Sorry about the delay but here is a fresh Open Thread for you to complete.

The BBC is to set poverty stricken Pleb against poverty stricken Pleb in a vicious and exploitative TV entertainment that makes Benefits Street look like a heart-warming examination of the lives of the ‘poor’.

‘The BBC has defended a new TV reality show pitting unemployed and low-paid workers against each other for a cash prize, which has been accused of echoing film the Hunger Games, arguing it is a “serious social experiment”.

The show, called Britain’s Hardest Grafter, is seeking 25 of Britain’s poorest workers with applications limited to those who earn or receive benefits totalling less than £15,500 a year.’

Russell Crowe received $5,000,000 for his part in Gladiator, the winner of the BBC’s show, Britain’s Hardest Gladiator, wins a not insignificant £15,500.

Ironically, after all the fuss about Benefits Street, the guardian publishes this defence of the BBC and also one of Benefits Street in retrospect so as to bolster its defence of the BBC…

It’s a bit rich moaning about poverty porn

Even if exploitation is sometimes at play in these shows – and perhaps it is; happily, I can’t claim to have seen them all – this surely doesn’t discount the possibility that the BBC and Twenty Twenty can between them deliver a serious-minded series, one that provokes more than just the standard responses from left and right (in fact, it has been commissioned by current affairs, not entertainment, so the aspiration is there, if nothing else). The stories of the poor do need to be told, don’t they? Or are we saying that we would rather wipe them from our screens altogether?

Benefits Street was just a reality TV programme that revealed a few truths that the liberal do-gooders didn’t like to admit whilst the BBC’s latest effort will be truly exploitative and demeaning for the participants…the ‘winner’ hardly getting a prize worth the effort….the BBC no doubt anticipating any money made during filming being subtratced from their benefits giving the BBC a chance to show the ‘evils’ of the welfare system under the Tories.

‘Britain’s Hardest Worker’ is just ‘Gladiator’ repackaged for a modern age…the desperation of those in need exploited for entertainment purposes by the caring BBC which spent the last 5 years trying to shame the Coalition government over welfare reform…..the programme being commissioned by BBC Current Affairs…and blatantly being based upon the minimum wage rate….is Aunty being political whislt trying to hide that politicisation?

Why does the BBC never show us the uncomfortable truth like this?….extraordinarily from the Mirror….

Are these children victims of the Tory welfare cap or sheer parental stupidity?

It would take a harder heart than mine to see a sobbing 12-year-old being thrown out of her home and not care.

Autumn Parker was pictured being comforted by her dad Lee as their family were evicted after months struggling to pay their rent under the Tories’ benefit cap.

Lee lost his job, the council stopped paying their rent, their private landlord couldn’t take the losses, and along came the bailiffs.

So far, so bad luck – how many of us are only one or two pay cheques from needing the welfare safety net which Dave’s stormtroopers have been merrily slashing great holes in?

None of that is Autumn’s fault. And nor is the £500-worth of SLR Nikon camera slung around her neck in photographs of the eviction.

Because that’s her parents’ fault.

Lee and Katrina Parker appear to be not just irresponsible, but the kind of parents that make the rest of us despair.

Despite never once in their lives being in a position to afford it, they have seven children. The eldest, a daughter, was born in 1994 when Lee and Katrina were aged 19 and 21.

Just as the BBC kept Churchill off the airwaves in order that he wouldn’t upset the Fascists the BBC keeps the truth off the airwaves about Islamism so that Muslim sensibilities aren’t upset by suggestions that the Islamic State and its kind have any link to Islam and the link between the ideology and the violence that spreads around the world by people stating that they are fighting in the name of their religion, Islam.

The BBC publishes yet another piece of Muslim propaganda that is designed to create the impression that Muslims are victims and any criticism of activities by Muslims is based upon racism and Islamophobia, the hope being that the critics will be silenced.  Naturally the BBC does not make any attempt to challenge the assertions made in the article by a member of the Qatari royal family…that’ll be Qatar which, along with Saudi Arabia, is at the heart of the Islamist revival and all that that entails…….

Muslims ‘dehumanised’ warns Qatar’s Sheikha Moza

A senior member of the Qatar royal family has warned that Muslims are being “dehumanised” by the coverage of violent extremism in the Middle East.

“Why do Muslim lives seem to matter less than the lives of others?” asked Sheikha Moza bint Nasser in a speech at Oxford University on Tuesday.

