Category Archives: TRUTH BASTARDS

Burning hatred, Health, NHS, Politics, Responding to media, TRUTH BASTARDS

Lord Warner – A Challenge

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Lord Warner has released a report stating that we should pay £10 ‘tax’ to use the NHS and that the NHS is ‘not cost effective’ despite all the evidence to the contrary. Both of these statements are frankly bollocks. However we have grown used to these lies and, as the media keeps pushing them, eventually they will be believed.

I looked up Lord Warner, he is the executive director along with a Suzanne Warner of ‘Sage Advice Ltd.’ A company that has no contact details, no website and no telephone number. At least none that I can find. This doesn’t mean that this ‘company’ is in any way dishonest, but as a simpleton in the ways of business I can’t see the reasoning behind it.

Of course, this, and Lord Warner’s previous job advising Apax Partners (a company that invests in private healthcare) might mean that he has some sort of vested interest in bringing about further privatisation of the NHS.

Sadly the newspapers only printed Lord Warner’s side of the story (i.e. Bullshit) and have not in any way highlighted these vested interests.

So, as I lay in bed trying to sleep but with sparking neurons of flaming anger keeping me awake I came up with an idea. It’s not a cunning idea, and Lord Warner would never agree to it, but it might be nice to dream.

You get a small, agile, hell – even amateur, filmmaker to stage an hour-long debate between Lord Warner and a defender of the NHS. They each have plenty time to prepare and can bring actual, real, evidence to defend their position – and this evidence is added to the debate, maybe even using whizzy computer graphics. Maybe there could be a referee who calls for the evidence to be brought out when one side or the other makes a statement and challenges the participants.

This film then goes up online where anyone can see it and we try to get newspapers (who really should be the people doing this sort of thing) to publicise it.

Every soundbite has to have evidence to back it up, there is no ‘playing to the crowd’, there is only truth.

Not that this sort of thing would ever be allowed – because Warner, (sorry, forgot the ‘Lord’ and tug of the forelock) already has all the power and this sort of truth finding would only have the risk of him seceding power to someone opposed to him. While the defender of the NHS has nothing to lose (except, y’know, the NHS) Lord Warner would have everything to lose by taking part in such a radical idea as a search for the actual real truth.

So, silly idea, but at least it gets this idea out of my head and onto the screen so that I can hopefully get some sleep.

TRUTH BASTARDS

TRUTH BASTARDS

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I’m working on something at the moment, let’s codename it ‘TRUTH BASTARDS’, (the idea was suggested to me by the rather excellent David Wynne).

It’s a near future thing set in the world of citizen journalism – the key thing is that it is set in a ‘post-Leveson’ world.

I’ll admit to making some guesses about what Leveson’s report might have said and the fallout from the same. After all I started working on this some months ago when Leveson report was taking evidence. I thought that after Leveson the public would trust the media less and would turn towards the citizen journalists that are on the whole rather more successful at self-regulation.

Turns out that this is unlikely to be the case and that the ‘post-Leveson’ world is pretty much the same as the ‘pre-Leveson’ world.

What this means is a bit of a rewrite, one in which the otherwise very ethical citizen journalists will, instead of agonising over using some somewhat morally grey methods, will actually revel in the horrible things that they do in order to get to ‘the truth’. Their justification is that at least they are going after the villains, rather than the parents of murdered teenagers or just making crap up in order to please the politicians.

This may, of course, change if some sort of cross-party group actually does something about press standards – but as I understand it ‘cross-party’ is parliamentary code for ‘do bugger all’.