Yearly Archives: 2015

Here’s something that should shame many a BBC journalist, all those, such as Mark Mardell and Kevin Connolly, who report with all too much pleasure the rise of ISIS and the destruction of the nations of Syria and Iraq, those nations they tell us with disdain that were so carelessly ‘carved out’ by France and Britain, the border lines drawn so imperiously and casually and now being erased by the reincarnation of the Muhammedan blitz on the Middle East 1400 years ago.

At least one man had the guts to stand up for something he believes in, and to die for it…

Remembering Khaled al-Asaad, the Syrian archaeologist who dared to stand up to Isis

Erudite and bespectacled, he was the sort of Arab the Islamic State loathed. Khaled al-Asaad, an 81-year old archaeologist, was for the past four decades inseparable from Palmyra’s ancient ruins.

Beheaded in part for his role shielding them from the militants, they strung his headless body up on Graeco-Roman columns he once restored. His remains dangle there still.

On the coat-tails of a pornography of violence which saw the immolation of a captured pilot and the sexual enslavement of a captured aid worker before her murder, Isis still found, somehow, a way to shock.

In all this, one humble octogenarian dared, as the West has not, to defy the most chilling murders the present century has yet seen. And when a new Syria one day confronts the impossible task of rebuilding itself, one elderly academic’s quiet resistance in the name of antiquity, like David against Goliath, will provide a stark example of dauntlessness and civilisation amidst the rubble of its bleakest hour.

Whilst the BBC seems to cheer on ISIS in its own inimitable anti-Western way, others recognise the real dangers to the world and, in their own little way, try to fight it.  Not the BBC and its journalists who all too often are seen to be the ‘friends’ of such ‘radical’ groups and their grievances.

The BBC couldn’t resist for long.  There was their ex-economics editor, Paul Mason, announcing the wake for Capitalism in the Guardian ad nauseum and they’d missed out.

No matter, one phone call to their old mate and it’s all fixed and up he pops with Dutton and Sarah (1 hour 16 mins) being put on the rack, his feet to the fire and his most cherished illlusions and delusions being challenged and dashed….well, not really.

Mason had a lovely benign time on the programme in an ‘interview’ that lasted a good 40 minutes or so, the bit about capitalism anyway.  The problem with interviews like these where the guest is treated as a ‘friend’ and there is a reluctance to upset them with tough questions, is that the guest is allowed to get away with murder, and indeed Mason was allowed to ramble on in fantasy land about the brave new world he proposed.

Sure the interviewer will ask a relevant question but then lets the guest ramble on and evade giving an answer if the question puts him on the spot.  Humphrys would continue digging, usually, but in interviews like this the presenter lets it slide, its almost like they feed the guest a question about something controversial or problematic but only in order to allow them the chance to explain it away…the presenter then doesn’t challenge the answer and moves onto the next ‘feeder’ question.

That’s essentially what the Mason interview sounded like….the presenters just wanted him to keep talking and to ‘get along’, can’t upset a guest who is supposed to be there for an hour or more.

For instance no challenge came when they asked if he was a Marxist and he said no, but then said he did believe in what Marx said.  Or when he said because he was a public sector broadcaster he had to be neutral, before giving Corbyn a good talk up…or when he started backtracking on his thesis….apparently Capitalism is broken and needs replacing….or is it?….. now it’s just ‘parts’ need refurbishing, or when he laid out that grand thesis on on his alternative economy…..with time banks, alternative currencies and co-operatives….don’t all those exist already in one shape or another and aren’t they just different forms of the same thing, it’s still trading, manufacturing, buying and selling, capitalism?

Sarah Brett was quite happy quoting a commentator saying that the EU had ‘smashed Greece’ and she raised no objection to Mason adding that ‘the democratic will had been overturned and the EU is unaccountable’.

Is that true?  Didn’t Greece smash Greece with massive overspending and borrowing?  Was the ‘democratic will’ overturned in Greece?  Hardly.  The Greeks wanted to have their cake and eat it, get rid of economic stabilisation and still reman in the EU….in the end the Greek Parliament ‘voted’ to stay in the EU and continue austerity.  And now the Greek people will have a chance to vote on that decision….hardly democracy overturned.  If you’re in the EU club you have to obey the club rules and the Greeks really, really want to be in that club.

