This is a response by Milverton to this rather self-indulgent attempt at humour……I might suggest he represents the views of most people who read this site and puts them across very well and concisely….namely that the BBC is, in concept, a good idea, that in reality it provides much of value but falls down seriously by ‘polluting’ its output with its own political and social agenda and that privatisation is not the answer to providing many vital, and necessary almost regardless of cost, public services.

‘Very nice site, but filling a pothole is a somewhat simpler prospect than filling every second God sends with programming. Forever.

Look, it is plain to see that there are certain parts of the BBC that need urgent action, and those aspects involve what are clearly poor journalistic standards led by a liberal groupthink, and the demands of rolling news, the most evil invention of the post-war period, including the atomic bomb.

Five Live, for example, are, by dint of the sheer amount of airtime dedicated to it, an absolute bastion of unchallenged left wing opinion. From Campbell and Burden on a Monday morning to Stephen Nolan on Sunday night its non-sport output picks up and runs with issues taken straight from the Guardian’s Comment Is Free section to fill in the time between Labour talking points and press releases from left of centre think tanks and charities.

Biased BBC exists to point out these sorts of issues. This apparent conflation of all private sector is good and all public sector bad is simply bias in the opposite direction.

It is noticable that the one BBC employee who is regularly praised here is Andrew Neil. He is the last remaining example, now Paxman has given up the ghost, of the sort of BBC journo I grew up watching. Neil disdains our political classes equally. That is exactly how it should be. I don’t want leftwing bias replaced by rightwing bias. I want evenhandedness. I accept such things are in the eye of the beholder, but the BBC used to be far better at it, if never perfect.

I don’t expect to watch a BBC news programme and see someone who should be impartial and should take professional pride in being so seemingly wilfully abrogate that responsibilty to push their own agenda. It is the anithesis of what the BBC should be.

I’m going to come out and say it. I like the BBC. For the most part it fulfils its remit. It shows many programmes I personally don’t like. My wife does, and my children do. The BBC have to be all things to all people, and away from the news output broadly do so.

No, I don’t think it is realistic for every British Army General, senior police officer or High Court Judge on Doctor Who to be by default black, but nor is it realistic for a one thousand year old alien to be chased around the galaxy by sentient pepperpots.

My point is this. Many of us on this site seem to see ourselves as representative of all of society. For good or ill, and the jury is still out, that simply isn’t the case. There are things on the BBC that simply aren’t meant for me and you. We would disagree amongst ourselves as to the good and bad. The thing that the BBC do for everyone, the news and current affairs, however, are in a parlous state. That is the battleground, not whether lessons can be learnt for the BBC from a potholes hotline. (The answer, by the way, is “No”.)

The BBC doesn’t need a wreath, it needs a Reith. Now, where you find one, perhaps standing next to the modern day Churchill over there, is a different matter.’

The BBC produced a programme recently following the lives of some ‘girls’ who are already, or are thinking about becoming, members of the EDL….they began filming before Tommy Robinson jumped ship.

EDL Girls – Don’t Call Me Racist

The English Defence League has gained notoriety as the far-right street movement with racist and extremist members whose protests often end in violence. Many of its members feel misunderstood and misrepresented by the media. This film explores the lives of some of the females living within the EDL’s ranks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZacuNY6vYmY

On one level it is purely a fly on the wall film with little intervention from the producers.

AA Gill in the Sunday Times said it was an ‘odd documentary, part fly-on-the wall and part structured inquiry’…and so it was.  The question you might ask is just how much of that ‘structure’ was designed to nudge the viewer into a certain view of these girls and in particular of the EDL and its views?

Gill suggested the BBC was editorially rigorously neutral about the politics, saying this was refreshing and quite brave (hmm…shouldn’t that really be the whole purpose of such a programme….or is Gill suggesting the normal BBC practice is to manipulate what the viewer sees and thinks?…which if course it does.)

He suggest that showing the EDL girls in a not unsympathetic light might not please the BBC bureaucrats…which is a telling comment……if they don’t like your politics you probably won’t get a ‘like’ from the BBC and all the subsequent user friendly coverage the BBC bestows upon its ‘friends’.

