Author Archives: Andrew

This evening BBC News Online’s news ticker flashed up: “Prisoner found hanged in his cell at a privately-run Warwickshire jail”, which linked to Prisoner found hanged in his cell, which reads:

A prisoner has been found hanged in his cell at a Warwickshire jail.

Michael Bailey, 23, was serving a four-year sentence at the privately-run HMP Rye Hill for supplying drugs.

He arrived at the prison in December after being convicted at Birmingham Crown Court.

There will be an investigation by the prison and probation service ombudsman Stephen Shaw, a Prison Service spokeswoman said.

She added: “Every death in custody is a tragedy and we offer our sincere condolences to the family and friends of Mr Bailey.”

On the face of the evidence thus presented, the private ownership of the prison is irrelevant to the story. So why mention it? If the ownership of the prison is germane, then by all means explain why it matters, but until then it should be left out – unless of course the BBC intends to point out the ownership of every prison and other public service when reporting incidents within those services, complete with the implication that the incident is in some way related to the ownership of the service.

In a similar vein of public good, private bad, we’ve recently had a rash of right-on BBC hidden camera Inside Story exposés, including The Secret Policeman, the BNP, a privately run prison, privately run immigration detention centres and transport, privately run airport security, Yes Car Credit, etc. etc.

While almost all of these have been interesting and informative, they also tend to breathlessly emphasise the private ownership of privately run services, as if that is the sole or main cause of any lax management, inefficiency or abuse that is uncovered. Perish the thought that a publicly owned and run service could ever be lax, inefficient or abusive!

I look forward, in the interests of justice and fearless investigative journalism, to future exposés. Here are a few suggestions for the BBC to turn it’s fly-on-the-wall attention to:

• Local Government – an investigation into inefficiency, fraud, maladministration and corruption in local government – at least two full programmes worth here: 1) Housing benefit administration – how much fraud really goes on? 2) Planning officers and committees – how easy is it for corrupt officers and developers to subvert the planning process against the interests of local residents?

   

• The Police service and the Home Office – investigating the effect of government targets and bureaucracy in the fight against crime;

   

• The Immigration Service – how effective and efficient is the immigration service? Why does it take so long to process immigration cases? Are the rules always followed? How easily can the system be abused?

   

• The NHS and the Dept. of Health – investigating the effect of government targets and bureaucracy in the health service;

   

• The Far Left – an inside view of the kaleidoscopic splinter world of Britain’s far left activists, exposing, for example, the involvement of the SWP in the establishment and operation of the Stop the War Coalition. Does the hard left still plan and theorise about how best to foment revolution in the UK, do they engage in entryism and agitation, and so forth;

   

• The Fire Service – just what do firemen get up to when they’re on duty but not on call? How much moonlighting (second jobs) goes on, and how does it affect their ability to perform their public duties?

   

• HM Customs & Excise – an exposé of the zeal with which Customs & Excise meet their collection targets even where it involves bankrupting otherwise viable businesses (employers) with short-term cash-flow problems, at greater cost to the state than delaying or temporarily foregoing tax collection;

   

• Religious worship & teaching – what’s really being said in private in Britain’s churches, mosques, temples and synagogues? Do they all honestly promote community cohesion? Or are there instances of hate-speech and indoctrination?

   

• The Passport Office – how easy is it to get a British passport, even if you’re not entitled to one? How much does it cost? How scrupulous are background checks? Do they check the validity of counter-signatures properly? etc.

   

• Animal Rights terrorism – an inside view of the harassment and terrorism of legal businesses and their employees by animal rights extremists, and the loopy logic they use to justify their activities.

While we’re at it, we could also have a secret fly-on-the-wall film of the day-to-day goings on at BBC news – both in newsrooms and out and about, including: 1) the selection, prominence and fact checking of stories; and 2) the tricks that journalists and camera operators get up to present participants favourably or unfavourably.

I’m sure Biased BBC readers will be able to suggest many sensible additions to the list of public services and institutions that could do with the astringent glare of national exposure. Investigating public services is a public service in itself – unlike the private sector, where you can walk away and get a better deal elsewhere, most government services are a monopoly – you pay what you’re told to and you get what you’re given. It’s time for more Lights, Camera, Action!

* from Animal Farm, by George Orwell – a concise satire of the Soviet Revolution and Stalinism – very relevant to politics in general. Full text online in various places, including here at Project Gutenberg of Australia.

On Wednesday March 16th BBC News Online featured a story Italy ‘hopes’ for Iraq withdrawal, that begins:

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has confirmed that he “hopes” to begin pulling out Italian troops from Iraq as soon as possible.

Mr Berlusconi told the US president of his plans to begin withdrawing troops this September in a telephone call.