And something for Mason and the BBC to consider….Just what did Capitalism do for China?…

China has almost wiped out urban poverty. Now it must tackle inequality

Yet-to-be-released data shows that China has all but eradicated urban poverty. For a country with huge numbers of poor people streaming into its cities, many of whom living initially in conditions of abject misery, this is an extraordinary success. It has been achieved, in large part, because of a government subsidy paid to urban dwellers to bring incomes up to a minimum level of 4,476 yuan ($700 or £446).

I have yet to hear Mason come up with the real problem with Capitalism…cheap and easily available credit.  We know full well that was the reason we had the last crash, made worse because our own government borrowed huge sums on the basis that the good times would keep on rolling, bankrolling their largesse….and in order to keep things going the government turned a blind eye to what the banks were up to and failed to regulate them…running a risked based economy as Gordon Brown boasted.

Mason has no solutions just naive, simplistic utopian fantasies, childlike in their optimism and failure to recognise the pitfalls and insurmountable problems that make such dreams unworkable.

Still good of the BBC to let him back to ramble on amiably.  Trouble is he probably left the studio thinking ‘that all went well, they seemed really receptive, maybe I’m on to something….better give Russell Brand a call’..  We’ll hear no end of this now….though he doesn’t seem to have the social media draw of Brand…his recent video winning a mere 10,175 views…which is amusing as Mason is pretty obsessed with the power of t’Web….didn’t it spawn the Arab Spring after all?  Looks like the Revolution is a long way off yet…….

Here you go, a new Open Thread to detail the bias!

The BBC broadcast a lecture by Katy Long.  Who is Katy Long?  She is an academic whose speciality is immigration and refugees.

What the BBC doesn’t tell us is that she is an ardent, if not fanatical, proponent of open borders and the unregulated, totally unrestricted movement of migrants and the destruction of the nation state.  She is also pretty much on the far left economically and is immersed in the language of equality and justice so favoured by the Left as a pathway to imposing their other political ideals….such as open borders and mass migration and the end of the nation state…all ideas with much BBC support.

Her thoughts on the nation state and citizenship…

Our interest in maintaining what are essentially inherited privileges – that 50% lifetime birthplace bonus – begins to look pretty selfish. At some point, borders are no longer self-preservation: they’re greed.

Yep…we’re all terrible people, greedy, selfish, protecting our ‘inherited privileges’….how dare we suggest that it might be welcome that we can get our kids into the local school, or that we can access a GP or the NHS without being put into a long queue or that our children can get a home of their own…especially as it is our taxes that have paid for all this largesse and not the migrant who waltzes in and gets the ‘free’ services from day one.  Odd how Long doesn’t label the migrants who come here for economic reasons in the same way as greedy and selfish without a thought for the locals.

She of course also works for that bastion of common sense and rational thought, the UN.  Which could explain an awful lot.

Her talk asked ‘What does it mean to belong?’, as in how do you define a ‘citizen’?  She very carefully avoided giving a clear understanding of her full intentions concerning open borders and the end of the nation state and merely tried to spin an argument that there is no such thing as a ‘citizen’….for such a thing is surely just an accident of birth which you’ve done nothing to deserve….hence why should not someone from anywhere in the world not also be allowed automatically to be a ‘citizen’ of your area of the world?  She neglects to mention of course the long history of a nation, the wars, the political and intellectual development, the science and industry, the thought, the inventiveness, the hard work, the character and spirit of a nation that has shaped both that nation and its people.  Nations and peoples have character and a long history invested in that country.

