, BBC News Online reports that:
Former Humberside Police Authority chairman Colin Inglis has been charged with 14 counts of indecent assault in relation to allegations of child abuse.
News Online goes on to say:
Following the launch of the North Yorkshire Police investigation last September Mr Inglis was suspended from the police authority and the Labour Party.
He was replaced as leader of Hull City Council in May this year.
This story was also reported on the BBC’s Six O’Clock News this evening, though Inglis’ party affilition and former tenure as Hull City Council leader weren’t mentioned, which is odd, since “Tories” (as the BBC unfailingly calls Conservatives) subject to legal proceedings are almost always linked to their party.
Update, 19NOV05:
Catching up with the news after a hectic few days, by way of contrast, The Times’ coverage of this story last Tuesday, Police chairman charged with 14 counts of child sex abuse, begins:
A LABOUR politician who supervised Britain’s worst-performing police force was charged yesterday with 14 counts of child abuse.
No doubt about Inglis’ political affiliation there then! The Times also reports:
The politician, who is openly gay, has consistently denied any wrongdoing, blaming the allegation on a homophobic conspiracy. He cited “dark forces” as the reason for his fall from political power.
– yet more facts that the BBC completely omitted from their coverage of this story. Would any of our BBC readers care to offer their adoring telly-taxpayers an explanation for keeping the public in the dark?
I think you’ll find there’s a happy medium somewhere to the right of the USSR (and BBC come to that) and somewhere to the left of your slightly scary ideological purity.
rb,
I find the desire to jail people for refusing to pay for things that harm them rather scary.
The Alcohol Concern gambit is, quite obviously, a transparent attempt to shift the focus from the 24hr pub openings. And how did Alcohol Concern decide to slag of 1 in 4 of us as “binge drinkers” just then. Well, check its own website: Alcohol Concern “is supported with funding from the UK Department of Health.”
If you’re interested the person directly responsible for “policy and public affairs” is one Geethika Jayatilaka. Who she? Well, surprise surprise, she’s in fact Councillor Geethika Jayatilaka, Labour councillor for the Kings Cross ward of Camden Council. In other words, she’s a classic Blairite stooge – something it took me three minutes on Google to find out. Somehow this is a connection the BBC’s journalists couldn’t, or more likely couldn’t be bothered, find out for themselves.
Pathetic.
In the end, that’s what bothers me most about the BBC: we can argue until the cows come home that they’re biased. But what the hey, we all have our own leanings which we don’t always fail to understand. No, the real point about the BBC is that its journalism is just plain BAD. It is, actually, pretty much what you’d expect from a nationalised monopoly provider: the Austin Allegro of the airwaves. It’s not that they can’t do it, it’s that they can’t be bothered to do it. It’s surely revealing that the one time this lot actually got called on its bad journalism – by Blair & Campbell – what killed them wasn’t malice but the sheer lazy incompetence of a pointless two-wayer with Gilligan early in the morning.
Michael Taylor,
Subscription would reveal the true demand for the BBCs “quality” output.
Rob,
Well, yes, of course, but I’m not holding my breath.
In the meantime, us bloggers have a big job on our hands trying to keep these guys honest. If you look at the interaction with Paul Reynolds, and what it has brought about, this may be a less obviously lost cause than waiting for any govt to stop the TV polltax.
Hi Michael Taylor
You wrote:
It’s surely revealing that the one time this lot actually got called on its bad journalism – by Blair & Campbell – what killed them wasn’t malice but the sheer lazy incompetence of a pointless two-wayer with Gilligan early in the morning.
I was listening to BBC R5 when this ‘broke’.
The BBC was interviewing the old-style Labour stalwart, Dr John Reid.
It was put to him that sources within British Intelligence were saying that a dossier presented to parliament by the PM had been altered and that the Government knew that certain claims it had made were false.
In short, the BBC said that it had sources within Whitehall who asserted that the Government had lied to Parliament.
Reid was incoherent by the end of the interview. I don’t know if it was anger or fear, and it was Reid’s reaction that drew my attention, rather than the story which I thought was just a piece of whitehall gossip.
Anyway, I have a conspiracy theory that explains the Government’s behaviour throughout the Kelly affair.
It is possible that many of the people here have not heard of the Zinoviev Letter, but it is most certainly etched into the Labour Party’s soul along with the attempts at destabilising the Wilson Government(see ‘Spycatcher’) and the surveillance of present-day New Labour luminaries.
The BBC openly stated that the Intelligence Community was calling the government ‘liars’.
This of course is a charge that is impossible to refute, the only chance would be to find the source of this ‘information’ and make them recant.
I have little doubt that the Government started such a manhunt among the Secret Services, and I believe that when nothing was found (because Dr Kelly was never a member of the Intelligence Services), the Government (and possibly the higher echelons of the services) were in a state of near hysteria.
Assuming all this to be correct, I believe the Government relief when it found that MI6 were not involved would have been tangible; likewise, when Dr Kelly put himself forward as a source for the story, the rage toward the BBC for misrepresenting its sources would have been beyond description.
My point is that the description of Gilligan’s source, by either Gilligan or the BBC, was deliberate and designed to prevent the Government refuting the story. Gilligan would get his ‘Woodward and Bernstein’ moment and the BBC would have staged a coup d’etate.
The Gramscian activities of the BBC continue apace, and in surprising places. On the TV at this moment is EastEnders – a “gritty, realistic drama about everyday London folk”, or so the BBC would claim. A few years ago, there were calls from the usual quarters demanding that characters from the ethnic minorities be written into the screenplay so as to be more realistic. Today, even though all of the characters are white, there are no calls from the left to show ethnic minorities(?) in EastEnders. This is because the reality is that the real Eastenders of cockney London have been displaced by Bangladeshis and waves of illegals. That is why there are no calls for the reality to be seen: the BBC doesn’t want reality to waken the UK from its slumber while its Gramscians get on with their dirty work.
