Author Archives: All Seeing Eye

Question Time 7th April 2010

By | | ,
10 Comments


Question Time this week comes from Woking, which is the town where the Martians first land in The War of the Worlds and also features in Douglas Adams’ book The Meaning of Liff as the word for when you go to the kitchen but forget why.

Woking constituency is represented for the Conservatives by Humfrey Malins with a majority of 6,612. He supported Ken Clarke’s leadership bid in 2001 and resigned from the Opposition front bench in 2003 over the Iraq War.

On the panel we have Foreign Secretary David Miliband, Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary and serial QT under-perfomer Theresa May, the historian Simon Schama and Daily Telegraph columnist Janet Daley. Menzies Campbell will be reprising his part as the grandfather in the Werther’s Originals advert..

Alistair Darling has confirmed that TheEye and David Mosque are only sustainable for the long term if there is a 83% hike in your National Insurance, so vote early and vote often at the slightly later time than usual of 10:55pm.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

Question Time 1st April 2010

By | | ,
13 Comments

Question Time this week comes from Stevenage, which is twinned with Shymkent in Kazakhstan, and location of The Pied Piper which is the only pub in the world to be opened by Her Majesty the Queen. Stevenage is represented for Labour by Daphne Barbara Follett, who is standing down at this election after overclaiming the highest amount of expenses of any MP in the country.

On the panel is ex-postman and soon to be ex-Home Secretary Alan Johnson, shadow Business Secretary Ken Clarke, broadcaster Richard Littlejohn and poker-playing Grauniad columnist Victoria Coren.

For those who wish to take part in the Biased-BBC Buzzword Bingo, we will be playing by the “April Fool Rules” meaning that anyone with enthusiastic references to “Capitalism“, “Thatcher” and “Ashcroft” on a diagonal line will be disqualified for watching a spoof show.

Once again TheEye and David Mosque will be scanning the small text for dodgy Labour statistics, and we look forward to the pleasure of your company at 10:30pm UK time.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

Fun With Immigration Figures

By | | ,
5 Comments

From the Let’s Compare Headlines Dept, we have another example of counter-spin in action. Via Channel4s FactCheck we hear that:

“Gordon Brown has done it again. The statistics he used for 2009 are an under-estimate, because they don’t include all migrants. The figures he used for 2007 and 2008, however, do. So he’s misled the public by comparing the most flattering data for the latest year with the most unflattering data in the previous years.”

That gives us a stark insight into the subject of a surprisingly wide spread of headlines:

“How Gordon Brown’s podcast turned an immigration rise into a fall” – Daily Mail

“Gordon Brown accused of fiddling immigration figures” – Daily Telegraph

…a wide spread, because BBC doesn’t seem to think it’s that big a deal…

“Row over Gordon Brown immigration figures podcast”

A “row” sounds so much less interesting, eh? Move along, nothing to see.

Hat-tip to GeorgeR in the Comments

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

Question Time 25th March

By | | ,
10 Comments

Question Time this week comes from Glasgow, home of the Red Clydeside socialist movement and not home to a Tory MP since 1982.

On the panel we have Chief Secretary Treasury and Unite member Liam Byrne MP, the Conservative Shadow Minister for Communities Baroness Warsi, the Liberal Democrat communities spokesman Julia Goldsworthy MP, the First Minister of Scotland Alex Salmond and businessman Sir Martin Sorrell.

Liam Byrne is a late replacement for Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy who has pulled out – just possibly because last time he did something significant in Glasgow it was attending a Labour Party fundraising dinner with Gordoom and Steven Purcell, who then mysteriously resigned in a cocaine and financial scandal which has oddly not gained the prominence the story deserves.

For those who wish to take part in the Biased-BBC Buzzword Bingo, we will be playing by the “Blatantly Political Budget Rules” meaning that anyone with “Spending Up“, “Taxes Up” and “Borrowing Up” on a diagonal line will win Greece, which is in much better shape than us now. Please note that for the duration of this game, living in Belize will result in your tax status being randomly targeted.

At the helm of the ship once again TheEye and David Mosque will be scanning the horizon for icebergs, and we look forward to the pleasure of your company at 10:30pm UK time.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

Budget2010: The LiveChat!

