A pool cameraman for the BBC, ITV and Sky filmed the Queen making a comment about the visit of a Chinese delegation to London saying they had been ‘very rude’.

The BBC has led with this for most of the day as their top story on the radio, and apparently Derbyshire also ventured there [As always looking for the important story] and the BBC blasted it out over the World Service…to be blocked in China.

The Guardian tells us that it was the BBC itself that decided to broadcast this conversation to the world and it was a high level BBC news mandarin who made the decision to go ahead….

“We have a team looking through the rushes of this sort of thing, and that’s what they found,” said a BBC insider. “It’s just a routine thing and usually there is nothing much of interest. In this case there was.”

Given the sensitivity of any story involving Buckingham Palace, the story would have been referred to the news department’s most senior executives before it broke on the BBC on Tuesday lunchtime. “There would have been high level talks within the BBC about this sort of thing.”

What’s you’re poison?

The BBC itself has been coy about revealing that it was in essence their cameraman and they who broke this story…the BBC have been somewhat reserved about telling us just who the ‘pool’ cameraman was and his relationship to them….From the Guardian….

As is usual, when the Queen performed her walkabout on Tuesday, meeting garden party guests lined up in advance by officials, she had in tow a small pool of journalists.

Among them was Peter Wilkinson, the pool cameraman. BBC reports referred to him as the “palace cameraman”. However, he is not a member of the royal household – though he wears a royal badge for ease of security access.

He is employed by and paid by the three major broadcasters – the BBC, ITV and Sky – to cover royal engagements for them as a pool, sending his footage directly to them.

The BBC has also been somewhat economical with the whole story and the reason for the Queen saying the Chinese were rude…I had no idea from BBC radio other than she had said they were rude……from the Guardian….

Later, the Queen told her guest: “They were very rude to the ambassador” – referring to Barbara Woodward, Britain’s first female ambassador to China.

D’Orsi complained to the Queen that Xi’s visit had been “quite a testing time for me” and claimed that at one point Chinese officials “walked out” on both her and the British ambassador, telling her “that the trip was off”.

“Extraordinary,” the Queen replied.

“It’s very rude and very undiplomatic, I thought,” the police commander concluded.

The BBC website is more forthcoming but if you didn’t see that you’d be in the dark and you still aren’t told that it was the BBC that first betrayed the Queen’s trust….as Buck House says….it was a private conversation, and the repercussions could be damaging diplomatically at the very least.

Why did the BBC broadcast the story when they knew that this would cause some trouble with the Chinese who obviously are not happy having blacked the story out at home?

The Guardian thinks that this has caused a rumpus between the UK and China..

UK’s ‘golden era’ with China in balance after Queen comments

Whoever the senior BBC news executive was that made the decision to go public he/she must have known that this would cause huge embarrassment for both sides and perhaps cause a fallout.  So why did he/she decide to broadcast this and do so so prominently making it one of the BBC’s top stories?

This must be something of a breach of protocol for the BBC to publicise a private converstaion and one that is obviously so diplomatically sensitive.

The BBC’s intent seems to be to deliberately cause a rift with China…the story in itself is hardly news…the Queen saying the Chinese were rude for not giving enough notice as they cancelled a meeting, so what?….it is the BBC that has made it news by stirring up an ‘international incident’ over nothing at all.   Why?  Are they out to damage Cameron who has made a big thing out of the relationship with China?  Have to think that is the real motive as there seems to be little other…as said it is hardly a news story of any real interest in and of itself.

Whatever the motive it is hardly the action of a responsible and trusted news broadcaster and no doubt in future the Royal family will look even more askance at any request from the BBC for unique access and stories.

OK, here’s a brand new Open Thread to detail the bias from the State Broadcaster. So what’s been bothering you….?

Trevor Phillips has made another speech on immigration and integration in which he slams the likes of the BBC and politicians who don’t just bury their heads in the sand but actively work to hide the problems and paint an alternative, and false, narrative of all being well….a more perfect description than the one above of the BBC and the Left’s approach to this issue would be harder to find.

In a 100-page paper, published by the think-tank Civitas set to provoke uproar, he argues that a new brand of “superdiversity” is bringing challenges to the Western way of life, far removed from those of immigration of the past.

