Category Archives: BBC bias

Interesting choice of main subjects for the Today show’s guest editors….we had Tamara Rojo interviewing George Osborne who took the chance to peddle his views on Brexit, then we had Prince Harry interviewing his dad who wittered on about climate change and then Obama who trashed Trump and social media, then we had Ben Okri on the Rohingya and Grenfell, and tomorrow it must be the turn of Lady Trumpington, the 95-year-old Conservative peer who worked at Bletchley Park during the second world war and wants to explore the legalisation of brothels.

All, except perhaps the last, definitive BBC issues that dominate its broadcasting agenda.  Guess the BBC just got lucky that the people it chose to guest edit the Today show were so onboard with the BBC’s own concerns.  Only surprised that Yemen and immigration didn’t get a look in…maybe they did and I missed it.

Great excitement!!!!……renewable energy production has overtaken coal!!!!!   Wow, you could have knocked me down with a feather as I heard the unbelieveable news from the doleful voice of the BBC’s devout high priest of climate change, Roger Harrabin, as he breathlessly intoned the good news in the manner of a Spanish Inquisition torturer insisting with dread enthusiasm that the earth is flat and that you must believe him and renounce your previous disbelief!

The UK has achieved its greenest year ever in terms of how the nation’s electricity is generated, National Grid figures reveal.

In June, for the first time, wind, nuclear and solar power generated more UK power than gas and coal combined.

Separate findings from power research group MyGridGB show that renewable energy sources provided more power than coal for 90% of 2017, figures up to 12 December show.

British wind farms produced more electricity than coal plants on more than 75% of days this year.

So coal is down and out and renewables are stepping in to take its place?  That’s the BBC message they want you to believe.  Naturally that’s rubbish.

First, coal, after the government forceably cut its use as a fuel for generation, now accounts for a mere 2.9% of our electricity production….so hardly a surprise that renewables have ‘overtaken’ coal…or perhaps more accurately coal has undertaken renewables.  But have renewables surplanted coal as the BBC implies, the BBC pushing solar and wind?  No, gas generation was massively ramped up to fill the hole left by coal.  And of coure there’s nuclear….and the one renewable the BBC fails to hype in its bulletins…the controversial biomass.  And of course after all the headlines about renewables on a surge the BBC quietly admits….

Renewables overall – including wind, solar, biomass and hydropower – beat fossil fuels for only 23 days of the year.

And here’s the reality….solar and wind may have increased slightly but are in no position to replace gas and nuclear…and from the figures renewables may generate a good share of the power but the use is of non-renewable as wind and solar are produced at times when people don’t need power or is not produced due to adverse weather conditions.

Listening to the BBC’s news bulletins today you’d be forgiven for believing that wind and solar were rocketing in use and had replaced coal when the truth is that it is gas that has replaced coal, and nuclear and gas are still the main providers.  The BBC bulks out its sermon with messages from the converted…

Dr Andrew Crossland from MyGridGB and the Durham Energy Institute said: “The government has focused on reducing coal use which now supplies less than 7% of our electricity.

“However, if we continue to use gas at the rate that we do, then Britain will miss carbon targets and be dangerously exposed to supply and price risks in the international gas markets.”

He added that “refreshed government support for low carbon alternatives” is now needed to “avoid price and supply shocks for our heat and electricity supplies”.

Emma Pinchbeck, executive director of Industry body RenewableUK urged onshore wind to be developed across the UK in an “ambitious sector deal with the off shore wind industry” that could help secure a “golden age for renewables” in 2018. 

Hardly impartial…especially the renewable industry demanding the government subsidise a vast programme of onshore wind farm building.

Nothing new in the BBC ‘nudging’ the news to ensure we get the message it wants us to believe…and indeed its reporting from the US about the arctic weather they are having right now is a case in point as the extent and seriousness of the issue was played down by the BBC as half the US was engulfed in an arctic blast and is having record cold temperatures and snowfall.

The BBC almost mentions in passing in a small story yesterday the record cold across the US…

Snow emergency in US city Erie after huge storm

A record-breaking snowfall of more than 60 inches (150 cm) has hit the Pennsylvanian city of Erie over the Christmas period, with even more said to be on the way.

