The BBC has excelled itself in its latest example of pro-Labour anti-Coalition ‘cuts’ propaganda.

No other word for it but propaganda.

If this can’t persuade a reasoned person that the BBC’s politicised reports are no more than Labour Party press releases I’m not sure what could.

The HMIC has released this report into how police forces are managing the cuts to their budgets:

Policing in Austerity: Rising to the Challenge

It is essentially positive and commends most forces for their achievements in cutting their budgets whilst maintaining or even improving their service.

It has a few concerns one of which is that neighbourhood policing ‘risks being eroded’ if officers are also used on other tasks….note that it talks of the ‘potential risk’ not of any evidence that there is any actual damage being done…and that:

The College of Policing is already looking at this area of policing, and HMIC will examine how neighbourhood police resources are allocated in the autumn.

It is a point of interest but not the major point…that being the positive nature of the report.

The BBC take a different view, this being the headlining report on their front page:

Watchdog warns over local policing

Neighbourhood policing risks being “eroded” but forces are praised for coping well with budget cuts as figures suggest that crime is down.

Recorded crime down 7%, ONS says

Cuts ‘lead to slower 999 response’

The BBC are almost entirely concentrating on ‘cuts’ and any supposed detrimental effects they might have.

But look at that ‘Cuts ‘lead to slower 999 response’…..who is the source for that story?:

Cuts to police budgets have resulted in slower response times to 999 calls, Labour has claimed.

This is entirely a story concocted by Labour..timed to be released along with the HMIC report….and the BBC willingly give it frontpage status and immense ‘credibility’.

And look who they report as backing Labour’s ‘findings’…

Durham police and crime commissioner Ron Hogg said he “totally supported” Ms Cooper’s concerns.

He said: “The pace and depths of the cuts is entirely unnecessary and is increasingly bringing undue pressure on the front line.

What the BBC neglect to tell you is just who Ron Hogg is:

Ron Hogg is Labour’s Police & Crime Commissioner in Durham & Darlington. … number: 03000 264631 Email address: enquiries@durham-pcc.gov.uk

Strange that the HMIC report doesn’t mention this slow 999 response time….it in fact gives information that would imply the opposite….there are more officers on the frontline…and that neighbourhood officers are also now being used to respond to 999 calls when they were not so used  before apparently.

So the BBC have run a story headlining the worst case scenario…one of ‘potential’ only as yet…and backed up  Labour Party scare mongering about response times using a Labour Party stooge.

Such stories from the BBC have one intended purpose…to damage the Public’s confidence in the Police and to blame that upon the Coalition’s ‘cuts’.  It is blatant scaremongering and the BBC have engaged in it shamelessly with their political fellow travellers in the Labour Party.

 John Humphrys grandly suggested to IDS yesterday that ‘There are facts and beliefs and you can believe whatever you like.’

So let’s look at how the BBC presents some ‘facts’.

The BBC has been trumpeting the left leaning Resolution Foundation’s claim that:

Rent ‘unaffordable’ for low-income families in third of UK

The BBC have tagged that onto their news bulletins or reports about welfare all day without qualification.

But this is what the Resolution Foundation’s report actually said:

Ian Duncan Smith tore a strip off the BBC this morning for orchestrating a politically motivated campaign against government welfare reforms: 

‘Cabinet minister Iain Duncan Smith today accused the BBC of launching a ‘politically-motivated’ attack on government plans to cap benefits at £26,000.

In an extraordinary on-air blast, the Work and Pensions Secretary accused the Corporation of using ‘lots of little cases’ to claim that limiting welfare payments would not get people back to work.

The confrontation live on Radio 4’s Today programme marks a significant escalation in the political row between Mr Duncan Smith and the BBC over reforms to the benefits system.’

IDS’s claims that the BBC use ‘little cases’, that is highly personalised cases which supposedly show the disastrous consequences of the reforms on the ‘vulnerable’ and which therefore illustrate no less than the futility of the whole policy ….or so the BBC hopes.

