BBC officer class enrages people, chief admits 

Executive salaries at the BBC have created an “officer class” which is causing “resentment and anger” among lower-paid workers, Lord Hall, the director-general of the corporation, has admitted.

Liz MacKean, a former BBC Newsnight journalist, said: “The whole issue about severance payments gets to the heart of something that has gone badly wrong with the BBC over the last decade and more, which is the creation of an officer class that seems to fly in the face of the principles of public service broadcasting.”

Alan Yentob, who earns £183,000 as the BBC’s creative director, joined Lord Hall on stage and rejected a call for more transparency over salaries. He said: “The BBC is not a local authority, OK? We need to invest, we need to get people to come in. Who wants to come to an organisation where their privacy is [affected]?”

Talking of privacy maybe Yentob should listen to this:

Mariella Frostrup asks:

Is Privacy Over Rated?

And talking of officer elites Evan Davis asks:

What’s the Point of an Elite?

Both programmes very BBC…both jam packed with worthy, highly educated middle class ‘elites’….you can hear Davis has the decency to be embarrassed about the makeup of his panel.

But…Evan Davis admits that he wouldn’t have wanted to go to a school like Eton…because he would have a been a small fish in a big pond, whereas at a state school, where he was headboy, he was a big fish in a small pond….a small pond intellectually and academically he means.

Charmed I’m sure to know how the BBC’s finest look down upon their fellow state school inmates…..intellectually wanting but that’s good as it makes Evan look better.

Listening to both programmes, and well, any such programme from the BBC, and you keep hearing ‘The Poor’ being mentioned, concern for the ‘lower orders’, but where are their voices?

How is it that concern for the ’Poor’ and ‘Disadvantaged’ is the sole preserve it seems of middle class intellectuals? Do ‘The Poor’ not have any thoughtful comments about ‘elites’ or ‘privacy’?

We’re told that ‘The Poor’ are shut out more than ever from the higher reaches of society and that privacy is the domain of the rich….so how come they have no voice on these BBC programmes, a seat at the table rather than picking up the crumbs thrown to them by their ‘betters’?

The BBC’s latest review of its lack of impartiality from earlier in the year has resurfaced as one of its authors, Mike Berry,  pushes the lie, lovingly created and honed by him and those ex BBC employees now ensconced at Cardiff University who manufactured this ‘report’,  that the BBC is actually biased towards the Right.

The BBC say it went to Cardiff University but you might conclude that it took a wrong turn and ended up in Cardiff on the day the Circus was in town.

Even the BBC has admitted it is biased towards the Left so either Berry is a fool or a liar.

DB has mentioned this in the Open Thread and Is the BBC biased has picked up on that and delved into Mike Berry’s left wing, anti-Israeli background.

The usual stuff.

We have already had a look at this report and its authors and I think it is obvious that you can dismiss it as yet another BBC smoke screen.

Just what is the point of the BBC commissioning such reports into its impartiality when the people it gets to conduct the reports either have very close ties to the BBC or have very obvious, strong, political leanings that indicate they will not be impartial?

This is Berry’s final conclusion:

So the evidence from the research is clear. The BBC tends to reproduce a Conservative, Eurosceptic, pro-business version of the world, not a left-wing, anti-business agenda.

A more dishonest and misleading statement about the BBC would be hard to find.

Pro-Conservative, anti-Europe, pro-Business?  Did he not have the room to add on pro-EDL, pro-Christian, pro-Israeli?

Amazing how Berry can get those big clown feet into his mouth ….but he has such an appreciative audience who clearly like their news spoon fed to them because thinking for themselves is so hard to do as the Twitter mob of the usual left wing trolls that come out from under their stones to celebrate his nonsense admirably demonstrate:

Seumas Milne ‏@SeumasMilne 19h  Contrary to media mythology, #BBC coverage is dominated by Conservative, corporate & City voices, research shows http://bit.ly/15klDyq 

 You have to laugh at this from Berry (If I was  a student at Cardiff I’d be asking for my money back if taught by Berry):

The fact that the City financiers who had caused the crisis were given almost monopoly status to frame debate again demonstrates the prominence of pro-business perspectives.