The division between East and West was creating a “fear and suspicion of all things Islamic”, she said.

The failure of progressive politics in the Middle East was fuelling “distorted and perverted” interpretations of Islam, she added.

‘Muslim-phobia’

Speaking at the opening of a new building at the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College, Sheikha Moza warned that while there was an “intellectual curiosity” in the West about Islamic culture, individual “real, living Muslims” faced growing distrust.

She described this as being “Muslim-phobia”, as distinct from claims of “Islamophobia”.

And she questioned whether globalisation was really achieving more “pluralistic” societies.

“A Muslim is first and foremost identified as a Muslim, rather than simply a human being.

“Whether they are Pakistani, Malaysian, Senegalese, or even British born, their multiple identities are levelled under a constructed monolith of Islam,” she said.

This collective identity was seen as something “fearful and unknowable”, said Sheikha Moza, mother of the current emir of Qatar and wife of the previous ruler.

The consequence was “double standards” in the reaction to the casualties of conflict, said Sheikha Moza, a senior political figure in the oil and gas-rich Gulf state.

“Only silence follows when innocent Yemeni and Pakistani children and civilians,” are killed by drones, she said.

She challenged the increasing use of the word “medieval” to describe the actions of radicals in the Middle East.

“Global media, both Western and Arab, often claim that Islam does not believe in freedom of expression and is stuck in medieval times,” said Sheikha Moza.

Why does the BBC make no mention of the serious questions that Qatar’s support for Jihadis raise?

The revelation casts serious doubt on the Gulf state’s insistence that it does not support terrorists, including jihadists in Syria and Iraq.

It will also add to growing calls on the British Government to put pressure on Qatar to crack down on terrorist financiers following the murder of two British aid workers in Syria.

It is simple enough to ‘Fisk’ the article and demonstrate that it conforms to every jihadi propagandist template…so again why does the BBC not take issue with the piece?

Possibly because the BBC itself has been guilty of promoting the same terrorist narrative about foreign policy, Western ‘double standards’ and that ‘Muslim lives matter’, telling us that the Islamism and The Holy War is not Islam, telling us that this is a modern creation with no relevance to the religion, that there is no ‘Muslim community’ (except when ‘the Muslim Community’ is upset and angry about foreign policy…non-Muslim foreign policy that is…’racist’?).

The BBC feeds the terrorist grievance industry and enables the recruitment process (and all that time asking ‘What is it that causes our young British Muslims to bcome radicalised?’)  whilst closing down real debate on the issues.

The road to Hell is said to be paved with good intentions.  The BBC is dragging us allr apidly down that road whilst applauding its own ‘humanity’.

Sandi Toksvig makes Hitler jibe about Nigel Farage

Sandi Toksvig disclosed last month that she has given up her role on Radio 4′s The News Quiz in order to focus on launching the Women’s Equality Party.

Toksvig saved her most cutting remarks for Nigel Farage. ‘I watched the count for South Thanet and I found myself cheering for the Tory candidate,’ she told the audience. ‘I hate Farage for that, I really do. He made me cheer a Tory, the b—-rd.’

She then went on to refer to the testicle the Ukip leader lost to cancer, joking about what Farage and Hitler have in common: ‘Farage kept having pictures of him defaced with Hitler moustaches. I mean he’s not really like Hitler. Okay, he has a German wife, he hates foreigners, he only has one testicle and he was defeated.’

What happened to UKIP’s Douglas Carswell today can be laid at the door of organisations like the BBC that deliberately seek to portray UKIP as a racist, Islamophobic Nazis who would like nothing better than to gun down immigrants.  The BBC gives a spurious sanction to people to attack members of UKIP.

Always curious how the BBC made it its job to discredit and vilify the EDL when it was the leftwing UAF that began much of the violence at any marches…that’ll be the UAF run by the Unite union with connections to extremist Muslims and of course the puppet masters of the Labour Party.

Always curious how the BBC downplays Muslim violence and looks to deny any connection between Islam and the actions of those who do it ‘in the name of Islam’ and yet it is the same BBC that tries to paint others as violent and extreme when they are not.

The BBC does more harm to this society than good.  The BBC is dangerous.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPDQ8rrupEA

It must be nice to have the abundant resources of the BBC available to you to promote your own personal agendas…such as gay marriage.

In 2013 when we had a vote to legalise gay marriage the BBC broadcast an epsiode of Mrs Brown’s Boys which involved a gay marriage the night before the vote in Parliament ….the intention clearly to persuade people of the correct way to think about this subject.

