LULA'S THE ONE

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Following on from Jonty Bloom's paean to Brazil's socialist President Lula on the 5th November's edition of The World Tonight (http://beebbiascraig.blogspot.com/2009/11/world-tonight.html) fellow BBC reporter Stephen Evans was back there for last night's edition of the programme, doing much the same sort of thing .
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Lula may be a socialist, but he's following sound conservative economic policies and it's these (not socialist economic policies) that are helping fuel Brazil's "breakneck economic growth".
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Evans didn't put it quite like that, of course! He was keen to stress Lula's social policies: "I climb the steps to meet a single mother who's benefited from Lula's social programmes."
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All fair enough. It's what happened next that shows that Stephen Evans is a true BBC reporter: "Lula's critics on the Right say he's giving money to the poor who then vote for him - naked populism -, and also that benefits remove the incentive to work. The Left says that massive inequality remains, despite the programmes. Leda Paulani of São Paulo University."
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Leda Paulani is, naturally, of the Left and used almost exactly the same words Evans had just used to voice the self-same left-wing criticism.
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So, Evans outlines two types of criticism - criticism from the Right and criticism from the Left, but it's only the Left we get to hear from. Typical!
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Evans then flew above São Paulo and backed Leda's point, asking the helicopter-taxi driver "Is it good for the city if all the rich people are up there, and all the poor people are down here?".
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So Lula may be great, but he's still got more to do to please Stephen Evans and the Left.