Interesting reaction to this BBC Tweet……Not the one the BBC hoped for I imagine……

Fears grow for ‘Syria-bound’ girls http://bbc.in/1GdNqB9 

• Salga Union Europa ‏@apostolouc Feb 20

  “@BBCNews: Fears grow for ‘Syria-bound’ girls http://bbc.in/1GdNqB9 ” Interesting denial from school governor…

• Scott McChesney ‏@scottrmcchesney Feb 20

  @BBCNews They’ll be back as soon as they start having problems with their WiFi.

• David D. ‏@jedleonard Feb 20

  @BBCNews Why would security let these girls on a plane without parental consent? Honestly if they are dumb enough to fall for the b.s.—–!

• Gideon’s Way ‏@gideonsway Feb 20

  @BBCNews with any luck ,they will be blown up, WE DON’T THIS SCUM BACK IN BRITAIN, AND THEIR LIKES CAN FECK OFF TO SYRIA AND DONT COME BACK

• Rotimi Gbenga ‏@rotimigbenga32 Feb 20

  @BBCNews please fear the bound Isis girls,they might be train as bomber.

• nick ‏@nickboy141 Feb 20

  @BBCNews bye bye see you so you long don’t come .no one made them go so fuck them

• nick ‏@nickboy141 Feb 20

  @BBCNews what makes 3 girls watch the news of girls being raped sold as sex slaves killed by lsis want to go in the first place

• 23-8-17 ‏@deffmick Feb 20

  @BBCNews Why does fear grow ? If there brain washed enough to go in first place, so be it,far more important things going on .

• Paula ‏@MathersPaula Feb 20

  @BBCNews fears??! Find them and hang them!

• Andy Smith ‏@Adnyuk Feb 20

  @BBCNews Can we stop being sexist… These are people joining a terrorist organisation…

• john o’brien ‏@obrien_john Feb 20

  @BBCNews Not sure boarding a plane to Turkey is a hanging offense #Strange. But they have been rather naughty

• Carolyn Waters ‏@ana_phylactic Feb 20

  @BBCNews Parent governor doesn’t believe girls going to Syria when girlF went in December and they have snuck away…..join…the….dots!!!

• CforSocialJustice ‏@CfSocialJustice Feb 20

  @BBCNews @Ed_Miliband @edballsmp @YvetteCooperMP @F4JOfficial Why were these #underagegirls #allowed #toleavethecountry #noquestionsasked

Relatives of the three missing London boys believed to be heading to Paris have pleaded for them to come home.

The boys travelled to Paris on Tuesday. It is feared they may be planning to join Front National extremists in Paris.

One of the boy’s family said they understood he wanted to help those suffering attacks from Islamist fanatics in Paris but said Paris was “a dangerous place”.

The family said they were “feeling completely distressed”.

The three London boys who all supported Chelsea Football Club, travelled to Paris by train on Tuesday after telling their parents they were going out for the day to watch Chelsea play in the Champions League.

Football managers from clubs across the country have issued a statement pleading with the boys to come home.

Supporters at the  London club were asked to come forward if they had any information to help the boys return home safely.

A Club spokesman said the trio, who have been described as “straight-A students”, had been manipulated, possibly influenced by the heightened atmosphere around the subject of immigration during the run up to the election, much of it possibly due to the dangerous attitudes promulgated by Nigel Farage and UKIP.

He said: “They have been misled. I do not know what was promised to them. If they do go to Paris, it ‘s like a war zone and there are serious ramifications for going in to a war zone.”

He continued “Our understanding is the family didn’t have any idea and the children didn’t leave any clues and even their school, which is quite a good school in this borough, they don’t have any clue as to why these three boys just suddenly left.

“They might have some other friends and people don’t know whether they were radicalised online or by some individuals physically.”

“It’s a mystery for the community.”

Police said the boys had previously been  interviewed by officers after another boy from their supporters club went to Paris in January, but nothing had indicated they were at risk and their disappearance had come as a great surprise.

In a statement, one family said: “We miss you terribly and are extremely worried about you.

“Paris is a dangerous place and we don’t want you to go there. Get in touch with the police and they will help to bring you home.”

“We understand that you have strong feelings and want to help those you believe are suffering in Paris.

