BBC Pioneers: Hain's Job Goes to Ex Beeboid

The Website of the BBC Young Pioneers

The Song of the Pioneers

The people’s flag is brightest red - it helps us earn our daily bread
Though skinflints mock and Tories jeer - the licence fee’s not really dear
The licence fee! The licence fee!
It pays the bills for you and me!
From single mums in Bethnal Green - for expense accounts and limousines
If they don’t pay the licence fee - it’s jail and chuck away the key
For posh school fees and winter sports - we need to add a few more naughts
Our pensions are inflation free - all paid for by the licence fee
The licence fee! The licence fee!
Don’t take away our licence fee!
A hundred and thirty odd quid a year - will keep the red flag flying here!
-

Thursday, 24 January 2008

Hain's Job Goes to Ex Beeboid

James Purnell has been appointed Work and Pensions Minister in place of disgraced Peter Hain who is facing a police investigation into undeclared donations.

Purnell is a classic Nulab/BBC apparatchik. Before become a Downing Street adviser in1997 he was BBC Head of Corporate Planning.

Prior to that he worked for the left wing think tank - the Institute of Public Policy Research.

While still a student, prior to the 1992 election, he worked as a researcher for Tony Blair. At that time Ed Richards worked in the next door office for Gordon brown and was later to become BBC Controller of Corporate Strategy.

So the two key people in charge of the BBC's strategic direction in the run up to Labour's 1997 election victory had previously respectively worked for New Labour's two principal players - and would return to work for them again soon afterwards.

Does anybody believe this was a coincidence?

Did these appointments reflect the BBC's legal obligation to political impartiality?