Please use this thread for comments about the BBC’s current programming and activities. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog – scroll down for new topic-specific posts. N.B. This is not an invitation for general off-topic comments, rants or chit-chat. Thoughtful comments are encouraged. Comments may also be moderated. Any suggestions for stories that you might like covered would be appreciated! It’s your space, use it wisely
General BBC-related comment thread.
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Seems like there are a lot of heads of state lecturing Brown about fiscal competence.
A few weeks ago the Chilean leader was laying into Brown. Now we have the Polish prime minister telling him some homw truths.
Gordon Brown receives a lecture from Polish Prime Minister
Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, has received a lesson in economics and the correct means of tackling the recession from his Polish counterpart.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/5235897/Gordon-Brown-receives-a-lecture-from-Polish-Prime-Minister.html
Brown left red-faced by debt lecture from Polish Prime Minister
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6185051.ece
And the BBC? Why, it never happened. Goodness me, doesn’t exist. Ignore it, no one will notice.
Instead they give us this puff piece.
Brown promises Auschwitz support
http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8022227.stm
BBC in bed with labour scum.
Very interesting letter in the Daily Telegraph today from Oleg Gordievsky relating to Jack Jones. One aspect of his life that the BBC would not willingly report.
Gerald Brown | 28.04.09 – 12:14 pm |
A letter in the Daily Telegraph is not exactly proof (Did the D.T. check that this Oleg Gordievsky was who he said he was) but as a public service here is the letter Gerald Brown refers to.
Jack Jones, Soviet agent
SIR – Simon Heffer (Comment, April 25 ) writes that my information that Jack Jones was a Soviet agent “may or may not be true”.
I was his last case officer, meeting him for the final time in 1984 at Fulham, together with his wife, who had been a Comintern agent since the mid-1930s. I handed out to him a small amount of cash. From 1981, I had had the pleasure of reading volumes of his files, which were kept in the British department of the KGB until 1985, when they were passed on to the archive.
Oleg Gordievsky
London SW1
———————————–
Surely this is the plot for the next BBC thriller. Sort of a much more politically correct James Bond.
Gerald Brown | 28.04.09 – 12:14 pm
The only thing that Gordievsky is ‘economical with the truth’ about is the location and postmark at the bottom of his letter.
How do they justify this bias – even to themselves? Astonishing, really.
Dr Michael Ross | 28.04.09 – 1:16 pm
All this after Ms. Eilana Cohen had done so much to endear herself to the Muslim community 🙂
Two wives down, now Khalid ditches Elaina
I saw hundreds of postal ballots forged in election
The staggering ineptitude of the Obama administration reached new depths yesterday with the New York fly-by.
The US media are, quite rightly, astounded by the Whitehouse’s insensitivity (though one might think they’d be growing used to it by now, given the number of Obama gaffes) but the BBC?
The best the BBC can manage is, a day late, the inclusion on its website of a short video clip of the plane and a snippet from Mayor Bloomberg’s angry reaction to the incident.
Yet again, the BBC refuses to broadcast the truth about one of its heroes, ignoring an event until it becomes impossible not to cover it and doing its best to minimise the story when it does.
Even the Left-wing Guardian and Independent seem to have more moral courage than the BBC these days. Is there no one in the Corporation’s management with the wit to realise what it has become and the integrity to take a stand against it?
GCooper: If that had been the ‘Boosh’ administration we wouldn’t have heard the last of it.
Normally when a company announces large job losses we get a quote from a union, maybe some from the workforce, maybe one from the local MP. Especially as the company is making larger profits, has more orders etc.
When it’s an ‘eco’ company and the reporter is the BBC we get positive spin, ‘Analysts broadly welcomed the results’.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8022688.stm
!!!!
Krimper 3.36
Didn’t our leader or his Chancellor tell us the other day that our future industrial expansion and hence recovery would come from green technology industries!
Gerald Brown
Exactly.
And what does the BBC have to say about that…….er…nothing.
Do ‘green’ companies also get tax breaks?
Chuffer – don’t worry, the beeboids master plan to save the countryside is in full swing ! Yep two of their farming today types are going to learn to keep a bee hive, (well somebody else is actually keeping it for them).
Think of the street cred when they sit down to dinner with their toffu munching chums, how they single handedly saved the peasants & led them to the sunlit uplands of nulab enlightenment.