The city has declared a citywide emergency as a result of the storm, which began on Sunday.

New York, northern Ohio and northern Michigan are also heavily hit.

The cause?…

Forecasters say the extreme weather is caused by very cold air passing over the unfrozen Great Lakes.

Hmmm…but that’s not why it is ‘extreme’ is it?  Odd how this is just ‘weather’ and not ‘climate’ whereas record heat would be ‘climate’.

The BBC finally admits the truth in its headline today….but curiously no mention of climate change at all…

Brutal cold spell sets record lows across the US

Bitter cold continues to blanket the northern United States and Canada as forecasters warn that the deep freeze will continue into the start of 2018.

Can’t be long though before they start pumping out the ‘record cold is a product of global warming’ line to go with ‘record heat is a product of global warming.’

The BBC’s top story all day, and on its World page and of course on the US page, was its ‘Obama’ hatchet job on Trump on the Today show…following on from George Osborne [anti-Brexit] being the guest editor’s apparent choice of interviewee [for the life of me can’t think why a Spanish dancer should want to talk to Osborne]….guess the guest editors get some ‘guidance’ from the Today show on who to pick and what questions to ask.

As well as his less than subtle attack on Trump he gave us an extraordinarily patronising attack on people whom Obama thinks are rather stupid and live in echo chambers with no contact with the outside world…he suggest they must get out more and meet other people.

“Social media is a really powerful tool for people of common interests to convene and get to know each other and connect.

“But then it’s important for them to get offline, meet in a pub, meet at a place of worship, meet in a neighbourhood and get to know each other.

“Because the truth is that on the internet, everything is simplified and when you meet people face-to-face it turns out they’re complicated.”

Gosh, really?  Who’d a thunk?  Life is complicated!

Rather think it is lefty liberals like himself who create these echo chambers with the deliberate creation of identity politics and the ghettoisation of whole communities and thus the resultant antagonism and conflict that arises from that as each group is encouraged to demand more and more ‘rights’ and privileges for themselves…naturally at the cost of other groups.

Trump may tweet undiplomatic and strongly worded criticisms and messages but he didn’t run from Iraq and let ISIS take over and allow Assad to force millions of refugees to flee into Europe, he didn’t hand Iran billions of dollars, let them start trading again [thus raising more cash for weapons] and allow them to keep their nuclear programme on track whilst promising everyone they had stopped it, he didn’t preside over an increasingly divided and racially tense America, something that Obama helped create.

Obama was invited onto the Today programme deliberately to attack Trump….just the usual shallow, partisan rubbish that passes for news at the BBC.

Remember James Cook’s highly opinionated attack piece on Trump?  There was another similar hatchet job a month earlier from the BBC’s Nick Bryant…The time when America stopped being great.

If America ever did stop being great apparently it is all the Republican’s fault as Bryant can barely find a word of criticism for the Democrats…and indeed dismisses Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky affair as merely a ‘frivolous distraction’…and an ‘ostensible’ one at that….does the BBC doubt the affair?

He can though find much to criticise Reagan for…apparently he, like Trump, is a racist who played to the racist white southerners to get elected….and of course if you are white and southern…you’re definitely a racist….

Reagan’s sunniness was sullied by the launch of his 1980 campaign with a call for “states’ rights”, which sounded to many like a dog-whistle for denial of civil rights.  His chosen venue was Philadelphia, but not the city of brotherly love, the cradle of the Declaration of Independence, but rather Philadelphia, Mississippi, a rural backwater close to where three civil rights workers had been murdered by white supremacists in 1964. Reagan, like Nixon, pursued the southern strategy, which exploited white fears about black advance. 

Trouble is, not only are Bryant’s facts wrong his interpretation is wrong also….the speech was not in Philadelphia but 7 miles away, nowhere near the murder site and at the Neshoba County Fair which attracted 10’s of thousands of visitors in a state that was closely contested by the two parties….and immediately afterwards Reagan spent a week pitching his case to black voters in the North stating…

“I am committed to the protection of the civil rights of black Americans,” Reagan told the Urban League. “That commitment is interwoven into every phase of the programs I will propose.”