Gill says…‘It was far closer to allowing people who don’t normally get a shot at explaining themselves on television a fair, structured but unmediated slice of airtime than they can normally expect.’

Well….I suppose it was ‘more than they could normally expect’ but that isn’t really saying much because there was a vast amount of necessary background left unsaid……the politics, the ideology, any sophisticated argument about what the EDL is opposed to, is left off the record…..which makes the whole programme worthless really….it becomes just a voyeuristic ‘reality TV’ film that teaches us nothing.

Which is perhaps ironic because one of the reasons behind the film was, as the BBC kept telling us, that these girls were fed up with being misrepresented in the media….but the BBC failed to mention its own part in demonising the EDL and making it legitimate to attack EDL members in the street….as happened to one of the main characters who was severely beaten up by anti-EDL ‘protesters’….curious the BBC never examines the violent thugs of the UAF…controlled by Unite…the Union that also controls Miliband.

The BBC set out from the creation of the EDL to vilify it and undermine its credibility…..such as Andrew Neil’s vicious and malign attack on Tommy Robinson, at the instigation of Mehdi Hasan (Islamist….why does Neil not question his motivation and beliefs?) and Sarah Montague’s  remarkable assertion that the EDL’s beliefs are ‘poisonous’….

‘It’s one thing to say these are extremist groups on the fringes…but it’s the extent to which they pollute the rest of the population I suppose in terms of how you deal with it is the concern and how much pollution do you think has gone on?’

Is the London School of Economics ‘polluting the rest of the population’ with their Islamophobic views?

“Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here”: the human rights struggle against Muslim fundamentalism

Gill finishes with   ‘And that is what a liberal public-service broadcaster should be doing.’

Well it should be doing that, providing a voice for the underdog …but it failed on this occasion….missing out any indepth look at the background politics, missing out the BBC’s role in demonising these people and always the ‘innocuous’ slights in the commentary or linked footage that might pass you by or might just be seen as attempts to edge your opinion against the girl’s views, though, as Gill said, the girls themselves did get a ‘not unsympathetic’ hearing but the programme also gave prominence to a girl who decides not to join the EDL in the end…..because she didn’t want to be labeled a racist.

Is that a condemnation of the EDL and its views or of the likes of the BBC which has portrayed the EDL as racist?

In case you missed it and don’t want to plough through 3 hours of ‘Sport Relief’ here’s the ‘Only Fools and Horses’ bit…at 2 hours 38 mins on the actual show:

Sport Relief – 2014

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9H6Yxq1-EQ

We cough up 145 beer/irn bru tokens every year for the privilege of being patronised and manipulated but what has the BBC ever done for us?

Is it worth the cost? Does it do anything useful?

Here, via the Telegraph, is a site that provides, at no cost whatsoever and completely unadulterated by political spin, a sterling  public service of immense usefulness:

http://www.fixmystreet.com/

How to get potholes repaired

Honest John hears of a very efficient way to get potholes repaired

The BBC demands a ‘sustainable recovery’ and never mind what recovery there is now you’d better batten down the hatches because it forecasts a grim, depressing future as austerity really bites…you ain’t seen nothing yet….and welfare cuts are impoverishing the demonised poor.

Remarkable how the BBC have totally ignored the wave of criticism that Miliband received, much from his own side, for his abysmal response to the budget……Pienaar and Co’s only reference to the bad performance was to make the excuse ‘Well it must be difficult for the poor lad‘….strangely the same lame excuse Ed Balls muttered.

Never mind this damning look at Miliband’s robot like performance:

No wonder it seemed familiar! How Ed Miliband’s Budget speech recycled the same soundbites he has used for four years

The BBC weren’t so reluctant to step up the attacks when Grant Shapps published his ‘bingo and beer’ response:

Hardly the biggest story of the day…not a story at all really.

However the BBC clearly thought it was, putting it straight onto the frontpage:

Note also that headline….. ‘Chancellor defends pension overhaul’

He defends it does he?  So there is something wrong with the scheme?  Perhaps he was just ‘explaining’ it.

