Prince Charles’ communications with government have been published after a freedom of information request from the Guardian which reports…

The Guardian editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, said: “We fought this case because we believed – and the most senior judges in the country agreed – that the royal family should operate to the same degrees of transparency as anyone else trying to make their influence felt in public life.

If the criteria is one of trying to influence public life……

I wonder if they will be pursuing the BBC with equal vigour to find out the contents of all its communications with government…especially as the BBC is so ‘right wing’.

Will they be demanding to see a transcript of the secret meetings held recently between the BBC and Muslim activists who were demanding that the BBC change how it reports on any events in which Muslims are involved?

Will they be demanding the release of all communications concerning climate change that have passed between the BBC, climate activists, the UEA and government?

Will they be demanding the release of all communications that the BBC has had with the Home Office concerning how it reports on immigration or the EDL or Muslim terrorism?

If not why not?  The BBC is far more influential than the prince could ever hope to be…so shouldn’t there be complete transparency in relation to who it talks to and what is said between them?

The BBC is straight on the story….no hanging about waiting for facts or details…essentially what they bring us is a headline with the words ‘Election fraud’ and ‘Farage’ in the same sentence….

Fraud probe in Nigel Farage-contested Thanet South seat

And that’s it…oooh hang on…there’s more…

Kent Police are making inquiries into a report of electoral fraud in the Thanet South seat, contested in the general election by Nigel Farage.

The UKIP leader failed to win the seat, losing out to Conservative candidate Craig Mackinlay.

Mr Farage secured 16,026 votes, with Mr Mackinlay achieving 18,838.

That really is it…except for this…

‘More follows.’

So the BBC are so excited about an allegation of fraud in the same constituency that Farage stood for election that they run the story with Farage’s name mentioned very, very prominently, implicating him by default, and very little else.  Why no mention of the Tory candidate who actually won the seat?

This rush to report from the BBC that hid the fact that a Muslim Mayor of Tower Hamlets was kicked out of office for actual electoral fraud deep down in its ‘England’ page…not on the Frontpage, or the UK page but the England page where you’d have to go looking for it…the Mayor in charge of a £1 billion budget who used it to buy votes and yet the BBC looks to downplay and ignore it as if it didn’t happen.  The reason?  Because he was Muslim and was voted in by Msulim voters and used claims of racism and Islamophobia to try and shut up those who were asking questions…the BBC is as always reluctant to highlight instances of practises that show Islam in a bad light and especially cases where claims of islamophobia are patently false and used to silence critics because it then raises the question about others who use similar tactics to silence people…..the BBC et al not averse to using the same tactics themselves.

A ’30-day trial’?  I’m sure we can hang him out to dry in less time than that……

It is a remarkable thing isn’t it just how much energy the Labour Party and its fellow travellers expend on defending the BBC….the BBC which they insist is in fact right wing and in the pocket of the Conservatives.

We had a look at some of this a while back and wrote that ‘What we have is a BBC reliant on a band of Marxist academic activists and ex-BBC employees to produce pro-BBC propaganda to cover up  the corruption, professional, political and financial, that lies at the heart of the Corporation.’

To that band of comrades you can add Labour’s villainous spin doctor Tom Baldwin who has just penned, in the Guardian, where else, a defence of the BBC which by no stretch of the imagination could nary a word of it be described as true.  But then again he was the man who placed Labour propaganda into the Times when he was a journalist there so professional ethics are possibly an inconvenience, or rather not an inconvenience, for him.

He claims that ‘The BBC was not in the pocket of Labour this election. Quite the opposite’  I note with interest that qualification ‘…this election’.…so in every other election?

He tells us that there is a ‘disturbing suggestion that a democratically elected government would seek to stamp on and silence dissent from an independent broadcaster, there is deep falsehood at the heart of this…..[that] the world’s most successful state-funded public service broadcaster is a giant leftwing conspiracy. ‘

This from the man who adds…‘ I write that with the certainty of someone who has spent this year making almost daily complaints to the BBC on behalf of the Labour party.’