Crucially, he says, race is no longer a “purely black and white affair” but a divide between the majority and people with different “values and behaviours”.

What is extraordinary, but not unexpected, is that in a week when the BBC is focussing on immigration and will have a day next week devoted especially to the subject it has totally and absolutely ignored Trevor Phillips’ comments whilst every other news outlet covered the story.  The last time Phillips spoke on this issue and suggested Muslims’ lack of willingness to integrate was a problem the BBC instead of investigating the issue chose to mock and discredit him and yet today he states that Muslim immigration threatens to shake the foundations of “liberal democracy” itself…..surely newsworthy and demanding investigation…apparently not if you are a BBC journalist.

Rome Burning

Britain risks “flames” of racial and religious conflict because of a “liberal self-delusion” over the impact of mass immigration, the former head of the equality watchdog Trevor Phillips claims today.

In a startling assault on decades of official multiculturalism and diversity policy, the founding  chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission argues the UK is being allowed to “sleepwalk to catastrophe” by leaders too “touchy”, “smug”, “complacent” and “squeamish” to talk about race.

“We maintain a polite silence masked by noisily debated public fictions such as ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘community cohesion’.

“Rome may not yet be in flames, but I think I can smell the smouldering whilst we hum to the music of liberal self-delusion.”

Significantly, he claims the arrival of some Muslim groups in particular who are actively “resistant to the traditional process of integration” threatens to shake the foundations of “liberal democracy” itself.

The reaction by many to the election of Sadiq Khan to be Mayor of London illustrates how it is not just the BBC that burys its head in the sand…..Khan almost certainly being voted in on a tide of Muslim votes in a London with nearly 1 million Muslims in the population.  Never mind Khan’s deliberately chosen associations with extremists you only have to look at what he has said and done to get an idea that his first identity is ‘Muslim’ and that Muslim issues are his first concern….and those concerns, such as British foreign policy and Israel, are the very same concerns that fuel Muslim radicalisation.  Khan feeds that narrative whilst of course not backing the violent Islamist response.

Hugo Rifkind in the Times tells us that ‘The new mayor could be a great British leader, a symbol of how multiculturalism can work.’  I would suggest this is a blinkered and overly optimistic view of what Khan stands for given his signing of a letter denouncing British foreign policy as an attack on Muslims, presumably his Muslim identity trumps being British, and that he backs a boycott of Israel whilst telling British Jews that he doesn’t.

Did Khan almost certainly say he was ‘looking forward to being Emir of a great city’ on the Marr show (28 mins 30 sec)….When I heard him speak I was sure he did say that…then thought maybe he said ‘a mayor’…but why would you say ‘a mayor’ and not ‘the mayor’ which is the more normal phrasing when he has already been elected and there is only one mayor of London?  Was Khan playing games having been bet he couldn’t slip in such a word into the conversation?  Calling yourself an ‘Emir’ might indicate problems ahead.

Rifkind states that ‘In a better world Britain’s Muslims and Jews are obvious allies’.   Says it all about the delusional state of many in the media who live on a diet of wishful thinking and self-delusion as ‘Rome burns’.

So the BBC is not alone in its delusions though the BBC’s are more often cynically deliberate and intended to suppress the truth.  With millions of Muslims flooding into Europe that is a truth that needs to be talked about openly….does such a movement of people who follow a religion so implacably opposed to Western values ‘ threaten to shake the foundations of “liberal democracy” itself.’?

I thnk we have the right to know.

The BBC thinks we don’t have that right.

Deepjoy….this morning the BBC were once again trying to use a bit of emotional blackmail to keep the borders flung wide open as the Today programme spun a tale of thousands of desperate migrants dying and being lost or buried in unnamed graves across the Mediterranean.  We had the sad tale of an Afghan who couldn’t find his family and had to sell his home in Afghanistan to fund a search for them [So he had a house which he kept…no doubt intending to use it as a holiday home to go back to occasionallywhilst allowing his extended family to live there whilst he sent home the handouts to them he was given by the gullible Europeans….Most of Afghanistan is safe, as is much of Iraq….why do we allow ‘refugees’ from these countries to come here, especially as so many ‘desperate’ Iraqis head back home to Iraq when they don’t like the weather or the handouts aren’t big enough?]

