The BBC is having a ball with the Senate committee’s report on interrogation……all too often forgetting to tell us that it is a partisan report produced by the Democratic party…

A scathing Senate report two days earlier said “brutal” methods like waterboarding were ineffective.

While he [John Brennan] was speaking, Senator Dianne Feinstein, who heads the committee that produced the report, was rejecting his arguments on Twitter.

 

 

…..and it was an investigation that did not bother to interview anyone from the CIA itself.

Who did the BBC get in to comment?  James Rubin, a Clinton era democratic politician, a well known Islamist, Moazzam Begg, who was asked for ‘his thoughts’ on the report, and other democrats.  Haven’t heard a single ‘off message’ voice supporting the CIA on the BBC….I’m sure there are one or two somewhere.

The BBC are playing fast and loose with facts…here failing to mention why Bush said terrorists shouldn’t be considered parties to the Geneva Convention…

September 2001: After the 9/11 attacks, President George Bush authorises the capture, detention and interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects.

February 2002: President Bush signs an executive order which says the Geneva Conventions – which prohibit mutilation, cruel treatment and torture – do not apply to al-Qaeda or Taliban suspects.

 

The reason the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply to terrorists is  because it says it doesn’t….

Convention (III) relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. Geneva, 12 August 1949.

A combatant, even one in a militia, can be considered a prisoner of war and be treated in accord with the Geneva Convention but only if some conditions are met…the combatants…

….having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance;

…. that of carrying arms openly;

…..that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.

….And in particular that they treat nationals of the Occupying Power who may have fallen into their hands, according to the provisions of the present Convention.

 

None of those apply to terrorists or the Taliban.

However…..The BBC’s Jon Sopel bucks the trend and sounds a sceptical note about the Senate committee report..not something you would have got from Mark Mardell:

A whiff of hypocrisy about CIA report?

The really big picture is legacy. In 50 years’ time when the history books are written and children are sitting at their desks in Duluth, Des Moines or Detroit, and turning to the chapter marked “9/11”, what are they going to read? Here are two versions.

On 11 September 2001, the United States came under attack from al-Qaeda terrorists, claiming the lives of 3,000 people when planes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania – a war on terror was declared, and those responsible were hunted down and detained, and there were no further attacks on US soil.

Or:

On 11 September 2001, the United States came under attack from al-Qaeda terrorists, claiming the lives of 3,000 people when planes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania – a war on terror was declared, but the torture tactics used to hunt down and detain those responsible brought condemnation and America lost its moral authority in the world.

Remember Winston Churchill’s adage that “history is written by the victors”? This is a battle between Bush-era officials and the Obama administration over which narrative of these events should prevail.

A battle between most Democrats, who think that there are NO circumstances EVER when coercive interrogation techniques can be condoned; and most Republicans who say America was under attack, there was intelligence that there could be a second and third wave of attacks and we did whatever we could to prevent that.

But is there just a small whiff of hypocrisy here? What if it had been a Democrat in the White House when America came under attack on that dreadful September day. Would the response have been that different?

I’m sure there were sadists, oddballs and bad people out there. But weren’t the overwhelming majority of CIA operatives at that time just driven by one thing – a patriotic duty to keep America safe, by whatever means?

And this is where it gets uncomfortable. Of course I can sit here at my keyboard and pronounce that torture can never be justified. It is an absolute. I do totally believe that. But what if a child of mine had been kidnapped, and the police arrest the kidnapper, but say to me, “Well we’ve got the guy who took your kid, but despite us asking him really politely where he’s being kept, he’s not telling us… However there are these things called enhanced interrogation techniques – we could give them a go.” Would I say no? I’m really not sure.

 

Now that’s just something that you would never expect from the BBC….an entirely nuanced piece that suggests, in the circumstances, use of harsh interrogation methods might be justified.

Then again there’s the more usual fare we expect from the BBC in the shape of Frank Gardner’s highly partisan and wilfully blind interpretation of what is effective interrogation techniques….

Why interrogators prefer the soft approach

“At no time did the CIA’s coercive interrogation techniques lead to the collection of imminent threat intelligence, such as the hypothetical ticking time bomb,” says the report.

In other words, all that mistreatment, all those hours of waterboarding, of dragging people hooded and shackled, up and down corridors, depriving them of sleep for days on end and subjecting them to white noise, did not actually yield any real information that stopped a terrorist attack.

