I didn’t get to see it myself but was interested in how the BBC has covered it! I’m talking about the “Leader’s debate” on ITV last night, of course. BBC enthusiastic about Sturgeon, in particular. It seems her brand of strident caledonian neo marxism appeals to the BBC, for some inexplicable reason! They also bigged up Bennett and Woods, whilst downplaying Farage and Cameron. No bias at all in play, right?

Here you go, on time and awaiting your completion!

This has a prominent position on the BBC Frontpage…

#BBCtrending: The ‘Eid Pray Love’ movement

The BBC tells us that ‘These Muslims are fasting…and its not Ramadan’ to show solidarity with Christians.’

Really?  In what way are they ‘fasting’?

What are the big sacrifices they are making ‘in solidarity with Christians‘?

Sweets, cheese, no online shopping, Instagram…and the man who organised it…he’s giving up sour cream and onion crisps….for a while.

We’re told by a Christian ‘interfaith activist’ that they are showing a different side to Islam to how it is portrayed in the Media…challenging people’s perceptions, myths and fears.

The Muslims tells us that it is an “initiative with the goal of uniting Muslims and changing our perception through positive social, and interfaith action.”

So in other words it has nothing to do with ‘solidarity with Christians’ but all to do with trying to make people think Islam is wonderful.

It’s outright propaganda for the Muslim religion,  a ‘Trojan Horse’ if you like.

Good of the BBC to put it on the Frontpage especially at Easter when we hear what other Muslims think is the real face of Islam rather than what we hear in the Media….the BBC and the Guardian….. Muslims may be taking the opportunity to flock to ISIS….. about which this is an interesting comment….

However, police have not been told of the families’ concerns as the schools do not want their pupils to be criminalised.

Mr Afzal told The Times: ‘One head said he was being approached almost on a daily basis by parents who fear their kids are about to go to Syria.’

But neither the parents nor the school go to the police.

Will we hear Muslims subsequently blaming the police for not stopping their Jihadi offspring from going to Syria as we have recently had….only for it to turn out the parents often knew more than they were admitting about the radicalisation process? Or as Sir Peter Fahy said…

The parents of teenagers who flee Britain to join ISIS should take more responsibility for their children’s actions, a senior police officer has said.

Sir Peter Fahy, one of the country’s leading counter terrorism officers, said families are more to blame for young jihadis who runaway to Syria than the police, schools or local authorities.

Rather than report their concerns to police for fear of being criticised, some parents are guilty of embracing ‘victimhood’ when their children leave, he claimed.

Despite the major economic news being manufacturing is growing at its fastest rate in eight months the BBC was pretty much ignoring that and instead is blitzing us with stories about productivity, or the lack of, in the economy and are trying to present it as a result of ‘Austerity’….that’s despite the lack of productivity being a very old story.  Robert Peston was on the R4 news telling us that if we hadn’t had austerity growth would have been 15% higher…and so would wages….a Labour narrative and pure speculation…there is no counterfactual, Peston is claiming something he can’t prove…and therefore should not be saying it.

But who did he get that figure from in the first place?  An economist named John Van Reenen, who was an advisor to the Labour government and has always opposed austerity...even before it began...

Van Reenen, John (2010) Extreme austerity is the wrong medicine British Politics and Policy at LSE (28 Jun 2010)

Here is his thoughts on the Labour economy in 2007…..just before the SHTF….(not saying that he’s a bad economist but he had no idea that the worst recession in one hundred years was about to hit)

Labour’s Economic Legacy

John Van Reenen
The economy is probably the most successful legacy of the Blair years. Ironically, New Labour’s economic policies have been set by his heir, chancellor Gordon Brown.  Blair leaves behind an economy in better shape than any previous Labour leader.

Here we see where Peston gets the figure of 15% from…and it is the worst case scenario…why did he pick that?…

John Van Reenen of the LSE, who also disagreed with austerity, said “UK GDP is about 15% below where we would have expected on pre-crisis trends… Premature austerity has damaged UK welfare and, as I and others argued at the time, delaying consolidation would have left the UK in a much stronger position than it is today.”

