Pink News CEO Benjamin Cohen caused quite a stir on the Today Programme this morning, after accusing the BBC of hosting “two different gay people [to talk] about trans issues […] without a single trans voice” following Liz Truss’s call for government departments to leave Stonewall’s Diversity Champions programme – and the charity’s boss suggesting that freedom of speech ‘has limits‘ in the context of LGBT rights. It was possibly the most raucous exchange Guido’s ever heard on Radio 4…
Clearly spoiling for a fight, Cohen also attacked presenter Justin Webb for introducing the issue despite being “cisgender”*, and suggested the coverage of Stonewall’s new “free to be” strategy reflected a “a homophobic and transphobic media frame”. The usually even-measured Webb managed to lose his patience, telling Cohen “you don’t know anything about me”, and insisting he stay on track. All very loud for an early Tuesday morning…
UPDATE: Listeners heard denials that Stonewall want to allow trans-women into women’s refuges. Stonewall has made repeated calls for exemptions – which allow for female-only services – to be abolished. That is the logic of claiming “trans-women are women”. This is their long-standing position, see the August 2015 Stonewall submission to the Women & Equalities Select Committee:
- A review of the Equality Act 2010 to include ‘gender identity’ rather than ‘gender reassignment’ as a protected characteristic and to remove exemptions, such as access to single-sex spaces
This is just one of the reasons why feminists have had enough and are at loggerheads with Stonewall.
*Normal.
On this morning’s Today Programme, BBC presenter Justin Webb made a sly jab at The Express for leading on the Government’s rescue package for cultural institutions.
“The Daily Express too… Oh… Quite unexpected that it’s its lead story but there it is…”
“Quite unexpected” he claims, despite the paper having run its significant #RaiseTheCurtain campaign on this exact issue since June; writing last month:
“BRITAIN’S world leading network of theatres could completely collapse due to the devastating impact of the coronavirus pandemic unless the nation rallies to offer it essential support. In response to this unprecedented crisis, the Daily Express is today launching a campaign encouraging the public and government to Raise The Curtain by keeping this vital industry alive.”
Classic BBC sneering…
Justin Webb does it again on the Today programme this morning:
Never forget when it happened three times in one day:
Never gets old…
An entertaining Today programme to-and-fro about Breitbart’s chief Trump strategist Steve Bannon. Justin Webb boldly told Breitbart* editor Joel Pollack that Bannon “doesn’t like Jews”, Pollack replied that he is an orthodox Jew who observes the Shabbat and eats kosher food, and that Bannon is not an anti-Semite. Undeterred, Webb asked why a Breitbart report mentioned that the journalist Anne Applebaum is Jewish. Pollack replied: “I don’t know, why don’t you ask the Jewish author of that sentence?” For those interested, it’s worth reading Iain Martin and Freddy Gray on Bannon. Rather than learn the lessons from the election the liberal media has reverted to its perennially outraged misfiring attack mode…
*Andrew Breitbart himself was Jewish.
George Osborne told Justin Webb on the Today Programme this morning: “… what have we got, a country where the debt is falling”. This is just not true, the national debt is still rising and the day when Osborne promises it will start falling is, after the budget, a year further away than it was before, which in itself was two years later than he originally promised in 2010. Interviewers who let the Chancellor deliberately conflate the debt and deficit are doing their audience a disservice. The Today Programme is almost part of the unwritten constitution of Britain, given we are likely to have an opposition that is introspective and irrelevant it is essential that they hold the government to account – at the very least challenging political spin and lying. Justin allowed this to go unchallenged. Guido is sure that Evan Davis would not have let him off the hook so easily, Andrew Neil would have wrenched the Chancellor’s testicles off…
Osborne and his allies don’t repeat this slip of the tongue by accident, it is deliberate and repeated time after time. It is dishonest. It is designed to give the public the impression that Osborne is successfully dealing with the deficit. He is dealing it with very slowly and he is lucky in that he can print more pounds so the Bank of England can buy up UK government bonds and avoid going the way of Greece. That is despite have a higher deficit as a proportion of GDP – his preferred measure – than those crazy left-wingers in Athens.
This was not a tax cutting budget, it was full of tax cutting rhetoric and actual tax rises. Osborne has increased planned spending compared to what he promised in the March budget and in the Tory manifesto. Tax rises of £47 billion mean that “the tax increases are roughly twice the size of the tax cuts in aggregate” according to the OBR’s Robert Chote. Taxing and spending are rising after this budget…
There were some other minor fibs that also went unchallenged, such as Osborne claiming that the Resolution Foundation think-tank is “left-of-centre”. It is chaired by his former Cabinet colleague David Willetts. Willetts started his career in the policy unit of 10 Downing Street working for Margaret Thatcher…
