‘The BBC is supposed to remain politically neutral and balanced.’

The BBC is not.

It is utterly biased towards NuLabour and the middle class leftie point of view. End of.

And then you notice that the BBC news headline was XYZ.

It used to be (although I haven’t checked recently) that the government/Labour used to “state” things (hence implying factual accuracy) while the Tories were reducing to “claiming” (implying doubt).

It seems to be that is is virtually impossible to have a “politically neutral” reporting system – for me, I would far rather that you had the ability for independent (and not state funded) news/opinion channels. At least with Fox (like the Telegraph or the Guardian) you know where they are coming from and can make your own bias adjustment as needed.

Any way, why do we need state funding of news? I can see the role for a PBS style channel making the programmes that commercial stations wouldn’t, but why do we have to have a state funded organisation doing stuff that would exist anyway in a free market?

For example:

Either you can ask a partisan question about how they plan to fund it and create doubt in the public mind about who will suffer as a result (dog-whistle to ‘honest hard-working families who pay their taxes)…

If you find the following exchange to be partisan:

Gordon: “I’d like to buy something that I think we all need, using the money from the communal kitty.”
Dave: “Oh, right. How do you plan to replenish the kitty afterwards?”

then either you, or I, or both of us are going to consider pretty well everything to be partisan in some way.

It could be that they are taking the narrow definition from the pov of the service recipients, or that they have found a way to indenture carers at no extra cost etc… there are infinite possibilities.

Of course it’s a reasonable assumption that there will be extra costs to the taxpayer, but it is still an assumption with no factual basis until the proposer makes it explicit.

There are two politically acceptable ways to respond to such a technical argument.

Either you can ask a partisan question about how they plan to fund it and create doubt in the public mind about who will suffer as a result (dog-whistle to ‘honest hard-working families who pay their taxes), possibly emphasising the bureaucracy and wastage which makes it unworkable given the government calculations, but which opens you up to accusations of being uncaring and not supporting national health services (dog-whistle to NHS fetishists).

Or you can impartially query how representatives of the carers industry would respond, noting the proportion of carers who are family members working for free and who don’t qualify for benefits (empathy with real people, implicit criticism of failed system and ill-considered proposal whose effect will be little more than a fart in a hurricane).

The first method is the respose of a Conservative, the second is that of a LibDem.

The first will win as many votes as it loses, the second will have no discernable effect on its’ own.

But it will start to matter further down the line when you want to hold up your track record as the party most able to reliably balance each side of the argument to those people to whom this single issue matters most and they see that the attempts of the two sides who were currying favour were ineffective and unhellpful, while the third was trying to do the right thing by listening to all the public concerns was ignored.

Of course the difficulty for LibDems is that it is necessary to string together a whole raft of issues in order to float our narrative in a consistent way, rather than taking the easy route by just pandering to vested interest groups.

Gordon Brown today confirmed that the sun rises in the East.

David Cameron today denied that the sun sets in the West.

The issue is balance, and you achieve that by having competing views aired simultaneously.

The Today programme, for example, would benefit from having a Conservative editor and presenter to go up against the current crop. Thus would the BBC fulfil its charter obligations.

A more interesting philosophical debate lies in where to place the centre point, the fulcrum on which the balanced debate rests.

And that’s before you even begin to worry about how to incorporate the Lib Dems into all this…

But yes, taxpayer-funded is better than ‘taxpayers will pay’, and I’m not certain about ‘The Government wants’ as an opening. Could be construed as making the government sound frivolous. Perhaps:

‘The Government has announced taxpayer-funded plans to supply needs tested free personal care to elderly pensioners.’

Possibly a bit of a mouthful…

Incidentally, ‘free’ is technically accurate, isn’t it? A pensioner receiving personal care now has not paid for it and is receiving it free. The reason the NHS is free ‘at point of care’ is because somebody being treated has theoretically already paid for their treatment through NI. That isn’t the case with this care scheme, and it will be many years before the people paying for the care now will be in receipt of the care in the future. A subtle but important distinction, no?

The Government wants taxpayers to pay for needs-tested personal care of pensioners in England.”

I disagree that this is politicall neutral, as it stresses the “taxpayers to pay” element first, without even mentioning “free at the point of access”.

This is pedantic, I’ll admit, and I don’t have a huge problem with your way of phrasing it — but I don’t think it’s entirely neutral. Of course, it’s impossible to word anything in an entirely neutral way, but I think it might be better phrased as:

“There will be taxpayer-funded personal care, free at the point of access for the neediest Elderly pensioners in the country.”

Of course, YMMV!