Sorry about this but it’s more Savile….it does seem that the BBC are interfering with the due process of any inquiry into this affair……

The BBC have announced two inquiries into the Savile business looking at whether the BBC was in any way to blame and why the Newsnight investigation was pulled.

However judging by what I have seen and heard and what some of the comments here are saying it would seem that the BBC has already decided and is on a mission to ‘fix’ the public’s perceptions regardless of the inquiries’ outcome.

It is wheeling in the big guns in a damage limitation exercise that is set on muddying the waters and massaging the truth.

We’ve had John Humphrys  suggesting it was all so long ago and in a culture that is long gone, we’ve had Joan Bakewell  spinning the same line….

“We were all padded, pinched, stroked, the whole female sex was available in those days – not willingly so – in the 1960s. It was how you treated women.”

But perhaps not how you treated 11,12,13, 14 year old girls…and boys.

Tory MP Rob Wilson delving deeper stated on the same programme that:  ‘There was a culture in the BBC of Senior BBC management targeting younger female employees’……and he rightly says that other organisations also have many questions to answer but that doesn’t mean the BBC should escape from also providing answers.

And we’ve had Victoria Derbyshire doing a double act  (45 mins) with ex-Today editor Kevin Marsh.

Derbyshire herself pre-empts the inquiry possible findings by stating that Newsnight dumped the programme because of ‘editorial reasons’……she reads out a few texts or emails that are against the BBC but the only callers that get through are pro-BBC…however she does read out this classic…..

‘Apart from harbouring tax dodgers and paedophiles the BBC does a cracking job’.

She then brings in Kevin Marsh to spread his own form of oil upon troubled waters….he has difficulty with recognising, or admitting the truth…..Derbyshire fed Marsh the questions and got the required answers…nothing to see here, move along.  It is quite apparent that programmes such as this are meant to make people’s minds up about the BBC’s role long before any inquiry comes up with its own answers.

The BBC is acting as judge and jury in its own defence….and strangely enough finding all the evidence points to an acquittal.

KM:  There will always be people who will be suspicious of big organisations and believe in conspiracy….having been inside the BBC for 30 years I know that is not true about the BBC’….he then comes up with his own conspiracy theory….’It is a commercial (Murdoch?) or political (Conservatives?) conspiracy against the BBC…no matter what the BBC says, it will be at fault’……he said it was ‘very easy to get angry about something for the sake of a newspaper column.’

So it’s all just a big conspiracy….firstly by anyone who just doesn’t trust ‘Big Organisations’ and secondly by Dark Forces opposed to the BBC seeking to attack it….and its all really about false anger drummed up to fill a few column inches.

KM:  I believe George Entwistle when he said he didn’t interfere with Newsnight because it is part of the BBC’s makeup to be rigorously independent and to avoid allegations of interference…it’s not the way the BBC works for bosses to interfere…..There’s no question that Newsnight wasn’t pressured to drop the investigation…there were sound editorial reasons for it not to go ahead…..The investigation wasn’t even complete really, not a film ready to go….if we’d gone ahead and been wrong it would have been catastrophic.

That’s OK then….he believes Entwistle, the BBC is rigorously independent, and it was an internal Newsnight editorial policy to abandon the investigation.

No need for any inquiry at all then…it’s just an exercise in ‘seeing justice being done’…all a waste of time and money….as ‘Auntie’ is so trusted and respected it of course could never really be found to have done anything wrong.

Marsh has his version…but other BBC sources say otherwise:…let’s have Derbyshire & Co interviewing them…..

‘Questions remain about just why Newsnight editor Peter Rippon took the decision to stop the report, and how close it was to completion when he did so. On Sunday Kevin Marsh, a former editor of Today who has now left the BBC, wrote a blog that was sympathetic to Rippon. “When the Newsnight editor paused the investigation, it was still at the evidence-gathering stage… evidence he was beginning to have doubts about,” wrote Marsh. “In other words, there was nothing to ‘pull’ – there was an investigation in progress and it had hit a brick wall. There was no script, even, in spite of what’s been reported in the press.”

Meirion Jones, the then Newsnight producer who was putting together the Savile report (and who is now working on a new Savile investigation for Panorama), declined to comment when contacted by The Daily Telegraph. But Pollard will want to ask Jones whether Marsh’s version of events is correct, or whether Jones’s Newsnight report was – as some BBC sources continue to insist – actually at a more advanced stage (and therefore less easy to shelve for genuine “editorial reasons”).’

