Author Archives: Alan

BBC’s doom mongering over the Olympics is gathering pace.

Plenty of people contacting the Today programme to complain….such complaints have been flooding in for over a week as noted in a previous post.

The BBC’s response?  It was to wind up the rhetoric even more…immediately after Montague read out a complaint (and one praising the coverage) she linked to a story in Der Spiegel which said that the London Olympics were going to be a disasterous and chaotic nightmare.

There was absolutely no reason for the link because this was a purely speculative piece based on one foreign journalist’s own ideas.  No reason at all to discuss it…it seemed there just to deliberately annoy the people complaining about the BBC’s miserable coverage.

Are the BBC just padding out the news with ‘bad’ news?  It certainly seems so when you listen to Peter White investigating the ‘scandal’ of trading standards officers being ‘press ganged’ into working at the Olympics in order to protect ‘Big Business’ brandnames.

But all was not as White presented it…for several minutes White insisted that the officers were there to serve Big Business…the Olympic’s representative gave a good explanation…they were there to stop the public being fleeced by people flogging fake or dangerous goods not to protect brand names…..but White wouldn’t accept that….only after several minutes did he actually ask ‘Well what are they going to be doing?’

And remember this is just 50 TSOs from 30 councils.

If he’d asked that at the beginning of the interview I suppose there wouldn’t have been a story, or a controversy…which it seems the BBC were intent on stirring up.

White also had on the usual union rep. who of course blamed ‘The Cuts’…and this was the clip the BBC used in its news bulletins thereafter.

However a different story emerged eventually when we had a council representative on who said the trading standard officers were not forced to go and were volunteered by the councils involved….not only that  but it is standard practise to send one council’s TSOs to help out another council when large events are going on…and he noted that there is no BBC interest in the story in those cases.

So to sum up if White had asked immediately what the TSOs were going to be doing,  had they been volunteered and  were they just carrying on a normal practise there wouldn’t really have been much of a story.

It seems the  BBC are intent on whipping up as much controversy as possible over the Olympics now that the Tories are essentially in charge regardless of whether you are interested or even extremely fed up with the BBC’s  politicking….this was just a juvenile attack on Big Business, much hated it seems by the BBC, and a chance to have another pot shot at government ‘cuts’…and to lay it on thick about another ‘disaster’ at the Olympics.

Mark Easton has surely been abducted by Tory Central Office and replaced with someone more willing to sing to their tune.

First he betrayed the BBC narrative and  admitted that The Big Society, in some respects, may actually be working, encouraging communities to become active and to work together towards a common goal rather than have the dead hand of government tell them what they need.

Now he has really gone and done it, he’s blown his left wing credibility right out of the water and revealed that police numbers and unemployment statistics bare little relation to crime rate figures. So there.

He says ‘Something really interesting is going on’ (21 mins)….not just in the UK but across the developed world….irrespective of criminal justice practice and police numbers, crime has been going down for 20 years….not only that but it is also irrespective of employment levels and the economy…crime rising/falling whether we are in a boom or a downturn.

Actually he has said all this before in 2008  but clearly his colleagues in the  BBC have completely ignored his conclusions and continued to berate Tory ministers for daring to reduce police numbers.

Home Office Minister Tony McNulty described it as “a statement of the blindingly obvious”. But is it “obvious” that when an economy turns down, crime inevitably turns up?

Broadly crime in Britain rose inexorably for 50 years – from 1945 to 1995 – and then started to fall. Crime rose fastest in the late 1950s and early 1960s, just as the economy was starting to boom. Indeed, throughout the swinging 60s, police and the courts had never been busier.

During the roller-coaster ride of the British economy in the 70s and 80s, crime went up and up. Recession or growth, boom or bust, crime continued to rise regardless.

There is little correlation between joblessness and crime – for almost the entire period from 1945 to 1970 the British unemployment rate was less than 3% of the workforce. And yet crime exploded during this period.

For the past 12 years in Britain and most of the developed world, crime has been falling. It is a drop which coincides with a sustained period of economic growth.

