So, Labour’s Lucy Powell states live on radio that Labour’s 2015 general election pledges are carved in stone, but nonetheless breakable! Awkward? Fear not…
The good old BBC runs with her “denial” of that which she plainly said! It seems those “world class journalists” are prepared to give her a pass EVEN though she wasn’t misquoted in any way!
Ed Miliband on the Today programme yesterday told us that ‘Trust is a huge issue’…so much so he set out his promises to the nation literally carved in stone…and has constantly attacked David Cameron as someone who can’t be trusted to fulfill his election pledges.
Such a massive emphasis on his determination to carry out his own promises must surely mean any deviation from that would be headline news….trust in politicians apparently being the big, raging question on everyone’s lips if you believe the BBC.
How then when in a BBC interview Miliband’s chief political strategist tells us this….
‘I don’t think anyone is suggesting that the fact that he’s carved them in stone means he’s absolutely not going to break them or anything like that’
…..does the BBC essentially ignore that ‘bombshell’ comment when they spent days wittering in about Cameron’s ‘brainfade’ and yesterday filled the airwaves with the mutterings of a loose-lipped LibDem who told us the shattering news that Cameron may think he won’t get a full majority?
You have to look fairly hard to find the story about this on the website…not on the frontpage, not on the UK page, but it is tucked away on the Election page…..what is on the frontpage is this…a story from 1892 no less….
How a gingerbread biscuit took out the prime minister
Nick Robinson fails to mention the comment in this piece in which he says ‘So, what is obsessing politicians of all parties behind-the-scenes is the debate about what a legitimate government would look like. ‘…...you might think a man who wants to be PM who makes promises, and promises to keep those promises, might not seem legitimate should he take office with votes he received on the basis of those promises…so why does Robinson not raise the issue?…..after all he has Tweeted cynically on the comments…
This cheered me up. @LucyMPowell on Edstone – fact promises “carved into stone” doesn’t mean “absolutely not going to break them”. Really?!!
— Nick Robinson (@bbcnickrobinson) May 5, 2015
As polling day approaches, it strikes me that the BBC has dropped any pretence of balance. It wants Miliband into 10 Downing Street and the propaganda machine is pumping out as much Pro Ed material as possible. It has sought to blame down the #Milistone farce from yesterday – even though The Guardian itself expressed disbelief in the limestone folly – and instead has led the news today with the Clegg attack line that Cameron told him in a private conversation that he did not belief that the Conservatives can win a majority. Meanwhile, Miliband keeps pretending that he CAN win a majority and Andrew Neill apart, the BBC complies with the fantasy. Until Friday.
Great to see Nick Robinson starting the final week of the election with such a balanced headline.
Meet the Edstones from the town of Edrock.
Fair do’s to Humphrys, he tried his best to challenge Miliband on Labour borrowing….Miliband absolutely refused to admit that Labour borrowed too much, despite, as Humphrys stated, that Miliband must be ‘the last person standing who believes that to be the case’…..except of course Robert Peston who backs Miliband. Miliband also tried to pass the buck for the lack of regulation of the banks…admitting such a lack led to the Banks running rampant but not linking it to Labour.
Miliband’s refusal to admit any blame is in direct conflict with his pronouncement that ‘trust is a huge issue’….the Question Time audience made that quite clear and the major trust issue was on the economy and Labour’s record….which Miliband refuses to admit….bizarre…..he can’t think on his feet and has a long list of pat answers to any question that he reels off regardless of the actual content of the question.
Whilst Miliband thinks ‘Trust is a huge issue’, one that merits his policies being literally set in stone, Robert Peston thinks not…or at least not if you’re a Tory as he explains in this blatant anti-Tory tract…..Should Tories put the chancellor in straitjacket?. As always with Peston’s reports the article concentrates almosty completely on the Tories with a very small comment on Labour.
Humphrys did a good job this morning…I’m sure Twitter will be ablaze with claims of the ‘Right Wing BBC’.
A fresh open thread for a new week…..the election draws near….will the restraints come off at the BBC?
Of those two images the BBC knows which is the ‘extremist’ one…..Naughtie has just described the exhibition as an ‘anti-Islamic event’….actually Jim it’s about freedom of speech…the right to say something without being killed.
Today told us that two people who shot at and hit a security guard at an exhibition of Muhammed images were killed by police officers…the BBC’s response….it was a ‘provocative’ exhibition run by an anti-Muslim hate group (so labelled by an organisation that tracks extremists in America the BBC tells us), the American Freedom Defense Initiative, which ran anti-Muslim adverts and was attended by the ‘Far Right’ politician Geert Wilders.
Not sure that Wilders is ‘Far Right’ just because he opposes mass immigration and the Islamisation of Europe.