She makes a comparison between Russian oligarchs buying citizenship and the penniless immigrant who can’t buy his way into the country.  She asks why citizenship is up for sale.  But that is a false and blinkered comparison.  Oligarchs can buy citizenship but she neglects to mention the millions of ordinary people that have come here, many who have taken up British citizenship, and all without having to shell out the odd million.  Their currency is the skills and the desire to work that they bring with them, in return they are offered citizenship.  Where is her argument, especially as we took in over 300,000 immigrants last year alone?  Were they all Russian oligarchs?  She fails to mention the costs of migrants and why they have to make a contribution in some way.  The NHS, for example, is free at the point of delivery, but it ain’t free.

The real point about controlling immigration is numbers.  If there were 20 million oligarchs wanting to come here they would not get in regardless of money….it’s a numbers game and not ultimately about what they bring here although that is an essential part of the ‘rationing’ process to decide who is going to make a contribution to society and not just take from it.

It’s interesting what the UN says, and Long quotes…..

…by living and working abroad, such people effectively reduce the competition for jobs and other scarce resources in their country oforigin, and thereby contribute to the peacebuilding process. As far as countries of asylum are concerned, the continued presence of refugees…may make a valuable contribution to the growth and productivity of both local and national economies.

So to have  a peaceful country it is best not to be overcrowded, best not to be competing for scarce resources (such as schools, the NHS and housing?), and to have as few unemployed people as possible.  The migrant countries export their unemployed and excess population and somehow we’re supposed to absorb that ad infinitum?

You have to laugh at this highly simplistic argument for mass immigration that she makes…..

It is relatively easy to make the argument that freedom of movement furthers global justice. The World Bank has estimated that up to 50 per cent of a person’s income is determined by only one variable – their country of citizenship.

So everybody should move to the UK and their income will automatically rise and life will be fantastic?  And what of Hong Kong, or Korea, or Taiwan or China, or India or Brazil…..did they all move here to improve their lives or did they build their own economies and create a more equal society, a richer and more prosperous society?  Is it not better to improve a nation than to label it a basket case and give up on it and say you know what, let’s bring the population here and, well, we’ll house ’em somewhere, and get ’em some sort of job, and give them vouchers for the food banks.  What of Germany and Japan after the war, did they move here or did they get on with it and rebuild their nations into industrial powerhouses, the envy of the world?  And that was a Japan with no natural resources apart from the knowledge and skills of its workforce.

Interestingly in the same UN paper Long reveals that many, up to half, of ‘refugees’ admit they are actually migrating for economic reasons whilst officially claiming the reason as seeking asylum.

Here is her argument in a nutshell:

Yet for champions of global justice, the opposite is true. In 2009, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) determined that migrants who moved from a low-income to a high-income country saw, on average, a 15-fold increase in income, a doubling of education enrollment rates and a 16-fold reduction in child mortality numbers. Framed like this, migration is no longer contributing to the problem of inequality. In fact, on a global scale, it’s the solution.

Immigration, she says, means the immigrant will have a much better life and the country that welcomes him or her will also benefit, as will the country that the migrants leave behind.

She admits that national interests make this argument hard to make…but that is because, she tells us, the people who oppose immigration are wrong, ill-informed, making their judgements based on ‘dubious’ information…

When it comes to politics, global justice arguments can’t simply trump national ones because – at an almost instinctive level – the vast majority of people would claim that nations – communities – are important, and effects of migration at a local level can’t simply be discounted.

It’s therefore important to recognize that the evidence for many claims made about the injurious effects of immigration upon locals is dubious.

Sounds a familiar argument….one that brings us straight to the BBC and indeed the answer as to why the BBC is broadcasting this talk by such an obviously biased, fanatically pro-immigration left wing ‘champion of global justice’ as Long.

The BBC is pro-immigration, it thinks, as Long does, that the British public are prejudiced, racist, and uneducated about the true facts on immigration.  They oppose immigration because they don’t understand the enormous benefits it brings them, nor do they have the humane principles and compassion that are the lifeblood of any half decent BBC journalist and which enables him or her to adopt the moral high ground and lecture them rather grandly and piously about the need to open the borders ever wider.

Where are the voices making the opposite arguments on the BBC?

The BBC, still on the immigration campaign trail.  News?…what’s that then?