By | |
4 Comments

Welcome to the Budget 2010 live-chat, which is simultaneously starting just before 12:30 here on Biased-BBC, and on All Seeing Eye, Barking Spider, Corrugated Soundbite, Dick Puddlecote, Governmentitus, GrumpyOldTwat, Man Widdicombe, and Subrosa

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

Budget2010: The LiveChat!

By | | ,
6 Comments

On Wednesday afternoon at 12:30pm here on Biased-BBC we will be live blogging the last Budget before the General Election. The Budget will be carried on all major television channels except for BBC1 which will be showing Bargain Hunt (no, really!).

Importantly for us here on Biased-BBC, we will be looking carefully at the different ways that channels report and editorialise the announcements. We’ll be able to compare, for the first time here, one event reported several ways in a live environment. Good for bias checkers as well as important for everyone who pays tax in the UK.

The Chancellor’s speech will certainly be a political affair rather than a fiscal exercise, so we can expect plenty of unaffordable goodies deferred until after the Election with a challenge issued to the Conservatives to oppose them.

This chat will be a collaboration between A Tangled Web, All Seeing Eye, Barking Spider, Biased-BBC, Corrugated Soundbite, Dick Puddlecote, Governmentitus, GrumpyOldTwat(thanks for the pic!), Man Widdecombe, and Subrosa – all excellent and highly recommended blogs. If you haven’t been to some of them before then please take this chance to try them out.

From Biased-BBC, All Seeing Eye and David Mosque will be in the moderators chair so it’ll feel just like our regular Question Time evenings. To catch the live blogging, come back here on Wednesday, March 24th just after noon.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

Nasty Nasty Breeeetish

By | | , ,
10 Comments

Or, as the BBC more prosaically put it yesterday, “Lethal landmine legacy from battle of El Alamein“; accompanied by a picture of two blokes, a flock of sheep, several buildings, some power lines with masts and a tree – and captioned “featureless”. So why the sudden interest 68 years down the line?

The battle of El Alamein was a turning point in World War II but the unexploded munitions it left behind continue to kill and maim the local population, as Christian Fraser reports from Egypt.

Right, that’ll be the time we saved all of Europe from the Germans, the Italians and their allies but let’s not worry about that small factoid because we’re about to find out who the real villain of the Second World War is.

…no country is prepared to accept responsibility for owning or laying the unexploded ordnance. Who then is to blame for the maiming of 11-year-old Mawa? 

You’ve found one *just one* person to feature in the story and it’s an injured 11 year old girl who likes football. Brilliant. Her father chips in:

“I used to have sheep but I had to sell them because the children refuse to go to the fields now because they’re too dangerous. 

You’ve had sheep in those fields for 68 years and only now there’s a problem? Could this article be leading somewhere? Enough! Someone must be responsible! Name names, BBC, we demand it!

“Psychologically and economically we have been badly affected. And we’ve had no compensation.” The detonator could have been of Italian or German origin but Abdulaziz blames the British. “It was their battle,” he said. “They brought the war to Egypt.” 

Yay! It’s our fault!Perhaps we could apologise and pay them some…

Now though, a group representing some 660 registered injured is compiling a formal dossier to bolster claims for compensation. 

….damn, they got there before me. So remind us all again, why did we send tanks into North Africa in the early 1940’s? Without drawing breath the article informs us:

The region is rich in natural resources. There is a huge amount of natural gas that lies buried underground and the Egyptian government suggests there could be 4.8bn barrels of oil, potentially doubling the country’s existing reserves. 

Ah yes, Churchill was testing the waters for the whole turn of the century invading-countries-for-oil thingy. And we have “Evil Capitalist Pigs Caught Only Clearing Some Mines Shocker”.

International oil companies that have cleared their own access roads through the mines have already been rewarded with considerable finds.

Christian Fraser has been fed a plea for cash because the Germans and Italians haven’t been daft enough to fall for it. The BBC swallows the whole thing in one gulp. If only the other side in those battles had a self-loathing media as naive as ours then they too could enjoy journalism of this standard.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.