Monthly Archives: September 2017

The liberal do-gooders falling out with each other.

Normally the BBC treats every utterance from his holyship as the word of God, Gospel, especially if he is doing a drive-by take-down of the Tories or their welfare or ‘austerity’ policies.

Today not so much as the Archbish, the Most Reverend Justin Welby, lays into the BBC.

The BBC’s response was immediately to source voices critical of the Churche’s own response to abuse claims against it rather than to look too closely at what Welby said about the BBC, never mind admit he may have been right…naturally he is completely wrong and the BBC just doesn’t recognise anything he says.

I imagine the BBC will send Dimbleby round to the Archbish’s place to give him a dressing down.

The Spectator is similarly unimpressed with the BBC’s self-serving response [not to mention ungrateful as the Archbish gave his services to them]…

The BBC’s self-absorption has obscured Justin Welby’s real message

You have to try really hard to get any idea of what the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby actually said in his interview for the BBC Today programme, the one where he said the BBC had acted with less integrity than the Church of England or the Catholic church when it came to the abuse of children by Jimmy Savile. You may well have heard that part because it is what the BBC itself reported on its own news broadcasts and duly, every other news outlet followed its lead.

The BBC opted to focus on the one bit of the interview where Justin Welby had the impudence to criticise it. Perhaps – probably – he was rash to say that the BBC’s response to Savile had less integrity than that of the churches when it came to abuse, but was it really that interesting? If the Corporation has done one thing, it’s to bear out what the Archbishop says that the reflexes of institutions are to protect themselves. Justin Welby may well feel he’s been stitched up by the BBC – quoted out of context and with one observation blown out of all proportion from the rest and used to condemn him – the programme promptly invited victim support groups to take issue with his remarks. Presumably he gave this interview in a friendly spirit. Well, that’ll teach him.

Another stabbing outside a mosque, unlike the last one which the BBC put up in lights as a ‘racist attack’ [turns out of course that it wasn’t] and gave it massive publicity on every bulletin, this time all is quiet despite the police saying they are of course looking at all possible motives including racial and religious.  To find the story on the BBC website you have to go to the England page…not the frontpage or even the UK page.  Why might the BBC be reluctant to highlight this possibly ‘racist’ attack?….after all even the Telegraph has decided to label it a ‘suspected racially motivated attack’[despite no evidence other than what the ‘mosque elders’ said…not always reliable as the last attack showed when witnesses claimed to have heard anti-Islamic shouts…turned out to be complete rubbish]…

The Telegraph gives a clue as to why the BBC isn’t putting this up in the headlines...

A 14-year-old boy is fighting for his life in hospital after being stabbed outside a mosque in a suspected racially motivated attack as his father dropped him off to attend a youth event.  Mosque leaders believe the attack was “racially motivated” by a gang who were “lying in wait”.

Adnan Khan, information secretary for the mosque, said: “This is the biggest event in the Shiah calendar.

“We believe this was a racist attack and the young lad was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

West Midlands Police said the attack is being treated as attempted murder but not as a terror incident and they are probing whether there was any racial motivation.

The mosque is a Shia mosque…in other words, just like the Ahmadis, not considered ‘islamic’ at all by Sunnis who are the majority in the UK, and as we know the Shias suffer regular attacks and abuse from Sunnis.

The BBC suggest that ‘Police have not ruled out the attack could be racially motivated.’  Why just ‘racially’ motivated when what evidence there is points to religious motivation…and as the BBC admits…

Det Insp Jim Colclough said: “We do not believe it to be terror-related. The motivation for the attack is not yet known, we are keeping an open mind as to whether it could be racially or religiously motivated.

Remarkable lack of sensationalism from the BBC…have they learnt their lesson from their last attempt to label a stabbing ‘outside a mosque’ as racially motivated?  Somehow you have to doubt that.  They must know this is a Shia mosque, but don’t mention it in their report, and so you must think they are holding back on this story because they suspect it may be an inter-religious attack between Muslim groups….if it is that the story may well then vanish off the radar completely, if it is a ‘white supremacist’ it will be bounced onto the frontpage and will get star billing on the news bulletins…if it is perhaps gang related it will get some coverage but nowhere near that which a white neo-nazi would get despite a gang related attack perhaps being more significant for society in that white neo-nazis kill almost nobody whilst gangs kill or injure many many people…all too often young people like this kid.