Why does Bryant not accuse him of pro-Black racism as he targets black voters?  Why does Bryant not mention that Carter opened his election campaign in the KKK’s homeland…

Meanwhile, President Carter opened his general election campaign in Tuscumbia, Alabama, then the national headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan (there was a Klan rally the day Carter came to Tuscumbia).

Reagan in fact launched his campaign nine months earlier from the Mississippi speech and he made almost exactly the same comments about taking back power for the states as he did in Mississippi….Here’s that part of his speech on national TV...absolutely nothing to do with race….

The 10th article of the Bill of Rights is explicit in pointing out that the federal government should do only those things specifically called for in the Constitution. All others shall remain with the states or the people. We haven’t been observing that 10th article of late. The federal government has taken on functions it was never intended to perform and which it does not perform well. There should be a planned, orderly transfer of such functions to states and communities and a transfer with them of the sources of taxation to pay for them.The savings in administrative would be considerable and certainly there would be increased efficiency and less bureaucracy.

Here’s his words from Mississippi…read the speech….I defy you to find anything racist in it….

I believe that there are programs like that, programs like education and others, that should be turned back to the states and the local communities with the tax sources to fund them, and let the people [applause drowns out end of statement].

I believe in state’s rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.

Bryant is peddling Democrat black propaganda about Reagan which is easily disproven…if one can be bothered to look, which Bryant obviously didn’t feel inclined to do…why let the facts spoil a good fake news story about a ‘racist’ right-wing politician?

Where is Bryant’s claimed ‘exploitation of white fears of black advance’ in the speech?  There is none, it’s a lie.  Bryant bases his claim that Reagan was racist on this…‘a call for “states’ rights”, which sounded to many like a dog-whistle for denial of civil rights.’   As we can see ‘state’s rights’ had nothing to do with race [essentially just like devolution here], and who is this ‘to many’?….does he mean to Democrat propagandists?  Once again the BBC adapting their stock phrase, ‘many might think’, to create the false idea that it was widespread amongst all right-thinking folk that they thought a particular way about an issue…such as in this case Reagan was a racist….which is a lie.

Bryant then goes on of course to trash Trump, the real aim of this piece…Obama is excused any blame….he inherited a terrible situation and the Republicans, of course, created a level of dysfunctional government unprecedented in US history…a ‘crisis of governance’…poor old Obama…just how did he cope?….

Barack Hussein Obama. His improbable success story seemed uniquely American.

Although his presidency did much to rescue the economy, he couldn’t repair a fractured country. The creation of a post-partisan nation, which Obama outlined in his breakthrough speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, proved just as illusory as the emergence of a post-racial society, which he always knew was beyond him.

During the Obama years, Washington descended into a level of dysfunction unprecedented in post-war America.

“My number one priority is making sure President Obama’s a one-term president,” declared then-Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell, summing up the obstructionist mood of his Republican colleagues. It led to a crisis of governance.

Not only that but all opposition to Obama was due to racism…a ‘whitelash’…

Beyond Capitol Hill, there was a whitelash to the first black president, seen in the rise of the Birther movement and in elements of the Tea Party movement.

Bryant dismisses Trump’s success as down to his TV appearances…thus doing what Obama does, labelling voters stupid, shallow and unthinking…

Norman Mailer once said of Reagan, that the 40th president understood “the President of the United States was the leading soap opera figure in the great American drama, and one had better possess star value”. Trump understood this, and it explained much of his success, even if his star power came from reality TV rather than Hollywood B-movies.

Nothing to do with his policies then?…Oh wait….his campaign was one based on grievance and identity….a dark campaign…

His politics of grievance, and the fist-shaking anger it fed off, struck a different tone than the Gipper’s more positive pitch. It played on a shared sense of personal and national victimhood that would have been alien to Reagan.

In the space of just three decades, then, the United States had gone from “It’s morning in America again” to something much darker: “American Carnage”, the most memorable phrase from Trump’s inaugural address.

Actually it is the Left that campaigns on such identity politics…Trump spoke to the whole nation about ‘America’ and making it ‘great again’….the BBC likes to say Trump only talks to his ‘base’ [white supremacists of course] but that is far from the truth.

Bryant set out to attack Trump….the whole piece is about setting Trump up as the bad guy who has betrayed America….

