This is a screengrab of the Labour Party using a Telegraph report into the HSBC scandal from 2010 to back  up its attack on the Telegraph and the Tories…go figure!!!

 

 

The Sunday Telegraph reports that HMRC is investigating more than 200 “extremely wealthy” British taxpayers suspected of tax evasion totalling “many millions of pounds”. It adds that they are “believed to have failed to declare huge sums of interest from private deposit accounts with HSBC’s bank in Switzerland.” A HMRC source said the inquiry would continue for “quite a few months” and could lead to criminal proceedings in the courts.

Sunday Telegraph, 26 September 2010

 

An old, old story…HSBC and tax evasion…and of course it is only HSBC that did that?…even the BBC’s Nick Robinson admits this is an old story…

”This tax bombshell has been ticking since 2007” 

 

So why the interest from the BBC and the Guardian just before an election?

 

John Humphrys on the Today programme (07:50)  brought us comment on the Telegraph’s editorial in which it declared its position on the Oborne’s mischief making.

The Telegraph noted the hypocrisy of news organisations like the BBC and the Guardian which have their own very dubious practices when it comes to what they will and will not report and no doubt this had something to do with the BBC’s interest in this editorial…their interest being in undermining and dismissing it as fast as possible.

It is curiously pious and very selective of organisations like the BBC and the Guardian to attack the Telegraph in this way for they themselves shape their news to a political agenda and only give the Public a view of the world filtered through their own ideological prisms.  So why all the fuss about a paper that perhaps shaped its editorial, and it denies doing so, to suit a company that pays for its existence?  The BBC undeniably shapes its news to favour the Labour Party….hypocrisy on a grand scale?

There are ‘right wing’ papers and ‘left wing’ papers….they all provide a view of the world to their own agendas, we know that.  We know that owners of these papers can direct how they cover news.  Murdoch for instance directed his stable of papers to support the Labour Party for over a decade.  No complaints from the Guardian?

This was the BBC’s take on Murdoch once the hacking saga took off…

RUPERT MURDOCH – A PORTRAIT OF SATAN

There was a growing sense that Murdoch was now manipulating British politicians for his own personal gain. So the BBC decided to investigate Murdoch’s business and personal background.

 

But now he’s a saint?

The BBC famously ‘spiked’ Winston Churchill’ when he warned of the dangers of a Nazi Germany…the BBC, as this site notes day in day out, has a long and dishonourable history of manipulating the news to fit an agenda, a lot of agendas in fact.

For example….Who was the expert, neutral and impartial commenter that they brought in today?  Roy Greenslade from the Guardian who wrote this in that august publication a few days ago…Peter Oborne may be a maverick but his Telegraph revelations are dynamite..and he’s gone on in a similar vein since then attacking the Telegraph.

So are we likely to get fair comment from him?   I don’t think so.

His initial thought was that the Telegraph’s editorial was all ‘bluster and obfuscation’….presumably he meant the bits about the Guardian being just as unprincipled as any other rag.

Humphrys tentatively suggested that perhaps other papers might also have similar practises….Greenslade was adamant that never, ever,  in the history of the Free Press had the integrity of that Press been so imperilled, and democracy undermined, by the likes of theTelegraph’s actions….well what he actually said was……

‘I have never seen (in all my long career in the Press)  such a blatant example before where advertising has influenced editorial.’

 

Yeah right.

Hilariously he uses the disgraced Robert Maxwell as an example of probity and propriety in the news industry.

Of course he has no proof for Oborne’s claims.  He relies on bluster and obfuscation to make his attack.  The Telegraph’s lack of journalistic integrity may have happened but as yet it’s just the word of a man who unquestionably supports Ed Miliband for PM when the Telegraph clearly doesn’t…and as the Telegraph’s editorial makes clear they believe Oborne’s, and the BBC’s and the Guardian’s, motives in seeking to make an issue of this are highly suspect.

 

Here is an instance of Greenslade’s sleight of hand…he sets out a list of concerns about the Telegraph, one of which is this..

The Telegraph, alone among UK newspapers, failed to hold the Chinese government to account over its reforms to the Hong Kong electoral system that led to last year’s street protests. Indeed, on 15 September, it published a commentary by the Chinese ambassador, Let’s not allow Hong Kong to come between us, that sought to justify the electoral reforms.

 

Any Google search will show that the Telegraph has had many reports on the Hong Kong protests….and a search of the BBC’s coverage will show that they too have a similar timeline in how they reported events in Hong Kong..here the BBC lays out the timeline showing that the protests only began in late September….

 

28 September – Occupy Central begins

Frustration had been mounting since Beijing’s ruling in August that voters would only be able to vote for their chief executive in 2017 from a list of pre-approved candidates.

