Nothing has changed in 25 years to ease my concerns about Islam

It seemed to me that most Muslim leaders saw their role not in integrating Muslims in Britain, but in asserting difference and increasing their muscle. Many favoured sharia law trumping British law. They would not support Muslim membership of the Armed Forces if those forces were deployed against Muslim countries. They wanted it to be illegal to attack Islam, let alone denigrate its prophet; and they waged constant “lawfare” to try to silence their critics. They tended, I thought, to see the advance of their cause as a zero-sum game in which the authorities had to cede more ground (sometimes it is literally a matter of territory) to Muslims.

[Ironically after saying on the video that he couldn’t be charged with hate speech Twitter has moved to sideline him…his response…he Tweets….The truth is now hate speech…..curiously the terrorist supporting Jeremy Corbyn still has his blue tick]…and I see the BBC are still labelling Tommy ‘Far Right’ as they gloat over this.  I’m looking for their coverage of Nasreen Khan’s resignation from Labour…oddly can’t seem to find it.

One thing missing from Tommy’s analysis…the massive Muslim drive, how much funded by the Gulf states?, to normalise Islam, to make every part of Britain ‘Muslim friendly’, ie Muslim, and the determined effort to silence anyone who dares to suggest the Islamisation of Britain might not be a good idea…..note the recent Runnymede Trust [which seems to have been hijacked by Muslim activists for their own ends…a practice becoming more visible everyday as we get more and more people who work on the basis of doing so ‘as a Muslim’….Sadiq Khan for instance…ran for mayor ‘as a Muslim’, and note how many Muslims the BBC puts on air….far more as a ratio than their population merits along with the huge number of programmes designed to make Islam seem nice] that wants to make any criticism of Islam a hate crime….Islamophobia is ‘racing’ away in Britain apparently….the BBC always gives the Muslim spokespeople from the Runnymede Trust lots of unchallenged airtime to spread their propaganda…

Islamophobia: Still a challenge for us all

Islamophobia is any distinction, exclusion, or restriction towards, or preference against, Muslims (or those perceived to be Muslims) that has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.

The original Islamophobia report states that the term

refers to three phenomena:

•

Unfounded hostility towards Islam;

•

Practical consequences of such hostility in unfair

discrimination against Muslim individuals and

communities;

•

Exclusion of Muslims from mainstream political

and social affairs.

Note how the first, hostility towards Islam, becomes the basis for claiming discrimination against Muslims.  What is ‘unfounded hostility’?  What would qualify….if you criticise Islam for promoting Anti-Semitism?  Violent Jihadism?  Misogyny?  Killing apostates?  Defining white women as slags and prostitutes? Calling non-Muslims kafirs, immoral, unclean, unintelligent cattle?   I would think many people have very justifiable qualms about Islam…is that ‘hostility’?, it’s certainly not unfounded….as David Goodhart tells us:

The gulf between conservative Islam and secular liberal Britain is larger than with any comparable large group….for those of us who value an open, liberal society it is time to explain why it is superior to the alternatives.

Some claim that if people understood Islam more everything would be fine, they would be more tolerant, I think quite the contrary….the more they understand about it the more alien they would find it…authoritarian, collectivist, patriarchal, misogynist…..all sorts of things that Britain might have been 100 years ago but isn’t now.

As the good Mo Ansar suggests:

The Mirror says:

WE MUST NOT GIVE IN TO MUSLIM BLACKMAIL

AS the country vexes itself over how to deal with the radicalisation of British-born Muslim youths, it’s revealing to know some of their leaders believe they have the answer.

The introduction of Sharia Law in Britain along with important religious days in the Muslim calendar becoming public holidays for followers of the faith should do the trick, or so claims the secretary general of the Union of Muslim Organisations in the UK and Ireland.

As Dr Syed Aziz Pasha says: “If you give us religious rights we will be in a better position to convince young people that they are being treated equally along with other citizens.”

This sounds perilously close to blackmail. Thus far the British people have shown exemplary tolerance in the face of terrorist threats.

