Wednesday 10 September 2008

Green Report critisises parties equally?

The Today programme had a report on a report from Green activists (CPRE, FoE, NT, RSPB, etc.) that "critises all the major parties" about their lack of Green credentials.

Surely, that can't be right, I thought. I wonder what they think we're doing badly on.

The two-way went some thing like:

Presenter: So, has this report picked out any particular party or is it a plague on all their houses?
Correspondent: They all come in for criticism. Some politicians I spoke to are glad they are all criticised as it's less damaging.

(Blimey, we must have done something bad).

The summary she then gave was:

Labour - Inadequate
Conservatives - All style and no substance
LibDems - (must be bad...)Have lost their traditional leadership is these issues

What? Leadership? The media don't report this, yes we know this.

Sorry, are we still the only party with any decent Green policies? Yes. Are we still proposing a massive shift to green taxation? Yes. Oh, maybe we've quietly dropped some policies recently? No!

So, a story which should have been good for us has instead become a all politicians are the same story to prepetuate people's dissillusionment with politicians.

I couldn't find this story on the BBC website but found the PA report. Hmm, as well as saying the LibDems "have seen their lead on green issues "wane" at points during the year" (strong criticism indeed!) it also described our position on zero carbon as "brave and bold".

It also said that Labour's position was "incoherent and contradictory" and there was an"increasingly alarming" gap between the conservative's green aspirations and commitments.

So is this the fault of the BBC's shoddy reporting or the fault of the press release that felt it had to appear even handed by criticising all parties but in actually just levelled them all done to the same level and mitigated any positive impact on the debate this report might have had?

Bah, who do I complain to?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

bbc.co.uk/complaints