Victoria Derbyshire can’t stop and won’t stop talking.
She was rabbiting on about Ian Brady much to the annoyance of listeners who texted in to say ‘no more….it’s just giving him the publicity he craves.’
She read out some of the texts and said ‘Their point is that we shouldn’t be reporting on this ….’
To which she added….‘…which is another debate.’
Made me laugh anyway.
Another open thread….carry on…tell us what it is about the BBC that makes you laugh……
Over the past 24 hours the BBC has, quite rightly, made a big deal about the intimidation of its journalists in Turkey.
Bear that in mind.
Also in the past 24 hours – an unassuming little animated film promoting opposition to the TV license (the source of the BBC’s wealth) was posted on YouTube. It mocked the current TV Licensing “Excuses” campaign [See original TV Licensing ad here – comments disabled, you’ll notice]. I watched it on YouTube myself this morning. It’s not there any more. Here’s what you’ll find in its place:
The video is now available on LiveLeak, although for how long is anybody’s guess. This is what TV Licensing doesn’t want YouTube to show, claiming copyright infringement:
Does anybody really think that a “copyright claim” was the real reason they wanted that video pulled from YouTube? Nasty authoritarian bastards.
Don’t pay the license fee. (H/t http://tv-licensing.blogspot.co.uk/)
As Boris Johnson might say….‘it sounds like a trivial thing to get worked up about, but one trivial thing leads to another.’
The BBC presented us with another exotic adventure chasing wild animals in out of the way places…this time Tigers in Siberia in ‘Operation Snow Tiger.’
Awesome landscape with some majestic beasties, the programme itself promised to be somewhat formulaic but was rescued by an unexpected turn of events….watch it and see for yourself.
However one tiny little thing jarred….the naivety of the presenter or the compete lack of awareness of history and context.
The programme was trying to investigate the likely survival of Tigers in Siberia in the face of various threats…from land use, poaching, disease and the like.
At 26 mins in the presenter gave us a history lesson telling us:
‘Poaching here hasn’t always been a problem. Back in the days of the Soviet Union stricter management of the landscape and its wildlife saw tiger numbers rise…but when Communism collapsed so did the economy. People turned to the forests for food and as capitalism took hold and the borders opened an illegal trade in animal parts for Chinese medicine took off…tiger numbers declined dramatically.’
Let’s hear it for the Communists from a BBC presenter stood in the snows of Siberia…the same snows that helped kill off nearly 2 million of the 30 million or so prisoners in the Gulags or the forced labour camps who were worked to death and many of whose bones lie under the very roads they built and over which the self same presenter probably travelled to get to her picturesque film location.
As I said a small and almost trivial point…but not really…not if it gives people watching a romantic, nostlagic view of Communism that it very definitely doesn’t deserve….and maybe somewhere down the line makes them think well what if..maybe we could just try it and see….
Boris Johnson has a similarly dim view of some of the BBC’s PC world views which are small but damaging nonetheless…here changing the dating system from BC/AD to BCE/CE:
This decision by the BBC is not only puerile and absurd. It is also deeply anti-democratic, and I urge all those who are fed up with the advance of pointless political correctness to fight back.
The BBC is almost alone in Western democracies in being a state-funded broadcaster. Even though I get most of my news from papers or the internet, I pay through the nose for the privilege of having a TV. I think the last bill was about £148. We all pay through the nose. And therefore I think we deserve to be consulted before the corporation makes a decision of immense cultural importance, a decision that affects the way we will ask our children to think about the history of our civilisation.
If the BBC is going to continue to put MMXI at the end of its programmes – as I think it does – then it should have the intellectual honesty to admit that this figure was not plucked from nowhere. We don’t call it 2011 because it is 2011 years since the Chinese emperor Ai was succeeded by the Chinese emperor Ping (though it is); nor because it is 2011 years since Ovid wrote the Ars Amatoria. It is 2011 years since the (presumed) birth of Christ. I object to this change because it reflects a pathetic, hand-wringing, Lefty embarrassment about thousands of years of cultural dominance by the West.
There was Christ, and if the BBC doesn’t want to date events from the birth of Christ then it should abandon the Western dating system. Perhaps it should use the Buddhist calendar, which says that it is the 2,555th year since the nirvana of Lord Buddha. Perhaps it should have a version of the old Roman calendar, and declare that this is the fourth year of the fourth consulship of Silvio Berlusconi.
It is always apparent that any programme that uses audience participation either in a phone in or like Question Time, actually imports an audience, is vulnerable to those people who under cover of being someone unaffiliated with any agenda are in fact political, big business, religious or other activists or lobbyists peddling their own interests.
