Monthly Archives: November 2017

The BBC constantly goes on about Russian interference in US Democracy…and yet has nothing to say as the EU tries to annex Northern Ireland and has flooded the UK with an EU citizen ‘army’ that is meant to undermine ‘Britishness’, the British identity and loyalty to Britain.  Others have noted the hypocrisy of those who attack Russia….

Is Noam Chomsky on the payroll of the Kremlin or just a secret supporter of alt-right ideology? https://t.co/uh256Z7Bhu pic.twitter.com/sbCZynPblY

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 12, 2017

Worth a closer look I suppose….

I'm tempted to change my name to GA Ponsonski.
Incidentally, I don't claim anyone at the BBC is involved in a *conspiracy*, I argue that there is evidence of institutional corruption. If Leask wants to challenge this evidence then he is free to do so. pic.twitter.com/zkaLruFjyC

— GAPonsonby (@GAPonsonby) November 12, 2017

Ah…of course…how the BBC stole the Scottish independence referendum…the BBC…a British unionist instituiton…lol…the BBC wants nothing more than to break up the UK and serve it up in pieces to the EU superstate as ‘regions 1, 2, 3, 4’……it hates ‘Britain’.

I know RT is institutionally corrupt. It has to be. I also know the BBC is institutionally corrupt. It has to be. Scotland's democracy suffers because the BBC dominates. There is no counter to its British Nationalist viewpoint. That's the real problem here, not Salmond's RT show.

— GAPonsonby (@GAPonsonby) November 11, 2017

The man is delusional….the SNP are rampantly successful in Scotland….how is that ‘Scotland’s democracy suffering’?  Oh…maybe he’s right for the wrong reason.

How can the BBC report this with a straight face?…

Mr Corbyn told the Observer Mr Johnson should be sacked as foreign secretary for “undermining our country” and “putting our citizens at risk”.

Jeremy Corbyn, the man who wants to dismantle NATO, who wants to scrap our nuclear deterrent and mothball the Army, the man who wants to put our intelligence service out to pasture, the man who has voted against just about every piece of anti-terror legislation, a man who supports Islamist terrorists, a man who supports Irish terrorists [no doubt cheering those who placed a bomb at a memorial service today], a man who has close ties to Russia and Iran, a man whose economic policies would impoverish Britain and whose fanatical followers would make it a far, far nastier place, and a man who has conducted secret negotiations with the EU in order to try and stop Brexit.

You have to ask who is it that is really undermining our country and putting our citizens at risk?

The once head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, said:

It seems that the BBC are so intent on getting rid of a Brexit supporting minister that they are prepared to spread Iranian propaganda to do so.

We now hear that Boris is ‘under mounting pressure’…why?…because Corbyn has demanded he be sacked.   That’s not pressure is it?  That’s just the usual Labour politicking by a man who knows he has the BBC in his pocket and whom he can rely upon to broadcast his views as the most important views in the country…never mind he is closely linked to the Iranian regime….so you have to ask what he is doing to help Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe….not a lot from what I can see….just playing politics and using Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe as a pawn in his game.

Then we have this from the BBC…

Michael Gove has come under fire for saying he didn’t know what Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was doing in Iran when she was arrested in 2016.

Mr Gove told Andrew Marr he would “take her husband’s assurance” that the British-Iranian citizen was on holiday.

So Gove is under attack because he says he didn’t know what the woman was doing in Iran but he understands she was on holiday….a perfectly normal statement but the BBC et al have jumped on him.

Funny then that I have just listened to Peter Allen ask Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s sister-in-law what was she doing in Iran and was she on holiday? Surely there is no doubt at all, why ask the question?   Should Peter Allen now resign?  Will he be vilified by the Left-wing vultures out to ‘defend’ Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe for his “cavalier approach to international diplomacy”?

