Yearly Archives: 2014

UKIP romped home in Clacton and put the frighteners on Labour in Heywood and Middleton.

The BBC are not happy.

The Today programme dragged in Matthew Parris (08:53), a man they know has a visceral, almost psychotic, hatred of UKIP and anyone who wants to limit immigration.  The BBC no doubt expected some bile and were not disappointed as Parris pronounced UKIP’s, and right wing Tories’, immigration and Europe policies as nutty and the Party as bigoted and racist.

Parris admits he doesn’t have to be respectful to voters in Clacton…and indeed he isn’t…showing complete contempt for them saying ‘This part of Britain is simply wrong about immigration and Europe.’

Parris’ prescription for how UKIP should proceed in future if it wants to win more seats…..

‘Stop looking like a bigoted, nasty, rightwing party.  Carswell’s already beginning to feel uncomfortable.’

The BBC immediately took up that line about Carswell feeling uncomfortable with UKIP’s immigration policies, almost instantly repeating it on 5Live using Carswell’s victory speech as evidence…….the Guardian also uses the same interpretation….

In a clear sign that he will use his position as Ukip’s first elected MP to ensure that it acts as a tolerant agent of change, Carswell said his party must have a broad appeal.

“To my new party I offer these thoughts. Humility when we win, modesty when we are proved right. If we speak with passion let it always be tempered by compassion.

“We must be a party for all Britain and all Britons, first and second generation as much as every other. Our strength must lie in our breadth. If we stay true to that there is nothing we cannot achieve.”

I would suggest that he isn’t saying he is uncomfortable with UKIP’s immigration policies, that is a disingenuous and deliberately misleading reading of his words by the BBC et al who are subtly trying to put the boot into UKIP’s policies….after all he’s just joined the Party and has long argued for immigration control.

The BBC also came up with a couple of other interesting thoughts….UKIP voters are all white, old and working class….well as UKIP took 60% and 39% of the votes in the two by-elections  that would have to have been a remarkably unique turn out.

Guess that is just the BBC wishing to dismiss UKIP’s support as ignorant, racist and out of touch people who haven’t caught up with the modern world.

The second ‘interesting thought’ (12:10) was that Carswell’s victory wasn’t in fact a vote for UKIP but for a very popular local MP, Douglas Carswell.

That is undermined by a simple look at Heywood and Middleton where UKIP almost stole the election from Labour and their voting perecentage increased by 60%.

That might suggest it is the policies that people are voting for and not just the person…never mind that in 2010 UKIP didn’t put up a candidate in Clacton and  supported Carswell….presumably because he had views that aligned well with theirs.  A vote for him was a vote for UKIP’s policies in essence…the BBC is yet again trying to spin against UKIP.

A very Orwellian rewriting of events by the BBC.

I look forward to the Now Show tomorrow…..three weeks in a row when they trash Miliband?  UKIP is always trashed regardless.

Here we go, folks, a new OPEN THREAD, to see us off into the weekend. Detail the bias here!

Well then, it’s been a big 24 hours for UKIP. Clacton was EVEN more of an impressive win than “the pundits” were suggesting and then there was UKIP coming within just over 600 votes of unseating Labour in Heywood and Middleton. As regards the latter, I notice the BBC parrot the Labour spin that they “increased their share of the vote”. Yes, but they also LOST 9000 voters from last time round and a safe Labour seat is now a very tight marginal. The BBC, like much of the rest of the media, have worked on the assumption that UKIP can only win in Conservative heartlands. Last evening proved just how fatally wrong that assumption could be next May. The BBC’s hero, Miliband, is now every bit exposed by UKIP as Cameron is, and it will be fascinating to see how they handle this issue between now and next May.

I received this thoughtful piece from a Biased BBC reader and wanted to share.

“On Monday (7th of October) the BBC informed us – or at least James Gallagher did – that “Nobel Prize winner John O’Keefe” has a big problem with the the government’s rules on immigration. More precisely, O’Keefe “has warned the UK government [that its] polices on immigration” are “risking Britain’s scientific standing”. 

The BBC – or at least James Gallagher did – then backed up its pro-immigration position with a kind of positive ad hominem. It told us that “Prof O’Keefe, 74, was awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine on Monday”. And then came the politics. The BBC quotes O’Keefe as stating: “The immigration rules are a very, very large obstacle.”