“You can help from home, you don’t have to put yourself in danger. Please don’t cross the border.”

The family said: “In your absence, we, as a family, are feeling completely distressed and cannot make sense of why you left home.

“Due to the speculation that you may be travelling towards Paris, we are extremely worried about your safety.”

David Cameron says the disappearance of three London boys feared to be heading to Paris to join the Front National extremists is “deeply concerning”.

He said “Our authorities will do everything we can to help these boys.”

“But it does make a broader point which is the fight against racism is not just one that we can wage by the police and border control.

“It needs every school, every university, every college, every community to recognise they have a role to play.

“We all have a role to play in stopping people from having their minds poisoned by this appalling xenophobic hatred.”

Police have issued images taken from CCTV of the boys they want to speak to:

Detectives said the priority was to find the boys and “make sure they are safe”.

The families of the boys rejected claims that they had become radicalised saying there was “no concrete evidence” of this.

The Metropolitan Police said the investigation has been taken over by the South East Counter Racism Unit.

“They have strong international links which places them in the best position to pursue the investigation overseas and try to find the boys and bring them home,” a force spokesman said.

“We will continue to work closely with the families and the community in London.”

A police spokesman said it was a “really sensitive investigation” and they were doing “everything nationally and internationally” to find the boys.

He said: “We suspect they may have been influenced by others to leave the UK.”

Jim Blarney from the London Sporting Academy said there was “absolutely not” any radicalisation at the Academy.

“I’m 100% confident – with the head and the senior leadership team and the whole school – that we’ve done everything to put in measures that safeguard all the children that attend the school,” he said.

Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said: “The idea of young British boys setting off to Paris is very disturbing, and shows that more action is urgently needed to stop young people being drawn into extremism and conflict.”

Those with information can call the free Anti-Racism Hotline number on 0800 789 321.

I’m sure you are all familiar with the BBC narrative that promotes the ‘Golden Age of Islamic Science’  and tells us the West owes all of its progress to Islam.

It is a constant refrain, one that the BBC wants to impress upon us, the idea being that once we realise that Muslims were once very clever we will change our perceptions about Islam as a backward, violent and intolerant ideology.

Good luck with that.

The problem is that the ‘Golden Age of Islamic Science’ owes its sheen to the cultures it conquered and the accumulated knowledge of the Romans, Greeks, Persians and Indians.  Muslims became great librarians as they stored up that accumulated knowledge from past centuries.  It profited from an intellectual drag….once conquered the various cultures held on to their science, philosophy and intellectualism…and we had a great deal of ‘cultural appropriation’…for example…A major innovation of this period was paper – originally a secret tightly guarded by the Chinese.  The art of papermaking was obtained from prisoners taken at the Battle of Talas (751), spreading to the Islamic cities of Samarkand and Baghdad.    This continued until Islam asserted itself fully and began to restrict the practise and development of science and learning and notably many of the scholars were in fact not Muslim but Christians and Jews.

For a more sceptical view of Islamic claims to scientific genius you might like to read this:

How Islamic Inventors Did Not Change The World

What should be understood is that it wasn’t ‘Islam’ or the Koran urging its adherents to strive in the fields of science purely for the sake of knowledge.  The scientific progress was merely a necessary adjunct to practising Islam…the need to know when to pray during the day, in which direction Mecca lay, and the dates of the various festivals and sacred days…as well as the need to administer a massive and complex empire.

Knowledge and learning were not next to Godliness, they were just a practical necessity.

Suggesting that Islam is ideologically a driver of scientific endeavour and knowledge is like saying warfare is…and by virtue of that we must all love War.

Huge leaps in scientific progress come out of war as the arms race sucks in huge funding and resources to develop war winning weaponry but there is no ideology of ‘War’ that directs and eulogises this development….the Army does not turn five times a day towards the MOD building in London and kneel in prayer as they submit themselves to the wisdom of Michael Fallon MP, Secretary of State for Defence.

Funnily enough the same people who praise Islam denounce the ‘Industrial-Military Complex’ as evil.

The magnificent Koran’s science tells us that the Sun orbits the Earth…a view still held by some….