Of course the BBC rarely bothers to present the other side of the argument, those who suffer under the present regime or those who will benefit from the new one.

It’s one of the BBC’s favourite ‘tricks’.  The ‘little case’.  Used to especial effect in any debate about immigration or asylum.  The BBC briing on ‘an immigrant’.  The BBC paints a picture of dire need and danger if that person is not allowed to stay….and uses that single story to illustrate how immigration or asylum are vital and necessary if we are to be a humane, caring society.

Curiously today, by coincidence, on the Sheila Fogarty show we have the perfect example of that in action.

In support of refugees she brings on not one but two advocates…Maurice Wren, Chief Executive of the British Refugee Council and Maria Hennessy, the Senior Legal Officer at the European Council on Refugees & Exiles.

Think we know what they will be saying.

Then Fogarty plays her ace card, or should that  be the ‘Grace card’?

At 12:37 Fogarty introduces ‘Grace’s story’ a refugee from the Ivory Coast.  She came here in 2000 but her claim for asylum was rejected…she appealed three more times…each one rejected…she made another appeal and is awaiting the result.

Fogarty is concerned at how long it is all taking….she basically ignores the fact that ‘Grace’ has been refused entry 4 times already…and all funded by legal aid….her claim based upon the fact she is Muslim and will suffer female genital mutilation on return to the Ivory Coast….she feels safe here..nobody gets killed, nobody’s after you.

Fogarty is thoroughly on board and accepts totally that ‘Grace’ should be here….the sole concern seems to be how she is treated here and the speed of the asylum process.

Personalising the story is intended to elicit sympathy and make you think ‘oh my god, she must be allowed to stay’….and thereby also think differently about the immigration/asylum debate as a whole….in other words…. fling open the borders.

It is in essence, bluntly, a BBC propaganda drive to brain wash you into agreeing to allow anybody and everybody into the country.

At 42 mins Fogarty reads out an anonymous text from Glasgow in which someone claiming to be an ‘Asylum decision maker for the Home Office’  says that they are on a productivity drive,  being forced to make more and quicker decisons about cases…he/she claims this leads to bad decisions….he/she says the Home Office is only interested in the numbers….which is counter productive and morally repugnant.

Astonishing that Fogarty can use an anonymous text to then provide evidence of  the ‘human suffering’ caused by the asylum system.

The irony is that the programme was based upon the premise that the asylum system took too long to deal with cases…the text claimed this was being dealt with one way or another……but Fogarty still wasn’t happy….speed meant ‘human suffering’…but so apparently does slowness.

A paradox but what to do? 

The BBC has the answer…open the borders…agree to every asylum claim and hand out houses and money….simple.

CCE in the comments pointed out this offering from the BBC:

NHS failings ‘suppressed for electoral reasons’

An independent expert on mortality rates has suggested that ministers have suppressed details of NHS failings to avoid losing votes.

Prof Sir Brian Jarman said a “basic problem” with the NHS was that the government both provided health services and monitored them.

In a report out on Tuesday, he says 14 NHS trusts totalled 13,000 more deaths than the national average in 2005-10.

Note  the present tense despite the dates provided at the end giving the impression that the present government is possibly to blame.

‘Labour’ doesn’t get a namecheck until halfway down the page despite this being a story about them.

But even when it does get a mention it’s almost as if they are merely commenting on something that’s happened but which had nothing to do with them really…they aren’t actually  answering for their atrocious record on the NHS.

Here Sir Brian Jarman is quoted but it is still unclear who he is talking about

Sir Brian told the BBC: “One of the basic problems is that the government is responsible for provision of the health service but also for the monitoring of it.

“The NHS is very popular, and quite rightly so, in the country, and they don’t want a bad news story for electoral purposes.”

In an interview with Sky News, he said: “When they had a problem with quality, they couldn’t really say what it was, so things were suppressed…. spin.

“Effectively they had to deliver good news for the minister. The minister then indicated that the pressure came from Number 10. Although he then denied it.”