Perhaps if they’d bought a dairy herd, they could get to watch it slaughtered as bovine TB reactors, from all those cuddly badgers they’re so keen on protecting.
Or, gasp, they could get some actual proper peasants to make the farming today programme !
Bizarreness on the World Service right now.
A “Yes We Can” campaign speech from The Obamessiah, with a background track of “Somewhere Over The Rainbow”.
Now Kevin Connolly – he who called people like me “teabaggers” – is given a faux-sober analysis of the US economic situation.
“Mr. Obama’s calm, relaxed style, and the size of his mandate, helped him….”
The size of his what, Kevin?
Now another white lie about people like me trying to stage a “tax revolt”. False. We pay our taxes; we just don’t want that money flushed down the Leftoid pork toilet.
Now Connolly has just said that The Obamessiah has claimed that He doesn’t believe in Big Government. Baloney.
His supporters will say, yadda yadda, His detractors will say, yadda, yadda. But it’s all cool, and don’t take the detractors too seriously.
backwoodsman | 28.04.09 – 3:52 pm
It’s a ruse to blame MMGW. There was a rather feeble and inadequate prog. on BBC4 on Sunday about ‘Colony Collapse Disorder’ where bees are leaving the hives and not returning.
The prog. mentioned ‘climate change’ as a possible cause.
In the beeboids mindset bees are flying out, thinking ‘it’s nice and warm out here, no way am I going back in that box’.
I’ve just had my afternoon’s cropspraying ruined by a thunderstorm.
DAMN those pesky married-to-Royalty criminals!!!!
Atlas Shrugged:
“I did warn you!”
Did you Atlas? I don’t think so. Why not give us a link that proves conclusively your omniscient wisdom.
There is an extensive archive function on this site. Please pull up any instance of you telling us something would happen and then it happening.
Even the Left-wing Guardian and Independent seem to have more moral courage than the BBC these days. Is there no one in the Corporation’s management with the wit to realise what it has become and the integrity to take a stand against it?
GCooper | 28.04.09 – 3:22 pm
Personally, I prefer a neutral BBC without a moral agenda. I am prepared to compromise over support for Britain, however, although neutrality certainly beats support for Britain’ s enemies.
Gerald Brown
deegee
Whether or not Mr & Mrs Jones actually did stand in line for a hand-out from Oleg (and it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if they had), Gordievsky has done more for this country than Jones – or his missus – ever did.
The World Service is now telling me that Islamic Banking is safer and more ethical than the nasty, greedy, Capitalist speculators who ruined everything. Of course, banking insiders think this should only be supplementary to the current Western banking system.
But it’s clear that Islamic banks are safer and more ethical.
Oh, yeah, BBC. The Islamic Bankers are way more trustworthy than nasty US bankers. Way more.
The moderators normally pull me off after a few minutes.
Getting pulled off is great.
Krimper/wind farm job losses
To amplify what Krimper said above about this story, the astonishing thing is that if this was in any other sector (450 job losses, there’d be oodles of BBC “analysis” explaining the background, probably with pundits wgo were highly critical about the ethics of the industry concerned. Because its windfarms – a BBC sacred cow – there’s zilch, other than that it’s a reasonable financial exercise by the company.
The reality, of course, is that – despite all mad Gordon’s puffery about “green” jobs – wind farms are not profitable unless there are massive government subsidies that hike electricity bills, and they are also HIGHLY inefficient, providing energy for only around 25% of the time – on a totally unpredictable basis- when the wind actually blows.
Chances of the BBC reporting this? Zero.
And really if there is a secret cabal running the world they have hardly shown evidence of being competent of organizing anything.
To which you will probably reply that is what they want you to think.
Ron Todd | 28.04.09 – 6:18 am | #
I certainly would say exactly that.
However
You did not read my comment properly, I said this is just a practice run.
G cooper is on the right track. Simply look at the MSM coverage and the BBC’s especially. UN this and WHO that, while the British government remains almost ignored.
PROBLEM
REACTION
SOLUTION
You cause a global crisis, then you don’t even bother waiting for the reaction anymore, then you inflict the solution, to the problem you deliberately conspired to cause.
It is also an example of state terrorism. We do not need the TV to frighten us all to death for days on end, for ABSOLUTELY no beneficial purpose WHATSOEVER. What we may need is Lem-Sips, and a strong hanky.
