France 24 online news programmes are good and you can listen in french or english (or both).
But my favourite Fr24 viewing is François Picard’s, evening progamme, The Debate which is always excellent with three or four experts in different countries intelligently discussing the issues of the day.
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Yes Dr Mark, some good stuff on France 24. They have a wide coverage of all things Africa.
I see Tories as not ideal… wow where have you been for the last 12 months?
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Errr, you surely meant 12 years…
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Good point. I think that is what happened in the US. Obama was, and still is, the rare good soul in politics but the system is designed and set up to block. The ghouls don’t want to be shown up.
Not so sure it’s the same phenomenon in France. Macron is clearly capable but added to French distrust of government there is a very strong push from the right, resulting in the rightest left there has ever been.
The trouble with democracy is that it means those in power are only ever considering the short term that gets them to the next election. Criticism is easy. Especially organised criticism manufactured and spread online. Truth, as we know, is the first casualty and sadly, a majority of voters believe what they read. That was basically proven when a slim majority voted to disconnect the as yet UK from Europe on the basis of an imaginary 350 million membership ‘saving’ and media whipping up the latent but omnipresent xenophobia.
Same elsewhere in Europe. Instead of pulling together in times of economic turbulence humanity is looking for scapegoats and sacrificial lambs.
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Surely the last 80 years at least?
When I think of UK governments since the war, I can think of a whole list of things Labour governments have done to improve people’s lives. The 1945 government establishing the NHS, strengthening the welfare state, massive house building programme (ok that peaked just after they left office, but the programme was Labour’s); the 60s and 70s Labour governments’ huge extension of education, not only many new universities, but also the introduction of comprehensive education, and of course extension of social justice and equality, the equal pay act, etc; the Blair/Brown years not so radical, but some important reforms like the independence of the Bank of England, introduction of the minimum wage, etc…
ButTory governments? All Churchill’s achievements were with the wartime cross party government - as Tory PM in the early 50s he did nothing (partly of course because he wasn’t there for much of it); Eden? - the Suez crisis; Macmillan, Douglas-Home? - well can you think of anything positive? Heath - joining the EU, the one Tory highlight; Thatcher - total disaster from which the UK has never recovered; Major - Black Wednesday; Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss…
Isn’t that their job in Opposition 
Their raison d’etre is to question/test the policies of the Government - if they were in power they could do so much more but as has already been seen, since the Tories are so devoid of ideas now, it is Labour who have been driving their agenda of late - even to the extent at PMQs, the PM asking the Leader of the Opposition what they would do and then cherry picking the bits they think they can get away with without alarming their membership too much…
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Yes - I agree about Obama. He was a radical by rhetoric but a centrist by results - not much actually changed. To be fair, it was inevitable that as the first black US President all sorts of hopes and expectations were bound to focus on him, and bound to be disappointed.
Macron is I think more culpable - rather like Blair: both promised a new politics, but ended up offering principally the same old, same old. I thought much the same about Biden too, but there are some signs that maybe he will perform - he has at least kept the radicals like the brilliant Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on board, and influential.
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I follow discussions about the Ukraine war on BFM and LCI. Many people say these channels are biased, but frankly I cannot see it, they seem very intelligently presented and not at all biased to me, even if it’s clear the presenters want Ukraine to win. Any comments?
Certainly beats all the biased websites that most critics of these channels seem to prefer.
If I have access to it, I like Al Jazeera too.
Just to add to my post yesterday on Labour governments generally out-performing Tory ones (Who to listen to? - #19 by Geof_Cox) it occurs to me some might say ‘OK Labour achieves more progressive change, but what about the normal routine working economy - surely things like growth, public debt, the balance of payments, etc, are better under the Tories?’
But the facts are that they’re actually not. All the evidence points in precisely the opposite direction - Labour is simply more competent by pretty much any measure…
You really do have to ask why many Brits seem to think the Tories are, or at least have been, more competent, when any objective measure indicates exactly the opposite?
Honestly, I can only think of one answer: media bias.
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On Ukraine, I agree with John Pilger about what and who to believe.
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It’s doubly difficult because although there may be nuances in the rights and wrongs of it all, in war you can’t give succour to the enemy by recognising they may be 10% right. You can’t 90% kill an enemy soldier coming to rape your wife and loot your home (other examples of war crimes available).
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But you can recognise that not every enemy soldier is coming to rape your wife or loot your home, that in fact most enemy soldiers are just like you - human beings with mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and children that they love, and that love them, and that you’re probably all in fact just caught up in somebody else’s war - and if you could just get an accurate handle on what it’s all about, beyond propaganda, maybe you’d stand a chance of stopping it, rather than perpetuating it.
Haven’t had chance to watch the video yet Fleur - but John Pilger has been a hero of mine from childhood, when I first read his brilliant stories in The Daily Mirror.
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You have been following the news recently? The Conservatives give the impression that they could not organise a party in a brewery. (Although they seemed to party in No 10 but we were assured that this was not a party.)
How ?
That will vary with the actual circumstances, won’t it? But I think knowing the truth is always going to be a better basis for action than a view derived from propaganda. That’s obvious, isn’t it?
But in the circumstances of the situation under discussion, how can individuals possibly make a significant difference? ‘Knowing the truth’ seems a sound basis for action, but by itself surely it’s insufficient to be effective.
Also given the preponderance of reports of Russian war crimes, even if one is being generous it seems as though soldiers have been brutalised by the system that they’ve lived under. So you’re talking about an encounter between members of two very different societies with different moral values.
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It was definitely ‘a work experience’
I have several bottles of Prosecco waiting for a similar experience this Christmas.
is composed of many very different individual situations, if we’re talking about individual actions.
It’s true of course that sometimes there is no available action that will make a difference in a particular circumstance, or that any action has negative consequences - but this applies whether or not we know, or tell the truth.
(I’m reminded of Sartre’s discussion (and real experience) of the morality of choosing to resist the nazis when this could lead not only to your own death, but that of your family too.)
To be effective, of course action requires many resources and externalities besides an honest and accurate knowledge of reality - so what? Are you arguing that its better not to see things as they really are?