Month: April 2022
Talk TV: Selective staff recruitment policy
Talk TV’s choice of presenters and panellists reveals a predilection for hiring people from wealthy backgrounds. Almost all of the onscreen staff attended very expensive private schools.
Below is a list of some of Talk TV staff announced a few days before its launch on 25th April (2022), the school each attended and the current yearly fee for each school.
(Note: All prices below are for 2021-2022 academic year. Prices were lower when the people named attended each school.)
- Tom Newton Dunn – Marlborough College – £39,930 per annum
- Emily Sheffield – Marlborough College – £39,930 p.a.
- Isabel Oakeshott – Gordonstoun – £42,750 p.a.
- Douglas Murray – Eton College – £44,094 p.a.
- Bim Afolami – Eton College – £44,094 p.a.
- Miatta Fahnbulleh – Beechwood School – £30,600 p.a.
- Adam Boulton – Westminster School – £43,272 p.a.
- Jeremy Kyle – Reading Blue Coat – £18,039 p.a.
- Anna McGovern – Rochester Independent College – £40,800 p.a.; St. Edmunds School, Canterbury – £43,494 p.a.
There are only a handful of presenters/panellists who attended state schools, including Piers Morgan whose primary school is a private school.
Seven of the people listed above went to schools whose yearly fees are in excess of £30,000. Even allowing for the fact that the fees are tax-deductible for the customer (due to UK tax system favouring the wealthiest) they are five times the yearly state pension for people in the UK and more than twice the yearly full-time salary for someone on minimum wage (before tax and national insurance deductions).
A tiny percentage of the population of UK can afford such fees. That percentage is much less than the seven percent of children that attend private schools because most private schools do not have fees as high as those mentioned above.
There is no educational or professional reason why a presenter or panellist on a debate- and opinion-driven TV channel needs to be a product of a very expensive school.
The extremely skewed choice of presenters is partly due to huge bias throughout news media industry toward hiring privately-educated people.
The key motivation for Talk TV’s highly selective recruitment policy is the necessity for its staff to be beneficiaries of the skillset that elite private schools inculcate in their pupils. That skillset includes
- Unwavering focus on supporting concentration of wealth
- Ingrained ignorance of realities of life for most people
- Intrinsic belief in racketeering and theft as definitions of humanity
- Irreparable suppression of awareness of concepts of community and society
- Revulsion toward integrity, accountability and humility
- Hollow bombast and anti-didactic verbosity designed to preclude debate and analysis
- Conman’s patter including arts of deflection, obfuscation, misdirection and relentless dishonesty
- Belief that law is not applicable to them
The most expensive private schools are machines to produce enablers of economic and political systems that divide the country into a small elite of wealth gatherers and everyone else as providers of that wealth. Talk TV, like all of Rupert Murdoch’s businesses, has the single aim of supporting wealth concentration. Its use of private school machines is vital to the aim.
Arms industry demands a long war in Ukraine
Short wars ending with binding negotiated settlements are of little benefit to the arms industry and its associated financial industry. The longer the war, the more wealth accrued. Twenty years of war in Afghanistan achieved nothing and changed nothing for the people of Afghanistan but the arms industry wallowed in uncountable profits.
On Saturday (April 9th 2022) UK prime minister Boris Johnson went to Kyiv to broker a gift of armaments from UK to Ukraine. The weaponry Johnson offered won’t end the war with Russia and won’t prevent Russian attacks on residential areas in Ukraine. The point of the gift of arms is for them to be used up. To enhance arms industry profits, UK doesn’t need to be directly involved in war and doesn’t need to sell arms to another government. All that needs to happen is that there exists a necessity for more “defence spending.” Gifting weaponry achieves that aim.
Johnson knows why war exists and he is aware of the constant demands of arms industry for more handouts. Gifting arms is preferable than UK getting involved directly in conflict.
As soon as the first Russian tank crossed the border into Ukraine many NATO governments displayed commitments to the welfare state for the arms industry. They declared their intent to increase “defence spending” indefinitely, and they handed weaponry and logistic assistance to the Ukrainian government and its various militias.
The centrist gloop in UK is as keen on enabling arms industry profits as any conservatives. New New Labour’s indebtedness to its wealthy donors’ desires requires Keir Starmer to attack any Labour MP or member who makes any comment that could be construed as pacifist or as suggestive of a negotiated termination of the war in Ukraine. Liberal media outlets praise Ukraine’s president unreservedly including acceptance of the presence of NAZI militia in Ukraine’s army, and they shout excitedly for military gifts.
An absurd Observer editorial eschewed analysis in favour of pseudo-emotional pleas and demands for direct military intervention by NATO in Ukraine. The editor chose to pretend to be able to offer strategic military advice including that NATO should assume control of parts of Ukraine with the threat that Russia would face “face serious, unspecified consequences” if it did not agree. “The risks are obvious. But the only alternative is endless slaughter.” The “risks” include nuclear armageddon; there is a “alternative“: Diplomatic negotiation, but that would not be welcome by the arms industry.
An intrinsic driving force of capitalism is that destruction equals profit but harmony and progress are a lot less lucrative. Johnson and his peers elsewhere in NATO countries understand the persuasiveness of that force as do Keir Starmer and liberal journalists and commentators.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people have died in Ukraine and cities are destroyed.
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