for a "a huge amount of content" but much of that is uncontroversial. We are not really concerned about Eastenders or Traitors. What we are concerned about is that BBC news is regarded as impartial and truthful. A couple of important labels it has lost (if it ever really had them).
They want to put up income tax, breaking a manifesto commitment to do so, in order to fund this and end the two-child cap?
That’s not going to go down too well, to put it mildly.
The 2CC I can, however, see as an investment in the future in the most basic sense. I don't hold with the simplicistic breeding of shiftless proles notion . Lots of folk end up poorer than they had planned, through no fault of theirs, and with three children whom they'd expected to be able to support.
Though, from a Scottish point of view, it's odd to have Slab [edit] refusing to support the SNP in [edit] opposing it for years, and now look what happens ... 5 months after the SNP had given up and started mitigating it [edit] out of their budget.
Another pressure campaign that has recently been launched is the government promised not to tax pays out for the blood scandal. The children of those effected are now campaigning that they should get IHT exemption on any of that money being pass to them.
Number 3 is important and worth highlighting. If the devil catches you with your pants down, you can't claim innocence by attacking the devil.
The 'sinister Reform/Boris Johnson/far right/Jewish Chronicle/etc (delete where appropriate) agenda within the BBC board' argument is only relevant to this particular matter if Robbie Gibb himself edited the Panorama footage, promoted Stonewall talking points as gospel, and ordered BBC Arabic to favour Hamas. Otherwise the original criticisms need to be addressed.
I want the BBC to survive as a national broadcaster. I pay the licence fee and am happy to continue to do so. I value its output and consider it a national asset. But to keep its status it needs to meet certain standards.
Another pressure campaign that has recently been launched is the government promised not to tax pays out for the blood scandal. The children of those effected are now campaigning that they should get IHT exemption on any of that money being pass to them.
You would expect a report on bias in an organisation to be objective, and not itself to be massively biased. That's why I think the BBC board engaging a partisan hack as its bias consultant is a bigger problem than any of the issues he has identified. Any big organisation has issues that get resolved some how, but a leadership guided by consultants not acting in good faith is a leadership seriously adrift, in my view.
The idea that there's a room full of Plato's Philosopher Kings wing to be released upon the world to give us Pure Impartiality is... improbable.
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*.
No but there's already a review process in the BBC for bias, which is dealing with most or all of the genuine issues including the Panorama edit. This process appears to be much more rigorous and objective than Michael Prescott's hatchet job. So why not run with that?
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.
They haven't delegated editorial judgement to an outsider.
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.
I accept the report mentions a couple of genuine failings - the Panorama edit, some of the reporting on Gaza - which are being dealt with through the proper process already. The "partisan stuff' is the problem. Not even because it is partisan - anyone can have a view - but because the board has decided to make it their totem.
The problem is that "The Proper Process" is reactive and after the event.
What is needed is to prevent them happening again. Which means changing behaviour.
I'm not sure what "changing behaviour" would actually mean here. I think there's one with the BBC Arabic service where the journalists over identified with "their people" rather than reporting objectively. That's a specific issue the organisation is dealing with specifically, correctly in my view. The rest? The BBC is responsible for a huge amount of content and the number of incontestably wrong calls identified by the report is tiny. How do you generalise that in organisational, behavioural terms?
False claim again. The BBC might be responsible for a "a huge amount of content" but much of that is uncontroversial. We are not really concerned about Eastenders or Traitors. What we are concerned about is that BBC news is regarded as impartial and truthful. A couple of important labels it has lost (if it ever really had them).
Which easily available general coverage news source would you trust more than the BBC?
You would expect a report on bias in an organisation to be objective, and not itself to be massively biased. That's why I think the BBC board engaging a partisan hack as its bias consultant is a bigger problem than any of the issues he has identified. Any big organisation has issues that get resolved some how, but a leadership guided by consultants not acting in good faith is a leadership seriously adrift, in my view.
The idea that there's a room full of Plato's Philosopher Kings wing to be released upon the world to give us Pure Impartiality is... improbable.
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*.
No but there's already a review process in the BBC for bias, which is dealing with most or all of the genuine issues including the Panorama edit. This process appears to be much more rigorous and objective than Michael Prescott's hatchet job. So why not run with that?
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.
They haven't delegated editorial judgement to an outsider.
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.
I accept the report mentions a couple of genuine failings - the Panorama edit, some of the reporting on Gaza - which are being dealt with through the proper process already. The "partisan stuff' is the problem. Not even because it is partisan - anyone can have a view - but because the board has decided to make it their totem.
The problem is that "The Proper Process" is reactive and after the event.
What is needed is to prevent them happening again. Which means changing behaviour.
I'm not sure what "changing behaviour" would actually mean here. I think there's one with the BBC Arabic service where the journalists over identified with "their people" rather than reporting objectively. That's a specific issue the organisation is dealing with specifically, correctly in my view. The rest? The BBC is responsible for a huge amount of content and the number of incontestably wrong calls identified by the report is tiny. How do you generalise that in organisational, behavioural terms?
False claim again. The BBC might be responsible for a "a huge amount of content" but much of that is uncontroversial. We are not really concerned about Eastenders or Traitors. What we are concerned about is that BBC news is regarded as impartial and truthful. A couple of important labels it has lost (if it ever really had them).
Which easily available general coverage news source would you trust more than the BBC?