Saudi Muslim cleric claims the Earth is ‘stationary’ and the sun rotates around it

You might want to read this to help understand how a Muslim, taking the Koran as his guide, as a good Muslim should, could make that error:

Scientific Errors in the Qur’an

The Qur’an mentions numerous times that the sun and the moon travel in an orbit, but does not mention once that the earth does too. This is consistent with a earth-centered (geocentric) view of the cosmos that places a motionless earth at the center of the universe and all “heavenly bodies” travel around the earth. This was the prevailing understanding of the universe prior to the 16^th century when Copernicus helped explain and popularize a sun-centered (heliocentric) view of the universe. Tellingly, the sun’s orbit is always mentioned in the context of night and day.

 

It is notable that at times when a strict interpretation of Islam was followed science and culture died.

For 800 years Islam turned a land of sand into an intellectual desert, a backwater.

However, that, apparently, is an ‘invidious, ungentlemanly’ view…according to Evan Davis on Newsnight.

Craig from ‘Is the BBC Biased?’ has transcribed an interview that Davis held with Richard Dawkins who had tweeted about the lack of progress of Islamic nations…….Here is Davis at work….

…a tweet in which you drew a very invidious comparison between the number of Nobel prizes won by people from Trinity College, Cambridge and the entire Muslim population of the world. Trinity College, Cambridge comes out on top of that comparison. Now, not disputing the factual basis of it, why make such an invidious comparison? Why raise that? Why raise the issue? What’s the point of drawing attention to that?

I can think of much more gentlemanly ways of making the intellectual point that Islam has not been a great scientific…

 

This from the same BBC that dismisses centuries of European culture as a ‘Dark Ages’…

The Dark Ages – a period in which Europe, and scientific progress, slumbered.

“Just because Europe was stuck in the Dark Ages,” argues Jim Al-Khalili the professor of physics at the University of Surrey and author of Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science, “we shouldn’t assume that the rest of the world had stagnated. There was this great flourishing of scholarship and discovery in the Islamic world of the middle ages”.

 

Curious isn’t it that the BBC can rubbish European culture and then go to enormous lengths to burnish the credentials of Islam with claims that it was a culture that a thousand years ago may have produced great scientific leaps to which we all owe our modern lives to and yet, when someone comes along to suggest all is not well now with the Muslim world, they are told to shut up, told not to mention the fact that Islamic countries are intellectual and scientific backwaters, that it is just a bit rude to say so.

I did laugh because the great enemy of Richard Dawkins, the slippery Mehdi Hasan,  is on Dawkin’s side on this.

In Hasan’s now infamous speech in which he labelled the non-Muslim as immoral,  ignorant cattle he also said this….

 

The Middle East, despite all its oil wealth…is an intellectually stagnant area of the world, where one in three Arabs, 65 million human beings, Muslims, are functionally illiterate, of which two thirds are women. 10 million children in the Middle East have never stepped foot inside a classroom, inside a school. That is the modern Muslim legacy. The Middle East…is now intellectually closed off to the outside world. … Closed off to the world – and let s not hear any of this nonsense about foreign literature, or foreign books, or foreign languages, being alien to Islam. It is the only way to learn, to open your minds to non-Muslims, to open your minds to other cultures, to learn foreign languages.

Just think about our priorities as a community, as a Muslim world, think about our priorities,: because when you look at our priorities….you look for example in the field of research and development…the West as an average spend around 2% of their GPD, their national income, on research and development…no Muslim country spends more than 0.5% of its national wealth on research and development…instead we spend the money on what? On killing, bombs, bloodshed, destruction, warfare, arms. Take Pakistan, for example, the “Islamic” Republic of Pakistan, with shamefully high levels of child illiteracy, and one of the world’s worst child labour problems, and yet it spends 20% of its GDP on its military and 2% of its GDP on education.

It is no surprise then that when you look at the Muslim world you see that we 1.2 billion Muslims have just 10 Nobel prizes to our name….and our Jewish brethren who we spend so much time fighting and arguing with, 12 million Jews in the world, they have 150 Nobel prizes to their name….We are not under-armed, we are under-educated. We have lost our ability to think, to acquire knowledge, to advance intellectually, and then we wonder why our community is in such decay, why globally wherever you find Muslims we have such problems. It’s not a secret, it’s not a conspiracy, its clear to anyone who looks at the numbers.

Once again we see the BBC propaganda machine at work, you can see the cogs actually moving…Islam good, Europe bad.