I haven’t done any real digging for figures but this graph from the US does seem to agree that when unemployment is at its highest for 20 years the crime rate is at its lowest….there is a definite trend of falling crime however it does show that as unemployment rises there are small rises in crime…apart from 2008-09. 

All that is fascinating, if true…as it destroys the Left’s case…firstly concerning police numbers but more tellingly….the recent riots….which they blame on socio-economic factors…..Easton’s analysis suggests that isn’t the case ……I would take that view personally….the riots were started by a group of criminally intentioned people who would be criminal regardless of high employment levels and a booming economy.

Which all begs the question…if that  is true then aren’t all the proposed ‘solutions’ to ‘disaffected youth’ so much hokum?

Sometimes the solution is that there is no solution….they get their friendships, excitement and money from crime….and prison is accepted as an occupational hazard…..why work frying burgers or stacking shelves when you can live on the ‘edge’ and have some ‘respect’….from those whom you think count?

And if so why waste enormous sums of money ‘saving’ them from themselves when they don’t want to be saved?

Suited bankers maybe the new scourge of our age but the BBC does enjoy some roguish ‘petty thieving’ by immigrant Romanian pickpockets who are rather daring with dazzling skills and an enterprise and professionalism so sadly lacking in our own underclass of thieving toerags .

Yes immigrants can teach us a lot.

This was brought to my attention  in the comments and is a remarkably ill judged piece that reports pickpocketing as a commendable profession if done with flair and professionalism, one to be admired….whilst the police arresting them are ‘heavy handed and terrifying’.

I suppose I might be a little angry if I lost my smart phone or my wallet or passport…but you know what, a year later I would be laughing about it…really I would….and of course I’d be voting Labour next time because they brought us this rich diversity of new skills and enterprising immigrants who do so much for GDP… we have to keep buying new phones after every little bit of roguishness…so good for the economy.

Over 3,000 BBC staff are using tax avoidance schemes.

You might think that this would be of great interest to a news organisation which has set itself the task to root out corrupt and ‘immoral’ practices in politics, banking and , er, other media companies.

You would be wrong.

As the Daily mail points out when given the chance to talk to the chairman of the public accounts committee they dodged it…..

On Monday, Newsnight, introduced by Kirsty Wark, should have devoted an item to BBC chief Zarin Patel’s gripping testimony to the Commons public accounts committee. Guess what? They found much else to talk about.

Amazingly, Margaret Hodge, chairman of the public accounts committee to which Miss Patel had given evidence earlier in the day, was invited to talk about the London Olympics. Tax avoidance by BBC presenters was not once mentioned. It is a subject far too close to home ever to be discussed on the BBC.

The BBC intended to broadcast a show that gave a platform to last year’s rioters so that they could excuse their actions and blame society for their behaviour…which let’s not forget involved…..‘The riots across England in August 2011 should need no introduction. Following the police shooting of Mark Duggan, a peaceful protest in Tottenham developed into explosive violent disorder.  Over five days trouble spread across the country with people looting, setting fire to property and attacking the police.  Five people died and over 2,500 shops and businesses were damaged. To date 1,290 rioters have been sent to jail.’

But as the BBC tells us:  ‘A court order has been made preventing the BBC from broadcasting the programme as planned on 16 July. The BBC will broadcast the programme at a later date. You will be able to comment on Nicola’s post when the programme airs.’

No reason is given, it may have to do with ongoing criminal proceedings but whatever the reason it’s a welcome block on the BBC’s campaign to white wash and excuse the arsonists, looters, rioters, killers, thieves and thugs who took the opportunity to have their fun at many other people’s expense.

This is what the BBC believe the programme represents:  ‘As a TV production team, we were faced with the decision whether to use this important and illuminating piece of work, even though it granted anonymity to criminals.  In our view it was justified because of the insights it provides into why and how the riots had happened.’

‘Illuminating, important, insightful’?  Hardly, it makes all the old excuses…the report (from left wing Guardian and LSE) this programme is based upon fingers bad parents, bad schools, bad government and of course bad policing but fails to mention the truth….that a hard core of criminally minded people took the opportunity to raise hell and destroy as much as they could and steal whatever they could carry away….and enjoyed themselves immensely.

