Amused to see Robert Peston complaining about Press freedom:

Why has Google cast me into oblivion?

This is coming from a man employed by an organisation that tried to shut down a ‘right wing’ news organisation that was a commercial and political opponent of the BBC.

It also comes on a day when the National Audit Office slams the BBC for its secretive ways:

Imagine that: the BBC is more secretive than anybody

The BBC is more prone to hiding behind commercial secrecy to withhold embarrassing evidence than almost any other organisation, according to public spending watchdogs investigating its costly failures.

The BBC’s willingness to deploy commercial confidentiality and individual privacy as reasons to keep back information put it in a league of its own, the head of the National Audit Office (NAO) said.

An organisation that spends £300,000 hiding a report into its activities in the Middle East perhaps has reasons to be secretive.

One thing to note…I have noticed that searching for BBC reports, even ones from a few days earlier, is becoming harder….BBC articles used to top the search pile but more often than not the Guardian seems to top the list and the BBC often isn’t there leaving you to alter the search terms until you hopefully dig something up….or go back through your history to connect directly to the link if you’ve read the article before.  Is that Google having a different priority for the BBC, or the BBC changing how articles can be linked to, or my own limited ability on the internet?

The BBC also seems to block access to older versions of reports…every time I have tried to use internet archives there is no link to anything but the most current version….meaning all those ‘mistakes’ and inappropriate interpretations of events are ‘vanished’.

Whatever the reasons, a technical glitch or the BBC ‘managing’ its news archives,  it does seem harder to dig up ‘old news’ from the BBC.

You have to laugh at the hypocrisy of the BBC….so ready to blame Sykes-Picot and the ‘carving up’ of the Middle East regardless of ethnicity, culture and religion for the current state of affairs there…and yet so ready to encourage us, by hook or by crook,  to accept the oppressive hand of the European Empire erasing our nation states regardless of ethnicity, culture and religion.

How long before an Anglo-Saxon ‘ISIS’ declares its own Jihad against ‘Europe’ and demands its land and culture back?

Wonder if the BBC would be as supportive of those ‘militants’ as they are of the real jihadists?

Radio Four yesterday was cheerleading for Europe with yet another example of its use of a ‘discussion’ as a subterfuge to promote Europe rather than engage in a genuine debate….asking  ‘Would you be better off with Britain out of Europe?’

Remarkably, considering the weight of opinion against the European adventure,  the BBC found difficulty in getting EU sceptics to call in…as it admitted during the programme.

Not only that but some of the ‘callers’ you had to suspect were somewhat more than the average man on the street…’Hazel’ from Aberdeen seemed more likely to have an office in the Scottish parliament building whilst ‘John Butcher from Surrey’ (10 mins 30 sec)  would seem to be conservative councillor John Butcher, once a member of the Conservative Group for Europe…..but the BBC didn’t bother to tell us that and let him go on demanding the full costs of an ‘out of Europe’ vote be quantified whilst telling us that the approach to the referendum was fundamentally dishonest.

The presenter, Shari Vahl, gives the impression of being an enthusiastic EU supporter eagerly listing all the benefits of EU membership, as she sees them.

What isn’t gone into is the fact that the ‘European money’ that the EU so generously sends to us is in fact our own money once the EU has extracted a large wodge  that they take to pay themselves a nice wage, to provide themselves with a generous expense account and to gild their pension pot…what’s left funds Spanish motorways and white elephant airports  as well as some eventually finding its way back across the Channel to us.

We are told all that ‘European money’ will vanish, that businesses won’t invest here, that we won’t be doing any business with Europe, that all that useful legislation passed by the EU wouldn’t have happened if left to a national government, that ex-pats will be deported and should they be allowed to stay in their Spanish villas they won’t get health care anymore.

One of the few sceptical callers to get through took issue with all those points (about 12:36) ….and you could hear the sniggering from the studio….clearly they weren’t actually intending to have a genuine debate.

Another caller slipped through the net and said the majority of people wouldn’t think their lives would be effected in a beneficial way by membership of the EU...Shari Vahl countered with another caller saying he had a different point…clealry thnking he was a pro-EU caller…..the caller was an ex-fisherman who told us of the great fishing industry we used to have…Shari Vahl asked him what happened to that industry when we joined the EU…he said the industry was closed down.

Cue a rapid intervention from Shari Vahl demanding to know what would happen if we left the EU and then went back to the previous caller and said triumphantly ‘There you go, someone whose life has been effected by EU membership!’

Well yes, but not for the good….an industry was destroyed….hardly the beneficial effect the caller was actually talking about.