There has been no widespread backlash against the Muslim community. Quite rightly, the majority of us can only extend sympathy to those who must feel mortified that, within their vast numbers, lurks a bunch of lunatics with one shared ambition – to bring about the destruction of our democracy.

Except, of course, that many Muslims are in an even greater state of denial than the rest of us about terrorism: “It’s hyped up”, “The government hates Muslims and so does Tony Blair” and “Muslims feel like there is an underlying agenda against us,” are a selection of comments from Walthamstow in East London, the neighbourhood targeted by anti-terror raids last week.

Anyone would think they’d forgotten the banners at a demo, just a few miles down the road, last February which read: “Europe You’ll Come Crawling When Mujahedeen Come Roaring”.

I find it hard to believe any decent Muslim shares such extremist beliefs but it’s equally hard to argue these views aren’t held by “radicalised” youths or whatever name you want to give the murderous minority who preach jihad.

God knows, we must bear the burden of the BNP but we are, at least, prepared to acknowledge their existence, vile though it is, without blaming it on the government.

It’s unfashionable to say it, but some of us are beginning to find the Muslim victim culture a little tiresome.

And Dr Pasha’s words have not helped. If you were cynical you might even believe he was trying to provoke a fight.

Ditto the group of prominent Muslims who penned an open letter suggesting Muslim youths are alienated by Britain’s foreign policy, so it should be changed.

Why exactly? To placate a handful of home-grown terrorists and terrorist sympathisers?

In other words the rest of us can only be safe if THEY get a foreign policy that suits them. The Mafia would call this extortion. Give us what we want and we’ll do our best to stop the baddies blowing you up.

Muslim leaders should know better but let me remind them: Britain’s foreign policy is decided by a democratically-elected government (a rarity in the Muslim world).

If the public does not approve of this policy, it is perfectly free to vote one lot out and put another in. In short, we favour the ballot box over the bomb. And let’s not forget, Tony Blair’s party won an election after the decision to invade Iraq.

Just as Islamic fundamentalism had taken root before 9/11. Back in 1994 Massoud Shadjareh of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, spoke on a platform bedecked with a banner proclaiming: “Death To The Enemies Of Islam.”

That sentiment is as true now as it was then, the borders have allowed more preachers of sedition to infiltrate Britain with the consequence that some mosques have been run by fundamentalist clerics.

If this government can be accused of anything – apart from a ludicrously out of control immigration policy – it is permitting, in the name of multi-culturalism, ghettos of hate to flourish in our inner-cities.

Ghettos which embrace mosque schools where Muslim pupils spend much of the day learning the Koran and Islamic tradition, but little of British values.

There are enough wedges between us without introducing more in the form of Sharia Law or Muslim Bank holidays.

Nor should we feel it necessary to beat ourselves up because willing recruits, who happen to be born here, have signed up to become human bombs.

Some people, John Reid reminded us last week “just don’t get” the seriousness of the threat facing the West.

What will it take to understand? Ten planes destroyed and thousands of innocents dead while the family of the perpetrators weep into the cameras and say, “he wouldn’t do a thing like that”.

Oh yes he would. And believe me, he will.

From the Mail:

MAKING OF A BREXIT LIE
It’s an alarming refrain constantly repeated by Remainers, the BBC and the Guardian: that the Brexit vote has caused a staffing crisis in an NHS heavily reliant on EU workers. One problem – the story’s utter hokum, as this forensic investigation proves

Daily Mail 11 Nov 2017 by Ross Clark

WHO could not be worried by the news that the number of EU doctors and nurses working in Britain has plummeted over the past year?

Of all the developments attributed to Brexit, few have more power to scare the public than the idea that the NHS is crumbling for want of medical staff who have been put off coming to work in Britain because they no longer feel welcome here.

For the fact is that our National Health Service is very dependent on foreignborn staff. According to figures from the House of Commons Library, around 62,000 people from the rest of the EU work in the NHS in England alone. No wonder the fear of them leaving as a direct effect of Brexit is so potent.

Radio Four’s flagship news programme, Today, nine days ago led with the news that there has been a ‘drop of nearly 90 per cent’ in EU nurses registering to work in Britain over the past year.

Listeners were left in no doubt as to the reason: Brexit.

