Category Archives: LBC

LBC’s Iain Dale Compares Ban On Gender Identity Talks In Schools To Section 28

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LBC presenter Iain Dale compared the government’s plan to ban lessons about gender identity in schools to infamous legislation from the 80s.

Speaking on BBC Question Time last night, Dale hit out at the new strategy which would prevent all children under nine from having any sex education, and stop all students from being taught about trans issues.

PM Rishi Sunak claimed this new draft guidance would stop children from being “exposed to disturbing content”.

However, Dale argued that this ban just echoes Section 28, a damaging Thatcherite policy enforced between 1988 and 2003 where schools were prevented from “promoting” homosexuality.

Dale told BBC Question Time: “Young people always have questions.”

He continued: “In an ideal world, our parents would be able to answer those questions. But we don’t live in an ideal world.

“There are many parents who just will not go into this area whether it’s gender identity of just sex education, so therefore it’s left to the teachers.

“What I don’t want to see is a repeat of what happened in 1988 when Section 28 was brought in and teachers weren’t even allowed to mention the word homosexuality.

“We don’t want that to be here – if young people have got questions about gender identity, they have personal issues, they should be able to approach people [like teachers] for whatever.”

Host Fiona Bruce pointed out: “So the government aren’t suggesting that it wouldn’t happen, but they’re saying it wouldn’t be taught.”

“Well, if I was a teacher I wouldn’t find that very acceptable,” Dale said.

He said that governments are always “years behind developments”, and pointed to the rapid advancement in the field of pornography as an example, saying children are exposed to it now.

He said: “Therefore, if you try to sweep this under the carpet and say nine-year-olds actually shouldn’t be taught that this [pornography] is wrong in school, I think that’s a problem.”

Dale continued: “I don’t want young people today to experience what I did in school where you have the head of needlework and head of geography doing the sex education.

“Neither of them wanted to do it, neither of them really knew anything about it.”

He said the solution was to have “professionals teach sex education”, going from school to school, and “doing it properly”.

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‘Where Are Those 40 Hospitals?’: Health Secretary Victoria Atkins Skewered Over Tory Election Pledge

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Health secretary Victoria Atkins was skewered on live radio this morning over the Tories’ pledge to build 40 new hospitals.

The cabinet minister struggled to say how much progress the government was making towards its target.

Boris Johnson made the pledge to build the hospitals by 2030 in the run-up to the last general election.

On LBC this morning, presenter Nick Ferrari asked Atkins: “I know it was a number of years ago and I know it was under a previous leadership, but where are those 40 hospitals?”

The minister replied: “Well we are making progress and we will be opening, I think, four of these hospitals this year and there will be many other sites around the country.

“I’ve been to visit one or two of them that are not completed but very much rising out of the ground. Alongside that we have the programme of works to upgrade existing hospitals.”

But Ferrari hit back: “Of the 40, how many will be built by the time we come to a general election?”

A clearly-flustered Atkins said: “We’re opening four more this year, so depending on when the election is … we will have around four this year, we’ve already opened a few more.”

Asked precisely how many, the health secretary said: “Nick you’re doing this thing where you ask me to remember all the stats in my brain.”

Ferrari went on: “We know the general election will be held this year. I’m going to put it to you that you’ve delivered 10 of the 40, would that be about right?”

Atkins said: “In fairness, the programme of 40 was by 2030 because they are huge projects.”

A report by the National Audit Office last year said the government was set to break its hospital-building pledge.

Gareth Davies, head of the NAO, said: “The programme has innovative plans to standardise hospital construction, delivering efficiencies and quality improvements.

“However, by the definition the government used in 2020, it will now deliver 32 rather than 40 new hospitals by 2030.”

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Why Did World Leaders Fly Hundreds Of Miles To Glasgow? The Environment Secretary Can’t Quite Explain

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Environment secretary George Eustice put his foot in it on LBC

George Eustice struggled to justify why world leaders had flown from around the globe to attend COP26 on Tuesday.

