Well, how do you think the BBC is dealing with Jihad in Paris? I was interviewed on the BBC yesterday and I did get to express my strong views. Anjem Choudary was also interviewed and I was not allowed to engage directly with that lowlife parasite. Maybe a good thing. I have also watched SKY news on this and they are serially dodgy too.
Why should we have imagined that radical Wahhabism would create moderates? Or why could we imagine that a doctrine of “One leader, One authority, One mosque: submit to it, or be killed” could ever ultimately lead to moderation or tolerance?
It didn’t take long for the BBC to revert to type and start peddling the Islamist line only hours after the slaughter of fellow journalists by AK47 toting Islamists and telling us that Muslims are the real victims of this attack, whilst the real threat is from the Far Right.
Today we had wall to wall Muslim apologists telling us ‘How terrible the shootings were’…but then came the inevitable weasle word…‘however’.
Apparently Newsnight was choc-a-bloc with them (h/t Is the BBC Biased?) but of course no day would be complete without the likes of sly Islamist Tariq Ramadan and Ibrahim Mogra, Assistant Secretary General of the Islamist Muslim Council of Britain, who told us that we should respect Islam and consider ‘common human courtesy’ before we criticise the religion…..that’ll be the religion that tells Muslims not to make friends with Christians and Jews, in fact it tells them to kill unbelievers.
Nicky Campbell was asking ‘Has this made you think again about freedom of speech?‘…..but that question should really have been ‘Has this made you think again about freedom of religion?’.
Muslims and their apologists fill the airwaves with talk of the insult to Islam…Newsnight dragged in Iqbal Sacranie, ex head of the extremist MCB, who once told us there is no such thing as a moderate Islam, nor an extreme Islam, there is just Islam. Today he was demanding censorship and blasphemy laws.
If you consider that the Koran calls unbelievers unclean, people who will suffer eternal torment in hell and trashes the Christian religion’s deepest held beliefs then you can see the hypocrisy when they tal of insults to Islam and the hurt feelings of Muslims.
According to Muslims Jesus is not the Son of God, the Holy Trinity is a Kufar belief, Jesus did not die on the cross and was not resurrected. All central to Christian belief and yet day in day out trashed in Mosques and Muslim schools up and down the country as Muslims like to make the provocative claim that Jesus is one of theirs….a Muslim prophet.
And fight them on until there is no more sedition (literal translation) and religion becomes Allah’s in its entirety (Surat Al-Anfal 8:39).
We’ve had many of the usual suspects peddling their Islamist views on the BBC but there was one blatantly missing, the cut rate Tariq Ramadan that is Mehdi Hasan.
Not a peep from him about Charlie Hebdo, at least not in his usual form of a long diatribe apparently saying one thing but meaning the entirely opposite as he tries to ingratiate himself with the secular Establishment and worm his way into a position of influence from which he can push his Islamist fantasies…being the devout Muslim that he insists he is.
He has made a lot of comments on Twitter...but they are not in solidarity with the dead of Charlie Hebdo, instead he prefers to spend his time defending Islam…..and indeed his latest retweet seemed particularly divisive and seemed to indicate a certain hesitancy about denouncing the killers of the journlalists:
Whilst the normal over productive Hasan has not bothered to pen any commentary denouncing the killers the self-serving Hasan did publish a letter to ‘angry Islamists’ in 2012, in which he, on the face of it, criticised their ‘extremism’. This letter re-appeared yesterday in the New Statesman but has since been taken down for some reason.
However no fear…..someone else thinks Hasan is the dog’s doodahs….the BBC’s Mishal Husain:
You have to remember whenever you read something from Hasan that he has told Muslims to take jobs in the media in order to proselytise for Islam, to push the case for Islam, to gain influence in order to make Islam more powerful and dominant. Ironically perhaps the pen for Hasan is mightier than the sword in the fight for Islamic dominance.