Few countries look anymore to Trump’s America as a global exemplar, the “city upon a hill” Reagan spoke of in his farewell address to the nation.

Hmmm…since when has the US been a ‘global exemplar’?  The BBC et al have hated the US and everything it stood for for decades….South America?  Plenty of states there that hate America, and what of the Middle East, Russia, China?  Did they all love America pre-Trump?

Bryant’s interpretation is based upon his own prejudice and how he thinks the world should be.  This is just another of these anti-Trump opinion pieces that BBC journalists churn out at regular intervals channelling their own bigotry and ignorance and pretending it is news.

Falling asleep on the couch watching the telly post Xmas dinner  did you notice any BBC bias?  If so list it all here…….

The Today show’s [08:55] guest editor, Tamara Rojo, the artistic director and lead principal dancer of the English National Ballet, unwittingly nailed the problem with the BBC on the head as she talked of the way funding of the Arts is done in Europe…nearly 100% coming from government.  Thus she tells us the Arts don’t have to bother with producing anything that the Public want, they are completely out of touch with that Public with little creativity, little care for the audience, producing what they like for the like-minded people that they want as an audience.  This single, guaranteed source of funding not only makes for a very closed off, insular Arts’ world but is open to being politicised, to being propaganda and to the manipulation of the People.

The BBC is in even more of a powerful position in that its funding, though reliant on the government, or perhaps rather Parlaiment, at the end of the day, is not only free from the pressures of having to be raised as the commercial broadcasters have to, ie producing programmes that people want to watch and thus attracting advertising, it is free from government pressure, or free to totally ignore any pressure and complaints….and thus is not only totally unaccountable to the People who pay for it but is also free to attack and undermine any government it sees fit to [Labour sees the BBC as its own party broadcaster and defends it and its privilege regardless of sense], again totally unaccountably…the BBC Trust as was, being reliably onboard when it came to complaints and Ofcom seemingly also unwilling to hold the BBC accountable for its failings….the BBC of course itself famously unwilling to accept criticism however valid and backed by evidence.

Being free from government control is a good thing, but only if the BBC is under proper and effective oversight, and it is not.  It is pretty much unaccountable and free to shape the news, current affairs and entertainment programmes as it likes in order to peddle a world view that those in its very homogenous, insular echo-chamber, populated by like-minded people, all celebrate.  It is free to load its programmes with messages, political, social, historical and economic, that buttress its world view and discredit, undermine and demonise those who it sees as a threat to its world view and dominance…hence Trump and Farage are freely protrayed as racists and Nazis with little to no real debate about their actual views, Brexit is a product of ignorance and bigotry whipped up by Russian propaganda, sceptics of ‘man-made’ climate change are denounced as dangerous lunatics who have to be silenced, social media [ie people being able to circumvent the MSM’s control of information and thought] is dangerous and full of hate, thus it must be controlled [ironically by the government that the BBC insists it itself must be free from].  Of course that is an attempt to maintain the likes of the BBC’s dominance of information and which is why the BBC is so keen for you, or rather for those in government, to be persuaded that there is a new era of fake news, a ‘post truth’ era that needs regulation and control of social media with the added message that it is the BBC that is the only provider of news that can be trusted to be honest and accurate [how many lols do you want for that?].  Journalists of course pre-Trump and Brexit were the most respected and trusted people on earth no?  The Left invented and weaponised the so-called ‘post-truth era’ in order to control the Right wing press and social media broadcasters and writers.

‘Fake news is nothing new, though technology has allowed it to be disseminated further and faster than ever; its prevalence in Britain is unclear; and many of those who bang on about it, from politicians to the mainstream media, have an incentive to inflate the threat.’

The irony is that it is the BBC that is out of control, entirely corrupt as it fills the airwaves with very one-sided propaganda much of which is ‘extremist’ in itself…such as the dangerous promotion of mass immigration of people with very different values and beliefs to our own and uncontrolled, open borders, the cheerleading for Marxist terrorists now hijacking the Labour party, the support for Muslim extremists and ideology, the drive to destroy the reality of British identity and the idea of Britain as a nation with culture, character and history to be proud of, the BBC’s willingness to serve a foreign master, the EU, and to sell out the British people and their interests, peddling pro-Remain messages at every turn, painting Brexit in as black a light as possible…and of course then there’s the BBC’s interesting take on the Middle East, its history and where the  blame lies….just  how much time do you have?