Political Betting of course
That's not entirely a joke, though it's a good one. I'm increasingly aware how few places there are one can get a range of opinions and comments [edit] outwith the silos.
A document was not shown to Liz Kendall, who was Work and Pensions Secretary at the time of the decision, but had since come to light and needed to be considered, the government has now said.
Current Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden told the Commons that retaking the decision did not mean that payouts would be made to those affected.
Presumably the government can't say no immediately, but they had better blooming well say no after due consideration.
(The more relevant question is, why the hell wasn't Kendall shown the document at the time? Does anything in this country work, apart from the Passport Service?)
All the illusion of fiscal prudence appears to have been chucked out the window in this week's government media grid....
I remember her! She was Gordon Brown’s girlfriend between 1997 and 2001.
Misreading this exchange led me to this fun fact, per Wikipedia:
"In his youth at the University of Edinburgh, Brown was involved in a romantic relationship with Margarita, Crown Princess of Romania. Margarita said about it: "It was a very solid and romantic story. I never stopped loving him but one day it didn't seem right anymore, it was politics, politics, politics, and I needed nurturing."
An unnamed friend of those years is quoted by Paul Routledge in his biography of Brown as recalling: "She was sweet and gentle and obviously cut out to make somebody a very good wife. She was bright, too, though not like him, but they seemed made for each other.""
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
Your joking....not another one.....
The numbers in 2023 and 2024 were 1.5-2.5 per week, with a rise to 2.5 per week in 2025. Context is that prisoner releases are around 1100 per week (15k per quarter) *.
So error rate has spiked to 0.2% of releases, approx. There's a clear strain, which I put down probably to a system under strain with lots of tactical changes and unusual practices on top.
It's worth a note that the Conservative Government were also involved in a lot of early releases, so there IS something worse under Labour.
"More than 90" have been released since April this year, so looks like this year is slightly down on last year (unless the number goes up in the winter)
In some three months, the Ukrainians have greatly reduced the Russian options for selling their crude oil to international sellers - the remaining options now being heavily hit - whilst very significantly reducing Russia's ability to refine or store crude oil. At the same time, the Ukrainians have been systematically destroying the abilty for Moscow especially to maintain electricity and heating going in to winter, to the point where another big push and what was already teetering through inadequate maintainence (often linked to corruption) will collpase.
Remarkable. Putin will have traded the rubble of Pokrovsk (perhaps temporarily) for a working economy able to support military activity.
Fair trade, says Ukraine.
This is a crucially important point that I think is underappreciated. Russia is dependent on oil exports to pay for things. The army gets first dibs on oil, the civilian economy second, and only after that do they get to sell oil abroad. So, every time an oil pipeline goes boom, and cuts 50k barrels a day from Russian production, that's $5m a day they've lost.
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.
I think the likes of Schlumberger (now SLB) are still operating in Russia, albeit they've reduced their presence. It's an example of an area where sanctions could be tightened further.
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.
Both Russia and CHina have spent decades in industrial espiionage getting the technology for modern oil exploration. Particularly things like Deep directional resistivity (which is about as close to magic as I have ever seen in science). Only a few years ago one of the DDR well placement specialists I had been working with for several years was caught red handed collecting information on new tool updates and algorithms and passing them back to China.
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.
I'm fairly sure DDR is actually just magic.
I am actually quite good at DDR interperetation. I learnt from the best as the tools were field tested on some of my jobs when I was both Wellsite and Operations Geologist at Premier. Being able to string an 8 1/2" hole horizontally through 4ft thick sandbodies 6 miles away is quite fun.
Another pressure campaign that has recently been launched is the government promised not to tax pays out for the blood scandal. The children of those effected are now campaigning that they should get IHT exemption on any of that money being pass to them.
Given how long it has taken ...
If they’re giving people in their 80s and 90s million-pound cheques, which they’ve waited three or four decades to receive, then wanting 40% of it back in IHT when they pass on does seem a little off.
The government should name Trevor Philips as new BBC DG, give him a licence to clean house and bring back impartiality.
I think that is an excellent idea. I have a huge amount of time for Trevor Philips.
iirc the BBC Board decides the DG?
Indeed. And I am not sure Philips would be the government's choice anyway. Doesn't stop him being an excellent candidate.
Isn't Robbie Gibb likely to want someone like Richard Littlejohn as DG?
Sadly yes.
What about Andrew Neil?
He is going to run the BBC from his villa in the South of France? He seems to be there full time now, every time I see him commenting on Times Radio he is there.
Another pressure campaign that has recently been launched is the government promised not to tax pays out for the blood scandal. The children of those effected are now campaigning that they should get IHT exemption on any of that money being pass to them.
Given how long it has taken ...
If they’re giving people in their 80s and 90s million-pound cheques, which they’ve waited three or four decades to receive, then wanting 40% of it back in IHT when they pass on does seem a little off.
Not sure. The compensation is for the individual, not the family.
Number 3 is important and worth highlighting. If the devil catches you with your pants down, you can't claim innocence by attacking the devil.
The 'sinister Reform/Boris Johnson/far right/Jewish Chronicle/etc (delete where appropriate) agenda within the BBC board' argument is only relevant to this particular matter if Robbie Gibb himself edited the Panorama footage, promoted Stonewall talking points as gospel, and ordered BBC Arabic to favour Hamas. Otherwise the original criticisms need to be addressed.