I await with interest further developments.

Further developments…Sunni v Shia…..the Mail reports….

The founding member of the Shia mosque, who asked not to be named, believes the attack was ‘inspired by Daesh’ – the Arabic nickname for ISIS.

He said: ‘There is no doubt that this was a targeted attack.

‘The victim might have been random, but in my mind it is clear that these people are from Daesh, and wanted to kill a Shia Muslim based on the belief that they would go to heaven.’ 

‘The West thinks the animosity with Daesh is a new thing, but we’ve been dealing with this for 1,400 years.

Why does the BBC not report that when it so readily reports ‘Mosque elders” claims in other reports and go on to label such attacks as ‘racially’ motivated based on such claims?

And so the weekend approaches and time for one of these to take us off into the wide blue yonder! Detail their remorseless bias here!

Nick Robinson…peddling pro-BBC, anti-the opposition propaganda….or is he?  Who is he kidding…himself?  But does he admit the BBC nearly won it for Corbyn?

The BBC always hated the so-called Right-Wing Press and attacks it relentlessly and at every opportunity never missing a chance to sneer at the Mail, The Sun or Murdoch but it has a new rival, one possibly more dangerous to the BBC dominance of ‘truth’…the Internet and all those upstart digital news-sites, special interest sites and of course bloggers…many of them experts in their own right…far more so than many a BBC journalist.

The BBC wants to position itself in the mind of the Public as that trusted and respected provider of news, as perhaps The Only One to really trust and it has been pumping out constant attacks on the Internet sites portraying them as unreliable, inaccurate, biased and untrustworthy providers of fake news.

This is of course laughable as the BBC hates these sites so much not because they bring us fake news but because they bring us the truth…the inconvenient truth that the BBC hides.  The vast majority are not malicious or intent on distorting the news agenda, they are there more often than not to counteract the lies and omissions of the mainstream media such as the BBC on a vast number of subjects from climate change, politics, economics and history to name a few.

Nick Robinson however wants to reassure you that in a world where nobody can be trusted you can trust the BBC…

Is ‘guerrilla war’ being waged on news broadcasters?

How should the BBC and other broadcasters respond to the changing media landscape including “guerilla” attacks on social media? In an inaugural lecture to mark the contribution of the late Steve Hewlett to journalism, his friend and colleague Nick Robinson discusses the issue. Steve Hewlett, a BBC Radio 4 presenter and former Panorama editor, died this year from cancer. This is an edited version of that lecture.

News is too important to be reduced to a three-letter word.

Yet that is a risk we now face as more and more people get their news from social media, with what they read and see determined for them by the all powerful algorithms that prioritise emotion – “OMG” or “LOL” – over facts and analysis.

That’s such condescending, self-serving tosh…..where are the studies, where is the proof, where is the analysis that shows that shallow, attention deficit, ignorant people really only get their news solely from Facebook or somesuch?  Most people I know get their news from a variety of providers and they are more than adequately informed about current affairs.  Do you think he is really talking  about the ‘Deplorables’…you know those uneducated, bigoted and prejudiced Whites who voted for Brexit and Trump because they were too stupid and uninformed to know the truth…the sort of people you suspect he thinks are too lazy and uninterested in the world to make the effort to find ‘real’ news preferring ‘fast’ news McDonald’s style…flashy, easy on the eye and superficially tasty but ultimately unnourishing, unsatifying with dangerous side effects.

To prove his point Robinson quotes..

To summarise, let me quote one of the bosses of one of those corporate giants who pose the greatest challenge to the old ways of doing things, Google News’s Richard Gingras, whom I met in Silicon Valley a few weeks ago.

Information v affirmation

“We came from an era of dominant news organisations, often perceived as oracles of fact,” he told me.

