The Luvvies are all out in force as they see the end is nigh for their easy life troughing aboard the BBC gravy train.
We’ve had BBC top brass manning the barricades with Hall and Harding telling us what a brilliant job they do, now we’ve got the Grunts coming out to join the frontline in the battle against the dark forces of evil that are arrayed against the BBC, that New Hope for the world.
Hall must be calling in a few favours and dusting off the address book in order to get the troops to answer the call to arms to save the BBC from the terrible Tories and their allies in the right wing Press.
Everyman and his dog are making some noise, including David Dimbleby. Apparently the whole news and entertainment industry will collapse without the BBC propping it up…not only that but the nation, nay, the world, will be a poorer place without it and its preaching.
The Writer’s Union, WGGB, has signed up for the cause, as has the NUJ and BECTU amongst other Media unions…..all lobbying hard to keep the licence fee going and their share of it coming their way. Even Hollywood has taken Aunties’ shilling.
I particularly liked this from a template protest letter that union members were instructed to bombard Parliament with….
BECTU is campaigning for a strong, independent and properly-funded BBC so it can carry out its duties as a public service broadcaster; protect quality journalism and programming, the World Service and the important cultural role it plays.
A functioning democracy depends upon its citizens hearing a range of arguments and having equal access to information and opinions in order to participate. The BBC plays a major role in presenting balanced, impartial news coverage which does not depend on the personal prejudices and foibles of media moguls or commercial pressure to appease shareholders.
A functioning democracy does indeed depend upon its citizens being properly informed and able to hear a range of arguments…unfortunately they don’t get that from the BBC….what they get is a very left wing slant on the news and deliberate attempts to downplay or hide relevant facts that would, if broadcast or published, completely alter the narrative that the BBC is actually feeding the Public.
And it is amusing that the creative types need a template letter, shouldn’t they be just the people to come up with something unique, inspiring and gamechanging?
The Guardian reports that ‘Jonathan Dimbleby warns of ‘powerful vested interests’ attacking BBC licence fee’
Broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby has hit out at the BBC’s “enemies” and warned against cuts to the licence fee….“the nation would lose massively if the BBC were to face any kind of demise”.
“I believe that while there are powerful vested interests who would like to see the BBC denied a licence fee, without a licence fee the BBC could not do what it does.”
“The BBC has enemies, it has powerful enemies. It has powerful enemies in the press and powerful enemies in Westminster – some for ideological reasons, some for straight commercial reasons.”
Curious how anyone who criticises the BBC or thinks it may need reforming in any way is classed as an ‘enemy’ of the BBC.
Does Dimbleby think that the BBC is sacred, too sacred to mention at all….perhaps like Charlie Hebdo he’d like to see Murdoch and his ilk machine gunned for having the temerity to challenge the might and majesty of the BBC.
The licence fee is totally iniquitous….why should you have to pay for a service that you may not use at all? OK, you could make a case for a ‘national broadcaster’ but why should anyone have to pay for the BBC if they only want to watch Sky?
BBC funding should come out of general taxation with the added benefit that the less well off will pay less and the rich more. The other benefit is that the BBC will stop hounding people, mostly the poorest in society, for their money….often with menaces.
Will that mean that the BBC is dependent on the largesse of politicians? They already are….hence the mobilisation of the ‘Ain’t Half Hot Mum’ brigade to defend the licence against the predations of the Conservative Party and Fox News.
Bollox to the beeb
The Dimbleby family has been sponging off the TV licence fee for over 50 years. It started with the father, Richard and now the sons David & Jonathan are continuing. No due process was followed when the question of hiring the younger Dimblebys came up.
When he talks of “vested interests”, I wonder if he is referring to his family’s vested interest is in seeing the TV licence fee continue & certainly increase as it means more money can be siphoned off into the Dimbleby family coffers.
If Al Beeb is as good as it says it is, it should have the confidence to stand on its own two feet and survive without the aid of a compulsory, archaic and unjust poll tax .