The world is a very different place now thanks to Labour’s new laws that will protect children from sex abuse, says John Humphrys. 

Let’s see what laws Labour’s Harriet Harman wanted to introduce….. 

Harriet Harman under attack over bid to water down child pornography law

Harriet Harman’s political judgement has been called into question after it emerged that she once advocated the watering down of child pornography laws.

 and updated.

The BBC, especially their prime news programme, must have known that and as soon as Harman spoke up they must have decided not to embarrass her.

Listen to Humphrys as he tries hard to downplay Savile’s actions.

Churchill’s disagreement with the pre-1939 war policy of appeasement was kept off the air by the BBC…..

“For 11 years, they kept me off the air. They prevented me from expressing views that proved to be right. Their behaviour has been tyrannical.”

The BBC’s own Nick Robinson spills the beans….and a lesson for us all….

‘The way Churchill was handled is a powerful warning of the dangers of the BBC believing it is being balanced by excluding the voices of those who do not represent conventional wisdom….

 …he (Churchill) did complain to a young BBC producer who visited him on the day after Chamberlain returned home from Munich. A memo records their meeting. They spent hours discussing the Nazi threat and “Churchill complained that he had been very badly treated… and that he was always muzzled by the BBC”. The producer was called Guy Burgess. The man who would become his country’s most famous traitor tried to reassure the man who would become its saviour that the BBC was not biased.’

Churchill was expressing the voice of the people…a thing that the BBC assiduously works to avoid:

‘After Churchill became prime minister, on 10 May 1940, vast numbers listened to his extraordinary wartime broadcasts. Churchill claimed that all he did was to give voice to the national mood of defiance: “The people’s will was resolute and remorseless, I only expressed it. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.” ‘

Now not saying that there is any similarity at all between a dyed-in-the-wool communist traitor like Burgess and any working at the BBC now who entertain anti-war ideas but you can’t help making comparisons……but today of course no one at the BBC is in any way biased…they were in the past but Mark Thompson has assured us that’s exactly that…in the past.

…but it seems further comparisons could be made with today….the BBC’s attitude towards Murdoch and his media ’empire’ may have  deep roots:

 ‘[Churchill] had decided to break the monopoly that his old enemy John Reith had considered so vital for broadcasting. He did so in the face of Reith’s hysterical warning that commercial television would be as disastrous for Britain as “dog racing, smallpox and bubonic plague”. ‘

Clare Balding mounts defence of BBC with some black propaganda…..or a distortion of the truth…or a lie if you like.

The photo below was presented to us by Balding as if it were a picture taken in secret by a paparazzi in  the bushes and published without consent by a newspaper for dirty old men to ogle…..the truth is entirely different and puts another, completely different, perspective on the story.

The BBC are rattled, very  rattled.  They are being subjected to the sort of inquisition that they  normally dish out to others whom they perceive to have committed some form of misdemeanour.

We have long been witness to the defensiveness of those working for the BBC when their integrity is brought into question….just how prickly does Humphrys get when challenged about BBC reporting…or Campbell or Derbyshire?

There is an unwillingness to accept that the BBC can do anything wrong or to challenge their own perceptions.  Which BBC journalist has dared to investigate the Balen Report?  Any journalist worth his salt would be digging away at that one….it has the potential to be absolute dynamite if it says what many think it might say.

Rather than fully accept that they maybe got things badly wrong they are lashing out and trying to divide up the ‘guilt’, pointing fingers at others,  so as to lessen the BBC’s own part in this saga.

The latest ‘Have I got News For You’  sold its soul and became a mechanism to channel the BBC’s propaganda.  Even the doughty Hislop toed the party line, taking the BBC shilling, and rather disengenuously defended the BBC by claiming no one was examining the NHS’s role or that of the Press……the BBC is hard done by and innocent of all wrong doing.

They claimed no one knew about any of Savile’s actions or those of other people….but again that’s not true….as senior staff were informed of ‘goings on’, just as with Liz Kershaw, and they decided to ignore them…..former BBC director David Nicolson told The Sun that a BBC boss had said “That’s the way it is” and “That’s Jimmy” after he reported that Savile was having sex with a young girl in his dressing room.