Thank you Allan of Aberdeen, possibly a voice in the wilderness attempting to influence the flock.
Where can one begin? Maybe that I believe the smartest British people are Scottish? Purely because you have dumped your lying, deceitful, excrement on us English and parked them in Downing St and places of influence in the South-East of England.
Pleasantries aside, while the mainly English believe they are better off under New Labour with house price increases then unfortunately it will remain as at present. Borrowing against the virtual house’value’ provides a’virtual’ wealth that New Labout continually exploit. WHEN the penny finally drops could be influenced by the 40% low cost housing dilution, pay per view (and not the New Labour President – Rupert Murdoch channel) or impending council tax increases (AFTER the 2006 council elections).
If we bloggers really have a value then surely it is in a campaign to remove the BBC Licence Fee !
Paul C,
As a conspiracy theory, your account has a lot going for it. The paranoid legacy of the Zinoviev Letter incident would surely have added to the hysteria over what was just about the most extreme charge anyone could lay at the door of a government.
The question which remains is: was the BBC’s allegation part of a conspiracy (a coup d’etat, as you name it) or just the product of the quotidian intellectual sloth and arrogance which we the BBC’s “journalism” demonstrates every day. My money’s on the latter. But that’s not to say that coups d’etat aren’t occasionally triggered by intellectual sloth & arrogance.
“while the mainly English believe they are better off under New Labour” : Communist Dancing.
That’s not strictly true. It wasn’t reported by the BBC (et al) but the party with the largest number of voters in England was the Conservatives.
Rob,
Of course, it doesn’t matter whether the Conservatives are the largest party in England or in the whole country, they still wouldn’t get in. The point of Labour’s hiring 600,000 civil servants has been to buy an average of 1,000 votes in every constituency in the land.
The point of allowing those civil servants to retire at 60, on a final salary pension funded by private sector taxpayers who’ll consequently have to work to 67 before they get their own much smaller money-purchase pension, has also been to buy another few thousand votes in each constituency.
Something seismic needs to happen before this corrupt government can be removed.
It will, just as the corruption and incompetence of the Callaghan government eventually became more than we could collectively stomach.
Meanwhile, the answer to the pension problem is simple. If someone works for the state, on retirement they simply get the state pension.
If any of them think that might not be enough, they do what other humans do, and fund their own.
Can’t resist this comment on re pensions. As anyone in the private sector can tell you, getting your pension right is a function of two things: a) the lump sum saved and b) the rate of return achieved on it. If we really do have a “pensions crisis” (which I’m inclined to believe we probably don’t), you have a choice. You can either try to make people save more – though most likely you’ll collapse the economy and send returns on capital into a spin, and thereby exaccerbate your problem. You can call this the Japanese approach – and look where it’s got them. Alternatively, you (as a govt) can do everything you can to get rates of return on capital to rise. Easiest way to do this? Cut taxes and regulations. You can call this the US approach – don’t save too much, but work the heck out of what savings you have. Folks, I have to tell you, only one of these ways work. And it ain’t the approach our govt is going to force on us.
If any of them think that might not be enough, they do what other humans do, and fund their own.
the_camp_commandant
I think most or all public service pensions schemes are contributory (but some are unfunded). Trouble is that what whilst the concept was equal contributions from employee & employer, the employer is now required to provide more. But then, if the employer contributions hadn’t been cut by government decree in the late 80’s, as a means of limiting the increase in local tax bills, there would be less of a mess.
Hi Michael Taylor.
Is the BBC malicious?
I think so.
The latest story concerning the use of White Phosphorous demonstrates that.
From the time the Italians first came up with the story, the BBC has been playing the ‘Chemical Weapon’ angle for all they are worth.
The International Organisation that rules on chemical weapons specifically excludes WP, but the BBC persists and quotes people like Monbiot.
I can’t see this as anything but deliberately abusing the ignorance of the general public.
As to real ‘conspiracies’ by the BBC, I don’t know. It may be like a children’s game of football, ‘kick and rush’ but occasionally, ‘Auntie’ comes out with something that can only be part of a strategy.
BTW I think your assessment of the BBC as an extraordinarily lazy organisation is very accurate. This sloth seems to pervade everything, from news gathering (especially in non-anglophone countries), to analysis and reaction. If everything else on this website can be dismissed as people pandering to their own prejudices, the BBC cannot evade the charge of sheer, monumental laziness.
I find England funny – it has an Established Church which Americans think is funded by taxpayers – but it is NOT, and unlike US Churches it actually PAYS taxes to The State.
But England has an Established Broadcaster (BBC) which IS funded by taxpayers and which thinks it is the Moral Arbiter of what people may say, do and think.
The BBC then attacks the Christian Church at every opportunity because it thinks the only God that may transmit messages through the ether is the one established in 1922. The employees of the BBC see themselves as Self-Appointed Missionaries of The Digital Cult recycling their Sociology Lectures to the Great Unwashed Masses.
Ironically, most of the Great Oppressed paying tithes to the BBC don’t watch its sermonising and many will stay with the blank analogue screen when digital becomes the new prayerbook.
😆 That’s a great observation Rick.
Rick,
It is an great observation. If you get the time, you might like to look up Coleridge’s defence of the Establishment of the Church of England. It is, if you like, an early statement of the Reithian defence of the BBC. Needless to say, the current degenerated BBD fails the Coleridge test.
Speaking of which, this article must really have stuck in the craw of the BBC editor having to report this:
English ‘should reclaim identity’
Dr Sentamu says he has a passion for the English culture
Multiculturalism has left the English embarrassed about celebrating their true national identity, Britain’s first black archbishop has said.