And now we have another tale of some Afghans infiltrating into Europe via the ‘refugee’ route [so often denied by the BBC] only this time intending to carry out extensive terrorist attacks across Europe….including the UK.

Interesting the brevity of the BBC report compared to the far more informative Telegraph one.

Nothing from the BBC like this for instance…

The two men were described as “human bombs” by a centre-Right politician, Roberto Calderoli of the Northern League.

“We now have human bombs here at home, bombs that are in danger of exploding in our homes and in our piazzas,” he said in reaction to the arrests.

He blamed the centre-Left government of Matteo Renzi for “allowing in hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants without the slightest controls, without knowing who they are, where they come from, how they paid for their journeys.

“Now we find that we have terrorists at home, welcomed into our migrant reception centres.”

The BBC in a dangerous denial whilst spinning relentless lies about the benefits and necessity for all these people to come to Europe whilst avoiding mention of the very obvious dangers, and not just those of terrorism.

Self loathing, the hallmark of many BBC leftists, has been nicely exposed in this story.

A range of British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) television departments, programmes, and radio stations are currently offering highly desirable, paid internships, but white people are prohibited from applying. 

Creative Access – an organisation, registered as a charity, which offers placements at “many of the UK’s top media organisations” – has listed a number of BBC placements on its website, demanding applicants are only from “Black, Asian and non-white minority ethnic backgrounds”.

As the Breibart article states, the head of Creative Access is … yes,  a Parliamentary candidate for the Labour Party, while one of the organisation’s board members is Baroness McDonagh, the former General Secretary of the Labour Party.

Labour. BBC. Hatred of our overwhelmingly White population.

I’ll be on Russia Today at 8pm to discuss this story. The BBC are playing mute on it.

The BBC really has given up all semblance of balance and impartiality on the EU as it bombards us with ‘news’ and interprets it as showing Brexit as a risk and fails somehow to be equally alert to the dangers of staying and being engulfed in a Euro state that is surely on the cards.  The slow down in employment we are told has many causes but the one the BBC likes the best is the looming referendum….never mind that Osborne’s ‘living wage’ was predicted to cost over 60,0000 jobs and oh yes…employment in the US is also slowing…hadn’t realised they were holding a referendum on EU membership as well.   Alternatively they slip in programmes that are supposedly a history of the EU and yet seem always to show us how wonderful the EU is and how badly off we would all be if it had never existed.

Today we had an allegorical tale of Rome and the Pax Romana, which of course we are supposed to look upon in wonder and think if only we had a similar empire where everyone was the same and lived under one rule, with one set of laws and one currency.  Apparently the Barbarians all wanted to be civilised Romans and cooperated willingly in their own subjugation.  It was one big happy family as people lived across Europe with multiple identities and yet rubbed along famously together.

Lesson to take from that?  Submit to Pax Europa and you may give up a few freedoms but you’ll be happy in your servitude…after all what didn’t the Romans do for us?

Next week more of the same as the BBC heads off to Estonia to show what being outside on the fringes of Europe could be like...’How a tiny nation has lived with conquest and constant tension on Europe’s edge’…..no doubt it won’t be good…but you know what….Europe and open borders bring such joy….Join Europe and you can forget about your woes, your conquests, your constant tensions……and you will find out in this impartial and balanced programme ‘why Europeans are such an extraordinary mix of languages, cultures, and migrations.’  In other words it’s the usual BBC anti-nation state spiel that insists there is no such thing as a unique British or English or Scottish identity…you’re all really just European…so stay in the EU.

I guess that’s why we have a large statue of Boadicea and celebrate her battles against the loveable Romans…..she too just wanted to be a Roman….just didn’t know how to express it very well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7dgWlInpok

From the Guardian….

Six-year-olds need delight, not drilling – this grammar regime is a farce

Angela Moore

As a teacher I’m glad the spelling, punctuation and grammar test had to be scrapped this year. We need to stop colluding with this damaging system… There’s little room for deep and meaningful learning, politicians are far too busy ensuring that we are counting.