The fall of Camilla Batmanghelidjh has distressed the BBC and I see they ran the following “news” story earlier today …

“Much of the focus of the collapse of charity Kids Company has been on its finances and its(cough) flamboyant founder Camilla Batmanghelidjh – what has increasingly been overlooked is the fate of the people who relied on it.

Part of the problem concerning those “helped’ by the Kids Company is precisely what they were helped to get.

“A teenager has boasted that she and pals used cash handouts from Kids Company to buy drugs. The youngster said they would queue up to collect an oyster card and £30 which they could spend how they wished. She claimed: “It was weed heaven on a Friday, you could smell it coming down from the landings.”

I thought that this was a strange item on the BBC earlier today.

“Large supermarkets are becoming a thing of the past – shoppers are increasingly using smaller shops, discount stores, and local retailers. What might those changes mean for our towns? We hear from retail consultant and broadcaster Mary Portas, and Matthew Price reports.”

The item sang the praises of the German discount chains, Lidl and Aldi. It also allowed Mary Portas to pontificate unchallenged – as if she were an expert. Is this the same Mary Portas…?

Retail guru Mary Portas has been branded as a ‘Queen of Flops’ by critics who say her plans to help struggling high streets are nothing more than ‘gimmicks’ that have failed. Traders in the seaside resort of Margate in Kent, which won a £100,000 government grant, claim the town’s high street is now in a worse state than when she arrived to help, as the Government-appointed ‘retail tzar’, six months ago.  Her plans for the town have included displaying art in abandoned shop fronts.

Great to see the Today programme focusing on issues that really affect our lives!

Labour leadership contender Yvette Cooper has called for a “feminist approach to the economy”. It has been a branch of economic thinking for a long time, but what does it mean in practice?

Feminist economics shows how the models and methods of traditional economics are biased towards masculine perspectives and masculine topics, said Oxford University’s Prof Jane Humphries (pictured above). “Equality is economic sense,” said Polly Trenow of the Women’s Budget Group.

Unbelievable that they actually devote time and resource to this male bashing tripe.

The most popular boys name in England and Wales is….Oliver with 6,649 lucky lads so named, whilst Muhammed just squeaks into the top 100 with 7,240 lucky lads with various spelllings of said name as the BBC tells us.

The BBC gawd bless ’em, still hiding uncomfortable truths as they see it….

What’s in a name?

Born in 2014

6,649  Olivers – most popular boys name

5,327 Amelias – most popular girls name

• “Mohammed” and common variations of in top 100: 7,240
• Chart places “Harper” has moved up in a decade: 3,636

The ONS itself barely mentions Muhammed and hides the name way down its statistics briefing.

The BBC happily reports what the ONS said without question despite other reports clearly stating that Muhammed is top…and the figures, reported as you can see by the BBC,  saying that.

The Baby Centre says:

The entries are in, the numbers crunched, and the top 100 boys’ names of 2014 have been unveiled!

For the first time at BabyCentre UK, the name Muhammad has topped the list, when alternate spellings such as Mohammed are included. Meanwhile, Oliver is holding fast in second place.

How is it that an organisation like the Baby Centre can get it right and the BBC with all its resources, and the facts in front of them, can’t? Or rather won’t.

The Spectator asks the same question about the ONS’ similar reluctance to admit that Muhammed is top of the list…

Why doesn’t the Office of National Statistics want us to know that Mohammed is the most popular boys’ name in England and Wales?  Yesterday, it put out its annual survey of the top 10 baby’s names.  In 2014, it reported, the most popular boys’ names were Oliver, Jack and Harry. This contrasts somewhat with a similar survey by the website BabyCentre last December which claimed that the most popular boys’ name was now Mohammed.

Ten years ago, the ONS was quite happy to announce in its press release that Mohammed – then apparently the preferred spelling — had entered the top 20 most popular baby’s names.  But now it seems it has become shy of informing us that it is now the single most popular boys’ name in England and Wales.