“We’ve moved to a marketplace where quality journalism competes on an equal footing with raucous opinion, passionate advocacy, and the masquerading expression of variously motivated bad actors.”

I read that last bit and had to laugh…it’s the perfect description of BBC ‘journalism’…indeed Robinson’s very article is a prime example of that….short on genuine fact and relying on emotive drivel that the BBC is the most trusted news source.  And hasn’t this always been the case…Tabloids versus the ‘quality’ Press?

However paradoxically he then claims actually the young love the BBC and get their news from it…

It’s worth noting that BBC News is still watched, listened to and read by a remarkable number of people.

And we are trusted, even by the young, who come to the BBC when it matters. For example, 91% of under-34s consumed the BBC’s 2017 general election coverage in the week of the vote.

Actually that is of interest…Corbyn surged based on a huge turn out of the young….the BBC made a grat deal of effort to encourage the young to vote knowing there was a good chance they would vote ‘Corbyn’, but on top of that the BBC’s news programmes gave Corbyn a massive lift as they relentlessly attacked and undermined the Tories whilst avoiding talking about Corbyn’s radical politics, his links to terrorism and the fact that he dumped all his long held convictions in order to win the election by pulling the wool over voters’ eyes…aided by a complicit BBC.

Robinson is admitting the BBC almost won the election for Corbyn.

Robinson thinks the BBC is beyond reproach, above criticism however somewhat bizarely he does a complete volte face and admits the problem could be the BBC.

He starts off asking…

Attacks on the media are no longer a lazy clap line delivered to a party conference to the raise the morale of a crowd of the party faithful. They are part of a guerrilla war being fought on social media, day after day and hour after hour.

How to respond? I turn to my late friend Steve Hewlett here for inspiration.

Did Robinson read what he has written?…it runs counter to his whole narrative…which is ‘don’t you dare probe the consensus [of the glorious MSM]’..

What made him [Hewlett] different is that he asked questions many others failed to ask.

‘Probe the consensus’

In the early days of Channel 4, Steve worked on a series called Diverse Reports, which had a clearly defined purpose: “Wherever you can find the liberal consensus, probe it, probe it, probe it. And if there’s another way of looking at it, broadcast it.”

Probe, probe, probe the liberal consensus?  Isn’t that what the internet [and the Daily Mail] does so well? Amusingly Robinson says this…

My instinct is that we should build this mindset into all our programmes, so that we ask questions – and can share online items that ask questions – that are invariably not asked.

Again and again over the years, views that start off being seen as extreme quickly become the new conventional wisdom – monetarism, green politics, gay rights, calls for curbs on immigration.

Yeah right, the BBC probing itself and ‘discovering’the joys of immigration curbs.

He goes on…

We must learn from our past, when the BBC has been slow to challenge the conventional wisdom of the day. Churchill’s pre-War warnings about the dangers of German rearmament were heard by radio listeners not in his own country, but in the US.

The way Churchill was handled is a powerful warning of the dangers of the BBC believing it is being balanced by silencing the voices of those who do not represent conventional wisdom.

I wonder if the ‘Islamophobic’ warnings of the dangers of a Dark Ages, unpleasant and backward ideology will become the BBC narrative in time to hold back the future…let’s quote Churchill as it seems appropriate…

Mein Kampf…..”the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message.”

Robinson then oddly tells us how wonderful and impartial the BBC is after having admitted it fails to provide a broad and accurate news service…

There is a danger in these times that a growing number will question whether impartiality still has any real meaning, whether it is an establishment plot to limit debate and whether it can be sustained in an era of almost infinite media choice.

I believe that it is still vital, and we should proudly tell our audience that the BBC is not owned, run or controlled by the government, media tycoons, profit-seeking businesses or those pursuing a political or partisan agenda.

It is staffed by people who – regardless of their personal background or private views – are committed to getting as close to the truth as they can, and to offering their audience a free, open and broad debate about the issues confronting the country.

They aim to deliver what Carl Bernstein called “the best obtainable version of the truth”.