I want the BBC to survive as a national broadcaster. I pay the licence fee and am happy to continue to do so. I value its output and consider it a national asset. But to keep its status it needs to meet certain standards.
I think I agree with all of this including (perhaps surprising to some) contnuing to pay the licence fee until a more equitable system of funding can be devised.
You would expect a report on bias in an organisation to be objective, and not itself to be massively biased. That's why I think the BBC board engaging a partisan hack as its bias consultant is a bigger problem than any of the issues he has identified. Any big organisation has issues that get resolved some how, but a leadership guided by consultants not acting in good faith is a leadership seriously adrift, in my view.
The idea that there's a room full of Plato's Philosopher Kings wing to be released upon the world to give us Pure Impartiality is... improbable.
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*.
No but there's already a review process in the BBC for bias, which is dealing with most or all of the genuine issues including the Panorama edit. This process appears to be much more rigorous and objective than Michael Prescott's hatchet job. So why not run with that?
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.
They haven't delegated editorial judgement to an outsider.
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.
I accept the report mentions a couple of genuine failings - the Panorama edit, some of the reporting on Gaza - which are being dealt with through the proper process already. The "partisan stuff' is the problem. Not even because it is partisan - anyone can have a view - but because the board has decided to make it their totem.
The problem is that "The Proper Process" is reactive and after the event.
What is needed is to prevent them happening again. Which means changing behaviour.
I'm not sure what "changing behaviour" would actually mean here. I think there's one with the BBC Arabic service where the journalists over identified with "their people" rather than reporting objectively. That's a specific issue the organisation is dealing with specifically, correctly in my view. The rest? The BBC is responsible for a huge amount of content and the number of incontestably wrong calls identified by the report is tiny. How do you generalise that in organisational, behavioural terms?
False claim again. The BBC might be responsible for a "a huge amount of content" but much of that is uncontroversial. We are not really concerned about Eastenders or Traitors. What we are concerned about is that BBC news is regarded as impartial and truthful. A couple of important labels it has lost (if it ever really had them).
Which easily available general coverage news source would you trust more than the BBC?
Political Betting of course
That's not entirely a joke, though it's a good one. I'm increasingly aware how few places there are one can get a range of opinions and comments [edit] outwith the silos.
It wasn't really meant as a joke if I am being honest. Whenever I see an item of news interest appear on the wires, my first port of call is always PB rather than any official media website.
I'm not sure if that suggests they'll actually award anything to the Waspi or are just covering their arse if the previous decision was made in the absence of important information. I.e. to avoid the judicial review challenging the decision.
The government should name Trevor Philips as new BBC DG, give him a licence to clean house and bring back impartiality.
I think that is an excellent idea. I have a huge amount of time for Trevor Philips.
iirc the BBC Board decides the DG?
Indeed. And I am not sure Philips would be the government's choice anyway. Doesn't stop him being an excellent candidate.
Isn't Robbie Gibb likely to want someone like Richard Littlejohn as DG?
Sadly yes.
What about Andrew Neil?
He is going to run the BBC from his villa in the South of France? He seems to be there full time now, every time I see him commenting on Times Radio he is there.
He’s also 76, and presumably quite likes working a couple of hours a day from home somewhere sunny.
In fact most of the names suggested so far are well past retirement age, for what’s very much a full-time executive position.
You would expect a report on bias in an organisation to be objective, and not itself to be massively biased. That's why I think the BBC board engaging a partisan hack as its bias consultant is a bigger problem than any of the issues he has identified. Any big organisation has issues that get resolved some how, but a leadership guided by consultants not acting in good faith is a leadership seriously adrift, in my view.
The idea that there's a room full of Plato's Philosopher Kings wing to be released upon the world to give us Pure Impartiality is... improbable.
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*.
No but there's already a review process in the BBC for bias, which is dealing with most or all of the genuine issues including the Panorama edit. This process appears to be much more rigorous and objective than Michael Prescott's hatchet job. So why not run with that?
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.
They haven't delegated editorial judgement to an outsider.
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.
I accept the report mentions a couple of genuine failings - the Panorama edit, some of the reporting on Gaza - which are being dealt with through the proper process already. The "partisan stuff' is the problem. Not even because it is partisan - anyone can have a view - but because the board has decided to make it their totem.
The problem is that "The Proper Process" is reactive and after the event.
What is needed is to prevent them happening again. Which means changing behaviour.
I'm not sure what "changing behaviour" would actually mean here. I think there's one with the BBC Arabic service where the journalists over identified with "their people" rather than reporting objectively. That's a specific issue the organisation is dealing with specifically, correctly in my view. The rest? The BBC is responsible for a huge amount of content and the number of incontestably wrong calls identified by the report is tiny. How do you generalise that in organisational, behavioural terms?
False claim again. The BBC might be responsible for a "a huge amount of content" but much of that is uncontroversial. We are not really concerned about Eastenders or Traitors. What we are concerned about is that BBC news is regarded as impartial and truthful. A couple of important labels it has lost (if it ever really had them).
Which easily available general coverage news source would you trust more than the BBC?
Many of the European English Language channels. France 24, NRK, Yle (Finland).
I'm not sure if that suggests they'll actually award anything to the Waspi or are just covering their arse if the previous decision was made in the absence of important information. I.e. to avoid the judicial review challenging the decision.
The government should name Trevor Philips as new BBC DG, give him a licence to clean house and bring back impartiality.
