On this morning’s Today programme he was interviewing Ed Balls. I say inteviewing, it was more like an invitation for Balls to push his five point plan for jobs. At one point Balls effectively blamed youth unemployment on the Tory trashing of the Future Jobs Fund. Disgusting as this policy reversal is, it’s not the only reason for youth unemployment (and Balls knows that) but he was able to get away with this effort at partisan point scoring.
As the conversation moved on to house building and the news that the government will put up £400 million for new developments, Balls quite rightly pointed out the actual £3.9 billion cut in capital funding (pdf, p8) for new builds. Humphreys skirted over this little nugget and conveniently forgot about it when he again tried to press that the £400m is a good thing.
Furthermore, in another segment minutes later in the show about housing explicitly, guests were invited to talk about what the £400m means, for developers little and large. There wasn’t a single mention of the capital funding cut. And this is supposed to be one of our pre-eminent current affairs programmes?