 

Note that Peston’s article is one of those rapid rebuttals the BBC issues when things are going pear shaped for Labour…such as one hundred businessmen writing in the Telegraoph that Labour’s economic policies will damage the country just as Miliband is trying to say he is business friendly…

Who to trust – business leaders or economists?

 

Peston says…

On the day that more than 100 past and current business leaders have written to the Telegraph that the “Conservative-led government has been good for business and has pursued policies which have supported investment and job creation”, a survey of academic macro-economists has come up with a different conclusion.

 

Trouble is it wasn’t ‘on the day’...it was last Saturday this poll was released….the letter in the Telegraph appeared on Wednesday.

Here you can see the cogs working and evidence that he is trying to counter the Telegraph letter…

Now to be clear, this is not a scientifically robust poll of those who know best. But nor is the Telegraph’s letter – and those those who took part in the economists’ survey are no less distinguished in their field than the business signatories.

 

Who would I trust?  I’d follow the money and the people who make the money not those who have political axes to grind and don’t dirty their hands actually producing the stuff they talk so knowledgeably about.

Here is Peston’s unemotional report on productivity…

Weep for falling productivity

We should be both grateful and worried that British productivity has been so lousy since the great crash and recession.

Lousy only since the crash?  Hmmm…productivity in the UK in comparison to other countries has always been ‘lousy’…here’s what the IFS says……

The UK–US productivity gap narrowed over the late 1980s and early 1990s but has widened slightly since 2004. In 2008 – the latest year for which international comparisons are available – US worker s were 33% more productive than those in the UK. The UK’s lower level of productivity has contributed to a lower level of GDP per capita. In 2009 GDP per capita, measured in US dollars, was $37,391 in the UK and $46,008 in the US .

GDP was growing under Labour but what was the cause of that?  Was it productivity? or was it merely the huge number of immigrants flooding here increasing GDP but lowering wages and not actually adding to the economy overall?  The London School of Economics tells us that it was not a rise in productivity…..

Since 1997 total GDP growth has been driven mainly by increases in employment and capital (especially information technology) rather than increases in overall efficiency.

Even Peston’s new friend, John Van Reenen, admitted in 2007 that UK productivity was low under Labour…

Gordon Brown and British business leaders alike have jealously eyed the US “productivity miracle” for more than 10 years – after 1995 US output per hour growth doubled compared to the previous 20 years.

The US continues to lead in productivity, the measure of output per employee. According to the Office of National Statistics, GDP per worker in the US was 27% higher than in the UK in 2005.

Yet the UK is showing little sign of catching up.

 

Peston tells us…

The point is that a big contributor to the absence of any growth at all in output per worker and output per hour is that employment has grown much faster than national income….Lower productivity undermines the competitiveness of British firms in the global economy.

And the absence of productivity growth undermines the ability of British firms to increase our pay.

 

Many issues with that…first…we’ve always been less competitive as the IFS showed and Van Reneen admitted…second Peston claims lack of productivity undermines pay growth and that output per worker and output per hour are the measure of productivity.

Another way of measuring it would be to assess output per pound paid in wages….employers are keeping people in jobs at lower wages…but they are still producing the same amount….for less money…so productivity per pound is probably still good….or else why would employment be rising so fast?  After all employers are not charities they employ someone for a good reason, a reason that will result in profits for the business.

There is no ‘puzzle’ to the apparent lack of productivity…it is just that the wrong measure is being used.

Wages are part of the equation when measuring productivity….maybe not in the textbooks, or in BBC studios, but on the factory floor it is.

One reason wages are so low is because of the mass immigration and flood of cheap labour that means employers don’t have to compete for workers by offering higher wages.

Wonder why Peston doesn’t dwell on that?

A contribution by Graeme Thompson who posts as ‘hippiepooter’.

“Picking up from Alan’s post here on the BBC’s (ahem) ‘under-reporting’ of recent facts emerging about the Commons appearance of the families of ‘jihadi brides’, Britain’s patron saint of counter-jihad Douglas Murray prompts further thought here.

So let’s give this another spin with all that has now emerged. The father of one of the girls who went off to do Jihad and the lawyer that represented all the families who blamed the police in the Commons are rabid Jihadists.