I think that is an excellent idea. I have a huge amount of time for Trevor Philips.
iirc the BBC Board decides the DG?
Indeed. And I am not sure Philips would be the government's choice anyway. Doesn't stop him being an excellent candidate.
Isn't Robbie Gibb likely to want someone like Richard Littlejohn as DG?
Sadly yes.
What about Andrew Neil?
He is going to run the BBC from his villa in the South of France? He seems to be there full time now, every time I see him commenting on Times Radio he is there.
He’s also 76, and presumably quite likes working a couple of hours a day from home somewhere sunny.
In fact most of the names suggested so far are well past retirement age, for what’s very much a full-time executive position.
The government should name Trevor Philips as new BBC DG, give him a licence to clean house and bring back impartiality.
I think that is an excellent idea. I have a huge amount of time for Trevor Philips.
iirc the BBC Board decides the DG?
Indeed. And I am not sure Philips would be the government's choice anyway. Doesn't stop him being an excellent candidate.
Isn't Robbie Gibb likely to want someone like Richard Littlejohn as DG?
Sadly yes.
What about Andrew Neil?
He is going to run the BBC from his villa in the South of France? He seems to be there full time now, every time I see him commenting on Times Radio he is there.
He’s also 76, and presumably quite likes working a couple of hours a day from home somewhere sunny.
In fact most of the names suggested so far are well past retirement age, for what’s very much a full-time executive position.
Who do we have aged 55-65 in the running?
Gary Lineker (age 64). Lots of BBC experience. Worth it for the apoplexy that would be witnessed.
Hopefully the Ukrainians can keep chipping away at Russia's oil infrastructure and supply,
Indeed, the Flamingos appear to be flying well.
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.
The question with the flamingos is still ultimate accuracy afaics.
You would expect a report on bias in an organisation to be objective, and not itself to be massively biased. That's why I think the BBC board engaging a partisan hack as its bias consultant is a bigger problem than any of the issues he has identified. Any big organisation has issues that get resolved some how, but a leadership guided by consultants not acting in good faith is a leadership seriously adrift, in my view.
The idea that there's a room full of Plato's Philosopher Kings wing to be released upon the world to give us Pure Impartiality is... improbable.
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*.
No but there's already a review process in the BBC for bias, which is dealing with most or all of the genuine issues including the Panorama edit. This process appears to be much more rigorous and objective than Michael Prescott's hatchet job. So why not run with that?
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.
They haven't delegated editorial judgement to an outsider.
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.
I accept the report mentions a couple of genuine failings - the Panorama edit, some of the reporting on Gaza - which are being dealt with through the proper process already. The "partisan stuff' is the problem. Not even because it is partisan - anyone can have a view - but because the board has decided to make it their totem.
The problem is that "The Proper Process" is reactive and after the event.
What is needed is to prevent them happening again. Which means changing behaviour.
I'm not sure what "changing behaviour" would actually mean here. I think there's one with the BBC Arabic service where the journalists over identified with "their people" rather than reporting objectively. That's a specific issue the organisation is dealing with specifically, correctly in my view. The rest? The BBC is responsible for a huge amount of content and the number of incontestably wrong calls identified by the report is tiny. How do you generalise that in organisational, behavioural terms?
False claim again. The BBC might be responsible for a "a huge amount of content" but much of that is uncontroversial. We are not really concerned about Eastenders or Traitors. What we are concerned about is that BBC news is regarded as impartial and truthful. A couple of important labels it has lost (if it ever really had them).
The point is, you're wasting your time if you say lessons must be learnt, behaviour must change but you can't articulate what those lessons actually are and what behaviour needs to change.
So don't juxtapose two quotes without indicating the break. That's a no-no that no-one else as far as we know has done. What else?
The government should name Trevor Philips as new BBC DG, give him a licence to clean house and bring back impartiality.
I think that is an excellent idea. I have a huge amount of time for Trevor Philips.
iirc the BBC Board decides the DG?
Indeed. And I am not sure Philips would be the government's choice anyway. Doesn't stop him being an excellent candidate.
Isn't Robbie Gibb likely to want someone like Richard Littlejohn as DG?
Sadly yes.
What about Andrew Neil?
He is going to run the BBC from his villa in the South of France? He seems to be there full time now, every time I see him commenting on Times Radio he is there.
He’s also 76, and presumably quite likes working a couple of hours a day from home somewhere sunny.
In fact most of the names suggested so far are well past retirement age, for what’s very much a full-time executive position.
Who do we have aged 55-65 in the running?
Not only full-time executive but will need to show some serious backbone.
Unstupid question. Why are Labour doing this? Genuine change of mind? Incoherence?
It's a large issue to the women involved but not so large as to shift the dial on the polls. Of all the Hail Mary plays, this is not the one I would have picked.
It feels like the same flat footedness that thought the 'one out one in' policy would help with the small boats. Reconsidering Waspi women will offend all the people who think the very idea is scandalous (me), and then rejecting it will reoffend the Waspi women who will choke on their pink gins in their cruise ships.
You would expect a report on bias in an organisation to be objective, and not itself to be massively biased. That's why I think the BBC board engaging a partisan hack as its bias consultant is a bigger problem than any of the issues he has identified. Any big organisation has issues that get resolved some how, but a leadership guided by consultants not acting in good faith is a leadership seriously adrift, in my view.