Now I’m willing to accept that much of what John O’Keefe says may be true or accurate. However, this piece isn’t about O’Keefe’s position on immigration. It’s about the BBC using O’Keefe’s position (or words) on immigration to advance or support its own position on immigration. (That’s why I won’t be commenting on O’Keefe’s no doubt controversial position on animal experimentation.)

You can take the under-text of this piece to be the following: 

Limiting immigration is a bad thing because a Noble Prize winner says that it is. 

Or alternatively: 

Why aren’t we allowing all these fantastic neuroscientists and other highly-qualified people into the UK (along with all those other super immigrants)?

As everyone knows, for every neuroscientist or scientist allowed into the UK there will be tens of thousands of unqualified people who are also allowed in (many of those end up on benefits).

Besides which, I doubt that highly-qualified people do find it (that) difficult to enter the UK. For a start, there’s no evidence in the BBC piece as to why it’s so difficult. In fact it’s all very vague. John 0’Keefe himself is quoted (twice) as saying: “The immigration rules are a very, very large obstacle.”

He continues by saying:

“I am very, very acutely aware of what you have to do if you want to bring people into Britain and to get through immigration, I’m not saying it’s impossible, but we should be thinking hard about making Britain a more welcoming place.”

Again, John O’Keefe says that he’s “very acutely aware of what you have to do if you want to bring people into Britain and to get through immigration”. Now is he talking about neuroscientists, scientists and other qualified people here or immigrants generally? 

It becomes clear that O’Keefe ( as well as the BBC) must surely be talking about immigration generally (not the situation with highly-qualified immigrants) when you take on board what the Home Office says in response to these complaints. It states:

“Whilst the government has not shied away from taking tough action on abuse, the number of genuinely skilled people coming to the UK to fill skilled vacancies is on the rise.”

And that’s why I think this is yet another example of the BBC rather surreptitiously publishing another piece in favour of immigration. 

Considering the fact that 5,466,000 – over five million – immigrants entered the UK between 1997 and 2007 alone (as well as the fact that O’Keefe says that “we should be thinking hard about making Britain a more welcoming place”), I can only conclude that O’Keefe and the BBC are in favour of yet more mass immigration. In other words, over five million immigrants have been allowed into the UK in the last decade and O’Keefe and the BBC are still deeply unsatisfied.

The BBC itself – rather than O’Keefe – shows us its bias (or the fact that it’s really talking about immigration generally) when it states the following: 

“Prime Minister David Cameron has pledged to reduce net migration to less than 100,000 a year by 2015, while Home Secretary Theresa May has spoken about reducing it to tens of thousands.”

Now there’s not much in the above quote which is specifically about Noble Prize winners, neuroscientists and other highly-qualified scientists, is there? That’s because, underneath the fluff, this piece is really about the government’s recent statements on immigration (which surely can’t be believed anyway). 

Actually, this BBC article is really about the BBC’s own position on immigration.

*The BBC’s Prose-style*

It’s the easiest thing in the world to display political or ideological bias without explicit editorialising or comment. You certainly don’t need to indulge in political rhetoric and polemics. Left-wing academics galore, for example, restrain themselves all the time (“academic standards” and all that). And just like such left-wing academics, the BBC also refrains from explicit political bias, rhetoric and polemics because that’s what’s expected of it . 

Despite saying that, the BBC is often at its most extreme and biased when it comes to the subject of immigration. And it shows that bias in many and various subtle ways.

In this particular case, instead of an article with the title, say, ‘Why we should allow more immigrants into the UK’ or ‘Why immigration is a good thing’ (or ‘We are international community’), the BBC offers us this title instead: ‘Nobel Prize winner John O’Keefe concerned over immigration policy’. 

I have yet to see an entire BBC News piece about either a single individual’s problems with immigration or the problems with immigration in the abstract. Though – and here comes that BBC subtlety again – people’s problems with immigration are sometimes covered. Of course they are. The problem is that they’re rarely – or never – the central point in any BBC pieces. (Except in extreme and exceptional cases such as the infamous Gordon Brown Bigotgate case.)

Sure, there’s no explicit pro-immigration pontificating in this BBC News piece. The BBC rarely does that. Instead the bias is displayed in the very fact that the BBC has chosen to cover this very minor story in the first place: a story which it thinks is worth turning into news. After all, no other newspaper has featured this particular case. 

As I said, the BBC doesn’t go in for extreme or blatant editorialising/commentary on its website BBC News…. The BBC’s a “public service broadcaster” funded by the taxpayers of the UK – remember? So the BBC publishes articles like this instead. It also fills BBC audiences (such as Question Time) with ethnic minorities, Leftist lawyers and other professionals who support unlimited immigration. It quotes the ideologically-correct people more extensively than it does “bigots”. 