‘I think there is absolute lack of clarity for those colleagues of ours who are giving so much to our NHS, working in our nursing homes, working with our families, that they are welcome, that they are going to be allowed to stay,’ Janet Davies, of the Royal College of Nursing, told the programme.

The story was followed up by the Victoria Derbyshire show on BBC2, which claimed that the latest figures ‘add to previous evidence pointing to a significant reduction in the number of EU nurses wanting to work in the UK’. Derbyshire interviewed Stephanie Aiken, also from the Royal College of Nursing, who made the further claim that ‘we’ve lost more than 9,000 EU nurses this year’.

BEFORE

the programme, a producer sent out an appeal on Twitter for a nurse who was thinking of leaving the country to contribute to the broadcast.

In the event, a male Polish nurse who had been working in Britain for 17 years made it on to the airwaves. Though he was worried what would happen to his employment status, he said that he wanted to stay here.

The ‘nurses quit the NHS because of Brexit’ story has been given much play all year.

‘EU nurses no longer want to work in Britain. Brexit is poisoning the EU,’ ran the headline on an article by Suzanne Moore in the Guardian in March. The claim was based on a report from the Nursing and Midwifery Council on a decline in the number of EU nurses registering to work here, a similar set of statistics to the more recent figures that the Today programme used as the basis for its report last week.

In September, the Guardian returned to the theme with a news story which declared ‘Almost 10,000 EU health workers have quit NHS since Brexit vote’ — based on statistics from NHS digital, the agency that collects health service data.

The report added: ‘The British Medical Association said the findings mirrored its own research, which found that four in ten EU doctors were considering leaving, with a further 25 per cent unsure about what to do since the referendum.’

Lib Dem leader Sir Vince Cable latched on to this scare story, telling viewers on BBC1’s Question Time: ‘Ten thousand people have already walked away from the National Health Service because they don’t think they’re needed or wanted any more. That’s the frightening thing.’

Labour’s health spokesman, Jonathan Ashworth, has also claimed that Brexit has slashed NHS recruitment, saying in June: ‘Our health service has always relied on the contribution of overseas workers, yet these staff are being forced out by this Government’s neglect and disregard.’

Yet it simply isn’t true that Brexit has caused a staffing crisis in the health service. This is all a big lie which the

Remain lobby keeps repeating as part of its propaganda campaign against Brexit.

Contrary to what these doomladen reports imply, the NHS’s statistics show that the overall number of EU citizens working in the health service has actually grown since the Brexit vote.

The Guardian and Cable were technically correct in saying that 10,000 EU citizens have left the NHS since the Brexit vote.

The health service’s figures show that, between June 2016 and June 2017, a total of 9,832 EU citizens left jobs with NHS trusts and Clinical Commissioning Groups in England ( because health is a devolved issue, statistics are collected separately for the rest of the UK).

But this completely ignores the other side of the equation and therefore is deeply misleading.

While they were happy to quote the number of EU staff leaving, they failed to mention the number of EU staff who joined the NHS.

Perhaps that’s because, during the same period, health service statistics show that 13,013 EU citizens took up jobs in the NHS.

Far from the exodus the pro-Remain establishment wants us to believe has taken place, this represented a net rise of 3,181 in the number of EU citizens working in our health service.

FURTHERMORE, official figures show that in most areas of the NHS, since the Brexit vote, more staff from across the Channel are working in our health service.

The number of EU citizens working as NHS doctors rose from 9,695 to 10,136 — a net gain of 441. The number of consultants increased from 3,747 to 4,080 — a net rise of 333. The number of EU midwives grew from 1,220 to 1,247 — an extra 27. Ambulance staff numbers rose by 136, from 250 to 386. Scientific, therapeutic and technical staff increased by 841, from 6,112 to 6,953.

What’s more, Theresa may has done everything she can to reas- sure EU citizens that they will be able to stay in Britain after Brexit.

For example, just last month she wrote an open letter reassuring them that securing their continued residency rights ‘remains a priority’.

The idea that EU doctors and nurses are so worried about Brexit that they are fleeing elsewhere is utter nonsense, and it is shamefully wrong for the Remain lobby to keep scaring people by trying to convince them that it is true.