Hasan is a Muslim preacher but a Shia one…so when he criticises ISIS and says the ‘Caliphate’ does not represent him he isn’t being progressive and secular he means a Sunni Caliphate that defines Islam as ‘Sunni’ is not something he can accept….ISIS (and many Sunnis) does not consider Shias to be ‘Muslim’.
Hasan criticises the Wahhabi Saudis for demolishing the house of one of Muhammed’s wives….he of course as a Shia is no supporter of the House of Saud…so such criticism is again a sign of his slippery nature as he pretends to be a critic of ‘Islam’. Does he similarly criticise the building of the Al Aqsa Mosque on top of the holiest Jewish site at Tempe Mount when Islam conquered and colonised the Middle East? No, of course not.
When Hasan criticises those who challenge the teachings of Islam and rages about Islamophobia remember this is the man who, not only is a devout Muslim and a preacher, tells his followers that non-Muslims are ignorant cattle, they are immoral animals, they are Kufar.
No problem insulting and demonising other religions there then.
Extremists point to western foreign policy to explain their acts. Why do we ignore them?
Often, the likes of Michael Adebowale and Michael Adebolajo, who used violence to make “points” about the Muslim world in Woolwich, aren’t “religious fanatics”. The trigger we refuse to see is our foreign policy.
And why has he maintained a studied silence about Charlie Hebdo? Could it be that he recently called for the prosecution, bullying and victimisation of those who criticise Islam or rather those whom he claims are ‘smearing Islam’…
Note that after intense criticism Hasan asked for this to be added to the piece in the Guardian about him:
“I’m all in favour of free speech and the robust criticism of all religious beliefs. But it’s the made-up stories and the smearing of individuals and whole communities that I have an issue with. ‘Why isn’t anti-Muslim bigotry as unacceptable in the press as anti-Jewish bigotry?’ That’s the question that needs answering.”
What about the ingrained anti-Christian and anti-Jewsih bigotry in the Koran?
Good though that a fellow Muslim at the BBC, who said that she felt she could use her job on the Today programme to further people’s understanding of Islam, should support this charlatan Islamist.
The actions of the Islamist killers are ‘unislamic?’ The Koran orders Muslims to defend Islam if it is ‘assailed’…..
If they … assail your religion, then fight the heads of disbelief. …
Fight them! Allah will chastise them at your hands, and He will lay them low and give you victory over them 9:12-14
The savage murder of twelve people is not the price for freedom of speech it’s the price of an extraordinarily dangerous experiment with immigration that the ‘elite’ has been playing whilst all the time lying to us.
In 2009 the Guardian, of all papers, published this:
In a week in which the European election results have shown the potency of the anti-immigrant vote in many countries, including Britain, Christopher Caldwell’s contention that immigration has not only changed Europe but revolutionised it has a topical plausibility. Immigration, he says, and above all Muslim immigration, has planted in the heart of a weak and confused civilisation communities, rapidly growing in number, that have already changed Europe to suit their needs and beliefs. And the chances are, he insists, that in the future we will bend to their will rather than that they will bend to ours.
The truth is that immigration was not inevitable on the scale on which it took place, and that its effects have ranged from the pleasing – more ethnic food – to the positive – more cultural diversity – to the truly terrible – race riots, social tension, terrorist attacks.
When the Danish cartoons furore was at its height, newspapers the length and breadth of Europe upheld the right of free speech – yet the vast majority of them somehow neglected to reprint the offending sketches. The code insists, says Caldwell, that Islam must always be defined as a peaceful religion, yet ignores the way in which Muslim leaders in Europe lay down red lines that the non-Muslim majority is not supposed to cross. Once Muslim majorities emerge in certain towns and areas, Muslims will demand the right to live not only differently, but also separately, and Europe will lose control, Caldwell believes, of significant chunks of its territory.
