Newsnight: fair and balanced

Conservative Home is very angry about Newsnight having four "lefties" and no "righties" on its new 'Politics Pen' show.

These "lefties" are:

Deborah Mattison, Gordon Brown's opinion pollster

Matthew Taylor, Tony Blair's former adviser on political strategy

Greg Dyke, who voted Liberal Democrat in 2005, warned that if Labour were elected then 'democracy was under threat', and is currently an adviser to the Conservative Party on the UK's creative sector

Digby Jones, the former Director General of the CBI, who was approached by the Conservative Party about being their candidate for Mayor of London, who described trade unions as 'backward looking and not on today's agenda' and Labour as 'always in thrall to the unions', and who wouldn't join the Labour Party even when Gordon Brown appointed him as a minister


What Newsnight have done is picked a balanced panel with four members of the meritocratic elite, in order to give an idea about what the political establishment think about different options for public spending savings. They are drawn from quite a narrow ideological range, but that's rather the point.

It would be different and quite fun to get, say, Daniel Hannan, John McDonnell, Frank Field and Sir Patrick Cormack as the panel, but there's nothing wrong with Newsnight deciding it is more interesting to get a panel of people in the political mainstream and then different people from other perspectives putting forward proposals.

And anyone who thinks a panel with an adviser to the Conservative Party and an anti-union businessman is an example of 'all lefties and no righties' should find something more important to whine about.