Monthly Archives: February 2012

LESS IS MORE!

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Here is another interesting piece of analysis from B-BBC contributor Alan with which it is hard to argue!
“It is a fact that government cuts are forcing local authorities to close libraries. We know this because the BBC tells us so. It is just one of the remorseless attacks on the poor and vulnerable in society that this government’s savage cuts inflict upon us….leading inevitably to social breakdown, lack of opportunity, lack of social mobility, all combining to produce a level of frustration and fury amongst the disposessed that their only outlet for political dialogue is rioting and looting….a political statement of despair and rage at being abandoned on the scrapheap of life as bankers loot the country and pay themselves massive bonuses.
However looking at the annual accounts of a council such as Brent in London, which is closing libraries, a curious picture arises.

Here we have the budget requirements for the years 2004-2011:
http://www.brent.gov.uk/councilfinance.nsf/Pages/LBB-8

2004/05 £347,415,000
2005/06 £367,234,000
2006/07 £235,513,000
2007/08 £255,972,000
2009/10 £261,836,000
2010/11 £265,469,000

I am no accountant nor an expert in local government finance but it would seem to me that in 2006, under Labour, Brent ‘s budget dropped enormously….but there was no talk of library closures then.And it looks that since then its budget has been growing again….could it be that the library closures are politically motivated….puts a new perspective on the comrades in City Hall…..prepared to sacrifice the citizens for political advantage. The question is….if libraries were kept open throughout the years of depression and recession in decades previous how is it that they cannot be kept open now…just what has the council been spending its money on? Why hasn’t the BBC asked that obvious question?

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NIESR

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The National Institute for Economic and Social Research. It sounds important and credible and the BBC always seems to think so and happily reports its findings without any ‘warnings’ about being a ‘pressure group’ or ‘leftwing’.


B-BBC contributor Alan details…

“The NIESR tell us that there is no link between unemployment and mass immigration, it is now telling us that the government should adopt Labour’s ‘Plan B’ to stimulate growth based on its computer modelling and the deep ruminations of its chief. Who is the chief of the NIESR? Jonathan Portes. Who is he, or rather who was he? He was Gordon Brown’s chief economist in the cabinet during Labour’s years of destruction….and presumably one of the architects of that ‘creative destruction’. No wonder he doesn’t want you to link losing your job to Labour’s open door immigration policy. No wonder he thinks splurging on debt and spending is the answer….because that was his policy pre-credit crunch….a dog always returns to its vomit they say. It is rather bad timing for him that facts on the ground apparently point to us not being in his claimed recession: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16869870

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MORE HUHNE

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Biased BBC exists to provide a forum for YOUR view, to allow you to point out the things that bother you about BBC coverage. Here are the views of a reader who is most concerned about how the State Broadcaster is dealing with the Huhne resignation issue;

“I’ve been watching the coverage of Huhne’s resignation – on BBC 24-hour News channel- for the last 90 minutes. At the end of each (30-minute interval) report, there’s been an interview with a Greenie spokesperson – who, of course, calls for Huhne’s successor to be just as robust in pushing the Green agenda and standing up for delusional fantasies such as wind power. Obviously, as far as the Beeb is concerned, the great unwashed can go freeze in the dark, so long as the BBC maintains its ideological purity. Question: why is the BBC (a supposedly ‘impartial’ broadcaster) giving so much prominence to such a non-mainstream point of view? We all know they wouldn’t do so on many other topics we could mention. I don’t claim to be a climatologist. But I do have a decent Cambridge degree in early medieval northern European history – and northern England, Scandinavia, Greenland and Iceland were several degrees hotter in the Medieval Warm Period than they are now. Why do you think the colonising Vikings called ‘Greenland’ just that? Because it was largely free of ice when they first arrived!”


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ANY QUESTIONS

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I don’t listen to ANY QUESTIONS very often, after all there is only so much BBC that the human spirit can take. However as fate would have it, I did catch this most recent programme. It was from Wirral, so perhaps that was a warning. On the panel were;  Work and Pensions Minister, Maria Miller; Liberal Democrat President, Tim Farron; Shadow Secretary of State, Andy Burnham; and geneticist, Professor Steve Jones. So, that makes THREE to the left and ONE to the moderate right. What could be more balanced?

The first question raised, and I kid you not,was concerning the NOBILITY of Chris Huhne’s decision to step down and defend himself against the allegation that he and his wife colluded to pervert the course of justice. There was universal praise for Huhne, with Steve Jones even comparing him to a pearl.