Jihad Watch predicted the response….
The freedom of speech is under violent attack. It now remains to be seen whether American authorities will defend it, or will blame the victims and the targets and kowtow yet again to violent intimidation.
We’re told the motivation isn’t known…however others aren’t so coy….
And of course the BBC are quick to blame ‘anti-Muslim’ sentiment as the ‘provocation’ that led to this shooting.
Who is that group that ‘tracks extremists in America’? The Southern Poverty Law Center….that’ll be the group that have been removed from an FBI list of ‘advisors’ because it itself spreads hate.…
‘In the fall of 2012, Floyd Lee Corkins, armed with a loaded semi-automatic pistol and 100 rounds of ammunition, entered FRC headquarters not far from FBI headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C. Corkins shot the front desk security guard and tried to gain entrance to the upper floors where he intended to kill FRC employees…. Corkins said he got the idea of killing FRC employees from reading the SPLC hate list and made use of a map of the FRC office found on the SPLC website.’
Perhaps the BBC should be more circumspect in who it uses to back up its own pro-Muslim prejudices….
‘A 2013 article in Foreign Policy concluded that SPLC exaggerates the hate crimes threat, saying SPLC is not an “objective purveyor of data,” instead calling them “anti-hate activists” and suggesting that their reports need to be “weighed more carefully by news outlets that cover their pronouncements.”’
The SPLC’s definition of an extremist is interesting….
‘The SPLC defines hate groups as those that “… have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.” The SPLC states: “Hate group activities can include criminal acts, marches, rallies, speeches, meetings, leafleting or publishing” but that “Listing here does not imply a group advocates or engages in violence or other criminal activity”‘
Surely that should include many religions…..in their actual form not as defined by their defenders. The SPLC is itself a ‘Far Left’ campaign group that uses its influence to distort American politics….
‘A critical analysis published recently by Professor George Yancey of North Texas University concluded that SPLC targets only those groups its leaders disagree with politically while leaving liberal groups who use extreme language alone.’
The BBC of course ignores all that but then it has always had an odd way of looking at life…..if a Muslim doesn’t have a job, or has a job he feels is below him, or is prevented from ‘living’ his religion to its full extent and therefore feels ‘oppressed’, he is excused by the BBC for mass murder…..express a view that an ideology might be regressive, backward and deeply unpleasant, to channel Mishal Husain, and the BBC vilifies you as a racist and a fascist……say all Jewish settlers are Nazis and should be killed and the BBC will laugh it off and continue to employ the person who said that…argue against Islamic terrorism and once again you are are spreading ‘hate’…..as these adverts obviously are……
Sky has trumped the BBC and Peston is peeved….
Curse you
@SkyNews, you made me smile https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KyISprZphtM&feature=youtu.be …
Some idle amusement on the bank holiday for you….
Good idea of the week….
Is this the real idea…..Red Ed rebuilds the Berlin Wall?…
Perhaps he should try Hadrians wall.
Better idea of the week….. what the SNP are announcing they intend to set in stone once in government on both sides of the border….The Miliband surrender….
A bit ironic this report from the BBC, The WW1 poet kids are taught to dislike, in which we are told of the prejudices and cultural values that teachers impose upon their pupils, not teaching them facts but attitudes, using the ‘facts’ as propaganda to sell the pupils a particular narrative. The teachers approach WWI as an event in history that was unremittingly appalling and anyone who supported the troops and the fight against the Germans should be condemned as jingoistic warmongers, the teachers using such people merely to contrast with the views of those ‘good people’ who opposed or who expressed cynicism about the war which naturally the teachers believe is the correct approach to viewing the war…..never mind that poets and writers are not perhaps the most inclined to be warlike or keen to fight and so may produce a rather jaundiced view of things whilst many people were up for the fight and had a ‘good war’.
It is all a bit ironic for the BBC to report critically on the teacher’s attitude when the BBC is probably the single most powerful purveyor of such an attitude towards War, the Empire, British colonies, British society and its influence in the world…all of which are apparently bad….no wonder any immigrant who comes here is disinclined to sign up to the institution of ‘Britishness’ when he’s told everything British is tainted by our history.
One part of Britain’s anachronistic history is still with us, John Humphrys, still treasured by the BBC which has let him off the leash to supplement his meagre BBC stipend with an article in the Telegraph, John Humphrys: Where did this general election go so wrong?, that is entirely negative and, whilst making little mention of political parties, is almost entirely weighted against the present government in its bleak view of life in modern Britain.
He tells us this has been a passionless, ‘bloodless’, election with little conflict or argument….can’t really see how he can say that when everyone else is saying this is an election that is breaking the mould, the end of two party politics (ignoring of course the fact we have had a coalition for the last five years…and several in the previous century), not to mention the rise of UKIP, the SNP, and Miliband turning ever redder if not tartan, and the TV debates certainly being examples of a great deal of passionate debate from the polticians.