With that in mind it should be encumbent on the likes of the BBC to weed out such people if possible….and failing that, they ensure that any guests they have onto any show are there to provide informed comment unadulterated by their politics, comment which informs and educates the listener without them being sandbagged by partisan voices masquerading as the honest truth.
This Friday Nicky Campbell was discussing Jeremy Hunt’s comments that he could not guarantee that all NHS hospitals were completely safe.
Who did Campbell have on as his prime speaker?
Dr John Ashton….the same Dr John Ashton who says ‘ it is a basic human right to belong to a political party but insists his concerns about the bill are based on professional, not personal or political opinion.
He said: “I have always been open about the fact that I have been a member of the Labour party since I was 17. For me it is my values and in my blood.” ‘
The same Dr John Ashton who strongly opposes the Government’s health service reforms:
A LIVERPOOL doctor said it was “outrageous” he had been summoned to a disciplinary hearing for criticising the Health Bill.
Campbell didn’t bother to reveal that link to Labour or his views on the health reforms.
But such links might explain the views he did express on the show:
Private sector values corrode and corrupt public service ethics that were part of the NHS since its inception…the solidarity of the NHS has been torn apart and the workforce alienated.
He believes that Jeremy Hunt is trying to privatise the NHS by the backdoor and that when a caller suggested that Hunt’s comment about not guaranteeing the safety of NHS hospitals was a deliberate policy to undermine the NHS and give him an excuse to privatise it, Ashton said he ‘absolutely agreed with that’.
Funny old world…when Labour were getting a lot of flak for Stafford they were keen to claim that the ‘vicitms’ of that regime were being ‘forgotten’…now all they want to talk about is the politics and the blame that can be piled onto the Tories if possible.
Shame the BBC gives a platform to someone who is so obviously completely opposed to this government in every way when they present him as a impartial commenter…..all the worse on a ‘phone-in’ when we know that many callers are not the disinterested parties that they claim to be and so we need a credible, informed and balanced voice…something that the BBC in this case so obviously failed to provide.
Just how much work does the BBC put into researching any subject in preparation for an interview? When interviewing someone about a report that criticises the interviewee severely it might be well to read that report and test what the interviewee claims against what that report actually says.
On the Today programme today Jill Finney, former deputy chief executive of the Care Quality Commission claimed that:
‘As soon as Grant Thornton were appointed to this inquiry the first thing I did was to advise them of the existence of this report and I made it available to them and urgerd them to read it.’
Grant Thornton says different, it says the fact that there had been an internal report and that it had been ‘hidden’ was unknown to them for a long time:
During the course of our enquiries it was brought to our attention by an internal CQC source that in the latter part of 2011, during the period of “Gold Command” and other activity that culminated in CQC launching its Investigation into UHMB, an internal review of regulatory decision making and activity had been conducted by Mr J, a senior CQC individual. The source commented that a report had been produced (the “Mr J report”) but that it had not been disseminated or circulated within CQC, despite the fact that it was understood by the source that one of the main purposes of the review was to identify lessons to be learnt from the regulation of UHMB.
6.2 Hitherto we had not been advised of an internal review having been conducted along the lines described to us, which we considered unusual given there appeared to be a clear parallel with the work we had been instructed to do.
We raised the issue with Mr G who indicated some recollection of a report prepared by Mr J. He advised that he did not have a copy of the report but would make enquires and suggested Mr F, another senior CQC individual, might have a copy.
6.4 On 18 September 2012, Mr G emailed us a copy of a report entitled: “Summary of the internal review of the regulatory decisions and activity at UHMB” and advised that this was the Mr J report418
.
Finney claimed that the CQC did not address the report’s concerns because it actually praised the CQC and the CQC could see that that conclusion was obviously wrong….they were not trying to hide anything.
Again Grant Thornton seems to differ on that conclusion:
Having considered the report’s findings and explicit criticisms, we recognised the potential parallel with the Whistleblower’s concerns and therefore sought to determine why its existence had not been drawn to our attention earlier. We were not convinced by the explanation that the report was poorly written and unfit for disclosure and, in any event, its substance was, in our view, of key relevance to our investigation.
When I read the report by Grant Thornton those passages stood out immediately….shame the world’s finest news broadcaster doesn’t have the time to research it’s interview subjects and dig out the relevant material that might actually make an interview worthwhile and enlightening if it actually can challenge what an interviewee claims.
Finney claimed that the CQC was going to rewrite the internal report….did the BBC ask her where then is the rewritten report? No.
What was the point of the interview other than an opportunity for Finney to deny any fault on her part?