Mr Berlusconi said the decision to remove his troops would depend on Iraq’s security situation.

On Friday March 18th, The Times featured a story Italian troops to stay, after all, that begins:

TO BITING criticism from the Italian Opposition and the press, Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister, backtracked yesterday over his announcement that Italian troops would start withdrawing from Iraq in September, claiming that this had only ever been a “hope” rather than a commitment.

On Tuesday night Signor Berlusconi had caused consternation in London and Washington by declaring on state television that Italy would begin a “progressive withdrawal” of its 3,000-strong contingent from Iraq starting in September, provided local security conditions allowed this.

The Times story adds:

Yesterday, however, Italian newspapers carried a “clarification” from Signor Berlusconi’s office stating that after a “long and cordial” conversation with President Bush the Italian leader wished to make it clear that there was “no fixed date” for withdrawal, which could only take place “in consultation with our allies”.

Signor Berlusconi said that the media had misinterpreted his words and built “castles in the air”.

The difference in emphasis between the two reports is interesting. Whilst there are clear differences in the timings of the two reports, they both refer to essentially the same events, yet the BBC version emphasises the confirmation of hopes for withdrawal as soon as possible, whereas The Times notes that this “had only ever been a ‘hope’ rather than a commitment”. Perhaps the BBC is in the process of belatedly writing up Mr. Berlusconi’s clarification, to avoid any misleading impressions becoming established fact, as demonstrated in a BBC report from Saturday March 19th, Iraq rally hears troops out call:

Scottish Socialist Party national convener Colin Fox said the announcement that 3,000 Italian troops are to leave Iraq showed that the “illegal occupation” was unravelling.

Clearly the Italian troops are not leaving Iraq yet, and there is no firm plan or date for them to do so – so the BBC quote above is misleading. At the very least it needs more quotemarks to make it clear that it is the far-left speaking rather than the BBC (for those of us who hope and believe that there is a difference between the two!).

P.S. The satire-mongers among us may enjoy the cartoons described by The Times: ‘La Repubblica retaliated with a front-page cartoon showing the Prime Minister declaring: “I never said what I said, and if I did say it, I misrepresented myself”. The cartoon in Corriere della Sera had Signor Berlusconi dictating a statement reading: “I have agreed with Bush on an immediate withdrawal – that is, the immediate withdrawal of what I said on television”‘.

According to The Grauniad: “Mark Thompson, the BBC’s director general, is gaining a reputation as something of a rottweiler as he slashes into the corporation’s staffing structure. Yesterday this image took on a physical manifestation when allegations emerged that, when he was editor of the Nine O’Clock News, Mr Thompson sank his teeth into the arm of a colleague…”

Sounds like more of a gnasher than a slasher then. We wait with interest to see how the BBC gets its teeth into this story!

Update: News Online’s Entertainment page has a link, BBC bites back over Mark Thompson “horseplay”, to their story about old BiteMark: BBC playing down biting incident.

, I chanced up their story about Private Johnson Beharry, VC, UK soldier wins highest honour. In it they include the line:

Private Johnson Beharry, 25, becomes the first person to receive the award for more than 20 years.

Would it really have been too much to mention, even in passing, that the last two VCs were awarded during the Falklands War in 1982, perhaps even going so far as to remember their posthumous recipients, Colonel H. Jones, VC, and Sgt. Ian McKay, VC? It’s not like there’s any shortage of related material on the web, for instance,
this or
this or
this or
this.

This isn’t an issue of bias, but to include this small but noteworthy detail (even as a link) would be part of the BBC’s mission to educate, entertain and inform, and might even provoke curious youngsters to go and find out a bit more about British history. But then again, maybe that’s why the BBC didn’t mention it. Or perhaps the CBBC hacks were too lazy to look it up, or worse, have low expectations of their audience’s ability and interests.

The reason I originally went to the CBBC Newsround site was to find out what they said about the Hair-braiding sparks school row story. Newsround’s TV coverage on Tuesday evening included viewer’s feedback on the story, although neither the recap of the story nor any of the selected feeback mentioned the race discrimination aspect of the story.

Even though it is obliquely mentioned in their web coverage, why omit the relevant detail, the nub of the story, from their TV coverage? It is the race discrimination aspect of this story that makes it a story – it wouldn’t be much of an issue were the policy applied consistently to all pupils at the school (although Shabina Begum may beg to differ!).

Further to this, while they say that “Olivia has been given the chance to work in a unit at the school”, they omit to explain that it is the chance to work separately from her friends and fellow pupils. Hardly an adequate solution.

