Just listening (on Today 08:44) to yet another Frank Gardner attack on Saudi Arabia….bet the Saudis wish they had paid off Gardner with the £1 million that they said they would pay him for his injuries received in a terrorist attack.  Not saying it colours his reportage about Saudi but Frank’s a little bit bitter.

Apparently Britain and the US is responsible for the war in Yemen because we supply arms to Saudi Arabia…and of course the usual BBC narrative….this will lead to radicalisation of the ‘youth’…..regardless of whether the bombs hit targets by accident or not says Gardner. So war is bad whatever for Gardner.    Hmmm….so why is there a war in Yemen fighting and who started it?  Gardner of course doesn’t bother to give context or reasons just a condemnation of Saudi Arabia and the usual BBC pro-Jihadi narrative of angry, besieged Muslims, victims of the West.

Why doesn’t Frank mention in the same report that Iran has been supplying and encouraging the anti-government insurgency in Yemen…ie inciting the war?…

UN: Iran arming Houthi rebels in Yemen since 2009

UNITED NATIONS (AFP) — Iran has been shipping weapons to Yemen’s Houthi rebels since at least 2009, according to a confidential UN report, indicating that Tehran’s support dates back to the early years of the Shiite militia’s insurgency.

From the USA Today:

Iran’s involvement in Yemen goes back years, and ranges from political and religious support for Houthi leaders to military training and active involvement in the fighting, according to media reports and Yemen analysts.

“There is a well-documented history of (Iranian) support for the Houthi, including in various State Department reports — money, weapons — support for a very long time,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters Monday.

There probably wouldn’t be a war in Yemen if it wasn’t for Iran instigating it.

Curious how the BBC totally ignored the state sponsored terror in Iran where the male population of a village was killed by the government just recently…

Iran executed all adult men in one village for drug offences, official reveals

The entire adult male population of a village in southern Iran has been executed for drug offences, according to Iran’s vice-president for women and family affairs.

Of course its not just drug dealers being killed off but gay people and very young women who don’t conform to the Islamic modesty rules.

BBC?  Not really interested…..and not really interested in the wars Iran sponsors, certainly not interested in condemning Iran in the same harsh tones it uses to malign Saudi Arabia….wars such as the genocidal one against Israel carried out by Iran’s proxies….those wars that some BBC journalists cheerlead with their support for Hamas….and of course Iran’s support for Assad in Syria.

The BBC adopts a campaigning anti-Saudi tone that it doesn’t use when reporting on Iran.  Why?  The BBC has always had a soft spot for Iran and sees it as a victim of Western aggression and believes that Iran’s own aggressive actions are merely the inevitable and justified responses to that Western interference in its affairs.

Gardner’s report didn’t seem to have a point other than to blame the UK and US for the war…he told us that the Saudis denied deliberately targeting hospitals but then he said you get a rather different view on the ground….but all we heard was that billboards all over the north of Yemen were telling the local population that it was Western bombs killing them…..who put up those billboards and why?  Gardner doesn’t think that’s important.  And of course he came up with no proof or any of those ‘facts on the ground’ that indicate the Saudis deliberately target hospitals.

Gardner amusingly told us that he was advising(unasked) the Saudi government on their war….I’m sure their really interested.

Full of his own importance….and other stuff.

I wonder if the BBC thinks that supporting the government position on the EU referendum will make the government look kindly upon the BBC when the Charter Renewal is finally decided?  Has Lord Hall Hall got an agreement with Cameron?

No, of course not, the independent and impartial BBC would never stoop so low.

The BBC may interview some who support Brexit but it is becoming more and more obvious that the weight of the BBC coverage is favouring the pro-EU side.

There is little attempt from what I have heard to balance out the debate and provide voices from both sides on certain issues.

When Gove said the ECJ could override the agreement Cameron signed up to the BBC misquoted what he said claiming that he said the agreement was not legally binding at any time….but that wasn’t what he said…this is…

“The facts are that the European court of justice is not bound by this agreement until treaties are changed and we don’t know when that will be. I do think it’s important that people also realise that the European court of justice stands above every nation state, and ultimately it will decide on the basis of the treaties and this deal is not yet in the treaties.”

Not binding until the treaties are changed to incorporate it.   And of course the ECJ is a political body that serves the European Union and makes its judgements with that in mind…in the interests of the European Union.