Hislop said that no one knew the allegations were true…since when has that stopped an investigation into ‘allegations’?…as a BBC journalist himself says…..

“In most newsrooms if you are not quite there [with a story] you would just keep going.”

Did the Press do anything?…..In 1971, according to the Sunday Times, the News of The World ran an expose of the ‘goings on’ off camera at ‘Top Of The Pops’ and the partying and procurement of girls…..nothing was done.

Such behaviour, not just Savile’s, seems to have been pretty endemic, but accepted or brushed under the carpet. 

They knew but chose to ignore it.

The fact that similar behaviour by Savile was happening under the eyes of the NHS doesn’t let the BBC off the hook one little bit….and the NHS has come under considerable scrutiny from the rest of the media over this business and so the claim of the BBC being singled out does not stand up at all.

Clare Balding dug out a photo from the Daily Mail Online…from its sidebar…which she calls ‘its sidebar of shame’.  However looking at it now the sidebar is entitled ‘Femail Today’…..stories about women for women.

Balding tried to assert that the Mail showing a 14 year old girl in a bikini was somehow tantamount to procuring young girls for the likes of Savile……the reality is that the only readers of that part of the Mail Online is likely to be women…..I’ve read the Online Mail hundreds of times and never once bothered to click on anything on ‘the sidebar of shame’…..so the photo was for women’s eyes only.

What Balding doesn’t reveal is that the photos were on the girl’s Twitter page….on which she has two million followers….and the fact that she is one of the stars of the US show about the Kardashian family.

The choice of photo is also questionable….the BBC chose a shot that looked as if it had been snapped in secret with a hidden camera…..rather than taken as it was by a family member or friend.   The reaction from Merton et al said it all….shock….because they weren’t told the full story of course.

The BBC could have chosen these shots of kylie’s sister, Kendall, from two years ago….taken when she was 14 by a professional photographer as she launched her modelling career….but that wouldn’t have looked half as seedy as the one BBC picked to present the Daily Mail in a damning way…so they chose a very particular photograph in a particular style and presented it with a particular spin.

Balding tries to claim the moral high ground by saying the Mail is peddling stories that are only interested in what women look like….is this from a BBC that mainly employs young, good looking women to front its programmes?  Balding is a sports reporter….so exceptions can be made.

The girl in the photo shown by Balding is Kylie Jenner who has a column in 17 magazines giving her (and her sister’s) expertise on ‘fashion, beauty and style’….are those columns all ‘columns of shame’?

I think Balding needs to recognise that there is a big difference between the Mail publishing shots of your cellulite and wobbly bits and the BBC ignoring sex abuse going on on its premises by its employees.

That is an example of the BBC counter attack….using its own programmes to launch a bitter attack on a paper it disdains anyway.  The Daily Mail is the bete noire of BBC presenters who all pretend not to read it but undoubtedly do so avidly underneath copies of the Guardian.  That photograph did not appear from nowhere….the BBC had to dig around to find that…..and clearly did so with a purpose…..and that is to try and paint others in such a bad light that the BBC comes off better….nowt but BBC black propaganda at work.

However under the slightest scrutiny Balding’s story comes flying apart and it can be seen to be a mess of half truths and deliberate smears that sounded good on the night but turn out to be pretentious, pious, posturing rubbish….however mud sticks and the BBC knows that and are quite happy to have put the boot into the Mail whether the attack was merited or not.

To round off this sad little episode of HIGNFY Merton dragged in Thatcher….Savile spent a Christmas at Chequers with her….or ‘always spent Christmas at Chequers’  as Merton put it.  Apparently that might be the answer as to why Savile got away with it for so long.  If you were thinking maybe it was the BBC hiding anything sordid that might damage its reputation you’d be barking entirely up the wrong tree!

So then,  that’s it, the answer…..Thatcher is to blame for Savile’s long career of  abusing young girls and getting away with it.  

So that’s three boxes ticked….Defend the BBC, blame Thatcher for the ills of the world, and launch a clearly well planned assault on the Daily Mail.

Comic Gold.

Further to David’s comments on Bland…..