This sensational (though entirely unsurprising) story has had banner headlines in The Times, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the Evening Standard, but if you relied on the BBC for your news you would be unaware of it.

Why is this? Could it be that the correctnick left are anti-Western allies of Jihad and control the BBC? Why else would they aid and abet the propaganda of our country’s enemies then put a news blackout on their exposure?

We use the word ‘Islamist’ to differentiate between Muslims who want to kill us and Muslims who don’t. The last thing any civilised nation wants is a pogrom against an immigrant community when atrocities are committed in the name of its religion. However, Jihad is an integral part of Islam, and a Muslim who renounces Jihad renounces Islam.

One way we can defeat Jihad and stop demographic islamisation of our nation is to de-islamisize our Muslim population. The best way we can do this is with the Koran. How could such a lying, thieving, warmongering, child molesting, Jew hating monster like Mohammed possibly be the ‘last prophet of God’?

This Satanic religion is killing our country and the BBC is helping it.”

Wow, one of those mornings where I have received numerous emails from you folks mentioning the BBC Radio 4 Today programme hatchet job on the letter in the Daily Telegraph supporting Conservative economic policies. I also see it has been picked up on the Open Thread. I did hear Robert Peston in full “Save Ed” mode and the BBC was doing everything possible to push the Labour narrative that the thoughts of 100 senior business leaders means little and anyway there are academic based economists out there who support Ed! It looks more and more that the BBC are the official opposition to the prospect of a Cameron return to Number Ten!

Thought this was rather interesting. The BBC seems to have a mea culpa moment regarding Jeremy Clarkson and is to provide him with a regular spot on their Newsnight programme. 

Here you go, on-time and ready for your completion! Detail the bias here please and keep it polite.

Now there was me complaining that the BBC were ignoring UKIP. I wish to apologise… 🙂

Election 2015: Why is UKIP off to a slow start?

This is a candidate who has to win on 7 May. If he fails to become the next MP for South Thanet he has said he will quit as leader. Yet I have seen no door-knocking. Our cameras have not been told of any public event, yet. We have had two poster-unveiling ceremonies with impromptu leader interviews. He arrives, he speaks, he answers questions, then he leaves.

Couldn’t ask fairer than that, eh?

VOTE LABOUR

The IFS, the BBC’s favourite economics thinktank……

Paul Johnson, Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies.…..was at Oxford with Ed Balls…

Johnson studied PPE at Oxford University between 1985 and 1988, when his tutorial partner at Keble College was Balls. Both got firsts.

He also worked for the Labour government at the…

Department for Education and had three years at the Treasury while Gordon Brown was chancellor.

Just of interest, the BBC’s other goto think tank, the King’s Fund, is headed by Chris Ham…the man who advised Labour on their NHS reforms….so does he have a dog in the fight when he criticises the Coalition’s reforms…reforms which might suggest his own weren’t up to scratch?  I think he might….especially when he gets headlines like this from the BBC...’NHS reorganisation was disastrous, says King’s Fund.’

Never mind…Overall public satisfaction with the NHS increased to 65 per cent in 2014 – the second highest level since the British Social Attitudes survey began in 1983. Dissatisfaction with the service fell to an all-time low of 15 per cent.

Not as if Ham bigs up Labour policies now is it?...“Andy Burnham has set out an ambitious and wide-ranging vision for the NHS and social care. It throws down the gauntlet to the other parties to set out their plans ahead of the general election…His prescription for change is ambitious and his vision of delivering integrated care, co-ordinated around the needs of the individual, will be widely welcomed “

The IFS and the King’s Fund are guaranteed a favourable report from the BBC whenever they utter something but I’m not sure why….they do seem ultimately more Labour friendly than they should be, giving Labour policies far more credence than they merit whilst being highly critical of the government.

The IFS were very quick off the mark to attack the Conservatives over their claim of a £3000 tax hike by Labour and yet the IFS admits it doesn’t know what either party intends….and the figures that are available back up the Tory estimate.  The IFS can certainly say the claim is an estimate but can’t dismiss it using any actual figures…as indeed they weren’t able to merely suggesting the Tory claim was ‘unhelpful’….certainly unhelpful to Labour.