I’m sorry, I have to choke back the tears of laughter….I thought that tripping on LSD was so 60’s…does it still go on?….apart from the fact that the Banks have been massively reined in weren’t we told that it was ‘Occupy’ who had framed the debate…even by Mervyn King and Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England:

The BBC is pro-Occupy, it encouraged the ‘youth’ to riot and protest, it damns bankers and big business at every opportunity, it fanatically supported Labour’s Plan B, it has done everything in its power to knock the confidence of business, investors and consumers and to push the belief that Osborne’s policies are bringing us to the brink of ruin…even now as the ‘green shoots’ emerge they find ways to tell us we’re all doomed rather than look on the bright side.

You just have to listen to one of their recent efforts to see the BBC’s approach:

How You Pay For The City

The title alone gives away the drift of the programme.

Why not ‘How You Pay For Tescos’?  Because of course you do….…or ‘How You Pay For Your Own Wages’…by buying products from other businesses…whose workers go out and buy products from your company…which pays your wages …and so on….Capitalism is so awfully complicated.

or even  ‘How You Pay For The BBC’?.

The BBC isn’t free you know.

The programme was half an hour of anti-city, anti-business, anti-government policies, that condemned the banks for making profits and claimed Quantitive Easing was a terrible idea that stole money from the poor and put it in the pockets of the rich bankers…never mind that it was pension funds and insurance companies that held government bonds that received the money….designed deliberately not to put money into banker’s coffers.

 You heard nothing good about QE on this programme, that it stabilised and kept confidence in the economy, it was merely a highly politicised anti-banker rant with only one dissenting voice…on for a moment….no points for every time ‘casino banking’ was mentioned.

In one half hour programme it covered QE, oil speculation, Banks diversifying, commodities,  interest rates, inflation…..even if it was possible to, the BBC had no intention of looking at these subjects in any real depth, it merely cherry picked data and quotes to back up its narrative.

  It told us that banks were manipulating oil prices….a man came on briefly and said there was no evidence for that…the BBC ignored him and carried on anyway.

Never mind that oil prices are always manipulated…notoriously by the likes of OPEC and Saudi Arabia and of course now Russia with gas prices….funny, no mention of that though.

So yes, the BBC is pro-Business, pro-Conservative.

I see now, I was blinded by my own prejudices before.

LOLOL

Leftwing BBC type in melt down.

Tessa Dunlop on Today programme this morning (08:50)

Talking about a book published by Civitas which puts the case for families having more than one child…as it can be beneficial for siblings, they claim.

Dunlop, who has only one child herself, has other ideas saying:

 ‘The world’s population is exploding….People are always coming up to me and saying when will you have another child..and there’s two things here…Civitas is a right wing think tank, I just wonder if they would be saying ‘when are you going to have another’ to a Somali woman  standing next  to me in the supermarket….it’s like the Middle Classes must keep breeding, keep up our genetic army…’

Well, I don’t think Civitas are responsible for her friends and others, including her doctor, for asking when she will have another… that’s pretty much a standard line in the baby talk world…I don’t think they are recruiting for the Fourth Reich.

A ‘Somali’ woman in the supermarket queue,  really, is she on holiday?…we all know that they are ‘British’ as soon as they step off the plane….Dunlop clearly hasn’t read the memo from BBC ‘Diversity and Cohesion’.

Presumably she doesn’t mean Somali women like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was driven out of Europe to the safety of America by the same sort of Left wing prejudice, bigotry and stupidity on display here.

I wonder where she picked up her views…kind of reminiscent of this piece of BBC religious ‘racism’:

A Womb is a Weapon

For some, encouraging larger Christian families is part of a project to outbreed other religions, particularly Islam, winning back the world for Christ one baby at a time.

