The Sun sheds some light

I am not an avid reader of the Sun, but I admire its writers who can put a cross a message boldly and clearly

THE BBC should hang its head in shame.
At a time of grave economic peril, it is this public sector broadcaster's duty to tell the impartial truth.

Instead it has chosen, disgracefully, to take sides.

As The Sun reveals today, it is ready to bend the facts in a relentless propaganda war against the Government. It falsely portrays shiftless, workshy scroungers like James Van-Cliff as hapless victims of cruel coalition cuts.

The art school dropout is allowed to claim on the flagship News at Ten that he is being thrown on the streets by new housing benefit rules.

Nowhere is he asked why he refuses to work and has chosen to live off the backs of taxpayers.

This is not just an abject failure in the first rules of journalism. Nor is it the only example.

The Beeb is today the pompous voice of defeated socialism.

Labour lumbered us with terrifying levels of debt. Yet Newsnight relentlessly blames "nasty" Tories for trying to bring it under control.

Radio 4's Today programme gives Government critics like hysterical Polly Toynbee endless airtime while constantly interrupting ministers.

Its news programmes rip into any plan to make Whitehall's big spenders more efficient while rarely saying why savings are needed.

We are sitting on a powder keg of national debt, yet the BBC treats the crisis as if it were the coalition's fault, not Labour's.

It broadcasts ludicrous warnings about cardboard cities, mass evacuations and Nazi-style extermination of poor families as if they were fact.

Yet it scarcely mentions that Labour was planning almost exactly the same VAT hikes and draconian cuts to housing and incapacity benefit.

Nor does it mention the legion of Labour ex-ministers who have denounced mealy-mouthed Red Ed Miliband for failing to say so.

Labour is playing politics. That's their job.

The BBC is generously run on public money. It has a charter promising editorial independence.

That must not become a licence for malicious and unscrupulous propaganda.