So no attempt to stamp on the independence of the BBC by Baldwin in an effort to silence it or make it more pro-Labour than it already was?

He expands upon the reason for Labour’s complaints….‘Our biggest dispute with the BBC was over the prominence it gave to the idea of a deal between Labour and the SNP that was never on the cards……It was a scare story based on a false premise and some badly flawed polls. Britain was not heading for a minority Labour government but towards a Tory majority and we were all making the same mistake in believing the polls. ‘

Well yes….the BBC did give endless prominence to what the BBC presented as a ‘probable’ Labour victory and the prospect of having to deal with the SNP….. as the evidence shows such a deal was a very real prospect as Labour were never going to win a majority.  In fact that was the basis for this site saying the BBC was biased in favour of Labour…forever giving the audience the idea that Labour would edge the election.  Nice to see Labour actually confirm our view of the BBC’s stance on this.  Also Baldwin might want to talk to his boss, ex-boss, who made such a big play of not doing any deals or joining in coalition with the SNP…bound to attract attention.

Baldwin then spins his biggest line…

‘I suspect, however, that something else is going on too. BBC executives and journalists have told me that there were regular, repeated threats from senior Tories during this election campaign about “what would happen afterwards” if they did not do as they were told and fall into line.’

Really?  Name names.  Or is this just an example of the black arts of the Labour Party spin machine….a lie in other words?  Just put it out ‘there’ knowing that it will catch the headlines and eventually the legend will become ‘fact’ courtesy of the useful idiots like Owen Jones who as we speak is probably authoring his next exclamation of his outrage at Tory perfidy.

I too heard a similar tale from BBC executives and journalists who said that Baldwin threatened the BBC with severe repercussions should Labour win the election and its coverage not ‘fall into line’ and favour Labour.  See how easy it is to churn out some unattributed pap?

How credible is Baldwin?…well not much…even Labour thought he was a loose cannon wrecking their chances with his wild and reckless press briefings.

Even the Guardian thinks he’s wrong……

‘Yet even senior Tories seemed a somewhat taken aback at the way the appointment of Whittingdale – the veteran chair of the culture, media and sport select committee – was received. “I think there’s a debate to be had about all sorts of things to do with the BBC [during charter renewal negotiations],” said one, “but fundamentally will there be a public service broadcaster largely funded by the public? Yes.”

That debate – set to include an overhaul of BBC governance and the corporation’s impact on a beleagured local newspaper industry – could be had “without kneecapping the BBC”, he added.

So what’s going on? There is definitely a wing of the Conservative party happy to see the BBC humbled for perceived leftwing bias……And yet, in the runup to the election, when BBC bullying was de rigueur for parties that wanted to be seen in the best light, not one senior government member said that the universal licence fee should be scrapped. Indeed, in his interview with the Radio Times, George Osborne categorically said there were “no plans” to replace the licence fee, even if a future government would “look at all the options”.

Even the BBC itself poo-poos the idea of Tory war against the BBC blaming it on the Right Wing Press….the BBC getting its own attack in on them…….

Has war been declared on the BBC?

Does the new culture secretary pose a threat to the BBC, or are Tuesday’s headlines settling private scores?

The appointment of John Whittingdale as Secretary of State for Culture has been met with some fairly bold headlines.

However, the language from the government is rather calmer.

The former Culture Secretary, Sajid Javid, was asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme if the government was “going to war” with the corporation.

“No, not at all,” was his response.

“I think there has been some over-excitement in those headlines,” he added.’

It goes on….

‘The charter renewal process is not expected to begin in earnest until the autumn, but the loyal Conservative-supporting newspapers are making very clear what they would like as a “payback” – a smaller BBC.

Will it happen?

For those who want a radical reshaping of the BBC – perhaps even scrapping the licence fee altogether – there is a hope Mr Whittingdale might be their man.