The idea that there's a room full of Plato's Philosopher Kings wing to be released upon the world to give us Pure Impartiality is... improbable.
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*.
No but there's already a review process in the BBC for bias, which is dealing with most or all of the genuine issues including the Panorama edit. This process appears to be much more rigorous and objective than Michael Prescott's hatchet job. So why not run with that?
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.
They haven't delegated editorial judgement to an outsider.
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.
I accept the report mentions a couple of genuine failings - the Panorama edit, some of the reporting on Gaza - which are being dealt with through the proper process already. The "partisan stuff' is the problem. Not even because it is partisan - anyone can have a view - but because the board has decided to make it their totem.
The problem is that "The Proper Process" is reactive and after the event.
What is needed is to prevent them happening again. Which means changing behaviour.
I'm not sure what "changing behaviour" would actually mean here. I think there's one with the BBC Arabic service where the journalists over identified with "their people" rather than reporting objectively. That's a specific issue the organisation is dealing with specifically, correctly in my view. The rest? The BBC is responsible for a huge amount of content and the number of incontestably wrong calls identified by the report is tiny. How do you generalise that in organisational, behavioural terms?
False claim again. The BBC might be responsible for a "a huge amount of content" but much of that is uncontroversial. We are not really concerned about Eastenders or Traitors. What we are concerned about is that BBC news is regarded as impartial and truthful. A couple of important labels it has lost (if it ever really had them).
Which easily available general coverage news source would you trust more than the BBC?
ITV and SKY. Not as woke as the BBC, not as fash-lite as GB News.
You would expect a report on bias in an organisation to be objective, and not itself to be massively biased. That's why I think the BBC board engaging a partisan hack as its bias consultant is a bigger problem than any of the issues he has identified. Any big organisation has issues that get resolved some how, but a leadership guided by consultants not acting in good faith is a leadership seriously adrift, in my view.
The idea that there's a room full of Plato's Philosopher Kings wing to be released upon the world to give us Pure Impartiality is... improbable.
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*.
No but there's already a review process in the BBC for bias, which is dealing with most or all of the genuine issues including the Panorama edit. This process appears to be much more rigorous and objective than Michael Prescott's hatchet job. So why not run with that?
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.
They haven't delegated editorial judgement to an outsider.
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.
I accept the report mentions a couple of genuine failings - the Panorama edit, some of the reporting on Gaza - which are being dealt with through the proper process already. The "partisan stuff' is the problem. Not even because it is partisan - anyone can have a view - but because the board has decided to make it their totem.
The problem is that "The Proper Process" is reactive and after the event.
What is needed is to prevent them happening again. Which means changing behaviour.
I'm not sure what "changing behaviour" would actually mean here. I think there's one with the BBC Arabic service where the journalists over identified with "their people" rather than reporting objectively. That's a specific issue the organisation is dealing with specifically, correctly in my view. The rest? The BBC is responsible for a huge amount of content and the number of incontestably wrong calls identified by the report is tiny. How do you generalise that in organisational, behavioural terms?
False claim again. The BBC might be responsible for a "a huge amount of content" but much of that is uncontroversial. We are not really concerned about Eastenders or Traitors. What we are concerned about is that BBC news is regarded as impartial and truthful. A couple of important labels it has lost (if it ever really had them).
Which easily available general coverage news source would you trust more than the BBC?
ITV and SKY. Not as woke as the BBC, not as fash-lite as GB News.
The government should name Trevor Philips as new BBC DG, give him a licence to clean house and bring back impartiality.
I think that is an excellent idea. I have a huge amount of time for Trevor Philips.
iirc the BBC Board decides the DG?
Indeed. And I am not sure Philips would be the government's choice anyway. Doesn't stop him being an excellent candidate.
Isn't Robbie Gibb likely to want someone like Richard Littlejohn as DG?
Sadly yes.
What about Andrew Neil?
He is going to run the BBC from his villa in the South of France? He seems to be there full time now, every time I see him commenting on Times Radio he is there.
He’s also 76, and presumably quite likes working a couple of hours a day from home somewhere sunny.
In fact most of the names suggested so far are well past retirement age, for what’s very much a full-time executive position.
Who do we have aged 55-65 in the running?
The The Rest Is Entertainment shortlist mentioned upthread;
Alex Mahon 52 Charlotte Moore 57 Jay Hunt 58
which puts them in the right sort of age frame for a Chief Exec running things. (I'm sure that part of our problem as a nation is the generational bulge resenting the idea that policemen, bishops, newsreaders and BBC Director-Generals can be younger then they are.)
The government should name Trevor Philips as new BBC DG, give him a licence to clean house and bring back impartiality.
I think that is an excellent idea. I have a huge amount of time for Trevor Philips.
iirc the BBC Board decides the DG?
Indeed. And I am not sure Philips would be the government's choice anyway. Doesn't stop him being an excellent candidate.
Isn't Robbie Gibb likely to want someone like Richard Littlejohn as DG?
Sadly yes.
What about Andrew Neil?
He is going to run the BBC from his villa in the South of France? He seems to be there full time now, every time I see him commenting on Times Radio he is there.
He’s also 76, and presumably quite likes working a couple of hours a day from home somewhere sunny.
In fact most of the names suggested so far are well past retirement age, for what’s very much a full-time executive position.
Who do we have aged 55-65 in the running?
Gary Lineker (age 64). Lots of BBC experience. Worth it for the apoplexy that would be witnessed.