Students, led by activist groups Scholarism and the Hong Kong Federation of Students, stage a week of class boycotts culminating in a protest outside government offices at Admiralty on 26 September.

 

 

The Telegraph didn’t hold back at all in reporting those protests…

Why are there protests in Hong Kong?

Hong Kong protests spread as 80,000 take to streets

 

And its reporting didn’t start just as the protests started…they were revealing the problems well before that…

From July 5:

Lord Patten attacks Beijing over interference in Hong Kong

From August 30:

China warns against foreign meddling in Hong Kong

From September 2:

China ‘has breached terms of Hong Kong handover’

 

and ironically..and not a word from Greenslade about the British government’s ‘kowtowing’…from September 5….revealed by the Telegraph…

Hong Kong activist attacks ‘deferential’ Britain

 

So quite clearly Greenslade is ‘mistaken’ in his attack on the Telegraph in this instance. Well he’s allowing his own agenda to colour his reporting on people allowing their agenda to colour their reporting.

Greenslade is conducting an ideological attack on a commercial and political rival…of course not a lack of integrity highlighted by Humphrys…..some might suggest that it is a rather dubious practice by the BBC to use such a  person who is clearly antagonistic towards the Telegraph as a commenter on their activities.

Once again the BBC makes no connection between the stories and the various motivatioins behind the claims by various people…..unusual for the BBC to hold back on the speculation about motives and the behind the scenes realities.  Of course to do so would shine a light on a rather disturbing and probably corrupt agenda by those involved….the BBC itself being major player in this.

Let’s have a look at the timeline…

On February 7 Ed Miliband launched his attack on tax havens…

Ed Miliband issues warning to UK-controlled ‘tax havens’

 

On February 9 the BBC and the Guardian both launched their long planned attack on HSBC and tax evasion…

HSBC bank ‘helped clients dodge millions in tax’

 

On February 11 we had PMQs where Miliband had the perfect platform to posture grandiously and to link the Tories into the scandal….

Miliband attacks ‘dodgy’ PM in HSBC donor row

 

Can it be mere coincidence that the Labour supporting BBC and Guardian launched their attacks at that precise moment in time?  It seems all too perfect doesn’t it?

The HSBC scandal is over 5 years old…why did the BBC and the Guardian wait until now, just before an election and in synch with Labour’s election campaign strategy, to disinter this story?…..the BBC’s own Nick Robinson admits this is an old story…

”This tax bombshell has been ticking since 2007” 

 

And yet the BBC and Guardian only decide to investigate it at this precise moment in time when all the information they have now has been available since at least 2010 and has been extensively reported on since?

 

13 October 2011: HMRC officially announces that it is investigating some 6,000 UK-based Swiss bank account-holders

 HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) will shortly begin writing to UK residents and organisations holding Swiss bank accounts with the HSBC in Geneva who may not have reported all their income and gains to HMRC.

 

David Keighly at ‘Conservative Woman’ also thinks it just a bit too much of a coincidence that the BBC’s output is timed to fit in with an agenda that seems set to influence the election…‘The BBC are attacking {The Tories] with planned, unrestrained glee”….

We are condemned to a solid six months of posturing, tub-thumping and `soap box oratory.

For broadcasters this is proving a bonanza beyond their wildest dreams. Most of those who work in the media, and of course, especially the BBC, hate the Tories, and now – for the first time ever – they have been able to plan on multiple levels and on an industrial scale how to rubbish them.

In the formal campaign period in April and May, they will still have to abide by the strict electoral law that requires public service broadcasters to achieve political balance – but not in the months of canvassing before that.

And so, this week we have had the debut of the first – and longest-ever – Labour Party election broadcast conceived, shot and put in prime time by the BBC. It’s a drama called The Casual Vacancy, it has cost £5m to make, and the first one-hour episode went out this Sunday.

 

Now we have the Ed Miliband supporting Peter Oborne jumping ship from the right wing Torygraph and laying into them for their coverage of the HSBC scandal which Labour is desperate to link to the Tories.

Just coincidence?  Just a coincidence that the news outlets making so much of this are the BBC and the Guardian?

That stinks of a grand political stitch up and an interference of a most serious kind in the democratic process…the Guardian of course is free to do as it likes, as is the Telegraph, but the BBC is legally obliged to be impartial and balanced.

Clearly it has not been so.

It is an irony I suppose that we have the two news organisations here that tried to shut down the Free Press now demanding that the Telegraph publish what they deem news….when they don’t like what you publish they try to close you down, when you don’t publish what their own agenda dictates they try to force you to publish it.

The BBC is corrupt as they come…it tried to destroy News International and now seeks to malign and damage yet another rival news organisation….having already crushed ‘local news’.

About time the Conservatives grew some balls and took on the BBC.