davek
Player Valuation: £150m
The EU aren't daft. They know a BS story when they see it.
There was no strategic gain for Russia in Salisbury.
Quite frankly anyone believing this cock and bull story need to have a word with themselves.
Current Affairs Critically ill man is former Russian spy
- Thread starter GrandOldTeam
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There was no strategic gain for Russia in Salisbury.
Quite frankly anyone believing this cock and bull story need to have a word with themselves.
davek
Player Valuation: £150m
...let's face it, they've been in the Tories hands ever since it was set up - its first task ever was to break the General Strike in 1926.
peteblue
Welcome back Wayne
Perhaps, but this is for a different thread and a different day. This is a nerve agent attack within the U.K. and god only knows what is going through the minds of the people of Salisbury and the immediate neighbours........
tsubaki
Player Valuation: £90m
To see it in strategic gain / loss terms is to miss the point.
Russia clearly wants the likes of him and the other exiled opposition dead, and indeed has been picking them off over here for the past decade and a bit (including by means that were arguably as bad as this). They think they can act with impunity, and based on the response from the Government during that time they are right to think it.
peteblue
Welcome back Wayne
Putin believes he can get away with anything. If he had just had them murdered or ‘accidented’ it would have been covered up and there would be no issue. But a mistake has been made, by using a nerve agent that then infected a British policeman who was giving aid, this cannot be hidden. This is a test of the West, the UK’s response, NATO and the EU’s solidarity. Russia will learn from this by seeing just how far they can push and just how strong and how unified is the response......
orchard
Player Valuation: £60m
May hasn't called on a response from NATO, has she? When asked about it yesterday, she seemed rather awkward.
tsubaki
Player Valuation: £90m
Which highlights the problem that the Government has with its allies - that they are in effect being asked to help (and in the EU's case whilst we are actively seeking to break up with them) because we object to the way in which a foreign state has tried to murder someone on our territory, not that they have tried to murder someone on our territory or that they have been murdering people on our territory for some time.
I'd be amazed if any of them do anything before seeing what we do first.
Agree
orchard
Player Valuation: £60m
Sky News Newsdesk@SkyNewsBreak
2h
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says he has requested access to the nerve agent allegedly used to attack former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury and says the UK Government has denied Russia access to materials related to the case
View details ·
Sky News Newsdesk
@SkyNewsBreakReplying to @SkyNewsBreak
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Russia has no connection to the poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury
3:23 am - 13 Mar 2018
orchard
Player Valuation: £60m
Government will choose most members of BBC board, says Whittingdale
Culture secretary accused of trying to ‘bend BBC to his political will’ over plans for new body to run corporation
Mark Tran
@marktran
Sun 13 Mar 2016 14.06 GMTLast modified on Wed 29 Nov 201701.03 GMT
This article is over 1 year old
The culture secretary has been accused of attempting to “bend the BBC to his political will” after it emerged he plans to have the government directly appoint most members of a new body to run the corporation.
John Whittingdale said only two or three members of a 13-strong unitary board, which would replace the discredited BBC Trust model, would be BBC executives while the rest would be government appointees.
In an interview with the Sunday Times, Whittingdale said: “I don’t think the government appointing the BBC non-execs would compromise their independence.”
Whittingdale’s intervention follows areport two weeks ago by David Clementi, the former chairman of Virgin Money and Prudential. It recommended that the BBC’s day-to-day operations be run by a unitary board, headed by a majority of non-executive directors, while full responsibility for regulation be handed over to the media regulator Ofcom.
Calling the BBC Trust model flawed, Clementi said it conflated governance and regulatory functions and called for a “unitary board charged with responsibility for meeting the obligations placed on it under the royal charter and agreement, and responsibility for the interests of licence fee payers”.
Clementi proposed that the government would appoint half of the BBC board of 12 to 14 people, including the chairman, so Whittingdale’s proposals go beyond the Clementi report.