It is true that there was a modest drop in the number of EU citizens working as nurses in the NHS — down from 20,907 to 20,618, a net fall of 289.

However, with more than 20,000 EU nurses employed in the NHS, this amounts to a fall of less than 2 per cent.

The ‘90 per cent’ drop reported by the BBC’s Today programme came from a set of statistics from the Nursing and midwifery Council, which is responsible for registering nurses and midwives as fit to work in Britain.

The figures do not relate to the number of people actually taking up employment. They refer, instead, merely to the number of foreign nurses completing the process of registering to work in the UK.

Between September 2015 and 2016, 10,178 nurses and midwives from other European Economic Area countries (which means the EU along with Norway and Iceland) registered to work in Britain. over the following year, to September 2017, the number fell to 1,107 — as reported, a fall of nearly 90 per cent.

But that didn’t mean the BBC was being straight with listeners. Blaming the decline in registered nurses on Britain voting to leave the EU is a misrepresentation of the facts which ignores a very important factor that has nothing to do with Brexit.

From January 2016, overseas nurses wanting to register to practise here have had to take the International English Language Test System (IELTS), and to achieve level 7 — the proficiency of a ‘good’ English user — in each of four elements: reading, writing, speaking and listening.

It is of course right to ensure that nurses speak good English if they are to work in British hospitals — the consequences of even basic misunderstandings can be deadly.

Yet in the tough written tests in particular, nurses were expected to reach the same standards as graduates applying to take higher degrees at our leading universities and were asked to write academic essays on topics that had nothing to do with nursing or even healthcare.

In one case, the assignment centred on the changing number of Japanese tourists visiting parts of Britain.

These tests, which require a level of knowledge far beyond that which nurses require to do their jobs safely, set an impossibly high bar.

Eighty per cent of applicants put forward for the test by one recruitment firm failed to reach the required standard. Even native English speakers from countries such as Australia failed.

If these English speakers couldn’t pass, is it any wonder nurses from Spain or Estonia struggled?

ON NOVEMBER 1, the day before the scaremongering report on the Today programme linked nurse shortages to Brexit, the Nursing and midwifery Council relaxed the language tests in order to bring them more in line with the vocational versions used in places such as Australia and Canada. Yet not a word of this made it into the Today report, which blamed nursing shortages on Brexit alone.

The reality is that EU nurses are still keen to come and work here.

According to HCL Workforce Solutions, which recruits foreign nurses for the NHS, the number of applications it received from nurses in other EU countries has actually gone up since the Brexit vote, from 1,629 in the 12 months to June 2016 to 1,886 in the year to June 2017.

The main reason dedicated foreign nurses are not able to take jobs in the NHS is the rigorous language test, which the vast majority of them failed.

All of this hard data comprehensively disproves the claims made by the BBC, the Guardian, the Lib Dems, Labour and others that Brexit — which, of course, hasn’t even happened yet — is causing an NHS staffing crisis.

How many times have we heard the Remain lobby whining that the British electorate were duped into voting for Brexit by the ‘lies’ of the Leave campaign? Yet at the same time it keeps repeating a blatant lie about the NHS haemorrhaging staff due to nurses and other personnel supposedly being frightened away.

This is a disgraceful attempt to scare the public in the forlorn hope of overthrowing the result of the EU referendum. We had Project Fear before the vote — now we are witnessing Project Fear II.

We can have Brexit or the NHS. We can't have both, says @campbellclaret. https://t.co/n1bGaWozqu

— The New European (@TheNewEuropean) November 11, 2017

Brexit is destroying the NHS…no more EU staff, disaster!….says melodramatic spin doctor Alistair Campbell….

The NHS was ‘the silver bullet’ the anti-Brexit campaign needed, ‘because it is becoming clearer and clearer that we can have Brexit or the NHS but we can’t have both’. Heed those words. Polling published here last week showing growing concern that Brexit may be damaging the NHS suggests the public sense that is right.