In response, Mr Burnham said the last Labour government had “established independence” by setting up the independent regulator and that “was not the move of a government that wanted to hide”.

Note that first paragraph:

‘Sir Brian told the BBC: “One of the basic problems is that the government is responsible for provision of the health service but also for the monitoring of it.” ‘

The Telegraph tells a slightly, but significantly different, version:

“The government was in the position of providing the health service and monitoring it, it was a conflict of interest. Ministers have an electoral interest in getting out good news.”

Now as the BBC mentioned the correct tense at the beginning of the report….‘a “basic problem” with the NHS was that the government’….is it possible that the author changed it for the second quote but forgot to do the first one?  Changing the tense changes the whole meaning of the sentence and the sentiment.

The BBC end with a final quote from Sir Brian Jarman:

‘”We have another group of Mid Staffs hospitals.”

Which leaves a lot of questions….does he mean that in the historical sense…that more problem hospitals were hidden…or does he mean that the problems still exist and are ongoing under this government?

The BBC have left that very much open to speculation.

Labour is accused of operating a ‘Denial Machine’….welll yeahhh…it’s called the BBC.

The NHS is safe in Labour hands….just not perhaps your life.

The BBC is going to be paying out some overtime to spin this one:

Andrew Marr once said:  “The BBC is not impartial or neutral……It has a liberal bias, not so much a party political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.”

Hardly true…the bit about ‘not so much a party political bias’ [Ta to Pah] I mean of course….we know huge swathes of the BBC casts its vote in favour of Labour…most of the senior journalists reporting on politics  and economics are Labourites…and some have close ties to the Labour Party.

So it’s more than an ‘innate’ sense of their own ‘rightness’…..there is a deliberate, conscious effort to present a certain Labour friendly world view.

If that is so you might ask just how far would they go?  If we turned over some stones, looked in a few dark corners, would we find some emails or texts between the Labour spin doctors and the BBC?

Would a call from Labour HQ ‘set the agenda’ for the day’s news?

If Tom Baldwin, Labour’s spinner in chief, contacted, quietly, oh so quietly, an editor at the BBC and suggested that ‘We, Labour, are going to oppose the government’s decision on plain packaging for cigarettes and will use this to attack Lynton Crosby to deflect attention from our Union woes….will you be on board?’…do you think the BBC would play ball?

Hell yeah!

Er…I mean…We’ll never know….but it looks like Labour needn’t bother on the price of a phone call…the BBC did a splendid job stitching up Crosby yesterday on the flimsiest of evidence…well, no evidence except the mutterings of Labour spinners.

Despite denials that Crosby had any input into forming ‘policy’ the BBC has turned legend into fact.  Only this morning on 5Live I heard a presenter almost telling Vince Cable he should be demanding  the resignation of Crosby…..based on what?  Rumour and innuendo and the fact that ‘this just won’t go away’?

Why won’t it go away?  Because the BBC et al will keep flying that kite for Labour as long as it takes to embarrass Cameron…as they did with Coulson.

Coulson..now there’s a thing…..he worked for Murdoch so is clearly an evil person….but not a mention of Labour’s own spinner…Tom Baldwin…also a Murdoch man…one who was the Labour Party’s bagman at the Times where he would place stories that Labour wanted planted during their time in government.

hmmmm….wasn’t that where we came in….stories planted in the media for political advantage?

So the BBC ignore Baldwin….they also ignored the proven conflict of interest that the chairman of the Energy and Climate Change Committee, Tim Yeo,  having many fingers in many green industry and renewables pies.  Guido Fawkes for months listed those conflicts of interest…..but the BBC took no notice.

But look…..it took less than half a day to be on the trail of the Tory’s electoral and political advisor, Lynton Crosby.

Yesterday we were treated to a never ending barrage of news and comment about the government’s decison to postpone introducing plain packaging for cigarettes…..and gradually we were introduced to rumour and suggestion that this was all down to Lynton Crosby because his lobbying firm worked with tobacco companies…..no evidence that he lobbied for those companies on this subject or that he influenced the policy decison in any way…just Labour Party innuendo taken up with gusto by the BBC.

