The BBC are broadcasting a series of documentaries purporting to show crises that could affect Britain over the next two to three decades. It is already clear from the subjects tackled: the dangers of gated communities, the bankruptcy of pension systems, the rise of obesity and the superiority of women, that they were written from a left-wing viewpoint that hypes up the modish problems of the would be regulators. The striking omission is the nightmares conjured up by the Greens but they will no doubt form the subjects of a second series.
If you do catch these, then try to spot the technological innovations that spice up the world of the future.
As part of this conversation, the BBC asks for views of the world in 2020 and I thought that it would be rude not to oblige.
By 2020, we will no longer have to pay the licence fee to watch substandard populist rot that masquerades as quality TV, notably, the series of poor documentaries called If.
If Iran or Al Qaeda obtain weapons of mass destruction, then we can expect them to unleash a second Holocaust, in order to remove Israel from the Middle East. Half of Europe will revile this, half will be relieved.
One or more countries will withdraw from the European Union due to its institutional inflexibility and inability to compete with the United States or the Far East.
There will be further wars in the Middle East involving the West (without a UN mandate) due to the threat of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism in oil producing areas.
It was an antidote to some nauseating missives extolling peace in our time and a World Union (based on the European Union). One would have thought the barbarities of twencen would have extinguished this Fabian and Wellsian nonsense.
Well done.
People will be too fat to get throught the gates of their communities to collect their pensions and women won’t be allowed out without a male relative.BBC Prayer for the Day will be increased to five times.
Good luck getting anything published on their website. I already posted a comment about the BBC’s bias in this series, but I have no expectation of seeing it published.
I saw the first one, concerning the possible breakdown in the power supply system. In one sequence that will stay with me for some time, one of the talking heads commissioned, one presumes, to lend some sense of authority to the programme, said: “Well, you can’t make power out of thin air”. This was followed not five minutes later by a picture of an air turbine on a wind farm. Priceless.
On a different note, the whole idea of docudramas strikes me as real evidence of ‘dumbing-down’. Either the subject is entirely factual, and of sufficient interest to broadcast, or it isn’t. To mix in some filmmaker’s interpretation of a future event based on fatuous speculation is, at best, to muddy the waters. There were points during the programme when it was impossible to distinguish between fact and speculation. (End of rant.)
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Regretably, if we are to succeed, we alone must be perfect. So grammar is important. We must say – ‘ The BBC IS broadcasting…’ ‘ The striking omissionS ARE the nightmares…’. But you’d have to worried about gated communities, kinda says I’m alright and you’re not?
‘So grammar is important’ is not a sentence
“Kinda” is not a real word.
Only use a question mark when you ask a question.
Do the words “pot”, “kettle” and “black” mean anything to you.
Get a job.
They did interview a token non-leftist, an American woman whose name I forget who talked some sense about free market economics, and pointed out that the poor *have* got richer, it’s just that the rich have got richer faster.
(Incidentally, their example of poverty was a single mother who worked as a manicurist. Presumably she was able to do this because people can afford such luxuries as manicures.)
But everyone else seemed to think the government’s main role is to solve the problem of poverty. One chap talked about “making the business case” to abolish poverty, and pointed to “a study in America” that showed how for every $1 spent on poverty, $7 was saved. I really can’t fathom how that is possible…
It may be wrong to posit “the superiority of women”, but how does it betray “a left-wing perspective”?
In the BBC thesaurus ‘Docudrama’ is a synonym for ‘leftist propaganda.’ Trouble is, read on and under the same heading is ‘Documentary’. In fact keep reading and you will find ‘the who fickin’ BBC output’ in the same paragraph, in its amended 21st Century edition, anyway. We’rrre aa’ doooomed!
Because the female supremacist argument could been imported from any number of radical feminist tomes. Though, of course, the reason boys are failing behind in education is because there is something innately wrong with them (nothing to do with the schools, nature of school curriculum, teaching methods, lack of fathers, media portrayal of boys)
“Though, of course, the reason boys are failing behind in education…..”