We could work with that - but only if his salary is tied to the number of TV licenses sold; license count goes up from today and he gets a pay rise, licence count goes down and he looses income.
You would expect a report on bias in an organisation to be objective, and not itself to be massively biased. That's why I think the BBC board engaging a partisan hack as its bias consultant is a bigger problem than any of the issues he has identified. Any big organisation has issues that get resolved some how, but a leadership guided by consultants not acting in good faith is a leadership seriously adrift, in my view.
The idea that there's a room full of Plato's Philosopher Kings wing to be released upon the world to give us Pure Impartiality is... improbable.
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*.
No but there's already a review process in the BBC for bias, which is dealing with most or all of the genuine issues including the Panorama edit. This process appears to be much more rigorous and objective than Michael Prescott's hatchet job. So why not run with that?
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.
They haven't delegated editorial judgement to an outsider.
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.
I accept the report mentions a couple of genuine failings - the Panorama edit, some of the reporting on Gaza - which are being dealt with through the proper process already. The "partisan stuff' is the problem. Not even because it is partisan - anyone can have a view - but because the board has decided to make it their totem.
The problem is that "The Proper Process" is reactive and after the event.
What is needed is to prevent them happening again. Which means changing behaviour.
I'm not sure what "changing behaviour" would actually mean here. I think there's one with the BBC Arabic service where the journalists over identified with "their people" rather than reporting objectively. That's a specific issue the organisation is dealing with specifically, correctly in my view. The rest? The BBC is responsible for a huge amount of content and the number of incontestably wrong calls identified by the report is tiny. How do you generalise that in organisational, behavioural terms?
False claim again. The BBC might be responsible for a "a huge amount of content" but much of that is uncontroversial. We are not really concerned about Eastenders or Traitors. What we are concerned about is that BBC news is regarded as impartial and truthful. A couple of important labels it has lost (if it ever really had them).
Which easily available general coverage news source would you trust more than the BBC?
ITV and SKY. Not as woke as the BBC, not as fash-lite as GB News.
You would expect a report on bias in an organisation to be objective, and not itself to be massively biased. That's why I think the BBC board engaging a partisan hack as its bias consultant is a bigger problem than any of the issues he has identified. Any big organisation has issues that get resolved some how, but a leadership guided by consultants not acting in good faith is a leadership seriously adrift, in my view.
The idea that there's a room full of Plato's Philosopher Kings wing to be released upon the world to give us Pure Impartiality is... improbable.
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*.
No but there's already a review process in the BBC for bias, which is dealing with most or all of the genuine issues including the Panorama edit. This process appears to be much more rigorous and objective than Michael Prescott's hatchet job. So why not run with that?
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.
They haven't delegated editorial judgement to an outsider.
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.
I accept the report mentions a couple of genuine failings - the Panorama edit, some of the reporting on Gaza - which are being dealt with through the proper process already. The "partisan stuff' is the problem. Not even because it is partisan - anyone can have a view - but because the board has decided to make it their totem.
The problem is that "The Proper Process" is reactive and after the event.
What is needed is to prevent them happening again. Which means changing behaviour.
I'm not sure what "changing behaviour" would actually mean here. I think there's one with the BBC Arabic service where the journalists over identified with "their people" rather than reporting objectively. That's a specific issue the organisation is dealing with specifically, correctly in my view. The rest? The BBC is responsible for a huge amount of content and the number of incontestably wrong calls identified by the report is tiny. How do you generalise that in organisational, behavioural terms?
False claim again. The BBC might be responsible for a "a huge amount of content" but much of that is uncontroversial. We are not really concerned about Eastenders or Traitors. What we are concerned about is that BBC news is regarded as impartial and truthful. A couple of important labels it has lost (if it ever really had them).
Which easily available general coverage news source would you trust more than the BBC?
Political Betting of course
That's not entirely a joke, though it's a good one. I'm increasingly aware how few places there are one can get a range of opinions and comments [edit] outwith the silos.
It wasn't really meant as a joke if I am being honest. Whenever I see an item of news interest appear on the wires, my first port of call is always PB rather than any official media website.
Reeves’ “fiscal headroom” is going to evaporate like an ice cube under a blowtorch at this rate. WASPI women are the most undeserving group of the lot - if Labour caves to them it really is all over & we’re just going to get an entire Parliament of payouts to aggrieved subgroups that can bend the ear of sympathetic MPs & nothing for investing in the future of the UK.
You would expect a report on bias in an organisation to be objective, and not itself to be massively biased. That's why I think the BBC board engaging a partisan hack as its bias consultant is a bigger problem than any of the issues he has identified. Any big organisation has issues that get resolved some how, but a leadership guided by consultants not acting in good faith is a leadership seriously adrift, in my view.
The idea that there's a room full of Plato's Philosopher Kings wing to be released upon the world to give us Pure Impartiality is... improbable.
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*.
No but there's already a review process in the BBC for bias, which is dealing with most or all of the genuine issues including the Panorama edit. This process appears to be much more rigorous and objective than Michael Prescott's hatchet job. So why not run with that?
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.
They haven't delegated editorial judgement to an outsider.
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.
I accept the report mentions a couple of genuine failings - the Panorama edit, some of the reporting on Gaza - which are being dealt with through the proper process already. The "partisan stuff' is the problem. Not even because it is partisan - anyone can have a view - but because the board has decided to make it their totem.