It does seem that once again the news is being ‘managed’ so that we only get to hear what they want us to hear in the hope we don’t realise what is going on.  When Germany is facing the prospect of over 750,000 asylum seekers, not general migrants, and they will be mostly Muslim, you have to start asking questions about the effects importing large numbers of people with such a radically different set of beliefs and values into Europe will have on society.

That of course is the question the ONS and the BBC want to stop you asking.  They certainly won’t be asking it themselves.

From the Mail:

BBC screens foreign ‘propaganda’: Corporation accused of breaking broadcast rules by showing programmes that promote charities and governments

The BBC has screened ‘propaganda films’ funded by foreign governments in a blatant breach of broadcast rules, an Ofcom investigation found.

The broadcaster has shown dozens of programmes designed to promote charities, NGOs and governments in what the regulator described as an ‘inherent risk to [the BBC’s] independence and integrity’.

The Ofcom probe revealed the BBC had bought the ‘sponsored’ films for as little as £1 from public relations companies.

Officials found 20 breaches of sponsorship rules by BBC World News, the broadcaster’s 24-hour news channel that is shown across the world.

One programme was made by a London-based media company which was given millions of pounds by the Malaysian government, The Independent reported.

The probe revealed the BBC had failed to declare which programmes were funded, leaving viewers unaware that they were watching ‘propaganda’ from foreign companies.

Here’s part of Ofcom’s decision….there is also a long write up about the BBC’s acceptance of sponsorship for programmes in the Ofcom document….

Ofcom noted BBCWN’s admission that, in hindsight, FBC was not an appropriate producer of the programmes investigated and that there had been a risk to BBCWN’s editorial independence by what it described as “the lack of knowledge” available to it at the time the programmes were broadcast.

Ofcom acknowledges that BBCWN was potentially misled by FBC in its pre-production and pre-transmission checks. However, broadcasters must always seek to apply the utmost rigour in investigating and documenting the relationship between producers and the interests featured in their programming. That third party interests might exploit their role in programming made available to a broadcaster at no charge may not have been inevitable, but its obvious possibility in this case should have been a strong indicator that better care was required.

It is essential that broadcasters take steps to ensure that content is not used as a vehicle to promote the interests of a third party, especially in current affairs content.

In circumstances where broadcasters have acquired programming, they should be able to demonstrate that they have taken adequate steps to obtain all information necessary for them to make appropriate independent editorial decisions. For example, they will need to ascertain how such programmes have been funded to assess whether a funding arrangement has influenced the editorial in a way that would call into question the programme’s editorial independence. We welcome the steps that BBCWN has since taken in this regard to strengthen its compliance procedures, as detailed above, and will invite BBCWN to attend a meeting with Ofcom to discuss further possible  improvements.

Here’s the BBC’s own guidelines about Ofcom:

Woman’s Hour had a long love in with the Female leaders of Scotland’s political parties (I think the Tory one, Ruth Davidson, might have been mentioned somewhere in the piece.)

Woman’s Hour asked how is it that if there is so much success in Scotland for women why is that not the case in Westminster?

You may have thought that that would be the occasion when the BBC might take a look at the prospects for women in a reborn Labour Party, would they prosper under one of the new leadership candidates, two being women and one being a far left, sorry, as corrected by a BBC presenter the other day, ‘left’ politician, Jeremy Corbyn?

But no, instead of looking at Westminster they concentrated on the rise of women in Scotland.

You could be forgiven for thinking Jeremy Corbyn is irrelevant in Scotland…but you’d be wrong…as the Spectator spells out..

Jeremy Corbyn can fill a Glasgow hall quicker than Nicola Sturgeon. It’s time for her to worry

Strange things have been happening in Scottish politics of late, and Jeremy Corbyn’s speech in Glasgow on Friday was one of them. I’m a Labour supporter, and can safely say it was the most electrifying and energetic rally I have ever attended. 

Within two hours of tickets going on sale for Corbyn’s Glasgow event, they sold out. A frantic search for a larger venue began and the rally was moved to the Old Fruitmarket in the centre of Glasgow; capacity 1,500. Again, it sold out within a few hours. Corbyn could have filled a hall four times the size.

Scottish politics dramatically changed in last year. If Corbyn wins, it could do so again.