When or if people start dieing in anything like serious numbers, is the time for the media to get involved on this sort of subject. Otherwise it is better for all ordinary people concerned, to not be told MSM/BBC Grims Fairy Tales before bedtime.
Look at the months, nay years of nonsense the BBC claimed for the future of AIDS, for example. BBC stile terrorism if ever there was such a thing? Which of course, there ALWAYS is such a thing. Basically if it seems to be an act of terrorism, but is not reported to have happened by the MSM/BBC, then it is not an act of terrorism. Because the act has not terrorized, it has simply just murdered people.
IMO we are being buttered up for ‘The Final Big Sneeze’, while our ruling elites get their ducks lined up in the correct order.
People die all over the world of all types of Viruses, every second of every day. There is seemingly no evidence of an important difference between this flu, or any other flu, as yet.
So why has the BBC hardly mentioned anything else, for the last 12 hours?
My guess is that there maybe an important difference. The difference is in the origin of this particular virus.
There is ALWAYS a reason why the BBC concentrate on a particular subject, especially when they do for days if not weeks on end. The trick is working out what the real reason is, who exactly is giving the orders, and for what ultimate purpose?
It is a really interesting game, that can make you massive fortunes.
Deegee,
Very interesting but not surprising to me, I would love to see the KGB files on labour and TUC traitors.
When you think how the union movement destroyed our heavy industries like shipbuilding on the direct orders of the Kremlin, its sad to see these b*****ds left to die in peace enjoying their wealth when they should be either rotting in prison or rotting beneath the prison walls.
If Putin wished to cause the UK establishment a shedload of pain he only has to open the KGB handlers files and publish the list of traitors, ill bet its a long list too!
Credit where it’s due: Nick Robinson is not kind to Gordon Brown at all. He’s been very critical, in fact, since he got back from his extended holiday.
Robinson slowly turned away from supporting Mr. Brown after he got double-crossed over the Pre-Budget Report. But he got obviously fed up with the grand-standing and cheerleading during G20. Now that he’s back, Robinson is being as critical as I’ve seen him in a long time. I wonder if McBride had him cowed somehow?
David,
I’ve always though Nick Robinson has been good at tackling the PM. He has his gentle days sometimes, but remember, these guys are told that the kinder they are, the more exclusive spoon fed press releases they will get ahead of their rivals.
Evan Davies on radio 4 is good in the mornings too.
Atlas shrugged,
Sorry but I cannot help but laugh at your paranoia. Do you really believe that these events are always planned by some shadow government somewhere? The world seems a lot more random and chaotic than you imagine it to be. I doubt any governments quite have the competetence to engineer a flu outbreak on the public, they’d probably affect themselves by accident first.
That should obviously be ‘infect’ rather than affect.
I hope its not those pesky joos poisoning wells again.
The moderation on Toenails blog has upped a gear.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/nickrobinson/2009/04/expenses_controversy.html
The excuse is it being ‘off topic’.
Blogs comments are soon shut down too, so debate (and criticism of Brown) is silenced.
I guess the tidal wave of disapproval is getting too much for the beeboids.
The second I clicked ‘publish’ here the above blog from Nick Robinson was ‘closed for comments’. The BBC are in opposition mode.
This may be silly, but it’s revealing nonetheless (I think).
The BBC News website has a light-relief story about a cat who visits a Kent library every day. It’s a story that might make a cat lover smile, and is harmless enough.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/kent/8021407.stm
(Hope this link works. I’ve never tried linkinh before, so apologies if it doesn’t).
The cat’s name though is, of all things, Fidel.
Now I wonder how the Beeb came up with this heart-warming tail. Was a Beeboid making her daily scan for good news of the BBC’s favourite Latin American despot (before Chavez) & came across this story by accident? Did they think, “How amusing! And the cat’s called Fidel. That’s the icing on the cake. Castro’s great! Let’s put this on the BBC News Website.”
How nice!!
P.S. Who but a leftie moron would name their cat after Fidel Castro.
P.P.S. Castro was one of the most corrupt dictators in the world & one of the most oppressive. He blighted the lives of millions of people – not just in Cuba, but across Africa and Latin America as a result of his military adventurism. The BBC has always had a crush on him.