The problem is that "The Proper Process" is reactive and after the event.
What is needed is to prevent them happening again. Which means changing behaviour.
I'm not sure what "changing behaviour" would actually mean here. I think there's one with the BBC Arabic service where the journalists over identified with "their people" rather than reporting objectively. That's a specific issue the organisation is dealing with specifically, correctly in my view. The rest? The BBC is responsible for a huge amount of content and the number of incontestably wrong calls identified by the report is tiny. How do you generalise that in organisational, behavioural terms?
False claim again. The BBC might be responsible for a "a huge amount of content" but much of that is uncontroversial. We are not really concerned about Eastenders or Traitors. What we are concerned about is that BBC news is regarded as impartial and truthful. A couple of important labels it has lost (if it ever really had them).
The point is, you're wasting your time if you say lessons must be learnt, behaviour must change but you can't articulate what those lessons actually are and what behaviour needs to change.
So don't juxtapose two quotes without indicating the break. That's a no-no that no-one else as far as we know has done. What else?
Don't reverse footage to turn the victims of violence into the perpetrators.
Don't ignore the paedophiles and sex pests in your organisarion because they are your 'stars'.
Don't allow one of your main foreign language services to become a propagsnda base for anti-semitism and radical Islam.
There are three to start with. There are dozens more.
Meta’s chief artificial intelligence scientist Yann LeCun, a Turing Award winner who is considered one of the pioneers of modern AI, has told associates he will leave the Silicon Valley group in the coming months
Comments
It doesn't make it any less serious, nor does it excuse Lammy per se as the buck stops with him. But it would be interesting to see what the rates of mistaken release were a year ago, 5 years ago and a decade ago.
https://data.justice.gov.uk/prisons/additional/releases-in-error
We didn't care, beause we didn't know, because it wasn't on the news.
Awkward reality is that things will always go wrong. With effort, we can reduce the frequency and impact, but there will always be a hard limit where the financial or other costs of prevention are worse than the harm done by the bad things.
He is much more Labour friendly so not a terrible option for the government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_Phillips
So error rate has spiked to 0.2% of releases, approx. There's a clear strain, which I put down probably to a system under strain with lots of tactical changes and unusual practices on top.
It's worth a note that the Conservative Government were also involved in a lot of early releases, so there IS something worse under Labour.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce3xe57v7kvo
* https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/offender-management-statistics-quarterly-april-to-june-2025/offender-management-statistics-quarterly-april-to-june-2025#:~:text=There were 14,946 prisoner releases,the same period last year.
As I said., this is a classic case of attacking the messenger (whether it is Prescott or Cyclefree) whe you should actually be listening to them.
Why is it that an organisation that was doing this shit more than 40 years ago (on behalf of the Government against the miners) not only has never been held to account properly for it but is still doing it. How many court cases have the BBC lost (or had to payout public money to prevent getting to court) because they don't have proper editorial standards?
Saying it is all a vendetta is simply bullshit.
Either that or we have an explanation for the dragging out of this year that doesn't involve the psychodrama in the White House.
Edit - don't divide by 52 for 2025, it should be by 45.
We need a Tusa.
One interesting suggestion I have seen raised is Alan Rusbridger, who is 71 - the same as Trevor Phillips.
But an organisation with 218 employees and a budget of £17 million. That's a moderately-sized academy trust. It's not a big organisation.
The BBC has 22000 employees and a budget of about £5 billion.
More importantly, Chair ≠ Chief Executive. Maybe getting Phillips on the board would be a good move- maybe replacing Samir Shah if his head rolls in this fiasco.
But being DG needs a set of experiences that Philips doesn't have.
To be fair, I actually don't think the raw number tells us the whole story. If you release somebody 1 day early does that still count, is that the end of the world*? If you are releasing people who still have 4 years to serve or haven't even started their sentence (the other the other week, where somebody thought it was a suspended sentence rather than an actual one), that is a bigger problem. Same with if you are releasing murderers, sex offenders or people who should be being deported (there was definitely an issue I remember under the Tories with that).
* there is some suggestion with the moving of the goal posts over the past few years of how long somebody has to serve as a minimum of their sentence (plus how long they served on remand), I can see how it can become confused.
But it will be another year before we know that.
The suggestion that the early release schemes are part of the cause seems plausible. Also the pressure on prison staffing & the increase in recruitment from nations where English is not the first language of the applicants might also be having an effect.
- Alex Mahon (who has just left Channel 4 as as chief executive)
- Charlotte Moore (ex BBC controller of BBC 1)
- Jay Hunt (also formerly of the BBC)
Although as The Rest Is Entertainment (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mYnOsiSKao) points out, it's a shitty job and nobody really wants it, so it'll go to whoever is highest on a long list who says "yes"The incorrect prisoner releases, on the other hand, does actually appear to have become more of a problem this year than in the past.
https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/bbc-under-scrutiny-heres-what-research-tells-about-its-role-uk
You couldn't make this up
It's a large issue to the women involved but not so large as to shift the dial on the polls. Of all the Hail Mary plays, this is not the one I would have picked.
What I have set out are not in any sense "defences". They are the very common reactions to criticisms. They are hopeless. The best defence is evidence which shows the criticism to be wrong. That is precisely what the BBC is not doing. It is being its own worst enemy by not engaging properly with the criticisms and either accepting them, where valid, and putting matters right or explaining why they are wrong. It is a great pity.
