Would you approve it the station had a left-wing agenda?

I would be interested in the Labour Party policies on the economy and immigration so I can make an informed decision, but the Leader seems to have forgotten them!

Although I have no proof, I believe a lot of people vote on what they perceive would be the party that represents their views rather than listening to policies.

I would prefer it if LBC's only agenda was to engage the general listening public via phone calls from listeners and interviews with politicians and experts. By and large it does this quite well, which is why I continue to listen. Also, there seems to be a lack of competition in this area of broadcasting.

Some provisos I would mention though are:

1. I really don't need the presenter's opinion - I prefer to make up my own mind having listened to various sides of the discussion. To me, this is just the presenter's ego getting in the way. Most presenters strike me as woefully ill-informed on a variety of topics and general knowledge, with a lack of compensating for this by doing some 'homework'. When it gets to the point where callers (whose opinions don't coincide with the presenter's) are cut off is where I begin to lose interest in the discussion.

2. Right Wing agendas tend to be simpler and less nuanced than Centre or Left policies, therefore they are easier to feed to the public. Most topics tend to get boiled down to 'good' or 'bad', 'for' or 'against' which I find simplistic and childish.

3. Corporations tend to ally themselves with populism. I suppose one can't really blame them for that, but I think this is what tends to happen with LBC. I believe it's a 'lite' version of the Murdoch/Fox News/Right Wing media, which is populist, gets people angry and fearful, and is therefore easy to broadcast in order to get a reaction. In other words, lazy journalism. (see proviso number 2).

2 mistakes -

Boris is intelligent and smart

Its erroneous to presume/guess business owners are right wing .Many arent -


Another point - Milliband is a complete idiot

No I wouldn't approve it should be neutral. I agree with your last point.

Smart if you are in the 1% for example no congestion charge in the rich area of London. Let's stick an airport in the Thames estuary so that the poor people in Essex and Kent have to suffer whilst the property developers can develop luxury properties on Heathrow.

Another point Cameron is a rich Tory complete idiot. I didn't say some business owners weren't left wing. Some people have a conscience.

^^^^ This.

I completely agree. And when you couple those with the other point about presenters often not being clued up enough to see the nuances anyway... It doesn't make for very grown-up radio.

Posters here have occasionally said that they find detail boring, but as you say, Charlie, the devil is in the detail. There is always going to be a issue for a commercial station, dependent on listener numbers, in balancing good reporting with being entertaining. I think LBC err far too much towards the latter, and as most of their presenters tend towards the right-wing, we end up with simplistic reporting, sarcasm, name-calling, cutting people off, or even sometimes stopping their expert guests mid-flow because they're giving too much detail! I am sure I have heard both NF and JHB blatantly say that their listeners weren't interested in detail at least once each...

The main reason I cannot listen to Ferrari, JHB or IC anymore is that they consistently directed their ire, interruptions and sarcasm at callers who disagreed with their, generally right-wing, opinions. Thus we end up with a total lack of balance and the equivalent of The Daily LBC Mail.

And your evidence for this is...?

I don't think anyone can doubt Boris' IQ, but I am always interested in how he gets away with so much, whereas other politicians are pilloried for far lesser offences than his.

It's a mistake to confuse intelligence with knowledge.
The fact that Boris has learned a smattering of Latin and Greek doesn't necessarily make him intelligent, any more than a parrot would be.
His utter inability to answer important questions with any real knowledge, honesty or integrity makes him both unintelligent and unknowledgeable, unfortunately.
He 'succeeds' by being a buffoon and a colourful character, which is already dangerous enough, but what keeps him in power is his Bullingdon bully-boy privileged background coupled with an inbred belief in his own sense of entitlement and a quite awe-inspiring lack of empathy and self-doubt.

Hear Hear!

Getting into Oxbridge is formidably challenging irrespective of where you did your A levels .Even a classics trained parrot would find it challenging .

Intriguing. Who do you suppose is envious of public schools? I presume you mean to say a public school education. This sounds like a classic red herring to me and not a coherent argument. It certainly wouldn't be true in my case, if that's what you meant.

fk it - the above was meant to be a new post .Sorry about that ...

No problem!

You forgot 'lazy'. I think Boris forgets that being mayor is a job, not just a political position.

As for being candid, he's famous for just saying whatever the crowd in front of him wants to hear.

It is hard to point to anything that Boris actually did as a mayor. Congestion charge, bike lanes, transport policy, even gaining the Olympics .... anything of any significance was started by Ken Livingstone.

People like Boris succeed because they know how to play the game - in Boris's case acting the buffoon and treating the unwashed public like the ignorant fools that they are. If the average Joe ever decided to become a bit more clued up about what was going on around him and less apathetic, then the Borises of this world would have a much rougher ride.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAxA-9D4X3o

Agreed. But it would also help if the media subjected him to the same level of scrutiny as most other politicians.

Well done Harry Smith. A very moving speech from a man in his 90's defending the NHS which the Tories are systematically destroying.

So it's okay to call Cameron an idiot (I'm not disagreeing) but not Miliband? There's very little between them, Clegg and numerous others MPs in terms of being identikit modern politicians.
Besides, same as we're always being told Blair wasn't really Labour, Cameron isn't really a Tory.


At least Boris won his own election and didn't knife the real winner in the back. Does anyone remember. Andrew McIntosh, head of the GLC for all of 24 hours?

If there was 'like' button here - I'd probably destroy my keyboard.

Good to know this thread is still somewhat active.

Saw him being interviewed on BBC News. A very good speaker for his age. I bet when the Labour Party 'found' him they were beside themselves !

However, he cannot say that the NHS today is almost bad as it was before the NHS. He can get his medication free of charge, he does not have to pay to see his GP or hospital treatment. More treatment is available now than ever before.

Perhaps the NHS is a victim of its own success with more people wanting to use the service for more conditions. Successive Governments have pumped more money into the Service but there is never enough. Patients are always praising the nurses and doctors, so maybe a lot of money is going into the administration and computer systems that aren't fit for purpose.

Yes, I remember him. He was suddenly replaced by Ken Livingstone as the Leader of the Labour Party in the GLC.

Although I believe BIB is probably true, there are plenty of those who simply abuse the NHS.

I recently attended an A&E at a hospital n Harrow and had a 3 hour wait before being seen. While I was waiting I noticed a number of Muslim mothers with young kids who seemed to have nothing wrong with them. Their kids were lively, fidgeting and none of them looked like they were in any sort of discomfort. On the other hand there were a sufficient number of adults who were in obvious pain like myself (I had a broken ankle) or who looked genuinely ill. There were also a few adults and Muslim mothers who after a while walked out of the waiting area and didn't return, so obviously nothing that seriously wrong with them

So I concluded during my recent spell at A&E that maybe 10% - 20% of the people waiting to be seen really should not even be there and are just clogging up the system. Multiply that across all the A&E departments in the UK and you have a colossal waste of time and money in the NHS just in A&E alone. And that's before you consider the waste caused by habitual drunks who pile into A&E on a Saturday night.

I hope you are not suggesting that only Muslims are abusing the system. I am sure there are many others as well.

Besides if they are not permanently resident in the UK they would have to pay for any treatment they receive on the NHS.

I didn't say only they were abusing the NHS, but there were an unusually large proportion of them with kids in the waiting area who didn't seem to me that much was wrong with them. A&E means accident and emergency. Not one of those kids looked to me like they had suffered an accident (no limping, bleeding or signs of discomfort in their behaviour). Nor did any of them seem seriously ill. So what were they there for? I've no idea whether they were resident or not, but I'd bet my last shirt button none of them were paying for being seen.