The BBC’s Britain’s Streets of Vice series is being repeated on BBC1, starting tonight with Sex in the City, described by Radio Times as follows:

Sally Magnusson tells the story of a young prostitute struggling with her addiction to crack cocaine and heroin, one of more than 5,000 women thought to be working on the streets and risking violence, disease and a criminal record

It’s on at 11.05pm – it’s on so late because of the adult nature of the material and topic – not that that stopped the BBC showing it (and the rest of the series) at 9.15am in the morning three weeks ago, just as toddlers and children off school sat down to watch. The next episode will be on late at night next Tuesday. Make sure your kiddies are safely tucked in bed, just in case they find these programmes as ‘challenging’ as Alison Sharman, BBC Daytime Controller, bragged.

For the full story, see my previous post: All right my darling? Looking for business? What, at 9.15 in the morning? Are you kidding?

(Realplayer, 224Kbps) spent its first seven minutes covering the Conservatives proposals for dealing with the problem of illegal traveller camps built in contravention of planning laws, both on their own land, and, more often, on other people’s land, often in the green belt.

All the usual leftie hot-button words were used – racism, bigotry etc., with lengthy Going Live! reports from Vikki Young in Essex (with Michael Howard) and John Kay in Worcestershire.

Between 5’35” and 6’58” into the broadcast the following exchange took place:

Anna Ford: “Our Chief Political Correspondent, Mark Mardell, is at Westminster. Mark, why have the Conservatives decided to focus on this issue?”

Mark Mardell: “I’m sure the fact that the powerful Sun newspaper is running a vociferous campaign on this issue doesn’t put them off, but there’s something broader than that, I think a lot of the political parties realise that there’s a sense running through British politics for a number of years now of respectable outrage at, uh, uh, uh, an injustice. Now, we’ve seen this with single mothers on benefit, we’ve seen it with asylum seekers, but the feeling that respectable people who feel that they’ve played by the rules see others really taking the mickey out of society and getting away with it and that’s what the Conservatives are tapping into here, and it also allows them to say ‘we’re listening to you, uh, uh, the Labour government is not'”.

Anna Ford: “Now some people are being extremely critical of the Conservatives policy aren’t they?

Mark Mardell: “One Labour MP has, in the last few minutes, said this policy has, [pause] the whiff of the gas chamber about it. Now those are very serious words indeed, and of course Michael Howard has made it clear that, uh, there is no hint of racism behind what he’s doing as far as he’s concerned, but more broadly than that, as I think we’ve heard already in the programme, the other parties, uh, feel that, er, the Tories have brought this upon their own head or upon society’s head, in that they, in 1994, er, er, abolished the, uh, need for councils to provide these sites and they say the problem is simply there aren’t enough sites legally available.”

Anna Ford: “Mark, thank you”.

My jaw dropped at the emboldened words. How about yours?

Michael Howard’s Grandmother was murdered at Auschwitz, as the BBC well know. To say such a thing about him without a shred of evidence is deeply offensive in a number of ways to a wide range of decent people.

It doesn’t surprise me that a Labour MP is stupid enough to say such a thing – but that Mark Mardell should repeat such offensive tittle-tattle without the decency of at least attributing it to the moron concerned shows, at best, a distinct lack of judgment on his part.

That apart, whilst smearing Howard and the Conservatives with talk of gas chambers, Mardell has a cheek to suggest the problem is all the Conservatives fault for changing the law in 1994. Well hello Mark, but T. Blair esq. has been in power since 1997, so if there’s a problem with illegal traveller camps now he’s had some time to do something about it himself.

On a related note, I’d like to see more detailed coverage of this issue, rather than simple political point-scoring all round. For instance, in Vikki Young’s report she mentions that there are 5,964 caravans on council sites, 4,813 on private sites, 1,855 on land without planning permission and 2,377 on other people’s land, again without planning permission. We aren’t told the origins of the travellers, where they come from and go to, how they make a living and pay taxes, how many of them there are in the UK each year (are there more now than before? if so, why?), how many vacant pitches there are (are travellers being fussy about their location?) and so on. At the moment the broadcast media are reporting this issue as if UK has a responsibility to provide legal pitches to roaming herds of nomadic travellers wherever and whenever they happen to pitch up in the UK, regardless of the available space or the concerns of local residents, which is not something I recall any public debate on.

Update: According to several B-BBC commenters, the above remark has now been attributed to Kevin McNamara – an old-time leftie retread who’s standing down at the next election.

Recently, a rather odious Conservative MP, Jonathan Sayeed, now expelled from the party, has been mentioned several times on BBC News Online, with headlines such as Sayeed to stand down as Tory MP and Tour row MP loses Tory party whip. BBC News Online’s coverage of old Seedy has been fulsome and detailed, leaving no doubt that Sayeed was, to use their term, a Tory.

