There are certain touchstone issues that inflame BBC bias. I’m sure we can name several of them; Israel, Afghanistan, Global Warming, Capitalism….and Immigration. Today has been relentlessly pushing the line that despite the fact the 370,000 immigrants to the UK are on Welfare this is a big ho-hum because only around 2% of this number are ripping us off by claiming that which they are not entitled to. If you listen here, you will hear Sir Andrew Green (polite cove but not pushing the issue too forcefully) getting dusted up by Matt Kavanagh of the IPPR “Thinktank” and John Humphyrs. (By the way, why wasn’t the IPPR “thinktank” introduced as left-leaning, in the interests of fairness?) The narrative here was that this is all much ado about nothing. Immigrants bring so much benefit to us that is almost impolite to mention the Big Issue flogging Bulgarians and Romanians who then rip us taxpayers off. It’s a big ho-hum. Kavanagh was virtually yawning with boredom that the issue was even being discussed. The BBC was not finished, however, and Coalition Minister Chris Grayling was then dragged into the Today star chamber to be also given a verbal pounding by Humpyrys. Just listen to the tone of his voice. Unbiased? Also note how the BBC has erased Labour’s pernicious destruction of our borders from 1997 to 2010 and chooses to present unfettered Immigration as an issue that only started in 2010. This enables Labour to then claim some sort of surreal moral superiority on the very problem THEY created. It’s amazing stuff.
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING…
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It’s pretty bad and its far worse that the benefits issue.
The UK government spends 11K per person per year. To be a net benefit to the UK you need to be on over 40K per migrant. Come with dependents, and the figure goes up accordingly.
Now if you are on 40K a year, you shouldn’t be getting benefits.
So I would change it that you can stay so long as you pay 11K a year in taxes per migrant.
It removes the BNP’s arguments completely. After all if you are benefiting because migrants are paying more taxes than their fair share, its hard ot complain.
They won’t get social housing.
Earning more, meanst they are better educated. That tends to mean their children will be better educated, which means less crime.
The arguments I heard from the left are.
1. The poor won’t be able to immigrate to the UK. Quite.
2. What about all the cultural aspects. So don’t the rich have a culture too?
The only argument against it is that if we pull in the educated from poor parts of the world, we impoverish them.
mr green really needs to sharpen his act up in interview, i ve noticed this previously, he has the facts, he should make them count, one has to with the bbc.
Notice the neat way Humphrys diverted the discussion to the benefits given to those not legally entitled to them (a very small part of the sample) while successfully brushing from sight the much greater scandal of the entitlement. Breaking the law is one thing but the fact that these freeloaders are entitled to these hand-outs is something Humphrys didn’t want discussed and, to be fair, Grayling didn’t insist on discussing. Notice also, as Humphrys informed us, that Labour (although invited) declined to put up a spokesman (surely a first!): either Labour was too embarrassed to do so or, far more likely, were happy to leave the heavy-lifting of a whitewash to its friends on Today – and Humphrys duly did them proud!
“duly did them proud”?
In LibLabLuvvieland maybe?
All I heard was the Roland Freisler of the Elite Corps barking 2% at Simon Cadells body double, but to ne effect!
Seems to me that Humph either gets his Tory teeth put in for him by nursey…or his Guardian gummers applied-depending on who is invited in to dote on the old fools dry olives!
An utter joke of an interview-but the BBC template for what passes for “analysis”.
Anyone see the BBC show Harriet Harmans foreskin of a hubby saying sorry for fleecing us of £60,000 that he`d already creamed from his old union yesterday then?…
No, nor did I!
I caught the last 15 mins on R5 with Nikki bloody Campbell. The usual spin about immigrants good, objecters racist. I despair, I really do as it seems that any protest at the insane levels of immigration we have had and are still getting is slapped down as stupid and racist. Nobody who is capable of putting a robust argument for curtailing immigration ever gets near a microphone.
Campbells game show, was as usual loaded, but actually quite open, eastern europe, poles, czechs, farage was on… until! …
a pakistani caller, all of a sudden, we re into offence, into racism
etc etc, campbell lapping it up, looks like i tuned out, when you tuned in,(i can only stand so much sycophantic brown nosing 😀 )
Yes Tonight’s Winner On The Big Wheel tried to get all snippy with Chris Grayling. Aping ‘the big boys’ style of ask a question, interrupt, ask a question, interrupt; and any statement by Grayling was responded to by Gameshow with a cod incredulous, ‘is it?… hmmm’. Not a fact-based rebuttal, but an ‘is it?…hmmm.’
Gameshow’s line of attack (such as it was) went along the lines of ‘many have said that this is a convenient time for the government to be releasing this information with the economy doing so badly’. The ‘many’ turned out to be one whole pretrendy leftie, and this from a shill for the party who thought 2,750 dead on 9/11/2001 made it a good day to bury bad news.
I caught the first 5 minutes of Big Wheel’s phone-in where he was frantically cycling through the callers trying to find one who agreed with Big Wheel/ BBC’s/ the Labour Party’s premise that there’s nothing wrong with Britain trying to provide benefits for all the world’s unemployed.
I don’t know what annoys me more about the Palace Builders – the default as-natural-as-breathing Labour Party shilling; or just the thorough unprofessionalism of the ‘anchors’ who being too busy looking after ‘my husband’, ‘my children’, ‘walking my dog’ spend not a minute of their free time reading up on current affairs and come into each programme unprepared, unread, unbriefed, ill-educated, and winging it.
Time to put Radio 5 Persistent Vegetative State out of our misery.
Nicky Campbell’s opening softball question to a pro-immigration spokesman this morning:
Campbell: Don Flynn is founder and director of the Migrants’ Rights Network. Hello Don!
Don Flynn: Morning.
Campbell: What do you make of the timing of this Don?