Shari Vahl was an impressively enthusiastic cheerleader for the EU becoming very animated with pro-EU callers, eagerly listing the apparent benefits of the EU that would either never have happened without the EU’s legisltaion or will be taken from us should we leave.

One of the things not discussed was what happens as the EU draws ever closer to becoming an actual federal state and not just a federation of sovereign nation states….Britain would then have to choose…it wouldn’t be possible to stay a fringe member of a such a state.

That is probably the most important and inevitable question as such a federal state is the intended end result of the European project.

The programme gave the impression of being a ‘debate’ with opposing pro and sceptic ‘experts’ and opposing callers, however the sceptics were few in number and treated with disdain or outright opposition and the whole programme gave the impression of being set up to promote the Dream as much as possible.

All part of the ‘education’ of the ignorant and foolish masses.

A Palestinian teenager has been killed in Jerusalem.

Israeli Internal Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch said it was too early to draw conclusions as to the motive.

“We know of a boy who apparently was abducted and we see a link to the discovery of a body. This is still under investigation by the forensic labs and detectives,” he told reporters.

“Everything is being examined. There are many possibilities. There is a criminal possibility as well as a political one,” he added. “I am telling everyone, let us wait patiently.”

The BBC has already decided…..the teenager was killed by Israeli extremists in revenge for the killing of three Israeli teenagers by Palestinians.

Kevin Connolly reports (11:37) that ‘Most people, in the absence of evidence, are making a direct connection between this and the abduction and murder of the Israeli teenagers.’

Connolly goes onto make a spurious connection between what Netanyahu said and the motive for the killing….‘Now we don’t have the evidence to know that this is what happened but if you think about the words of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who described this murder as a despicable act….that implies he sees a political connection.’

Calling the murder a ‘despicable act’ and urging the police to catch the killers does not imply anything about the politics…that is purely Connolly’s spin.

Victoria Derbyshire shows her worth and asks…‘So it’s impossible to say what is behind the killing of this Palestinian boy but who might be behind it?  What do people say?’

More indepth, factual reporting from the BBC.

Connolly tells us that the Palestinians are pretty sure it is Jewish extremists…but, ironically, ‘It would be nice to know more before we make our political judgement.’

But that hasn’t stopped them laying this at the door of the Israelis.

The one o’clock news on R4 (3 mins in )tells us that this was almost certainly the work of Israelis and Connolly tells us that the boy was kidnapped early in the morning on the way to the mosque…his family say they saw it on CCTV from the father’s shop…it showed a car pull up and a group of Israelis get out and abduct the boy.

However that’s not what the BBC reported elsewhere when ‘live’ witnesses saw the whole thing and were close enough to hear the conversation…remember this is in a solidly Palestinian area, right in front of people in the street:

Witnesses said Mohammed Abu Khdair was abducted near his father’s shop in the Arab district of Shufat in East Jerusalem.

A relative said he saw two men approach the boy and ask for directions before bundling him into a car.

“While they were speaking to him, a car approached in which there was a third man,” Saeed Abu Khudair told the Reuters news agency. “Two of them carried him. He was small so he couldn’t resist.”

“Some men who were nearby saw what happened. They chased after the kidnappers’ car, but they couldn’t catch it.”

So two different stories already.  And it would be interesting to know how they knew they were ‘Israelis’ from the CCTV footage.  Good of the BBC to give credence tot hat story.

Almost no doubt in the BBC’s mind that this could be anything other than an Israeli killing…they are happy to keep pushing that ‘suspicion’ anyway regardless of the ‘absence of evidence.’  An equally plausible scenario is that Palestinians staged the abduction themselves.  It wouldn’t be the first time they have ‘sacrificed’ one of their own for propaganda purposes…to ‘blood-libel’ Israel……but no mention of any such possibility from the BBC.

Muhammed Al Dura was most likely killed (if killed at all) by Palestinian’s intent on blaming the Israelis and generating some anti-Israeli black propaganda:

The killing of 12-year-old Mohammed al-Durrah in Gaza became the defining image of the second intifada. Only Israel claims it was all a fake

Here you go, I can see the old open thread one is listing faster than the BBC’s gallery of 1970’s superstars. Over to you..see bias, detail it here!

This could explain an awful lot….and give an insight into not only Mark Easton’s mind but that of many of his colleagues so often reluctant to wave the flag…from 2008:

 About Mark Easton

I recently filled out a form for a visa that asked me my nationality. The choices were English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish or Other. I didn’t want to be an “other” but the options were forcing me to pick. So in the end ‘other’ it was.