Compare and contrast this with the sparse coverage of Chris Pond MP, quietly mentioned in passing on BBC News Online’s UK and Politics index pages (no picture or feature box or prominent billing for him), leading to their story MP cautioned for criminal damage.

Nowhere in the headline or even in the story is it mentioned that Chris Pond is a Labour MP. Nor is it mentioned in the headline that Pond is a government minister, no less, at the Department of Work and Pensions.

To see what the BBC omitted from their coverage you have to locate the original report in The Mail on Sunday, Minister arrested for attack on young mother, where we find that, apparently unnoticed by the BBC:

Neighbours in the modern mews development where the incident took place said yesterday that they had at first understood from the police that Mr Pond would be prosecuted. But, after the decision was referred to both the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Attorney General, the MP escaped with a police caution.

The fact that such senior Government law officers were consulted raises questions over whether the decision not to prosecute was made in order to save Mr Pond’s Ministerial career which would almost certainly have been ended by an ensuing court case.

Another interesting snippet unmentioned by the BBC is the fact that “Mr Pond, 52, has repeatedly spoken out on the need to crack down on ‘nightmare neighbours'”. Indeed.

As with much BBC bias, either of these stories, Sayeed or Pond, taken in isolation, would be fine. It is when you put them together and compare the detailed coverage of ‘Tory’ Sayeed with the bland coverage of ‘MP’ Pond that the BBC’s ‘angle’ becomes apparent. If Pond were a Conservative Minister in a Conservative government in the run up to a general election you could bet that the BBC, along with much of Fleet Street, would be much more interested in his story, leading bulletins with it and generally baying for his head. Lucky for Pond that he’s not a ‘Tory’.

Update: More in Today’s Times: Parking row MP escapes court action.

was the headline in a news summary by Philip Hayter on BBC News 24 just now, followed by a brief mention of the Conservatives plans to reform the law to protect homeowners and the environment from the blight of illegal traveller encampments.

This surprised me – the last thing the Conservatives would want to do is go anywhere near starting a race row, particularly knowing how the shrill harpies of the left screech on and on at the merest hint of race being an issue – so who has suggested the issue involves race, and, more importantly, why does that become the BBC headline to the story rather than proper coverage of the substantive issue itself?

The issue is that it appears that anyone from anywhere in the EU with a caravan and an attitude can settle wherever they like in the UK, in complete contravention of the planning laws, using their ‘human rights’ to disregard everyone else’s human rights.

Turning to BBC News Online, the story is a little clearer – although their angle on the story is the same – Tories deny Gypsy race row claim. It turns out that:

Planning minister Keith Hill said the Tories were “tapping into the biggest vein of bigotry – prejudice against Gypsies and travellers”

So, there we have it, a not particularly bright leftie minister (who, one is left to assume, is Labour, since the BBC fail to name his party) has neatly demonstrated the old truism that goes:

Q. What’s a racist?

A. Anyone winning an argument with a leftie.

…and that then becomes the BBC’s focus on the whole story. Trebles all round in the newsroom.

Further down the story (timestamped 11:52, 20MAR05), in a classic piece of BBC News Online sloppy journalism, we find:

The Conservatives have already said they intend to review the Act and scrap it if it cannot be rewritten to their satisfaction.

They claim it is putting the interests of criminal “chancres” before hard-working members of the public.

While ‘chancre‘ might well be appropriate, I suspect ‘chancer’ is what was actually said – as has turned out to be the case, following a stealth edit between 3 and 3.30pm – a mere three hours after the story went online!

, the BBC ‘will cut 1,500 extra jobs’. This is one set of redundancies (sorry, ‘cuts’, as the News Online hacks call it) that’ll be given the full treatment whenever possible by BBC News staff. On with the reform!

This evening’s CBS Evening News with Dan Blather, sorry, Bob Schieffer, as repeated on Sky News in the UK, covered the meeting of Robert McCartney’s magnificent sisters and partner with George Bush at the White House today, as well as the exclusion of Gerry Adams (the well known member of the IRA’s seven-man ruling Army Council, along with Martin McGuinness). The refreshing thing was that, unlike the BBC, CBS told it straight: Robert McCartney was described as a “Northern Ireland Catholic killed by the IRA” and Gerry Adams was described as “the head of the IRA’s political wing”. Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political pretence, wasn’t mentioned.

While I’m off the topic of the BBC, I take my hat off to Private Johnson Beharry, age 25, of the 1st Battalion The Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment and to all his brave colleagues. Private Beharry is the first winner of the Victoria Cross, the United Kingdom’s highest military honour, since the Falklands War in 1982, and the first to live to tell the tale since 1965. An inspiring example to us all.

Update: The Times, 21MAR05: I’ll soon be fit enough to serve again – perhaps in Afghanistan, says new VC