If you agree with this, vote here ……………..
https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/end-the-bbc-licence-fee
“BBC funding should come out of general taxation”
Can’t agree, unless it’s to fund ONLY that which cannot be provided by commercial entities and is deemed public service. Where the BBC treads on the toes of commercial entities it must stand on its own feet. There must be an opportunity to opt out of the BBC and general taxation removes even the small opt-out ability we currently have.
Totally agree with your can’t agree.
General taxation is the Whittingdale option, and does zero to encourage any change in the output that has caused many to opt out of supporting the BBC even if it means losing services the rest of the civlised world freely enjoy.
Load it in and the state compulsion only embeds further.
Whilst a factor the whole legal/tvl farce is a sideshow.
The BBC is an unaccountable law unto itself, and too often seeks to sway policy and social engineer its merry way.
It can be inaccurate, lacks objectivity and integrity. Yet self-oversees and ruthlessly censors anyone who takes issue. All in secret, ‘purposes of’ excluded.
Popping that along with education, health, defence, police, fire, etc to get a rigged QT audience or .’Snog, Marry, Avoid’ will not help any party’s chances with my vote at the next election.
If the bbc is funded in any way other than by voluntary subscription, it will never be purged of the communists/ socialists who dominate it and everything it stands for. If the bbc and its supporters win the battle to be funded by public money, whether by licence fee or general taxation, they will be emboldened in their efforts to impose their socialism on our country. Just as with the withdrawal from the EU, we cannot afford to lose to them.
Middle class socialism essentially boils down to living off the peasants and telling them what to do. Saying the “phrase” social justice in every other sentence absolves you from the charge of being a parasite.
Just make payment of the licentious fee voluntary.
If al-Beeb is as much loved as they say it is then it shouldn’t be a problem.
I’m uncertain about the annual licence fee, I am happy to pay it to keep advertisements off the screen, but the Beeb’s own tedious trailers are almost as bad.
I never watch BBC television in real time, I use the iPlayer, so technically I am not obliged to pay the fee, but because I have a television & computers the idea of doing battle & trying to claim I do not watch live TV is something I have no energy for. This in itself is an outrage, why should I have to prove my innocence?
But what really annoys me is that I work in Europe for up to six months a year, why cannot I, as a licence payer, not get access to the iPlayer television whilst I’m outside the country? If all licence payers get a personal access code for the iPlayer that runs for twelve months anyone working abroad or even on a fortnights holiday can get the full years value of the licence fee.
There are easy ways to watch iPlayer abroad, just google VPN
I believe you’d have to pay for any VPN service capable of streaming video. Which is somewhat galling if you’ve already paid your licence fee.
‘Curious how anyone who criticises the BBC or thinks it may need reforming in any way is classed as an ‘enemy’ of the BBC’
If Dimbs Senior really was a champion of truth and vanguisher of propaganda, this effort will have him turning in his grave.
In fact Joseph Goebbels will be spinning too, in embarrassment.
The whole thing is based around un-named bogeym… persons in dark places plotting foul deeds against sainted Auntie.
What next, posters in the trail breaks with Murdoch holding Ian Katz aloft on his bayonet? Plucky Clare Balding in her Land Girl best extolling the virtues of digging the vitality of Strictly? Loose lips sinks Sherlock? Home Guard posts in EastEnders… ‘Oi… Pay that licence fee… You want Netflix marching in the Square?’.
An un-BBC Activities committee looking for critics under the bed? (OK, I have jumped a decade).
Talk about clunky. They must be in some kind of funk to be wheeling out the old boys with their Panzerfausts in the rubble with this tripe.
Soon we’ll have a quivering Lord Hall Hall in his tatty greatcoat, arm behind his back, inspecting a line of BBC Jugend, pausing to pinch the cheek of a wide-eyed Jon Donnison as he prepares for his next secret mission in a leaky boat.
A Downfall spoof is sure called for.
“The whole thing is based around un-named bogeym… persons in dark places plotting foul deeds against sainted Auntie.”
… Sainted Auntie? Dirty pervy old unle Beeb more like. They have no right to demand the trust and respect of the public when they covered up for this country’s most prolific paedophile for 5 decades!
I stand corrected.
The BBC seems to be getting a little fraught over the lack of Government Ministers being put up for their programming, and I suspect some at Auntie see the writing on the wall, and that the left wing chickens nurtured of the last five years are coming home to roost.