Ahhh…just seen this from Guest Who….maybe James O’Brien will tear into Allen as he seems to have done to Marr… awkward times ahead in the BBC canteen…

Isn’t the question itself irresponsible? Her family, the FO & her employer concur that she was on holiday. Only the Iranian regime disagreed until Johnson & Gove opened their mouths. Marr must have known this. https://t.co/xnBgMBCqiY

— James O'Brien (@mrjamesob) November 12, 2017

That was in response to this…the Sun also stirring things…And the response from a Scots Nat [no doubt trying to deflect from Salmond’s love-in with Press TV]

Why did Marr ask this? Is he part of the save Bojo plot or just another natural BBC Tory hack at heart?

— Cailean Donnchadh (@CokieDee62) November 12, 2017

Like rats in a sack.

The BBC keeps saying that Boris said he thought she was teaching in Iran at the time…he did not…he made no mention of a time or a location for her activities he merely said…

“When I look at what Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was doing, she was simply teaching people journalism as I understand it,” he said.

He added: “Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, nor her family, has been informed about what crime she has actually committed. And that I find extraordinary, incredible.”

She was arrested for activities she had supposedly engaged in whilst in the UK working for the BBC….and I note the sister-in-law said she had no idea why she was arrested and yet the family know perfectly well why…as they made clear previously….

British-Iranian aid worker sentenced to jail for ‘cooperation with BBC’ – family

The family of British-Iranian aid worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who has been sentenced to five years in jail in Iran on undisclosed charges, said she has been accused by a Revolutionary Court of acting against national security by cooperating with the BBC.

The family said that at the appeal hearing two new accusations have been raised against her: being the head of recruitment for the BBC Persian service, and knowingly being married to a British spy.

Speaking in response to Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s jail sentence, Francesca Unsworth, director of the BBC World Service Group, said on Monday:

“Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe has never worked for BBC Persian. She worked briefly [err… 18months] for BBC Media Action, our international development charity, in a junior administrative capacity.”

Funny how the BBC always, always avoids mentioning that.

The BBC is headlining with the amazing news that a ‘Labour’ politician wants Boris to resign for his comments about Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.  Of course they don’t tell us that he is Labour…just that he is the Mayor of London….the same mayor of London that told Muslims that to cooperate with the police on anti-terror issues would  make them ‘Uncle Toms’. Maybe he should resign…..maybe the BBC should ask him about his comments [lol] or that he campaigned ‘as a Muslim’ for the Mayorship whilst declaring that Zac Goldsmith was a racist dogwhistler for raising the issue of Islamic extremism and Khan’s close relationship with some extremist speakers….never mind that Goldsmith never mentioned that Khan was a Muslim, just that he kept unsavoury company…it was Khan, as said, who campaigned on the Muslim ticket.

Of course Boris was probably accurate about what Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been doing, when she worked for the BBC’s Media Action…he had of course been briefed that this was the case by his staff.  He probably should not have said what he did as the result could have been foreseen.  Note though that the Independent reported his comments without putting any significance on them at all and in fact praised Boris…..until the anti-Boris lobby started to ramp up the rhetoric…..absolutely no flicker of recognition from the Independent that Boris had said anything untoward…..

Boris Johnson has finally condemned Iran’s detention of British citizen Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and offered to visit her in prison.  Speaking to a committee of MPs, Mr Johnson attacked both Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s conviction for spying as a mockery of justice and her treatment by the authorities in Tehran.

“When I look at what Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was doing, she was simply teaching people journalism as I understand it,” he said.

He added: “Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, nor her family, has been informed about what crime she has actually committed. And that I find extraordinary, incredible.”

Mr Johnson was told that an MP had been informed she could visit the dual British-Iranian national if she wished and asked if he would make the trip, replying: “Of course.”

Note that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was already facing an increased sentence which the BBC etc fail to mention when they tell us Boris’ words will condemn her to a life behind bars for years more….

Last month, Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe was told she could face 16 more years behind bars after the Iranian courts reopened her case and added three charges.

Look at the husband’s reaction then…

Responding to Mr Johnson’s comments, Mr Ratcliffe said: “I warmly welcome the Foreign Secretary’s condemnation of Nazanin’s treatment by the Iranian authorities to date. He is right – her case is a mockery of justice, and an abuse of Iranian and international law.