The BBC on the Today programme brought in Dominic Grieve to give us his legal opinon…but he is, as he admitted,  an ardent supporter of the EU and in fact was a loud voice urging Cameron to sign up to the agreement he that did.  Hardly the voice of impartiality that was needed.

Today I just heard Pienaar give us his opinion on whether the referendum debate is civil or not….apparently it is all Boris Johnson’s fault for calling the PM’s claims ‘Balderdash’…no mention of Cameron’s attacks on the Brexiteers or his rigging of the referendum by trying to gag them and with-hold information from them.

Then we had a clip of the Norwegian PM telling us how awful life was outside the EU…she really wanted to join because you know what, Norway just didn’t have any sovereignty.

The BBC is now playing that clip on the news as if it is a truthful and impartial voice in the debate.  What the BBC doesn’t tell us is that the Norwegian politicians have been constantly trying to sign up Norway to more and more EU legislation by the backdoor behind the population’s back…..do we trust Cameron and Co not to do exactly the same?

Why doesn’t the BBC quote other voices from Norway when the vast majority of the Norwegian population are against further integration?…

Trouble is we’ve been here before with the BBC and its less than honest protrayal of the Norwegian position.Let’s just remind ourselves, and the BBC, what the Norwegian position really is….it co-operates closely with the EU and has a great deal of say in its workings….

Norway and the EU

Norway and the EU enjoy good and close relations, although Norway is not a member of the European Union. The Agreement on the European Economic Area (EEA) is the mainstay of our cooperation, and it ensures that Norway takes part in the EU internal market. We are also part of the Schengen Agreement and cooperate with the EU on foreign and security policy issues.

Through the EEA Agreement, the three EFTA states Norway, Iceland and Liechten-stein are equal partners in the EU internal market, on the same terms as the EU member states. Moreover, the Agreement also covers cooperation in other important areas such as research and development, education, social policy, the environment, consumer protection, tourism and culture. It also enables the three EEA EFTA states to participate in various EU programmes.  Norway also participates in the activities of a number of EU agencies through provisions in the EEA Agreement or on the basis of bilateral agreements.

Let’s look at what they have opted out of.…all the politics of the EU including the human rights…note the rules for the single market are 90% global and would be followed anyway, in or out of the EU…..

I think the BBC has given up any real pretence of impartiality and its journalists are now slipping in the pro stuff because it comes so naturally to them, they just can’t help themselves, they don’t even notice it.

Always amusing how much effort the BBC puts into avoiding mentioning or downplaying immigration and its effects.

Just why did the BBC decide to frame Macedonia’s actions in protecting itself against the attempt by mostly young, male Muslims to invade Macedonia using brute force as something Macedonia had to ‘defend’….Macedonia doesn’t have to ‘defend’ its actions, it has to defend its, and Europe’s, borders against vast numbers of people who have no intention of integrating and who will in the course of time demand that their families be let in and that they be allowed to practice their religion as they see fit.

Back in Blighty yesterday the world was looking at the shortage of school places.

The BBC’s report tells us what the problem is…

With a population bulge about to hit secondary schools, councils want powers to open new maintained schools and to compel academies to expand.  

The population bulge which has put primary schools under pressure will start hitting secondary schools this year, according to official figures.

And that’s it…no talk of immigration or anything connected to it just that euphemistic ‘population bulge’.

The BBC in a What the Papers Say article report the Sun saying…

“One in six schools are full”, is the headline in the Sun, which says the “classroom crisis” is set to worsen because of “Britain’s immigration-fuelled population boom”. In its leader column, the paper says “overcrowded classrooms and the challenges of accommodating myriad different languages will nobble attempts to drive up standards”.

And the Mail saying…

The Daily Mail agrees, saying the number of children who are “non-native speakers soared by nearly 400% from 51,955 to 190,506 in seven years, stretching teachers’ time”.

Rather selective choice of Mail quote as the Mail’s main headline was…

British children ‘neglected’ as migrant pupil numbers soar with 1.2 million children in school whose first language is not English

Then scroll down to the video of Author Matthew Green and Jenni Russell of the Times reviewing the front pages and you will get an EU love-in where they find the arguments for the EU ‘quite convincing’.