 Savile was said to have got away with what he did because of his reputation and celebrity status……I would suggest that the very same effect is allowing the BBC to get away with its own sordid, illicit liasons…its finger prints all over several crime scenes of political and cultural vandalism as it snuggled up with the Labour Party.

Bland’s comments on the Today programme perfectly showcase the sheer arrogance of the BBC mindest….the self righteous belief in their own goodness, their sense of entitlement to lecture us and yet be free from any need for transparency or accountability themselves because….

….as Bland told us….‘Given the BBC’s reputation we should take it on trust that it would never do anything wrong.’

He maintains that BBC editors and producers are completely independent of management and do not take direction from them as to what programmes to produce and whether to broadcast them or not.

Now that is obviously no where near the truth…..no organisation can work like that.  We know for certain that the BBC operates an internal consensus driven narrative on certain subjects…Climate, Israel, immigration, Toryism, Europe to name a few…with guidelines being passed along the chain to mould how programmes are made, what programmes are made and what the agreed line is intended to produce in the way of affect on the audience and its perceptions and thoughts.

The programme makers are not independent…and nor is the BBC…..their coverage of abuse in places such as Rochdale, before the truth finally came out, followed the official Establishment line of  ‘nothing to see here….and if there is then the girls are just trash and not to be believed.’

The BBC essentially colluded in covering up a shocking series of crimes for years.

This line is still coming out in places…Nicky Campbell when discussing Savile asked if it could still happen now….and his answer was of course it could…look at Rochdale….why did it happen there?…because, he says, the girls weren’t believed.

Really?   That’s not true is it.  The reason nothing was done was because of sensitivity about race and a certain religious minority….the police knew it was true…they just didn’t act because they were afraid of charges of racism….a legacy that can be laid at the feet of the likes of the BBC who have driven that particular line of thought…that any talk of immigration or race is ‘racist’.

Jimmy Savile seems to have got away with it because those who knew kept quiet, the gangs in Rochdale got away with it because those who knew kept quiet, Labour were allowed to impose mass immigration upon a crowded nation that didn’t want it and didn’t get asked because the BBC kept quiet.

The BBC has failed and failed again, and again, to do what is really its primary purpose…to inform and educate the Nation….it has hidden not only its politically favoured friend’s dirty secrets, but it has hidden its own using its world class reputation for trustworthiness, honesty and accountability to fool us all.

An organisation that lectured us on gender issues and even has its own ‘Woman’s Hour’, was found to be operating an ‘ageist’ and sexist policy for older female presenters. 

It has berated bankers, businessmen and politicians for tax avoidnace and yet has been found to be operating its own little scheme on an industrial scale….never mind paying banker style salaries to some of its stars.

This is a BBC that would be horrified if the Army were to have a regiment just for British Black soldiers….and yet the BBC has its very own ghetto radio…the Asian Network….staffed by Asians.  Are Asians British or what?  If British, why do they need an ‘Asian Network’?  Does a brown skin mean they can’t like fish and chips, Eastenders and Dr Who? 

Mark Thompson admitted the BBC had been left wing once and had failed to report on Europe and immigration in a balanced way.  And yet even now we get the same old stuff coming out of the BBC.  Thompson’s legacy is a BBC that if anything has become even more polarised, anti-Tory, pro-Climate Change, anti-Republican, anti-war, pro-Muslim, pro-Europe and pro-immigration.

Its historic failures with Savile continue and the results are the same…..the failure to ‘hold Power to account’  has allowed The Power, in one shape or another, to corrupt and damage our society, culture and democracy.

The BBC has allowed one political party to do enormous damage to the economy and the makeup of society.  The BBC’s betrayal of its duty, the faith and trust placed in it,  has served to undermine nearly every aspect of this country’s being, from its economy, its welfare system, its political and cultural values, and even its very ethnic makeup….the ‘whites’ being too hideously white and British to be allowed to ‘dominate’ in their own land….so much so that Labour were allowed to import literally millions of foreigners to break the ‘dominance’ of the natives…as well as to serve a calculated political purpose….the new arrivals would, Labour believed, vote Labour, vote for ‘Europe’ and never vote Tory. 

The BBC has in effect collaborated in a quiet coup  that has attempted to gerrymander the voting system and deliver up an almost one party state…that one party being Labour….as well as a peverse sort of ethnic cleansing to dilute the whiteness and Britishness of Britain.

