21 October 2012

Save the Guardian - sack Toynbee

An interesting article from this week's Press Gazette.  In it the Guardian NUJ chapel calls for massive pay cuts for senior execs and marquee journalists instead of axing 70 odd editorial staff.

The Guardian is in trouble - losing more than £44 million last year.  Yet it pays editor, Alan Rushbridger £400,000 per year.

It also employs patronising, hand-wringing, state aggrandising, poverty crocodile tear crying, socialist atrocity denying, Lib Dem flip flopping, top rate tax cut benefitting, lip quivering, septic - Polly Toynbee.  She admits to be paid more than £100,000 per year by the Graun - and no doubt thousands more from her contracts with other media outlets such as the BBC.

Her wrongheadedness can no better be expressed by this article from 2004 entitled 'Why isn't New Labour proud to be the nation's nanny?'

In it she boasts:
"The nanny state is the good state. A nanny is what every well-off family hires if it can afford it. So why do the nanny-employing Tories use the word as an insult? In the Commons and in their press, they bray like a bunch of prep-school bullies calling anyone a cissy if they do what nanny says."
What La Toynbee forgets (or probably never knew in the first place) - as the ever excellent Eaten by Missionaries reminded me at party conference - is that nannies are for children.

So here's a thought - by getting rid of the awful Toynbee the Graun could save itself a large sum of cash - enough to employ several young hungry journos and possibly increase its sliding sales figures by seeing the return of the many Lib Dems who have stopped buying the paper due to its kneejerk antipathy to the party since 2010.

4 comments:

  1. If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. - John Stuart Mill.

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  2. Thanks Jonathan - I should have known that such an esteemed blog as yours wouldn't have missed such an obvious open goal.

    She was standing next to me in the conference bar at Brighton and I had decided to ask her if she was enjoying her top rate tax cut - but by the time I summoned up the courage she had gone...

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  3. The Liberalism of the Manchester Guardian has long since gone from the pages of the Guardian.
    The Guardian Weekly is more balanced than its parent newspaper maybe because there isn't much Polly in it.

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