The BBC is lying to us.  The more we get bombed or otherwise attacked by ‘Conservative’  radical Muslims the more we get patronised and lied to by the BBC about how wonderful the ‘Religion of Peace’ is.

Why does the BBC keep pushing the lies?  This might give us a clue as to the thinking behind it…

People in MI5 tell me that denying the connection between Islamism and terrorism derives from the belief that if you accept it, there’s no hope for a multicultural society in Britain: we would just have to recognise that part of the population is permanently liable to become terrorists.

 

The trouble is if you keep denying the connection you don’t get to a solution….you just keep getting more and more terrorists as you do not tackle the cause…the ideology…..

In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

 

It seems the BBC would prefer to accept some ‘collateral damage’ amongst non-Muslims rather than upset certain communities with the truth about the causes of radicalisation and extremism.

Change the narrative about foreign policy, about Muslim victimhood and admit that what drives radicalisation is an ideology that stems from the Koran.

Not all Muslims are terrorists but most terrorists are Muslim at this time in history.  Why is that?  Is it ungentlemanly to ask?

You may want to read this from Nick Cohen:

The Great Betrayal: How Liberals Appease Islam

I must face the fact that there is a vast woozy mass of liberal-leftists who will never change, and would not fight back even if a bomb exploded in their own back yard.

I will not let supposed liberals forget that, by their own cowardice and lack of conviction, they have brought this dismal moment on themselves.

We’re now well into day 5 of the BBC’s intensive coverage of the racist Chelsea fans story.

In the past week a number of other race-related stories have emerged, none of which you’ll find reported on the BBC website.

On Tuesday police released video of a black man dragging a white guy from a bus and beating him with a belt in an unprovoked attack.

You won’t find that story on the BBC website.

On Thursday the Coventry Telegraph reported that a young white mother had anti-white graffiti and faeces daubed on the front door of her new flat in Willenhall. A note pushed through her letterbox said that the area was for “black sisters and brothers” and “Willenhall is black so fuck off”.

You won’t find that story on the BBC website.

Today’s Evening Standard reports that police are “hunting a man after a female staff member at a bookmakers was threatened and subjected to racist abuse.” The man they’re looking for is black.

You won’t find that story on the BBC website.

Why is that? Is there a reluctance at the BBC to report stuff that could, in its view, agitate the despised white underclass in the run-up to the election? Or maybe it’s just a case of the old left-wing “only white people can be racist” ideology, therefore the BBC doesn’t deem stories newsworthy when white people are victims. Whatever the reason, it’s inconceivable that none of the above stories would’ve been reported by the BBC if the perps had been white and the victims non-white.

If you want to commit a crime and not be hung out to dry by the thought police make sure you have some ‘ethnic’ authenticity and credibility in the bank.

If you’re white and push a person of colour off a train you’re big news.

If you’re a Muslim who stabs someone for not being a Muslim then you’re probably justified in doing that by virtue of undoubtedly having suffered a history of oppression and humiliation….and you’re not big news.

Are the BBC making a song and dance about this?

Muslim man who allegedly stabbed two men over religion not charged with hate crime

A Detroit man who allegedly attacked two men after asking if they were Muslims has not been charged with a hate crime by prosecutors in Oakland County, Michigan.

He allegedly asked the men if they were Muslim and when they said they were not, he allegedly began attacking one of the men.

 

 

Rather than representing the nation as a whole, the BBC has become a vital resource – and sometimes attack weapon – for a narrow, arrogant Left-Liberal elite.

Awkward…..Did the BBC and Guardian splash this on their front pages day after day in 2011?  I am guessing Peter Oborne wasn’t such a hero then.

From Peter Oborne in 2011:

Coming to the BBC, an everyday story of bias and falling standards

The corporation has fine values. It must act swiftly to stop their further erosion

There are very few institutions – maybe only the monarchy, the Armed Forces and Parliament – that express what it means to be British more than the BBC. The state broadcaster enjoys a very privileged place indeed at the heart of our national conversation. But this, in turn, means that there is an implicit deal between it and the British people.

On the one hand, the BBC is funded by public money and given a semi-monopoly of broadcast news coverage. On the other, the BBC is by charter expected to reflect the British values of fair-mindedness, decency and tolerance.