What’s also remarkable is that the BBC, other than to show the page itself, doesn’t discuss the Mail’s front page which looks at Blair and the Iraq War …a very sore subject with the BBC…we’ve mentioned this a few days ago when the Mail had Blair’s secret plot to import millions of immigrants on its front page and the BBC ignored that…..I’m guessing the BBC ignore this because it would link to the story on immigration…and then they would have to explain why they didn’t expose Blair at the time of his plot and when Andrew Neather blew the doors off it all and revealed everything….

Conman Blair’s cynical conspiracy to deceive the British people and let in 2million migrants against the rules: Explosive new biography lays ex-PM’s betrayal bare

Look at the selected quotes the BBC plucked from the Mail yesterday….

The Daily Mail agrees, saying the number of children who are “non-native speakers soared by nearly 400% from 51,955 to 190,506 in seven years, stretching teachers’ time”.

The Daily Mail says it has been a “disastrous year for some charities”, with interventions from the prime minister and a committee of MPs, the latter warning charities “are now looking at their ‘last chance’ to put their own house in order”.

The Daily Mail adds a disclaimer to what might otherwise appear to be a good-news story, that while people were “significantly happier at 69”, this was “despite most of them developing chronic diseases such as arthritis, diabetes and high blood pressure”.

Daily Mail – Back to uni on helicopters, private jets and in flash cars: Rich Kids of London show off their favourite transport as they ‘sneer at peasants outside Primark’ and clean their shoes with £50 notes

The Daily Mail reports the hedgehog population was thought to be about 36 million strong in the 1950s, but has declined to less than a million since 2003.

And what about this….

‘Eye-catching headlines’

What would be that ‘eye-catching headline’?…..one about the BBC…

Now the good news: we’re all in the BBC survivors’ club – the Daily Mail reports on how seasoned BBC hacks Frank Gardner, Andrew Marr, Nick Robinson and George Alagiah formed the Survivors’ Club, having been through serious illness or injury.

Incredible that the actual headline story plastered across the frontpage of the Mail is not even mentioned….not a peep about Iraq.     It’s almost as if the BBC doesn’t want you to read the book on Blair and his betrayal of the British people….which the BBC silently consented to.

After all the years Paul Mason worked for the BBC has the Tory Party just woken up to the fact he is somewhat left of left?  Just why did the ‘impartial’ BBC employ him when he was so obviously way off any norm?

Via Guido…

“The fact that the Labour Party is now getting its advice from Yanis Varoufakis and the revolutionary Marxist broadcaster Paul Mason does not suggest to me that they’ve got an answer to economic security. Presumably they chose those two because Chairman Mao was dead and Mickey Mouse was busy.”

Business Insider have unearthed a 1987 ITN clip of a dashing Paul Mason handing out the Workers’ Power newspaper and talking about “building revolutionary politics within the Labour Party”. Workers’ Power were a militant Trotskyist entryist group which infiltrated Labour in the eighties when Mason was working as a music teacher – his economics is all self-taught. The same year Mason was distributing their material, they published a pamphlet commemorating the Russian revolution and praising Lenin. It has taken nearly thirty years to achieve his entryist ambitions, now finally Labour’s Shadow Chancellor has signed him up to help with Labour’s economic policy…

It seems the BBC has shut up shop, it has burnt itself out reporting so enthusiastically about the letter (written by No10) from a group of businessmen cheerleading for the EU and another from some military types who hold the same views.

Odd, if we are supposed to vaue the opinions of such people, that the BBC ignores views from similarly statuesque figures on the Brexit side of things…such as the ex-Governor of the Bank of England whose opinion on the EU seemed to be of absolutely no interest to the BBC at all despite making the somewhat important judgement that the Eurozone is doomed.

Today we have Maj Gen Julian Thompson who expresses yet more critical thinking about the value of the EU…and again no sign of any BBC interest in his views… the one about Obama being a lameduck president no doubted grated somewhat…

Today, membership of the EU weakens our national defence in very dangerous times. Why? Clear-sighted understanding is obscured by four common myths.

Myth One is that the EU has kept the peace in Europe since 1945.

Myth Two is that the Americans want us to stay in the EU.

Myth Three is that if Britain takes back control of her own destiny it will help Putin.

Myth Four is that the EU helps us defeat Islamist terrorism.