There is very little in the BBC news that you can take on trust and at face value….it, and nearly its other programmes, peddle a message, a ‘liberal’ extremist message that is utterly intolerant of any other views.

As we’ve noted before, the problem isn’t social media, it isn’t some dodgy ‘news’ site in Macedonia, it’s the main-stream news organisations which have an aura of respectability and trust about them which they can exploit to push fake news to people who trust them….even the BBC’s own Amol Rajan has noted this:

Fake news isn’t the big problem in news. The big problem in news is…the news

I’ve written several blogs here about fake news, a phenomenon whose supposed rise has coincided with my time as media editor. Correlation not causation, let me assure you.

In summary: fake news is nothing new, though technology has allowed it to be disseminated further and faster than ever; its prevalence in Britain is unclear; and many of those who bang on about it, from politicians to the mainstream media, have an incentive to inflate the threat.

It’s also a distraction from the real issues, which are the editorial selections and judgements that comprise the news. Getting news right – choosing which stories to cover, and how to cover them – is a constant challenge. No programme editor ever goes to bed thinking “We got everything right today”.

But doing the stories that really matter, and getting them right, is a much bigger challenge to the integrity of news in Britain than the alleged threat from fake news.

San Francisco: Man arrested over ‘Christmas terror plan’

Listened to the BBC all day yesterday and their reports about the ‘US Marine’ who wanted to be a terrorist….no idea, but could have guessed, that he was a Muslim convert…..just why would the BBC miss that crucial and very relevant piece of info from their bulletins?  Why tell us he was a Marine but not a Muslim….which is more relevant?  The BBC web report manages to include a quick mention of the fact that he is a Muslim convert but again seems more concerned about his Marine status telling us…’Mr Jameson completed basic recruitment training for the US Marine Corps in 2009, but was reportedly discharged for not disclosing details of his asthma.’  So hardly a Marine and nearly ten years ago….but a more important fact about his identity than being a Muslim?  Nothing at all about how he came to convert to Islam, when he did it and whether his asthma was a drawback when it came to exercising his new religious fervour.

Then again it’s just the usual BBC practice to downplay any facts that implicate the ‘religion of peace’ as a motivation…just as they happily report the Aussie police’s great big lie that the attack by a Muslim in Melbourne was not terrorism.  Others beg to differ:

Call it for what it is: an Islamist terror attack

We have all been knocked off kilter by this terror attack in Melbourne, another cowardly, vicious and sickening attack using a car to mow down innocent civilians.

The police arrested an Afghan migrant who according to their own reports cited the treatment of Muslims as his grievance and his motivation.

Yet Victoria Police waited five hours before sharing any of the ­detailed information and even then denied any link to terrorism.

This denial is so worrying so ­ignorant and so dangerous, yet even the Prime Minister adopted this same ridiculous line.

They tell us a Muslim migrant from Afghanistan has mown down people and raved about the treatment of Muslims yet they say there is no link to terrorism.

How can the public feel safe if the authorities and politicians won’t even confront the very real enemy of Islamist extremism terrorism.

This is the evil whose name they dare not speak — they are in jihad denialism.

Another favourite BBC narrative is of course that Brexit is a big mistake, the result of ignorance, perhaps stupidity, and bigotry.  Hence we get constant ‘subtle’ little nudges urging us to look back in history and weep as we would then realise what a catastrophic disaster Brexit will be just as country ‘X’ discovered when it left the utopian collective and benevolent dictatorship that had long held it in its kind embrace….such as say the once state of Czechoslovakia…..which the BBC now tells us was a happy, multicultural place that has now been rent asunder by savage nationalism….they really should have stayed together.  The BBC’s whole tone is one of  regret and negativity.  Brexit, you know, will be just like this…even if ‘just like this’ isn’t in fact the truth at all about Slovakia and the Czech state….I’m pretty sure they are quite happy making their own way in the world.

