Occasionally we have something off topic to amuse or amaze…hopefully.
Here is something, that despite being narrated by the Guardian’s resident Green guru, George Monbiot, is worth a looksee……
Milipedia: n Condition of a BBC journalist being unaccountably attracted to the person and policies of Ed Miliband
John Pienaar….what to say? He just can’t seem to find a harsh word to say about young Eddy….or can he?
Today on ‘Pienaar’s Politics’ he had Ed Miliband on the rack for half an hour, he took no prisoners and cracked the whip…Miliband was given a proper roughing up over serious issues of State…the union take over of his party, Syria and the Russian invasion of the Ukraine and PIE.
Actually…no…I made that all up. This is Pienaar photographed preparing for the interview….
Miliband was given the softest of interviews, not even an interview really just a series of soft questions designed to allow Miliband as much time as possible to sell us his pitch.
Paxman’s interview with Russell Brand by comparison had something of the Spanish Inquisition about it….and we all know how laughable that was as a serious bit of journalism.
Nobody should expect any such ‘inquisition’ from Pienaar for his favourite adopted ‘nephew’.
Perhaps this gives us a clue as to why Pienaar is so mellow…….
The programme started promisingly with the Sun’s political editor, Tom Newton Dunn, nailing it on the head saying….
‘What can they say, Obama, Cameron and Miliband, to Putin who is totally satisfied that he has called the West’s bluff on Syria. The West blinked over chemical weapons, arguably a defeat inflicted upon the government by Ed Miliband and now Putin can do what he wants across the world without anyone caring.’
A pretty damning statement about Miliband’s influence….Putin does what he wishes because Miliband ducked not the actual use of force but merely the threat to use it in Syria…leading to Assad remaining comfortably in place with no intent, or need, to negotiate and Putin doing as he pleases knowing no one will lift a finger.
Pienaar has always claimed that Miliband is leading the way….over energy price freezes and Syria. But Miliband’s ‘influence’ has terrible consequences…in Syria….
and as for an energy price freeze…that has consequences too…..via Bishop Hill…..
The loss arises from pollution taxes that are forcing the closure of old coal-fired plants. Big subsidies for renewable energy, meanwhile, have made even gas-burning plants, which are much cleaner than coal stations, loss-making.
The hit will alarm Whitehall, which is increasingly worried about the lights going out. Companies have stopped building new power stations amid a political and regulatory backlash, sparked last year by Ed Miliband’s pledge to freeze energy prices.
“I can think of a dozen very good reasons not to invest in the UK, and not one good one to invest here this side of the election.”
OK I’ve had a few jokes at Pienaar’s expense but the issues are serious…..and yet Miliband was nowhere near breaking into a sweat at anytime…except when he was shown up by a much more articulate and personable Jermain Jackman.
Pienaar was supposedly getting to the bottom of the union’s influence…but instead declared that the newly approved rules would mean that no one could call Miliband a ‘creature of the unions’…and the Tories couldn’t call him Red Ed any more.
Miliband is allowed to get away with calling his new rules ‘an incredibly brave step’…and then he says that ‘I’m not factional’.
Pienaar says nothing…Miliband not factional? The leader of a Party that bases its politics on generating class warfare and ‘them and us’ name calling? The Leader of a Party that is controlled by Unite, whose leader wants to end democracy and impose Communism ala Ralph Miliband?
Pienaar does suggest Miliband owes his leadership to Union power but doesn’t follow up and challenge Miliband’s answer…a pattern followed throughout the interview with a soft question and Miliband allowed to answer without fear of contradiction.
Again another pertinent question…this time about Miliband’s ‘One Nation’…Pienaar taking his cue from Labour MP’s who have disagreed with Miliband’s approach…..Pienaar asks what does it mean, what are the policies?…it’s an old argument that people are turning away from.
But there is no rigorous questioning of Miliband’s reply.
We then had Jermain Jackman, singer on the BBC’s ‘The Voice’ and Labour activist pop in.
He gave a good account of himself, managing to sound more plausible than Miliband himself….but had to be silenced when he said we should be using songs, poetry, scripts and dance to push the politics….probably all too close to the truth for the BBC which inserts subliminal politics into all its programming and loves to bring on a celebrity to give anti-Tory rhetoric a bit of street cred…or so they think….ala Labour’s ‘Cool Britannia’ no doubt.
Pienaar tells Jermain he’s great and he’ll have his pick of Labour safe seats.
It all turned into a bit of a Labour love-in with no real answers wrung out of Miliband….there was no mention of the big scandal of the week that has dominated the headlines….Labour’s connection to the NCCL and PIE in the 70’s and 80’s…an extraordinary omission.
Tim Newton Dunn’s opening accusation was also completely ignored despite it being an extremely serious one that utterly undermines Miliband’s credibility as a serious politician who can be trusted to take difficult and complex decisions.
Note that Miliband spoke ‘outside the BBC’…….because he wasn’t asked about it inside the BBC.
Playing it safe whilst thousands die and millions suffer.
Miliband’s stance on the Union’s, Syria and his populist energy price freeze him to be someone without a stomach for the fight, someone without the necessary grit and judgement to be the leader of a nation, someone who will duck from those hard decisions but still try to take the credit for being ‘reasonable and moderate’ as people die or are forced to flee their homes and country in their millions because someone like Miliband didn’t dare take that decision that could change things….and the BBC is there to watch his back telling us what a fine job he is doing…..
This one is early! But I can see the existing thread is bulging at the seams so here you go, a NEW thread. Warning – if trolls appear let me know and they will be squashed.
