Nobbling Boris

The BBC, Knights of the Long Knives.  Very adept at political and character assassination or they try to be.  Their heavy handed attacks on Trump and Farage failed miserably despite massive resources thrown at them, Tommy Robinson succumbed to the intense scrutiny and extremely hostile BBC reporting about him and quit the EDL but has since seen the light and bounced back.  Andrea Leadsom might be added to the list as she was beaten up badly over her statement about having children.   May was savaged during the election and Corbyn given a free ride….undoubtedly costing the Tories many votes.  Not forgetting Jacob Rees-Mogg, the DUP, Bush, Sarah Palin and of course Thatcher.  Any theme to those chosen?  All right-wing.  But what about Boris?  Like Trump and Farage he has been subjected to massive amounts of highly negative, if not malign, comment from the BBC and yet he still keeps on rolling.  Just why does the BBC target Boris in particular?

Boris is enormously popular with much of the Public.  This is a problem for the good liberal folk at the BBC who want to stay in the EU and definitely don’t want Boris as PM should he throw his hat into the ring as and when.  So two major issues for the BBC, a very popular politician who supports Brexit and who may lead the Tory Party to another stomping election victory….the BBC not wanting either of those things to happen they see Boris as a huge threat to their hegemony and liberal elitist club.

Consider how the BBC reports Hammond and Rudd.  Hammond has consistently tried to hijack the Brexit process in order to ensure we get the softest of Brexits, in other words no Brexit at all in effect.  He has made statements that go against government policy claiming we need to have the longest transition period possible which he knows would morph gradually into a permanent state of pseudo-non-membership of the EU, he lobbies for a Brexit that is about jobs and the economy, in other words stay in the Single Market, Customs Union and thus keep freedom of movement and rule by the ECJ…ie…stay in the EU, when he knows that the referendum was not won on the jobs and economy platform…it was about sovereignty and immigration, and he has refused to provide money to fund the necessary infrastructure to prepare for a ‘no deal’…or indeed for a Britain which wants to protect its own borders as it leaves the EU.  Then here is Amber Rudd who has campaigned vociferously for a soft Brexit and who just days ago said that a ‘no deal’ was ‘unthinkable’.

So both Hammond and Rudd, two very senior cabinet members, have come out in the Press against a key negotiating lever with the EU and May’s official policy…‘no deal is better than a bad deal’…if you aren’t prepared for a ‘no deal’ you are essentially then at the EU’s mercy with little leverage to make them compromise.

Hammond and Rudd have thrown a huge spanner in the works and yet hardly a peep out of the BBC, no shocked headlines, no claims that they have stabbed May in the back, no claims they are undermining May, no claims they are manoeuvring for the leadership, no legions of commentators wheeled in to heap abuse upon them for their shameless politicking.  Hammond and Rudd of course want to stay in the EU so why would the BBC criticise them?

How different is the BBC approach to Boris.

Boris as Foreign Secretary has a legitimate interest in Brexit negotiations and as the lead Brexit cheerleader we were told by the Remainders that he must now bear responsibility for the outcome of Brexit.  Odd then that when he speaks out, takes that responsibility, he gets  shouted down and loudly abused for having the temerity to do so….and the BBC is the chief cheerleader attacking him.

BBCers constantly asked why he hadn’t been sacked (and of course keep asking when May is going), we hear he’s disingenuous, a clever idiot, an egotist, lazy, self-centred and not fit or competent for Office, that he’s a populist with simple solutions but no positive vision for the Country or Party, a divisive, disloyal figure making life impossible for May, odd, difficult, eccentric, an international joke, self-indulgent and only thinking about himself when important world events are happening, an irresponsible revolutionary who is out of control [and should be sacked], that he’s undermining May, stabbing her in the back, he’s not interested in Brexit [a piece of misinformation that he said he only went with Brexit to annoy Cameron was given a lot of credence in passing by the BBC] and is only really positioning himself for the leadership…hmmm…as most Tory MP’s are Remainders how would that work?  Kuenssberg spent most of her time filing reports that he was intent on the leadership and Brexit was the means to that end…she later admitted that this ‘fact’ was based upon ‘vicious rumours at Westminster’…in other words poison dripped from his enemies….Kuenssberg’s reports seemed to be more about discrediting Boris in the eyes of possible Leave voters than in the truth.

I did think that the BBC had turned a corner way back earlier in the month when Nick Robinson said he was examining what Phillip Hammond [08:10] had been up to and why everyone was up in arms about him.  Would we get the dirt, would Hammond be called a backstabber who was trying to thwart Brexit?   Er no…what we got was a pro-EU Labour MP and someone, although a ‘Leaver’, who was actually employed by Hammond.  Nothing to see here then…Hammond doing a good job under enormous pressure.