It’s not ‘impartiality’ that limits debate it’s the BBC’s partisan approach that loads the dice and sets up certain ideas and political view points as ‘unacceptable’, immoral and wrong.

It does in fact pursue a political and partisan agenda more often than not brought to us by people who channel their own political and social values and beliefs allowing them to shape their narrative in debates and how the news is presented.

Who decides what is the ‘best obtainable version of the truth’?  Can we leave that to the BBC?  No, not likely.

Not even Jonathan Dimbleby could deny the BBC’s bias in this pro-EU puff piece.

This morning in the Today show [08:50] we had a skit ostensibly about Chinese advances in DNA science.  It turned out that this was merely an excuse to guess what, promote the EU and damn Brexit.

“Chemical surgery” has been performed on human embryos to remove disease for the first time, Chinese researchers have told the BBC. Sir Paul Nurse is director of the Francis Crick Institute and Professor Jeremy Farrar is the director of Wellcome Trust, a biomedical research charity.

Both guests were, and admitted it, pro-Remain….at the end.

The discussion started off about the Chinese breakthrough but quickly slipped into how the Chinese were able to make such advances in science….as you might expect we heard this was due to long term investment and commitment from the Chinese government, so lobbying for money, but then we were told there are only three major powers in science…China, the US….and the EU.  You were given the impression that without the EU Britain just wouldn’t have a science culture, no research and development and no industry drawing upon that science….despite them telling us Britain was actually the leading scientific partner in the EU….so we’ll be cut off completely will we on Brexit?

It was mentioned a couple of times, you knew what the message was you were supposed to be receiving but they didn’t spell it out absolutely blatantly…no mention of Brexit…until that is Nick Robinson intervened and asked if they were worried Brexit might damage science.  From his tone you can tell he knows this is a deliberate attempt to steer the conversation onto Brexit and portray it as a negative.  The two scientists of course said it could be very damaging but, bravely, they would soldier on.

No effort made to look at what the government is actually doing to encourage and fund science development and technical industry….

In November’s Autumn Statement, Mr Hammond provided more detail: a new National Productivity Investment Fund will inject £4.7bn extra into R&D between 2017 and 2021. It is the largest increase in R&D investment since the Labour government of the late 1970s. The UK government is no longer the outlier among European nations in keeping its market interventions minimal and its regulations as light touch as possible. The government has also included this investment in its broader industrial strategy, which is being designed to help businesses cope after Britain’s departure from the EU.

And just for interest here’s something from the same article I didn’t know…the US government’s role in developing the Apple iPhone….

The importance of governments in driving a nation’s scientific and technological achievements were outlined most clearly in the 2013 book The Entrepreneurial State by Mariana Mazzucato of Sussex university. In it, Prof Mazzucato traced the role the US government had played in creating Apple’s iPhone.

Without undermining the creative genius of Steve Jobs or the supply chain mastery of his successor Tim Cook, Prof Mazzucato found that almost every piece of technology in the ubiquitous smartphone had its origin in a government programme, dispelling the myth that the success of Silicon Valley was largely the work of eccentric entrepreneurs tinkering in their garages and savvy investments made by venture capitalists.

Apart from being of general interest it also raises some questions…Apple refused to decrypt messages on a terrorist’s phone and it keeps its hundreds of billions of dollars in profit off shore so that it can avoid paying US domestic taxes.  Apart from the fact such a company should pay its taxes per se, it clearly owes a debt to the US government/people and has a moral obligation to pay its share of taxes back in the homeland…where of course it is based.

Apple…..beloved of the media types…..so where do you see anyone attacking Apple for not paying taxes?  Apple Boss Tim Cook has said he might repatriate those profits this year [no sign of that so far] but had refused to do so before as tax rates were too high [40%] for him…

Cook had consistently said Apple would not repatriate profits to the US until Washington slashed the US tax rate.

Two speeches, two classic examples of revived 1970′ failed political dogmas masquerading as progress and nicer, kinder politics.  Anyone listening might have thought Christmas had come early as McDonnell and Corbyn spread the great tidings of joy to all men [and women, gay people and all ethnic minorities]….presents for everyone…and a massive turkey with one left wing….it goes round in ever decreasing circles with its head up its backside eating itself.