The BBC’s director general, Tony Hall, has already flagged his concerns about the Clementi proposals for the unitary board. In a speech last week, Lord Hall pointed out that unlike any previous governing body, the unitary board would set the editorial direction of the whole BBC. Neither the trust nor its predecessor – the BBC governors who oversaw the corporation from its founding until 2005 – had such powers.
“It will make key decisions on programmes and services, and it will work with me – as editor in chief – on how we manage our impartial journalism. It doesn’t feel to me that these tasks should be undertaken by government-appointed board members. The BBC is one of the world’s great public service broadcasters – not a state broadcaster. A strong, sustainable BBC needs new safeguards for independence, not yet more erosion,” Hall warned.
The only BBC executives on the new body will be the director general, the head of finance and possibly one other.
Labour’s shadow secretary of state for culture, Maria Eagle, said: “With the independence of the BBC clearly at real risk from this government’s mendacity, independent appointment processes must underpin the formation of a new unitary board, including its chair.
“It is unacceptable that ministers are ignoring what the public want from the BBC, and that they are so desperate to bend it to their political will.”
Topics
Culture secretary accused of trying to ‘bend BBC to his political will’ over plans for new body to run corporation
Mark Tran
@marktran
Sun 13 Mar 2016 14.06 GMTLast modified on Wed 29 Nov 201701.03 GMT
This article is over 1 year old
The culture secretary has been accused of attempting to “bend the BBC to his political will” after it emerged he plans to have the government directly appoint most members of a new body to run the corporation.
John Whittingdale said only two or three members of a 13-strong unitary board, which would replace the discredited BBC Trust model, would be BBC executives while the rest would be government appointees.
In an interview with the Sunday Times, Whittingdale said: “I don’t think the government appointing the BBC non-execs would compromise their independence.”
Whittingdale’s intervention follows areport two weeks ago by David Clementi, the former chairman of Virgin Money and Prudential. It recommended that the BBC’s day-to-day operations be run by a unitary board, headed by a majority of non-executive directors, while full responsibility for regulation be handed over to the media regulator Ofcom.
Calling the BBC Trust model flawed, Clementi said it conflated governance and regulatory functions and called for a “unitary board charged with responsibility for meeting the obligations placed on it under the royal charter and agreement, and responsibility for the interests of licence fee payers”.
Clementi proposed that the government would appoint half of the BBC board of 12 to 14 people, including the chairman, so Whittingdale’s proposals go beyond the Clementi report.
The BBC’s director general, Tony Hall, has already flagged his concerns about the Clementi proposals for the unitary board. In a speech last week, Lord Hall pointed out that unlike any previous governing body, the unitary board would set the editorial direction of the whole BBC. Neither the trust nor its predecessor – the BBC governors who oversaw the corporation from its founding until 2005 – had such powers.
“It will make key decisions on programmes and services, and it will work with me – as editor in chief – on how we manage our impartial journalism. It doesn’t feel to me that these tasks should be undertaken by government-appointed board members. The BBC is one of the world’s great public service broadcasters – not a state broadcaster. A strong, sustainable BBC needs new safeguards for independence, not yet more erosion,” Hall warned.
The only BBC executives on the new body will be the director general, the head of finance and possibly one other.
Labour’s shadow secretary of state for culture, Maria Eagle, said: “With the independence of the BBC clearly at real risk from this government’s mendacity, independent appointment processes must underpin the formation of a new unitary board, including its chair.
“It is unacceptable that ministers are ignoring what the public want from the BBC, and that they are so desperate to bend it to their political will.”
Topics
Stress testing, though Crimea told them all they needed to know.
orchard
Player Valuation: £60m
Possibly, but a chemical attack on a NATO member is different.
tsubaki
Player Valuation: £90m
Crimea was actually an admission of weakness by Putin. By taking it (and the Donbass) they ruled out ever getting control back over the Ukraine as a whole by taking most of its Russian-supporting population away; the end result will probably be another NATO and EU state directly on his border within a decade.
That just leaves Belarus as a buffer state for them, which will make for interesting times if Lukashenko gets into difficulties.
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