Listening to the BBC and you might think that the SATs school tests were a new form of enhanced interrogation method one step up from waterboarding and that pupils are throwing themselves under buses up and down the country in response to the intolerable stresses and strains placed upon their delicate and still forming minds.

This morning we had a less than subtle, politically motivated, anti-SATs programme from Marr that told us that today’s Victorian era industrialised learning, designed to churn out unthinking wage slaves to run the Empire, was outdated and unfit for purpose…what was proposed was that pupils were left to their own devices to learn for themselves, being put in challenging situations to force them to learn on the job so to speak, learning through group cooperation without teachers, carried aloft by a natural enthusiasm for learning that is presently stifled by the rigour and strait jacket of formal education in today’s schools….a sort of Lord of the Flies scenario is the preferred outcome I believe.  Marr espoused that today’s education system was brutalising and terrifying the kids and not providing them with the necessary skills to handle today’s world…for instance actually having knowledge readily to hand in your head is so much wasted time and effort to learn when you have the internet instantly on tap to answer any question that may arise…why ‘know things’ if Google is but a click away?   Goodbye Mr Chips, hullo Micro Chip.  Marr, that old lefty, also manages to shoe-horn in ‘class and fairness’ in education throughout the programme.  Political?  Not a bit of it.

Listening to the BBC you’d have no idea that the ‘pupils’ strike’ was something in all likelihood organised and supported by the teaching unions as a political action rather than out of any concern for the pupils.  The response to SATs has been driven by ideological dogma not genuine, intellectual, coherent critique of the tests and the reasons behind them.

Today there are questions over whether the so-called ‘kids’ strike’ is part of a wider political campaign after possible ties with trade unions emerged – and children were seen waving teaching union flags and clutching anti-Government placards.

The unions have been agitating against SATs for years...here they are in 2009, under Labour, giving us their considered opinion as they vote to boycott the tests…..how times change…

Max Hyde, of the NUT executive, said: ‘At best SATs are detrimental and skew the curriculum. At worst, and particularly for our most vulnerable children, they are perilously close to child abuse.’

Our old friend Michael Rosen was a key agitator against SATs…

Starting with the end of the year, the Michael Rosen meeting last Monday was a real highlight.  There was a good turn out of members and non-members, and the debate and discussion left nobody in any doubt that SATs are damaging to all in our education system, and must be stopped. It was a great start to our local anti-SATs campaign.

I love this bit of nonsense from the NUTs Christine Blower…

‘We are not against assessment. What we want is assessment that is meaningful, assessment that is more accurate, and assessment that focuses on what children can do, rather than stigmatising them as failures for the things they can’t do.’

Many parents’ lack of knowledge of the tests, their misperceptions of what the national curriculum involves and for some, their own political persuasions, will have been exploited by the unions to generate an atmosphere of alarm, fear and concern that is at odds with what is really going on.

The main campaigning group is all too professional to be anything but a union front…The ‘Let Our Kids Be Kids’ group for instance says that the SATs boycott was “a show of support to heads and teachers everywhere that they will have overwhelming parental enthusiasm for a boycott of Sats and a return to a curriculum based on the joy and wonder of learning”.    They have a nice website…and a Facebook page.  Not to mention a 38 Degrees page.   Who runs all that?

Why are they also concerned now about academies?…

We started this campaign as Year 2 parents against Year 2 SATs… then Year 6 parents came on board to say they’ve had enough. Now a third horseman of the education apocalypse has reared it’s head as a massive concern for ALL parents.

Making schools into academies means privatising schools… our school buildings and the land they sit on are then assets in their businesses… our children are no longer going to go to a comprehensive school supported by parent governors… academies can have their own agendas… appoint their own teaching staff and leadership teams. Who knows what this will lead to for our children’s childhoods!?

All very, very political and little to do with educational achievement.  A union front?  More than likely.

The BBC though continues to peddle the scaremongering and the tales of traumatised kids…telling us of the wonderful headteachers who are doing all they can to limit the emotional damage to the kids…er….by ramping up the fear and making sure the kids look upon the SATs tests as something to be very worried about.  The BBC calls these ‘inspiring letters’...Personally I’d sack the head teachers who sent them out.