That didn’t merit a mention in the BBC interview which might seem odd as surely it would be of interest/concern to the new Scottish Labour leader.

There was a swift mention of the leadership candidates, and Jane Garvey homed in on Corbyn…but it was his desire to get rid of Trident that was her only concern asking Scottish Labour Leader Kezi Dugdale ”You didn’t discuss Trident with Jeremy Corbyn, I can’t believe that?’

Apart from that brief foray into what life might be like under a Jeremy Corbyn regime Corbyn was allowed to slip off into the shadows once again without the BBC turning the spotlight upon him.  Which is just as well really as with his dubious associations with Islamists you might be justified in asking how women like Dugdale would fare in his brave new world.

Nick Cohen asked such questions….

The British left has a lot to answer for. The Labour Party’s long-shot leadership candidate, Jeremy Corbyn, embodies the worst of it.

He has a purity and certainty his rivals, who must deal with the messy business of governing, cannot hope to match.

But then comes the rub. The tribune of the left, the indomitable defender of equality and decency, is also the greatest apologist for clerical fascism in the British parliament.

Corbyn indulges radical Islam, and by extension  all that comes with it: the subjugation of women; the judicial murder of homosexuals in compliance with sharia law; the racism, most evident in its anti-Semitic conspiracy theories; the denial of democratic rights, the demand to create a global caliphate must bring; and the denial of religious freedom the sharia-prescribed death penalties for blasphemy and apostasy do bring with miserable regularity.

Islamism is against everything the left pretends to believe in. But in Britain and elsewhere, leftists rather than conservatives are the first to defend it.

I could give you a dozen reasons why right-wing parties are winning elections everywhere here. But one ought to be obvious. Politically correct left-wingers say they believe in equality for women and gays. Everyone must agree with them apart from protected religious leaders, who can be as misogynist and homophobic as they please. 

The voters look on with jaundiced eyes. They mutter that political correctness is a sham and the left is filled with the most brazen hypocrites. The worst of it is, they are right.

The BBC just isn’t interested in Corbyn’s Islamist friends.

Why might that be?  Is it that they like the [Far] left wing candidate who favours the policies long peddled by the BBC itself...’There would be an end to austerity, higher taxes for the rich and protection for people on welfare’  or is it because he’s leading light in the ‘Stop the War Coalition’, again a cause the BBC has a lot of time for, or is it because the BBC also has a similarly benign and supportive approach to Islamist extremists and terrorists?

Curious how even the Woman’s Hour bunker can overlook Corbyn’s associations when they appear to be so strongly against the interests of the sistahood and indeed progressive politics as a whole.

The BBC does have a lot to say about Corbyn…but very little is critical, certainly none of it mentions his very dodgy friends and honoured citizens he applauds…..most is very positive and upbeat…

What is Jeremy Corbyn’s programme for government?

Where is Labour’s ‘Jeremy Corbyn mania’ coming from?

Labour risks ‘annihilation’ if Jeremy Corbyn is leader – Tony Blair

Jeremy Corbyn: It’s going extremely well

You may have thought that a man who seems to turn a blind eye to all of this ‘ the subjugation of women; the judicial murder of homosexuals in compliance with sharia law; the racism, most evident in its anti-Semitic conspiracy theories; the denial of democratic rights, the demand to create a global caliphate must bring; and the denial of religious freedom the sharia-prescribed death penalties for blasphemy and apostasy do bring with miserable regularity.’  would merit close inspection.

Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson were torn apart by the Leftwing media, BBC included, indeed the BBC leapt in to recruit LBC’s James O’Brien after his mendacious kangaroo court hatchet job on Farage, and Andrew Neil, of all people, shamed himself by trying to hammer Robinson with questions laid out by the Islamist Mehdi Hasan who thought the BBC was ‘going easy’ on Robinson.

It does seem that Jeremy Corbyn is untouchable…..and Owen Jones seems just as unconcerned as the BBC about Corbyn despite his proclaimed passion for equality and the rights of oohh just about everyone if there’s a book in it.