Could that be somehow related to the fact that 92% (or whatever) of the teachers are women ?
I don’t know, Jacob. It’s an interesting point. But then, 100% of mothers are women. And mothers have a million year history of raising boys to be men.
I think it has more to do with the lefty, tranzi, victim curriculum. Women were “oppressed” and now have a right to surge forward and kick the living daylights out of their former “oppressors” (although most straight women view men as protectors). Just as it’s OK for Robert Mugabe to be a vicious dictator. Because black people were subject to horrendous unhappiness and indignities, courtesy the whites – and black and Arab slave traders, but we definitely do not mention that. I don’t know how the lesbian agenda got so widely accepted – although yes, of course I do. It was the Marxists pushing it, many of them staunch employees of this very same BBC! Now there’s a coincidence for you!
And they used the same bully boy tactics the race industry and the multi culti industry use. If you disagree with their stance, you’re “prejudiced” and should all but be shackled and shuffled off to a re-education camp.
Most curious of all is, these people have actually managed to shut down many debates by colonising the language. And we allowed it to happen.
Gated communities are the INEVITABLE consequence of liberal policies!
How? By not locking up those who commit crime they commit the honest remainder of society into a prison.
Gated communities should be seen as wings in the liberal prison. Or are liberals saying want is a legitimate excuse for theft? Oh yes they are!
I saw the first one, concerning the possible breakdown in the power supply system.
It’s not clear what point Rudolph is making here. Is he perhaps denying the geological reality that in 5 years time we will burning more of the the finite, extractive resource that is our indigenous gas supply than we produce? That we will therefore become dependent on fuel import, and that import system contains several notable Single Points of Failure, some in areas of political instability?
Given that a couple of blokes in deck chairs almost brought the country screeching to a petrol-starved halt 3 years ago, I suspect the wind-farm induced smirk will fade pretty rapidly when poor old Rudes pitches up at Tesco and there’s nothing there …
Verity
‘Most curious of all is, these people have actually managed to shut down many debates by colonising the language. And we allowed it to happen.’
Though I would not wish to challenge anything in your post, prior to the last paragraph, can you please elucidate: who are ‘we’ and how did ‘we’ … ‘allow it’? Or better still if you can delineate ‘we’, perhaps you can suggest how ‘we’ can reverse the process? If you can … I hereby volunteer to be part of the ‘we’.
Just to confirm that the comment was never published in an edited or unedited form.
If anyone does have access to the BBC editorial criteria for publishing comments, please let me know.
If anyone does have access to the BBC editorial criteria for publishing comments, please let me know
I don’t know. I think that in my case referring to the BBC as ‘parasites’ and their series as ‘more socialist rubbish’ may not have helped.
My point was the continuity error in the quote and subsequent image (thought it was obvious, apologies if it wasn’t). I included the caveat ‘possible’ because I am neither a fortune-teller nor an authority on energy supply and consumption (thank God).
I saw the ‘oh crikey, no gas or electricity, but the mobile phones will still mysteriously work’ programme but I haven’t seen the ‘rise of women’ one. Is it just a re-showing of the docudrama on the subject made several years ago by messers Corbett & Barker?
My (ignorant) predictions for 2020:
A hybrid helicopter/aeroplane for short hops.
Supersonic airliners for long haul.
End to traffic congestion by constructing new multilane highways.
A hybrid typewriter/television to store and retrieve information easily and thus create the paperless office.
Water treatment plants to purify tap water so that people no longer need to purchase bottled drinking water.
A way of extracting power from nuclear reactions.
Re-usable craft to take stuff into orbit.
Frank P – I shouldn’t have taken it upon myself to speak for the world at large. Let us say out of laziness and frustration with circular arguments, I am guilty of my share of not speaking up every time someone put down a new little marker in the English language and perverted its meaning a bit further.
For one thing, one is arguing with ignorant people who have been indoctrinated by ignorant teachers whose chief characteristic is the proud possession of a closed and locked mind. Not just closed and locked, but lights turned firmly out.