Is anybody interested in the packaging of cigarettes to any large extent?  No.  So why did the BBC give it such a big news profile?  This is a story that was always a ‘trojan horse’, packaged and shaped to allow Labour to attack Crosby.  As Grant Shapp’s said:  ‘This is looking like a smear campaign’.

There is no proof as yet of any undue influence by Crosby whilst there was very definite proof of a serious potential conflict of interest with Tim Yeo….who has now suspended himself from his role….which suggests that seriousness….not enough for the BBC to take early notice of though.

Yeo has got well known interests in green industry and he made decisions that had enormous effects on that industry as Chair of the energy committee….so a proven cause and effect here….Yeo defintiely worked on Green policy…..what should have been investigated was if his decisions also benefitted him financially in his other capacity as a green industry baron.  

The BBC is of course devoted to the Green cause and it looks like it compromised its journalism to help promote that and hide any possibly embarrassing problems like Yeo….no such qualms about a man who is the Tory’s electoral guru….the Devil incarnate for the BBC….straight onto his trail hunting him down…after having set the scene with wall to wall negative reports about the decision.

But this is of course nothing new…the BBC conveniently failed to investigate Unite’s election rigging allegations…..even as the story broke the BBC played it down trying to limit the allegations to Falkirk whilst there was laready evidence that up to 41 other constituencies had been targeted by Unite and to suggest that Miliband knew nothing of this…and that heroically he is determined to clean out the stables.

But that ignores the fact that highly regarded Labour supporting websites had been complaining about the Labour Party ignoring the allegations and indeed threatening disciplinary action against some who complained about Unite….in Falkirk the local Party officlas who noted the large number of Unite members joining suddenly were told to keep quiet and sign them up anyway by Party HQ.

Miliband almost certainly knew of and supported Unite’s policy and actively tried to block those who wanted to raise the issue.

The BBC ignore that previous stance by Miliband as it would completely destroy Miliband’s credibility and tear Labour apart for the forseeable future.

They also ignore Miliband’s ridiculous claim that Labour is the Party of the Working Class…the very people that for 13 years the Labour Party ignored and sidelined…when they weren’t calling them racists for their attitude towards Labour’s immigration policy…..Labour going so far as to import a whole new working class that they hoped would vote Labour in their gratitude whilst undercutting the wages of the existing British workers and forcing them out of housing, schools and hospitals.

The BBC ignores the real stories if they don’t fit with its agenda, they ignore the thoughts, desires and needs of a vast majority of the populace, and of course they ignore your complaints.   The BBC is out of touch.

Charles Moore in the Telegraph has some thoughts along those lines for the BBC:

Why does the impartial BBC not tell the story of the great majority?

Our self-righteous national broadcaster is woefully detached from voters’ real lives

The one entity, in short, in which the BBC feels permanently uninterested is the individual citizen.

It is not surprising that the BBC takes him for granted, because it can. It takes his money by law, and without his consent, in the form of the licence fee. Until this ends, the BBC will, with the finest impartiality, refuse to tell his story.

All pretty ironic when you think the BBC constantly backs attacks on Cameron and Co as millionaires ‘out of touch’ with the real people.

‘George Zimmerman’s  innocent?????’

Say that in the tone of ‘Flash Gordon’s Alive!!?’  and you get the idea of the BBC’s incredulous reaction I just heard on the radio news announcement.

WHAT!!???  An almost whitish sorta man kills a ‘unarmed  black boy’….surely he’s got to be guilty?

All the President’s men and all the President’s horses couldn’t jail ‘Whitey’.

Even though they tried to pin a charge of ‘child abuse’ upon him in the dying moments of the case…not bothering to inform the defence.

A charge which the BBC seems to have ignored.  Could it be that the charge was so obvoiously ridiculous, drummed up  in a last desperate measure to get Zimmerman for something, anything that the BBC knew it would discredit the prosecution’s case and how the public view this.