I heard David Vance on Five Live the other night discussing BBC bias with Stephen Nolan. When Vance pointed out that when the exit poll was published the BBC seemed every bit as shocked and horrified as Labour and the Lib Dems Nolan simply denied it full stop. This despite the delicious evidence on the night, still, and forever, available on YouTube.
This morning Five Live are in mourning, desolate at the death of a seventeen year old suicide bomber, and grasping at every straw to defend the faith. The Islamic faith, that is.
I’m sorry, but part of me hopes dearly Media City is targeted by one of Five Live’s beloved suicide killers. It would be well deserved.
David Starkey is on Five Live now and Burden is about to ask him about the SNP and the Nazis. Poor girl. He will rip her limb from limb.
Still waiting for news about the victims of this nice mans misguided escapades.
Was there any innocent women and children killed? how many families have been devastated?
Or are the crocodile tears of the ones who spawned him more important?
I heard the Starkey interview, it didn’t last long before burden decided that they were out of time, funny that, because before the interview started sneering nicky decided that they would use the Magna Carta chat to ‘out’ Starkey on his extreme views on Scottish nationalism..”Maybe he will recant”, sneered campbell. How wrong he was, as soon as Starkey got started he was stopped.
As for our local Yorkshire lad, a lovely kid apparently, it reminds of that old adage that my Yorky workmates used to have a laugh with…’Yorkshire born, Yorkshire bred, thick in’t arm, always wanted to fight for ISIS and wish myself dead’.
I may have got that a bit wrong but the point is that a Yorkshire lad was the last thing he was but the bbc want to paint all these ‘victims’ (apparently he was groomed) as all of our problem because they are just like us really?
My favourite bit was the old lefty confusion and hypocrisy, what he did wasn’t his fault, the jihadi was young, he was only 15 and didn’t know what he was doing, but, if allowed, not long after he would have been allowed to vote in every election as suddenly he knows everything and isn’t a poor innocent victim anymore…pathetic.
The best thing I’ve heard on the bbc recently was on the radio when they were working on a transmitter, from 9am (just in time for sneering nicky’s ground shaking phone in) all there was to be heard was white noise, i was bliss, like the best noise ever heard. The whole warped lot needs bringing down.
Jonathan Dimbleby, “the nation would lose massively if the BBC were to face any kind of demise”
With the exception of a few exceptional science documentaries on BBC 4 I have not watched, nor listened to any BBC programs for a considerable time. I haven’t lost massively. On the contrary, my blood pressure is lower, I feel calmer, I am no longer depressed and feel more content. However this does reduce my options in contributing to this site.
The trouble is that while you don’t watch, the population all around you is being drip-fed a skewed version of the facts, under the mistaken impression that because the BBC says it’s impartial, it is impartial. And the effects of that will impact upon you in the end.
Roland, your right. Let’s hope they all see the light and get all their news and views from a selection of unbiased and independent sources preferably via the internet. Abolish the BBC poll tax.
Listening to Al Beeb in far West Wales this morning, and they are still pouring over why Labour lost the elections and how the polls got it wrong?
Well let me put them out of their misery in one line – Labour voters switched to UKIP. There!
UKIP? Who are they? Oh yes, that party that took the 3rd largest share of the vote in the election, the party that were never out of the bbc headlines with one negative story after another, the party that now can’t get a two minute slot on any bbc programme!!
Funny that, the bbc aren’t biased though, nah, totally impartial. Until the EU referendum comes around that is.
Why should anybody who votes for the UKIP have to pay for the BBC?
The marxists used to like to consign things to the oblivion of history. I think that is ideal for the BBC. No reform just oblivion.
It has been a leftwing outfit for 50 years and recruited only it’s ideological fellow travellers.
Besides that it is so bloody up itself and as boring as hell. It’s compulsory leftwing drama is crap and it has lost most sport. What is left? Eastenders and reality shows about antiques and houses.
If it went we would get used to it after a week or two.
“…reality shows about antiques and houses.”
You forgot the cooking. Endless shows for Leftie foodies.