It is not just about money, of course. There is staffing. The day we met, the Nursing and Midwifery Council reported a 67% rise in the number of EU nurses and midwives leaving the register compared with the same period the year before. Dr House said there had been a 96% drop in EU nursing applicants – there is a nursing recruitment crisis in mental health by the way – in the 12 months following the referendum. Recently I spoke for the Time to Change mental health campaign at Kingston Hospital, Surrey, where 13% of the medical staff are from the EU. They’re not all going home, but some are.

So the NHS is to be weaponised, a ‘silver bullet’ that is sent to destroy the evil Brexit monster.  The BBC is happily onboard with such fantasies, peddling them for all it’s worth.  Trouble is…it’s all fake news.

The proportion of EU nationals leaving jobs in the NHS is rising, while the share of those joining is shrinking.

The BBC analysed NHS Digital figures, which showed the trend in England over the past two-and-a-half years.

Health experts say the UK’s decision to leave the European Union in June 2016 was behind the trend.

 

So the BBC and the EUseful idiots like Campbell are telling us this…EU staff are fleeing the NHS……due to Brexit….

But is that true in the slightest?  No, of course not.  They give grim warnings about 10,000 EU staff leaving the NHS but fail to mention the 13,000 that joined…..never mind more Brits and non-EU staff.  The NHS has more staff now than in June 2016….

The headcount was 1,187,298 in July 2017. This is 1,699 (0.1 per cent) more than the previous month (1,185,599) and 21,076 (1.8 per cent) more than in July 2016 (1,166,222).

The BBC even admits way down the report that its headline is hugely alarmist and misleading as we have more EU staff and the number of nurses we are short from the EU is relatively minute….

Overall, the NHS says there are around 3,200 more EU nationals working in the NHS than at the time of the referendum, as the size of the health service continues to grow.

Over the same period, there has been a slight reduction of 162 nurses, which it suggests may be down to the Nursing and Midwifery Council introducing new language requirements in January 2016, making it more difficult to be eligible for employment.

So how does that merit the headline…

Share of European Union staff leaving NHS rises following Brexit

 

The Mail took the BBC’s reporting apart   [as did Mark Tinsley here]:

MAKING OF A BREXIT LIE
It’s an alarming refrain constantly repeated by Remainers, the BBC and the Guardian: that the Brexit vote has caused a staffing crisis in an NHS heavily reliant on EU workers. One problem – the story’s utter hokum, as this forensic investigation proves.

WHO could not be worried by the news that the number of EU doctors and nurses working in Britain has plummeted over the past year?

Of all the developments attributed to Brexit, few have more power to scare the public than the idea that the NHS is crumbling for want of medical staff who have been put off coming to work in Britain because they no longer feel welcome here.

Radio Four’s flagship news programme, Today, nine days ago led with the news that there has been a ‘drop of nearly 90 per cent’ in EU nurses registering to work in Britain over the past year.

Listeners were left in no doubt as to the reason: Brexit.

Yet it simply isn’t true that Brexit has caused a staffing crisis in the health service. This is all a big lie which the

Remain lobby keeps repeating as part of its propaganda campaign against Brexit.

Contrary to what these doomladen reports imply, the NHS’s statistics show that the overall number of EU citizens working in the health service has actually grown since the Brexit vote.

[I will post the whole of the Mail’s article in the next post as it is too big to post here and in its web form is hard to read.]

I looked over the figures and the facts and they’re right…the BBC, Guardian and fellow EU cheerleaders are spinning us a big lie…..any shortfall in nurses has little to do with Brexit.

This chart shows the truth…an overall rise in EU staff since June 2016, more doctors, more clinical support staff and only a drop of 0.1% in nurses…..

