Monthly Archives: November 2017

The Iranians have released some of their ‘proof’ that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was training Iranian journalists when she worked for the BBC in the form of some of her emails.  The BBC will only admit that she worked for the BBC’s Media Action ‘charity’….which is, to be blunt, in fact an organisation that trains foreign journalists to subvert political regimes in their own countries…it is ‘soft power’ deployed by Britain to influence events and politics abroad.

As yet the BBC has not reported this latest Iranian statement [Sky, The Mail, Evening Standard, Telegraph, Independent, the Sun Huffington Post…all have reported it many hours ago] though they were quick off the mark, and quite vocal about it too, to report when an Iranian court said Boris’ comment about Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe proved she was guilty.  The BBC used this to put enormous pressure on the figurehead of the Brexit campaign and continually suggested that ‘perhaps he should resign’.

Why might they not be so keen to report the latest statement?  Because it proves Boris was correct [as we knew] and because it puts the blame squarely on the BBC which has been trying hard to avoid any ‘contamination’ from this story…flying the flag for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe but not quite all the way up the flagpole….did the BBC ever advise Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe about the likely consequences of going to Iran in light of her job?  Consider the huge effort the BBC put into getting Alan Johnson back from Gaza…a massive amount of publicity and effort….where is that in this case?  The BBC denies everything saying…

“Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe was never a journalism trainer but undertook administrative duties such as travel bookings, typing, and filing.”

Her husband doesn’t say that the emails are faked and they do seem to back the suggestion that she was more than a ‘clerk’ as the BBC would like you to believe.

The BBC have a lot of questions to answer not least their attempt to exploit the situation to topple a government minister that they do not like….I guess if you can’t topple the Iranian Mullahs then why not have a go at the Tories at home?

[Polish Government video….with English subtitles…no irony that Tusk is doing the EU’s dirty work and tries to blackmail Britain into turning NI into an EU colony by default but opposes EU forced relocation of migrants to Poland…Brexit was in the main about immigration forced upon us by the EU.]

Perhaps we should adopt the ‘Norwegian Model’…not for Brexit but for immigration and supposed asylum seekers who are anything but…..from the Spectator:

Norway is hard on migrants – but tough love works

The country’s outspoken immigration minister, Sylvi Listhaug, on the best way to help genuine refugees.

When Angela Merkel invited refugees to Germany in 2015, tearing up the rules obliging migrants to seek asylum in the first country they arrive in, the consequences were pretty immediate. Over 160,000 went to Sweden, leading to well-publicised disruption. Next door, things were different. Norway took in just 30,000; this year it has accepted just 2,000 so far. To Sylvi Listhaug, the country’s young immigration minister, this might still be a bit too much.

‘We have a big challenge now to integrate those with permission to stay in Norway to make sure they respect Norwegian values,’ she says. ‘Freedom to speak, to write, to believe or not to believe in a god, how to raise your children.’ Also, she says, what not to do. For example: ‘It is not allowed to beat your children in Norway.’

It’s unusual for a European government minister to link immigration with child-beating, but the 39-year-old Ms Listhaug is accustomed to speaking plainly. The rest of Europe, she believes, is coming around to the Norwegian position.

While Sweden and others saw the migration of 2015 as a blip caused by conflict in Syria and Iraq, she sees it as part of an irreversible demographic trend. ‘Africa is going to gain almost 500 million more people by 2030,’ she says. ‘Much of the Middle East and Africa is fragile. People have difficult lives but can see via mobile phones that life in the West and in Europe is quite different. So I understand why they would like our life, our kind of standards. But it’s not sustainable to integrate so many.’

The case for limiting economic migration is clear. But about half of the registered asylum seekers in the EU last year were from countries that were struck by conflict. Can Norway justify taking so few? Ms Listhaug is a practising Christian (albeit sceptical of the ‘thoroughly socialist’ Church of Norway) and says her government’s immigration policy, when combined with its aid policy, is not just a moral response, but the most effective moral response.

‘For me it’s a moral issue as well. You can’t just help the ones you see. You have to think about the millions you don’t see and that have a very difficult life in the world.’

She’s referring to the refugee camps in Jordan, where both Norway and the UK send aid to help those displaced by war. Norway gave £23 million to its Jordanian mission last year, almost twice as much, per capita, as Britain. The cost of helping refugees at home is taken from its foreign aid budget, so as its influx subsides and costs fall, all savings are used to help refugees abroad. Some £370 million has been transferred so far, with more expected next year.