As usual with the BBC we don’t get the real analysis, background and context to anything concerning Corbyn and his gang.  The McDonnell and Corbyn speeches get cursory scrutiny, McDonnell’s being a complete fantasy wishlist, Corbyn’s along similar lines peppered with the usual tripe about justice and equality and padded out with false accusations liberally, or illiberally, targeted at the usual bête noirs of the Far Left…..Margaret Thatcher was actually blamed for the Grenfell Tower fire….surely it was Lord Nelson….or was it Boadicea…or maybe Donald Trump?

The BBC’s effort seems to be concerned with giving us a dry run down of some of the highlights, chosen to highlight his disdain for those targets, the Tories, Big Business and the Right-wing Press, and the brilliance of his ‘manifesto’.

The problem is that Corbyn’s speech showed him up to be a liar, a hypocrite and a fantasist…not that you’d know from the BBC coverage as it avoids asking real questions about Corbyn’s narrative….such as is any of it true?  We have a BBC ‘Reality Check’ but it is limited to Corbyn’s approach to the EU, and it is a fair enough run down…but ends on a false note about immigration…apparently it doesn’t lower wages….when we know from many, many sources that it does.

Perception is important but a Bank of England report in 2015 suggested that evidence for a link between immigration and low wages was relatively marginal.

So let’s have a look at some of the lies.

I was actually sitting today at traffic lights caused by roadworks as a water company was digging up the road to replace the mains pipes, as it has been doing in the area for over a year when Corbyn said this…

“Take the water industry. Of the nine water companies in England six are now owned by private equity or foreign sovereign wealth funds. Their profits are handed out in dividends to shareholders while the infrastructure crumbles the companies pay little or nothing in tax and executive pay has soared as the service deteriorates.”

The water companies have invested over £150 billion since privatisation and those hedge funds etc are in fact investing your pensions, those dividends Corbyn hates so much pays into those pensions.

Corbyn attacks the big companies and demands that government listen to the people, the small voices…and at the same time announces that he will do exactly what those big companies want and will ignore the Brexit vote [the voice of those little people] and stay in the Single Market and keep on importing that cheap labour under freedom of movement.

The of course he is outraged about terrorism telling us how it is an attack on democracy….yeah but….not so long ago Jeremy and McDonnell, and of course Abbott, were vocal supporters of the IRA [not to mention the Islamist Hamas] telling us how bombs and bullets were the only way to get what you want.  Odd how the BBC doesn’t make a great song and dance about such links to terrorists and challenge these three on their hypocrisy.

Naturally he supports the Palestinians…no mention that Israel has been under attack by those self-same Palestinians and their fellow Muslims for 70 years…and as for illegal settlers…surely they are just undocumented migrants?

Let’s give real support to end the oppression of the Palestinian people, the 50-year occupation and illegal settlement expansion and move to a genuine two-state solution of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Then there was this from Corbyn…..

Some of the most shocking cases of people not being listened to must surely be the recent revelations of widespread child sex abuse.

Can this be the same Corbyn who oh so very recently kicked out two of his party for speaking out about that abuse?…

Labour Muslim Candidate Deselected After Raising Pakistani Gang Abuse

Female Labour candidate Amina Lone (pictured above), who stood in Morecambe in the 2015 General Election, has been de-selected as a future Labour candidate in either parliamentary or local elections, meaning that she will not be able to defend her existing council seat in Manchester at the next round of local elections.

Ms. Lone has been living up to her surname by being a lone voice in the muslim community in Manchester speaking out about Pakistani male abuse, and she is also one of the high profile Labour members that rallied in support of Rotherham MP Sarah Champion when she was recently forced to resign from the Shadow Cabinet.

Sarah Champion is being used as a ‘scapegoat’ after warning of cultural link in child sex cases, critics claim

Sarah Champion, the Labour MP forced to step down for speaking out about child sex grooming by the Pakistani community, is being “punished” and “used as a scapegoat” critics have warned. 