Let me summarise them….Don’t forget to sparkle kids, you’re all amazing, unique and special.  The people who set these tests are so stupid and don’t know that you are all geniuses in your own right.  The tests are a meaningless bore, a chore to be completed…but have no fear, success or failure is mere fool’s play, make-believe and mumming, you’ve been fretting over these tests for over a year as we’ve been instilling the fear of god into you about them for months but not to worry, they, and the knowledge and abilities they test, are so much wastrous piffle.  Have some ice cream and sweeties, washed down with copious amounts of frothy cola and self-indulgence and enjoy the hot weather as you occasionally glance out of the window in a moments distraction from the TV or flipping burgers at Macky D’s….better get used to that kids because that’s your life when you leave school because all you will be taught by this iniquitous national curriculum is some life-enchancing knowledge that would enable you to get a good job and make the most of your life…but hey, we, the teachers, don’t want to fuck you up by making you work towards that and stop you having fun, we don’t want to place any pressure on you to succeed, failure is an option…you can succeed at failure…go for it!!!  Sparkle!!!  F**k the national curriculum!  Oh, yes…you are special and unique.  Really.

And of course what is really needed is a stress coping strategy for the kids taking the tests….I’m sure there will be a test for that.

We hear a lot about the terrors of these tests but how much is true?  Allegedly the tests are far too hard and reduce kids to tears….but the reality is that the tests are set to test a range of abilities and that some questions are designed to stretch only those with higher abilites…teachers can withdraw pupils who they think won’t be able to do those questions at any stage.  However all pupils will have the option to take all the papers if they want to unlike in previous years.

Teachers have been teaching to the test and forming their curriculum around it is one of the major claims and issues….but the Department of Education specifically states that the tests are not designed to be  used as a framework or guide as to what or how to teach…the teachers should follow the national curriculum.  Teaching to the test is clearly very limiting even supposing the teachers knew what was in the test.  If you are teaching to the curriculum the pupils should have the knowledge to attain a good score in the tests by default having the breadth of knowledge to cope with most random questions, if not always the academic ability….and the tests don’t just test knowledge but also reasoning and a grasp of concepts and comprehension…the ability to think

Are the tests so much harder?  We’ve already noted that the questions meant for more able pupils are now included in the test as a norm, available for all to answer, and that not all pupils are expected to answer these, but in many ways the tests are made simpler…there is no mental maths test, no mind-bending contextualised questions and no English writing test.  There will be more focus on grammar, punctuation and spelling and more arithmatic with the knowledge of basic times-tables encouraged.

The BBC tells us that..

Up until last year, Sats tests were graded on levels – for example Level 4 was the expected level for children finishing primary school. But these national curriculum levels have now been scrapped.

Instead parents will be given their child’s raw score (the actual number of marks they get) and whether they have reached the national average.

The raw scores are not the relevant mark….the raw scores have to be processed by ‘scaling’ them….a raw score one year may seem to indicate a better performance than the same score the year before but the tests may be have been harder the previous year…..the converted, scaled, score is designed to allow comparison of the tests across the years taking into account the differing difficulty of each year’s tests.  The raw scores themselves do not allow this and would be misleading without an indication of the level of difficulty of each year’s tests.

The BBC has not provided the public with an informed debate in this subject preferring sensation to fact,  highlighting the alarmist and politically motivated complaints rather than hold a reasoned and sensible debate.  We get campaigners who are more than likely connected to the unions but unattributed by the BBC, we get tales of depressed and stressed out pupils, tears, fears and sleepless nights…but little in the way of genuine information about the tests.  If we had that information we could judge for oursleves whether these tests are really so gruelling and traumatic…or this is all about left wing unions doing what they always do…oppose anything that shines a light on the qualtiy of their teaching and their own performance…I suspect not a lot to do with the pupils at the end of the day.

Sparkle kids……

‘Children need learning that matters, that can steer their lot and influence their futures. We need to give them opportunity to improve the world, time to create and craft beautiful work; immerse them in the delights (and the despairs) of the real world. They are ready to show what they know, what they can do, and what they can dream up. But none of it will show up on a test score.’

Despair!  This apparently is all too difficult…it must be as the adults seem unable to cope…….and Michael Rosen’s still at it….