Sadly, it is only very rarely that the BBC keeps its side of the bargain, and this negligence is starting to become a scandal. Rather than representing the nation as a whole, it has become a vital resource – and sometimes attack weapon – for a narrow, arrogant Left-Liberal elite.

BBC chiefs used to deny this charge outright, but in recent years even they have been forced to acknowledge the weight of evidence. The organisation and its staff were institutionally opposed to Margaret Thatcher, whereas they took New Labour to their heart. They have swallowed every progressive orthodoxy, while viewing with naked contempt the concerns of ordinary people.

The BBC is doctrinally pro-European. During the 1975 referendum campaign, it was the propaganda wing of the pro-Brussels machine, and this attitude has not changed since. The ranking members of the BBC Trust, Lord Patten of Barnes and his deputy Diane Coyle, have never made any secret of their contempt for Eurosceptics, let alone the opinions of the very significant and growing minority of the British people who want us out of Europe altogether.

This ossified institutional attitude has become an urgent problem. Thanks to this week’s uprising on the Tory benches, and the financial catastrophe now facing the 17 eurozone countries, it now looks very likely indeed that a further euro-referendum can be expected in due course. Given the abysmal record of BBC partisanship, and the unashamed pro-European bias of the corporation’s board, there is no hope that the debate when it comes will be treated in an even-handed way.

This problem is made much worse by the fact that bias is not the only problem. A further difficulty is lack of standards. It is not simply the opinions of BBC producers and reporters that are suspect. So are the facts they put in front of the public.

One notorious recent case concerns the documentary produced by the flagship BBC current affairs programme, Panorama, about Primark. Screened in June 2008, it made a series of very serious and damaging claims, of which the most troubling was the assertion that the clothing company employed child labour in Bangalore.

There is ample evidence that Panorama’s “undercover” footage showing three boys in a Bangalore clothing workshop was actually an elaborately constructed fake – and this evidence became available almost at once. But the corporation was unbelievably slow to admit this. Only three years later, in June this year, did the BBC come up with a grudging apology. By comparison, when the columnist Johann Hari was caught out in a comparable (though not identical) act of fabrication, his newspaper suspended him within days.

Even before the discredited Primark documentary was screened, the BBC was caught out in another act of fabrication. This one, because it involved the Queen, gained massive publicity. The BBC showed the monarch, in full garter regalia, angrily leaving a photographic sitting after being asked to remove her tiara. It made compelling television, and at first was accepted as true. In fact, the scene was a fake, the result of misleading editing.

It cannot be stressed enough that the BBC makes a great deal of excellent television and radio, while employing many admirable journalists. But there is a pattern forming here. It now emerges that the corporation has fabricated yet another story, this one involving the Conservative backbencher Andrew Tyrie.

Three weeks ago, Mr Tyrie was the subject of a mocking BBC report at an otherwise dull Conservative Party conference. He was shown preparing to give a televised response to George Osborne’s party conference speech, then being led away by some Downing Street heavies, only to return full of praise for the Chancellor. The inference made was that Mr Tyrie had been nobbled.

Nothing of the sort had occurred, as the BBC reporter involved, James Landale, has since to his very great credit made clear (though unfortunately only in a little-read blog written some time afterwards). It was ingenious television editing which made it appear that Mr Tyrie had been got at by No 10’s heavy mob. The crucial point is that Mr Tyrie had already told the BBC exactly what he was going to say about the Osborne speech before he talked to Downing Street officials – and not one word had changed after.

The BBC has been trying to brush this affair off as a matter of no consequence, a cunning tactic. For Mr Tyrie is a man of few political friends, and none at the top of the Government, where his discomfort has been openly relished. I have followed his career for many years, and he is the very model of what a backbencher ought to be: independent and unbribable by office or money, dedicated only to a high-minded vision of public service.

Now chairman of the Commons Treasury Committee, he has been unafraid to take on George Osborne – for instance, using investigative powers to find out the ugly truth about the state-owned RBS bank. For the past six years, he has waged another lonely battle to find out the truth about the controversial and unethical practice of extraordinary rendition (the dispatch of terrorist suspects to foreign countries, where they can be tortured). He is now involved in a challenge to the CIA in the American courts. Thanks to the inaccurate BBC story there is now a real danger that Mr Tyrie’s quest for the truth may be hampered. The American intelligence agency could claim that he is simply the easily exploited pawn of a foreign government.