Robinson’s introduction was interesting…..he sneeringly referenced the Mail as the ‘chief cheerleader for Brexit’ and their frontpage that shouted ‘Daggers Drawn….PM slaps treacherous chancellor down!’.  Now as just about every other media outlet was giving a similar impression of Hammond’s actions you have to wonder how the BBC could avoid mentioning it or coming to a similar conclusion about Hammond’s betrayal…but they did.  They ignored Hammond’s ‘treachery’ for a long time and finally when they did notice they wheeled in two yes men to blow smoke up our backsides.

Why did Robinson raise the subject?  Not of course because he was in the slightest bit interested in actually holding Hammond to account but first because of course the right-leaning Mail is pretty influential and therefore needs to be discredited and its story attacking a pro-EU Chancellor pooh-poohed and second because the Mail in the same edition had drawn attention to the fact that Robinson had been wrong about Romanian and Bulgarian migration…

The ‘experts’ who rushed to judgement and got it wrong

‘Well, well, well. So much for those predictions of a flood of immigrants coming form Romania and Bulgaria once the door to the UK was opened’  Nick Robinson, BBC political editor May 2014

And the Mail gloated….naturally Robinson made no mention of his own appearance in the paper nor of the reason for it…..

STEPHEN GLOVER: How the Mail got it right on Romanian and Bulgarian migration and the BBC got it so wrong – and deceived Britain

We all know how, in 2004, the Labour government opened the door to immigration from Poland and seven other Eastern European states, while other countries such as Germany and France imposed restrictions. 

The Blair government forecast a relatively small annual influx — of between 5,000 and 13,000. Within five years, nearly a million had arrived.

Following that gigantic miscalculation, one might have expected a little more caution would be shown at the beginning of 2014 when immigration restrictions from Romania and Bulgaria were lifted by the Coalition government. 

The Mail warned that history would repeat itself. So did a small number of other organisations such as Migration Watch, a think-tank run by a respected former British ambassador.

This did not prevent many — most notably the BBC — from predicting that anxieties over the number of migrants would turn out to be misplaced. 

In fact, they were utterly justified. Yesterday, the Office for National Statistics estimated there are 413,000 Romanians and Bulgarians living in the United Kingdom, equivalent to the population of Bristol.

How misguided the BBC has been. In January 2014, it carried an uncritical interview with the then Romanian ambassador in London, Dr Ion Jinga.

He said the number of citizens coming from his country to the UK would be ‘fewer than in recent years’. It wasn’t.

But the Beeb was adamant that those expressing concern about a new wave of migration were guilty of scare tactics. 

Even before the gates were opened, BBC2’s Newsnight carried a report in April 2013 which suggested that only 1 per cent of Romanians and 4 per cent of Bulgarians were ‘actively considering work in the UK’.

Where are all the Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants, asked an item on the BBC’s website at the end of January 2014. It claimed ‘some parts of the UK have reported very few arrivals so far’.

This echoed a visit to Luton airport on January 1, 2014, by the publicity-seeking Labour MP Keith Vaz, which was celebrated by the BBC. 

In May 2014, after official figures suggested (wrongly) that very few Romanians and Bulgarians were coming here, the then BBC political editor, Nick Robinson, scoffed: ‘So much for those predictions of a flood of immigrants coming from Romania and Bulgaria once the door to the UK was opened’.

As late as December 2014, Mark Easton — the supposedly authoritative BBC home editor, who over the years has been relaxed about EU immigration — told Radio 4 listeners there were ‘probably 100,000’ Romanians and Bulgarians working in Britain. It took John Humphrys to point out that there were already 189,000.

In short, the all-powerful BBC has been spectacularly wrong. If more than 400,000 people from two countries come to live here in the space of a few years, that surely amounts to some sort of ‘flood’. 

We stand at a crossroads over Brexit, with reactionary forces in the government, led by Chancellor Philip Hammond, intent on ensuring that as little as possible changes.

But for the good of this country — its workers, its public services, its businesses, not to mention social cohesion — we have an opportunity to end wildly uncontrolled immigration, whether the BBC and the Establishment like it or not.

So pro-Brexit Boris gets attacked by the BBC, the pro-Brexit Daily Mail gets attacked by the BBC with the added motivation that the Mail had shown the BBC up to be, at best, incompetent, at worst, wilfully misleading, when reporting on issues like immigration.  The BBC has a long way to go.  Maybe it should just be closed down as it is completely out of control, unaccountable and beyond redemption.