He is right to argue that immigration on the scale that Europe has experienced constitutes a risky experiment to which we need not have submitted ourselves, and of which the final result is not yet clear. He is right that we frequently talk about it in stupid and dishonest ways. If his book sharpens a so far sluggish debate, it will have served an important purpose.
In 2009 then they were hoping that the debate about this ‘risky experiment’ and its consequences would have developed and taken on these important issues. Clearly that didn’t happen…..the results of which are being played out on the streets of Europe ever more frequently, ever more bloodily.
Unless politicians and the Media, especially the dominant BBC, start to challenge the false narrative that the West is to blame for all the ills in the Middle East, that our foreign policy is to blame for terrorism across the world, then there is no hope of dealing with the threats posed by an ideology that feeds off such a narrative despite it being absolutely untrue….after all the people of Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan view the Jihadists as foreigners themselves…..so straight away there is a conflict with Muslim (Usually Pakistani) assertions that British foreign policy is the problem when they are the foreigners themselves invading and destroying those countries in an attempt to create their Islamic paradise on earth.
We keep hearing that the narrative must change…..so change it. And then start looking at immigration and major issues such as the importation of alien and extreme ideologies that seriously conflict with our values and beliefs long nurtured and defended over the course of two thousand years and not to be carelessly thrown away by a weak and submissive elite unwilling to stand up for their own beliefs whilst at the same time unwilling to bring themselves to challenge beliefs diametrically opposed to theirs however much that will lead to the destruction of their society and everything they presumably hold dear.
One caller was a doctor called Ali who told Campbell that the problem stemmed from changes introduced to the doctor training programme by Patricia Hewitt under Labour and that doctors were on a mass exodus to Australia and New Zealand.
Campbell suddenly lost interest in Ali.
Now wouldn’t any journalist worth his salt pounce upon that and demand to know what changes were made, how they effected the training and why it had such a negative effect and is the programme still being used?
Campbell showed not the slightest interest for some reason even when another senior doctor came on and said Ali had hit the nail on the head and that the major issue was indeed a shortage of doctors which had its roots in issues going back 7 years or so.
Burnham: Cameron’s been saying it every week in the Commons: “Oh, the shadow health secretary wants to spend less on health than us.”
NS: Which is true, isn’t it?
Burnham: Yes, it is true.
Oh yes, another issue…European legislation:
Obliging doctors to adhere to the European Working Time Directive has had an effect on patient care and on medical training with the Royal College of Surgeons of England reviewing research in 2009 and finding that there were not enough surgeons to fill rotas if they worked only 48 hours a week. They further noted that 90% trainees were exceeding their rostered hours on a weekly basis, 85% reported coming in to do operations on their days off, only 25% felt the working patterns held by their human resources departments accurately reflected their actual working hours, and 55% reported being pressured to falsely declare their actual hours worked. More than two thirds felt the quality of their training and operative skills had deteriorated as a result of shift-working patterns brought in to meet working time regulations, and 71% felt the reduction in working hours had not led to any improvement in their work/life balance.
The Association of Surgeons in Training have stated that they believe 65 hours a week is required to gain the necessary training opportunities, and that 80% of respondents to a survey they ran would support an opt-out of the European Working Time Regulation (EWTR) to protect training.
In rational, post-Enlightenment Europe, religion has long since been relegated to a safe space, with Judaism and Christianity the safe targets of satire in secular western societies.
Not so Islam. The battle within Islam itself between Sunni and Shia, so evident in the wars of the Middle East, and the fight between extremist interpretations of Islam such as those of Islamic State and Muslims who wish to practice their religion in peace, is now being played out on the streets of Europe with potentially devastating consequences for social cohesion.
These latest shootings may be the work of “lone wolves” but their consequences will ripple across Europe and provoke much soul-searching about the failure of integration over the past decades.
Immigrant communities are already being viewed with increasing suspicion in both France and Germany, with their significant Muslim populations, and even in the UK.
