Absolutely. The BBC does lots of great work which is undermined by its news & current affairs output, much of which is awful.

It is, yes. And it won't.

For sure, competence is better than incompetence. My point is that actual, genuine competence is better than the appearance thereof.

Yes. Ironically the MMT many on the left once supported tells us just this. We need taxes not to raise money but to control inflation. To do this, we need to cut spending rather than saving - which means taxes on the middlingly well-off.

Salami slicing your way to fiscal headroom introduces more tax complexity, likely means poorly targeted measures increasing deadweight costs, raises uncertainty (where might they look to tax next?), and reduces flexibility going forward (pulling all but the obvious levers sends a signal in itself).

So a handful of unelected people with perhaps-dubious qualifications get to set the political agenda, and nobody asks whether this is desirable or not.

Yes. But this raises qns such as who gets to decide what's topical, and how? And: is this process compatible with good government or not?

Maybe that is the issue, but it's not the one Mason is talking about.

But they didn't have that conversation when he was in office.

Much of the money goes to savers! That said, it's not helpful to think of where the money goes. Interest rate changes affect inflation by changing real behaviour; money is just a way of keeping score.

The case for higher interest rates rather than taxes is that it can be done outside of Budgets and thus quicker, & that they're less unpopular (the BoE gets the flak!). The money doesn't necessarily go to the banks - rather, it's not created as loans aren't taken out.

I'm not sure bond markets are much worried by the level of national debt. For them, it's inflation that's much more important.

Insofar as I make moral claims (and I don't like doing so) I condemn the system more than the individuals.

He was speaking figuratively! My point is simply that newspapers are businesses like any other, so we shouldn't be surprised when they pursue their owners' interests even to the detriment of the public. Moral exhortation is a weak counterweight to this.

Insofar as he has such a duty, it's because misleading his readers would be against his employers' interests; doing so would lose readers. If his employer wanted him to mislead, I don't think the journo neglects any duty in doing so - other than the one we'd like to exist but which does not.

No. The context I had in mind was the claim that journos have a "duty" to (eg) ask questions of the rich or the right, or even to report accurately. You might want them to, but such desires don't generate duties.