I admit to having been lazy, especially when I lecture other people that the only way to defend fredom is eternal vigilance.
Tim Sturm – I don’t know. I think that in my case referring to the BBC as ‘parasites’ and their series as ‘more socialist rubbish’ may not have helped.
Hmmm. You could be right. In my own case, calling the photo of the editorial team a vivid illustration of the products of third rate sociology departments in third rate universities, and referring in unflattering terms to their clothes sense and failure to keep up on hair grooming products may have prejudiced my case. I may have added something about poor posture and bad complexions and made a scathing reference to a Sixth Form common room.
Anyway, my email wasn’t posted, needless to say. But here is the surprise ending. I sent another email a few days later, which also wasn’t posted, but the photo of the editorial team who were going to make the momentous decision of whether my submission would be part of the “reflection of the views we have received so far” (in a pig’s eye) came up and, hard to believe, but it was a new photo of the same lefty rabble, but with all new haircuts, new, businesslike, outfits and they were posed professionally.
They still looked thick and ignorant, of course, but I take pride in having done my bit.
Water treatment plants to purify tap water so that people no longer need to purchase bottled drinking water
I’m still laughing at the idea that people in Europe or North America need to purchase bottled drinking water…
Verity
‘I admit to having been lazy, especially when I lecture other people that the only way to defend freedom is eternal vigilance.’
‘Get your hair blouse off V. Self recrimination is not in order in your case. Your dogged persistence and withering wit on MP’s blog, when it was interactive, and on this one also, of course, has been wonderful and worthy. What is questionable is to what extent weblogs (of any colour) will impact on cultural trends. And my question was a genuine one, not a reprimand. When the vehicles of language are being systematically hi-jacked by cultural vandals, who do we call upon to reverse the blag? Certainly not politicians, they are the first to receive the proceeds to be recycled as newspeak. Not the educators, because they are implementing the Hegelian-Gramscian philosophy. Parents? Not likely, because they are pandering to their issue as compensation for the preoccupation of being obsessed with work to obtain excessive mortgages that can only be repaid by two incomes. The press, the literati and media? Nah! They are the main perps. The egregious Chomsky gives us a clue. Does he not assert that language is an organ as tangible as the heart, liver or skin? An organ that mutates through evolutionary adaptablilty? It evolves and wipes out weakness.
Any grouping that wishes to undermine the traditional values rooted in our island culture has free rein to do it now. Is’nt PC corruption (mutation) of the language similar to criminal argot and backslang? Verbal cryptography designed to enable subversive aims. The language of pop-music; faux pidgin-Carib used by indigenous black British of West Indians parentage – now even adopted by some Asian – and even Anglo -youngsters as in-jargon; okay-yah babble; Jamie Oliver’s ‘awright me ol’ mukka’ lingo now adopted by the Sloanes (and at times Teflon Tony); all instruments of culture change that have challenged the status quo ante of natural seniority and authority. We have generationally ceased to demand respect from our juniors by over-resourcing them regardless of real talent or worthiness. Mea culpa. But how the hell can we can reverse the trend when the Gramscian gremlins have now captured most of the cultural spanners. Particularly when we small-c-onservatives profess (nay insist upon) libertarianism and demand maximum freedom. What I was asking was: have ‘we’, who want it both ways, a dew-drop’s-chance-in-Hades of holding on to what we politically desire, when, as you apositely describe them, the multi-culti, tranzi tossers have their sweaty mits on all the cultural levers? Bash on with the blogging, buddy! It’s a way of treading water ’til the next election. But unless Howard reverts to Thatcherism (hi-jacked Friedmanism) who do ‘we’ vote for? At the moment he is sucking up to those who won’t vote him anyway, rather than making sure that the core Tory support comes out to play at the next election. If we don’t manage to get some hard noses into the Parliament of Mother-s soon, there will not ‘always be an England’ I’m afraid.