“I thank him for his offer to visit Nazanin and check that she is OK.”

Mr Ratcliffe also clarified that at the time of her arrest his wife had simply been on holiday with Gabriella, visiting her parents and other family members in Iran.

Mr Ratcliffe explained that Mr Johnson’s comment about his wife having taught journalism was a in fact a reference to her first graduate job eight years ago when she was an assistant at BBC Media Action, the corporation’s international development charity.

He said that his wife had never actually taught journalists but instead had simply made travel arrangements for tutors on an international journalism course.

No outrage, but an admittal that she was part of the system that taught journalists, the BBC’s Media Action [a soft power organisation designed to undermine and subvert undemocratic or authoritarian regimes like Iran’s]…the Iranians unlikely to make a distinction between teachers and those who facilitate their job.

Dimbleby on Any Questions presided over the usual BBC biased audience who repsonded with  great cheering when asked if Boris should be sacked.

Just  shame that genuine, contextualised, nuanced journalism is beyond the BBC these days and a baying mob of left-wing Corbynistas is running the show now.  They don’t give a damn about Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, they just want to politicise and weaponise her imprisonment in order to ‘get Boris’.  The more they attack Boris the more the iranians will tak ethe opportunity to dmaage him as well by ‘sabre-rattling’ about how they will treat Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe….the anti-Boris mob are doing the Iranian’s work for them…..they would love to see their politiciking end in the fall of Boris….a famous victory.  The BBC et al are helping in that, doing Iran’s work for it.

Boris was esentially right you just wouldn’t know it from listening to the BBC…who also must owe a duty of care to Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe as she is in prison for working for them.  Maybe Lord Hall Hall should resign?

There is hardly a day that goes by when the BBC isn’t running an ‘NHS in crisis’ story usually as a result of ‘a BBC exclusive investigation’…so you know they have gone out looking for these stories, which aren’t hard to find of course.  The NHS is massive, over 1.5 million employees and in England alone deals with over 1 million patients every 36 hours.  Any wonder you will find stories of some sort of failure…add to that the population is growing rapidly due to immigration and the resultant added pressure on the NHS is endless and relentless.

The BBC just likes to dig out the negative stories which they like to present as ‘worthy’ news but are in fact mostly moral showboating that fills up the airtime and has the happy side-effect of damaging the Tories…they hope.  This morning on 5Live we were warned of a crisis in palliative care…not enough funds, ruthless bean-counters who don’t care about the patients and nowhere near enough care available.  The unfortunate woman who was wheeled in as an example of that failure had a husband and a daughter who both needed palliative care…when the husband died the NHS withdrew some of the funds the wife received to look after him and then when the daughter also died she lost more funding and her motability car that was to provide transport for the daughter.  The wife lost some of my sympathy when she seemed to expect this funding and provison of a car to continue…she said she felt she just couldn’t work anymore…..undoubtedly there are always wrinkles in the NHS funding system that means people don’t get everything they need but when the reason for that provision is no longer there they can’t expect to keep receiving the money….other patients will need it.

Why does the BBC keep on insisting in ramping up these small personal problems into massive signs of the NHS in crisis?

Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph suggests a reason……

‘I once used to dabble in “investigatve journalism”, so I know how soul destroying it can be to spend months beavering away at some supposed great scandal in public life only to find that the more you look into it, the less it turns out to be.  The temptation to ramp it up into something it’s not is hard to resist.  I therefore have some sympathy with the BBC Panorama team and their work on the exotically named ” Paradise Papers”.  We were promised a series of revelations that would blow the lid on supposedly rampant international tax avoidance; what we got actually didn’t add up to a hill of beans.

Try as it did the BBC failed to demonstrate anything significantly untoward and yet it left the impression of shameful misuse by multinationals of offshore havens to avoid paying their share.  You can see why commerce prefers to keep its affairs private when subjected to this kind of knocking and substantially ignorant, anti-business treatment.’