The BBC’s top story all day has been the alleged police attempt to smear the Lawrence family.
Listening to their reporting you would have the impression that this was ‘fact’…the police had been investigated and the allegation found proven.
As always the BBC seem all too ready to attack the police when they get the chance…evidence of wrong doing, or the lack of, not being much of an impediment to the BBC’s very own prosecution, judgement and sentencing process.
The BBC are not so interested in reports of racism, homophobia, violence, political subversion and intentions to impose an Islamic state upon the UK as well as the foreign powers funding such intrigues.
The Lawrence story was originated by the Guardian and Channel 4’s Dispatches programme.
The BBC weren’t so quick to report, in fact ignored, other Dispatches programmes such as:
Undercover Mosque in which we heard things like this:
Abu Usamah: Verily Allah going to bring a group of people that he loves and they love him, these people will who will be soft and kind to the believers and they will be rough and tough against the kuffaar, they will fight in the cause of Allah.
I encourage all of you to be from amongst them, to begin to cultivate ourselves for the time that is fast approaching where the tables are going to turn and the Muslims are going to be in the position of being uppermost in strength, and when that happens, people won’t get killed – unjustly.
Abu Usamah: Do you practise homosexuality with men? Take that homosexual man and throw him off the mountain.
Abu Usamah: Allah has created the woman deficient.
Green Lane preacher: If she doesn’t wear hijab, we hit her.
We want to have children and offer them as soldiers defending Islam. Teach them this, there is nothing more beloved to me than wanting to die as a mujahid, put in their soft tender hearts the zeal of jihad and the love of martyrdom.
Or indeed this Dispatches programme which looks at ‘Britain’s Islamic Republic’:
Tonight on Dispatches, how a fundamentalist Muslim group has secretly infiltrated the Labour party – and the broader political system.
JIM FITZPATRICK MP: They are acting almost as an entryist organization, placing people within political parties.
How it wants an Islamic state, or caliphate. And how it wants to live by sharia law in the UK.
AZAD ALI, Islamic Forum of Europe (undercover footage): Democracy, if it means that, you know, at the expense of not implementing the sharia, of course no one agrees with that.
The BBC, happy to undermine the police on the slightests hint of wrong doing but not to report on a phenomenon that undermines a whole society and culture….where the evidence is laid out on a plate for them to see.
What is a subtext to both reports is the influence of foreign players on Muslims in this country and their politics…the influence of Saudi Arabia flooding the UK with money as well as the business and social connections that the Saudis have with the ‘elite’ in this country…one reason no one will touch this subject. The Islamic Forum of Europe has its links to other Muslim supremacist organisations and is itself working hard towards that goal:
A quotation from original IFE documents has helped still those complaints about “defamation” and “vindictiveness”. Such as, for instance, the transcript of a 2009 recruit training course where the organisation tells its new members: “Our goal is not simply to invite people and give da’wah [call to the faith]. Our goal is to create the True Believer, to then mobilise those believers into an organised force for change who will carry out da’wah, hisbah [enforcement of Islamic law] and jihad [struggle]. This will lead to social change and iqamatud-Deen [an Islamic social, economic and political order].”
Or the leaflet where the IFE tells us that it is dedicated to changing the “very infrastructure of society, its institutions, its culture, its political order and its creed … from ignorance to Islam.” Or the document where the IFE says it “strives for the establishment of a global [my italics] society, the Khilafah … comprised of individuals who live by the principles of … the Shari’ah.”
Time for a new one….
The BBC seems to be up to its old tricks as it fails to mention ‘Labour government’ in relation to yet another health scandal from the time of the last Labour government.
Not only failing to mention Labour and its failures in charge of the NHS but actually facilitating their attack on the present government.
Labour has picked up on a small phrase in the report by Grant Thornton on the CQC that said that the deleting of the internal report by the CQC ‘may constitute a broader and on-going cover-up.’
Victoria Derbyshire talks to Labour MP John Woodcock (11:20) who turns things very political…saying it is a most shocking allegation about the deletion of an internal report….he claims the report makes out that there are ‘strong grounds to believe that there is a broader and ongoing coverup’.
That is misleading as the report doesn’t say ‘strong grounds to believe’…it says this (para 1.117):
‘The report addressed many of the same issues the Whistleblower was to raise and the alleged decision to suppress it (very shortly before the Whistleblower submitted their own questions) may constitute a broader and on-going cover-up.’
That’s ‘may’ indicate a broader and on-going cover-up…..the cover-up being by the CQC itself.
Derbyshire encourages Woodcock…‘Can you explain this ongoing cover-up and what it means?’