The truth could not be more different. Mr Tyrie has no official friends. All he has is his integrity, a commodity the BBC was disgracefully ready to trash for the sake of an eye-catching television package. It is time he was given a generous public apology.

I am one of those who love the BBC. I wake up in the morning listening to Radio 4, and it is often the last thing I hear before I go to bed. I believe that it represents something civilised and inspiring which sets Britain apart from other countries.

But there are forces – led by Rupert Murdoch – that want to annihilate the BBC and destroy what remains such an essential and unifying part of our public domain. In recent years, its senior management seem to have bent over backwards to give legitimacy to enemies, abusing its unique public trust by pursuing a factional agenda and rubbishing its own magnificent values. The character assassination of Andrew Tyrie, at heart an act of empty nihilism, is just the latest example. It is time the BBC woke up.

The BBC are outraged, and not a little gutted…..in order to pay for their election campaign the government has plundered the incomes of some of the most vulnerable people in society who were callously, cruelly,  forced out of their jobs by the savage and brutal austerity imposed upon the economy and made to fend for themselves.  Stripped of their dignity and all the trappings of success in this human tragedy all that they were left with was their indomitable human spirit to forge a new life and to rebuild their dreams.  They were the very people who could put the economy back on the road to recovery with their daring, enterprise and ingenuity….these were the  self-employed who risked all as they were left to sink or swim by a cruel government in the perilous waters of the free market only for that predatory Coalition government to leech off them, filling their coffers with their ill-gotten gains wrenched from the calloused, work worn hands of those who earned it with the blood, sweat and toil of honest labour despite being abandoned,  left behind by this pitiless and merciless Coalition government whilst Osborne travels the country to crow about it.

I think Polly Toynbee must have hacked my computer…back to normal now…..

So tax receipts have amounted to a rather tidy £9 billion…though I’m slightly confused…the BBC radio news said this was less than experts had expected (or is that mre than the BBC hoped for?) and yet the web report tells us the opposite…’A better than expected rise in tax receipts’

However if you have been listening to BBC news or its commentary on the economy over the last few years as reports of employment continually rising came in you will have heard the BBC continually attempt to downplay the significance of that, claiming that they were mostly part time…they were in fact mostly full time, that women were suffering the most when last week we heard that women were in fact the better off, that they were zero hour contracts..always bad in BBC eyes or that the jobs were generally two bit jobs in the dismissive words of one BBC presenter,  jobs like window cleaners or painters and decorators and gardening jobs…..shows what the BBC thinks of anyone making an honest living however ‘humble’.

Seems that was all in the imagination of BBC presenters who always seemed to put the bleakest interpretation on any good news for this government.

A £9 billion surplus would indicate that the self-employed are doing very nicely and that the economy is also chuggig along quite well.  This of course has been backed up all along by small businessmen who rang in to BBC phone-ins and kept having to insist that, yes the economy may be sluggish for some, but they themselves were doing very well thanks….businessman after businessman rang in to many phone-ins…the BBC ignored them.

The BBC ignored all these people’s statements and continued down the road of claiming the economy was in dire straits, even claiming we were about to hit the dreaded ‘treble-dip’ recession when the truth was we hadn’t even had a double-dip recession…and yet you can still hear BBC presenters talking of it.

The BBC insisted that rising employment was a ‘puzzle’…and yet the simple solution would have been to hit the road and ask the businesses that were employing these people as to why they were doing so….or listen to the businesses ringing in to the phone-ins.

But the BBC never did…for years they kept up that mantra about rising employment being a ‘puzzle’…..because of course it either couldn’t be true or there must be some appalling downside that we couldn’t see.  The answer could never be that the economy was picking up.

Anyway here we are….tax receipts up, solid proof of an economy on the mend and wages, at least for the self-employed, going up.

Never mind Russia, the Middle East and Grexit fears….all going well the UK has been put back on a sound footing…..whatever happened to that ‘Plan B’ the BBC used to urge us to adopt?