A pretty accurate summation of how the BBC goes about its business..basically mud-slinging…it repeatedly protrayed the use of tax havens as ‘secret’ operations, secret investments, highly secret documents of the rich and powerful….no…they were just private….as you and I like to think our own bank accounts and financial affairs are.  ‘Secret’ is a perjorative word carefully chosen to build a narative of something being hidden…and if it’s ‘hidden’ that must be because it is illegal or immoral…and thus they have something to hide.  The BBC inventing a story where there is none…or none of any significance.

Just the BBC trying to create a narrative that we are being robbed by the ‘rich and powerful’ using ‘secret’ investments that no one knows about….except they are all entirely legal and everyone knows about off-shore bankng and investment…the BBC indulges in a bit of it itself.  Ireland is a tax haven, indeed the UK is a tax haven with relatively low corporate tax rates.  The BBC has just chosen to target those it thinks would seem to help Jeremy Corbyn and his anti-capitalist drive in the same way it targets the NHS and presents it as in crisis all the time.

The BBC…Corbyn’s useful idiots on tap.

In the last few weeks the Remainders have really stepped up their campaign to stop Brexit in its tracks with daily apocalyptic alarms warning us of the catastrophic consequences if we continue down the Brexit road to Hell….planes will fall out of the sky the day we leave, everyone will get cancer…and as the NHS collapses you’ll have nowhere to get treatment, criminals and terrorists will lay waste to Britain and you will be driving cars made by a ressurrected British Leyland and Red Robbo’s descendants….don’t buy one made on a Friday…or any day in fact.  Some days it’s a constant diet of small pro-EU stories, such as this morning when Ed Stourton was talking about Pope Francis…he levered in a question about what the Catholic Church thinks abut Brexit, as you would…apparently they are dead set against it…after all the EU was a Catholic project [hmmm…so the Islamic State isn’t Islamic but the EU is a Catholic State?  Just one more reason to leave] and then we get the big hitters, like Carney, or Brown, or the head of the NHS coming up at strategic times to paint a terrifying picture of post-Brexit armageddon.

There is clearly an orchestrated drive to fill the airwaves and Papers with this scaremongering and the BBC has been incredibly helpful with its almost entirely uncritical, and hugely dishonest coverage.  It has a particular trick up its sleeve.  When the Leave campaign hyped the idea of £350 million a week going to the EU [which it does, more in fact…with the obvious qualifications] the BBC attacked them relentlessly in an attempt to discredit that figure.  But over the last year you may have noticed a change of tack…the BBC has now embraces that figure and when a Leave voice comes into their studios they then present the £350 million as if it was the actual amount we do send to Brussels and which will be an actual £350 million extra to spend as we like…the BBC deliberately completely ignoring the qualifications [such as the rebate].  Why?  Because they want to make the Public think they were ‘promised’ £350 million a week by the Leave campaign and when that, as it clearly won’t, materialise in real life they will be able to say the Leave voter has been conned and betrayed by the Leave campaign…thus the referendum was illegitimate.  And yet this is in fact the BBC conning and fooling the voter.

This came to a head last week with the head of the NHS, Steven Simons, hitting the anti-Brexit campaign trail with demands for that ‘£350 million per week to be spent on the NHS’….We want our Brexit cash boost – NHS boss

The health service should get the cash boost it was promised during the EU referendum, NHS England’s boss says.

Simon Stevens used controversial claims used by Vote Leave – that the NHS could benefit by £350m a week – to put the case for more money in a major speech.

Note that word ‘promised’…and frequently ‘pledged’…..the Leave campaign made no such promise…they were in no position to do so…they were not the government…..just another little white lie from the Remainders and the BBC….note how Stevesn couches his argument in terms of a democracy betrayed if we don’t get that £350 million…..which confirms that the BBC’s new slant is shaped to portray that narrative as well.