And as for beer and bingo being ‘patronising’….tell that to the workers:

Budget 2014: What do workers think?

Seems they liked the budget quite a lot.

Yep……We’ve just had the budget….but the BBC laid the groundwork for their narrative that they created and now intend to use, long before Osborne stood up and made his speech.

The BBC has had to develop a new approach to reporting the economy…just as Miliband had to abandon Plan B and has now adopted his ‘living standards crisis’ spiel now that the various double and triple dip recessions haven’t happened, employment keeps on rising, businesses keep reporting good news and inflation is down, and the recovery looks to be on its way, slowly but surely.

The BBC keeps of course trying to undermine the government, rising employment is a ‘puzzle’, or if not, it is the wrong sort of jobs, or the recovery is fragile….all based on consumer spending and borrowing or spending their savings…though no proof of that is ever given.

The basis for their latest approach….demanding proof of a ‘sustainable recovery’.  A bit of an amorphous demand….practically unachievable to prove such a thing, the BBC moving the goalposts that would signify success for Osborne….like Miliband’s ‘living standards crisis’ there would never be enough solid evidence that definitively proved anything…which of course is ideal as they can keep spinning out the talk of a ‘fragile, unsustainable’ recovery forever basically…however successful the economy becomes…..they will, and do, point back to the crash and say ‘You might think you’re doing well…but so did they way back then!’.

The second leg to their campaign to undermine Osborne is to say yes things might be improving, for some, but the future is really grim with 5 more years of austerity piling on the pain…..the country can’t take any more!

However, don’t know about you, but I have yet to meet anyone who is really struggling….or struggling more than they would be under any other government and economic regime…most seemed to have weathered the crash quite well….including the ‘vulnerable’ and the poorest.

Here is Peter Allen from a couple of days ago, doing his dead budget sketch telling us that it’s all ‘deeply depressing’ and that ‘most people would think they have been well and truly clobbered…but they ain’t seen nothing yet’.

He tells us that ‘It’s pretty grim….we’ve got several more years of cuts’……austerity is a ‘nonsense…we can’t go on like this.’

Allen rounds off his chat with economist Sarah Hewin from Standard Chartered Bank with a question…..‘Are others [countries] doing it better than us?’…meaning are they running their economy better…..you might be surprised to hear ther UK isn’t doing very well apparently…even Greece is moving ahead faster than us…..of course it is:

Later in the programme (2 hrs 45) we are taken to hear the views of those involved with the Community Links charity in Newham….a Labour controlled borough.

Community Links is run by Geraldine Blake….who is according to the Guardian, a ‘leading leftwing thinker’.

The presenter [Leslie Ashmall] starts by telling us that the budget brought no surprises [really?]…there wasn’t much in the budget for the poor of Newham…..just more welfare cuts and more local government cuts…and they hurt here, they really do, she tells us.

So you know where she is coming from…..she had a narrative and stuck to it, encouraging those being interviewed to paint the bleakest picture they could of their lives under the Tory yoke.

They responded well to the prodding….telling us that the poor will be getting poorer, they’ll be on the breadline…there’s no investment and no regeneration in the area.

The presenter didn’t bother to ask if that might have been the Labour controlled council that was responsible for that…they have been in power for decades after all.

Is there anything in the budget for people like this the presenter asks Geraldine Blake who replies……Well there’s a bit of tinkering and tweaking but not really…..this government  has very successfully demonised a very vulnerable group in society, tarring them with the same brush as fraudsters and shirkers…what we are seeing is that people are pushed away from the job market,  the situation is just appalling…a very bad reflection on how we treat the most vulnerable in society.

Pretty much confirmation that she might well be one of the ‘leading leftwing thinkers’ of legend.

Ashmall’s response…‘Yes, I’ve certainly met very many miserable people today.’

The BBC…never mind the millions who might benefit from the budget….just concentrate on the few who may, or may not benefit.

According to Guido the BBC has pulled a video from the iPlayer at the insistence of Gordon Brown

Guess Brown has no problem negotiating the BBC’s complaints procedure.