Here’s what the Institute for Employment Studies says in a government report….non-EU recruits are better qualified, speak better english and tend to stay in the job far longer than EU recruits…and EU recruits have dropped off due to new tests and because, in essence, we have drained the EU of health staff who in any case now have better opportunities in their own countries as their economies improve…and note that in 2015 the NHS planned to recruit more from non-EU countries….before the referendum:

Volumes of recruits in European countries were often significantly lower because some of the European economies, which had supplied nurses to several NHS trusts in recent years, were now doing a little better economically, reducing the supply of potential recruits. Second, there were anecdotal reports from interviewees that the European market had already been exhausted, particularly in places like Italy and Spain, where there has been heavy recruitment from some NHS trusts in recent years, and from places like Portugal, which already has a shortage of nurses. This is in contrast to the Filipino and Indian job markets, which are characterised by an oversupply of skilled nurses who are encouraged to seek posts abroad. As two trusts reported:

In Europe, we might look to get a maximum of 20 [nurses] now, whereas in the Philippines, you could get 80-100.
(NHS Trust, London)

The only way you get volume that you need… you get it from universities or you go abroad. The commissions are low and so going abroad is the only option.

Reported advantages of recruiting non-EEA nurses over EEA nurses
Trusts also reported other advantages of recruiting non-EEA nurses over EEA nurses. In line with this, the 2015 NHS Employers survey indicates that 56 per cent (83 trusts) have plans to actively recruit from non-EEA countries in the next 12 months.

Trusts and expert interviewees reported that non-EEA nurses from India and the Philippines (the two largest suppliers of non-EEA nurses to the UK) were also often more experienced and had better English language skills than some EEA nurses because these foreign workforces tended to be characterised by highly skilled nurses with good levels of spoken and written English. English language skills were thought to be increasingly important among the trusts and experts we spoke to because of the Nursing and Midwifery Council requirement, as of January 2016, for nurses from the European Union to pass an International English Language Testing System (IELTS) exam before they start working in the UK. All trusts anticipated that this would significantly reduce the numbers of potential recruits from the EEA, if not diminish them altogether. One trust went as far as to suggest the new IELTS exam would almost remove Europe as a viable alternative for them to recruit any new nurses, saying:

I don’t think anyone will go to Europe anymore after these [exams] are introduced because it will yield even fewer potential recruits. This will mean that the time and expense of European recruitment will be the same or even greater than foreign recruitment.
(NHS trust, London)

Trusts also reported generally better retention among non-EEA recruits, than among EEA recruits.

European nurses are easier to get in [to the UK], but harder to keep, whereas foreign nurses are harder to get in, but easier to keep.

Just lie back and think of the EU Anna…and don’t worry the BBC’s working on the fix……May out, Corbyn in and Britain’s problems will be over….coz we won’t be ‘Britain’ anymore…..just a region of the EU being milked of its riches to pay for the failed states that only joined to get the freebies…and of course keeping the unelected Eurocrats in the style to which they have become accustomed….and no doubt richly deserve.

If anyone should spot, in the unlikely event that it should occur, any BBC bias propagandising on behalf of the EU superstate please note it here…..tick tock tick tock….Brexit is coming and they’re getting a little bit frantic…..the rules will go out the window and all effort and resources will be targeted at stopping it impartiality be damned….they think themselves untouchable or that Corbyn will ride to the rescue…he might but there will be a price to pay….CBC…..having said that it’s pretty much there already.

Note the bias here….

Oh the irony as the BBC gives Bradley Wiggins a fair splurge on the frontpage….

Sir Bradley Wiggins says his life was ‘living hell’ during Ukad investigation

Sir Bradley Wiggins said his life was “a living hell” during an investigation into allegations of wrongdoing at British Cycling and Team Sky.

On Wednesday, UK Anti-Doping said there would be no charges over a “mystery” medical package delivered for Wiggins at the Criterium du Dauphine in 2011.

Wiggins, 37, said the investigation “felt nothing less than a witch hunt”.

The BBC, Gary Richardson in particular, had been a huge part of that witch hunt practically accusing him of being a cheat and constantly suggesting in a very loaded way that the ‘secret package’ as they called it, it wasn’t secret, must have contained something dodgy.

Absolutely no evidence just pure malevolent speculation about the contents of that package despite knowing absolutely nothing about it.

Wiggins white, working class made good and in the Sky team.

Five Live just had a chat [around 18:45..ish] with some expert on Iran who was obligingly completely on-message as he laid into Boris and told some whopping great fibs about what is going on….Tony Livesey agreeing with every word.