It still works to that end…even now Labour surge ahead with around 10% more support…..Labour’s past has been pretty much erased from BBC history…..the most likely BBC culprit for the credit crunch, if not the Banks, is Mrs Thatcher. 

The BBC cannot be trusted.  It cannot be trusted to hold itself to account and it certainly cannot be trusted to reform itself.

The BBC Trust can no longer be the body that is the ultimate arbiter in disputes….it cannot be both BBC cheerleader and chief critic.   Only a completely independent, politically and intellectually diverse body, can hold the BBC truly to account and make it answer for its actions.

It maybe that this body infact needs to be weighted towards the ‘Right’ to balance what is the very difficult problem to solve of Left wing bias within the BC given where it recruits from, the sort of people likely to be attracted to journalism and the dominant culture within the BBC that ensures anyone who goes against the internal cultural ‘stream’ sinks….slow promotion, rubbish jobs and a career reporting from places like Bogota.

Whatever the solution is it is one that needs to be found…and soon….as well as a pair of balls for the politicians who have so far run scared of tackling the all too powerful BBC.

BBC DJ Liz Kershaw was on Nicky Campbell’s show this morning giving a good account of herself regarding the BBC culture in the 1980’s….a time when PC and health and safety were rapidly becoming  a fixture in the workplace….so even if you were inclined to say ‘Well it was the times’, that’s just not true…it was not the 50’s when a woman knew her place nor the swinging 60’s era of free love and letting it all hang out.

Her story about being regularly groped and then her complaints ignored is now well known….but she revealed something else….that she had some concerns about something else, unspecified and unrelated to her other complaint, that she went to management to deal with…and was told that if she spoke openly about it she would ‘never work in the BBC again.‘

The BBC has a draconian non-disclosure agreement that prevents employees talking about the BBC and this was applied with vigour to Kershaw to shut her up.

So there are two questions here….one….what was the thing that Liz Kershaw felt so strongly about that she raised it with management….and two…..why did the BBC then close down all talk about it?

It does seem that far from being transparent and accountable the BBC works desperately hard to maintain its reputation by hiding its dirty secrets with legal injunctions, in the case of the Balen Report or threats, what Kershaw called ‘intimidation and fear’, to silence employees.

The more we see of the BBC the less we see of it.  What are the great ‘unknown unknowns’ that the BBC is hiding?

Bodo in the comments has highlighted this article in the guardian reporting that the BBC is to instigate a new investigation into its isupposed mpartiality.

The report will look into the BBC’s coverage of Europe, immigration and religion.

Now it may just me being cynical but this is just one in a long line of such reports which seem to be purely designed to cover up more than they reveal.

In 2006 the BBC commissioned Loughborough University to carry out a report into its coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict…its conclusion…the BBC was biased…against the Palestinians.

THE BBC’S coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict implicitly favours the Israeli side, a study for the BBC Governors has concluded.

Deaths of Israelis received greater coverage than Palestinian fatalities, while Israelis received more airtime on news and current affairs programmes. The references to “identifiable shortcomings” surprised BBC News executives, who are more used to accusations that their coverage is routinely anti-Israel.

The BBC Governors felt there was no bias at all:
The Governors received the panel’s report at their Board meeting last week and welcomed its finding of no deliberate or systematic bias.

Apparently the BBC does not have any bias towards Europe either……

We are pleased that the Panel found no evidence of deliberate bias in the BBC’s coverage of EU matters.

“That said, we note the Panel’s conclusion that “there is a widespread perception that the BBC suffers from certain forms of cultural and unintentional bias” and that “the BBC’s coverage of EU news needs to be improved and to be made more demonstrably impartial”.

The BBC’s 2007 report, From Seesaw To Wagonwheel  into impartiality failed to tackle the Israel/Palestine conflict….one of the major, if not the major, area of contention about BBC coverage and bias.

The BBC then employed Scientist Steve Jones to review its coverage of science….Jones was hardly independent, his career having been saved by the BBC which essentially has him on a short leash. It is no wonder that the pro-AGW Jones found no signs of bias in the BBC’s coverage and in fact argued for bias in favour of climate change and global warming.

The BBC employed another of its own to investigate its coverage of Israel/Palestine…Malcolm Balen….who declared even before the investigation began that he believed that the BBC was not biased but that it did make mistakes…..which seems to be the kneejerk get out clause for all bias….it’s not deliberate or systematic just cultural, unintentional and a result of group think.

