Panorama "Britain on the Fiddle": Straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel?

I was so incensed at the biased and inaccurate Panorama "Britain on the Fiddle", aired tonight 8pm BBC1, I sent a letter of complaint to the BBC.

BBC1's Panorama: "Britain on the Fiddle" 8pm 3rd November 2011

I was too sick to complain after John Humphrys' grievously patronising and offensive program on a similar theme last week. I used the few spoons I have left today to speak out. After all, the only thing needed for evil to triumph is for the good to do nothing. I'm not good, but evil mustn't be allowed to thrive unchallenged like this on national TV.


It breaks my heart to read all the despairing, hurting tweets, blogs and sobs from fellow disabled citizens of Great Britain on the social networks tonight.


We still have each other, and knowing others are in similar situations of being falsely branded cheats and fiddlers is something that keeps me strong in dark hours like this. My dander is well and truly up! Me and millions like me, eh?


This is what I said:


To: panorama.reply@bbc.co.uk


Subject: Re : Britain on the Fiddle, 8pm-9pm, BBC1 3rd November 2011

Panorama tonight (“Britain on the Fiddle”) was a travesty of all that I believed the BBC stands for.

Do we pay the extortionate license fee in order to have your so-called researchers peddle the government’s propaganda against the sick and vulnerable?

Does our license fee buy us the privilege of sitting through the drivel honed to incite disability hate crime I saw tonight and last week with John Humphreys’ appalling contribution to the anti-disability jigsaw you and such as the Daily Mail seem set on perpetrating?

I am incensed that such lies go unchallenged on this prime-time programme. I am disgusted that it is left to ordinary viewers such as myself to point out the errors here.

Who convinced the BBC to make another programme about benefit cheats? Did the DWP tip you off to a handful of cases so you could strain out a gnat and swallow a camel? We all know such people exist and agree, of course, they should be dealt with. What has kept them unchecked at liberty till now but slack and self-serving government departments?

However, sickness benefit fraud, according to the DWP stands at 0.5%. It isn’t “on the rise”. Of the £22 million lost by the government to fraud and error, only 4 million is accounted for by such cheats. The remaining £18 million is , as I understand it, lost through the errors and incompetence of the departments administrating benefits themselves. The government overpayments are costing the country more than sickness and disability benefit fraud put together. When can I expect to see your expose on that? Given your obvious bias and spouting of coalition propaganda, I am not holding my breath!


Am I to take it my license fee pays for you to choose to ignore real issues like this, in order to make Mickey Mouse knee-jerk programmes like this, which serve only to fuel unwarranted contempt, indignation and hatred against innocent citizens who have fallen prey to life-crushing disabilities and unemployment through no “lifestyle” choice of their own?

The cases you so gleefully paraded on this disgusting excuse for investigative journalism are, as you wholly failed to emphasise to your viewers, rare and extreme.

In the wake of your “documentary”, which documents nothing but your Corporation’s forelock-tugging to the powers that temporarily be, the 5 million disabled people who fight every day not only against the humiliating odds stacked against them in this weakest-go-to-the-wall society, but increasingly against the misrepresentation of their situation you are currently churning out to your ultimate discredit, are prey to terror they have neither courted nor deserved thanks to your casual cruelty.

I hope you feel no satisfaction in sinking to this level. I trust when one day you or yours are trapped by genuine disability and unable to escape into these fairy tales of Britain en masse “on the Fiddle” (the clue is in your title that this is exaggeration and, frankly, something far short of the truth we once trusted you to broadcast), you will not regret the degree of hatred you have fostered for people just like yourselves.

Disgusting. Shame on you, BBC.

Just received the automated response from Panorama. Sadly, the reply they promise if my email "requires a response" will be too late. The programme is now out there. The damage, distress and grief they have caused are spreading like ripples in a poisoned pool.

I hope they can sleep. I'm not sure I can, insomnia, discomfort or not.