‘Oddly’ the BBC didn’t immediately cut him off at the knees and say he was talking rubbish….that there is no £350 million per week as they did with the Leave campaign. Instead the BBC gave him massive publicity for what is a blatant lie….in fact two lies because the famous Battle Bus didn’t actually say we’d give £350 million a week to the NHS….it merely said money would be bettter spent on the NHS.

This demonstrates quite clearly how Stevens and the BBC, are being massively dishonest….before the referendum he told us…

Mr Stevens rejected the idea, suggested by Leave campaigners, that exiting the EU would free up money that currently goes to Brussels. At best, this would fund the NHS for 19 days a year, he argued.

So he said there would be no money from the a Brexit for the NHS…and at best, he told us, it would last 19 days a year…..he was lying then, as clearly leaving the EU would free up large amounts of money, and he’s lying now, first because he seems to have forgotten what he said in 2016 and because the Leave campaign didn’t ‘promise’ £350 million for the NHS.

What the BBC also didn’t tell us was that Stevens is a veteran anti-brexit campaigner who before the referendum told us on Marr that EU referendum: Brexit ‘could damage NHS’, health boss warns….

Leaving the EU could damage the health service, NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens has warned.

He said he took warnings of possible recession in the event of Brexit “very seriously”, adding that would be “very dangerous” for the service.

Here’s a blatant lie…

Mr Stevens also said the NHS had “benefited enormously” from having doctors, nurses and care workers from the EU working within the health service.

There would be an impact if any of those 130,000 staff chose to leave the NHS because of uncertainty over work visas if the UK left the EU, he added.

There are 60,000 EU staff in the NHS not 130,000.

Stevens had clearly coordinated his attack as part of ‘Project Fear’ with Cameron who appeared on ITV at the same time to praise Stevens….

The prime minister said it was right for “experts” such as Stevens to make their case in what was a critical referendum.

David Cameron told ITV’s Peston on Sunday that Stevens was careful about the way he had made his argument. Cameron said: “All the experts seem to be saying – the IMF, the ECB, the Bank of England, the Treasury, the Office of Budget Responsibility are all saying – the economy would suffer if we left the European Union and single market, and that is quite a consensus. And if that were to happen it would have a bad effect on the NHS.”

Project Fear is alive and well and coming to a BBC screen near you….daily, hourly, by the minute.

Priti Patel resigns: What went wrong?

Erm….according to The Sun an FCO official contacted the BBC and grassed on her…because?…The FCO was jealously guarding its territory, the FCO doesn’t like Jews and has always been Arabist, and the official was probably a Remainer…so why not grass up a Leave politician who is talking nicely to the Jews to the BBC which they might have grounds for considering to be broadly sympathetic with the FCO’s views?

Anyway…another open thread to grass the BBC’s bias to the world….

 

Tehran’s prosecutor general has said that a letter from David Cameron pleading for the release of a British-Iranian woman serving a five-year jail term in Iran on charges relating to national security was “confirmation that she had links with the UK government”.  Guardian Oct 2017 [why no fuss?]

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s work for the BBC put her in danger.  The BBC doesn’t want you to know this.  It misdirects all the blame towards Boris Johnson instead.

The BBC are out to get Boris and behead the Brexit Leave campaign….as are his fellow Tories…who are Remoaners….

This is appalling. In "normal" times Boris Johnson wld have been sacked long ago. https://t.co/aHaIMIn6j3

— Anna Soubry MP (@Anna_Soubry) November 7, 2017

Boris apparently made a gaff when making a statement to the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee last week…

“When I look at what Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was doing, she was simply teaching people journalism as I understand it,” he said.

He added: “Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, nor her family, has been informed about what crime she has actually committed. And that I find extraordinary, incredible.”

The question is of course, one we don’t see the BBC asking, who told Boris that she was ‘teaching people journalism’?