The Balen Report has famously been hidden from all eyes…you can only conclude that it must reveal something so damaging to the BBC’s reputation that it can never see the light of day…..what could that be?  Something that shows the BBC’s coverage has consistently been anti-Israeli and may have led to the death of Jews and the legitimisation of attacks on Israel?

There does seem to be a pattern here……evidence of bias but a declaration that no bias exists….or as with the Seesaw to Wagonwheels and the Balen Report, a complete refusal to acknowledge concerns about the BBC’s Middle East coverage.

The new report can only be more of the same…regardless of the content of the report you can only conclude that it will be kicked into the long grass and quietly forgotten should its findings turn out to be uncomfortable.

David Liddiment, the lead BBC trustee for the review, said the BBC’s reputation and commitment to impartiality was in its DNA.

A report into Europe, immigration and religion…what’s missing yet again?  Israel.

Presumably ‘DNA’ stands for ‘Do Not Answer’ any questions about our coverage of Israel.

This programme is one that should see the new DG in the dock at OFFCOM if any BBC programme would.

Evan Davis has ensured that the BBC has taken sides in one of the biggest political and economic arguments of the times. The BBC has become openly political and partisan.

A programme that was dreamt up as a clever ‘Trojan horse’ to ‘nudge’ us into accepting a certain economic viewpoint was allowed to go too far and become what amounts to a blatantly obvious piece of propaganda for the Labour Party’s spending, or is that ‘investing’, plans.

It should, I would assume, have been a subtle bit of agitprop that told a story, made its point but not say that point aloud, it should have ‘led’ the viewer to reach the desired conclusion himself…but the BBC being the BBC it doesn’t trust the British public to make the right decision so it spells it out for them…spend money now!

Evan Davis is investigating the condition of Britain’s Infrastructure…he finds it is in a dire state, of course….and in need of great deal of money to be invested in it.

This will not only help provide jobs and economic growth now…but future proof us when the population reaches 70 million….he tells us.

No mention of the immigration that Labour imposed upon us that makes 70 million a likely figure….and upon which we can heap much of the blame for the hugely expensive upgrades in infrastructure needed now….the estimate in the programme is, purely for energy, telecoms, water and transport improvements, that it will cost £500 billion by 2020….and that excludes other projects needed such as schools, housing and hospitals to cope with the flood of new people.

So not only has Evan’s Labour Party spent ruinously when in government and landed us with a huge bill hanging over us now but it has left us a legacy that is going to bankrupt us or turn us into a third world economic basketcase as the economy cannot pay for all the necessary infrastructure to cope with the influx of immigrants.

But don’t worry says Evan….the cost is a mere nothing in the scale of things…and even if you object to new construction, don’t worry…because once it’s built you’ll love it, you’ll be content!

Here is a taste of Evan’s thinking and the conclusions he proposes….it is essentially a Labour Party political broadcast giving unqualified backing to Labour’s own policies.

As I said, if he’d been clever he’d have left it at telling us of the crumbling infrastructure and the future problems that will arise from that and then allowed us to start thinking ‘maybe something should be done’…but he kept going and decided to lecture us in what is as he says an area in which there is a great argument.

He has ensured that the BBC has taken sides in one of the biggest political and economic arguments of the times. The BBC has become openly political and partisan.　

Evan Davis speaks:

‘Britain faces an almighty challenge…key parts of our infrastructure are wearing out and all over Britain it is the same story. Much of our civil engineering that’s holding our country together is not up to the job.

Britain needs some serious work.

It won’t be easy and it won’t be cheap.

But if we’re ambitious for our future there’s no better time to get on with the job of building it than right now!

Should we be doing a lot more of this work (building infrastructure)…I know I’m biased…because I like it….but isn’t there a case for investing far more in infrastructure to get Britain ready for the future?

Forth Road Bridge….although it cost 1.5 billion it is a useful fillip to the local economy at a difficult time.

Infrastructure is one of the most effective ways of creating jobs.

Many believe there’s a lesson for Britain today and we should be digging our way out of a slump.

There’s a big argument over that.

But it makes an awful lot of sense when the economy is in the doldrums.