There then followed a discussion of David Lammy and the “smacking” issue. Again the panel were in agreement that smacking your child is basically child abuse, if not savage. Evidently no one on the panel or even in the audience was prepared to say that judicious smacking is a perfectly acceptable part of parenting, all the more surprising when one reflects on the statistic that 55% of parents support it. Oh, and my source is this GUARDIAN poll. Yet in the BBC audience, 100% oppose it. So, the BBC audience is even further to the left than Guardianistas – quite a feat,

The discussion moved on to NHS reform and as you might expect, only Maria Miller was in favour. Burnham, Farron and Jones trotted out every asinine NHS cliche you could imagine. Again the view of the Government was clearly portrayed as a marginalised view with “most” opinion on the panel and in the audiencefavouring just keeping the NHS as it is. Burham was allowed to grandstand.

I lost the will to live at that point and tuned out but one does have to wonder how such an unbalanced and unrepresentative programme can get away with such visceral bias. Or so I think.

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Revolution’s Children

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Children of the Revolution BBC2 was interesting.
The three protagonists were young and camera friendly. Gigi, Ahmed and the Salafist were presented as young revolutionaries, striving for democracy, each in their own way.
Was it another stuck-in-a-rut documentary that amounts to the creation of more ‘here today gone tomorrow’ celebrities and little else? Normally the viewer is required to project a fantasy of their own onto some vacuous telegenic character, but the heroes and heroine featured here did not lack personality. There was bias, inevitably, but it was subtle, and the whole thing was thought provoking.

Gigi was already a well-known personality. During the ecstatic phase of the Tahrir Square uprising the Western media loved her. As the news unfolded she was pitted against Middle East specialists of stature, night after night, as a talking head. Part reporter, part political pundit, her opinions were credited with wisdom and maturity with what turns out to be a somewhat unrealistic optimism and overestimation. Subsequent events in Cairo forced this film to be more nuanced than expected.

“she was presented as well meaning but driven simply by naive youthful enthusiasm” says one commenter on the TV blog, when he felt she was really “a prominent member of the Revolutionary Socialists organisation in Egypt.”

Ahmed was originally motivated by frustration at being unable to find a job. Corruption kept him in an underprivileged position, and he wanted change.

The Salafist, whose religion, along with the Muslim Brotherhood, was illegal during Mubarak’s regime, was raring to go. Politics was his game and Sharia was his aim.

Gigi was more of a mystery. We were never quite told what her American education entailed, and how she came to be a revolutionary socialist. Was it youthful rebellion against the businessman dad she was prepared to dump for her politics? Was it a Vanessa Redgrave type self-hating hypocrisy? Was it altruistic idealism? Or maybe a quest for celebrity status?
Whatever it was, she couldn’t help appearing a tad deflated when it all went pear-shaped. Not to worry, off on hols, and a jokey text message: “Are you going to break the siege in Gaza?”
“No, I’m off to the beach” came the reply with a sheepish look to camera.

Frolicking in the sea, someone brought up the vexed question of bikinis. “They’ll never stop us wearing them in the new Egypt,” they agreed, as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists were celebrating their overwhelming triumph in Egypt’s glorious democratic elections.

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THINGS CAN ONLY GET BETTER

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Ah, you just gotta love Obama. Well, if you work for the BBC you do. Get this;

US President Barack Obama challenged Congress to keep the economic recovery going as new data showed unemployment down to its lowest rate in three years. The unemployment rate dropped to 8.3%, beating analyst forecasts, and was down from 8.5% in December.

Great stuff and a sign that recovery is now well underway. Time to re-elect The One, yes? 
Oh, except for this. But hey, the BBC has a unique way of looking at the world!

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FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF SOUND

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Have you been following the BBC coverage of the resignation of Lib Dem Chris Huhne? It strikes me that now that Mr Huhne has gone to spend more time with his windmills, the BBC is rather gutted and if you read through this report it smacks of BBC sadness that one of their own has fallen from grace. Mind you, armed with the ‘simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play’ I guess we can but hope Huhne will make a speedy return to Government…as it were.

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The Sound of Breaking Glass

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The genre ‘Rap’ (as in music) has a comical air, something to do with Ali G perhaps, and the more seriously it’s taken the more comical it becomes. This opinion is my own and does not represent that of the BBC.
So the BBC’s decision to ban the words “Free” and “Palestine” from the lyrics of rapper Mic Righteous, or muffle them with the sound of breaking glass, would be hilarious, if it wasn’t stupid and almost sinister.

Poor Mic Righteous had to chant:

“I still have the same beliefs
I can scream (broken glass)
Die for my pride still pray for peace,
Still burn a fed for the brutality
They spread over the world.”

However, the Beeb changed its tiny mind.