Note this which is at odds with the standard narrative of ‘psychologically unstable individuals’ that Frank Gardner for example used today to dismiss any connection to Islam:
France has already seen much more violence on its streets carried out in the name of religion over the past decades, although it has tried to write off most of its recent “lone wolf” attacks as the acts of mentally-unhinged individuals.
A hint of scepticism from Wyatt about that labelling of those attackers?
She even highlights this:
Some in its Jewish community have responded to increasing anti-Semitism and the killing of Jews in France and Belgium by Islamist extremists by emigrating to Israel and elsewhere.
Not the ‘Far Right’ then?
She states that:
Across western Europe, liberally-minded societies are beginning to divide over how best to deal with radical Islamism and its impact on their countries
But that’s not strictly true….there is a consensus that there is no problem with Islam and that it is perfectly compatible with secular, democratic societies….people who speak out in opposition to that belief are dismissed as Islamophobes and racists….just look at Germany right now.
The BBC wouldn’t be the BBC of course without the final word being along these lines:
Governments agonise over the potential for a backlash against Muslims living in Europe.
Today, mainstream Muslim organisations in the UK and France have unequivocally condemned the killings, saying that terrorism is an affront to Islam.
But the potential backlash, including support for far right parties and groups, may well hurt ordinary Muslims more than anyone else, leaving the authorities and religious leaders in western Europe wondering how to confront violence in the name of religion without victimizing minorities or being accused of ‘Islamophobia’.
Still, a fair effort. Soon to be gathering dust on some shelf somewhere long forgotten. Definitely not one for the college of journalism perhaps.
This is what the Guardian and the BBC would prefer you to see:
A savage attack on the offices of a satirical, left wing magazine. Ten staff are murdered as well as two police officers, and many others are injured. This wasn’t just an attempt to kill these people, it was an attack on the very basis of Western civilisation…that of essential freedoms.
Or freedoms we should have but which are curtailed by the thought police…prime guardian of the right to define what we should think and enforcer of that is of course our very own BBC.
The reaction to the murders was depressingly all too familiar…the hypocrisy piled upon hypocrisy, the weasel words, the burying of the truth by politicians, the Media and the Muslim organisations which were wheeled in to assure us that this has nothing to do with Islam.
On hearing the news of the attack I’m certain many of you reading this would soon have been wondering just how long before we would start to hear the subtle insinuations that this is blowback, that ‘Charlie Hebdo’ brought it upon themselves, that we must not do anything further to upset Muslims, we must not ‘provoke’ them, that Muslims are the first victims of this attack.
And you’d have been right.
Cameron at PMQs told us he stood four square behind democracy and freedom of speech…this is the man who denied people a referendum on Europe and has said he will sack any minister who doesn’t support his view on Europe.
Merkel told us this was an attack on freedom of speech, a core element of Western democracy…and yet she has spent the last week denouncing protestors who march against the Islamisation of Germany calling them racist and people with ‘hate in their hearts’. Will there be ‘lights out in Cologne’ tonight?
Malcolm Rifkind came onto the BBC and told us this was all about IS and Syria ( in fact the gunmen claim to be from Al Qaeda in the Yemen) trying to disassociate this from Islam in general, he told us the magazine went out of its way to criticise Muslim extremists…is he saying it’s their fault? He then essentially accepted the basic premise of the Islamic terrorist’s case by saying we should negotiate with them….this is one of the men who failed to intervene in Bosnia with disastrous results.
Then we had the pleasure of hearing Mohammed Shafiq, head of the Ramadan Foundation, on 5Live who told us that the cartoons published by Charlie Hebdo were ‘despicable’ and ‘insulting’…but of course he condemned the murders. However the real problem was that the attack would make it harder for Society to deal with Islamophobia and attacks on Muslims….and that we need to be less melodramatic about ‘freedom of speech’ being under attack. Of course we had the inevitable BBC presenter’s genuflexion towards political correctness when he asked ‘Are the killers Muslim?’…obviously trying to elicit the equally inevitable answer that ‘No, they are not…nothing Islamic about any of this at all…honest.’...an answer which indeed was quick in coming. Harry’s Place illustrates the slippery nature of Shaifq’s rhetoric.