How much would it cost?

To keep the water, energy, telecoms and transport systems alone up to scratch and keeping pace with the growing population will cost £500 billion by 2020.

Don’t we have to spend more to give our economy space to respond to change?’

Davis occassionally tries to keep to the script…ie this is a programme that is trying to suggest we build infrastructure for ‘the Future’…but keeps letting his true reasons slip out….it is all about spending for ‘growth’….or alleged growth…and no idea where the money comes from to  start with.

A more partisan programme, openly supporting a Labour policy, would be hard to find.

If the Tories don’t start acting on programmes like this and stop the BBC from airing them they deserve everything they get…which is probably a big fat zero vote in 2015.

The BBC seem to be still downplaying the Jimmy Savile affair.

George Entwistle this morning on ‘Today’ said that Newsnight was right to not broadcast the allegations about Savile and that he wasn’t in the business of  using the benefit of hindsight to try to blame people for their ‘mistakes’.

Could have fooled me…isn’t the British Empire and all that regularly run through the mill for its perceived sins by the BBC?

Mark Easton is still blaming Thatcher for everything….

The BBC told us that depression has risen 40% since 2006….but Mark Easton on ‘Today’ believed he had the reason why….Thatcher’s ‘savage’ attack on industry in the 80’s….a period of industrial decline that people have not got over…and now with savage Tory cuts on the mental health budget it can only get worse.

And speaking of Mark Easton, he seems to have taken his new boss’s message on board…….

Here is Mark Easton who, apart from revealing that a PE teacher at his school took great pleasure in making ‘small boys do naked press ups’,  almost puts the blame for the abuses onto the girls…or ‘groupies’ as he calls them….whilst taking the Entwistle line….the past was a different time with different mores……

‘The Jimmy Savile story takes the sexual politics of the present day and applies them to another age. The teenage groupies in the 60s and 70s who hung around the pop scene, hoping a bit of the glamour and excitement would rub off onto their own lives, were entering very dangerous territory – a world where sexual liberation was colliding with traditional power structures.’

It’s a rather curious tale he tells…because on the one hand he says no one would blink an eye about such goings on….but conversely his own ‘outrage’ had been raised by a visit to the local magistrate court where such an abuser was actually being tried…..so someone did care…..

‘When I was a cub reporter on my local newspaper in the late 1970s, I returned from the magistrates court with what I thought was a front page story. A councillor had appeared on charges of sexual assault on young girls, an alleged abuse of power that had left me shocked……

……But all too rarely were these kinds of concerns taken to the authorities.  In fact, one suspects that the police would have regarded accusations of such improper behaviour as domestic or trivial. Rather like my news editor, the desk sergeant would probably have shrugged and suggested the complainant worried about proper crime.’

So is he suggesting we don’t look back in anger at what may have gone on then…it was just the ‘times’? 

Or is that just a convenient get out for the BBC?

Here’s an interesting little video which shows just why climate sceptics have an uphill battle against the BBC.

Richard Black is ‘informing’ fellow journalists of the ‘facts’ surrounding various controversies….’myths’ as he calls them.

Note how he does not raise the very considerable questions that pour doubt upon the credibility and impartiality of the various inquiries into the CRU email hacking saga.

Black raises the ‘research’ done by B.E.S.T into surface temperatures….stating it is proof of AGW….no mention of the rather obvious problem….that one of the scientists completely refuses to be associated with the ‘research’ as she believes it draws the wrong conclusions and that the chief scientist is a proven pro-AGW advocate.

Black pours scorn on the notion that warming has stopped since 1998 (despite Phil Jones CRU admitting it had)…it is just a plateau for Black (it could well be).

However, he is quite prepared to use upper atmosphere temperature drop over a similar period to try and prove that the sun does not affect global warming….no plateau there then!

And all this is on the back of Prof Steve Jones report into BBC impartiality in science reporting….the same Jones whose career was ‘saved’ by the BBC as he couldn’t get any funding for his research….and then along came the telly with bag loads of cash.

When BBC reporters are fed this line of tosh is there any wonder that we do not get a proper debate on the subject….it is no less than brain washing by Black with a flood of misleading information.

I would be more impressed if the BBC College of Journalism also had some credible ‘sceptics’ on board giving their take on events….otherwise Black was merely pushing propaganda.