There is a very good reason the BBC doesn’t ask because it opens up a whole can of worms…about the BBC’s role in this.  Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe worked for Thomson Reuters Foundation and BBC Media Action, both organisations whose mission is to subvert regimes around the world that they do not like and turn them into democratic, liberal, progressive Western type states using Journalism as the tool to do that…’soft power’….training journalists to oppose governments and to stir up and empower the people to take action against their governments.  Any wonder countries like Iran try to shut down BBC services and are highly suspicious of people linked to these organisations?  Imagine if Saudia Arabia were training journalists in the UK to spread the message that Islam and Sharia were the only moral and ethical forms of society and that Western democratic societies were decadent and ungodly…would we accept that?  Oh hang on…

Iran really dislikes them and constantly harasses anyone connected to the BBC….

Several employees of an Iranian technology news website, including bloggers, have been given long jail terms for alleged links to the BBC.

Iranian authorities said this year that some of the employees had participated in projects run by the BBC and in its training courses, and received funds deriving from London. The Guardian understands at least one of the detainees was among the trainees of an award-winning journalism development programme run by the BBC World Service Trust from 2006 to 2010, called ZigZag.

BBC appeals to UN over Iran’s crackdown on journalists

The BBC will say it has no journalists in Iran but it sends ‘them’ over the airwaves into Iran to subvert the regime [and yet it complains about Russian interference in US democracy!]…

About 140 employees work for BBC Persian from outside Iran. The TV channel, which is broadcast from London, is loathed by the Iranian establishment and banned inside Iran, but millions of people, hungry for news not reported by the state-run channels, watch it via illegal satellite dishes.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is a dual-national and thus the Iranians, who do not recognise dual nationality [to them she is Iranian], consider her supposed actions to be sedition….

“In 2014-2015, the intelligence service of the Revolutionary Guards in Kerman province identified and arrested members of one of the groups that during the Sedition conducted activities against the security of the country by designing websites and carrying out campaigns in the media,” Movahed said. “Some of the group were outside Iran, including the suspect Nazanin Zaghari.”

Boris you may think was briefed fully on the subject by his staff.  Where might they have got the information?  From her family perhaps?  From Reuters January 2017:

British-Iranian aid worker sentenced to jail for ‘cooperation with BBC’ – family

The family of British-Iranian aid worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who has been sentenced to five years in jail in Iran on undisclosed charges, said she has been accused by a Revolutionary Court of acting against national security by cooperating with the BBC.

The family said that at the appeal hearing two new accusations have been raised against her: being the head of recruitment for the BBC Persian service, and knowingly being married to a British spy.

Speaking in response to Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s jail sentence, Francesca Unsworth, director of the BBC World Service Group, said on Monday:

“Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe has never worked for BBC Persian. She worked briefly [err… 18months] for BBC Media Action, our international development charity, in a junior administrative capacity.”

From the Guardian October 2017:

Dolatabadi added that Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s work training journalists at the BBC was behind her conviction, saying that she ran an online course that trained participants in encryption. The BBC’s Persian service is loathed by the Iranian establishment, which considers it a subversive arm of British intelligence service MI6.

“She ran a BBC Persian online journalism course which was aimed at recruiting and training people to spread propaganda against Iran.

“The training included how to use anonymous emails, how to create complex and long passwords as well as how to use encryption software.”

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the elite forces responsible for Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s arrest, had previously accused her of orchestrating a “soft overthrow” of the Islamic Republic.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe was charged with offences related to demonstrations in 2009:

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a 38-year-old mother, had already been sentenced to five years in prison for participating in anti-regime demonstrations in 2009, and last week was hit with further charges, carrying a possible 16-year prison term.

“These charges are linked to her work at BBC Media Action and at the Thomson Reuters Foundation,” said Thomson Reuters Foundation director Monique Villa.

“The accusation states that her charity work was a screen to overthrow the Iranian regime,” she added.

“This is a complete invention as the Thomson Reuters Foundation doesn’t work in Iran and has no programme or dealings with Iran.”

It is interesting that the BBC avoids all mention that the charges against her are linked to her employment with the BBC’s Media Action….it just doesn’t mention this…not a word today on the radio nor in any of the numerous reports on this issue….merely stating that she once worked for Media Action but making no connection between her imprisonment and that.

