Monthly Archives: April 2005

but the just-finished alien invasion episode of Dr Who was SIMPLY BRILLIANT.

but Tim Worstall’s correspondent does have a point.

BBC 4 is at this moment running a cosy little mutual back-scratching show about the London Review of Books, starting off with some quotes from left-wing BBC-oids such as Tom Paulin and Tariq Ali. Ali said it was zany (yes, zany). Paulin said it was great at stirring up trouble (the right sort of trouble though, right Tom?).

A list of mostly left-wing or radical writers such as Edward Said who have written for it was quoted as evidence of the LRB’s importance. It was said that there’s nothing like it. Really? Not even the New York Review of Books? Not even the Times Literary Supplement?

It was said that the LRB is theplace where the cultural and social questions of the day are debated. Well, it was certainly true that the LRB used to be one key player in such debates (and don’t get me wrong – it still publishes some wonderful pieces), but it’s certainly lost ground in recent years to journals that publish on the internet, not to mention the blogs and Arts & Letters Daily.

The famous Mary Beard LRB piece after 9/11 where America was said to have had it comingwas raised in the gentlest of ways, and no-one seemed to show much concern. An eyebrow was raised, and everyone went back to sleep. Seems a fairly standard view, even a mild one these days, was the response. I suppose in the BBC-LRB world this is true.

Don’t get me wrong. I mostly like the LRB. And I think a show on the LRB is a great idea. But there’s no doubt that this show is far easier on it than it would be on a right-wing mag like, say, The Spectator.

writes a reader,

“and I am really quite surprised nobody has yet proffered it. It is as follows.

In order to ensure that MG Rover remains fully funded in perpetuity, all the government need do is introduce a Motor Vehicle Licence of say £116 a year, which would be payable by everybody who owns any car. If you own more than one car, the MVL would be the same, and if your car is black or white you’d get a discount.

“There are about 20 million cars in the UK so this would bring in £2.3 billion a year for MG Rover, a national treasure that the world envies. Thanks to the unique way MGR would be funded, it would no longer need to worry about producing anything people actually want. It would rake in billions a year whether anyone bought a single car or not, and no matter how third-rate its output, we’d all be forced to pay for it regardless.

“To ensure full compliance, the MVL would be enforced by the MVLA, which would criminally prosecute anyone caught without an MVL and would send detector vans around to spy on people to make sure they don’t own any cars. It would assume that anyone who says they don’t own a car at all is lying and it would harass them continually with aggressive letters and vague threats.

“At only £116 a year or barely 35p a day, nobody could reasonably claim they cannot afford this, and it goes without saying that everyone benefits from MG Rover’s existence even if they have never used one of the company’s products and never intend to.

“With an income stream on this scale, it wouldn’t be long before MG Rover became a bloated bureaucracy of 60,000 penpushing lefties all sucking a living off the state teat – God bless them all.”

, our old friend Brian Wheeler (see here and here) is back in print at BBC News Online with another gushing piece concerning Gorgeous George “Sir I salute you, your courage, your indefatiguability” Galloway. Brian concludes his piece by noting that in the contest between Gorgeous George and Oona King, the sitting Labour MP in Bethnal Green and Bow, that “things could get very ugly indeed before the final bell”.

Oh indeed, Brian. It’s a pity that you didn’t see or haven’t learnt of the very newsworthy political nastiness that occured when Oona King, along with jewish and other WW2 veterans, was pelted with eggs and abuse during a WW2 commemoration event in the constituency. Fortunately for us, the concerned telly-taxpaying public, Brian isn’t the only set of eyes and ears in Bethnal Green and Bow – other non-telly-taxpayer funded reporters have managed to discover and report this serious incident.

Also noteworthy for its complete lack of coverage of this story is the BBC’s execrable ‘LDN’ local TV news, who managed instead to find time for a lavish talking heads outside-broadcast with three political has-beens (actually, it was two has-beens, Tony Banks and David Mellor, along with a LibDem never-was, whose name, unsurprisingly, escapes me). Something tells me that the BBC’s selection of the repellent David Mellor as a Conservative ‘representative’ has more to do with leftie BBC researchers than it does with any notion of selecting a genuinely representative Conservative to receive the BBC’s telly-taxpayer provided appearance fee.

This morning saw the launch of the Conservatives (sorry Beeboids – that’d be Toriees to you – never call a guy a Conservative when a 200 year old political insult will do) election manifesto. All the usual BBC subtleties have been indulged in, but perhaps the plainest example of this has been the selection of photographs to accompany the story on News Online’s home page.

First attempt: yellow smirk

Second attempt: ‘vote con’

Their first attempt was the ‘silly yellow smirk with a hint of Nazi salute thrown in’ photo. Their second attempt, when even they realised how partial the first photo appears, is the carefully cropped ‘vote con’ photo. How subtle. Perhaps we could see a bit more manifesto and a bit less of the BBC’s ‘con’ next time. Honestly Beeboids – do you think we’re as dumb as you think you are clever?

Update: The ever astute B-BBC commentariat satirises the Beeboids.