Douglas Carswell in the Telegraph suggests that:

The BBC’s mid-twentieth century TV poll tax should be consigned to the history books

 Carswell thinks a subscription service might work…Mark Thompson thought not…or rather put the case for keeping the license fee/poll tax:

We want to build a digital world based on universal access, open standards and unencryption.

Encryption, subscription and other forms of digital exclusion lead to widespread welfare losses.

They may well have a role within the total broadcasting ecology, but the idea that they can successfully replace free-to-air public service broadcasting, we believe, flies in the face both of economic theory and our real-world experience.

 There might be a case for keeping news and sport free to air but when the BBC is prosecuting thousands of people for not paying their license fee, and presumably they will be mainly the poorest people, Thompson’s claim that there will be ‘widespread welfare losses’ looks to be disengenuous….if you don’t pay the BBC’s license you don’t get the service now….officially anyway.

Do they watch the BBC’s socially and morally uplifting programmes anyway?  Thompson knows full well most people aren’t interested, life’s too short and they won’t pay for them….and yet they still get charged for them now.

The trouble is that the BBC always feel free to rewrite those history books.

In  Dreaming the Impossible: Unbuilt Britain – 2. Making Connections the BBC indulges in its usual trick of loading a programme about engineering with political and social messages…in this case about immigration and the dreadful people that oppose it.

In the first 5 minutes there were a couple of veiled references to what was to come and a couple of blatantly obvious markers for how the programme was going to lay judgement upon the British.

Olivia Horsfall Turner, architectural historian, tells us that one of the men who wanted to build a Channel tunnel had a ‘belief in a better world’…unlike those who opposed the tunnel who were full of intrigue and beset by xenophobia….those thinking of building the tunnel brought out the worst kind of rabid xenophobia in its opponents.

Never mind that this was originally at the time of the Napoleonic Wars…remember them?  When the French were trying to take over the world…marching onto the gates of Moscow and the Pyramids in Egypt…never mind that the French had helped the Rebels in the Americas to defeat the British…or that Napoleon had plans to invade Britain.

It was just out and out xenophobia, racism by some very nasty people..

So the Channel tunnel was more than a spectacular feat of engineering it was a social and political experiment, a statement that broke down borders and prejudiced attitudes….as immigrants flooded in through it.

Douglas Carswell says that he had a Tweet from a Lefty saying that the BBC was needed because it ‘fulfils a social role’

 The BBC fulfils a social role?…maybe, but how do you define that ‘role’ and what are its limits?

Its role was to educate, inform and entertain…..it has gone far beyond that…taking upon itself to not only tell us what is going on in the world but how to live our lives and to berate and pillory us when we don’t profess the same values and correct social attitudes that they desire us to have.

Mark Thompson claimed that: ‘The BBC is not a campaigning organisation and can’t be‘…unfortunately he also said:

The BBC was no longer just a broadcaster, the corporation was to be a social force in the land, he said. The corporation was an “important builder of social capital, seeking to increase social cohesion and tolerance”, which in future would try to “foster audience understanding of differences of ethnicity, faith, gender, sexuality, age and ability or disability“…

Really?

The Telegraph asked: Caring and sharing – is this what the BBC is really for?

Strangely when I’m watching a programme about engineering or how to dance strictly I don’t want messages, subliminal or otherwise, inserted into my consciousness telling me that a gay man, or even a French man, can make a brilliant engineer, or that everytime I drive my socially inappropriate 4×4 to buy the Sunday Newpapers I’m killing at least 3 Ethiopians and blighting the lives of many more as the climate changes, famine, plague and swarms of locusts scourge the land.

Its broadcasting has become value laden….it doesn’t just reveal the world to us but passes judgement on what is good, what is bad, directing us on what to think, policing our thoughts.

Anyone who steps out of line can expect a visit from the BBC and exposure in the BBC’s very own court for a public show trial intended to shame the blasphemous heretic and to terrify anyone else who thinks the same into keeping quiet.

A final word from the BBC:

 “The BBC doesn’t make judgments – what it does is to provide a forum for debate.”

