I thought Partisan TV News was suppose to be a Yankee thing

With election season at its peak in the U.S., televisions from sea to shining sea are tuned to the channel that emphasizes their viewpoints, be it Fox News for the rabid right, MSNBC for the rabid left, or HLN for the rabidly apathetic who don't care who's leading the U.S. over a cliff.

As this display of entrenched partisan nonsense and the simultaneous degradation of enlightened, sensible discourse and the general concept of centrism continues here, across the pond the greatest chance of it happening was scheduled to take place next week. And not by Murdoch-owned Sky News.

The taxpayer-funded BBC could have found itself the epicentre of a partisan programming debate, thanks to three unions who wanted to go on two 48-hour strikes timed to coincide with Prime Minister David Cameron's speech at the Conservative Party's annual conference in Birmingham and Chancellor George Osborne's speech on budget cuts two weeks later. At issue are concessions the BBC are asking members of the National Union of Journalists, Unite and Becta to grant for pension contributions. The cuts largely stem from a freeze into the rate of the annual television license fee and ongoing austerity measures that the Coalition government are starting to put into place.

The timing of the strikes is essentially aimed at the government, running contrary to the non-partisan objectives of the BBC. The unions have little to gain from the Conservatives being back in power. The last time Britain had a Tory government, Thatcher held out against the National Union of Mineworkers, and the unions' resolve fell flat. So the latest tactic: keep the Prime Minister from speaking on BBC by not having enough staff on hand to cover the speech.

Surely a political tactic like this — one activists would crave to use to stymie Fox News or MSNBC's ability to cover current events — would meet with with the leadership of a party still searching for traction despite a post-conference bump in several polls?

To the benefit of those who cling on to the hope of there being any semblance of objective news sources, it didn't. Shortly after the Labour party conference concluded in Manchester, new party leader Ed Miliband (or as the Tory-loving, Murdoch-owned Sun derisively calls him, "Red Ed") called on the very unions that nudged him past his old brother David to become party leader to not go through with the strike threat. Miliband said that the country had a right to hear what Cameron has to say from the Tory conference because the country heard what Miliband had to say. Additionally, several news presenters with the BBC, among them the venerable Jeremy Paxman and political editor Nick Robinson, warned of the action being seen as "unduly partisan"

As a result, principally because of a new offer on the table from the BBC, the strike's off. For the moment. But this threat just may have been the first blow toward the introduction of yet another American vice into British culture. (If only we could stick with continuing to impress Mountain Dew and Chiefs football on the world.)