So to Ms Listhaug, it’s not a question of whether to help refugees, but how best to do so. We meet after she visited Brandon Lewis, her British counterpart, who gave her a striking statistic: ‘The immigration minister here in Britain said that for the price of helping 3,000 young people here, he could help 100,000 children in other parts of the world.’

She sees this as a modern way to help asylum seekers — and more practical than the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, which obliges signatories to accommodate anyone with a ‘well-founded fear of persecution’.

‘It was an agreement for its time,’ she says. ‘But when people travel through 20 countries to come to a safe haven, I think people can see that this is not right. You could have a safe haven in your neighbouring country, so why go so far?’

Western countries that define their virtue by the number of refugees they let in, she says, also face a moral question: ‘Why should we have a system that works for the people who have money [to pay for the journey] while the rest of the refugees and people in need don’t have the money to go?’

People traffickers, she says, thrive on governments that follow the old rules and accept those who turn up on their shores. ‘If you smuggle an unaccompanied minor from Afghanistan to Europe, they say it is between $3,000 and $20,000.’ Young girls, she says, are sometimes sold to old men to finance such a journey. ‘Also, children are killed, or raped, on their way. So we need to have this under control.’

 ‘A lot of countries in Europe are thinking more like us: like Denmark and Austria. Germany, as well… France has big problems right now with integration, as does Belgium. A lot of countries in Europe see that we need to have this under control.’

The Norwegian model, she says, is very different and very clear. “If you are an economic migrant, you are declined in Norway,” she says. “We send people back to Afghanistan if they are not in need of protection; we send them back to Somalia if they are not in need of protection.” Isn’t this a rather expensive process? “Yes, but it’s well worth it.” Police are also sent out to areas where illegal immigrants are suspected of living and working. “If we find them, we send them out. That has also decreased crime in Norway, that’s very good.”

I ask Listhaug if she is getting used to being called cruel and heartless. How does it make her feel? ‘I don’t give a damn,’ she says. She believes that she’s doing the right thing, turning away those who don’t need protection, to spend more money on people who do. You might call it the Norwegian model of handling asylum. It might just catch on.

https://twitter.com/Independent/status/932657308584300550

I’d read Guido’s tale of the Independent and various other media outlets spinning a gigantic lie about the government not thinking that animals are ‘sentient’ and can feel pain and suffering gaining a willing and gullible audience, including a large number of lobby groups and organisations, who hyped the story as much as possible.  So it was with interest I listened to the Today programme…first their ‘what the papers say,’ and you’d be hard pressed to know what the story was about, they mentioned ‘fake news’ but what was it about?  They then gave the impression that the Independent was the victim almost of whatever was going on…this approach was set in stone at 08:10 as Webb interviewed Gove [who I have to say not totally impressed with…too eager to please and not got the killer facts to slamdunk what is a very stupid story].  Webb told us this was a story whipped up by ‘social media’ which the MSM got dragged into…not true as far as I can see…the Independent were pretty forthright in their story….as was George Osborne’s Evening Standard [which has deleted one, in fact several seem to have gone awol, of their guilty tweets about this…if they deleted everything they misled readers on about Brexit that would leave a few cartoons and the sports pages].  Webb worked hard to twist the story so that the Independent was almost right and the Government wrong…Webb, rather than seeking truth, sought to prove the Independent story was right.  Trouble is it wasn’t.  Far from it and very easy to demonstrate….literally 10 minutes on Google gets you a very full picture…certainly one more informative and insightful than the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme brings us.  Then again the BBC’s own report is far from innocent on this…and it’s own follow up still tries to suggest the government is somehow guilty of not caring about animal suffering.

For a start the Independent had already retracted the story last night…though remarkably it finds little fault with its own reporting.

Here is their initial headline….pretty clear what their sensationalist message is and what it is attempting to do….

The Tories have voted that animals can’t feel pain as part of the EU bill, marking the beginning of our anti-science Brexit

At least Laura Kuenssberg has put some effort in…

Important 'Animals can't feel pain' vote debunking here #AnimalSentience @estwebber https://t.co/mFVpzQxE5M

— Laura Kuenssberg (@bbclaurak) November 22, 2017

So a Labour MP tweets Labour’s narrative on the budget and what is more surprising, perhaps, is that the BBC comes up with exactly the same narrative almost word for word.

I had the misfortune to catch the first 5 minutes of Emma Barnett’s show.  It was more than eough, she’s always good value for money….this blog could run on her nonsense alone or what she calls ‘original journalism and surprising news stories.’