Naturally no news story about Islam on the BBC is worth hearing without a quote from the extremist MCB….the MCB which many might believe was at the heart of the Trojan Horse affair where ‘conservative Muslims’ tried to hijack and Islamise British schools. In 2007 the MCB sent out a policy document to education authorities up and down the country urging them to ‘Islamise’ their schools…to make them Islam friendly…this was to be done in order to allow Muslim pupils to integrate properly by fully practising their religion in school….’The result of meeting Muslim needs in mainstream schools is that Islam and Muslims become a normal part of British life and that we become fully integrated in this way’.…..the threat was implicit…if you don’t allow this the Muslim pupils will not integrate and will become alienated and angry and then…well, who knows. The BBC refused to mention this document when reporting on the ‘Trojan Horse’ plot as it gave the lie to their own assertion that the ‘Trojan Horse’ plot was a ‘provocative hoax’….and that people who were concerned about the Islamisation of schools were paranoid and racist.
Then of course we have the BBC itself…we are hearing a lot about the horror of this attack but also about freedom of speech and the freedom of the Press…and yet it was the BBC who were one of the leaders of the attack on News International, an attack that was intended to close down if possible and certainly to muzzle as much as possible, a political and commercial rival which propagated ideas and thoughts that were abhorrent to the good, liberal, tolerant, folk at the BBC, amongst others.
Using the excuse of the phone hacking scandal, a crime not just perpetrated by Murdoch journalists though you might have thought so from the BBC’s partisan coverage, they set out to remove that allegedly treasured freedom of speech and freedom of the Press from one organisation in particular.
‘Leveson’ in effect is no different to the terrorists who try to intimidate people into silence, into not saying anything they disapprove of. An FBI agent once said that the only difference between the Islamist terrorist and the Islamist is that the terrorists carry AK47’s….meaning that their aims were exactly the same, just the methods were different….as with Gerry Adams who has given up the bullet for the ballot…but his aim is exactly the same…a united Ireland….the fight goes on.
You may remember this when Islamic countries tried to silence critics of Islam….
What is the difference between the terrorists in France murdering people who criticise Islam and those who use other methods to silence them? Are these countries also ‘unIslamic’?
The only difference is the lack of AK47s…however that threat was implicit, explicit even, as the head of the OIC stated….
“If the Western world fails to understand the sensitivity of the Muslim world, then we are in trouble,” he told the AP. He said provocative insults are “a threat to international peace and security and the sanctity of life.”
Sadly nearly all commentators refuse to admit that ‘peaceful Muslims’ can have the same aims as the violent ones. Here is a comment from today’s Spectator which tries to make that split:
Mohammed Moussaoui, head of the French Council of the Muslim Faith, said his organisation deplored the magazine’s treatment of Islam ‘but reaffirms with force its total opposition to all acts and all forms of violence’….
As Muslim leaders know, one of the jihadis’s aims is to persuade others that they speak for Islam – to promote the idea or a war between Islam and freedom.
The Spectator is trying to make a case that Islam promotes freedom of speech and religion. It does not. Until commentators and politicians begin to admit Islam has a problem with certain freedoms there will be no solution.
Sarah Joseph, editor of the British Muslim lifestyle magazine Emel, wrote in the Guardian: “Some countries that have reprinted the images – Spain, France, Italy and Germany – have a nasty history of fascism . . . Now the great shape-shifter of fascism seems to have taken on the clothes of ‘freedom of speech’.”
Back to the BBC and their resident expert on all things Islamic and terrorist, Frank Gardner, who speaks up telling us that there have been several attacks in France…mostly by psychologically disturbed people who have their own personal issues and problems…nothing to do with Islam you understand. He goes on to tell us that the cartoons in Charlie Hebdo were ‘insulting’….no, they were not intended to insult Muslims but to raise serious issues in a satirical and comic manner.
