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Another example of how media is never satisfied. First, in these BBC cases, we are told:
The number of first-time home buyers in the UK has dropped to its lowest point since 1980 as house prices soar, mortgage lender Halifax says.
An estimated 300,000 first-time buyers entered the market in 2007, 15,000 fewer than a year earlier…
Hmmm. Yet why the maudlin tone? For one would have thought the Beeb would be quite pleased: the more people priced out of the market means fewer home buyers, which means lower overall demand, which means less pressure for new homes . . . which can only but assist in the struggle against “climate change.” Isn’t that a good thing?
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Secondly, the Christmas “To The Manor Born” special, shown last night on BBC1, was not particularly gripping stuff. The script was patchy and not really funny, and the characters seemed to be going through the motions, as if comedy had stood still since the early 1980s. One can’t go home again, as they say.
What was more interesting (to me, anyway) was less the program itself than the fact that it (perhaps inadvertently) displayed two of the Beeb’s reportorial stances. (Indeed, I even found myself briefly awaiting Orla Guerin’s voiceover solemnly informing us, “To the rural manor, it was expected the pop fans would flock in their thousands“.) 1) We were treated to cutting op-ed dialogue on the evils of supermarkets, because they supposedly devastate the countryside and impoverish honorable famers, whose out of date, expensive farming methods are superior morally. (At the end, the main characters conveniently “solve” their problem by setting up a “farmers cooperative.”) Yet 2) in a myriad of other BBC pieces and reports, the Beeb is endlessly bemoaning also how those on low or fixed incomes find it increasingly difficult to make ends meet nowadays?
Again, which is it? Is it better that we do NOT have modernizing farming methods, which produce much less expensive and varied foodstuffs than those that were available to our grandparents and great-grandparents ? Or does the BBC really prefer antiquated, inefficient farming methods and an ancien regime that keeps “manors” running pleasantly and quaintly for the landowners, paid for courtesy of the toiling masses . . . who find themselves unable “to get on the property ladder” themselves?
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