It could also be why the BBC have ignored the wider perspective of the US government’s determination to find Zimmerman guilty and the lengths they went to to try and ensure that….not least the shameful manipulation and interference by Obama when he said of the victim , Trayvon Martin:  if he had a son he’d look like Trayvon.

Mark Steyn elaborates:

Mark Steyn: Zimmerman case’s legal absurdities astound

 It is normally Paul Mason who gets highly excited about the Arab Spring and Social Media which he thinks is as good as  a tank division to any budding revolutionaries, but here is Roger Hardy telling us why it’s not kicking off everywhere…..

Democracy or disorder? The four lessons of the Arab Spring

It is necessary to ask what went wrong, and draw the right lessons.

1. It was never going to be quick or easy.

2. There is no fixed pattern.

3. The Islamists are at a crossroads.

4. People power is not enough.

Here’s my 4 conclusions from the Arab Spring, riots in Brazil, Turkey and the Occupy movement:

1.. Muslims don’t actually like the real, fundamental Islam….Muslims are ‘Islamophobic’.

2. Capitalism and the desire for individual freedoms and pleasures, and a progressive comfortable life, not Marx, Communism and Occupy’s desire to turn us all into peasants, is what is driving the ‘revolts’.

3. Social Media means little…it is a means to an end and is nothing new…revolts happened throughout history on word of mouth, pamphlets and the telephone. Churchill noted how fast an Islamic preacher could rouse a devout army of Afghans to fight a Jihad against the British in no time at all…in the depths of the most backward country on earth.

4. Iraq was probably a good idea long term….an ‘Arab Spring’ with 250,000 American troops to eventually establish order….without those troops a ‘revolt’ would have happened eventually but would have been even more violent with far reaching regional consequences….Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia fighting over the spoils…with Russia, the US, Syria and Egypt all wanting their piece of the action.

This is number heavy and involves a bit of reading…but it’s worth some effort as it is a classic example of the BBC either being lazy and incompetent and/or deliberately missing out relevant facts when it suits them.

The BBC are happy to ‘fly a kite’ or two with speculative ‘reports’  that present a negative image of any one of a number of BBC bête noires based on what ‘someone’ claims…usually a Labour MP, a charity worker or a community leader.

The intent?  To keep an idea afloat, to keep it continually in the background of people’s minds even when there is little to no evidence to prove it conclusively…perhaps the suggestion that ‘racism’ is behind  every bad experience for a black person or that every social ill can be linked to Tory policies, especially Austerity…or failing that a quick double take and we’re back to the eighties and the fall back cause of all the world’s woes is of course Thatcher.

Yesterday we had three classics:

Demand for food banks has increased hugely…..due to welfare cuts.

A Labour MP states that a constituent may commit suicide because of the welfare cuts.

A black cafe owner claims customers won’t eat at her cafe because she is black.

All given headline treatment but you could argue all stories that are baseless…at least on the terms the BBC wants to portray them.

Just look at one…suicide rates…..I’ll note this here first, that the figures given below indicate a fall in the suicide rate per 100,000 of the population….the BBC reports a rise in overall numbers but without that all important qualification…..amongst others that it also conveniently misses out.

The BBC et al became very indignant when arsonist Mick Philpotts, and his benefits funded lifestyle (£60,000/year), was used as the poster child for Tory suggestions that welfare might need to be reformed.  The BBC were more than happy to label the Tories as heartless monsters politicising a tragedy linking welfare reform to the killing of Philpott’s children…which of course the Tories never did…a highly politicised invention of the ‘Left’….but no one said anything about that exploitation.  

All that indignation at alleged politicisation and exploitation of personal tragedy gets thrown  overboard when the BBC scents Tory blood.  They are more than happy to link the personal tragedy of suicide to Tory Austerity policies….such as they are.

Here the BBC makes it clear the importance of how this is presented:

Tragedies such as the one that befell Stephanie Bottrill have the potential to cut clean to the heart of a debate that has the potential to intensify still further.

In this recent article the BBC takes a press release, likes the cut of its jib and slots it into its own world view of the economy…for which it is a perfect fit:

Will the age of austerity harm health?