Here quoting expert British interrogators…..telling us torture doesn’t work…and of course they never use it do they?…because it doesn’t work, does it!….and no hint of gloating and professional rivalry from the Brits…remember these were the ‘experts’ at counter-insurgency warfare…who got their arses kicked whilst the Yanks steamrollered through and wiped out Al Qaeda in Iraq.

So was there a better way for the US government to acquire this information without risking breaking international law and committing a moral outrage?

Yes there was. Talk to almost any trained British army interrogator and they will tell you that in the long run it is the “logical friendly approach” that yields the best results.

An experienced British army interrogator, who questioned high-value Iraqi POWs, says when a detainee is seized, often as a result of a violent struggle or firefight, there is the inevitable shock of capture and the fear of what is going to happen to them.

Often they imagine the worst – remember the Royal Navy sailor who broke down in tears when he and his crew were captured in the Gulf by an Iranian patrol boat and briefly held in 2007.

 

That sailor was not a high value prisoner…just a ‘callow youth’ way out of his depth.  Most of the prisoners, like him, that would react to the soft approach and the slightest pressure are the humblest of recruits probably just there for the money and would know little information of any value.

Curious Gardner doesn’t quote ‘Andy Mcnab’ who tells us that everyone cracks in the end under intense interrogation…just a question of when and trying to hold out long enough to make any information you do have out of date and useless.

Gardner quotes this….

“They are hungry for affection,” says the former interrogator about prisoners he questioned. “Eventually, they will be willing to co-operate in exchange for safety and comfort.”

 

Gardner thinks such a statement means the interrogator is saying harsh interrogation doesn’t work….but he isn’t really saying that…..the subtext to that comment is that the prisoners are made to feel ‘unsafe and uncomfortable’...and only cooperate when to do so would bring such suffering to an end…in other words…..don’t be nice to them.  Gardner reads into things what he wants to see…enhanced interrogation, or torture, doesn’t work when the subtle words of the interrogator suggests it does.

Perhaps the BBC should retrain its journalists so that they don’t have the wool pulled over their eyes…what does he expect the ‘expert’ interrogator to say…‘Yes we torture prisoners’?

Low level, non ideological recruits may well be more susceptible to less rigorous approaches, but then they know very little of value…… the hardcore  jihadists are far more radical and determined…and not likely to compromise themselves for a cup of coffee, a cigarette and few kind words….or indeed the suggestion that their cause is hopeless.

The only thing that would work to any degree at all is those good old ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, locking them up out of troubles way or removing them permanently from the battlefield once and for all.

They have confidence that with much of Western media on their side and numerous human rigths organisations and pan handling lawyers advocating on their behalf not much will happen to them…..which is why the CIA used techniques that were intended to break that confidence and make them think that they were beyond help, no Seventh Cavalry coming to the rescue…..to break their defiance and mental resilience.

And as a contrast to Gardner’s one sided view there’s this from the Mail:

Did torture stop UK terror attack? Al-Qaeda terrorist captured in London after CIA spies interrogated Guantanamo Bay detainee

Al Qaeda’s top British terrorist was captured after CIA spies tortured former Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg, it was claimed today.

Crucial information provided by Mr Begg while he was being held helped identify ‘dirty bomber’ Dhiren Barot who was plotting terror attacks on London, according to the long-awaited publication of a report into CIA torture programmes in the wake of 9/11.

The report claims that drawings by Mr Begg – who claims to have been beaten and deprived of sleep in Guantanamo Bay – helped lead British security services to Barot, who had gone to ground in London.

Begg, a confirmed Islamist extremist who admitted to training in terrorist camps, naturally denies he grassed on his fellow Islamists….

Mr Begg has also reacted furiously to the claim. In a letter to The Independent last night, lawyers for Mr Begg rejected any suggestion that he ‘volunteered or co-operated in the provision of information to any intelligence service’.

They added: ‘Insofar as he was tortured and under extreme and unlawful continuing duress for three-and-a-half years in Bagram and Guantanamo he, as every other individual subject to such treatment, cannot be regarded in any proper sense of the words to have ‘given or provided information’ voluntarily.’

‘……cannot be regarded in any proper sense of the words to have ‘given or provided information’ voluntarily.’

Yep….that’s the point….he was made to talk…not that he did of course!

I hadn’t been able to check the background to the BBC’s hyperbolic reports on the NHS this morning…every news bulletin I heard announced that the NHS had practically been privatised….

A third of NHS contracts awarded to private firms – report

The only clue (other than a lot of past experience) that the BBC might be misleading us was hearing Nick Clegg on PMQs responding to Labour’s claim, as above from the BBC, that 1/3 of NHS contracts had gone to private companies.

Clegg told us that a mere 6% of NHS spending had gone to private companies…a figure not dissimilar to Labour’s 5%.

The BBC’s web report confirms this…

The government says the data is misleading.

It’s unclear how much the contracts were worth because the CCGS would not disclose this information citing commercial sensitivities.

A Department of Health spokesperson said: “Official NHS accounts show that use of the private sector amounts to only six pence in every pound the NHS spends, slowing the rate of increase to just one penny since May 2010.

 

Which makes you wonder how the ‘hyperbolic’ and highly political headline was chosen.  The ‘privatisation’ of the NHS is one of Labour’s favourite narratives and one they aim to use to buttress their supposed position as ‘defenders of the NHS’….which makes the choice of headline by the BBC hugely suspect as it is so highly political.

I guess ‘6% of NHS spending has gone to private companies’ is just too lacking in drama and fails to paint a picture of Tory rampant capitalism destroying a national treasure….as so eloquently and ridiculously stated by Labour…

“These figures show what is at stake at the coming election. David Cameron’s Government is stealthily hiving off NHS services without the permission of the public.”

 

 

The BBC’s Director of BBC News and Current Affairs, James Harding, has launched a counter-blast to Conservative complaints of BBC bias. Harding’s response shows how quickly new recruits to the BBC absorb the dominant cultural and political orthodoxy of the organisation and so rapidly adopt the unquestioning obedience to the hand that feeds them.

Rather than admit what was a clear-cut case of bias and intemperate language by a BBC reporter Harding sets out to trivialise and sidestep the seriousness of the complaint.

He makes his case in the Telegraph starting off with this….

 Apparently the “Tories are at war with the BBC”. Rows between the BBC and the Government of the day are nothing new. They go back decades to the very birth of the BBC. And few would argue that a cozy relationship between the BBC and government – or indeed any news organisation – would be a good thing. Scrutiny and accountability can sometimes be a bumpy ride.

Immediately you can see he has no intention of genuinely dealing with the complaint instead dismissing it as ‘nothing new’, merely part of an age old game played by politicians….then trying to imply that taking the complaint seriously would be bowing to political pressure compromising BBC independence and integrity.

He goes on to say…

The economy is one of the key issues at the heart of the election. The BBC has played a leading role in covering the financial crisis and the return to economic growth. We have made huge efforts to give balanced coverage and reflect all sides of the argument from the fall in unemployment and the rise in private sector jobs, to the challenges caused by persistently downward pressure on wages and the resulting lower-than-expected tax receipts.

The economy is indeed one of, if not the most important, issues in the coming election which is why the BBC has a duty to report impartially with all the facts…something it has patently failed to do.

He tells us the BBC has played a leading role in reporting the economy in a balanced manner…is that true? No.

The BBC, as reported so often on this site, pushed Labour’s Plan B relentlessly, it pushed ‘Keynesian’ economics, it pushed the Occupy movement, it recruited Occupy acolytes like Giles Fraser. The BBC consistently reported we had a double dip recession, its journalists still do, despite the fact we had no double dip….the BBC reported with an all too evident eagerness that we were heading for a triple dip recession…the fallacy of that is all too obvious.

As for reporting the ‘the challenges caused by the persistent downward pressure on wages’ they certainly did report on that subject…but no-where near the truth….you will be hard pressed now to get a BBC journalist to link immigration to low wages and the subsequent fall in tax revenue and the increase in welfare payments.

The BBC repeatedly told us there was a puzzle as to why employment was increasing when productivity wasn’t increasing…but that fails to understand that wages are a part of productivity…..if wages fall and output stays the same then productivity, per pound not per worker, has gone up.

The BBC never bothered to knock on a factory door and ask why they were employing more people preferring instead to spin a tale of an economic mystery that apparently gave a lie to the face value facts of an improving economy. Let’s face it no employer would employ someone unless they had a reason to…they aren’t charities…and yet the BBC persistently insisted they were doing so, flying in the face of economic wisdom.

Harding defends the BBC by saying….

 In fact, it is not the BBC that pointed out that reductions in public spending proposed by the Chancellor on Wednesday amounted to a return to state spending on citizens last seen in the 1930s.

Indeed he is right…except the OBR referred to 1938 specifically not the ‘1930’s’ and definitely not the Depression era early 1930’s that the BBC decided to use as its comparison claiming this was the OBR’s reference…a blatant attempt to encourage a view that the Tories were going to lead us into an era where poverty and misery would be ‘stalking the land’, to coin a phrase.

He tells us that…

Through the course of the past week, we reported the run up to the Autumn statement as the Government made a series of announcements: a £2bn commitment to the NHS on Sunday, a package of infrastructure investments on Monday, a flood defences plan on Tuesday and the Autumn Statement on Wednesday.

Trouble is the plans were pretty much dismissed by the BBC as electioneering hype by the Tories and that once the election was over would be quietly shelved.

Here we get to the heart of the matter….

Just after 6am on Thursday morning, Norman Smith, the BBC’s Assistant Political Editor, was pointing out that while many headlines were around the changes to Stamp Duty – the big new news of the Autumn Statement – the issue that would dominate in the months ahead was the OBR’s prediction that Britain could face a return to 1930s public spending per capita. And if some people thought his reference to George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier was a tad strong, his editorial judgment was exactly right: spending cuts to reduce the deficit will be a central argument of the election. It’s clear it will be an issue irrespective of whichever party wins.

Note Harding makes no mention of Smith’s toxic reference to the economic outlook as ‘utterly terrible’ and dismisses his other comparison of the economy to an era of slump and depression, starvation, joblessness and misery.

He then helpfully and unintentionally spells out why the BBC’s biased reporting should not go unchallenged saying ‘spending cuts to reduce the deficit will be a central argument of the election.’…unwittingly admitting that by reporting in a biased manner Smith is misreporting one of the most important issues of the election.

And yet the BBC’s head of news’ trite, self-serving response to complaints of bias is to say ‘Well, look how clever my journalist is, he’s spotted that the deficit might play an important role in the election. He may well have spun a tale of doom and gloom that favours the Labour narrative but any Tory complaints are just the usual unfair criticisms we expect from politicians.’

This is a typical BBC response to criticism, brush it under the carpet, dismiss it paradoxically as other people’s bias and not the BBC’s, and to proclaim the BBC’s integrity and genius.

One day the Tories will have the guts to disembowel the BBC and bring it to heel. Until they do every election will be a battle not just against other parties’ political machines but also against the BBC’s hugely powerful and influential propaganda machine.

Remember this recent headline from the BBC?

‘Colossal’ spending cuts to come, warns IFS

When Osborne made his Autumn Statement the BBC went into overdrive to undermine any perceived good news. We know of its blatant comparison of the 1930’s depression to what they predict will be the outcome of his policies but they also hyped the IFS’s ‘revelation’ of those ‘colossal spending cuts’ after the election.

But hang on…isn’t that very old news? Haven’t we known for a long time that the majority of the cuts would come after the 2015 election? So why the hype from the BBC?

This was the New Statesman in 2013:

Austerity after 2015: why the worst is yet to come

This was the BBC itself in March 2013, reporting the IFS’ words….which have a familiar ring to them:

Budget 2013: ‘Cuts deferred’ until after elections

Or this from Politics.co.uk in 2012:

Never-ending austerity? More cuts to come after 2015

Nothing new there then…so why make such a song and dance about these cuts now in the run up to the election as if they are something new and terrible to be inflicted upon us completely unuspecting victims?

The IFS itself seems a bit confused as to what caused the slow reduction in the deficit….this is their analysis:

It is important to understand why the deficit hasn’t fallen. It is emphatically not because the government has failed to impose the intended spending cuts. It is because the economy performed so poorly in the first half of the parliament, hitting revenues very hard.

Oh right….poorly performing economy at the beginning of the Parliament…or is it?  Here is the other explanation…from the IFS in the same analysis by Paul Johnson:

The relatively modest fall over this parliament is largely explained by increased spending on social security, especially pensions.

 

So is it a poorly performing economy or welfare spending caused by low wages, caused by immigration, and pension raises that kept the borrowing figures up?

You might look at Robert Peston’s honest appraisal of our economic situation…..note in particular these words which have long since been forgotten… ‘The clean up will take years. And there is no quick fix…. What became clear in 2008 is that we will have to find a way of paying much of that debt back.

 That will take at least a decade.’

A decade…so by 2018…..as per the latest budget statement.

It is a very enlightening and honest look at the problem and consequences of debt, government spending and how it is funded….unfortunately it is an analysis that the BBC has always ignored, presumably as its diagnosis and prescription are a direct challenge to the BBC’s favoured narrative of high government spending on public services, welfare and infrastructure projects regardless of where the money comes from.

Here are Peston’s thoughts from his book ‘How do we fix this mess?’…..

How do we fix this mess? I don’t know. But don’t stop reading now. Perhaps if we have a clearer understanding of what went wrong, we’ll have a better idea of what needs to be done.

We will be right in the middle of the jungle, observing how bankers, regulators, politicians – and, oh yes, most of us – were by turns greedy, gullible lazy and short-sighted, and how we wilfully refused to see how our improving living standards were not being earned in a sustainable way.

We failed to rise to the challenge of globalisation.

We did not work harder and smarter.

Instead we borrowed.

And now as a nation, we have to pay back much of the debt, which inevitably makes us feel poorer, and will continue to do so for years to come.

The clean up will take years. And there is no quick fix.

We have allowed others, our governments and the so-called authorities, to take us from boom to bust.

I confess, during much of the journey, I had little idea we had taken a wrong turning….but as we headed for the swamp I succeeded in spotting the looming disaster and shouted out a warning: I was largely ignored and was even asked to shut up.

I am not going to pretend there is a road to Shangri-La, where we will suddenly find ourselves becoming richer and richer again.

We tried that road in the late 1990’s and early years of this century, and it was the road to ruin.

Boom and bust will be with us forever.

It was our foolish conviction that the smooth road to sunny uplands would go on forever which got us into such trouble.

The Future’s Overdrawn

Whether we own up to it or not, we can’t go on forever living on China’s credit.

What became clear in 2008 is that we will have to find a way of paying much of that debt back.

That will take at least a decade.

And when we repay debt, we’re spending less. Which means economic activity slows down, growth grinds to a halt.

It is reasonable to assume that growth will be as little as 1% in the coming 10 years….which wouldn’t look so bad after a contraction of 6.3% in output during the 2008-09 recession.

Cuts in public spending, including in benefits and tax credits, were almost certainly inevitable and have indeed followed.

Since 2008, the UK’s aggregate debt has been shuffled, not repaid.

The government kept spending to prevent recession turning into an extreme slump while tax revenues were shrinking.

When essential public services start to be financed through borrowing rather than tax, it is immensely difficult to cut the borrowing.

Remember this from 2011 when Richard Black tried to persuade us that it was the dumb, ignorant Anglo-Saxons who were climate deniers while the rest of the world wailed as it burned?

The world wide web, where climate change is most vociferously debated, is predominantly an Anglo-Saxon medium.

For we native English speakers who’ve never needed to become fluent in other tongues but speak the language of climate change daily, this raises an intriguing question: is it possible that we’re getting a distorted view of the “climate debate” globally, simply because we’re missing what’s going on elsewhere?

“The weight of this study would suggest that, out of this wide range of factors, the presence of politicians espousing some variation of climate scepticism, the existence of organised interests that feed sceptical coverage, and partisan media receptive to this message, all play a particularly significant role in explaining the greater prevalence of sceptical voices in the print media of the USA and the UK.”

To those who despair of the success of sceptical lobbying, the message is clear: learn one of the languages of Brazil, China or India.

 

 

WUWT suggests he’s wrong…

Climate Change … Who Cares?

Thanks to the blog of the irrepressible Hilary Ostrov, a long-time WUWT commenter, I found out about a poll gone either horribly wrong or totally predictably depending on your point of view. It’s a global poll done by the United Nations, with over six million responses from all over the planet, and guess what?

The revealed truth is that of the sixteen choices given to people regarding what they think are the important issues in their lives, climate change is dead last. Not only that, but in every sub-category, by age, by sex, by education, by country grouping, it’s right down at the bottom of the list. NOBODY thinks it’s important.

Now, people are always saying how the US is some kind of outlier in this regard, because polls in the US always put climate change down at the bottom, whereas polls in Europe generally rate it somewhat higher. But this is a global poll, with people chiming in from all over the planet. The top fifteen countries, in order of the number of people voting, were Mexico, Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Yemen, Philippines, Thailand, Cameroon, United States, Ghana, Rwanda, Brazil, Jordan, and Morocco … so this appears to be truly representative of the world, which is mostly non-industrialized nations.

So the next time someone tries to claim that climate change is “the most important challenge facing the world” … point them to the website of the study, and gently inform them that the rest of the world doesn’t buy that kind of alarmist hogwash for one minute.

 

 

The Media’s hypocrisy is quite stunning, the BBC’s most of all of course as it tells us it holds itself to a higher standard and is the news organisation that sets the standards for the rest of the pack to follow.

Recently they have been shouting a lot about how dishonest politicians are, asking why politicians, especially the Tories, won’t tell us about the true state of the nation’s finances.

Of course, in reality, that is the last thing the BBC wants you to know as it would be hard to justify its barrage of anti-austerity propaganda that it pumps out daily if the economy is ‘utterly terrible’.

Similarly the same goes for immigration and Europe…the BBC has hidden the truth about immigration for years, steadfastly refusing to examine it in detail and consistently ignoring the downsides to immigration…only recently having to tackle the subject with any degree of honesty because many politicians have had to at least pay lip service to the concerns of the population about immigration……and forced to do so by one man and his party…Nigel Farage and UKIP.

Now when you hear the BBC moaning about the ‘dishonesty of politicians’ just remember this is the BBC that tried, still tries, to undermine and finish off UKIP as a political force, that tried to shut Farage and UKIP up.

The BBC had no interest in talking about immigration until forced to do so…..and will rapidly revert to that position given half a chance.

Farage forced the pace and set the ball rolling on immigration.

All of which is backed up by this revelation from a BBC insider, an ex-insider, Paul Lambert who has jumped ship to become the communications guru at UKIP and says…..

“Over the past few years I have been following the work of UKIP and Nigel Farage and I feel that he is changing British politics for the better. I am delighted to be able to add my experience to his team. He has been one of the best, most hardworking and most normal political figures I have worked with, and trust me I have seen the lot”.

“UKIP is today the place to be if you want to be a part of a party that is changing the face of British politics for the better, and providing a new, clear and honest voice”.

 

The BBC are being nice to him at present but as one commenter says at Guido it won’t last long…..

Watch the remaining featherbedded stooges turn on him now.

 

The BBC rushed to tell us……

World on course for warmest year

The UK Met Office says the observed temperatures would be highly unlikely without the influence of greenhouse gases produced by humans.

“There is no standstill in global warming.”

 

Not sure the ‘Central England Temperature Anomaly’ can be describes as ‘all of the UK’ let alone ‘The World’….but let’s not be too critical…we’ll leave that to Christopher Booker:

Last week’s claims that 2014 is set to be ‘the hottest year ever’ are frankly a load of nonsense, says Christopher Booker.

Led by the BBC, the usual media suspects were quick to trumpet last week’s claims by the Met Office and the World Meteorological Organisation that 2014 is set to be “the hottest year ever”. It’s funny that the rest of us hadn’t noticed; least of all those citizens of North America and Russia whose lives were lately disrupted by record snowfalls. It is true that the temperature records compiled by the avid warmists of the Met Office and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (the one formerly run by climate activist James Hansen) have managed to show this year squeaking just ahead of 2010 as “the hottest year since records began”. But the much more comprehensive and reliable satellite records agree that 2014 is way down the list, with six of the past 16 years ahead of it.

 

At least there is one real journalist at the BBC who raises a few questions…..

Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past

Britain’s winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives.

“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”

 

The BBC is always busy looking for ‘proof’ of global warming….here they are in Oz in July….

Artificial snow on slopes of hotter Australia

Australia is sometimes the petri dish of climate change – a place where global warming is not just a theoretical concept but a tangible reality.

Oops….just a month later….

Ready, set…snow! Australia blanketed in a winter wonderland as cold front delivers a brisk start to the weekend

And this is from June a month before the BBC paints its picture of doom….which really shows how untrustworthy the BBC is…they knew there was heavy snow in Oz and yet they report ‘artifical snow’ stories….

Best snowfalls in a decade forecast for eastern Australia. Strap yourselves in for the megablizzard

While Australia rejoices in the heaviest June snowfalls this century, with the majority of lifts at all resorts set to open by the weekend, the Kiwis have barely got two snowflakes to rub together.

Of course the late snow on Mt Buller is an entirely new phenomenon isn’t it?…

“Historically speaking though it is not unusual for us to have no snow on Opening Weekend,” says David McNamara from the Victorian ski resort of Mt Buller.

Ahh…an explanation…the reporter is the never-reliable Jon Donnison telling us that the snow is so late and so thin that artificial snow is needed.

Really?  The snow came, in bucket loads, two weeks ‘late’ into the skiing season…..

Experienced weather watchers are calling it the storm of the century. They’re saying it could snow on and off, but mostly on, for the next 10 days.

And now the megablizzard has arrived. The NSW resorts of Thredbo and Perisher received 40cm and 50cm respectively overnight. Hotham, Falls Creek and Mt Buller (pictured below) in Victoria all reported similar totals.

A spokesman for Thredbo confirmed to news.com.au that as of about 3.30pm, 80cm of snow had now fallen in the past 24 hours.

“It’s an incredible amount for June, I’m not sure it’s a record, but it has set us up for the rest of the season,” he said.

The official Australian ski season started two weeks ago but up till yesterday then, there had been a desperately thin snow base with only a lift or two turning at the NSW resorts of Perisher and Thredbo. Victorian resorts, which are a little lower than their NSW counterparts, had nothing but grass.

That all started to change yesterday and after a brief lull in the early morning hours, the storm appears to be intensifying now.

Here’s what a user called “Snowblowa” said on the forums on leading snow industry website ski.com.au:

“Seriously when was the last time we were looking at a potential 100cm event to kick off the season properly with potential mega follow up?!!!!!!! We gotta savour this, it’s gunna be awesome, we might be saying in five years “remember late June in 2014”. Besides, we are so over due, last few years in General have been pretty average.”

 

So let’s see…that’s deep snow and lots of it.

The BBC is obviously trying hard here…they even drag in Al Gore who tells us he isn’t impressed by Oz PM Tony Abbot who is somewhat sceptical about the extent of the threat that is global warming….that’ll be the Al Gore who made a video with copious ‘errors’ in it that misled viewers about climate change and had to be ‘corrected’….and the same Al Gore who has massive investements in green technology companies reliant on the climate change bandwagon to keep rolling and bringing in the dollars.

Funny old world when a man who expressed so much contempt for the Westminster ‘gang’ as he calls them, now seeks to rejoin as an MP despite, apparently, the fact that the “writing is on the wall for Westminster”.….what’s more curious is that the BBC don’t seem to notice this hypocrisy in their grand analysis…nor do they notice that when the Slippery Salmond says:

“We won’t have any deal with the Tories – they are not trusted by the people of Scotland” he said.

…the truth is the Tories are just as ‘trusted’ as the SNP…..

At the 2010 General Election, the SNP polled 19.9 per cent and won 491,386 votes, while the Conservative Party polled 16.7 per cent and won 412,855 votes. Yet it is the SNP that has been allowed to set the agenda in Scotland, and to call the shots on the possible future of the Union, while the Conservatives have been painted as pariahs, and deemed about as welcome in Scotland as a nationwide dose of the clap.

 

 

But then the BBC has always had a soft spot for anyone who wants to destroy the United Kingdom…be it Communists, Muslim fundamentalists, Brussels Bureaucrats or the SNP.

Apologies, no time to do this justice but here’s some rough workings to get your teeth into….

Labour’s spending as a proportion of GDP in 1998?  36%

The Coalition’s projected spending in 2019-20?        35.2%

Hardly an enormous difference and yet apparently ‘utterly terrifying’ according to the BBC.

There is an election coming and the BBC has been running a campaign to disparage everything the government does.

The BBC has been extraordinarily critical, not to say dishonest, in its reporting of the Autumn Statement…..telling us we are heading back to a 1930’s depression era economy.

The BBC’s Norman Smith saying:

“While there was a lot of enthusiasm on the Conservative benches and political joy at a lot of the popular measures, when you sit down and read the Office for Budget Responsibility report it reads like a book of doom.

“It is utterly terrifying, suggesting that spending will have to be hacked back to the levels of the 1930s as a proportion of GDP.

“That is an extraordinary concept, you’re back to the land of Road to Wigan Pier.”

I wonder where the Beeboids steal their ideas from…could it be the newspaper they read such as the Guardian in 2011?:

Today the book seems curiously relevant to our own distressed times. An Old Etonian prime minister, in a cabinet stuffed with public school boys, has embarked upon the most radical reduction of public spending in generations, making cuts that have prompted robust criticism of their pace and scale. North and south are pulling apart once more – not yet to the extent where Orwell could describe his journey as if “venturing among savages”, but getting there.

 

Here is a verdict on Orwell’s book….and probably one that could be recycled for the BBC’s reporting…an enormous pile of piffle…..

Jack Hilton, the man who set him [Orwell] on the road to Wigan, hated the book, judging it a failure and falling out with the author. “So George went to Wigan and he might have stayed at home. He wasted money, energy and wrote piffle,” was his damning verdict.

 

Evan Davis (Labour) on Newsnight tells us that:

“You have to go back to the depression of the 1930s to find a crisis comparable to the one we are in — it is one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences.”

 

Now that’s just nonsense…and highly political.

For a start Orwell wrote ‘The Road To Wigan Pier’ in 1937…so about a period before 1937…and the OBR quote the BBC refers to actually says we could have spending as a ratio of GDP at a level equivalent to that in 1938  and certainly not the depression era of the early 1930’s which the BBC is linking to….

Government consumption of goods and services falls to its lowest share of GDP since at least 1948 – when comparable National Accounts data begins – and since 1938 using a historical dataset compiled by the Bank of England

 

But note this:

The UK’s National Accounts data have been revised substantially since our March forecast. In addition to the usual annual revisions process, the ONS has implemented the 2010 European System of Accounts (ESA10). The main consequence has been to increase the measured size of the economy. Relative to the data available at the time of our March forecast, nominal GDP in 2013 has been revised up by 6 per cent (around £90 billion)

 

So we are not comparing like with like….the GDP figure has been inflated by new accounting rules from Europe and so any cut in spending as a ratio of GDP will look worse.

Not only that but in 1998 Labour took us to similar low levels of spending….the OBR says…

As Chart 1.1 illustrates, total public spending is now projected to fall to 35.2 per cent of GDP in 2019-20

 

Labour’s spending in 1998 was 36%…a 0.8% difference then….hardly a massive difference….was that ‘utterly terrifying’ in 1998?

The BBC has been telling us that the Tories must answer the important, critical, question about how they will find the cuts, or savings, in government spending…apparently ‘critics’ and ‘people’ were asking this question….hmmm…does the BBC mean ‘Labour’ are asking the question and the BBC is doing Labour’s dirty work for them?…..however when it comes to Labour they actually praise Ed Ball’s refusal to answer claiming that he is intent on analysing the situation and will not be rushed into making a judgement…in other words he hasn’t got a plan and certainly doesn’t intend to let the Public know about one if he did have any thoughts on the subject….

The OBR report is more honest about what the parties say…curious the BBC missed this bit:

The recovery now looks stronger, with real GDP regaining its pre-recession peak in the third quarter of 2013, three quarters earlier than in the previous vintage of data.
The Conservatives have said they would look to cut welfare spending by more, so that they could cut public services by less. And the Liberal Democrats have said that they would be willing to borrow more to finance capital spending that would increase growth, and also to increase taxes on the relatively well-off. Labour has said that it would “balance the books and deliver a surplus on the current budget and falling national debt in the next Parliament. How fast we can go will depend on the state of the economy and the public finances we inherit.”

 

Now the BBC’s Adam Parsons told us that Labour had in fact, if you look closely, announced more plans to make cuts than the Tories….but he failed to lay out exactly what they were….and the OBR clearly doesn’t agree with the BBC on that.

The BBC doesn’t bother with this from the OBR:

On our central forecast, the Coalition Government is on track to meet its fiscal mandate – to borrow only what it needs to pay for investment, adjusting for the state of the economy, at the end of the five-year forecast – with £50.6 billion to spare. This implies an 80 per cent probability of success given the accuracy of past forecasts

 

The Telegraph does a fine job in critiquing the BBC’s coverage…Danny Cohen will be upset:

Once again, the BBC shows its true colours

Licence fee payers deserve better than the preposterous partisan bias of the BBC

David Cameron attacks BBC over ‘Wigan Pier’ cuts coverage

David Cameron’s spokesman says BBC coverage likening cuts programme to Depression-era Britain was ‘hyperbolic’

Tories at war with ‘biased BBC’

David Cameron and George Osborne furious over Autumn Statement coverage which they claim contained ‘systematic exaggeration’

Is Britain back on the Road to Wigan Pier?

As sparks fly between ministers and the BBC, the former mining town is yet to forgive George Orwell