The BBC was happy however to drag in as many anti-Boris talking-heads as possible…we had James Kirkup, a Remainer and not a Boris fan (Boris’s nasty politics would hurt the Tories and Britain) who claimed Boris was unsackable as a ‘Leave’ big hitter….er…how then are Remainers Hammond and Rudd still in office after massively undermining May?  The we had Malcolm Rifkind, another Remainer, who laid into Boris accusing him of failing to read his briefing and mastering detail…I would have thought the opposite…he had read his briefing and that was what he quoted to the committee….not Boris’ fault…but note he hasn’t blamed whoever briefed him.  Then we had an ex-senior civil servant who almost word for word repeated what Rifkind had said but without the mocking laughter.

Adrian Chiles was desperately trying to get these people to say Boris should be sacked for his ‘crime’ and before he could do anymore ‘serious harm’….this is Chiles of course who is anti-Brexit and thinks UKIP is the British wing of the Nazi Party.

The chances are that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was involved in some way in training and supporting Iranian journalists both here in the UK and, via the Internet, in Iran when she worked for the BBC’s Media Action.  Hence Boris’ comment…..after all her family revealed this was the charge that the Iranians had brought against her.

So Boris is repeating what the family said who were repeating what the Iranians told them and so it was hardly news to the Iranians.  So unlikely, as the Iranians now admit, to have the slightest effect on her sentence.

But it was the BBC that put her in this position by nature of its work…..did they not warn her that she might be in danger of arrest if she visited Iran?  Where is the BBC’s duty of care?

So the BBC is out to get Boris once again, and Priti Patel.  Guess what?  Both are high profile Leave campaigners with senior government jobs….Boris being the Leave campaign’s most influential voice.  The BBC would especially  love to take him down and discredit him and thus leave Brexit without such a motivational and inspirational figurehead.

Priti Patel has made a slight gaff but hardly a sackable offence and yet the BBC has been on her case all day….but in all the reporting they fail to reveal the whole truth, in fact they tell a rather large porkie on the radio today…that she didn’t tell the FCO about her trip at all, either during it or after the event.  This is not true.  She informed the FCO of what she was doing as the trip went along as the BBC would know as it has read the letter she published explaining her actions…..

The FCO were aware of the visit while it was underway, but were not informed about it in advance….The Foreign Secretary did become aware of the visit, but not in advance of it.

On her return from Israel, the Secretary of State commissioned Departmental work on humanitarian and development partnership between Israel and the UK, and on disability.

The FCO are clear that UK interests were not damaged or affected by the meetings on this visit.

No surprise the anti-Semitic Labour Party are calling for her resignation after what was a trip that was almost wholely concerned with humanitarian issues.  As well as meeting with 12 charities she met three political figures and the talk was based around a ‘get-to-know-you’ family and background chat, politics in Britain and Israel, and the rise of anti-Semitism in British politics as well as sounding out further ‘prospects for closer collaboration between Israel and the UK on development and humanitarian issues.’  All innocuous and worthwhile you might think.

The BBC prefers to minimise the information of interest, ie what they talked about, and instead tries to suggest some secretive pro-Israeli plot….led by a ‘pro-Israeli Tory peer and campaigner’…

The BBC revealed on Friday that Ms Patel held a number of undisclosed meetings with business and political figures, including Mr Lapid, the leader of Israel’s centrist Yesh Atid party.

No diplomats were present at the meetings, at which the minister was accompanied by an influential pro-Israeli Conservative peer and campaigner, Lord Polak.

Here’s what Priti Patel says of her meeting with Yair Lapid:

Yair Lapid – Leader of Yesh Atid

General introduction. Discussion of backgrounds, families and careers to date. General discussion of British politics, including the growing anti-Semitism within UK politics.

Very sinister.

Can’t imagine the BBC being so upset about a Labour minister going to visit Hamas in similar circumstances.