But their hope might be tempered if they read the recent report from his committee on the future of the BBC. Its conclusion was that there was at the moment “no better alternative” to the licence fee to fund an institution that was a “central presence in the life of the country”.

The MPs, though, were open to the idea that the BBC ought to make “bigger, braver decisions” about its services and “do less in some areas”.

However, exactly what, where and how those cuts would be applied, it was leaving to the BBC.’

I assume this Tory initiative is all about curbing the BBC in ‘Tom Baldwin World’…

New laws to target radicalisation

Here you go, a John Whittingdale approved OPEN Thread for your completion! Detail the bias here.

The feeding frenzy over Labour’s corpse is gaining momentum with the Unions demanding their pound of flesh and a lurch even more leftward than Red Ed promised to deliver whilst others in the party also say the problem with Labour’s election pitch was that it wasn’t Marxist enough, others want to disinter New Labour on whose grave Miliband junior danced…to the Union tune.

Labour was always badly riven by Miliband’s leadership but it wasn’t something the BBC dwelt on preferring to tell us that the Tories were in chaos and so divided about subjects such as Europe and immigration that the party was likely to blow apart.

Once again the BBC was spot on in its analysis.

So why drop a winning formula when you’re on a roll?  The BBC continues with its perspicacious political rune reading as Peston tunes in to the vibes….

GE2015 and the economy

If there was one policy associated with the Tories it was further deep spending and welfare cuts to generate a budget surplus.

If there was one policy associated with the Scottish National Party it was an end to deep spending and welfare cuts.

Which means that if the integrity of the United Kingdom is to be sustained, somehow a way has to be found – and presumably fairly fast – to reconcile the English vote for more austerity and the Scottish vote for an end to austerity.

Sorry what’s that?  The Scots voted for an end to austerity?  Did they heck.

Such an interpretation is a complete misreading of the politics that gave the SNP such a landslide win.

Here’s a chart which shows the number of MPs each party won over the years…note in 2005 the number of Scots MPs was reduced from 72 to 59…..

It is clear from that that Labour had held steady for years right up to the 2010 election and that the LibDems were in fact more successful than the SNP…..and then came 2015.  The SNP vote had nothing to do with austerity or independence.  If the Labour voters had wanted an end to austerity they could have voted for Labour…..but they didn’t, so there must have been another reason.

What changed in the last 5 years in Scotland?  For Labour there was a change of leadership and the hopeless Miliband put in place by the unions whilst the SNP possibly benefited from Salmond stepping aside and having the fresh leadership of Nicola Sturgeon who is still in her honeymoon period especially after her performance in the UK TV debates…though not doing so well in the ones in Scotland.  That honeymoon period will soon wear off once people start analysing what she really says….her claims to respect democracy when all the time looking to ride roughshod over the independence No vote and impose the SNP’s own party preference and her lies about not wanting independence and immediately the election is over starting her demands for it.

Scots did not vote for the end of austerity when they voted for the SNP.  What they saw was that Labour was dead in the water in the UK and that it was a wasted vote for a party that wouldn’t win as a whole.  A practical decision was made to vote then for the SNP more as a protest vote against Labour having taken them for granted with the only other choice being the Tories, not going to happen, or the LibDems who, as we know, were even less palatable across the whole of the UK.  The only choice left was the SNP.  How long the SNP’s dominance lasts depends on Labour resurrecting itself and taking the fight back to Scotland…..I doubt the SNP will be anywhere near as successful in 5 years time as reality sets in and more choices appear.

In the rest of the UK Labour voters went to UKIP…again nothing to do with austerity…they couldn’t bring themselves to vote Tory so they had a protest vote against Labour and its policies on immigration, Europe and the dismal, uninspiring leadership of Miliband.

So in Scotland Labour and Libdems voted SNP, in the UK they mostly voted UKIP…Tories being beyond the pale.