I was born in a small detached house on what was then a new estate on the edge of Glasgow in 1959, first child of four. At the age of 10 my parents upped sticks and we all moved to a little village near Winchester in Hampshire. At the local primary school, my Scots accent was quickly knocked out of me and I was left dazed and confused.

My veins, so the genealogy would have it, course with mongrel blood. Saxon, Pict, Jute, and Celt almost certainly. And there’s bound to be extract of Roman, Norman and Viking in there too.

Ancient Irish and Welsh ancestry mix with Scots roots and English upbringing. The whole I regard as 100% British.

Being British is not “other”. It is me.

From that you might gather that he thinks there is no such thing as ‘English’ or ‘Scottish’ or indeed any notion of nationality……preferring the borderless ‘Britain’ and in preferrence to that, if asked, probably ‘European’, and if asked again, a ‘Citizen of the world’.

Which all fits snugly with the BBC’s determination that we are a nation of immigrants and ‘Englishness’ is a relative, almost meaningless term…..echoing what Muslim ‘conservatives’ like the once head of the MCB, Iqbal Sacranie, said….‘no other language or culture should be treated as the ‘norm’ and that the British should only be treated as one community in a community of communities.’

For ‘Britain’ perhaps the BBC would like to use ‘Caliphate’ instead.

What was Englishness and is it possible now to define it in anything more than the loosest and baggiest terms?

This is the usual BBC mantra:

“Thus from a mixture of all kinds began, that het’rogeneous thing, an Englishman.”

Daniel Defoe’s poem, The True-Born Englishman, reflects how many see England – a “mongrel” nation forged from Celts, Angles, Saxons, Danes and Normans.

Successive waves of immigration in the 20th Century have given rise to the notion that England is unique in its composition, a mixture of all things good from all countries.

However they were disabused of this by Peter Mandler, professor of modern cultural history at the University of Cambridge, who said this view of English roots is simply wrong :

“The English are no more mongrel than any other European country – it’s a story that people tell themselves, but it doesn’t describe the country.”

The city centre has seen a 40% increase in private sector jobs, and one of the UK’s largest expansions in recent years

Here is the truth about Labour’s job’s record, showing how they destroyed manufacturing jobs in Britain….the blue area showing job losses in manufacturing from 2001 to 2013….note from 2011 the jobs started to grow:

Labour is now proclaiming itself the party that will bring jobs to the regions.  History tells a different story….most of that famed growth and financial wizardry was in…London…the spectacular collapse of which left the rest of the country having to dig deep to rescue the City whilst the BBC smoothed over the politician’s embarrassment by mostly ignoring their guilty part in that downfall.

However the BBC has been giving plenty of airtime to broadcasting Labour’s ‘new’ regional plan based upon figures provided by the ‘Centre for Cities’ think tank.

Miliband has claimed that 80% of new jobs are being created in London…and therefore this proves that the regions are being left behind…..and the Coalition is failing to spread the recovery nationwide.

Ever get the feeling we’ve been here before such as earlier this year when I asked  ”Will Miliband be announcing a new policy on cities in the next few days?” (A few months out!)

In January this year we looked at the very same claims….

This morning [January] the BBC were trumpeting on the radio some research by a think tank called ‘Centre For Cities’ that said London was growing much faster than other UK cities as the much vaunted ‘Recovery’ left them behind as economic also-rans…presumably hinting they were being ignored or abandoned by the Government.

The BBC said it was an independent think tank, but admitted that it had been set up by Labour peer Lord Sainsbury…er …the man who donated nearly £20 million to Labour.

Apparently…. Centre for Cities was launched in March 2005 as part of IPPR and became independent in November 2007.

 So independent of the IPPR now…Labour’s very own think tank.

Just as today, in January the BBC, and Labour, ignored that inconvenient growth occurring in the regions…..

The story seems to ignore some other truths about ‘the Regions’…the streets may not be paved with  gold but things are moving:

Record growth for business activity

Business activity rose at a record rate in the West Midlands in December according to the latest purchasing managers report for Lloyds Bank Commercial Banking. West Midlands private sector companies reported increases for the eighth month in a row with the rate of expansion the strongest in the 16-year-old survey’s history.

This is from Manchester which they tell us is doomed:

It’s double joy for regional growth

10 Jan 2014 05:59

The city centre has seen a 40% increase in private sector jobs, and one of the UK’s largest expansions in recent years 

So why is the ‘Centre for Cities’ claiming, and the BBC reporting, this:

Manchester ‘underperforming’

So not a lot has changed since January…the BBC is still guilessly reporting Miliband’s every word without challenge….here is the BBC’s ‘expert’ Nick Robinson, who doesn’t bother to fact check Labour’s figures…reporting the ‘stark facts’ as given to him by Labour…until corrected by Tory MPs:

Labour is promising to give more power and more money to cities outside London and the regions that surround them.