The way the BBC once described its position on anthropogenic global warming can be applied – pretty much untouched – to the case of immigration. For example, the BBC once said (in 2009) the following:

“…. given the weight of scientific opinion [on climate change], the challenge for us to strike the right balance between mainstream science and sceptics since to give them equal weight would imply that the argument is evenly balanced.”

That can be paraphrased into the following:

Given the weight of expert opinion on immigration, the challenge for us to strike the right balance between experts on immigration and immigration sceptics (or those against immigration) since to give them equal weight would imply that the argument is evenly balanced.

In response to the first quote, Christopher Booker said:

“In other words, in the name of reporting impartially, [the BBC] saw no need to report impartially.” 

The obvious point to make about the latter paraphrase is the majority of British people are indeed “sceptical” about the benefits of immigration – and they’re certainly sceptical about mass immigration. That is the case regardless of what the “experts” think. 

*Conclusion*

This isn’t about stopping neuroscientists, Noble Prize winners and other qualified/skilled people from entering the UK and even from becoming citizens. It’s about British governments – with the tacit support of the BBC – attempting to “alter the social and political make-up” of the UK; as well as the concomitant attempt to “rub the face of the Right [or the white working class?] in diversity” (at least under New Labour). So how do I know all that? I know all that because some of the people who were responsible for these things have explicitly admitted as much – if only after they left government! Continue reading →

Sorry for the delay in this – been away on business straightaway after being away on holiday! Phew.  Anyway, a few things to update you on. The site has been moved to a faster server so it should not take so long to load. Second, were you as touched as I was at seeing the BBC portray Moazzam Begg as the hero of Iraq? New open thread open for business..

Can’t help thinking the BBC sides with Pietersen in relation to his claims about the England team.

Adrian Chiles said he loved Pietersen’s book and then gave him an easy interview…later admitting he probably was too much influenced by his excitement for the book.

George Riley told us he didn’t care about the facts just the effect the revelations had on England’s reputation…but surely that would rest upon whether Pietersen’s facts were facts…and not I’m really interested in Riley’s opinion..surely he’s there to give us those facts rather than his own personal concerns about events.

Then we had another BBC sports reporter whose name I missed, saying he backed Pietersen and it was all the ECB’s fault.

Not sure on what basis he came to that conclusion.

If you’d listened to 5Live’s coverage of this story you’d be fairly badly informed about events….which as 5Live is the ‘sports’ channel for the BBC you might think that wasn’t a gold medal performance.

For instance the BBC on 5Live kept highlighting certain claims by Pietersen but didn’t reveal any contrasting information that might paint Pieteersen as a hypocrite or plain wrong….even though the ECB’s leaked document was mentioned 5Live didn’t quote anything of relevance from it and it wasn’t until I read it in the newspaper that I got a fuller picture and a different perspective on Pietersen’s claims.

Pietersen criticised Swann and Trott for going home early but he himself was reported to be looking to duck out of a match…

“Prior to the Perth Test, an England team physiotherapist approached AF to inform AF that KP had told him that KP was looking to do anything to go home after the Perth Test if England lost the match to go 3‐0 down. KP allegedly told the physio that if England lost the match, his knee was “going to be really playing up”.

 

Pietersen claims senior players bullied junior ones by shouting at them if they dropped a catch and yet he himself did something similar….

After playing a terrible shot to get out in one of his innings in the Fourth Test, KP returned to the England dressing room and in front of the younger England players, shouted “you lot are useless”.

 

Pietersen claims Andy Flower had it in for him…perhaps because Pietersen had it in for Flower…trying to get him sacked….

AF told KP at the end of the meeting that he was amazed that after 7 years of working together and AF bending over backwards for KP, that KP would talk to AF like that and be so incredibly disloyal as to try to get rid of AF like that behind AF’s back. KP then left AF’s hotel room.”

 

Pietersen said that one England player, Matt Prior, wasn’t good enough…the fact that England hadn’t taken up his contract proved it….

“I don’t think I could have been that wrong because he doesn’t have a central contract any more. England are finished with him.”

Well England haven’t taken up Pietersen’s contract…so that must prove he wasn’t good enough in many respects…scoring runs is not the sole criteria to be judged in a team game…England are finished with Pietersen.