Peston is wrong in claiming that a wish to end austerity was the defining factor in the SNP vote…it’s a convenient narrative for a reporter who seems inclined to put the Labour side all too often……it is an interpretation designed to put pressure on the Tory government of course….the BBC claiming that Britain is now divided and that the Tories don’t have a mandate in Scotland. Unclear why that is so…..they weren’t exactly popular in Scotland over the last 5 years as the chart shows so why have things changed because Scottish Labour MPs have turned into SNP ones? Not quite sure how the SNP expects to be given favourable treatment in respect of austerity.  Do they expect to be given relatively more money than the rest of the UK so that they can dodge the cuts?  Not sure that would go down too well.

It does look like the BBC is giving the SNP’s line a helping hand in order to split the UK and encourage independence and cause the Tories as much trouble as possible….how often have we heard the BBC kick off a debate about devolution in Wales and the regions?  Destroying the UK is a project the Left have long worked towards with Europe being the ‘State’ of choice to rule over a divided and regionalised ‘Britain’.

Perhaps the BBC should be broken up and its powers and huge income devolved…perhaps devolved not to regions but to those with a different political persuasion than the liberal metropolitan elitism on display at the BBC so that all people are truly represented by a news service that doesn’t sneer and look down on them and generates hate against them.

From the Telegraph….

5Live wasn’t having a good day today...or actually it was the same old stuff we normally get from the BBC….leftist tosh presented as insightful comment.

First thing I heard, as posted before, was that the Swedes were to blame for an atheist blogger being hacked to death by Muslim fundamentalists, then we had comedian Sean Hughes invited on to tell us not only about his marvellous comedy but his political views on the election as well.

You may remember that the BBC relentlessly used ‘celebs’ to endorse the BBC’s own anti-Iraq war line…..bringing them on to talk about their latest film, book or groundbreaking piece of artwork only to ask them what were their views on the war in Iraq knowing full well that they’d chunter on about how evil it all was and give Bush a good bashing.

No doubt the same tactic is being employed with the likes of Hughes to spread the vibe about the new government and the election result, the BBC trying to establish the idea that ‘everyone’ hates the Tory government and their evil, nasty policies.

Hughes is well known as being anti-Tory so the BBC were on safe ground asking him…especially as I’m sure they read his Twitter feed when researching him for the programme…

Then we had the BBC delving into Channel 4’s ‘Benefits Street’….apparently all is forgiven, it’s not a callous, exploitative programme revelling in the misery of the poor, it’s not poverty porn…it is though, essential social comment in these straitened times when welfare is being cut and the effects of such immoral policies must be aired, the poor and disenfranchised must have a voice!

The BBC doesn’t do itself any favours with the continuous anti-Tory narrative that also insults the people who voted for them…and UKIP.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

When an atheist critic of religious fundamentalism was hacked to death in Bangladesh you may have thought that the killers were the ‘masked men’ with machetes who were the guilty party…not so….the BBC can reveal that he died because Sweden refused him a visa to visit there in April.

So nothing to do with the Religion of Peace….and indeed on 5Live there was in fact no discussion of the issues that caused his death….he’d still be alive if Sweden had let him visit…it’s the Swede’s fault he’s dead.

Of course the same BBC were delighted when Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller and Geert Wilders were refused entry to Britain on trumped up charges…..how can criticising religious extremism be considered dangerous and against the interests of this country?

I can’t possibly imagine the BBC’s headlines should any of them end up being similarly assaulted by a Muslim fanatic.

But let’s ask why the Swede’s might have refused an atheist blogger who upsets Msulim sensibilities a visa….could it possibly be due to the large number of Muslims in Sweden and the very pro-Muslim attitude of the Swedish government that turns its back on large scale  anti-Semitism by Muslims in their country? Could it be that rather than defend free speech, liberalism and a civilised world the Swedes would rather side with the fanatics for a quiet life…at least for now?

Incredible really that Europe, the birthplace of the Liberal, democratic ethic which gives people around the world a better life, should surrender those values and its culture so easily.

