Margaret Hodges

[KateLMead]

I like her no nonsense approach of questioning, listening to her lambasting the BBC with respect to redundancy payouts!!

[Workingman]

Putting aside the fact that she has "baggage" from her past she did quite well, but I still think that a lot of these committees are toothless.

Evidence should be given under oath and when lies=perjury the punishments should reflect this. Without the ability to remove miscreants from their positions of power they are little more than talking shops.

[cromwell]

Don't like the woman. Typical upper class socialist; ask her about her own tax arrangements!
People like her are the reason the Labour party stopped being the party of the working class, and became the party of the middle clas, telling the working class what was what.
(Though I did like her sticking the boot into the BBC panjandrums, who richly deserve it).

[TheOstrich]

Oh, I think she makes a good Inquisitor General, Cromwell

Mind you, I used to think the same of Tom Watson in Committee - but then, with him and the Murdochs, it actually got all very grubby and very personal; I went off him at that point .....

[KateLMead]

Well we know that she is married to a controversial judge, so she obviously gets lessons. From him. I prefer her to the devious crook Vaz who got away with promoting a close friend as his lawyer who was supposedly representing him in a court case
Pompous! full of her own self importance she might be however it is good to see her in action.

[Suff]

Cromwell, you missed the point.

Most of the working class became Middle Class. Take your typical working class person from 1920 and identify that person in the UK today....

In 1920 a working class person would be apprenticed into a company at 15. That person would probably work for that company for life. Be paid in cash every week, have no bank account, live in rented accommodation, usually owned by the company and live their lives that way till they retired. Dying shortly after, if not before retirement.

The working class person that labour was set up to protect did not have a bank account, did not own property, had about 2 weeks holiday a year (if lucky), did not jet off on holiday, have ISA's, private pensions or a whole plethora of things taken for granted by everyone who works in the UK today. In fact many of the "Middle Class" traits of British society are now touted as "Rights" for the unemployed.

The mission for the Labour Party was a success. They lifted the vast majority of the British working class out of that section of society. Created a "Workers Paradise" and destroyed the jobs that those workers might have had if it was not too expensive to actually employ them for work that can now be done much more cheaply in Asia or Eastern Europe (for now)....

I see the mess in the BBC as a reflection of that Labour goal run amok. One of the usual issues with simple goals like the Labour goal is "What do you do when you get there". OK so in the BBC, we have an institution which was all about quality and integrity. However when those "socialists" finally make it to the top, what do they do? Act like capitalists. Because they have grown up with the story of the struggle to "take back the wealth".

When do they stop taking?? Ah now we hit the lack of vision wall. The mission statement of Labour didn't say "When we get the equality we want, then we'll stop taking and start giving". Oh, no, the statement was too simple and with little thought. So, long after the goal is met, they keep on taking. After all, there is always someone else who's richer, has more, could be compared with to make the excesses seem trivial.

The "view from the cheap seats" is always very simple. Most of those who "make it" are utterly bewildered to find they are vilified when they do. Because they think, inside, that they are still what they came from. After all, they pay Soooo much in taxes....

As for Labour leadership being taken over? Almost to a man the higher echelons of Labour have always come from educated, wealthy and privileged backgrounds. If they had not, there would never have been a Labour party in Government.

I liken this to what has happened in Dundee. Successive corrupt Labour councils have gutted the heart and soul of the city, ripped out the historical areas and monuments and replaced them with soulless concrete monstrosities as a monument to their complete lack of vision. Of course it made many millionaires, but, then, that's OK when you're "taking back" isn't it? The best hotel in Dundee for many years was a stakis, it won a design competition and the residents dubbed it Colditz, because it resembled nothing more than a prison block..... Today the best hotel in Dundee looks like a solid block of rust.....

Why should I be surprised at what is going on in the BBC? It has become a political mouthpiece of a political party which has achieved it's goal and found that it has to "invent scenarios" to justify it's existence. What better mechanism to promote these invented scenario's than a public broadcaster, funded by the public purse. And do we wonder why others want their slice of the cake when such largesse is being handed out????