@MichaelRosenYes Have you seen this one? Year 2!! pic.twitter.com/TDVjccH8U4

— Louise Bloxham (@LouiseBloxham) May 7, 2016

Ms Bloxham explained the question was posted on a ‘Parents against Primary Testing’ Facebook group where a member insisted the answer, according to the mark scheme, was 46.

However, no evidence has been provided to back up this claim.

 

National curriculum assessments: 2016 sample materials

Sample materials for the 2016 key stage 1 and key stage 2 national curriculum tests and information about scaled scores and test trialling

Here’s a new Open Thread to start the week. And the BBC Today programme on Radio 4 starts the week with a leftwing vengeance. In just 45 minutes we had the following political memes;

1. The evil John Wittingdale is out to destroy the BBC. An excitable speech by Peter Kominsky at the BAFTA TV awards is hyped up by the luvvies to suggest apocalypse now for our “National Treasure” which is “the envy of the world” apparently. I was on BBC5 Live discussing this last night and at least told them to stop whingeing.
2. There is no “weekend effect” in our NHS Hospitals. Researchers from Oxford University have “proven” that its as safe to die in the NHS than during the week. I am sure the Junior Doctors will enjoy this “research”
3. There will be war across Europe should the UK leave the EU.
4. It’s time to crack down on tax havens controlled by Britain.

This is sustained unrelenting left wing pro EU propaganda masquerading as public service broadcasting. As I said last night, IF the BBC is as wonderful and popular and loved as it claims to be, let it stand aside from the £3.5 annual tax extortion and compete freely. It won’t because it is too scared.

Jeremy Paxman had some negative things to say about the EU in an article in the Radio Times…he has been forced to withdraw it in light of the BBC’s determination to remain absolutely neutral in the EU referendum debate, no, really.

Never mind that Nick Robinson recruited Churchill for the Remain campaign and was allowed to falsely claim that Churchill was the father of the EU or that we have been relentlessly drip fed pro-EU material by the BBC.  Do they really think an article by Paxo in the Radio Times will swing the vote? They obviously have little faith in their own arguments.

Jeremy Paxman WITHDRAWS article critical of European Union from next issue of Radio Times ‘after pressure from BBC’

Jeremy Paxman has withdrawn an article criticising the EU from the next issue of the Radio Times under pressure from the BBC, it has been claimed.

It is understood the outspoken journalist and presenter’s views raised concerns with broadcast bosses ahead of a documentary set to air later this month.

He will appear on Paxman in Brussels on May 19, described by the BBC as ‘an impartial look at the fundamentals of what actually goes on between the UK and the EU’.

Although the article is not thought to have called for Britain to leave Brussels, the organisation fears his words will damage his neutrality, according to The Sunday Times.

The paper claims the article sees the former Newsnight presenter ‘express doubts’ about the EU, its procedures and the loss of British sovereignty, and that the 65-year-old was ‘unhappy’ with proposed changes to his work asked for by a senior BBC executive.

The BBC said….

‘Our coverage of the EU referendum is fair and balanced so that across the campaign period audiences are given clear and impartial information about both sides of the argument.’

But that’s just not true…from very inaccurate reports of what Cameron ‘achieved’ in his negotiations with the EU to highly misleading reports on trade and tariffs in coutnires such as Norway, Canada and Switzerland…and we are constantly treated to little snippets of pro-EU comment casually slipped into the mix…such as Brexit being risky for the economy…but no similar comments at all about the risk of staying inside the EU.

Sadiq Khan is ‘Looking forward to being a mayor of the great city of London’….His priority he says, as that Muslim Mayor of London, will be to take on the Islamist extremists.  He staged his coronation in the Christian Southwark Cathedral….the BBC interpets that as a show of unity and tolerance…you could also interpret it as a display of Muslim dominance … ala Hagia Sofia or Temple Mount.

The BBC thinks that asking questions about Khan’s promise to tackle extremism in light of his close associations with said extremists is racist.

The BBC is uncritically peddling Labour’s, and the Emir of London’s, narrative…..Labour was caught being anti-Semitic so now they try to paint the Tories as Islamophobic…and the BBC is there to put the smear in for them.

Just one suggested topic for the open thread…I’m sure there are many, many more….the floor is yours…..