Flynn accepted Campbell’s friendly invitation to criticise the timing with a rant about failed economic policies, just as Campbell had hoped. Later in the show Campbell refered back to this during his interview with Grayling:
Campbell: The question of timing is suspicious in some people’s minds. Here’s what Don Flynn of the Migrant Rights Network had to say… (followed by a clip of Flynn answering Campbell’s earlier entreaty)
So Campbell began discussion of the topic by questioning the timing of these benefits figures, and then used this later to inform Grayling that some people questioned the timing. That’s journalism right there, that is. It’s pretty clear where Campbell stands on the issue – as with most topics he follows BBC chattering class conventional opinion. I didn’t listen to the phone-in but it seems Campbell didn’t want to discuss immigration at all – he told a lefty on Twitter who was complaining about “divide and rule” tactics that he’d done that topic “reluctantly“.
Gordon Brown summed it up as far as the Left and the BBC are concerned – if you so much as raise this as an issue you are ‘bigoted’. End of discussion.
Of course Marxist economics – which is in the very bones of the BBC – and as implemented on the broad Russian Steppes – never recognises the importance of capital or entrepreneurship. The only factor is labour and the more of it the better – as in licence fees.
This ostentatious display of bias is god… because people aren’t fools.
They know what they see.
And one day this will hurt the BBC. Badly. One hopes that day comes soon.
So tell me Ahmed, apart from free housing, free education, free healthcare and free money, what was it that attracted you to England?
No sympathy for the Tories. They have had every opportunity to sort out the BBC and have failed to do so. They are like a battered wife with an abusive partner, forever coming back for another beating, and in total denial.
The best for me was gameshow’s Nikki’s favourite caller from Scotland.
He’s a regular. Why does gameshow Nikki like him (the BBC probably call him up as he’s such a regular)
Well.
1. He’s homosexual
2. Scottish
3. Tory hater
4 and if I remember he’s a Muslim or his ‘boyfriend’ is a Muslim.
I mean just HOW many more boxes can the BBC tick for this caller?
I noted that my questions to gameshow Nikki were not read out.
I asked how many Polish people worked at the BBC and why there are no Polish radio or TV presenters. Some of those Polish girls are very pretty and would brighten up the BBC and their English is as good as dame Nicola Campbell’s.
Needless to say the BBC didn’t bother to read out my question.
Didn’t they have one doing the weather? Thomas or Tomas something or other. Turned out to be a right attention-seeking idiot with no idea how to conduct himself, and fortunately no longer appears on the screen. So maybe that was that box ticked in Beeboidland for the time being.
BBC Breakfast also had a guy talking about the very small percentage of the 371,000 Migrants (note: not immigrants) claiming illegal benefit only about 7500, just 2%. That’s OK then, only 363,500 claiming it legally.
The BBC story on this is an exemplar of their total bias on the issue. By just after noon today the story has a new neutered headline after presumably internal meetings where a journalist got a rollicking for trying to make it interesting:
NEW HEADLINE – ‘Migrants on work-related benefits study published’
20 January 2012 Last updated at 12:07
The first four paras of the item (below) are not (or no longer) informational or newsworthy but a negative spin on the report and its findings, in essence declaring there is no problem. Now move along.
BBC Bias could not be more obvious, not that they care or worse still even realise. “Work-related benefits were claimed by 371,000 migrants last year – the vast majority of which were legitimate, the first research of its kind has shown. The estimates suggest workers born abroad may be less likely to claim benefits than UK nationals. A sampling exercise found 2% may not have rights to benefits – but the government couldn’t say for certain. Employment Minister Chris Grayling denied scaremongering, saying the full picture was not clear…”
Curiously, the immigration issue is one where the BBC chooses to keep very quiet about the EU example.
In all the BBC discussions and phone-ins I’ve heard in recent years the emphasis is always on how the recent huge immigration into the UK by people from the newer, East European EU countries has been a benefit.
There is rarely any discusion of why nearly every one of our fellow older EU members, including Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Holland etc etc chose to ban these same people from coming to work in their countries, or how that has affected their economies or unemployment rates.
I wonder why.
If immigration is so good why is it not encouraged that people immigrate into Africa ?
This country needs immigration like a goldfish needs a bike (or whatever the old joke is).
We are the most densely populated nation in Europe with record levels of youth unemployment. Letting coachloads of Poles, Lithuanians and Romanian gypoes into Blighty is like inviting more people onto the Titanic.
Anyone seen the lifeboats?
Questions the BC never ask a pro immigration mouthpiece
1; What other country takes in hundreds of thousands of people to legally give them benefits ?
2; Why cant anyone who comes to our country and works , when his job/ contract finishes be made to go back ( or did he come here not for his own benefit , but out of a desire to help the British people ) ?
3; What other country thinks that a short stetch of time in work entitles an immigrant to full benefits ?
4;Are there any other people in the world who think that they have to take in crooks , chancers and idlers because some good people have immigrated into their country ? [ The old “rough with the smooth “]
5; Do immigrants who have put a lot into our society /nation , and who have integrated , and abhor criminals and feckless freeloaders , want to be linked in any way to the baser sorts defended by the BBC and IPPR ?
6; How was the figure of just 13 000 made up , and by who (civil servant name ) which we were told were only going to come here when there are 370 000 alone who have come here and are on the dole , never mind the others ?
The numbers confuse me. If we have 370000 immigrants on the dole and we are told that as that is only 6% of immigrants proving they are harder workers than the natives then that would give us a total immigrant population of over 6 million.
Either far more than 6% of immigrants are on the dole, or the total number of immigrants is far higher that the ruling elite admit to.
Humpries is a right piece of work, “doing a bit of scaremongering here” The BBC are simply meant to report the news!
This has gone on forfar to long!