What hope is there for people who seek sanctuary and a safe place where they can think and speak freely when one of the few remaining places in the world to supposedly uphold those values and protect those who wish to live by them capitulates to aggressive, religiously inspired activists who exploit those rights in order to destroy the societies that are shaped by them and should defend them to the last?

Where will people who seek protection from those religious fanatics be able to go if the fanatics hold sway in the places where refuge is sought?  The world is getting smaller for people who love freedom, democracy and individualism.

It is an irony that the BBC expresses any dismay at the Swedes when its own narrative is to defend those same fanatics.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

The BBC’s very own turbulent trendy priest, Giles Fraser, was a happy boy on Thursday morning.  He’d been following the BBC and was excited to know that come Friday the nice Mr Miliband would be padding his way to the Palace to be annointed Prime Minister…Hollyrood Palace presumably.

Fraser was sorely tested come Friday morning and the unpalatable truth dawned….the British Public weren’t fools….Fraser is disgusted by the voter’s shameless greed…..

‘Right now I feel ashamed to be English. Ashamed to belong to a country that has clearly identified itself as insular, self-absorbed and apparently caring so little for the most vulnerable people among us. Why did a million people visiting food banks make such a minimal difference? Did we just vote for our own narrow concerns and sod the rest? Maybe that’s why the pollsters got it so badly wrong: we are not so much a nation of shy voters as of ashamed voters, people who want to present to the nice polling man as socially inclusive, but who, in the privacy of the booth, tick the box of our own self-interest.’

But it is not just the shameful self-interest of the great unwashed that Fraser denounces from his fiery pulpit, he knows who is to blame for the temptations put in the way of wavering, morally uncertain people….

‘We try and control the gods of Rothermere and Murdoch with our electoral intercessions. But maybe they are just too powerful, too remote.’

The Satanic forces of darkness…the Mail and Murdoch.

Bizarrely Fraser goes on to argue that elections are empty and worthless in reality and change nothing….so why is he so disappointed that Labour didn’t get in?

I was also amused to see this from Fraser….which pretty much sums up the problems with the Church…

The idea is that people tend to join churches not because of any specific belief but as a marker of belonging. And the rituals of the church are more an expression of this belonging then they are an ideological statement of faith.

Many ‘Priests’ like Fraser of course don’t themselves subscribe to Christian values, often not even believing in God…using the Church as a vehicle for their own left wing politics, sanctifying them with the implied question ‘What would Jesus do?’

Strangely the Guardian has a similar problem with the Mail and Murdoch as Fraser….’Yes, rightwing newspaper coverage did cause Ed Miliband’s downfall’

Well you could, I suppose, argue that Miliband and his policies were the cause of his downfall….and never mind the BBC claims that it was the BBC that put Cameron back in the driving seat.

The Guardian, as always has its own agenda…here is the rather sinister final paragraph from that article….

‘The press’s role in the 2015 election requires more investigation. As so often, the coverage over six weeks tells us little more than we could have anticipated before the campaign began. Agenda-setting over a longer period is far more important’

The Press, unlike the BBC, is not required to be impartial and indeed such an ability to take sides is part and parcel of this country’s prized liberty of free speech.

It looks like the Guardian is once again on the warpath against parts of the Press, the Right Wing, that don’t have the same values as the Guardian….funny how it is okay for the Guardian to be profoundly biased in its own reporting, and it was virulently anti-Tory, but for the Right Wing Press to be similarly disposed is morally criminal.

No doubt the Guardian will be teaming up wth the BBC and Labour once again, as it did with Leveson, to try and curtail the freedom’s of the Press and force them to deliver a pro-Labour message…sinister or what?

The Guardian and the BBC…..defenders of tolerance, liberalism, free speech and free thought?

Think again…if you’re allowed to.

Interesting that the BBC doesn’t mention Charlie Hebdo at all in this report about an atheist blogger being hacked to death by ‘Masked attackers’.

The blogger, Ananta Bijoy Das , was a critic of ‘religious intolerance’…..eventually the BBC admits that an ‘Islamist’ has been arrested.  Is an ‘Islamist’ a Muslim or not in the BBC lexicon?  Did Ananta Bijoy Das provoke Muslims and insult their religion and so, you know, deserve to die?