The Dalai Lama’s Little Book of Wisdom by His Holiness the Dalai Lama (15 Sep 2003)

• £9.99 £8.62 Hardcover

Many other books also available by the Dalai Lama from Amazon

Mark Tully questions the pursuit of economic growth at all costs:

Something Understood Why do we have to get richer?

 The BBC is here, as Ed West might agree, in full on pious clerical mode passing on their divine wisdom as they ‘question the Holy Grail of perpetual economic growth.’

Ironic that they counter that ‘Holy Grail’ by bringing on that Holy of Holies, the Dalai Lama…and I have to say it’s no wonder the rapacious, capitalist Chinese don’t want him in Tibet…he’s a bloody communist!

The D.L (PBUH) reveals that money can’t make you happy…it may bring quantity but it doesn’t bring quality….the pursuit of riches and the increase in wealth have not diminished suffering….science and technology, and the great Western science of Economics, have not brought any real benefits or reduced suffering.

Always the West’s fault….no one ever thought of getting rich before the advent of ‘The West’.

Well you can certainly quibble with his suggestions that science and technology, and indeed economics, have brought little benefits or improvements in quality of life….as his brethren flying around the world covered in bling know all too well.　

What’s Tully’s solution?

We can all have little farms…or a field each…communes in fact….Market driven economics doesn’t help anyone….you don’t need your car, we need more public transport…Consumerism is based on greed.

Perhaps Tully would like to give a definition of consumerism…when does the accumulation of ‘stuff’ become ‘greed’? What if you actually use that ‘stuff’? Is that consumerism or just buying ‘stuff’ that is useful for your life?

Perhaps the BBC is saying we have too much ‘life’, too much fun…cut it out…shave your head, relax, meditate….give all your money away.

“It costs a great deal of money to keep Gandhi living in poverty,” one of his patrons said….funny how all those churches preach that we should give away our money…who to?  er…to the Churches of course.

Gord bless the BBC though….lawks…I was a wrong ‘un I was until they puts me on the right path….the path to redemption, and poverty.

Hallelujah! Praise the DG and pass the TV remote.

The BBC have no problem with those taking illicit peeks at top secret government docs…but if you watch the Telly, without a license…maybe not even the BBC, you’d better watch out…(via Guido)

TV LICENSING offences now account for more than a tenth of all criminal prosecutions in the UK, City A.M. can reveal.

More than 180,000 people – almost 3,500 a week – appeared in front of magistrates during 2012 after being accused of watching TV without paying the £145.50 fee.

Magistrates handled a total of 1.48m cases last year, meaning a record 12 per cent of court cases now involve TV licensing.

Women are disproportionately affected by the fee – which funds the BBC – with two thirds of cases brought against females. Last night the TV Licensing authority said the gender imbalance was because women are more likely to be at home when their inspectors call.

In total, 155,000 prosecutions resulted in a conviction, which can lead to a fine of up to £1,000. Those who refuse to pay can face jail.

The Ministry of Justice figures were published following a parliamentary question tabled by Lord Laird.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13JK5kChbRw

The BBC have come up with a new and ingenious angle to tackle the government’s claims of signs of economic growth. 

The BBC will grudgingly admit that, yes, there may well be green shoots appearing but only in certain industries…and it’s the sunny weather, the wrong sort of consumer buying…bangers, BBQs and bikinis…it’s not sustainable.

But  look….the growth, what there is of it, is all in a tiny little well heeled harbour of the sunny South…the North is desolate…the North has disease, deprivation and desperation stalking the land.

The North South divide has become a chasm as the South plunges ahead reaping all the rewards leaving its Northern stable mate to its whippets and pigeons.

Julian Worricker asks if there really is a recovery…how do you feel about it?

The overall tone from the ‘adults’ is negative…the recovery is built on dodgy foundations…needless to say the BBC have the Marxist Resolution Foundation in as a witness….remember them…who wanted us to work 20 hours a week…how would you survive on the wages?…no problem….double the rate of pay.