Dorian Smith | 28.04.09 – 6:13 pm |
It almost seems as if Robinson is encouraging the negative comments about Mr. Brown. He probably wants a new Labour leader, so they can have a successful coalition with the LibDems at the next election.
BOLD HEADLINE: “Three men have been cleared of helping to plan the 7/7 London suicide attacks”
(BBC:Hurrah! Plod got it wrong (again)!!!)
PARA THREE: “Ali and Shakil were found guilty of a second charge of plotting to attend a terrorism training camp in Pakistan”
Ah.
Presumably it would have been only a matter of time then that they would have put their training to use in terrorism.
Innocent only in that they had planned to be guilty but hadn’t got round top committing terrorist acts. Just jolly British citizens dancing around the maypole.
And their lawyer? anti-police crusader Imran Kahn who has made a career out of the Stephen Lawrence case. According to the BBCs profile – “As the country’s best-known Asian solicitor, Khan has taken on some of its most intimidating institutions. The police and prison services he cites as racist and reactionary”
Yeah, mates of the 7/7 bombers – innocent.
Hang em high.
David Preiser (USA):
For my own sick reasoning I’d love to see a Labour/LibDem coalition, if only because it will inevitably end in disaster and finish them both off.
Amazing new development on BBC ‘politics’ page
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8022432.stm
A story about a 19 point Tory poll lead.
I get the feeling that the BBC has suddenly realised that its beloved labour party is about to be out of office for the next twenty years and that Brown is not only a dead duck but a cooked goose as well (!)
Isn’t is suspicious that all of a sudden critical stories start appearing (Robinson, radio 4. I believe the Red Guard have approached them and told them about the impending palace coup that will oust the porridge eating Nokia man and save Labour…….
Is this sufficiently conspiratorial Atlas?
Fat Face Penguin Seal | Homepage | 28.04.09 – 5:57 pm | #
I have already indicated that the vast majority of diseases are perfectly natural. It does not mean however that this one is, or more importantly a future one will be.
You are wholly wrong to believe that our ruling elites do not have the capability to do this and a whole lot worse, without harming themselves in the slightest, IF THEY SO WISHED.
This is, may I remind you, the year 2009 not 1916,1919,1945 or 1969? They have learned a thing or two since then about many things. The simple fact is that they have only told us about a very few of them. These not so few things, would make mustard gas, induced flu epidemics, nuclear bombs, and getting a man on the moon, look like ‘children at play’ in comparison.
I have predicted many things in my life, only a very few of them did not happen, sooner or later.
My advice is to trust no one who has a vested interest in not being trustworthy. If there is only one thing that all westernized states have, to a varying degree, in common with each other, then this is it.
They can’t pay for our old peoples retirement, even if they wanted to, which they don’t. Whats worse they know they can’t, and have no intention of trying to do so. This because they have all spent the pension fund cash, on lots of nothing worth having, and given the rest to the international banksters system. Primarily so that said system can carry on lending even more of it to us at rapidly increasing marginal interest rates.
One other thing.
In your perceived universe there is either no one in charge of this planet of theirs. Or if there is, they are so criminally incompetent that they have brought us where we are today in this post nuclear age, purely by accident, or fortune.
Quite frankly, if I believed what you believe, I would be even more paranoid and half frightened to death then I already am.
Oh dear. If you believed half of what you believe I believe, then you’d still be STARK RAVING BONKERS.
Time for your medication, Mr Shrugged.
Credit where it’s due: Nick Robinson is not kind to Gordon Brown at all. He’s been very critical, in fact, since he got back from his extended holiday.
David Preiser (USA) | 28.04.09 – 5:46 pm
ITV’s evening news gave a foretaste of tonight’s News at Ten with a bit of gloating about how they’d “got under the PM’s skin” or some such. They then played a sequence of clips of a tetchy Brown rebuffing questions at a press conference. Quite surprising, really. I think we might be witnessing the reaction of a guilty press pack shamed by its complicity during the McBride years. It’s payback time now, but it I suspect it will only last as long as it takes the Number 10 spinners to get their shit together again (something which is far from guaranteed, though).
(PS – in recognition of the kind comments about my previous innuendo-laden post, I’ve just put a large stiff one down my throat.)
I think Mr Presier is going down the Mr Shrugged route….
