"We let it slip" - Governor of the Bank of England at the TUC

In the good old days (25+ years ago), you could watch speeches at the Trades Union Congress (and the rest of the conference season) live and continuously on television throughout the day.

Nowadays, we have to make do with short clips selected for us by TV news editors (or by people who post videos on YouTube).

Better than nothing, perhaps, but it will make it quite a challenge if anyone ever wants to check out and/or replicate what John Heritage and I did in 1981, which was to use our shining new Betamax VCRs to record 476 speeches at the three main party conferences that year (detailed results of which were published HERE in 1986).

Easier though the internet has made it to collect video clips these days, there are some irritating frustrations. Having made it possible to embed some of their videos in websites and blogs a couple of months ago, the BBC website now seems to have withdrawn this facility.

This is a pity, because I'd like to have juxtaposed this rather interesting statement from Mervyn King (for which, thanks to Sky News for its embedding option) with union leader Bob Crow's equally interesting explanation of why he wasn't going to listen to the governor of the Bank of England (which can be seen half-way down a page on the BBC website HERE).