Finally, some say: “stay in to rescue others as the EU founders.” I say we’ll do that better from a seaworthy lifeboat than shackled to a sinking deck.

I know from my lifetime’s experience in the service of my country that delusions about what actually keeps us safe, threaten us all. So let us put an end for good to these myths about the EU helping security. The facts show the very opposite.

Both Mervyn King and Julian Thompson have important things to say, things that undermine ‘Project Fear’ and give  support to Brexit…..and yet the BBC doesn’t give them the prominence it gives to the voices of Project Fear, if any coverage at all.

Jude Law’s security team was attacked and mugged by migrants when the cameras stopped after the Hollywood star left the jungle camp in Calais

Security guards hired to protect Jude Law when he visited the ‘Jungle’ migrant camp were reportedly targeted by rock-pelting migrants just moments after the actor boarded the coach home.

But moments after the celebrities had boarded the production team coach back to Britain, their security team was ambushed, according to the Sunday People.

The attackers reportedly hurled stones at the men before stealing their mobile phones. 

A source told the newspaper: ‘We were shocked to see some of the migrants acting like football hooligans. The security team had stones thrown at them and two had phones smashed and stolen.’

Let ’em all in…they can squat at Jude’s place…places…or Mark Easton’s.

A nice gaff in Malibu or how about the £14 million one in Highgate?……

‘I am struggling a bit to see where the crisis is.’ 

John Humphrys in his own interview on the BBC’s nursing shortage ‘crisis’ in the NHS

The BBC has been headlining with the news that there is a shortage of nurses in the NHS and foreign nurses are having to be recruited, at great expense, by the shipload.

Trouble is, much like its claim that Jeremy Hunt was misleading us on the figures for deaths at the weekends, this is a story generated, it seems, only in the minds of the BBC itself for its own reasons and purposes.

Here is their web report….a report which misses out the absolutely crucial information that we only found out on the Today programme….trouble is, it seems the BBC only found out at the same time, found out that their story is complete bunk….hence John Humphrys’ reaction….’I’m struggling a bit to see where the crisis is?’  Yeah…that’s because there isn’t one.  Clearly either the BBC reporters did not research the story properly or they didn’t care that it was wrong and went ahead anyway in the hope that it was a ‘scoop’.

The whole piece began at 08:13:32 where we heard that patients were getting the care they needed with the help of agency staff, but John Humphrys interviewed Ian Cummings (08:19), chief executive of Health Education England who gave the lie to the BBC narrative.

The reason there is a ‘shortage’ of nurses?  Not because there is a lack of recruits, not because nurses are fleeing the profession but because……because the government is looking to recruit far more nurses, 24,000 more, in response to Mid-Staffs and other quality failings that have been found.  The ‘shortage’ is man-made if you like…in fact it is a ‘shortage’ in part generated by the BBC which has campaigned relentlessly for more nurses.

Are we recruiting more overseas nurses now as a response?  No…in fact we had more foreign nurses here in 2004/05 than we do now…and the level of overseas recruitment has been dropping.  Is there a shortage of applicants to be nurses?  No…there are 20,000 training places and 60,000 applicants.  Will patients suffer (as John Humphrys asked numerous times)..No.

It was at this time (08:22) Humphrys gave up and said he was struggling to see where the crisis was.  That’s because there isn’t one.  The NHS is coping until the new recruits filter through…the timescale is that it takes 3 to 4 years to recruit and train a nurse…hence by 2019-2020 the NHS should have all the homegrown staff it needs…and until then it will employ agency and overseas staff.

This is a non-story about a crisis that isn’t a crisis…a shortage of nurses that is only a shortage because the government is looking to recruit 24,000 more nurses in order to improve the quality of service.

The BBC should be applauding, instead it fabricates an entirely ficticious, negative tale about a crisis.  Why?

Thanks to Notafanofpoliticians for this:

Shame Rotten wasn’t as full of principles as he suggests…

Elsewhere…Paul Merton denies a transcript of him abusing Savile is real…..

Here’s the transcript….put up not by its writers but by someone else….who got the HIGNFY teams wrong….Savile did appear on the show but with Hislop.

The real writers admit to it being a hoax.

So who wrote it and why?

Comedian Richard Herring, who knows most things, told me it was some people calling themselves SOTCAA and, indeed, it was. Two of them.