The BBC tends to the view that Charlie Hebdo and the exhibition of Mohammed cartoons in the US that was attacked recently were ‘provocative’ and the people involved almost deserved to die….or at least we shouldn’t really mourn their deaths as they brought them foolishly upon themselves by ‘insulting’ Muslims.

The BBC is curiously quiet about who is to ‘blame’ for the deaths of these other people who express criticism of Islam in particular and end up dead as a result.  Why no mention of Charlie Hebdo in the report?  The BBC mentions the deaths of other Bloggers critical of Islam murderd by Muslims so where is the link to one of the most high profile  and politically significant of such attacks?

Does the BBC think these bloggers are somehow ‘better’ people? Perhaps the colour of their skin defines how the BBC inteprets whether or not they can be killed with impunity or not. Does the BBC not link to Charlie Hebdo because it thinks Charlie Hebdo deserved their fate and doesn’t want to give credibility to their criticism of Islam by linking them to other more ‘respectable’ critics of the same religion?  Of course we have seen that reaction before from the BBC and the Left….the EDL apparently ‘polluting’ the public discourse whilst other people, such as Peter Tatchell, who said exactly the same as the EDL, are heros.

The BBC’s take on what is an Islamist:

Ian Jolly, the BBC newsroom’s style guide editor, offers this guidance to BBC journalists; he starts by distinguishing between ‘Islamic’ and ‘Islamist’:

“The first simply refers to anything related to the religion. The second is derived from Islamism, defined in the dictionary as ‘Islamic militancy or fundamentalism’.

“Our own view is that an Islamist is someone who derives a political course from Islam. But it’s vital that we make clear what sort of course that is. For instance, there are Islamist political parties in various countries and Egypt has an Islamist president.

“So, if we are talking about Islamists pursuing a violent course, we should say so – ‘Islamist militants’, ‘Islamist rebels’, ‘Islamist extremists’. But context is, as always, important too and once we have established what we’re referring to then ‘Islamists’ on its own can be an acceptable shorthand.

 

Amusing to hear the BBC skirting the tricky subject of BBC bias this morning as John Whittingdale, BBC sceptic or is that licence fee ‘denier’, is appointed Culture Secretary.  They did manage to get out, without choking on their lattes and cinnamon buns, that the Tories might be upset about the BBC’s ‘supposed’ left leaning tendencies, but didn’t really put over the real anger that the Tories feel about the BBC’s election coverage…nor did they bother to explore the issue.

One big question the BBC fails to ask itself, and you know it would ask a similar question about the Mail or a Murdoch publication,  is ‘Is the BBC biased?’.

Not sure how the BBC can avoid investigating that if it takes itself seriously as an unbiased, impartial and accurate provider of news to the public….one legally obliged to be impartial by its charter unlike the newspapers.

The BBC only a couple of days ago was trumpeting the fact that ‘TV’ had had the biggest influence on the outcome of the election…..if that is true then the BBC, as the most dominant source of TV news, must question its role in that election and the professionalism and credibility of its output…..especially in light of the BBC having misinterpreted the whole tenor of the election campaign pesenting Labour as an almost certainty for government in an alliance of some kind with the SNP….and misjudged the issues that the election was being fought on preferring to present the Labour narrative of inequality and poverty as the defining issues that people were concerned about, or should be concerned about.

Will the BBC Trust commission a report into the BBC’s election campaign? How the BBC reported on the election is surely central to its existence in many respects.  It should play a crucial role in providing accurate, coherent and impartial information for the Public to inform their decision making in the voting booth.  The question is did it do that?

No.  And many, many people think that.

Even if there weren’t so many critics of the BBC’s coverage the Trust should initiaite an inquiry just from a professional point of view.  Most organisations would have a post mortem of their performance especially concerning such an important and high profile event as the election.

Wait out.