The big lie is that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested in 2016 for activities she carried out on her visit then, inside Iran.  She was not.  The BBC insist that Boris said she was teaching journalists at that time in Iran…he said no such thing, he made no mention of time or place….he wouldn’t because he undoubtedly knows that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested for activities she allegedly carried out during the 2009 Iranian uprising….from here in Britain…

“Some of the group were outside Iran, including the suspect Nazanin Zaghari.”

…as she worked for the BBC Media Action.

Nazanin worked for BBC Media Action between February 2009 and October 2010, “in a junior capacity as a Training Assistant” according the CEO of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, before moving to Thomson Reuters Foundation.

This is a deliberate deception by the BBC which is meant to divert attention away from its own role in Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s arrest….and its lack of action to help her.

The BBC continues to perpetuate this lie in its online report today..…

Richard Ratcliffe met with Boris Johnson after the foreign secretary said during a Commons committee hearing that Mrs Zhagari-Ratcliffe was in Iran to “train journalists” – which could lead to her five-year jail term being doubled.

No he did not.

Arrested in 2016 for activities in 2009.  Boris knows that.

The BBC demands to know what the government is doing, and demands Boris be sacked, what is the BBC doing for one of its ex-staff now thrown to the wolves and abandoned?  Sack Lord Hall Hall.

This post suggested that the BBC’s take on May’s warning to Russia about interfering in Western politics was more supportive of Putin than of May, which is remarkable given the BBC’s relentless anti-Russia propaganda as it tries to claim Trump was handed the Presidency by Russian hacking and fake news….though we did suggest a reason for the BBC’s new found nuance about Russia….Corbyn, a fellow traveller, if Russia is a bad ‘un so is Corbyn.

Isabel Hardman’s take on things in the Spectator may back that suggestion up…..

Aside from the importance of taking a stronger stance on Russia, rather than suggesting to Vladimir Putin that he can really do whatever he fancies, this is also good domestic politics. It’s the trick that many leaders use of trying to unite their country around a foreign enemy, to distract from the domestic chaos. Britain knows this all too well, given the way Spain and Argentina use Gibraltar and the Falklands as devices for distracting from the problems of their own governments. In addition, taking a strong stance on Russia works well when your opposition is at best ambivalent about the way the country behaves and at worst supportive of some of its territorial ambitions. 

Hardman thinks it is sensible to tackle Russia, something the BBC seemed to disagree with, but she also notes that Corbyn is closely linked to Russia, thus it makes sense for May to remind people of what Russia is up to as it tries to subvert democracies and by association remind people of the type of ‘friends’ Corbyn likes to have around him.

No wonder the Corbyn fan club at the BBC went totally off message about Russia and fake news and instead doing a remarkable volte face defending Russia.

This video is interesting as RT talks to Corbyn when he became candidate for the leadership….he states that he is interested in tackling corporate tax loop-holes….around Europe, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man….hmmmmm…..Just why did the BBC target the Isle of Man so much and remember how the BBC focussed on who hacked Clinton’s emails rather than on the highly damaging content…..contrast that with how the BBC never once made any attempt to discover who hacked and who leaked the ‘Paradise Papers’…….might it be the Russians as they note what Corbyn says and obligingly provides him, once he is Leader, with the very thing he wants….and the BBC obligingly ramps up the rhetoric about the ‘rich and powerful’ with ‘secret investments’ and even a ‘secret British Empire‘…..we know that there was in essence little of actual significance and yet the BBC went to to town on it…and they refused to handover the papers to the government so that it could then investigate for itself….why not?  Just what was the reason for the BBC hyper exposure?  Did they want to shine a light on tax avoidance or were they merely putting out propaganda to bolster Corbyn’s narrative?……Why was Labour being given ‘better briefings than HMRC’?

Theresa May ‘frustrated’ at refusal of BBC and Guardian to hand over Paradise Papers evidence

The Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman said: “Where journalists are advocating for further tax transparency we would wish to see that information rather than for it to be held back. Potentially it could help HMRC and other tax jurisdictions to investigate.”

James Cleverly MP said: “Anyone with evidence of wrongdoing should of course hand that information to the authorities so it can be properly investigated: at the moment it seems as if the Labour Party is being given better briefings than HMRC.“

Her Thatcherian nose quivered, as would that of a terrier scenting the breeze for sausages.