Blatant propaganda being broadcast on the BBC with the intent of influencing the vote…..the BBC knew, or desperately hoped, that ‘Mrs Brown’, with a huge following, may have some influence…and that was admitted with their coverage of the recent vote in Ireland when they repeatedly broadcast ‘Mrs Brown’s’ latest comments promoting gay marriage….

The BBC clearly thinks ‘Mrs Brown’ has the power to influence how people think and it is an admission that its broadcast in 2013 was a deliberate attempt to do just that with a one-sided programme that was pure pro-gay marriage campaigning on the BBC shilling.

The BBC will no doubt argue that it is part of its remit to promote tolerance, civil society and social cohesion…..but who decides what that entails, what ‘Society’ should look like?….here it was the BBC deciding before the vote in Parliament…surely it should have been the other way round if at all with Parliament voting then the BBC promoting the will of Parliament.

Middle of the week and time for a new one of these! Enjoy it and detail the bias here!

The BBC are going overboard on one of their ‘special’ investigations that has uncovered a shocking figure….500,000 people have been ‘forced’ to have pre-payment meters installed over the last 5 years.

No other news outlet seems in the slightest bit concerned, not even the Guardian as far as I can see.  Only the BBC has blitzed us all day with this revelation…..never mind that their own graph shows that there was a huge rise in 2009…

Of course there’s no context…no numbers of people who were cut off pre-2009…and figures for pre-payment meters are only available from 2009 apparently so hard to judge what went on before isn’t it?

This is an old story…the National Housing Federation ran a campaign from 2006 to 2010 to reduce pre-payment tariffs….

From 2006 to 2010, the National Housing Federation lead a national campaign to ensure that prepay meter customers don’t pay a penny more than quarterly billed customers. As of April 2010, all prepay meter customers now pay the same or less than quarterly billed prices.

The campaign was launched in January 2007, when the six million energy customers who pay up front to heat and light their homes via prepayment meters paid over £100 per year more than customers who pay quarterly for the energy. Some prepayment customers were being charged £300 a year more than those on higher incomes paying by online debits.

An old story so why has the BBC disinterred it in such a big way?  Can’t imagine that it could possibly be a project to make people think that bad things happen under a Tory government?  The next 5 years bringing us an entirely negative interpretation of events with the BBC seeking out stories that paint the government in the worst possible light just as the BBC seeks out the unemployed, single mothers and their ilk who are so cruelly treated by this world.

Speaking of which the BBC illustrated their tale of woe about the pre-payment meters by having on an unemployed single mother, cruelly treated by this world, in debt and forced to have a pre-payment meter…..she wasn’t sure how she’d cope with all the bills and also being taken to court for not paying her Television license……oops what???…suddenly the BBC lost interest and you could hear the strangled tones as the presenter moved rapidly on.

10,000 a year in Wales alone get dragged throught the courts on behalf of the BBC….in the UK as a whole it was 193,000 people in 2012 taken to court.

Why doesn’t 5Live do a special investigation into that?  Especially as nearly all the victims will be from the poorest households so  (usually) beloved of the BBC.

Best laugh I had all day!

Time for a new one of these. Sorry about my absence in recent times but two close family bereavements in succession have somewhat taken my eye off BBC bias. Anyway, I am back. So detail the bias here.

The BBC is feeding the Black grievance industry and victimhood narrative, and worse, promoting the idea that all whites are racist, and blacks the victims of that racism….a very dangerous and destructive line that sets one group against another.

Justin Webb demonstrates what is so often wrong with BBC interviewers…they go in with preconceived notions that any interviewee has to then defend themselves against rather than the BBC asking neutral questions intended to genuinely discover what is going on in any given situation that has suddenly got their interest.

Webb in this interview (08:48) with British police officer Michael Matthews, author of “We Are The Cops”, who has long experience of how American police operate, began with the prejudice that American police are brutal, racist, violent and a regard themselves as beleagured ‘superheros’ setting themselves against the rest of the population, the police not being part of the community.

Matthews soon put Webb right on just about every criticism.

Webb’s approach is all too often reflected in the rest of the BBC when it comes to reporting on recent events in the US, reporting as ‘fact’ that America is a racist society and that white police officers are gunning down black men because the white officers are racist.

The BBC plays a dangerous game feeding into the black activists game of race baiting, race hustling and facilitating the grievance industry and the line that Blacks are victims of white People’s prejudices at all times.

