Iain Duncan Smith has submitted a formal complaint to the BBC, accusing economics editor Stephanie Flanders of “peeing all over British industry“. IDS reckons that Flanders – who famously dated both Ed Miliband and Ed Balls – was guilty of bias over her coverage of last week’s positive unemployment figures:

“The BBC is locked to the reading of the economy that is run out of Ed Miliband and Ed Balls’ office. They think if only you spend and borrow more money you can create growth everywhere. This is the general tenor of everything that comes out of the BBC. They expected the (employment) figures to be flatlining. They convinced themselves youth unemployment would continue to rise, but when it fell they were in a complete quandary. Stephanie Flanders poured cold water over the whole thing. She said: ‘Of course this is good news, but it could be because we aren’t productive enough’. If the unemployment figures had gone up, we would have been on the BBC TV News at Six and Ten and would have got the blame. When the news is good, the BBC view is ‘Get the Government out of the picture quickly, don’t allow them to say anything about it’. When the news is bad, it’s ”Let’s all dump on the Government’. Flanders was peeing all over British industry and the private sector. It was terrible.”

It’s almost as if journalists at the Beeb only read the Guardian…