All Things in Moderation - Greg Parston and the BBC

A couple of weeks ago, the BBC published this article under 'Scrubbing Up'. This is a column on health and each week someone gives their perspective. It's generally quite good, but this article had a whiff of management about it. The contributor was one Dr Greg Parston, who belonged to a group called the Public Management Foundation. I decided that whatever they were, that they couldn't be innocent, so I put 'Greg Parston' into Google to find out what his hobbies were and who were his associates. To my surprise, the same article came up on News Sniffer with a comment that had been deleted from the original Beeb article and it ran as follows;

Maybe we don't need so many hospitals Greg. However the NHS could have done with the £1billion that Accenture escaped being fined when it walked away from the 'Connecting for Health' IT NHS project and whom you work for. I note you also work for the Priory Group, who stand to gain a great deal from GP commissioning. Any reason why you didn't mention this at the start of the article?

Apparently this broke the Beeb's House Rules and the moderator removed it. So what was wrong with the comment?

A quick check of Greg Parston's activities reveals that yes, indeed, he works for Accenture and up until recently he worked for the Priory Group. He also works for the King's Fund College, whom he praised as 'well respected' in his article. Nothing wrong with sticking up for your own, but should he not have declared his interest? Self praise and all that. He also appears to be a Dr of the PhD kind, rather than the MBChB, as one commenter pointed out.

So why did the Beeb remove this comment? There's nothing inaccurate about it and puts a completely different perspective on the article. And comments like this crop up regularly on 'Have Your Say'; the only difference is that they're usually lost in a snowstorm of remarks from the masses, which this one wasn't. It was obvious and embarrassing. Was that why? And is this proof positive that the Beeb are being leaned on to adopt a specific editorial policy on changes to the health service? Go figure..