Here are just some of the BBC’s own prejudices where it casually accepts that events in Ferguson and Baltimore and elsewhere are caused by police racism…

The Costco heir who became a voice for Baltimore

Justin Brotman is a human rights activist, and the son of one of the co-founders of wholesale superstore Costco. And as the voice behind the @Bipartisanism Twitter account, he became one of the main drivers of a campaign to change the public perception of what happened in Baltimore last week.

“I think what we’re seeing is a bit of a tipping point in American culture. With each incident, with video, with witnesses, we’re starting to think – wow, we really do have this problem in America,” Brotman said.

“People are starting to think ‘How many black men are in jail, and shouldn’t be? How many black men have been killed?’ That’s all starting to percolate clearly.”

Why do US police keep killing unarmed black men?

 

What a riot does achieve

So what box do we put the Freddie Gray story in?

It’s obviously a story – but it is none too rare, sadly not that unusual – and if you ask many in the black community, not in the least bit unexpected.

I heard one piece of commentary that more or less started “First there was Ferguson, now Baltimore”‘ – but in truth there has been a whole pile of incidents in between.

I haven’t the space to list them all – the 12-year-old boy shot dead in a park in Cleveland, Ohio, the student left bloody and bruised at the University of Virginia, the man fatally shot eight times in the back in South Carolina, the 44-year-old chased down and killed in Tulsa, Oklahoma, after volunteer officer pulled a firearm instead of a stun gun.

And there are more, culminating in Freddie Gray dying while in the custody of Baltimore police, after his spinal cord had been virtually severed. It’s unlikely you would sustain an injury like that simply by slipping as you stepped into the police wagon.

What the common features are of all these incidents is that the victims were black and the forces of law and order involved in them were for the most part white.

Which brings us back to the opinion piece that made the point that first there was Ferguson, then there was Baltimore. The writer is correct, insofar as they both resulted in looting, burning and vandalising – all playing out on our screens last night.

From the hapless Baltimore mayor through to the president the point has been made – rioting achieves nothing.

But, sadly it has. It has caught people’s attention – because it has conformed to the journalist’s law of what makes a story – it is rare, unexpected and unusual.

Perhaps the lesson is we need to take more notice of things that lead to the riots and sense of alienation by disaffected young African-Americans.

The white cop assaulting or shooting a black man may not be that unusual, but it has already led to dire consequences for those living in Ferguson and in Baltimore.

More black ‘victimhood’….you can’t call a thug a thug…

The unlikely origins of the word ‘thug’

In the wake of violence and unrest in Baltimore, media commentators as well as politicians – including President Barack Obama – called rioters “thugs”, and were criticised for it. But the term has a much older history.

In the US, “thug” is a loaded term.

“It’s this very effective way of suggesting that the people who are doing the rioting and who are being called thugs don’t actually have a right to their outrage,” she says.

That’s partly why there’s widespread disgust in the African American community over its use. Just take the response Baltimore Councilman Carl Stokes gave to CNN’s Erin Burnett over the word.

“It’s not the right word to call our children ‘thugs,'” Mr Stokes said. “These are children who have been set aside, marginalised, who have not been engaged by us.”

Garber isn’t surprised the word has become so loaded.“In some sense, the history of language is about people trying to wield power over other people,” she says.

“And so this is just one more example of that strife and that effort.”

Here is a typical BBC, very one-sided, look at the ‘problem’…..naturally the BBC doesn’t bother with any context or challenge to the lines being fed to us that blacks are treated more harshly than whites……..

Would it have been different if the Waco bikers were black?

Biker gangs in Waco, Texas, shot each other up and the police moved in to stop the shootings.  The police actually shot some of the bikers and arrested over 170…and yet black activists, and the BBC, are asking why there was no ‘tanks’ etc on the streets…it’s a race thing surely?

Well perhaps there were no tanks because, despite police shooting some bikers and arresting 170 or so of them, there were no mass riots, civil disorder and mass destruction in reaction to those shootings and arrests in contrast to how the black community reacted in Baltimore and Ferguson….here are those rioting bikers……

And yet there were heavily armed police at Waco…

Contrast with Baltimore and Ferguson….can you spot the difference?……

And you may remember a previous police action at Waco….guess that was police racism as well….or not as the ‘victims’ of police violence were white……….

How about those racist National Guardsmen?

or indeed back to Waco present day…….those racist cops arresting all these black boys……