{"id":2597,"date":"2015-07-13T08:09:06","date_gmt":"2015-07-13T07:09:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2597"},"modified":"2015-07-13T09:05:20","modified_gmt":"2015-07-13T08:05:20","slug":"what-3-7bn-gets-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/2597\/","title":{"rendered":"What \u00a33.7bn per year gets you"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a rather confused\u00a0article entitled The Arrogance of Power<\/a>, the BBC gives us this gem:<\/p>\n

Some European countries have no [Presidential] term limits, including Italy, Switzerland and Russia.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

According to the Russian constitution<\/a>, Article 81 Clause 3:<\/p>\n

One and the same person cannot hold the office of the President of the Russian Federation for more than two terms running.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Good journalism there, BBC.<\/p>\n

Having started talking about African presidents hanging onto power beyond their constitutionally determined limits, the article then veers off into an opinion piece by one Lord Owen, former British foreign secretary and leader of the Social Democtratic Party in the 1980s who argues:<\/p>\n

by the time they have been in power for many years, some leaders tend to become arrogant, unwilling to listen and overly optimistic that their decisions will produce good results.<\/p>\n

“Eight years is enough,” Lord Owen told Newshour Extra.<\/p>\n

“Blair is the classic example of hubris and it had profound effects because he reinforced the hubris of Bush and Bush reinforced Blair’s and these two made terrible mistakes.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I assume that Lord Owen is referring to the decision to\u00a0invade\u00a0Iraq in February 2003, which was made\u00a0during Bush’s first presidential term. \u00a0Bush assumed the presidency in January 2001, meaning he’d been in power all of 2 years when the invasion was launched. \u00a0Blair had been in power 7 years at the time of the invasion, and although Lord Owen is quite correct in his assessment of the man, even a casual observer would have spotted that he had been this way right from the start: he didn’t need 7 years in which to develop arrogance and the idea he was on some sort of holy crusade. \u00a0This is just another excuse for some washed-up Lefty to have a swipe about the Iraq War: they were quite okay with Blair’s arrogance and hubris until he did something they disagreed with. \u00a0Naturally, Lord Owen takes the opportunity to have swipe at “bankers” as well:<\/p>\n

Lord Owen believes acquired hubris is not limited to politicians:<\/p>\n

“It exists in bankers,” he says.<\/p>\n

“If you look at the roots of the 2008-9 crisis you see in many major banks that their chief executives were making decisions based on a lot of the characteristics of somebody suffering from hubris syndrome.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So in an article of the arrogance of power and hubristic behaviour, the best examples the BBC gives us are Bush and “bankers”. \u00a0The absolute clusterfuck that is the Euro project and the catastrophe unfolding in Greece warrants nary\u00a0a mention.<\/p>\n

Then last week we had the BBC report<\/a> on the resignation of Ellen Pao, CEO of Reddit:<\/p>\n

Ms Pao had been the subject of intense criticism over her handling of the site, one of the web’s most visited, since taking over late last year.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At no point does the BBC mention that Pao’s appointment to Reddit came in the middle of her highly-publicised\u00a0lawsuit<\/a> against her previous employers for discrimination and harassment, which she subsequently lost, and that many predicted that this appointment would be a car-crash from the beginning.<\/p>\n

The argument against scrapping the BBC is that the quality of news reporting available to the British public would suffer. \u00a0I’m\u00a0trying to think how.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a rather confused\u00a0article entitled The Arrogance of Power, the BBC gives us this gem: Some European countries have no [Presidential] term limits, including Italy, Switzerland and Russia. According to the Russian constitution, Article 81 Clause 3: One and the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[60,20],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2597"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2597"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2597\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2601,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2597\/revisions\/2601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}