Those readers of Biased BBC who are determined to maintain the line that the BBC is objective and impartial and not at all left-wing should have a look at this Times article by Tim Luckhurst, who used to work for the Today programme. An extract:

To someone like Mr Davies, with his experience of the private sector, it is painfully obvious that the corporation is saturated with left-wing values. It disparages competition and worships consensus. Views prevalent in liberal universities percolate through every aspect of policy. Political correctness and cultural relativism are holy writ. Democracy is usually good, but not in America where it produces the wrong result.

This progressive orthodoxy did not incense me when I joined the Today programme. I had started my career as an adviser to Labour’s Shadow Cabinet. I believed Conservatives were morally deficient and was delighted that most of my colleagues agreed. Those who thought otherwise were considered oddballs to be pitied. But as I climbed the BBC ladder the atmosphere began to grate. Producers argued when asked to consider private schools in a report on educational standards and complained when instructed to interview a French opponent of the euro.

BBC journalists are aware of their duty to be impartial but they understand it intellectually not instinctively. While the BBC would never endorse one political party, its dominant attitudes are rigidly social democratic. Those values are so dominant that they are treated as virtues not opinions. It is why a BBC correspondent cried when Yassir Arafat died and a Today presenter referred to the Labour Party as “we”.

These political prejudices are innate because too few BBC employees have ever experienced life in the free market and those who have are often refugees from it. The corporation grows its own managers in preference to recruiting from outside and advertises for staff in left-wing newspapers.

The fantasy of objectivity that the BBC cherishes is exposed again and again as a farce. The Rottweiler Puppy gives notes and comments on an example of where the BBC reports an issue so obviously part of a liberal agenda that it barely needs saying (about on a par, on the opposite coast so to speak, with the wilder shores of Nick Griffin’s mind), yet gives an illusion of objectivity by at least offering a glimpse of the immensely cogent case against this agenda of liberals and charlatans.

Who on earth could make a serious argument that it was sensible to give criminals the vote (Come on. I’m waiting.)? I mean, without wishing to digress from talking about BBC bias, picture the slogans used electioneering the prisons: ‘vote for me, I’ll release you’, or (if you’re a ‘conservative’): ‘vote for me, and a free DVD player to every prisoner’s room will follow’ (please do add some more in any comments offered; could be fun!). I understand from the Beeb’s spouting of the ‘reformers’ ‘arguments’ that the changes of law they want would bring us into line with seven other unnamed European countries, which leaves quite a lot more unmentioned ones (unmentioned by the Beeb, that is) who don’t let crims vote

So, given this senselessnes, why the need to be giving these moonbats (admittedly moonbats with an establishment history and more than a cat in hell’s chance of changing the oh so old and fusty law) the airtime (which of course increases the chances of getting the desired bandwagon a’ changin’ things) and covering the shameful farce of it with a figleaf called Anne Widdecombe? (Via House of Dumb). I wonder what proportion of the chums who want to water down the porridge are (/were, in the context of the rubber stamp of the Beeb’s charter) also supporters of the television tax which keeps the BBC afloat?

The BBC comes clean: We lied.

Okay, it’s only about Dr. Who, but we’ve all got to start somewhere.

also provided this post. Pete_London writes:

We all know how the BBC likes to highlight those Tory misdemeanours yes? And the BBC is impartial and even handed, yes?

“JUDGE UPHOLDS VOTE-RIGGING CLAIMS” (no clue there to the culprits then)

It has been a repeated theme of this blog that headlines unfavourable to the political parties, British or foreign, that the BBC dislikes nearly always specify the party whereas headlines unfavourable to parties the BBC likes tend to leave the party name out. Pete_London continues:

“A judge investigating vote-rigging in Birmingham’s local elections has ruled there was “widespread fraud”, and has ordered new elections.”

“Election Commissioner Richard Mawrey QC upheld allegations of postal fraud relating to six seats won by Labour in the ballot of June 10 last year.”

Nope, they were won by labour but no clue as to the culprit. No mention in the piece either that this government has brought in and encouraged postal voting against the protests of those who predicted this very thing.

Further down we discover the names of the victorious Labour coucillors:

Shafaq Ahmed, Shah Jahan, Ayaz Khan, Mohammed Islam, Muhammed Afzal and Mohammed Kazi. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there seems to be a pattern in that list of names somewhere. For some reason I don’t think this story will be around for long!

At the end of the piece a spokesman for the The Electoral Reform Society is quoted:

“We do not believe that electoral fraud is confined to Birmingham, to the Labour Party or, most importantly, to particular communities.”

Well that’s ok then.

Well, I don’t believe that electoral fraud is thus confined either. (This excellent story from the Guardian has more about other cases being investigated.) But it is concentrated thus. One of the reasons for that is that people refrain from digging too deep out of political correctness. In some ways this has parallels with the long reluctance to admit that there was a specific black criminal subculture until the problem was out of control. Just as the people who have suffered most from that reluctance were the black victims of black criminals, in this case the people who will suffer most are the Asian / Muslim victims of Asian / Muslim vote stealers. Pete was correct to predict that that particular aspect of the story would not be around for long. The quote from the Electoral Reform Society that he gives, and which was also repeated by the Guardian in the article above, has been stealth edited out and replaced by the supremely bland “The Electoral Reform Society said urgent action was needed to protect and maintain confidence in the voting system.” It seems that even a denial that fraud was confined to Labour and ethnic minorities was too pointed for the BBC.