Around 2005, when they were writing on the Cookd and Bombd forum, they were calling themselves ‘Alan Strang’ and ‘Emergency Lalla Ward Ten’.

Now I’m told I should call them Joseph Champniss and Mike Scott.

“At the time this all took place,” Joseph Champniss told me yesterday, “SOTCAA was hosted by NotBBC.

“Sometime in 1999, we started pondering on how affected stories get attached to ‘classic’ shows and films over the years which go down well in pub conversations but also blur any kind of factual coverage – stuff like the rushes of The Wicker Man being buried under the M4 motorway and so on.

“Faking some Have I Got News For You out-takes was originally going to be part of that initial plan. We probably decided on it after watching the Unbroadcastable Have I Got News video, which itself features rushes material… but mainly because we enjoy the idea of rushes per se.

“The original idea was to stick the page on the site in Hidden Archive and see if anyone noticed/cared. Emergency Lalla Ward went off and wrote the actual page – based on a tape of the broadcast itself. If you watch the show in tandem with the fakery you’ll note that he’s specifically ‘filled in’ stuff where there was an obvious edit-point. However, this was really only ever a first draft. Something to build on and re-write later in a less obvious/explosive fashion.

‘I saw that letter from business leaders this week saying we should stay in. Some of them are the same people who said Britain should adopt the euro. Why on earth should we listen to them?’  Mervyn King

So the world will implode if Britain leaves the EU.

Funny that the Deutsche Börse doesn’t think so…

London Stock Exchange in merger talks with Deutsche Börse

The London Stock Exchange is in talks to merge with Germany’s Deutsche Börse in a £21bn deal that would seal an alliance first discussed at the turn of the millennium.

The LSE said on Tuesday it was in detailed discussions with its German rival about an all-share merger. Under the proposed structure, the balance of ownership favours Frankfurt, with Deutsche Börse shareholders owning 54.4% of the combined company and LSE shareholders holding 45.6%. However, the merged company’s board will have equal numbers of members from each business.

The UK exchange said: “The boards believe that the potential merger would represent a compelling opportunity for both companies to strengthen each other in an industry-defining combination, creating a leading European-based global markets infrastructure group.”

Nor of course did HSBC as it decided to remain in the UK rather than flee to the Far East.

What of that ‘leap in the dark’ that Cameron and Osborne’s ‘Project Fear’ warns us of?  One moment Osborne is telling us how well the UK economy is doing and how it will be in surplus in no time at all…the next he’s warning us that it is about to go into intensive care…of course this has more to do with the referendum than anything else…we must stay in the EU or chaos will ensue.  But the real leap in the dark might be becoming ever closer tied to an imploding European Union.

The BBC presumably doesn’t want you to think there is any problem with the EU…look at this anodyne report on the thoughts of the ex-Bank of England Governor Mervyn King…..‘New crisis without reform’ warns ex-Bank of England boss..

The former Bank of England boss has warned in a new book that another financial crisis is “certain”, and may come “sooner rather than later”.

Mervyn King, who stood down in 2013, says reform of monetary and banking systems may help prevent the crisis.

But he says that failure “to tackle the disequilibrium in the world economy makes it likely that it [a crisis] will come sooner rather than later”

But what were his thoughts on Europe?  The BBC makes no mention of that for some reason….perhaps this is why….He says in essence that the Euro Zone is finished…..as the Telegraph headlines it…Mervyn King: the eurozone is doomed…..

With different political histories and traditions, a move to political union is unlikely to be achieved quickly through popular support. Put bluntly, monetary union has created a conflict between a centralised elite on the one hand, and the forces of democracy at the national level on the other. This is extraordinarily dangerous.

In 2015, the Presidents of the European Commission, the Euro Summit, the Eurogroup, the European Central Bank and the European Parliament (the existence of five presidents is testimony to the bureaucratic skills of the elite) published a report arguing for fiscal union in which “decisions will increasingly need to be made collectively” and implicitly supporting the idea of a single finance minister for the euro area. This approach of creeping transfer of sovereignty to an unelected centre is deeply flawed and will meet popular resistance.

In pursuit of peace, the elites in Europe, the United States and international organisations such as the IMF, have, by pushing bailouts and a move to a transfer union as the solution to crises, simply sowed the seeds of divisions in Europe and created support for what were previously seen as extreme political parties and candidates.

