It's easy to forget that the day job of Winston Smith in 1984 was rewriting history. As Orwell said:
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
I thought about that when reflecting on HMRC's tax gap data that I commented upon yesterday. In it HMRC are literally rewriting their past to make their present claims look better. The comparison between the grey (past) and orange (present) lines on this chart makes that clear.
What was getting worse is now getting better and an achievement outside the previously likely range is now reported to be possible.
Is this Orwellian? Of itself, no.
But when issued by a government that can claim asymptomatic transmission of Covid 19 was unknown in March when it was so clearly well understood by then, and which can rewrite coronavirus data as well as Brexit history almost daily, yes I do think it is.
We have to trust data to have confidence in a government. I do not trust this government's data. And I regret that.
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There is something inherently amusing about the way in which big business and the Cummings/Gove/Johnson mode of Government is more totalitarian than anything that has existed from the Left in this country.
It would be even more amusing if it were not also absolutely terrifying.
The new ‘Soviet’ is the rich and the establishment that serves it. Extreme Left and Right are to me at least, the same thing. They reduce everything down to a mono-culture.
Your comment, “Extreme Left and Right are to me at least, the same thing.” brought back a few happy memories!
20+ years ago after moving from Edinburgh to Bo’ness I met a chap, sadly no longer with us, as you do, in a local pub. Our political views were as different as possible to be; he on the extreme right and me on the left. We got on very well and spent many a ‘happy hour’ arguing our points of view.
He often joked that we were that far apart at the extremes we met each other in the middle. That resulted in working together in a number of local organisations on projects that could benefit the community.
The ‘monoculture’ that resulted from that relationship was the realisation of the untapped potential and opportunities that were not being exploited and making an attempt to change it. Happily, some were successful. Having said that, most are not as fruitful.
I noticed this morning on BBC Radio Scotland that the proposition was stated that Scotland had in fact done no better than the UK as a whole on COVID-19, because the official death toll in the UK was just under 45,000 and the Scottish death toll was just under 4,500. The implication was that Scotland and England were roughly the same. This is false; and it is wretched journalism. The comparative figure for Scotland should be just under 2,500 on the same basis as the English statistics. What BBC GMS appear to have done is mix the daily trends with the weekly figures for Scotland, measuring slightly different data.
There is no excuse for this. The actual figures; 44,650 and 2,490 are available on the British Government website: here, https://www.gov.uk/guidance/coronavirus-covid-19-statistics-and-analysis#covid-19-cases-and-deaths and click on the appropriate data. The different weekly and daily figures have been produced by Government, and reporeted on the media, including the BBC for months. No doubt there will be no explanation (if they still think they are right), or withdrawal or acknowledgement by the journalists involved, the editors, or the BBC.
Thanks John
Wow – that is just not on.
It’s a school boy error – speaking of which, I have noticed that the BBC at a local level seems to rely more and more on lowly paid youngsters to build up its media coverage – it’s also bad editing, but my experience in the Midlands is that you get really young people ringing you up asking to comment and what have you on public sector issues. Their lack of experience and aggressiveness in dealing with people certainly comes over (I live in the Midlands BTW).
Younger people whom I have come across who have worked in the lower echelons of the BBC say the hours are long and the pay is poor.
PSR,
BBC Radio Scotland GMS uses experienced journalists; it is their flagship radio news programme in Scotland. That is why I am struggling to understand this.
It is so egregious that I keep thinking I may have misunderstood somehow, but I am not sure in what way I could have done so. I am deeply worried by what I fear may lie behind this; the anxiety of the BBC to politicise everything on COVID-19 in Scotland into a political-constitutional matter, so it can ‘spin’ the facts favourably for the Union, no matter what.
Fair enough John.
After all that trouble over Corbyn, I began to see the BBC as badly riven by internal politics as Westminster or the Labour party itself and my trust in it has just waned since then. A strand of the BBC’s internal politics is about survival and that means pleasing this authoritarian Government. And unfortunately another part of their rather middle class management culture is that there is always a queue of greedy individuals who can be bought for the right price to get the BBC to say and do the most ridiculous things.
I still use the BBC only because it is so central to public communication in Britain, but I have always believed that the BBC should never have been allowed to renew its Charter after this report was produced: ‘Dame Janet Smith Review Report: The Jimmy Saville Investigation Report’ (2016.) (SJSR). The report – I read only parts – I found distressing.
Saville was not the only transgression. The basic failure to manage, and for example protect young girls invited in to shows like ‘Top of the pops’ was so egregious (read the report – one young girl who protested Saville’s activities during rehearsal was thrown out on the street by security: SJSR, Para.,12, p.4), I quite simply fail to understand how the institution could be allowed to continue. What does that say – about us? That if the Saville affair did not mark totally unacceptable performance and commanded of us the end of the institution, what could conceivably be sufficiently appalling, that it would lead to the BBC being terminated?
Oh no, the BBC is fine – look at all the funny comedy, and classic drama. Regrettably I feel obliged to say here that I do not write this because I wish to hand the airwaves over to a bunch of free market freebooters and looters. I don’t, but it does not mean I have to acquire a Nelson’s eye so i can keep the BBC. Incidentally, we are in a post-airwaves world. That ship has sailed. The pirates are running the world.
Despite BBC Scotland’s efforts, the SNP seem to be doing pretty well in the polls!
Yes – the Saville issue did it for me too and my sentiments are exactly the same as yours.
But the desire to cover up I found to be inherent in the wider public sector too – a lack of principle seems to be the new principle – if you see what I mean.
Maybe the BBC is just a battleground these days – enlightenment versus some form of authoritarian unaccountability – I’m not sure what to call to be honest.
For the avoidance of doubt, these remarks are not about the SNP or independence. They are directed at the principle of “impartiality”, and what that actually means on one level. The BBC’s typical interpretation seems to me superficial at best. On quite antother level the issue is what the BBC Charter is supposed to stand for. I am trying to raise this whole matter above party politics.
I did not intend to ‘take over’ this thread either. I arrived here by accident.
HMRC, has a vested interest in presenting the Tax Gap data and narrative in a way that maintains the organisation at its current size. But they are marking their own homework and raises the issue of moral hazard. As an organisation most of the time the Tax simply turns up but in much of HMRC there is a large body of staff who obtain additional tax each year through investigative work, and doing deals with corporates. Leaving the latter for now the additional revenues from investigative work is substantial several billion each possibly more now and part of the rationale for these teams is that they are bearing down on the Tax evaders occasionally avoiders. The narrative and data must show they are being successful. But are they really? One example will suffice I suspect that HMRC are close to arguing we have the smallest tax gap among OECD nations i.e. we are world beating. Based on what we know about UK’s financial sector just for example can such a claim really be credible?
We need an independent audit of the tax gap
Even the IMF, when they looked at it, were paid by HMRC