Then I heard a presenter ask ‘How much of an issue are the disenfranchised Muslims who become jihadis, go to Syria and then return?’
Now just where did the presenter get that word ‘disenfranchised’ from and why does she associate it with French Muslims who become Jihadis? It is almost BBC policy to make that link. Right there you see the problem with many at the BBC who blame society for the ‘anger and alienation’ of Muslim youth rather than putting the blame where it belongs…in Muslim teachings and with the Muslim terrorists themselves…..a tendency to shift the blame that the Telegraph notes…
[Some ] contextualise the attacks against the backdrop of alienation felt by many French Muslims.
Underlying all this was a persistent assumption. Islamist attacks are only ever reactions, only ever brought about by provocation from the West. All the way back to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s contract on the head of Salman Rushdie in 1989, we have accepted the idea that it is up to authors, artists and cartoonists to justify themselves in the face of threats and real violence.
“What a shame this much blood has had to be spilled for us to realise, finally, that we are digging our own graves when we allow thought to be crushed by accusations of unbelief, calling people infidels, and when we allow opinion to be countered with violence.”
As the New Statesman says there is an essential discussion to be had about society and what it should look like…..the question is will an influx of people with an ideology at odds with a secular democratic society endanger the cohesion and stability of that society?:
We have to stop mistaking healthy criticism of religion for racism, and must not let discussion of immigration and security elbow out the more important debate on secularism and citizenship.
Is Britain becoming too diverse to sustain the mutual obligations behind a good society and the welfare state?
The nation state remains irreplaceable as the site for democratic participation and it is hard to imagine how else one can organise welfare states and redistribution except through national tax and public spending. Moreover, since the arrival of immigrant groups from non-liberal or illiberal cultures it has become clear that to remain liberal the state may have to prescribe a clearer hierarchy of values.
The gulf between conservative Islam and secular liberal Britain is larger than with any comparable large group….for those of us who value an open, liberal society it is time to explain why it is superior to the alternatives.
Some claim that if people understood Islam more everything would be fine, they would be more tolerant, I think quite the contrary….the more they understand about it the more alien they would find it…authoritarian, collectivist, patriarchal, misogynist…..all sorts of things that Britain might have been 100 years ago but isn’t now.
‘Love is stronger than hate’
Ten people from Charlie Hebdo lost their lives in the pursuit of a civilised society. Let’s hope their sacrifice, knowing the dangers they faced, is not forgotten and all too soon turned back upon them by the voices of compromise and submission. Let’s hope that their values and beliefs are not buried with them.
Peter Allen on 5Live told us that this was an ‘attack on our fundamental beliefs’..…good for him…but just how long will that attitude last?
The Boston Bombs were, according to the BBC, the work of right wing white supremacists….as ‘all the evidence pointed to’ according to Evan Davis and Mark Mardell.
Similarly a mosque is allegedly firebombed in Sweden and the implied culprits are ‘far right, anti-immigration, neo-nazis’…never mind no one has been arrested and there is absolutely no evidence that indicated this….and what is more the BBC refuses to investigate the well known violence of the left in Sweden…or that of Muslim immigrants…instead we have one sided reports such as this:
An arsonist set fire to a mosque in the Swedish town of Eskilstuna on Thursday, injuring five people, police said.
Who is to blame…the BBC are quick to leap to conclusions:
The incident comes amid a fierce debate in Sweden over immigration policies.
The far right wants to cut the number of asylum seekers allowed into Sweden by 90%, while mainstream parties are intent on preserving the country’s liberal policy.
Police are treating the incident as arson but no arrests have been made so far, Mr Franzell added.
The BBC is pretty keen on telling us of the ‘threat’ from the Far Right in Sweden….