David Preiser (USA) | 28.04.09 – 5:46 pm |
You only have to read the usual comments on Robinsons blog to see that he had lost all cedibility – charges of being in bed with Labour are a frequent message. But one swallow does not make a spring.
Robert Peston hints at neo-Marxism from Gordon Brown:
Why tax the rich
Peston says straight out why the 50% rate won’t bring in revenue. Then he says this:
Which in turn implies that the 50% rate is less of an economic necessity and more a return to Labour’s 1980s ideological view of fairness in taxation, that taxing the rich is a good in itself for the way it closes the gap between rich and poor.
The BBC business editor is saying that dragging some people down so they’re closer to the bottom is “a good in itself”, according to Labour in the old days, and hints that this is the direction Mr. Brown is going now. It’s not just that reducing the gap between rich and poor is good, but that the good also comes in reducing what some people earn.
Straight from Gordon Brown’s biographer, who championed the fairness of his subject’s economic policies.
Craig,
Steady on there old boy. Fidel was nothing more than a bit player in a field of pro’s.
When you think of hard core dictators, fidels name isnt one that comes to mind straight away.
Mailman
Funniest thing I have seen in years
(Warning very bad language)
Ive got to put weedkiller on my garden tommorrow. BBC people, should I use Sodium Chlorate, Glycophosphate or CO2 ?
Justin Webb’s anti-religious bigotry is on full display today. Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter has switched over to being a Democrat.
The BBC is trumpeting it elsewhere as a great prize for The Obamessiah, and the final death knell for Republicans’ ability to block Democrats’ dreams in the Senate. None of the Beeboids will discuss how Specter basically votes with the Dems anyway.
But ol’ Justin gets the reasons behind Specter’s switch totally wrong.
If Arlen Specter could have won as a Republican he would have stayed a Republican – but Pennsylvania voters have been on a trajectory that takes them further and further away from the causes and concerns of the Bush-era Republican party, in particular on issues of religious social conservatism (whose strange death I chronicled in my book).
According to the BBC’s North America editor, Specter won’t be elected as a Republican because more of his constituents are turning away from religion, and nasty Republicans by extension. He also gets in a dig at Sarah Palin (two posts in a row, in fact, betraying his personal obsession with her).
Ol’ Justin is not only letting his bigotry get in the way of his analysis, but he actually denies Sen. Specter’s own words:
Specter faced an extraordinarily difficult re-election challenge in his home state in 2010, having first to confront a challenge from his right in the Republican primary before pivoting to a general election campaign against a Democrat.
“I am unwilling to have my twenty-nine year Senate record judged by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate,” he said in the statement.
“I don’t have to say anything to them. They said it to me,” Specter said, when asked in a Capitol corridor about abandoning the GOP.
In other words, Specter couldn’t even win his own primary as the incumbent because he had moved too far Left. That’s not because people are abandoning religion, as Webb claims.
He didn’t want to face it, he votes with the Dems on most things anyway, and now he says The Obamessiah will campaign for him next year. If this was about people in Pennsylvania moving away from whatever religious fervor ol’ Justin imagines, Specter wouldn’t be facing so much trouble winning a Republican primary, and wouldn’t need to jump ship to ride His coattails.
But all Justin Webb cares about his is getting in digs based on his personal issues and bigotry. I’m sure he’ll be a great addition to Today.
It’s all too much:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i…h? v=iMi776jah1w
Its been around a while now, but IMHO its the best in a very large field.
Nice try David P – but that is clearly the BBC Business Editor saying that Labour say that taxing the rich etc
AndrewSouthLondon – the addition of your subtext says nothing about the BBC and a lot about you.
Anyone without an axe to grind reading that article will wonder how they got away with it, it could not be any clearer.
If you have to add your own biased commentary to an article in order to show it is biased I suggest you look elsewhere.
Note: this one is even clear about their religious motivation.
backwoodsman | 28.04.09 – 3:52 pm | #
Since I’ve moved back to the sticks (ish) I have to agree with you about the badgers.
When I was a kid seeing a runover badger was a rare treat, now there seems to be one every half-mile round my way.
David Preiser
Exactly. Specter has been a RINO for a long time – Repub In Name Only. It is only on exceptions that he votes the Repub side.
Just seen this on Fox. Obama IS JESUS.
http://worldnetdaily.com/images/090425obamathetruth.jpg