Roy Greenslade in his support for Peter Oborne in the Telegraph uses ‘research’ by the Media Standards Trust to back up claims about the lack of reporting by the Telegraph on HSBC’s woes…

An analysis by the Media Standards Trust has found that the Telegraph published “far fewer articles” on the recent HSBC tax avoidance scandal than rival papers. This also requires explanation from TMG.

The BBC’s Robert Peston is a trustee of that ‘independent’ organisation which is about to launch this:

Every Thursday, from 26 February until the election on 7 May, Election Unspun will presentstatistics of news coverage of the campaign from the previous week.

 

Party leaders in the news: a league table of leadership coverage

Prominent in the news: other political and non-political figures who appear in political news this week

Coverage of the parties: how often each of the main parties features in the news

Issues by news source: is The Telegraph focusing on cuts to benefits while The Mirror concentrates on the cost of living?

Election coverage day-by-day: how coverage played out over the week

What the media say: a statistical analysis of leader columns

I’m sure we will be treated to the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth…as they see it.

Who are they?  Well apart from Peston as Trustee we have on the Board of the Media Standards Trust  some of these worthies.….

Sir David Bell …chairman of the Media Standards Trust until he joined the Leveson Inquiry into media (er that’ll be just News International!) standards, and Common Purpose trustee….and chairman once again.

What is the relationship between Hacked Off and the MST (2012)?

The Media Standards Trust houses the Hacked Off campaign and provides administrative and strategic support. The campaign manager, and one of its founders, are employed by the Media Standards Trust. Many of the campaign’s activities and supporters have no direct connection with the Trust.

Who runs the Hacked Off campaign?

Martin Moore, the director of the Media Standards Trust, and Professor Brian Cathcart, from Kingston University, direct the Hacked Off campaign. It is managed by Thais Portilho-Shrimpton.

 

 

Baroness Helena Kennedy QC …lefty human rights lawyer and favourite of the BBC.

Julia Middleton founded ‘Common Purpose’, a member of the Media Standards Trust and founder of the left wing Demos think tank. A good friend of the BBC’s Robert Peston.

The Right Reverend Stephen Platten...a ‘turbulent’ political Bishop.

Sir Anthony Salz Executive Vice Chairman, NM Rothschild; member of the Scott Trust  and on the board of the Education and Employees Trust which supports Peston’s speakers charity, an Media Standard Trust trustee and used to be vice chairman of the BBC board of governors 2004-06….the Scott Trust being ‘The Guardian’

Anthony Smith   Broadcaster, author and academic….and ex-BBC producer

David Loyn   Developing world correspondent, BBC

Another of note is ex journalist Mary-Ellen Barker who now runs MEB Projects which tells us…

.

Extract ‘value from content’.  Doesn’t that mean making money out of their content?

How we do it

By maximising the value of content and data. Our expertise is:

• Interim management
• Generating revenue with digital news and content
• Content workflow solutions and production, including offshoring
• Corporate communications
• News and data for financial services
• Content integration and news metadata
• Targeted distribution of high-value news and data

So one of the leading lights of the Media Standards Trust that is criticising the Telegraph from making money out of content is herself running a business that encourages the very same thing?

MEB Projects was approached to define a news content strategy for a major content provider, which wanted a competitive differentiator to help drive customer retention and revenue generation. The task was to define customer requirements across a range of end-users, commission customer research, and build a 3-year plan to plug content gaps.

So shaping a news content strategy to suit customers.

Shock horror.  No?

Can we trust an organisation so loaded with people with very defined agendas and close links to the Hacked Off campaign group and Leveson that the Telegraph has huge issues with?

Can we expect the Media Standards Trust to really hold the BBC to account in the same way it undoubtedly will right wing papers?

The BBC criticises the Telegraph for allegedly shaping its editorial to suit HSBC when HSBC were unhappy with the Telegraph’s reporting about it….similarly the BBC is unhappy about the Telegraph exposing the BBC’s own failings and bias in its journalism and rather than accept that criticism the BBC set out to attack the Telegraph using its own news platform as a weapon….are they any different in effect to HSBC in their reaction to criticism, or any different to the Telegraph in compromising their journalism to suit their own interests?

The Telegraph’s latest look at the BBC’s politically corrupt broadcasting…Anti-Labour bias at the BBC? What a fiction!

From the Telegraph in 2012:

The BBC deals a blow to investigative journalism

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.