The UN’s summit in Glasgow has been hailed as a last-gasp bid to stop catastrophic climate change – and yet hundreds of delegations flew into the city via private jets, one of the most damaging modes of transport, seemingly undermining the very message of the conference before it even began.

LBC’s Nick Ferrari asked the environment secretary: “Do we really need somewhere in the region of 200 to 300 private jets, a motor convey for the [US] president of 22 cars and a fleet of helicopters.

“This is rather hypocritical isn’t it, secretary of state?”

“Well, look, it’s always possible to see it in those sort of terms,” Eustice replied.

“I take a slightly bigger picture view on this. We’re only going to tackle this crisis if we can get governments around the world to make the right commitments and take the necessary steps to hit them.

“Having an event like this over two weeks where the world works together on a shared endeavour is an important thing to do and that does require people to travel.”

Ferrari persisted and pointed out: “But Mr Eustice – they [world leaders] seek to lecture us – they lecture the good people of Camborne and Redruth as they arrive in convoys of 22 cars, private jets which are gobbling out goodness knows how much CO2 emissions – and they lecture us.

“It’s ludicrous – isn’t it?”

Eustice still denied that the government is lecturing the public, claiming they were actually supporting technologies and decarbonising electricity to get to Net Zero CO2 emissions.

“It’s not really about lecturing people abut how they live their lives, but it is about having the policy agenda at government level,” the environment secretary claimed.

Ferrari then suggested there could be a danger that the government is turning people against it with “this level of hyperbole”.

Eustice’s colleague foreign secretary Liz Truss also fought back over questions about the methods world leaders had travelled to Glasgow on Monday.

She told Sky News that giving up flying is not the solution to reducing CO2 emissions – even though it is one of the most polluting activities out there.

She also claimed, “it’s really important that we do have people face to face”, when asking global leaders to make serious pledges about climate changes.

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Andrew Neil Slams Boris Johnson On His Strategy For Fixing The UK’s Crises

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Boris Johnson has been criticised by veteran broadcaster and Spectator chairman Andrew Neil for his “policy-lite” keynote speech at the Tory Party conference.

Speaking to LBC on Thursday, Neil said the public had an “expectation we’d get some policy now” as the pandemic has subsided and as the UK is being plunged into crisis after crisis.

He continued: “You can have more alliteration, as Mr Johnson had, than a West Coast poet from the 60s on LSD.

“That’s all fine. But we’re a country with major problems and we need to know the government’s solution to these problems and on that Mr Johnson had not a jot.”

Neil pointed out: “This winter we’re going into a serious cost of living crisis which will hit the poorest most of all, we don’t know when the shortages on the supermarket shelves or the petrol forecourts will end.

“We don’t know what the policy is on social care, we don’t know what the policy is on the NHS, other than to bung it more money, and we don’t know what ‘levelling up’ means.”

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Andrew Neil hit out at Boris Johnson after his speech on Wednesday

He said this was the first Conservative conference in five years when the party was not in some form of crisis – now that the divisions over Brexit have subsided and the pandemic has abated – meaning Johnson was in “world king” mode during his speech.

Neil agreed that Downing Street’s new promise to ‘level up’ the UK “is a very good idea,” especially as the UK needs more development in the Midlands and the north – but he added that this is an idea “without any flesh” at the moment.

The political pundit continued: “We have a right to know what the policies are, and to know if we have these been implemented yet.”

The former chairman of GB News speculated that Johnson’s popularity with voters comes down to his sunny optimism and that his rhetoric-heavy speech on Wednesday showed his priority is “bolstering the red wall”, rather than addressing the grim reality of the upcoming winter.

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Tuned In: How Radio Became Our Friend In A Coronavirus World

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Nigel Farage Steps Down From LBC Radio Show ‘Effective Immediately’

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