It will lead to not only an economic but a political crisis.

European Monetary Union (EMU) is the most ambitious project undertaken in monetary history. EMU has not proved to be an easy marriage, with the enterprise trying to navigate a safe passage between the Scylla of political ideals and the Charybdis of economic arithmetic.

How long this marriage will last is something known only to the partners themselves; outsiders cannot easily judge the state of the relationship.

The basic problem with a monetary union among differing nation states is strikingly simple. Starting with differences in expected inflation rates – the result of a long history of differences in actual inflation – a single interest rate leads inexorably to divergences in competitiveness. 

Some countries entered European Monetary Union with a higher rate of wage and cost inflation than others.

Instead of being able to use differing interest rates to bring inflation to the same level, some countries found their divergences were exacerbated by the single rate. 

The resulting loss of competitiveness among the southern members of the union against Germany is large, even allowing for some overvaluation of the Deutschmark when it was subsumed into the euro.

It is evident, as it has been for a very long while, that the only way forward for Greece is to default on (or be forgiven) a substantial proportion of its debt burden and to devalue its currency so that exports and the substitution of domestic products for imports can compensate for the depressing effects of the fiscal contraction imposed to date.

The inevitability of restructuring Greek debt means that taxpayers in Germany and elsewhere will have to absorb substantial losses.

Germany faces a terrible choice. Should it support the weaker brethren in the euro area at great and unending cost to its taxpayers, or should it call a halt to the project of monetary union across the whole of Europe? The attempt to find a middle course is not working. One day, German voters may rebel against the losses imposed on them by the need to support their weaker brethren, and undoubtedly the easiest way to divide the euro area would be for Germany itself to exit. 

But the more likely cause of a break- up of the euro area is that voters in the south will tire of the grinding and relentless burden of mass unemployment and the emigration of talented young people. The counter-argument – that exit from the euro area would lead to chaos, falls in living standards and continuing uncertainty about the survival of the currency union – has real weight…. leaving the euro area may be the only way to plot a route back to economic growth and full employment. The long-term benefits outweigh the short-term costs. Outsiders cannot make that choice, but they can encourage Germany, and the rest of the euro area, to face up to it.

One can only wonder what goes on in the mind of Lord Hall Hall.  He runs an organisation which has dishonesty running through its very core as it deceives the British Public on Europe, on Islam, on immigration, on the economy and yet he has sacked Tony Blackburn for apparently giving evidence to Dame Janet Smith that “…fell short of the standards of evidence that such an inquiry demanded.”

This is the BBC that won’t publish the Balen Report because it reveals (we must assume) just how anti-Israeli its reporters have been, this is the BBC which refused to publish the names of the people who attended its climate change seminars and changed the BBC’s stance to one in which it now pumps out relentless pro-Climate change propaganda…Lord Hall Hall of course was the man who approved these seminars, this is the BBC which joined the witch-hunt against Murdoch and News International rather than remain an impartial reporter of the Leveson Inquiry, this is the BBC which organised a letter from the ‘luvvies’ which was supposedly a genuine plea from the heart and turned out to be a cynical, corporate BBC trick.

And of course this is Lord Hall Hall who, rather than give evidence that might ‘fall short of the standards required‘ decided not to appear before a committee of MPs…

BBC chief Lord Hall locked in stand-off with the Commons after refusing to answer questions from MPs ‘because he is a peer’

The BBC is locked in a stand-off with MPs over its coverage of Europe.

Furious MPs accused director-general Tony Hall of putting the BBC ‘above accountability’ by refusing to answer questions from the Commons European scrutiny committee about the corporation’s alleged bias on the issue.

Lord Hall was accused of ‘hiding’ behind historic rules that mean members of the House of Lords cannot be summoned to answer questions in the Commons.

David Cameron today urged Lord Hall to back down, saying that as a ‘general rule’ BBC executives should be willing to answer questions from MPs.

‘The BBC needs to be, and is, publicly accountable,’ he said.

Tory MPs said the stand-off raised questions about whether peers should be allowed to run major public bodies.

Whatever Tony Blackburn’s memory lapses may have been they can’t possibly be anything compared to the cynical, dishonest and dangerous deceptions that the BBC employs to con the British Public.