However all is not as it seems, never mind the BBC’s refusal to warn us about Muslim violence in Sweden, specifically anti-Semitic violence.
Did the Far Right fire bomb the mosque in Eskilstuna?
It seems not. Police now say the fire was an accident….and note the words of a Shia Muslim who states that the danger to him and his brethren comes from other Muslims not the Far Right….
“After the whole Twitter Left mobilized, including a couple of Ministers, who collectively screamed “racism” and blamed the Sweden Democrats, the Police announced that the fire in Eskilstuna mosque was not the result of an attack nor did it have a political motive. Today, the state Police says that it believes it was an accident. …
Meanwhile, Ali Hussein from the Shiite community in Malmo said in an interview with Sydsvenskan regarding threats to mosques:
‘- For large celebrations, we usually have guards out there but thankfully we have not had any direct threats. Possible threats come from other Muslim groups and not from the extreme right. And we of course hope that we avoid threats,’ he says.”
Makes you wonder if those other attacks were real or engineered for effect…..much as the ‘arson’ attack on the Darool Uloom school in London may have been just after the murder of Lee Rigby….any possibility it was done to incriminate the EDL and ‘remind’ people that Muslims are the real victims of terrorism having to suffer the enormous backlash and resultant, irrational, Islamophobia. We’ll never know as the police haven’t released the identities of those arrested, nor have they been charged…..possibly in the interests of ‘communtiy cohesion’ ala returnees from syria.…. ‘The police and MI5 are being careful about how to handle the returnees because they don’t want to disturb community cohesion.
No sign of a correction from the BBC yet concerning the cause of the mosque fire.
The BBC has been blitzing us with tales of doom about the ‘crisis’ in the NHS…a target of 95% of patients seen to inside of 4 hours at A&E….the crisis being that only 92.6% has been achieved.
The NHS is crumbling…never mind it was recently named as the best health service in the West and other health services do not have anywhere near as stringent targets.
No coincidence that Labour launched their election campaign with its central theme being the NHS a day before the figures for A&E targets were released….but the BBC doesn’t seem to have noticed that engineered ‘coincidence’ merely saying the timing could ‘hardly be worse for David Cameron’, as if it was a matter of luck.
With Miliband using all of his questions at PMQs to pin down the Prime Minister on figures from Macmillan Cancer Care that suggest 7,000 patients will be losing out on benefits, the attack was clearly planned in advance. Suspiciously quickly, as in within three minutes after the PM sat down, Mike Hobday from Macmillan was on the Daily Politics defending Miliband’s use of their figures.
Is the BBC being biased? In reality it doesn’t have to be openly biased…it just has to highlight and possibly exaggerate the problems that the NHS is suffering and keep them in the headlines for as long as possible…..helped by charities and other groups that seem to daily be revealing new ‘crises’ in the NHS and all reported by the BBC with little to no challenge.
Doing so will create an air of panic and doom and the belief that the NHS is under threat even if it is not in reality. With an election coming the BBC knows that is a powerful message.
An example of the BBC’s desperate twisting of the facts…..The BBC is making a huge fuss about these A&E figures…the targets not being met…and yet here their health correspondent, Nick Triggle, asks the question….‘Is the obsession with NHS targets justified?’ He concludes they have good and bad points but are a blunt instrument that can have detrimental effects on other parts of the NHS that suffer as resources are concentrated in one area to meet a specific target.
Curiously a week later, as Labour launches its election campaign, he has a change of heart asking ‘A&E: Does missing the target matter?’ This time he concludes they very much matter….‘It is these figures that are sending a shudder across the NHS and government.’
Curiously as I listened to various discussions on this subject during the day the condition of the Welsh NHS, under Labour control, was dismissed as irrelevant by Norman Smith, and other BBC reporters, telling us the situation has gone beyond party politics and is about who has a grip on the NHS in order to deal with the crisis…..erm…so it is political then…..it was after all Norman Smith who stated that the missed targets in A&E would have ‘profound political ramifications’. The BBC then went on to defend the Welsh NHS telling us of the wonders that the Labour government had done to try and restore a proper service. The A&E figures from Wales are seemingly irrelevant to the BBC.