Amina Lone, the co-director of the Social Action and Research Foundation, said the former Equalities shadow minister should not have been asked to leave Jeremy Corbyn’s front bench team last night. 

She told the BBC’s Newsnight programme: “She has been punished and used as a scapegoat because as a politician she’s an easy target”, adding that Labour should not have forced her into silence. 

Then of course there is the fact that the BBC’s own Laura Kuenssberg has had to have a body guard whilst at the Labour conference….why would that be?  Does the Great Leader not like being asked questions or does he just like unqualified adulation?  Kuenssberg is not the only woman to get masses of abuse from within the Labour ranks…during the Labour leadership race the female candidates were subjected to massive abuse and intimidation, not to mention the odd brick through their windows.  A Labour MP who suffered anti-Semitic abuse was ignored whilst their abuser was glad-handed by Corbyn who laughed and joked with him immediately after the abuse had occured.

The anti-semitism inquiry was a white-wash with the leader of that inquiry coincidentally being given a peerage straight afterwards.

There’s so much more and so little time but enough time to say that Corbyn’s claim that he is ‘the Mainstream now’ is somewhat surreal….May is the Mainstream…she got more votes and that is why she is PM.

Corbyn must be using the Abbottcus to do his calculations…but then this is a man who thinks he actually won the election.

Let’s remember exactly what Corbyn supported……

After enduring a few days of turgid nonsense from what the BBC is helping to promote as the ‘Government in waiting’ here’s something to clear your head…….some stunning voices….

Who knew Drew Pritchard from ‘Salvage Hunters’ could sing…and he sounds just like Jimmy Somerville…better in fact….

And just because…have a blast…..

And here is a brand new Open Thread. Please detail the bias here! There’s no shortage of it after all. Off you go….

Ken Loach on ‘false’ anti-Semitism claims by Labour MPs

Will the BBC et al still love Ken Loach now that he gives the impression that he is happy for the Holocaust to be ‘denied’…he says all history is there to be discussed…ie did the Holocaust really happen?  Look at the furore over Kevin Myers’ badly phrased article and the false claims made that he is a Holocaust denier and then look at how he was treated as a pariah….will the same happen to lefty icon Loach?

Astonishing interview on the Daily Politics programme on which he denies there is a problem with anti-Semitism in Labour and he does this by channelling much of the anti-Semitic narrative about Israel and the Palestinians that is used to attack Jews in outside Israel [indeed it was a BBC journalist who told a Jew in France that she should expect to be attacked due to Israel’s actions in Gaza…his narrative suggesting Israel was committing war crimes]…it is all a plot to unseat Corbyn…note he fails to comment on homophobia or Islamophobia also mentioned by Coburn but goes directly to attack the allegations of anti-Semitism…..fellow travellers at the anti-‘Israel’ Electronic Intifada will be happy to hear he is echoing their propaganda…

Altrincham mosque stabbing: Surgeon attacked in ‘hate crime’ – BBC News

Muslim stabbed outside mosque…..it’s being treated as a race attack.

Oh hang on….after a day of constant headlines yesterday about a racist attack the BBC went quiet today…this story is now buried on the Manchester regional page…not the frontpage, not the UK page, not the England page…….you have to dig hard to find it…not a race attack after all…..

Altrincham mosque stabbing suspect remanded in custody

A 28-year-old man has been remanded in custody after appearing in court charged with assaulting a surgeon who was stabbed outside a mosque.

Ian Rook, of no fixed address, appeared at Manchester Magistrates’ Court charged with grievous bodily harm and possession of a lethal weapon.

A Greater Manchester Police spokesman said the force does not believe there was a racial motive to the attack.

Once again there is a massive hype from the BBC about a race attack on a Muslim but it turns out to be nonsense….the BBC complains about the Mail etc reporting ‘Muslim’ stories that are true but negative….the BBC on the other hand reports stories that are untrue and meant to paint a picture of rampant Islamophobia stalking Britain.

What does the BBC have against the British?