Curiouslyy he tells us that in the most recent debate the audience was ‘angry’and ‘bad tempered’ [Peston thinks they were ‘irrational’…that is…anti-Miliband!]…..not exactly bloodless then.
Here he gives us a very narrow, and I don’t believe at all a representative view, of the public’s take on things…
It remains to be seen how representative of the national mood that bad-tempered audience really was. With Today’s little jaunts around the country, we wanted to get cossetted presenters out of the studio for a few days and try to find out what real people are thinking about the election, as opposed to what the politicians and experts tell us they are thinking. Often – too often, perhaps – the answer this election campaign has been not very much at all. Sometimes, it has been absolutely nothing.
I imagine the views expressed in that debate are exactly what the majority of people feel rather than ‘absolutely nothing’. By way of example Humphrys tells us of his talk with a woman in a car wash who wanted him to tell her what was going on in the election…
‘I struggled in the car wash was that she wanted me to tell her what, exactly, was going on. To which there was only one honest answer: damned if I know.’
Humphrys is ‘damned if he knows‘ what is going on in the election…..this is one of the BBC’s senior political reporters from their premier current affairs programme and he doesn’t know what is going on? Some might say that’s not a surprise.
Humphrys moves onto the economy and our lack of productivity…or supposed lack….again a Labour theme now that thye have lost the growth and living standards arguments.
‘This is the sort of business that Britain needs to succeed if we are ever to get our productivity out of the slow lane, and it has big ambitions to expand. Should things go to plan over the next few years, it will be the biggest technology park of its kind in Europe. That means plenty of jobs – the right kind of jobs – and a serious boost to the economy.’
He goes on to dismiss the jobs created in the UK as the equivalent of ‘mere’ hairdressers….a habit that most BBC reporters have of dismissing the new jobs as worthless and demeaning….
‘….the economy could not really be said to be improving if the jobs being created simply amounted to more and more people cutting each others’ hair. It’s not that I have anything against hairdressers – that’s what my mother did – but those jobs don’t create real wealth by boosting productivity.’
Never mind that Employment in Creative Industries grows five times the rate of the wider UK economy and that ‘the Creative Industries contribute more than £8m per hour to the UK economy, and generate more than £70bn a year, and is outperforming all other sectors of UK.’
No real wealth then from the ‘creatives’…which includes the Media of course.
Then we had another Labour narrative…Europe, we must stay in…because the big bosses tell us we must….Ed Miliband…the ‘voice of the People’!!….
‘Europe. Dr George Gillespie, the chief executive of MIRA, had just returned from a trip to China. One of the big bosses he’d been trying to impress there asked him if it was true that Britain was leaving the EU, because if it was, he couldn’t see much future in investing here. Clarity on whether Britain is staying in Europe or leaving matters to Britain’s bosses.’
Humphrys trundles off to Lowestoft and makes a comment completely untrammelled by the inconvenient fact that the very Europe he has just been praising is responsible for the death of the UK fishing industry…
‘The fishing industry is dying on its feet and there’s little to replace it. ‘
Then we get the idea that Ed Miliband’s ‘everyday folk’ have been ignored…another Labour narrative…
‘….walk ten minutes from the 21st century centre and you’re back in the grim days of derelict factories when Birmingham stopped being the manufacturing heart of Britain.’
Never mind that the Midlands is powering back to industrial health….and Birmingham is in there fighting its corner...Birmingham is top regional ‘hotspot’ for businesses going for growth
Then it’s on to housing and then university with that old lie about ‘debts’…
‘ for their sixth-form children, the worry of accumulating their own debts if they manage to get to university. ‘
Does he not know that more of these ‘children’ have been applying to university than ever before, and from the poorest backgrounds?
He finishes on a whimsical note…
‘The laws of physics dictate that when a moving object achieves a precise momentum, it will proceed on its set course because its weight is balanced against the curve and the gradient. Something like that. It struck me later that political leaders would have us believe in such a happy state. Set the course, press the accelerator and the country will cruise merrily along. Dream on.’
Of course that is not the Tory narrative that we can carry on as before by pressing the accelerator and spending our way out of trouble…that’s a Labour one.
Intentional or not Humphrys is peddling a pro-Labour narrative, one that is entirely negative not to mention mistaken in its perceptions of how people think about the election and events surrounding it.
I suspect they know a great deal about the political options on offer and the various scenarios that may occur should votes go one way or the other.
Humphrys paints a picture of the election and of Britain that is distinctly jaundiced…perhaps he has been listening to the news on the BBC from his own colleagues and swallowing their nonsense whole for too long.
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