Monthly Archives: July 2012

Just adding to David’s post on J’lem (via The Commentator)….the BBC has a profile of each country and illustrates them with a photograph.

This is Israel:

And this is Palestinians:

You get the message….brutal Israeli oppressors armed with machine guns and tanks being heroically resisted by desperate, young Palestinains fighting for their freedom with all they have left to them…stones, bravery and determination.

How about that old colonial haunt Rhodesia…em…Zimbabwe?:

The Zimbabwe Ruins are the remains of a lost civilization.

Ah yes, Africans were great once, and civilised…probably just before the white colonialists arrived to mess it all up.

Horrible story about the loss of life in that Denver movie theatre –  BBC quick to tell us the shooter was a “White American”

BBC’s doom mongering over the Olympics is gathering pace.

Plenty of people contacting the Today programme to complain….such complaints have been flooding in for over a week as noted in a previous post.

The BBC’s response?  It was to wind up the rhetoric even more…immediately after Montague read out a complaint (and one praising the coverage) she linked to a story in Der Spiegel which said that the London Olympics were going to be a disasterous and chaotic nightmare.

There was absolutely no reason for the link because this was a purely speculative piece based on one foreign journalist’s own ideas.  No reason at all to discuss it…it seemed there just to deliberately annoy the people complaining about the BBC’s miserable coverage.

Are the BBC just padding out the news with ‘bad’ news?  It certainly seems so when you listen to Peter White investigating the ‘scandal’ of trading standards officers being ‘press ganged’ into working at the Olympics in order to protect ‘Big Business’ brandnames.

But all was not as White presented it…for several minutes White insisted that the officers were there to serve Big Business…the Olympic’s representative gave a good explanation…they were there to stop the public being fleeced by people flogging fake or dangerous goods not to protect brand names…..but White wouldn’t accept that….only after several minutes did he actually ask ‘Well what are they going to be doing?’

And remember this is just 50 TSOs from 30 councils.

If he’d asked that at the beginning of the interview I suppose there wouldn’t have been a story, or a controversy…which it seems the BBC were intent on stirring up.

White also had on the usual union rep. who of course blamed ‘The Cuts’…and this was the clip the BBC used in its news bulletins thereafter.

However a different story emerged eventually when we had a council representative on who said the trading standard officers were not forced to go and were volunteered by the councils involved….not only that  but it is standard practise to send one council’s TSOs to help out another council when large events are going on…and he noted that there is no BBC interest in the story in those cases.

So to sum up if White had asked immediately what the TSOs were going to be doing,  had they been volunteered and  were they just carrying on a normal practise there wouldn’t really have been much of a story.

It seems the  BBC are intent on whipping up as much controversy as possible over the Olympics now that the Tories are essentially in charge regardless of whether you are interested or even extremely fed up with the BBC’s  politicking….this was just a juvenile attack on Big Business, much hated it seems by the BBC, and a chance to have another pot shot at government ‘cuts’…and to lay it on thick about another ‘disaster’ at the Olympics.

Mark Easton has surely been abducted by Tory Central Office and replaced with someone more willing to sing to their tune.

First he betrayed the BBC narrative and  admitted that The Big Society, in some respects, may actually be working, encouraging communities to become active and to work together towards a common goal rather than have the dead hand of government tell them what they need.

Now he has really gone and done it, he’s blown his left wing credibility right out of the water and revealed that police numbers and unemployment statistics bare little relation to crime rate figures. So there.

He says ‘Something really interesting is going on’ (21 mins)….not just in the UK but across the developed world….irrespective of criminal justice practice and police numbers, crime has been going down for 20 years….not only that but it is also irrespective of employment levels and the economy…crime rising/falling whether we are in a boom or a downturn.

Actually he has said all this before in 2008  but clearly his colleagues in the  BBC have completely ignored his conclusions and continued to berate Tory ministers for daring to reduce police numbers.

Home Office Minister Tony McNulty described it as “a statement of the blindingly obvious”. But is it “obvious” that when an economy turns down, crime inevitably turns up?

Broadly crime in Britain rose inexorably for 50 years – from 1945 to 1995 – and then started to fall. Crime rose fastest in the late 1950s and early 1960s, just as the economy was starting to boom. Indeed, throughout the swinging 60s, police and the courts had never been busier.

During the roller-coaster ride of the British economy in the 70s and 80s, crime went up and up. Recession or growth, boom or bust, crime continued to rise regardless.

There is little correlation between joblessness and crime – for almost the entire period from 1945 to 1970 the British unemployment rate was less than 3% of the workforce. And yet crime exploded during this period.

For the past 12 years in Britain and most of the developed world, crime has been falling. It is a drop which coincides with a sustained period of economic growth.

I haven’t done any real digging for figures but this graph from the US does seem to agree that when unemployment is at its highest for 20 years the crime rate is at its lowest….there is a definite trend of falling crime however it does show that as unemployment rises there are small rises in crime…apart from 2008-09. 

All that is fascinating, if true…as it destroys the Left’s case…firstly concerning police numbers but more tellingly….the recent riots….which they blame on socio-economic factors…..Easton’s analysis suggests that isn’t the case ……I would take that view personally….the riots were started by a group of criminally intentioned people who would be criminal regardless of high employment levels and a booming economy.

Which all begs the question…if that  is true then aren’t all the proposed ‘solutions’ to ‘disaffected youth’ so much hokum?

Sometimes the solution is that there is no solution….they get their friendships, excitement and money from crime….and prison is accepted as an occupational hazard…..why work frying burgers or stacking shelves when you can live on the ‘edge’ and have some ‘respect’….from those whom you think count?

And if so why waste enormous sums of money ‘saving’ them from themselves when they don’t want to be saved?

Suited bankers maybe the new scourge of our age but the BBC does enjoy some roguish ‘petty thieving’ by immigrant Romanian pickpockets who are rather daring with dazzling skills and an enterprise and professionalism so sadly lacking in our own underclass of thieving toerags .

Yes immigrants can teach us a lot.

This was brought to my attention  in the comments and is a remarkably ill judged piece that reports pickpocketing as a commendable profession if done with flair and professionalism, one to be admired….whilst the police arresting them are ‘heavy handed and terrifying’.

I suppose I might be a little angry if I lost my smart phone or my wallet or passport…but you know what, a year later I would be laughing about it…really I would….and of course I’d be voting Labour next time because they brought us this rich diversity of new skills and enterprising immigrants who do so much for GDP… we have to keep buying new phones after every little bit of roguishness…so good for the economy.