Via The Spectator…..

The BBC’s latest recruit to Newsnight, Duncan Wheldon,  has admitted to having been a teenage werewolf.  The romance of the horror, the thrill of the chase, adolescent hormones coursing through the veins, the moonlight, all lured him into making that fatal decision.  But he’s better now.

He’s over his brief dalliance with demonic Beastliness and has settled down in comfortable old age as a dinosaur…cosying up to the Labour Party and the Union Barons of the TUC….and his new comrades at the BBC…..all strictly ‘platonic’ you understand.

Actually he admits to having been, shock horror, a teenage Fascist.

He’s embarrassed and admits to having been a ‘witless prat’….but as I said, he’s better now….He tells us:

The BBC is full of journalists from a wide range of backgrounds who left their political baggage at the door the day they started work.

…or maybe he’s not so better now.

He goes on….

By the time I was 18 I had joined the Labour Party, horrified by the racism, homophobia and anti-semitism I had encountered on my sorties into far right literature.

Hmmm…was he reading the Koran or the Bible then?  Or the Guardian? Must have some interesting conversations with Katz…will Katz be doing a self-expose, a mea culpa selfie?…admitting having worked for an anti-Semitic paper?

Wheldon continues:

Reflecting on the last week it’s hard to escape the irony that I have been accused of being a dangerous leftie and also a fascist within 48 hours.

None of this should be read as a plea for sympathy.

Well as Nazis were Socialists and they swapped personnel with the Communist party as often as the BBC does with Labour, there’s not much between the two ‘ideologies’ in philosophy or practice…..both murdered millions and enslaved their own people to the ideology.

Wonder how many more ‘selfies’ we will get from within the Labyrinth admitting to having been Trots, Marxists or even UKIP members?

You can see perhaps why Alex Salmond wants 16 year olds to vote on his nationalist agenda.

The BBC has been digesting the budget and I was a tad surprised to hear none other than Chris Huhne invited on the Today programme this morning around 6.45am to give his judgement on the green credentials of the Coalition. The swivel eyed eco-loon former jail bird Huhne is hardly a bastion of balanced opinion but Evan Davies nonetheless was happy to let him ramble.

Brand new OPEN THREAD to see us all off into the wild blue yonder of the weekend. The floor belongs to you….

Iraqi gunmen launched a three hour assault on British troops with the aim of killing them all……the Iraqis ended up dead or captured…the survivors now complain they were questioned oppressively and shouted at quite loudly.

They want money…no sorry, justice….and they knew, or thought they did, just the man to get it for them.

Lawyer Phil Shiner has been filling his boots at tax payers expense for quite some time (The Iraqi team is publically funded by the Legal Services Commission)…..(thanks to Rob in the comments for drawing our attention to this story)……a frequent guest of Victoria Derbyshire no doubt she is clearing the decks for tomorrow and a few words of apology and remorse from Shiner as he tries to explain away how he has managed to find no evidence of British forces unlawfully killing Iraqis…despite £22 million being wasted on this so far.

Al-Sweady Inquiry: Iraq unlawful killing claims dropped

42 weeks of inquiry, 281 ‘witnesses’…and nothing….

A public inquiry into whether UK soldiers unlawfully killed Iraqi civilians in custody in 2004 has heard their relatives no longer believe there is enough evidence to back the claims.

However have no fear, Phil Shiner and Co won’t be on the breadline:

There remain numerous allegations of violent and other ill-treatment of Iraqi Civilians in British custody which the Inquiry will have to consider.

Derbyshire will still have something to fill the airwaves with even if it is just the sound of ‘ambulance chasing’ lawyers whistling in the dark for their money.

She must be getting worried though…what with Moazzem Begg getting himself arrested, such a disappointment, and now Shiner having the shine taken off his bilge…..that’s got to be half the year’s schedule that might have to be filled with something else other than……what’s it called? …’Lawfare’ …for when warfare fails…..a certainty she can hustle up a few welfare claimants who are ‘genuinely’ on the breadline….never mind the car, 4 Rottweilers,  six kids and all mod cons.