BBC Verify is out defending itself after its pro-farm tax bias and poor reporting quality attracted ridicule. The main post on its website is a long justification for its reporting on the IHT changes. Funnily enough it’s not promoting this one on social media…
The article goes through various differing positions held by stakeholders – the government and farming groups. The very first think tank the Verify team consults for comment happens to be one CenTax. Co-conspirators will remember that one…
“The CenTax think tank has studied the impact of APR and BPR reliefs.
CenTax’s co-director Arun Advani argues that the government’s estimates of the number of agricultural estates likely to be affected by the capping of both reliefs at £1m combined – up to 520 estates a year – seems reasonable.”
Advani is then extensively quoted. What Verify makes no mention of is that his reports on APR and inheritance tax have formed the basis of Reeves’ policy. This has been admitted by the Treasury…
There is no mention of the fact that Advani has pushed for state expropriation of farmland that is sold as a result of APR’s removal. Readers are unaware from the article that Advani, along with CenTax co-director Andy Summers, is one of three “wealth tax commissioners” who consistently push for huge tax hikes. Using CenTax and think tanks like the IFS as vehicles to do so…
Advani is close to the government – he has boasted that Labour is “genuinely listening” to him and Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury James Murray was the keynote speaker at a parliamentary reception to officially launch CenTax. No mention of that from the BBC either…
Verify fronted an “independent” expert who is actually senior Labour activist to defend the Treasury in its previous coverage of the Farm Tax and quietly changed its article once under scrutiny. Seeing as their team confuses hectares for acres they probably aren’t the place to go to for reasoned coverage of this policy…
Tom Baldwin, author of Starmer’s hagiography, spoke to Times Radio:
Tom Baldwin: “I think he’d like to do something. He’s very dutiful and driven by service. That’s why he came into politics. I think that’s characterised his time as prime minister. He hasn’t always sought popularity or been good at being popular. But I think he has some of the necessary qualities that we actually do want in a prime minister. That resilience, that relentlessness, that ability to carry the weight and the job really does weigh very heavily on people and he carries that weight very, very well.”
Jo Coburn: “NATO Secretary-General?”
Tom Baldwin: “I think that’s something that he would be interested in. I think it probably requires Andy Burnham’s government to support him in that and these are some of the questions which Andy Burnham has to resolve quite quickly.”