A caller from North Yorkshire claims there’s ‘Looking on line there’s no jobs…they’re all in the South….nothing up here, they’ve forgotten all about us.’

Worricker agreed…it only confirms what we’ve said about the North South divide he claims.

Except that’s rubbish.

Look on-line and there are loads of jobs oop North…of all levels from basic labouring to high flying execs….and the economy isn’t exactly stagnating there either:

Figures released today by the Office for National Statistics have shown a 0.2% decrease in unemployment in Yorkshire in the last three months.
Not only does this indicate a short-term change in the economic climate of the region, but the 0.6% decrease over the past year could represent the long-term recovery of both Yorkshire and the rest of the UK after the prolonged financial struggles the country has faced.

Continued Improvement

Responding to the figures, Yorkshire’s Regional Manager of totaljobs.com, Gary Reilly, said that the fall in unemployment would continue over the next year.

“With the UK economy stabilising, employers in the region are more willing to invest in improving skills in the labour market with apprenticeships and work-based learning.

When a caller said he was doing well and finding success Worricker suggested that perhaps that was just his personal experience…he’d found a way through the gaps in the system…it wasn’t like that for everyone….it’s just your personal circumstances from which you can’t infer and apply any general conclusions to the whole.

Funny how anyone saying things were terrible didn’t get the same sort of treatment.

It’s a recovery but it’s not.

(Cartoon by Cartoons by Josh, courtesy of Tallbloke’s Talkshop)

Hacked climate emails: police seize computers at West Yorkshire home

Police seize equipment as part of investigation into the theft of thousands of private emails from the University of East Anglia

Tallbloke towers raided: many computers taken

“AN Englishman’s home is his castle they say. Not when six detectives from the Metropolitan Police, the Norfolk Constabulary and the Computer Crime division arrive on your doorstep with a warrant to search it though.

I waved the first three in and bid them head through to the sitting room, where there was less of an chill near the woodburner. Then they kept coming, being introduced by the lead detective from Norfolk as they trooped in. I thought I’d been chosen to host the secret policemen’s ball or something…”

Norfolk police had a warrant to “search and seize” Tallboy’s machines. In the end, they took 2 laptops and a router for the 90 day period of the Warrant.

A spokesman for the University of East Anglia said today: “We are pleased to hear that the police are continuing to actively pursue the case following the release last month of a second tranche of hacked emails from the Climatic Research Unit. We hope this will result in the arrest of those responsible for the theft of the emails and for distorting the debate on the globally important issue of climate change.”

What was it that merited such harsh treatment?

“The police told me that I’m not a suspect in any crime and so I am a little bit lost as to understand what they hope to find on my personal computers.

Mr Tattersall said police were interested in a comment posted on his blog which linked to a US website where the leaked emails could be downloaded.

“The bloggers aren’t really responsible for every comment that’s placed in the open public comments sections on their blogs,” he said.

“The police have been very clear that I’m not a suspect in any crime and it’s not illegal that my blog had this comment placed on it and people were able to go and download these emails, so I’m really just puzzled as to the police action at this stage.”

So  a mob handed police raid was instigated to have a look at the source of one comment placed on Tallboy’s blog by a reader…not even by him himself.

Surely a polite visit by one of Whitehall’s ‘most senior civil servants’ could have persuaded Tallboy to hand over the IP address and other details of the commenter.

Guess that was too easy.  Must have been a case of deliberate intimidation by the State to close down climate sceptic voices.

The BBC are headlining with the Snowden/Greenwald story and giving it plenty of airtime on Today….though it seems a minor revelation that Cameron asked the Guardian if it wouldn’t mind handing over the material.

They dragged in journalist Duncan Campbell, an expert in intelligence and computer surveillance, to tell us how bad things are now…..but, as a surprised Evan Davis pointed out, things were in fact at least the same, if not a lot worse in the past….Campbell had his door kicked in by police , the BBC were raided and an American was deported for writing about sensitive areas….which kind of undermines the Guardian’s stance now….though Campbell, somewhat of a lefty, disagreed….things are so much worse now he assured us, or reassured the ‘Left’.