It’s certainly new and unusual though I’d have to question the ‘journalism’ claim…just seemed like a simple matter of regurgitating Labour’s anti-Tory, anti-Brexit propaganda today as Barnett informed us that the Tories were spending more on Brexit than on the NHS….and…just think how many hospitals, nurses and operations we could have if that £3 billion had been spent on the NHS rather than Brexit as promised to us by the Leave campaign on their bus.

Trouble is I was pretty sure Hammond had mentioned the figure of £10 billion for the NHS, it certainly wasn’t only £2.8 billion as Barnett was telling us. [And interesting to read the comments about the NHS on this BBC/Labour press release]

Checking his speech and we get an entirely different story…

It is central to this government’s vision that everyone has access to our NHS, free at the point of need.

That is why we endorsed and funded the NHS’s Five Year Forward View in 2014.

And met its funding ask – providing an extra £10 billion in real terms per year by 2020.

But even with this additional funding, we acknowledge that the service remains under pressure and today we respond.

First, we will deliver an additional £10 billion package of capital investment over the course of this Parliament.

To support the Sustainability and Transformation plans which will make our NHS more resilient.

Investing for an NHS which is fit for the future.

But we also recognise that the NHS is under pressure right now.

I am therefore exceptionally, and outside the Spending Review process, making an additional commitment of resource funding of £2.8 billion to the NHS in England.

£350 million immediately to allow trusts to plan for this winter

And £1.6 billion in 2018-19, with the balance in 19-20, taking the extra resource into the NHS next year to £3.75 billion in total.

Meaning that it will receive a £7.5 billion increase to its resource budget over this year and next year.

So the government is on target to fund the NHS with an extra £10 bn per year by 2020, there will be an extra £10 billion on top of this…and ‘exceptionally, and outside the Spending Review process, making an additional commitment of resource funding of £2.8 billion’.

So the £2.8 bn is on top of large increases in NHS funding…it is extra to already promised funding.  The NHS will get £7.5 billion over 2 years, the £3 billion for Brexit was also over two years….so the NHS is getting at least double what Brexit gets.

It’s the same story with wages….the BBC is going into overdrive telling us a big lie…..that income has stalled and that we are being ‘squeezed’ more than ever.  They pump out a forecast from a think tank, the IFS, as if it were the voice of God and use it to continue peddling their narrative that ‘we’ve never had it so bad’ and it’s all #duetoBrexit.  They introduced their news bulletin with the claim that things were grim as we are set to lose two decades of earnings growth….according to the IFS… does real world experience of people bear that out?  Doubt it.  Amusingly that was followed by a Freudian slip as the announcer told us Hammond’s Budget day had  ‘passed off better than many hoped’.  Yeah…I’m sure they were all hoping he’d fall on his face in BBC Towers.

Trouble is they ignore, as always, a few salient facts…such as a massive, and endless, influx of EU workers who undercut wages, we have had incredibly low interest rates for a decade, inflation has been low and only rose to 3% as a peak….as predicted [and Hammond predicted it would fall back to 2% next year…’With inflation peaking at 3% in this quarter, before falling back towards target over the next year.  And today I reaffirm the remit for the independent Monetary Policy Committee, and its 2% CPI inflation target.’], then there’s the Living Wage and the Minimum Wage rises, and of course tax allowances have increased enormously and will increase again next year giving us more cash in our pockets……

Making work pay is core to the philosophy of this government.

That is why we introduced the National Living Wage in 2016.

From April, it will rise 4.4%, from £7.50 an hour to £7.83.

Handing full-time workers a further £600 pay increase.

And taking their total pay rise, since its introduction, to over £2000 a year.

We also accept the Low Pay Commission’s recommendations on National Minimum Wage rates.

Today, income inequality is at its lowest level in 30 years.

The top 1% are paying a larger share of income tax than at any time under the last Labour government.

The poorest 10% have seen their real incomes grow faster since 2010 than the richest 10%.

And the proportion of full-time jobs that are low paid is at its lowest for 20 years.

When we came into office the personal allowance stood at £6,475.

From April, I will increase the personal allowance to £11,850.

The typical basic rate tax payer will be £1,075 a year better off compared to 2010.

And a full-time worker on the National Living Wage will take home more than £3,800 extra.

The BBC happily ignores all that as it blasts out sensationalist and alarmist headlines and context free brief news bulletins spreading gloom and doom as fast as it can and as far as it can.

The BBC’s reporting seems entirely out of touch with the real world…some might think deliberately so….here we have this from Kamal Ahmed who provided us with such insightful and intelligent briefings during the Brexit referendum…..the BBC, always peddling Corbyn’s Marxist line about capitalism….I seem to remember the BBC telling us it was dead 10 years ago when ‘Occupy’ was all the rage and on every journalist’s[BBC’s] lips as the coming future…

Analysis: Kamal Ahmed, BBC Economics Editor

What is the point of capitalism?

That might seem like a pretty big question, but one answer could be “to provide people the opportunity through work to become richer”.

What, though, if the economy fails in that endeavour?

If the system leaves you – despite all your efforts – worse off in December than you were the previous January?

Or worse off now than you were a decade ago?

It was Lord Adair Turner, the former head of the Low Pay Commission, who put it succinctly.

“The UK over the last 10 years has created a lot of jobs, but today real wages are below where they were in 2007,” he told me earlier this year.

“That is not the capitalist system delivering its promise that over a decade or so it will raise all boats, and it is a very fundamental issue.”

About time for another open thread…definitely no shortage of BBC bias #duetoBrexit….list it all here….

A seat at the top table and those other silly meaningless metaphors about losing “global influence”. What gibberish.

Now WE, yes you and I, have lost OUR seat at the International Court of Justice. Gosh how will I recover from this? They deal with such important matters as Alleged Violations of Sovereign Rights and Maritime Spaces in the Caribbean Sea (Nicaragua v. Colombia).

“This is a failure of UK diplomacy“, says the BBC, and “a retreat from the international stage”. That’s it I’m getting in my nuclear bunker and I suggest you do the same, because Laos or Djibouti could invade any second and wipe us all out now that we are so tiny and frail. Little Britain all alone in the world. We’ll probably sink into the Atlantic some time soon if Laos doesn’t get us.

What these people are suggesting is that if we had a UK representative in the ICJ, they could simply ignore any kind of objectivity and legality in order to ‘influence’ things and make the rulings turn out in our favour – subverting international bodies to benefit the UK. Now that may be how many of these organisations work, and it’s certainly how the EU works, but to propose such a course of action says a lot about the neo-imperialistic approach some people support.

Talk about ‘Fake News’!  The BBC’s most prestigious flagship current affairs programme, Today, broadcasts a piece of fictional tripe as ‘news’….

What appear to be the last diary entries of Jim Hacker, of Yes Prime Minister fame, have been unearthed. Sarah Montague spoke to Jonathan Lynn, the co-creator of the series.

Just blatant, contemptuous propaganda from the Remainders…apparently the voters just didn’t listen…to their betters…and so we must of course have another referendum as after all we have general elections every 5 years or so, thus no referendum is set in stone.

OK…we’ll have a referendum on the EU every 5 years if a second one voted to stay in the EU.  No?  Thought not.

And let’s not forget that it was the EU that kept peace in Europe for 75 years.

No…it was the threat of the ‘CCCP’ that kept everyone onboard, and it was American tax dollars, nuclear weapons and a massive standing army that kept the peace in Europe.

NATO not the EU…

Poor old Benedict Allen.  Thought he was off to meet some old chums in Papua New Guinea and comes back to the UK branded a racist, colonialist, imperialist white man by the Guardian.  Which you might think an irony as the Guardian must be the archetypal ‘white man’s burden’ model with its patronage of every ethnic, anti-white cause under the sun…..Don’t worry you little Black folks, you Muslims, you repressed Asians….the Guardian’s here to save you!

And what of Brexit and immigration?  Doesn’t the BBC et al love immigration because it brings such diversity and interesting and unusual cultures to our doorsteps….we don’t even have to get on a plane or a boat…we can just import the exotic natives and watch them from our cars as we go on safari around Brixton or darkest Birmingham.  An open zoo for the multicultural, metropolitan, cosmopolitan, elitist white man!   The Guardianistas love it!

Today had a little discussion[08:20] on the subject with Ben ‘nice but dim’ Fogle and Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff [I think it turned out to be Afua Hirsch…..but it made no difference..their sentiments are exactly the same…here’s Hirsch in the Guardian on Allen]…Cuff is black and female.  Black or is she white?  Cuff is mixed race….but ‘black’  Naturally she makes a living as a ‘professional Black’…concerned with…… race, feminism, social justice and politics.  She has all the jive talk off pat and can populate her spin with all the righteous sounding phrases that have been coined by the race industry to make their case sound credible and important…she, and Hirsch, can do it without thinking…which is the problem.  

Sarah Montague didn’t say much but did stick up for Benedict Allen on a couple of occasions.  This might be because of the video above [sorry about the lack of quality] which is a BBC film of Frank Gardner with Benedict Allen earlier this year in Papua New Guinea.…

Thank God Ms Hirsch didn’t see this photo…King Gardner being held aloft by dusky natives ….

Hirsch complains that a photo of Allen in his western clothes alongside the native inhabitants in their own clothes is a picture of colonialist, imperialist superiority that treats the locals as interesting specimens.  She is pretty ignorant of anything about Allen as she complains about his ‘colonialism’.  Cuff tells us in her Guardian piece that he is “othering” foreign cultures and people with darker skin tones…..has he considered he could bring deadly diseases to an isolated tribe? That his presence might be unwelcome? Or that he is feeding into an ancient narrative of black savagery? His actions scream selfish midlife crisis.”  Hirsch thinks along the same lines.

Here is Hirsch winding herself up into a frothy state of indignation…

I don’t begrudge men like Allen for their adventures, but I do wonder if they have ever contemplated the imagery and messages they are creating from the perspective of someone like me. It’s a giant act of “othering”, of placing people like the Yaifo as scary savages under a white gaze, and promoting raw colonial era ideology.

Hmmm…not really true though is it, he’s done this all his life and he was revisiting the Yaifo tribe that he met 30 years ago….and in which he participated in a 6 week initiation ceremony…or ordeal.

The initiation had been designed to make me ‘a man as strong as a crocodile’. I was thrashed every day for six weeks.

Hirsch and Cuff have no idea what they are talking about and if anything it is they who are exploiting the Yaifo tribe as they use them, without any knowledge of what they think or want, to further their own racist views…and Cuff is a racist.  Her whole life is wrapped up in ‘being Black’…here’s what she thinks of Allen and Whites…

White men such as Benedict Allen should cease their meaningless, problematic “explorations” and focus instead on the ways they can counter the privileges they inhabit, at home and abroad.

She wants to ‘Black’ up Blacks…herd them into some sort of cultural, racially defined ghetto, her word…compound, in which they circle the wagons against outside influences…it’s how she makes a living…leeching off Black concerns about racism which are all too often whipped up by the likes of Cuff herself…keeping herself employed and ‘relevant’…just the usual ‘race-baiting’ agitator who want to generate the idea that Black people are oppressed by the nasty Whites….like the old joke about newspapers starting a war in order to sell more papers…except it’s not a joke here, it’s real…..a race ‘war’ in this case……

 

The aims of Cultural Compounds are to:

Race card played to the full.  The irony is that it is people like Allen who really appreciate and celebrate local, native culture….People like Hirsch and Cuff, who live in their modern, metropolitan ghettos and write from their ebony and ivory towers in the right-on Guardian, having probably never been to Africa let lone ever tried to live as one of their African families or communities as Allen and Bruce Parry do.  They are plastic Africans…enjoying the benefits of Western civilisation whilst pretending to be African.

Racist hypocrits.  On this occasion the BBC, as said, was somewhat subdued, but providing a platform for such Blacktivism is what the BBC lives for…all those privileged white middle class boys and girls who are so guilty about their place in life….desperate to over compensate and, Robert Fisk-like, offer themselves up for some righteous flagellation because of past sins of the colonialists.

Wasn’t it ‘Africans’ who populated the world by emigrating out of Africa?  Colonialists?  We are all African.

A Single Migration From Africa Populated the World, Studies Find

Modern humans evolved in Africa roughly 200,000 years ago. But how did our species go on to populate the rest of the globe?

In the journal Nature, three separate teams of geneticists survey DNA collected from cultures around the globe, many for the first time, and conclude that all non-Africans today trace their ancestry to a single population emerging from Africa between 50,000 and 80,000 years ago.

All non-Africans are closely related to one another, geneticists found, and they all branch from a family tree rooted in Africa.

Sky News has just reported on a new paper which claims households are more than £400-a-year worse off as a result of inflation caused by the Brexit vote. It may well be true, who knows. The BBC hasn’t actually reported on this yet, but it seems almost inevitable with a finding like that, so let’s see how long it takes them to plaster it on the front page of the BBC news site. Neverthless, isn’t it strange that they only interviewed the co-author Dr Thomas Sampson, failing to mention at all the three other co-authors, Holger Breinlich, Elsa Leromain, and Dennis Novy? I wonder why that is? Beautiful British names.

As for the report itself, it concludes that “the Brexit vote caused a negative shock to the UK’s expected
future economic performance leading to an immediate depreciation in the value of the pound”. If you do a quick search of the document you’ll find 92 uses of the word ‘import’ but only a single use of the word ‘export’. How very strange…