Nothing to do with BBC bias but why let a brilliantly observed, brutally honest and less than flattering portrait of Soubry’s most recognisable character traits go without a wider audience?…….

Old Soubry looked like she’d bitten a crab apple: QUENTIN LETTS watches pro-EU figures squabble in the Commons

David Cameron often mocks the Leave campaign for its disunity but in the Commons yesterday we had squabbling between top pro-EU figures.

Business Secretary Sajid Javid and his colleague Anna Soubry so went out of their way to berate Labour Europhiles, it was almost as if they wanted to create a diversion.

Old Soubry is an incorrigible pugilist. She could have picked a fight with Little Weed, this one.

Even before a word was uttered at yesterday’s Questions to the Business Department, she sat on the Government bench with her lips drawn into a fruity strop – a woman who had just bitten a crab apple.

Her Thatcherian nose quivered, as would that of a terrier scenting the breeze for sausages. La Soubry has been a Europhile since the 1970s, when she and her hot pants were a source of fever among Young Conservatives.

Her boss Javid is a more recent convert to the glories of communautaire socialism. Until the start of this year Mr Javid styled himself as a bold Eurosceptic.

Now, bingo, he is right behind Mr Cameron’s Love Brussels gang. Careerism can do that to a man.

Mr Javid and Miss Soubry, perhaps wishing us to think of something other than the collapse of his principles, threw insults at the Labour leadership.

Miss Soubry went first, complaining that Jeremy Corbyn was not doing enough to campaign for Brussels. ‘He’d be better doing that than engaging in CND rallies!’ she thundered, in reply to a perfectly friendly question from Labour’s Ian Lucas (Wrexham).

Kevin Brennan, Labour frontbencher, protested that Miss Soubry should look at divisions in the Tory party. Miss Soubry, shaking her peroxide mane, snorted that ‘the Labour leader is failing in his duty to play a full part in the Remain campaign’.

The BBC tries its ususal trick of trying to assert something without any context…here that the government is in chaos and flailing around in need of a big reshuffle.  When JRM suggesed otherwise and gave examples from history to illustrate that what is happening is just normal and that much is beyond any PM’s control the presenter, Stephen Sackur, wanted to shut him up telling him…

‘I’d prefer to focus on whether this government can continue’

Well yes, that’s been the BBC’s focus for a long time as it tries to portray May as weak and her ministers out of control, a government in chaos, a government that must fall.  Any context would just get in the way of that narrative, a narrative intended by the BBC to put pressure on the government so that it dumps May and forces a general election….which the BBC hopes Corbyn will win.

Of course when JRM says something disagreeable to our BBC man suddenly it’s ‘Let me give you some perspective’….ah…now you want context and nuance and history!

The presenter then told us that ‘Boris surely has to go’.  Nice that the BBC can pick and choose ministers.  He then just confirmed what we know about the BBC, it only pays attention to what the EU thinks and reports that as gospel…..here JRM is asked if ‘You ever think how the British government is viewed in Europe?’…who cares?  Whatever May says is derided and scorned as madness, naivety or fantasy by the BBC…and in fact that’s just what we got here…..‘A World Trade Organisation Brexit is just fantasy’...again good of the BBC to decide things for us…did we really need a referendum?

Sackur must have choked on his own bile as JRM finished with a killer blow when asked if he is out of touch with the country [lol…BBC in touch?]….

‘If you take the Sun and the Daily Mail as the great barometers of British public opinion I am probably pretty in touch.’

From the BBC:

Greggs apologises after replacing baby Jesus with a sausage rollhttps://t.co/Zavp7kQ2xC

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) November 15, 2017

I dare not look on Twitter for the themed piss takes.

Apparently the BBC has apologised to all Muslims as it replaces Muhammed, who obviously can’t ever be shown, on HIGNFY with a tub of lard….

Ahhhhh…sorry…not ‘lard’ but ‘warlord’…..

Fortunately it was Salman Rushdie who was teamed up with the Tub of Lard [or is that a Fatwah?]….could have been a right old bake off otherwise….