It wasn’t ‘raging at the system’,  it was unbounded pleasure and criminality….the fact that the secondary riots only occurred when it was realised the police weren’t going to intervene shows that it was too little ‘system’ not too much that encouraged the riots.

The Guardian and LSE already had the answers they wanted to finish up with…they just needed to get the dogs to bark the right tune. Who knows what ended up being written out of the report, what questions were asked, what answers were really given, and what is on the cutting room floor.

Look at the format of the programme….actors are repeating the words of the rioters, it is not a normal, rigorous, in depth interview with rioters being asked to back up any statement…….

‘Whilst we are able to listen in to these accounts to garner fresh insights, viewers may feel frustrated or even angry because the tone of the interviews is very different to what we might expect from BBC TV: as journalists we challenge our interviewees and ask them to justify their words, but we can’t here.

Similarly we can’t elucidate what our characters say or ask them to explain references that they make.

Some speak in a street vernacular that is likely to be unfamiliar to many BBC Two viewers and some of the nuances and context of what they talk about are in danger of being lost.’

In other words the rioters are able to say what they liked with no questions asked….the one question that can be asked is would you believe them?

This is highly dangerous polemics…it is giving the BBC’s sanction to rioting and looting.  It is  meant to precipitate government pouring millions, if not billions of pounds into helping the rioters turn over a new leaf and become honest citizens.

The BBC is acting as a part of a large left wing pressure group that spins a web of lies to ensure that politicians are embarrassed and pressurised into ever more generous handouts from the tax payer’s funds….let’s remember…these aren’t ‘forgotten families’…these are families that get massive amounts of state money thrown at them already…far beyond the normal benefits of free schools, NHS, dental and opticians, policing, housing and a judicial system to protect them….they also get endless social workers, counsellors, special needs teaching, never mind constant police attention and free room and board at Her Majesties Pleasure.

Only this morning on ‘Today’ it was stated that one family was estimated to cost a council upwards of £250,000 to help keep them under control. 

These are not ‘forgotten families’.

The programme is in two parts…the first the rioters, the second the police…..no victims then?  And no voice of the man on the street who wasn’t in the riots…surely their views count for something?…..but the BBC and Guardian want to shut them out…because they suspect, rightly, that there will be little sympathy for the rioters from the vast majority of people in Britain.

The BBC is manipulating the facts for political ends and the consequences are that massive amounts of government funds are diverted to pay for the wrong solutions and subsequently wasted rather than being spent on people and projects who would benefit vastly from it and would appreciate what’s being done to help them…and go on to change their lives because of it.

It is a shame more of the BBC’s programmes are not forced to undergo judicial review before being broadcast….but then again that wouldn’t leave much on the telly if all the biased, highly partial, politicised, Labour supporting, polar bear hugging, Muslim extremist apologising, anti-Israel claptrap was taken off air.

The upbeat BBC is coming in for a storm of criticism today over its coverage of the Olympics which has centred on the G4S farce and according to listeners and viewers has been entirely too negative and is leaching the joy out of the Olympics, spoiling the expectations of many.

The complaints have been building over several days but switching on to different programmes I have heard the presenters all admitting they are receiving many complaints.

Victoria Derbyshire had so many complaints that she had to stop her show to deal with them and alter the subject from G4S to defending the BBC and its coverage.

Admittedly the G4S story is a big one but it does seem to be the only story in the world just now…one programme finishes and another carries on where the last left off. Did we really need to hear the live inquisition by grandstanding MPs of G4S bosses? Not exactly riveting nor informative…especially if you’ve switched off.

It doesn’t help that you may have the suspicion that it is just another chance to bash the government…the Police have certainly not wasted any time in taking the opportunity to put the boot into G4S….especially as G4S are going to be part of the ‘privatised’ police force taking jobs from the boys in blue…ie the real coppers.