The crypto-Marxists in support of Islam, truth is stranger than fiction. The nastiest movement in history supporting the efforts of the formerly nastiest organisation in history in its attempt to regain the coveted #1 position.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has an instructive story somewhere in his writings. At a camp in the Gulag the prisoners were assembled at an unusual time. The camp commander told the assembly, in sombre tones, that Joseph Stalin had died, and instructed them to remove their caps as a mark of respect. The prisoners complied, they threw their caps into the air with whoops of joy and celebration.
A suicide bomber dies, my cap is in the air. If the event had been at Broadcasting House we could all have celebrated.
I believe that while there are powerful vested interests who would like to see the BBC denied a licence fee…
Ha ha ha ha. Oh, my aching sides.
Now just remind me: the Murdoch Empire and the BBC – which one is it has 70% of the UK market and is hellbent on being ‘the world’s broadcaster’?
There will never be a better time to deal with the BBC.
I am very encouraged by the fact that the tories and UKIP have realised that appearing on the broadcast versions of left-wing student magazines like Today, PM, Newsnight or Five Live only allows the activists masquerading as journalists on those programmes to ambush their political opponents and portray them as “far right” homunculi worthy only of contempt from their much loved national treasure betters.
The only thing duller than an all left-wing news programme with an endless parade of marginally literate single-issue “campaigners” masquerading as academics and experts talking hysterical crap to outraged BBC evil-tory-cuts correspondents (with their children all at the same house-price selective state schools); is jeremiads from the pigs with their snouts and egos bathing in the license fee funded troughs like Dimbleby and no doubt Mitchell and Webb, Eddie Izard and the class war hobbit.
Its nearly as much fun watching them squirm and get it so badly wrong as 8th May (or the day of national catastrophe) was throughout the useless corrupt outfits output…..
” ‘Jonathan Dimbleby warns of ‘powerful vested interests’ attacking BBC licence fee’”
For example those who do not watch the BBC but are forced by Law to pay the BBC in order to watch other channels.
” ‘Jonathan Dimbleby warns of ‘powerful vested interests’ attacking BBC licence fee’”
As opposed to the “powerful vested interests” who defend the licence fee.
“…what they get is a very left wing slant on the news and deliberate attempts to downplay or hide relevant facts that would, if broadcast or published, completely alter the narrative that the BBC is actually feeding the Public.”
I think this is the most concise and true description of the BBC’s bias.
How many times have I seen or heard BBC presenters interrupt politicians when they’re talking sense and allow them to waffle on ad-infinitum when they’re talking crap?! TOO MANY TIMES!
What we need to keep in mind is that, despite the opinion polls leading up to the last election, the people of Britain weren’t as stupid as the BBC thought we were, and the BBC need to learn from that, because there is a silent majority here that is growing – even amongst ethnic minorities – against the erosion of British society.
You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.
#Edward: We the people were not only not as stupid as the BBC thought we were, we were also not so stupid as to tell ‘them’ what we were really thinking beforehand. We the people are sick and tired of the PC toxic atmosphere permeating the BBC; the Orwellian use of stick-on labels to turn the News into Propaganda; the Orwellian passion to use the News to capture the present & control our view of history & manipulate the future.
Johnofenfield,
“#Edward: We the people…”
Would that be “We the people” who voted for the UK Independence Party (12.6% of the people)?
Or “We the people” who voted for the Conservative Party (36.9% of the people)?
Or “We the people” who voted for neither of them (50.5% of the people)?
Please clarify.
dez
Labour lost. Get over it.
Please don’t be a prat a;; your life ?
John Anderson,
“Labour lost. Get over it.”
Yes, I had noticed. I’ve also noticed you have ignored my request for clarification.
Oh, what a surprise…
I dreamed that we set the BBC free. Freed of all constraint to be impartial and the rest of that bollox after the abolition of the tax and the setting up of subscription channels.
All that creative energy set loose without the dead hand of BBC bureaucracy. How the people flocked to sign up. it was truly amazing. Plays, comedy shows as good as anything ever seen or heard. Incisive current affairs. Sport again of real class.
Then I woke up and knew that one of the last scelrotic and useless state organistions was still here. The British Leyland of the airwaves. Nevermind it was a good dream.