Following Newsnight's flawed onslaught on the Swedish schools model favoured by the Conservatives (see http://beebbiascraig.blogspot.com/2010/02/liz-is-too-mackeen-to-attack-tories.html), the BBC News website has another go, using a report from The Centre for Economic Performance (who?):
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8520208.stm
The C.E.P. (which turns out to be part of the L.S.E) gets 14 paragraphs and another critic, leftie Swedish bureaucrat Per Thulberg, gets 3 more. The Conservative response (mostly squeezed in the middle) gets just 4 (generally very short) paragraphs and a photo! (I have a photo too - of another Swedish model. Sorry, but some puns just have to be made!!).
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Hardly a balanced article.
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More on the C.E.P. can be found here: http://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/about/default.asp. Its co-founder (and key member) is Labour peer Lord Layard (of whom Wikipedia - which is infallible! - says 'He advocated many of the policies which have characterised the New Labour government, partly by founding the influential Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics.' ) No wonder the BBC article names no names at the C.E.P.
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Left-wing think tanks are never "left-wing" but always " influential " or "respected". Right-wing think tanks are always just "right-wing".
ReplyDeleteThis is the first I have heard of the Swedish model, but would be interested in more coverage, in depth.
Spot on Grant, and on a similar point I see that the BBC News website this afternoon has promoted the 60 economists who back Darling to the status of 'experts' in its headline. They didn't do that with the 20 economists who backed the Conservatives of course. They stayed as mere 'economists'.
ReplyDeleteNext BBC headline " 99% of BBC employees back government spending plans".
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