Woodcock does then read out the paragraph in full and states: ‘It is hard to exaggerate the seriousness of that charge…ministers need to make clear who in the Department of Health was aware of these allegations, including if Ministers themselves knew.’
Woodcock is trying to draw in and implicate the government in the cover-up…despite the report saying most of the CQC itself didn’t know of the internal report and no where implicates the government….and all with the help of Derbyshire who hasn’t read the report herself and doesn’t bother questioning or challenging Woodcock’s claims or statements.
Here the BBC acknowledges ‘political decisions’ in the process but fails to say whose political decisions:
‘There are structural problems. When the CQC was created it took on the responsibility of the three regulators plus a new licensing regime but with a third less funds.
Unsurprisingly, the number of inspections it was carrying out soon started dropping.
What is more, the inspection regime it was told to follow relied on a large amount of self-assessment by trusts.
These were political decisions that had unintended consequences.
Here the BBC shows Jeremy Hunt giving an apology….again no mention of Labour by the BBC…and they miss out a later, important comment by Hunt:
The Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has apologised to families affected by a series of baby deaths at a Cumbria Hospital after a report said that England’s healthcare regulator may have covered up knowledge of its own failings.
This is the comment by Hunt later in his appearance in Parliament:
When it comes to accountability, the right hon. Gentleman needs to explain to the House why the former head of the CQC, Barbara Young, said in her evidence to the Francis inquiry:
“We were under more pressure…when Andy Burnham became minister, from the politics.”
Is it the case that the head of the CQC felt under pressure not to speak out about care issues?
Tory MP, David Morris also remarked on this in the same parliamentary debate and in the ‘conservative home’ blog:
‘The former Chair of the CQC, Baroness Young, has made very serious allegations that ministers “leaned on” her to “tone down” criticism of NHS organisations. She claims that “there was huge government pressure, because the government hated the idea that a regulator would criticise it”. Damningly, she revealed that this political pressure peaked under current Shadow Health Secretary’s Andy Burnham’s tenure as Secretary of State. This is the man who turned down 81 separate requests for a public inquiry into the Mid Staffs scandal, and has attacked the current Health Secretary time and again for exposing and confronting “coasting hospitals”.’
This is what Baroness Young had to say about Labour’s attempted political interference in health care regulation:
Page 74-75
Q. Did you come under any government pressure to tone down the wording of reports?
A. In a way it was the other way round. The reason the government didn’t like tough reports was because they were running the services that were being reported upon, and so we used to fight tooth and nail to be as robust as possible, and to be as open as — and independent. I was absolutely determined that we were not going to be a regulator who was subject to the government being able to muzzle it or to infringe its independence, or to prevent it from doing a good job on behalf of the public and patients, which is what we were there for.
So had the government tried to tone things down, I would not have accepted that, quite frankly. And I don’t recall us changing a report at any stage, while I was there, as a result of government pressure.
There was huge government pressure, because the government hated the idea that — that a regulator would criticise it by dint of criticising one of the hospitals or one of the services that it was responsible for. And that was part of the problem of the nature of the Care Quality Commission, when it was established, and that was it was regulating — it was one of the few regulators in British public life that regulates something that is directly run by the government, and that was always going to be a real problem.
And on page 80 she noted the conflict of interest in the government being both provider and regulator:
So the health service got it both ways — they — they — they could run as providers but at the same time they could advise the guy who was making decisions ultimately about the shape and nature of regulation. And so it did feel like a bit living in an episode of “The Thick of It”
Labour once again are being let off the hook by the BBC…it conspicuously failed to connect Labour to the Mid-Staffs scandal and seems to be doing something similar here…what’s being forgotten is the real cause of all the fuss..the actual failure of the Morecambe Bay hospital under Labour….and what looks like the systemic failure of the NHS as Grant Thornton suggests.
The CQC, like Gordon Brown’s ‘FSA’, was ‘too big to succeed’ having been created by the merger of three other regulatory bodies to become an unwieldy and disjointed beast.
Labour’s part in that is of little interest to the BBC, nor are the comments by Baroness Young about attempted political interference to reduce the effect of CQC reports…surely more than a little bit relevant in the present circumstances.
Woodcock has had a good run over the last couple of days given free rein to air his conspiracy theories unopposed….the BBC not bothering to put anyone up against him to challenge his claims.
Thirteen years of a Labour government..and you’d hardly know if you only listened to the BBC.
Time for a new one.
Never mind the £300,000 spent concealing the inconvenient findings of the Balen Report….which reporters would have received pay offs along with their P45s if that had been published?
