Kaplinsky Offloaded

Joy of joys; that toweringly great moral and intellectual authority otherwise known to many as BBC News presenter Natasha Kaplinsky, is reportedly set to leave her post at the BBC for Channel Five and three million pound contract.

She takes her over-inflated celebrity chasing ego with her to Channel Five where I cannot imagine her new colleagues will be particularly impressed with her ludicrously over the top salary for simply reading an auto-cue.

Since hardly anyone bothers to watch Channel Five news, few people will have to suffer seeing much of her for the foreseeable future. Now, all the BBC need do is let go a few more of their highly overpaid celeb stars such as Dermot Murnaghan, Terry Wogan and Jonathan Ross.

Controlling Immigration

David Cameron has been interviewed by BBC Newsnight on a variety of issues including green taxes, immigration and Shadow Cabinet outside interests.

However, his comments on immigration were of particular interest because, for the most part, Mr Cameron has avoided focusing on this topic in his quest to re-brand the Conservative party by approaching issues with which it is not normally associated.

Immigration to Britain is far too high as David Cameron pointed out in the interview, and has reached completely unsustainable levels during Labour’s ten year tenure, causing both widespread social friction, housing problems, and increased pressure on public services.

Opinion polls reveal that immigration is consistently among the top three most important issues that concern voters, and also show that Mr Cameron’s views reflect the majority of British opinion. Therefore it’s welcome news that Mr Cameron is at least tentatively discussing the issue, even if he is also discussing possible ‘green taxes’ too.

I think it’s also useful to contrast Mr Cameron’s Newsnight comments with an announcement on Sunday by Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem Home Affairs spokesman who said the problems of immigration and the ‘twilight world of illegality’ needed to be tackled by allowing the legalisation of illegal immigrants that ‘proved’ themselves.

When Asylum Seekers Escape

I was listening to Five Live radio in the car this afternoon. They were reporting on how a total of twenty six asylum seekers had escaped from a detention centre in Oxfordshire.

I cannot imagine that the government centre puts much effort into keeping its occupants under lock and key, and the fact that so many have escaped from that centre in recent months is testament to that.

Five Live interviewed a local man who lived close by to the centre over the phone about how he had apprehended one of the escapees in his back garden. The man went on to tell them that this was the third time it had happened recently, and said he would not be surprised if it happened again.

The man then expressed the view that those in the Asylum centre should be sent back to where they came from if their application had been failed, and that in not doing so the Government was costing taxpayers in this country a large sum of money to pay for the Asylum seeker’s constant upkeep in a centre which they continued to trash.

Needless to say, he was cut off very quickly by the BBC after those honest comments.

We’ve Heard It All Before

Director General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, was interviewed yesterday by ITV News and asked why he would not resign over revelations that the BBC had actively deceived the public in faked competition phone-ins.

His response stated that he would not be standing down because he wished to help re-establish the BBC’s code of conduct throughout the whole corporation, and that he had the full confidence of the BBC Board in this undertaking.

Where have we heard something similar to this before? Ah yes, that’s right, it’s exactly the same type of response elicited from Labour Ministers Charles Clarke and John Reid after successive Home Office scandals. They created or had a hand in the scandal and then claimed to be the solution to fix it. How convenient.

Well, it didn’t work out in the end for either Charles Clarke or John Reid, and I hope that it doesn’t for Mark Thompson either. However, if Thompson goes, the BBC Board will only bring in another equally inept individual who won’t do anything but persist with the biased status-quo of a corporation who continue to take the license fee far too much for granted, and with little regard for those who pay it.

Mark Thompson said that the BBC’s latest problem was down to only a small number of individual staff who did not take fairness, integrity and honesty to heart. But, in reality the BBC itself is the problem – not just any one part of it. The whole corporation is an unaccountable and uncontrollable mess, and until it is abolished or privatised the problems will only grow.