It starts off with the usual anti-Thatcher rhetoric (Not the only BBC reporter to try and make the link…Mark Easton blamed a rise in depression on Thatcher…and of course Thatcher’s ‘Big Bang’ was the ‘real cause’ of Gordon Brown’s economic crash):

Sandwell, like many areas that were heavily reliant on manufacturing, was hit hard by the recession of the 1980s……But it has only been over the past few years that the impact on the health of the local population has been fully felt.

A host of areas badly affected by the 1980s downturn can point to a similar impact.

It is further proof that economic hardship is bad for health.

Then we get onto the figures for suicides….the numbers are rising…due to austerity the BBC tells us:

The problems could be further compounded by cuts to the welfare system.  The charity Mind has drawn attention to research just published by Manchester University.  It shows that the number of suicides among mental health patients rose from 1,175 to 1,333 last year.

The figures are taken from a 2013 report by the National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Homicide

Here is a video on YouTube from the NCI which explains some of the findings….one of which I repeat here:

That rise is unexplained…though it coincides with a rise in suicides in the general population which most people have related to the difficult economic circumstances at the moment.

So..the rise is ‘unexplained‘….though ‘attributed’ by others, not the NCI, to the state of the economy.

 Here are some of the reports actual findings and explanations:

• Our figure for suicide by patients shows a rise in 2011. This figure should be interpreted cautiously as it is a provisional figure based on incomplete data.

So the BBC reports as fact a ‘provisional figure based on incomplete data’.

The BBC also reports:

Prof John Ashton, the new president of the Faculty of Public Health, believes we need to heed the warning.

“Young people have been the hardest hit this time,” he says.

But the NCI says:

Suicides in patients aged under 25 and those aged 25-44 fell in the report period. A rise in 2011 is projected for most age-groups but not in those aged under 25.

And why have the figures risen anyway?  Is it purely a result of more people committing suicide or what?

The NCI says:

Suicide by mental health patients has risen – 1,333 deaths in 2011 (England). A change to the coding of causes of death has contributed to this figure and changes to the Mental Health Minimum Dataset (MHMDS) method make comparisons with earlier years difficult but it is likely that this is a true rise in patient suicide, following a previous fall. The rise probably reflects the rise in suicide in the general population, which has been attributed to current economic difficulties.

 When the Tories claimed knife crime was rising under Labour Mark Easton jumped in very quickly to claim that the figures couldn’t be compared to previous years…as the methodolgy for collecting them had changed…no such scruples here for the BBC….no qualification that the figures may have risen, at least in part, due to a new ‘coding method’…..as the NCI goes on to reveal:

Prior to 2011, some narrative verdicts were coded as accidental deaths where intent was not specified which may have led to an underestimation of suicide. However, in 2011 guidance was issued to coroners in England and Wales when returning narrative verdicts to provide clearer information on the intent of the deceased. This has led to improvements to the coding of narrative verdicts by the ONS coding team, and some cases which would previously be coded as accidental may now be coded as suicide.

What other inconvenient ‘facts’ might we find if we actually read the report?

First there is the same report by the NCI but from 2012:

In 2000 there were 4,819 suicides, in 2010 there were 4,021.

The report tells us that there was an average change in the general suicide rate in England between 2000 and 2010 of around minus 20%…that’s a drop of 20%.

For people with mental health issues who committed suicide in 2004 the figure was 1,317 and in 2011 1,333……..so at the height of Labour’s boom we had a very similar suicide rate.

So it must be austerity…right?  And remember the population was lower in 2004…hence…

The NCI report in 2013 claims that the suicide rate per 100,000 people with mental health issues was in:

2004  117.7

2010  91.7

2011  87.8

So in fact the rate of suicides has gone down…though the numbers have gone up…the population having grown enormously since 2004.

Here are some charts of the general suicide rates and the rates for mental health patients in England…note differences in the figures in the two reports (2012 and 2013)…which should be the same:

Here are the figures for the general population: