Monthly Archives: May 2012

Biased BBC contributor Alan observes how Martin Ivens has given the BBC a ‘fisking’ in the Sunday Times for never admitting it has a ‘dog in this fight with Murdoch’….and Thompson’s ‘most flagrant breach of the BBC’s impartiality obligations in its 90 year history’….and asks ‘who watches the watchmen?’.

Not sure who watches them but I was listening on Friday to ‘Book of the Week’ and it gave us a highly politicised, an ‘Occupy’, version of British history.

It was purely designed to provoke and add the BBC’s support to the racist anti-English clamour from the SNP….in the hope of influencing people’s vote should they get a referendum on Independence.

This week’s book was ‘Hedge Britannia’….apparently, it tells us, the history of Britain can be mapped from its hedgerows.

The BBC choose the book, they then abridge it to suit, and then choose the parts they want to broadcast…..the choice of book and selection of piece to read out seems more often than not to reflect the BBC’s own political agenda…….corrupt cop Ali Dezai’s book was ‘BotW’ on the day of its publication….a Muslim, an Asian, claiming race discrimination by the hated Police force….what’s not to like in the BBC world. Of course things turned out alright in the end….the police got their man…..don’t think the BBC will be in a rush to publicise that.

Friday’s effort was without doubt similarly chosen with targets in mind.

It started off by telling us that the author had a few problems with the Union Jack….some historian….it’s the ‘Union Flag’……he found it quite ugly….the word ‘Britain’ was spat out by the narrator.(Perhaps his own interpretation)

The author goes on to say the Cross of St George was ‘slapped’ on top of that of St Andrew in a  provocative manner…’stamping’ England’s flag on the flag of the other nations…..Oddly I have never been ‘provoked’ by the design of the Union Flag.

Even the choice of St George seems to upset him….St George having come from the Middle East…and so stolen by the English.

Then we get on to more familiar BBC territory….wealth, property, land and the poor.

Apparently even poor old hedgerows are symbols of entrenched wealth and inequality….current landowners are still raking in the loot and milking the poor by exploiting the benefits of historic appropriation of the peasant’s land….the legal system is designed to favour the rich landowners, and so hedgerows have a dark side….illustrating the political power and status that comes with land ownership….the greed and conflict that separates us all.

The author may, or not, have had his tongue firmly in his cheek….but the BBC are happy to ‘appropriate’ his book and make political messages out of it….nice timing too when the SNP are launching their ‘Freedom’ campaign.

Just a coincidence I’m sure.

Biased BBC’s Alan brings a curiously non-judgemental piece on a Labour MP here:

‘A Labour MP has branded a fellow train passenger a “lager drinking oaf” and suggested he should “have been killed before he could breed”.’

If that had been said by a Tory imagine the outcry….in fact wasn’t some one hounded just for using the word ‘breed’ a while back?

‘Howard Flight (millionaire banker, euro sceptic and Peer)criticised Chancellor George Osborne’s plan to strip child benefit from higher earners as an attack on wealthier families. “We’re going to have a system where the middle classes are discouraged from breeding because it’s jolly expensive, but for those on benefit there is every incentive,” he said.’

‘Labour branded Mr Flight’s comments “shameful” and said they showed the Tories were out of touch with people…. “These shameful but revealing comments cast serious doubt over David Cameron’s judgement in personally appointing Howard Flight to the House of Lords only a few days ago.’

The BBC take? ‘…..critics have said Mr Flight’s remarks smack of “eugenics”.

And eugenics is a bad thing in the popular mind, at least in part due to its association with the Nazis. But there’s more to the story than that.

If you had given a speech about eugenics in the latter part of the 19th Century, it would have been a fairly unremarkable position to take. Well of course they would say that……..because….the Left have record on this sort of thing……and never forget Hitler was a socialist…..

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/leftwatch/2010/11/eugenics-is-the-dirty-little-secret-of-the-british-left.html
‘Freedland concludes his piece as follows –
One other doctrine was crucial – profound elitism. It strikes the 1990s ear oddly, but these leading lights of British socialism had no patience for equality.
“For years, leftists, historians and everyone else have drawn a veil over Adolf Hitler’s naming of his creed National Socialism. It has been dismissed as a perverse PR trick of the Fuhrer’s, as if Nazism and socialism represented opposite faiths. The same view has infused the left’s understanding of the genocides committed in the name of communism, whether by Stalin or Pol Pot, as if those men were merely betraying the otherwise noble theory whose cause they proclaimed.”
“But the early history of British socialism tells a different story. It suggests that socialism – with its unshakeable faith in science, central planning and the cool wisdom of the rational elite – contained the seeds of the atrocities that were to come later. Eventually, in the shadow of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor, the British left gave up its flirtation with eugenics. They saw where it had led. But, just like the governments of Scandinavia, their past was buried too quickly and forgotten. The names of Russell, Webb and Shaw still retain their lustre despite their association with the foulest idea of the 20th century. They escaped the reckoning. Perhaps now, posthumously, it’s time to see them, and much of socialism itself, as they truly were.”
According to Freedland –
…George Bernard Shaw wrote: “The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man.”
…Bertrand Russell suggested that the state issue colour-coded procreation tickets.
…H. G. Wells hailed eugenics as the first step toward the removal of “detrimental types and characteristics”.
…Keynes endorsed legalised birth control because the working class was too “drunken and ignorant” to be trusted to keep its own numbers down.
…Marie Stopes and Mary Stocks “were not motivated by a kind of proto-feminism, but rather by the urge to reduce the numbers of the burgeoning lumpenproletariat”.
…Beatrice Webb was sure her genetic material was worth preserving, describing herself as ‘the cleverest member of one of the cleverest families in the cleverest class of the cleverest nation of the world”.
The New Statesman declared in 1931: “The legitimate claims of eugenics are not inherently incompatible with the outlook of the collectivist movement. On the contrary, they would be expected to find their most intransigent opponents amongst those who cling to the individualistic views of parenthood and family economics.”

Here’s a Friday morning round up from Biased BBC’s Alan….

“Hunt…..Was it the BBC’s own DG who signed a letter demanding the BSkyB bid didn’t go through and who made numerous speeches to that effect….as well as having his journalists smear news International….including the Panorama programme on ITV Digital’s failure?

Scottish independence……listened to the news….only voice I heard was the SNP given a long snippet to themselves.

And then there is this classic of the Dark Art talking about the new Dark Age of Right wing climate scepticism……

If you were looking for an example of the BBC’s pure outright prejudice towards climate change sceptics you could do no better than to have listened to the Today programmes ‘report’ on what is the ‘new age of unreason’ in which the denigration of science…‘in particular climate change science’….is leading us into a new anti-rationalist Dark Age.

Fewer people believe in climate change each year…..the interviewee claimed…‘What a tragedy…..I am scared to death.’

This is apparently a militant rejection of the best available science….and it is naturally identified with the rise of the ‘Right’, the Republicans in America.
In the UK people just do not appreciate the vital role science plays in evidence based policy making…..we need a mission to win over the sceptics…..they just don’t understand the science.

This ‘report’ had three interviewees who were ‘for’ this ‘mission’ and who all agreed the ignorant and prejudiced Right needed to be silenced….and then there was Evan Davis and the reporter himself, Tom Feilden…..all agreeing with the premise.

No counter argument at all. The science is settled even if you don’t understand it you muttering idiots of the Right!