I have to admit I can’t help thinking the responsibility ultimately rests with Theresa May…who should have been keeping an exacting eye on the big picture…something she failed to do with border control as well…she doesn’t seem to have gripped her brief….I think she should go…and police should not be privatised…but all that is for after the Olympics.

People are right…yes, acknowledge the huge mistakes that have happened, report them, but don’t dwell relentlessly on them to the exclusion of the big event itself.

A final word about the effect of lazy journalism….Derbyshire ‘broke the news’ to us that out of 300 expected G4S employees only 20 turned up for work.

Now if I heard that figure I would immediately query it….the obvious thing would be that maybe the figures were the wrong way round…but they weren’t.

Those figures were released into the world by the BBC without any corroboration…as Derbyshire herself admitted..they came from the completely neutral Surrey Police Federation (ie Union) but she said she didn’t know who at the Federation told her those figures….they were ‘unattributed’.

A tabloid newspaper would of course leap for joy at headlines like that but a serious, trusted and respectable news organisation like the BBC should be expected to make some effort to check those figures before  announcing them to the world.

It seems they may have been too eager to damage G4S’ reputation….which they did….despite later correcting the figures, around 42 out of only an expected 70 workers turned up, the 300/20 figures have now attained the state of urban legend…at least twice in her show callers stated the 300/20 figures as fact even after the new figures were mentioned.

The BBC’s eagerness to be first with a story has meant that what essentially may just have been some black propaganda released by a Police Federation has now become truth and G4S’s reputation is dragged even deeper into the mud by lazy or wilfully blind reporting in the search for a headline.

The rain in Spain may stay mainly on the plain but here in Britain it means we don’t have a BBQ summer and inflation drops as people don’t buy a new summer wardrobe….as the BBC’s Stephanie Flanders informs us….

Wet weather helps Bank’s inflation forecast

The Bank of England’s inflation forecast is looking better than it has for a long time – it may partly have the weather to thank.

So good news  on inflation is nothing to do with the government…how different it was when the government said that the massive snowfall we had last year lead to a drop in GDP as people couldn’t get to work or to the shops.

That claim was roundly denounced and mocked throughout the BBC…Victoria Derbyshire even went so far as to put together a montage of clips of George Osborne talking about the weather just to mock him…because of course he was talking complete and utter nonsense and just making excuses for his failed economic policies….wasn’t he.

I’d put that BBC attitude down to blatant political bias…much the same as they treated Bush…but it could just be complete ignorance on Derbyshire’s part.

Cultural cringe at work….

BBC shows no sign of shock, horror or outrage when a black man suggests that it is necessary to have ‘ethnic loyalty’.

Sounds not too dissimilar to something the BNP might print on a leaflet.

‘Somebody called Ashley Cole a “choc ice” on Twitter over the weekend after the footballer testified in defence of John Terry.

Ekow Eshun, a former director of the ICA who now writes about culture, believes it is a “slightly odd and archaic term” as it dates back to a time when black people “worried much more about their place in society” as there were fewer black people in prominent positions.

“It’s sad to see words like this still in usage,” he told the Today programme.

Novelist Diran Adebayo says the term doesn’t bother him and he believes it is still fair for some black people “to feel there has to be a word for people to feel somebody else… has less ethnic loyalty”.

The BBC has a wonderful device that gives it carte blanche to rewrite history or at the very least to put a preferred spin to it.

Programmes or projects like the ‘New Elizabethans’ for instance…’To mark the Diamond Jubilee, James Naughtie will be presenting 60 profiles of men and women whose actions during the reign of Elizabeth II have had a significant impact on lives in these islands and given the age its character, for better or worse.’

A list of 60 Brits who have had some sort of impact on Britain….all ostensibly chosen by the public but the final choice was the panel of historians selected by the BBC…and then it was down to the old lefty Jim Naughtie to write and present the biographies….so no chance of any left leaning re-interpretation of history then?

I have only heard a couple of programmes but, perhaps I was just unlucky, it seemed that being a left wing activist was a sign of heroism and saintliness whilst if you were a right winger, well you’re not really someone to praise but you did do some good work regardless of your politics.