“The BBC Trust has decided it is not “proportionate or cost-effective” to proceed further with the complaint, but the original decision does not seem proportionate either. Indeed, had the BBC allowed the song to go through uncensored, it probably would not have been remarked upon (after all, it was two words, not a long political diatribe). As it is, this incident sends a very uncomfortable message.”

This arbitrary censoring and arbitrary uncensoring shows what a muddled thing this impartiality lark can be.
It would be a mistake to assume that every pro-Israel blogger automatically approved of this ban, just as it would be wrong to assume that they would support the BBC’s decision not to air the DEC appeal, never mind the ensuing brouhaha. Most people were ambivalent. (Glad they didn’t show it, but sorry the ban made the BBC look even-handed.) It’s not that they didn’t want people to donate to the cause – as if the ban would have stopped them – but they didn’t relish the prospect of more propaganda than necessary being thrust upon us via the BBC.

The BBC is a devious beast. Things like this are used to bolster claims that they don’t take sides, but in the face of the constant barrage of pro-Palestinian material we detail here day-in and day-out that’s patently ridiculous.

H/T Sarah AB from Harry’s Place.

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RETURN OF THE USSR?

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Biased BBC contributor Alan writes; 


“We have long beentreated to the BBC’s eulogising of China and the delight and envy at itsdecisive decision making, unhindered by the need for public approval. JeremyPaxman only recently telling us ‘China is the great emerging force in theworld, and the sense of apprehension everywhere else must be good.’

But it now seems that long cherished dreams of the return of the Soviet Unionare being dusted off and burnished….the Israeli security barrier may be ahuman rights disaster for Palestinians but the Berlin Wall kept out the evilsof irresponsible capitalism.

Peter Oborne in the Telegraph reveals the BBC have long covered up for Putin…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/9055097/The-BBCs-distortion-of-the-truth-helps-Putin-suppress-his-critics.html

‘The BBC’s distortion of the truth helps Putin suppress his critics. A revealing documentary – Putin, Russia and the West – is all very well, but itshould not be playing into the hands of a tyrant.The BBC has heavily bought into prime minister Putin’s own narrative…itsdescription of the programme: “How the great Soviet superpower, crushed andhumiliated, has been resurrected in the form of Vladimir Putin’s new Russia.” ‘

Whilst the BBC happily hunts down every British or American soldier for theslightest misdemeanour Oborne says it is happy for the Russians to devastateChechnya….’this Chechen conflict was an event of hideous brutality, borderingon a genocide: the BBC presents it as something closer to a routine counter-insurgency.’  ‘The overall narrative, I believe, is slanted towards Putin, a fact whichbecomes more disturbing when the identity of the main consultant to the seriesis taken into account.

Angus Roxburgh is well known to the British public as a former BBC Moscowcorrespondent. Much more relevant is the fact that Mr Roxburgh was a publicrelations consultant to the Kremlin for three years between 2006 and 2009.

The Guardian correspondent Luke Harding records in his recent book, MafiaState, “the BBC Moscow bureau in particular is extremely reluctant to report onstories that might offend the Kremlin”.

Some good judges believe that this outcome (of the Russian elections makingPutin President again) might plunge Russia into a new dark age. How fortunatefor Putin that he has a useful idiot in Jonathan Powell and a fearful newsorganisation like the BBC to make life easy for him.”

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HAND IN HAND…!

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Biased BBC’s Alan asks;


“Is it possible thatthe BBC and the Labour Party are working hand in glove to attack the Coalitiongovernment?

Not just a chance meeting of minds and interests but a deliberately engineeredcampaign to bring down a government? 


Take the recent revelations by the BBC about Ed Lester’s payarrangements….why was he targeted?

We know the BBC has an intense interest in student loans having followed andbroadcast the student protests religiously and at great length.

Is it likely they chose Ed Lester deliberately precisely because he was runningan organisation that was part of a scheme that the BBC disagrees with andtherefore any bad news will damage that scheme?

Just how did they come to decide he was a target? Did they get a tip off froman interested party….a Labour member?

It is interesting how quick off the ball Labour were in demanding an ‘urgentquestion’ in Parliament.

Reminds me of the recent time when a charity published a report timed tocoincide with and support Labour questions.

Is the BBC co-ordinating with Labour?

Disappointing how political Margaret Hodge was on the radio today talking aboutthis….although the Public Accounts Committee was going to investigate thismatter it seemed she had already made up her mind of great wrong doings, andthe trail of guilt lead all the way to the top…government ministers areimplicated in this crime against the ‘people’.

Shame the BBC failed to tell us she was ‘Labour’ and had sponsored the 2004Higher Education Act which introduced tuition fees for students….wonder ifshe had any insider knowledge?”

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