Reports over the weekend suggested that Labour is set to make the health service a key election battleground should come as no surprise – nor should the timing.
In fact, some commentators believe, after the economy, the NHS could be the most important issue in the election campaign.
Well far from ‘reports over the weekend’ revealing Labour’s plans to place the NHS at the centre of its election campaign, it has been well known for years that this would be the case…the BBC after all has been bringing us NHS ‘disaster’ stories practically everyday and has been running an ‘NHS Winter Tracker’ which informs you of the state of the NHS in your region…why would the BBC do that? Because it thinks the bare figures, unadorned by explanation and reasons, would lead you to think the NHS was in meltdown.
So let’s shed a bit of light on the subject ourselves as the BBC fails to do so….the NHS is important, and Labour claims the Tories will cut the NHS and privatise it…….but isn’t that just a little hypocritical of Labour when they themselves would spend less than the Tories and were eager to privatise it?
But what did Labour say in its 2010 manifesto, when Burnham was still Health Minister?….bearing in mind that Labour complains loudly that just the act of reforming the NHS is problematic….
‘We will continue to press ahead with bold NHS reforms. All hospitals will become Foundation Trusts, with successful FTs given the support and incentives to take over those that are under-performing. Failing hospitals will have their management replaced. Foundation Trusts will be given the freedom to expand their provision into primary and community care, and to increase their private services – where these are consistent with NHS values, and provided they generate surpluses that are invested directly into the NHS.
We will support an active role for the independent sector working alongside the NHS in the provision of care, particularly where they bring innovation – such as in end-of-life care and cancer services, and increase capacity. ‘
Where changes are needed, we will be fair to NHS services and staff and give them a chance to improve, but where they fail to do so we will look to alternative provision.
Burnham claims that Labour only used private contractors to drive down waiting times but that clearly isn’t the case…the intent was to use them when they were more efficient and more effective than NHS services….Foundation Trusts themselves being semi-privatised services….never mind the budget busting PFI’s used to fund new hospitals.
So in summary…..Burnham, Labour, wanted to cut NHS spending and to privatise its services….and yet he claims….‘If the NHS stays on its current course it will be sunk by a toxic mix of cuts and privatisation.’
And just for fun, what did Labour want to do in its 2010 manifesto with the GP’s who now fail us so badly?
The GP access guarantee will ensure everyone has the right to choose a GP in their area offering evening and weekend opening.
We will ensure the NHS suits the lives of busy families expanding further the availability of GP-led health centres open seven days a week ‘8 til 8’ in towns and cities.
So they recognised that the lack of access to GP services was failing patients and needed reform.
And what about immigration….surely all this is a bit ‘bigoted’….
We understand people’s concerns about immigration – about whether it will undermine their wages or job prospects, or put pressure on public services or housing – and we have acted. Asylum claims are down to the levels of the early 1990s and net inward migration has fallen. We will use our new Australian-style points-based system to ensure that as growth returns we see rising employment and wages, not rising immigration – but we reject the arbitrary and unworkable Tory quota.
Our new Australian-style points-based system is ensuring we get the migrants our economy needs, but no more. We will gradually tighten the criteria in line with the needs of the British economy and the values of British citizenship, and step up our action against illegal immigration. There will be no unskilled migration from outside the EU.
We recognise that immigration can place pressures on housing and public services in some communities so we will expand the Migration Impact Fund, paid for by contributions from migrants, to help local areas.
Because we believe coming to Britain is a privilege and not a right, we will break the automatic link between staying here for a set period and being able to settle or gain citizenship.
I wonder if that all counts as part of the ‘race to the bottom’ as Labour now so rudely calls the competing party policies on immigration…except their own of course.
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