A remarkable omission is of course Gordon Brown….a man who for whatever reasons kept Britain out of the Euro whist also managing to destroy the economy….shurely shome mishtake to omit the man who for 13 years bestrode the world like a colossus and then went on to save it?  Perhaps the BBC would rather we just forgot what’s his name and transfer our allegiances to the New Pretender, the offspring of Marxist aristocracy, Red Ed.

Another such programme is ‘A History of The World In 100 Objects’. Whilst it may have  originally been a programme intended purely as one of historical interest it is simplicity itself to change the narrative and emphasis slightly so that each object is now a device to illustrate the scientific genius of medieval Muslims, the artistry of ancient Africans, the building talents of ingenious Incas and so on whilst contrasting that with the greed and violence of European colonisers whose own artistic, scientific and architectural achievements were only made possible by robbing the defenceless natives of conquered lands.

This is made all the easier because many of the objects have little or no ‘provenance’, they are what they are and you may have little idea or evidence as to what that meant at the time they were made and used.

So how do you interpret how they were used or their significance to their own society?

Reading the book based on the programmes (and it is a very good book worth shelling out for) you find that deriving a meaning from an object is not so easy….discovering its social, cultural and ‘industrial’ impact is often based upon inspired guess work….or what the book calls ‘The necessary Poetry of Things’.

If you wish to reconstruct what went on in times past you must ‘interrogate and interpret the object as deeply and as rigorously as any written evidence.’

How is that done? By using considerable leaps of imagination…re-imagining cultures by relying on our intuitions, imaginative interpretations and a capacity for poetic reconstruction of the past.

They also tell us that ‘A startlingly large number of objects bear on them the marks of later events…frequently later interventions which were designed deliberately to change meaning or to reflect the pride or pleasures of new ownership. The object becomes a document not just of the world for which it was made, but of later periods which altered it.’

Who can argue with that? The objects certainly do become something new in the hands of the BBC…small time bombs from the past targeted to destroy our beliefs and confidence in our own culture and history and undermine the basis of society.

As the BBC is fond of telling us….everything you thought you knew about your past is wrong!

Heads Buried in The Sand like Ostriches…or is it Emus?…Can never remember which….the BBC always refuses to bring itself into the discussion when talking about ‘The Media’.  It produced a programme on the media’s influence on politics last year….but didn’t mention itself once.

The BBC considers itself a ‘Torch Bearer for Truth’ and I suppose that as such it believes it can do no wrong and so actually defies engagement on a rational basis with any suggestion that it is not only the most powerful media organisation in Britain but also the most influential.

Such a reluctance by the media to step into the lime light and accept its responsibilities has been noticed by others….as quoted by Julian Petley, a left wing academic who abhors censorship but launches abusive attacks on what he construes as right wing writers who don’t adhere to his ideology.

However in his confused rant here…he comes up with a couple of quotes that sum up the BBC itself rather than the targets he was aiming for (the Right Wing Press):

‘As John Lloyd argues in What the Media are Doing to Our Politics: ‘the media have an unwritten rule not to divulge their power … They make and re-make the versions of the world with which we live – and yet when the news media represent the world, they largely excuse themselves from it’. Or as David Walker puts it in his contribution to the New Politics Network pamphlet Invisible Political Actors, journalists ‘rarely write about themselves or their own political responsibilities, and they almost never write about the organisations and interests of the organisations they themselves write for’. From the way in which most journalists write and speak about their work, one would never guess that they are employed by what are now some of the most powerful institutions in society. Furthermore, because they refuse to acknowledge their power they also refuse to acknowledge the responsibility and accountability that go with power – whilst at the same time, of course, constantly insisting on their right, and indeed their duty, to scrutinise and hold to account all other power holders. Consequently, as Will Hutton put it in the Observer, August 17th 2003: ‘Britain’s least accountable and self-critical institutions have become the media’.

The BBC to a ‘T’…lacking any self awarenes or any inclination to confront the problems so often highlighted by its critics….and so powerful that no one dare tackle it head on.