When Piers Morgan (Clarkson punched him…hurray) slagged off England Pietersen laughed and told them to get a thicker skin….which perhaps is an irony considering Pietersen’s own diaphanously thin skin….

“It riled the team and management that KP allowed Piers Morgan to belittle AC [Alastair Cook] and the team on social media. When asked by some of his team mates to get Piers Morgan to stop tweeting about the team, KP laughed at the players and told them to get a thicker skin.”

Pietersen’s book is a hatchet job designed to attack the England team, put Pietersen back in the limelight where he ‘belongs’, to paint himself as a victim and make him lots of money….no coincidence that another player said Pietersen would play for any country that offered enough money, so expecting any loyalty from him might be somewhat foolish.  Pietersen said of Matt Prior….“He’s back-stabbing, he’s horrendous, he’s bad for the environment.”  That surely is more descriptive of Pietersen himself than anyone else…which is why he was given the boot….regardless of his batting prowess.

You might be expected to be able to rely on the BBC to report in a more even fashion and to point out the hypocrisy and fallacies in Pietersen’s claims rather than seemingly to side with him and support his view of events which the facts don’t seem to fully back up.

However the BBC’s Jonathan Agnew does give us a far more nuanced look than I have heard from the rest of the 5Live team saying Pietersen’s book was ‘a stream of unhappiness, suspicion and accusations. ‘

Just a shame the rest of 5Live seem to be in awe of Pietersen.

The BBC has treated us to a lot of Islamist propaganda recently, a lot of it from CageUK.

Allowing such people onto the airwaves is a good thing.  It allows us to hear their arguments and understand what are the reasons for the various actions taken by such people and then lets us assess the rights and wrongs of the situation.

Or it would be a good thing if the BBC did its job and actually engaged them in debate and challenged their views.  All too often however the BBC does not do that, frequently presenting them as charity workers, community leaders,  religious scholars and academics.  They are then allowed to get away with presenting their views without any robust challenge giving them credibility and authority they don’t deserve and twisting the narrative to their own agenda.

Yesterday we had yet another Cage mouthpiece, Moazzam Begg, on the Today programme  (08:10)

Sarah Montague was interviewing him and surprisingly gave him a hard time repeatedly asking him if he supported ISIS….which he refused to answer directly…indirectly he admitted he did support ISIS by saying we should negotiate with the Taliban, Al Qaeda and ISIS…thereby indicating he believed these were legitimate organisations with aims and a status that we should recognise and accept.

Begg was claiming that he could have got Alan Henning released but that the government refused his help….therefore it is the government’s fault that he was killed.  Begg being an Islamist propagandist you can discount that completely…and indeed Montague did seem suitably sceptical about his claims.

Montague did, as said, seem to conduct a reasonably tough interview that revealed Begg in his true light…Begg it has to be said does not give a good interview.  Perhaps he should stay off the airwaves and stick to writing where he might seem less oily perhaps.

The problem is, as always with the BBC, when it comes to the news bulletins that then pick and choose which part of an interview they will highlight.

The bulletins chose to report  Begg’s claims straight, and R4 made them the headline news…unfortunately the context and whole feel of the interview was lost and Begg’s slippery dissembling and evasiveness, which would have revealed the true nature of his claims, went missing, meaning any listener would have been misled as to the real truth of those claims…..all highly relevant if you believe  that the government and society marginalises and ignores Muslims….as the BBC tells us is so…and yet does little to improve Muslim’s understanding of the truth.

Begg also claimed he knew who was holding the hostages….personally I don’t think an interview on the Today programme is sufficient here if he is telling the truth and yet refuses to reveal who those people are.  The best place for Begg might be lying on his back with his head in a bucket of water.

That aside, war with the Islamists isn’t being fought merely in the deserts of the Middle East, it’s on the airwaves and in the newspapers here at home.

The Islamists are still winning…they have shaped the narrative….this morning I heard Peter Allen telling us that Muslims are radicalised because they are disenfranchised, angry and marginalised….and yet we know that’s not true…..only yesterday a Muslim was arrested who had been offered a place at King’s College London to study medicine...and how many times have we been told Muslims love being British?

Until the BBC understands what the underlying basis of the radicalisation is we won’t get a proper debate on the problem and the solution.

They could start with the fact that all Muslim terrorists are Muslim and an examination of the Koran and its commands.

Don’t hold your breath, unless you have your head in a bucket of water that is.

You used to know where you were with Victoria Derbyshire ensconced on her 5Live show, it was safe to surf the airwaves knowing that you wouldn’t come upon her unexpectedly.