As for having an agenda: all whistleblowers and complainants have an agenda. But an investigator who allows that agenda to stop them investigating properly is a very bad one indeed. An organisation who does that is an organisation in denial. That is their agenda and it is a harmful one.
I cannot assess the validity of the Prescott criticisms. Some seem a little overblown; others much more serious. The Trump Panorama one seems to my mind less serious than some of the others. The conflict of interest determining how women's rights should be discussed is much more serious both because it has been longer lasting but also because such conflicts are always by definition more serious and harder to resolve. It is notable that it is the one area which the BBC and many of its defenders have ignored in their responses. What's the agenda there?
I wrote this as a critical friend. It pains me to see organisations make such a hash of their responses to problems like this. It is not hard to get it right. It is so easy to get it wrong and it shouldn't be because so much should have been learnt from others. And there are lots of people who could help them get it right professionally. But too many organisations are too arrogant, stupid or panicky to realise that they need help. And so we see the shitshow we've been seeing in the last few days.
And those who will do anything to destroy the best of the BBC will get their chance. It is so important to distinguish between the destroyers and critical friends. The BBC needs critical friends right now. The John Simpsons and others are not being critical friends. They are reinforcing the impression of an arrogant aloof organisation which thinks it knows best. It is a great pity.
I think its entirely possible.....
Seems to do everything else at the BbC despite being s***e.
They got all sorts of basic easily verifable facts wrong about him e.g. banned from YouTube*, but the centre piece was they used an interview with a "concerned citizen" that was the local Green party councillor who was allowed to make all sorts of claims about his activities in Totnes. Except they were basically all false. Talking about how he had regularly been in Totnes running his hate rallies. It appears he went once when standing for UKIP in the Euros and did a sort of Change My Mind thing, and that is the only time he has done "a rally".
* which would be rather odd has has a whole series of YouTube channels under his media "empire".
That’s not going to go down too well, to put it mildly.
Government to rethink rejection of Waspi compensation
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c709y7ln5zro?app-referrer=push-notification
Grayling is available I hear.
*Simply because it's a different legal system in Scotland - they've tried to put a stop to it there but I'm not sure how well it works.
https://www.lawscot.org.uk/members/journal/issues/vol-67-issue-09/defamation-in-the-modern-age/
Damning with faint praise.
According to the Yougov Trust Tracker, in 2003 81% of people said they trusted BBC journalists to tell the truth. By 2023 that was 38%
https://novaramedia.com/2023/08/02/brits-have-fallen-out-of-love-with-the-bbc/
No one in the right minds would trust any of the newspapers. But they have never really claimed to be completely impartial.
The BBC has. And people don't believe it any more.
Though, from a Scottish point of view, it's odd to have Slab [edit] refusing to support the SNP in [edit] opposing it for years, and now look what happens ... 5 months after the SNP had given up and started mitigating it [edit] out of their budget.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdezyrpgez3o
Number 3 is important and worth highlighting. If the devil catches you with your pants down, you can't claim innocence by attacking the devil.
The 'sinister Reform/Boris Johnson/far right/Jewish Chronicle/etc (delete where appropriate) agenda within the BBC board' argument is only relevant to this particular matter if Robbie Gibb himself edited the Panorama footage, promoted Stonewall talking points as gospel, and ordered BBC Arabic to favour Hamas. Otherwise the original criticisms need to be addressed.
I want the BBC to survive as a national broadcaster. I pay the licence fee and am happy to continue to do so. I value its output and consider it a national asset. But to keep its status it needs to meet certain standards.
What about Andrew Neil?
A document was not shown to Liz Kendall, who was Work and Pensions Secretary at the time of the decision, but had since come to light and needed to be considered, the government has now said.
Current Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden told the Commons that retaking the decision did not mean that payouts would be made to those affected.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c709y7ln5zro
Presumably the government can't say no immediately, but they had better blooming well say no after due consideration.
(The more relevant question is, why the hell wasn't Kendall shown the document at the time? Does anything in this country work, apart from the Passport Service?)
"In his youth at the University of Edinburgh, Brown was involved in a romantic relationship with Margarita, Crown Princess of Romania. Margarita said about it: "It was a very solid and romantic story. I never stopped loving him but one day it didn't seem right anymore, it was politics, politics, politics, and I needed nurturing."
An unnamed friend of those years is quoted by Paul Routledge in his biography of Brown as recalling: "She was sweet and gentle and obviously cut out to make somebody a very good wife. She was bright, too, though not like him, but they seemed made for each other.""
https://x.com/DailyMail/status/1988251045839974417
In fact most of the names suggested so far are well past retirement age, for what’s very much a full-time executive position.
Who do we have aged 55-65 in the running?
Worth it for the apoplexy that would be witnessed.
So don't juxtapose two quotes without indicating the break. That's a no-no that no-one else as far as we know has done. What else?
Alex Mahon 52
Charlotte Moore 57
Jay Hunt 58
which puts them in the right sort of age frame for a Chief Exec running things. (I'm sure that part of our problem as a nation is the generational bulge resenting the idea that policemen, bishops, newsreaders and BBC Director-Generals can be younger then they are.)
Don't ignore the paedophiles and sex pests in your organisarion because they are your 'stars'.
Don't allow one of your main foreign language services to become a propagsnda base for anti-semitism and radical Islam.
There are three to start with. There are dozens more.
Your joking....not another one.