It is entertaining to say the least to see the Guardian squealing about being treated like terrorists and complaining of the shadowy figures of State Security looming over them.

Remember the rumpus they set up over the CRU climate change emails? The Guardian and BBC worked furiously to denounce those who ‘stole’ those emails.

The Climate lobby demanded the police allocate huge resources to catch the criminals…for the consequences of the ‘theft’ could be catastrophic for the World.

Here the Guardian reveals the importance it gave to those CRU emails  and why the thieves really needed to be apprehended…

There is a scandal behind the latest release of emails written by climate scientists but is not about climate science. The true scandal is how, two years on, no one still has a clue who obtained the emails and why they so carefully timed their release for just before the UN’s annual climate change negotiations.

It matters. Those negotiations are central to the world’s efforts to tackling global warming.

Until we know the identity and motivation of those behind the release of the emails, they still present a danger…..until the merchants of doubt who seek to poison the debate are unmasked, that already Herculean task will be even harder.

Just how dangerous were the climate sceptics?….

‘….one scientist stating: “Those who deny the biophysical facts of the world would deny … gravity” and “we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against … merciless enemies.’

The stereotypical Lefty, and favourite economic guru of the BBC compared them to the Nazis…

And Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman evoked Pastor Niemoeller’s cry against the erosion of humanity under the Nazis: “First, they came for the climate scientists…”.

When Foreign Secretary, Labour’s Margaret Becket compared climate sceptics to Islamic terrorists:

On Thursday, Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, compared climate sceptics to advocates of Islamic terror. Neither, she said, should have access to the media.

Beckett is following a trend. Increasingly, environmentalists are calling for the silencing of climate-change sceptics or deniers. The deniers’ words are so dangerous, we are told, that they must be censored for the good of humanity. Some have even claimed that in denying climate change, these individuals are committing a “crime against humanity” and should be put on trial.

The Guardian and BBC set out to undermine the credibility and importance of the exposure of the dodgy science behind the claims of global warming, claims which have cost this country billions and sent the price of fuel skywards, as well as having a drastic effect upon industrial competitiveness and therefore economic growth.   They were happy to see Tallboy in the dock so to speak, no problem that his life was turned upside down and his family inconvenienced…and he’s not a journalist either…just a civilian blogger with an interest in climate.

On the other hand the Guardian and Co believes potentially handing enormous amounts of highly secret and sensitive information to terrorists or foreign powers isn’t important…..and you have to assume both China and Russia have their hands on the files now after accomodating Snowden.

It seems that when it suits, the apparatus of a police state should be put at the disposal of the Guardianistas and BBC fellow travellers like Black (RIP) and Harrabin to hunt down the criminals who ’stole’ the ‘smoking gun’ emails but when the spotlight is turned on them they squeal about freedom of the Press, being treated like terrorists and the injustice of dragging in family members into the affair…despite Miranda acting as a willing courier for the highly sensitive information.

We’ve had the Hitler Youth, and of course the Commie version, the Young Pioneers….but now apparently the Nation’s liberal, progressive judicial system  is under threat from ‘Dad’s Waffen SS’…in WWII they defended us from the Nazis now Dad’s Army are the Fascists.

The age limit for jury service may be raised to 75.

Evan Davis’ main concern seemed to be that as we get older we get more right wing….he tells us.

Can’t have that can we…right leaning jurists…they might have to pass judgement on black, Muslim or gay defendants…absolutely no chance of a fair trial!

The Guardian is huffing and puffing about the indignity, the complete unfairness of the stop and search on Glenn Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda.

 ‘Journalism is under threat’….it’s a ‘betrayal of trust and principle.’

Funny how they were completely unconcerned about the arrests of News International journalists…in fact they in effect helped engineer those arrests with the BBC cheerleading all the way…never mind causing the closure of a newspaper and loss of 200  jobs due to Guardian lies.

We should all be worried about the Sun journos’ arrest

by Dan Hodges / 13 Feb 2012 14:51