It is one part of a series of policies designed to mend what the party is calling the “fractured economy” symbolised by one stark fact – eight out of 10 new private sector jobs created in the past four years have been created in London.

Robinson, the ‘expert’ political and economic journalist, who should be doing some spade work, has had to backtrack and ‘update’:

UPDATE 12:20 BST

When Ed Miliband spoke he dropped the quote in the press release of his speech about four out of five jobs being created in London since 2010.

This was after the Tories pointed out that his figures were 2 years out of date and highlighted the latest official ONS statistics that in the last year four out of five jobs were actually created outside London. This is the link to the latest data.

Robinson adds:

When I asked the Labour leader about this he replied that he was using the “best data I’ve seen”.

So why didn’t Robinson ask about the provenance of the figures in the first place?

The BBC seems all too ready to report Miliband’s claims without questioning the facts or whether the planned chnages are workable or not.

It is a different game with the Tories when Mark Easton is straight on their case should they make any questionable claims based on ‘dodgy’ statistics:

Are the Tories being honest with their claims on violent crime?

5 Live is having a shake up and a reshuffle  …..women are getting thinner on the ground and not much to keep Lenny Henry happy.

Derbyshire and Bacon are out….Adrian Chiles and Peter Allen doing Derbyshire’s shift on a job share basis….any bets Derbyshire won’t be working from Salford anymore?  Peter Allen slipping into Derbyshire’s high heels means there will be no shortage of comment on this site.

Sheila Fogarty is also off unfortunately, and no mention is made of Campbell.

Derbyshire told us of her departure today and said we could find details in the Press and on the Guardian’s website….not sure why anyone at the BBC would be promoting the Guardian website.

Richard Bacon and Victoria Derbyshire to leave 5 live

Richard Bacon and Victoria Derbyshire, two of the biggest names on 5 live, are to leave the station later this year.

Shelagh Fogarty will also move on in the autumn as part of a daytime shake-up for the BBC talk radio station.

Derbyshire said it would be “a huge wrench to leave”, while Bacon said he would “always be grateful” to 5 live.

The new schedule will see Adrian Chiles and Peter Allen host a new mid-morning programme, 5 live Daily, and a new afternoon show on every day but Friday.

Chiles will host 5 live Daily in the 10:00 to 13:00 slot on Mondays and Tuesdays, with Allen hosting for the rest of the week.

BBC Sport presenter Dan Walker and BBC Northern Ireland’s Sarah Brett will co-host the other new show, Afternoon Edition, from 13:00 to 16:00 on Monday to Thursday.

Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode’s Film Review show will retain the afternoon slot on Fridays after a new Friday Sports Panel between 13:00 and 14:00.

Tony Livesey will take on Allen’s current role as co-presenter of Drive, with Chris Warburton taking over Livesey’s slot on Weekend Breakfast.

Punditry show Fighting Talk will also have two new hosts in Georgie Thompson and stand-up comedian Josh Widdicombe.

“Victoria, Shelagh and Richard have all played such key roles delivering fantastic live radio and I wish them every success with their future projects,” said 5 live controller Jonathan Wall.

“This Autumn feels the right time to refresh parts of our schedule as we follow on from what’s already proving to be a wonderful sporting summer.”

“5 live has been a spectacular place to work, I’ve got nothing but good things to say about it,” said Bacon, whose new projects include a BBC One talent search for “Britain’s best amateur painter”.

“It’s been a hugely important part of my career and life, and I’ll always be grateful, and a listener.”

In her own statement, Fogarty said 5 live had given her “some of the happiest times and richest experiences” of her working life.

“I’m very sad to be leaving but it’s definitely time to do so,” she went on. “I’m spending the summer exploring a number of opportunities, before deciding what’s next.”

I tuned into the BBC Today programme this morning before 7am. I was informed that the savage murder of the three young Israeli boys “may” have been “an unauthorised kidnapping” that “went wrong” and thus is no reflection on the good name of Hamas. This is EXACTLY how the BBC responded to the IRA’s bombing of Canary Wharf if you will recall – they instinctively default to the position that any terrorist act carried out is somehow a rogue one, not planned and most certainly not authorised. Just wait for this story to develop when Israel responds to the Hamas barbarism and John Humphrys can sigh about how this “sets back the peace process”.