You can rely on the BBC to provide a platform to those who push the AGW agenda and the more extreme the scale of this, the greater the platform!
What are the greatest global threats to humanity? Are we on the verge of our own unexpected extinction? An international team of scientists, mathematicians and philosophers at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute is investigating the biggest dangers. And they argue in a research paper, Existential Risk as a Global Priority, that international policymakers must pay serious attention to the reality of species-obliterating risks. Last year there were more academic papers published on snowboarding than human extinction. The Swedish-born director of the institute, Nick Bostrom, says the stakes couldn’t be higher. If we get it wrong, this could be humanity’s final century.
Incredible stuff, detached from any fact based science but dressed up in the doomsday rhetoric of the global warmers.
Interesting to see the BBC’s Mark Easton tweet the following chart which he says shows WHY the Coalition government’s promise to get net migration under 100k by 2015 is beyond its control. He has a point but he also misses a bigger point
Mark seems strangely mute on the more obvious fact that the HUGE surge in Immigration from the EU since 2003 until 2009 took place under the impervious gaze of Labour. Our problems can be directly traced to LABOUR.
Quite a concerted effort by the BBC to remove some of those “hideously white” faces that so offend bleeding liberal hearts. First this…
Match Of The Day needs to become more diverse with fewer white men on its panel of pundits, the BBC has said. Days after announcing its dramas would include more black and gay actors to reflect modern Britain, the corporation turned its sights on sports shows. Danny Cohen, the BBC’s director of television, singled out BBC1’s Saturday football highlights programme for fresh criticism. He said: ‘If we have five people on a panel show, it shouldn’t be five white men. I think the same thing of Match Of The Day. It’s a very diverse sport and it shouldn’t be like that.’
Sol Campbell has claimed he would have been “England captain for more than 10 years” had he been born white.
Institutional racism everywhere…
Tricky one for the Dhimmis at the BBC. An act of gruesome mass terrorism, dozens dead. What to say?
Chinese officials have blamed separatists from the north-western Xinjiang region for a mass knife attack at a railway station that left 29 people dead and at least 130 wounded.
Elsewhere..but not on the BBC.
China has blamed Islamic militants from the volatile Xinjiang province for an attack by knife-wielding “terrorists” at a railway station in Kunming city that left at least 33 people dead and 130 injured.
In 2006 the BBC was found to have a pro-EU bias by a report commissioned by itself:
The report may conclude that direction does not come from the Top but the problem is that the ‘troops’ are the ‘believers’ in the EU and they are the ones who mold the tone and direction of any programme as admitted by the report:
We were also told by Helen Boaden, the BBC’s former director of news admitted in July 2013 that:
The BBC has a “deep liberal bias” and has failed to reflect the public’s growing concerns about immigration and the European Union.
Seems nothing has changed.
The Spectator looks again at revelations that the BBC has pocketed money from the EU despite its claims to be ‘independent’ of politics:
Over the last three years the BBC has secretly obtained millions of pounds in grants from the European Union. Licence fee payers might assume that the Corporation would have been compelled to disclose the source of this money in its annual reports, but they bear no trace of it specifically. In the latest set of accounts, for example, these funds are simply referred to as ‘other grant income’.
Instead of making an open declaration, the BBC’s successful lobbying for this money had to be prised out of it using a Freedom of Information (FoI) request lodged for The Spectator, proving that there was never any danger of the state broadcaster’s bosses volunteering it willingly.
The FoI response confirms that BBC staff applied for, and accepted, about £3 million of EU funds between April 2011 and November 2013, most of which has been spent on unspecified ‘research and development’ projects, with the remaining £1 million spent on programming.
Rob Wilson MP, says:
‘The whole point of the licence fee is to protect the BBC’s political independence and impartiality by providing it with a source of funding that is outside the hands of governments and politicians. Thanks to this FoI response, we now learn that it has been going cap in hand to the EU for millions of pounds on the quiet over the last few years. Such outrageous flouting of the principles on which the BBC is based and funded will only promote cynicism about its political impartiality and lead to a loss of trust in the BBC’s independence.’
But it isn’t just the money…the BBC has been sidelining Labour MPs who are Eurosceptics so as to present ‘Euroscepticism’ as a rightwing plot:
When Newswatch [a site that checks for BBC pro EU bias] provided oral evidence [Of the BBC’s lack of reporting of Labour scepticism] to the House of Commons European Scrutiny Committee in March 2013, Labour MP Kelvin Hopkins said that the figures gathered by Newswatch were ‘a revelation’ to him as a Labour withdrawalist, and added: ‘Even in the House of Commons, at least one in 10 speeches are made by Labour withdrawalists, so the imbalance is very clear.’
Eurosceptic Labour MP Kate Hoey, now part of an unofficial coalition of politicians overseeing the privately-funded organisation Newswatch, which monitors the BBC for EU bias at a cost of £60,000 per year, says the FoI disclosure is ‘shocking’. She says:
‘I have grave concerns about the bias of the BBC when it comes to EU matters. I find the whole thing shocking. The lack of transparency is unjustified. Why does it seem so worried about people knowing where it gets its money? What has the BBC got to hide other than knowing that many of us don’t trust them on EU matters and the need for a referendum on Britain’s EU membership?’
Ms Hoey adds that she has concerns that the BBC ‘very rarely’ reports Labour MPs’ views on Europe. She says:
‘Even Today in Parliament [on Radio 4] always tries to convey Tory splits on Europe, and this doesn’t help the perception of an EU bias. There are Labour MPs with strong views on Europe as well. It doesn’t help that the BBC very rarely reports these views.’