That’s all over now she has gone free range.  Nowhere is safe.  Like a Taliban IED she is out there somewhere buried in the schedules just waiting for the unwary listener to tune in and be not so blown away.

Listening to Radio 4 yesterday, and you may be able to imagine the horror, I heard the words ‘The broadcaster Victoria Derbyshire has kept a diary since she was a child.’  They opened up a whole world of  nightmarish possibilities to be inflicted upon us….what had she instore for us?

But I had a reprieve…she had no intention of letting anyone pry into the contents of her diaries, it was to be other people’s diaries that she’d be exploring….the relief was shortlived however as the first guest was revealed….Labour spinmeister Alastair Campbell.

What is it with Campbell and the BBC?  They just can’t get enough of him.  And it’s not as if both he and his diaries aren’t already well known.  So why bother?

Why bother all the more so when you realise that there are only two programmes by Derbyshire on diaries…the next and final one is on writer Fraser Harrison who only kept a diary for a year and doesn’t believe they should be published.  So why bother with him?

Finding someone living who wants to explore their diaries on public radio must be difficult but there must be someone out there who would be willing and more importantly be much more interesting and much less well known already than Campbell.

It looks like the BBC have cast around for a project for Derbyshire to keep her, and Campbell,  busy.

Shame the BBC didn’t buy ‘Big Brother’….Derbyshire, Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson, Evan Davis, Andrew Neal, Mehdi Hasan and Sarah Montague locked up together for weeks on end.  I’d pay to watch that. And 24 hours a day we’d know where Derbyshire was and could safely surf the airwaves knowing we wouldn’t be ambushed by her in the remote parts of the network where we thought we were safe….or maybe send her here…

The Now Show has either had a word of advice about the meaning of impartiality in the run up to the general election next year or it has seen that Ed Miliband is so atrociously bad as leader of Labour that they could remain silent no longer.

For the last two weeks The Now Show has put the boot into Miliband.

It was especially unimpressed by his failure to remember to mention the economy in his big conference speech.

Curiously though The Now Show itself failed to mention the other topic Miliband ‘forgot’ to mention…immigration….usually a topic they are very eager to mention…in relation to UKIP…a party that would love to change the gun laws so that they could shoot more immigrants…says ‘The Now Show’.  I’m certain there would have been a lot of mileage for a satirical comedian in the news that a Labour party that lied about opening the borders and flooding Britain with immigrants now didn’t want to talk about it.

After all, Alice Gross, age 13, would still be alive today if Labour hadn’t allowed in all and sundry from Europe….and the BBC hadn’t spent 10 years covering up for Labour.

Perhaps Evan Davis would like to explain the benefits of uncontrolled immigration to Alice Gross’s family.

The BBC’s Start The Week had a look at how we should respond to climate change…starting from the position that climate change is happening, it is man made and it is the West that has caused it.

There was much talk of climate justice, changing the moral economy and compensation for the third world, those innocent victims suffering the consequences of the industrial world’s pillaging, exploitation and destruction of the environment and world’s resources.

All the guest speakers were on board the climate change band wagon, Naomi Klein would in any other sphere of life be declared an extremist, possibly a terrorist, for her views and intentions to destroy the Western world’s economy and incite revolution and an uprising of the people….but the BBC loves her.

Curious that Lord Lawson is missing from this conversation, after all the BBC declared he definitely hadn’t been banned from the air waves, and this was the perfect topic for his declared interest which is, not necessarily the science of climate change, but which policies we adopt in reaction to it…hence his think tank…The Global Warming Policy Foundation.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation is unique. We are an all-party and non-party think tank and a registered educational charity which, while open-minded on the contested science of global warming, is deeply concerned about the costs and other implications of many of the policies currently being advocated.

We are in no sense ‘anti-environmental’. There is a wide range of important environmental issues, which call for an equally wide range of policy responses. Our concern is solely with the possible effects of any future global warming and the policy responses that may evoke.

The BBC obviously bowed to pressure from the professional green lobbyists such as Bob Ward (not a scientist) to keep Lawson off air….though no problem bringing on a Bangladeshi writer and novelist, Tahmima Anam, to talk about climate and policies the West needs to adopt…more money for Bangladesh please.

Not the first time the BBC environmental reporting has bowed to such pressure…Harrabin famous for his altering of a report to suit a green activist.

The very cowardly, unethical and unprofessional BBC pumping ot pure propaganda for the climate lobby.