Another year gone, one that the BBC and its ilk tell us was a disaster, chaotic, uncertain and turbulent, a year that was somehow completely different to any other year…a very traumatic year.  And yet it wasn’t really was it?  Just the usual ups and downs of any year…just that for the BBC and its ilk the changes didn’t suit their world view and thus the year was ‘traumatic’ etc etc.  For many, many people the year has probably been extremely satisfactory and pleasant as the established order has been given a kick up the proverbial and the election of Trump and the Brexit result were far from being traumatic.  As for ‘uncertain’, that being a bad thing in the BBC’s eyes or rather that’s how they like to portray it as they try to build a case that paints Brexit as the bringer of a disastrous uncertainty…and yet isn’t every election ‘uncertain’….1997 was a total change, and the BBC seems totally unconcerned that a Marxist wrecker of economies and a terrorist supporter is poised to walk into Downing Street….if they think Brexit brings uncertainty and economic armageddon just what do they think someone like Corbyn and his even more fanatical running mate, McDonnell, not forgetting the shadow foreign secretary Diane Abbott [omg!!!!], would bring to the party?

So that’s one of the BBC’s major narratives for the year…it’s all a bit terrible #duetoBrexit&Trump…but their other go-to line is that Brexit will mean economic disaster….their every report is based upon some hyped up scaremongering claim that Britain will be reduced to the poor man of Europe, the NHS will crash, people will be begging in the streets en masse jobless and homeless, and we should start evacuating the children as the Brexit Blitz begins in earnest….and note #despitetheBrexitsqueeze spending is up..and may be a record for Christmas…the BBC reaction…’well it’s up but at a slower rate than previous years’….the news doesn’t fit with their narrative that Brexit has meant people have no money to spend.

Trouble is the BBC is wasting its time…it is only preaching to the already converted who want to Remain, Leavers didn’t vote on the economy, they of course want to do everything to keep the economy running well but their first concern is to leave the EU…and that was a political decision based upon sound reasons of sovereignty, the desire to control their own affairs as much as possible and to limit immigration.  Economics hardly figured in their calculations other than they knew that Brexit might hit the economy but they were prepared to accept that price and the hope that freedom from the EU might in future actually improve the economy in the long run.

Not only is the BBC wasting its time but this is clearly an approach that is designed as part of the Remain campaign’s ‘Project Fear’.  The BBC is taking sides and tries to keep Lord Hall Hall happy and not upset his dinner parties with the disagreeable news that despite the valiant efforts Brexit is still going ahead….a proper Brexit.  Better send him some Rennies.

So that’s the BBC’s main narratives to explain the year…a Trumpian/Brexit led dystopian political disaster and a future economic catastrophe unfolding as Brexit solidifies into its all too real evil manifestation of populist stupidity and bigotry.  Both wrong and highly partisan ways of looking at events.

With that I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a very happy, uncertain and Brexity new year.

Damian Green ‘resigns’ due to ‘lying’ about his knowledge of police claims about porn on his computer…according to Rod Liddle he didn’t lie…the police told Green’s lawyer who later told Green but only after he’d made his statement.

The BBC don’t work too hard to establish the truth…first they tell us Kate Maltby [who, despite claims to the otherwise, seems thoroughly intent on doing as much damage as possible to the Tories] told a ‘Downing Street advisor’, then it became a ‘senior Downing Street advisor’, then it became ‘Downing Street’ thus gradually ramping up the implication that May knew, and then it became ‘This speaks of a culture in Downing Street that didn’t take sexual harassment seriously’…the BBC going beyond implication into ‘fact’….in other words the BBC suggests May covered it all up….and all based on pure speculation.

Nothing like sensationalising rumour, innuendo and half-truths…but that’s the BBC…as Trump could testify…just where is the proof of the collusion with the Russkies?  Where is the proof that the Russkies manipulated Brexit?  None…and yet the BBC states that Trump almost certainly colluded with the Russians and that Brexit was a Russian plot.

You don’t have to look too hard to find the bias….list it all here….

The BBC’s latest anti-Brexit scaremongering headline:

MI5 warnings on Brexit, terror and Russia

MI5 has had to reassure its European partners about co-operation since the Brexit referendum, the head of the security service says, but the twin fears of terrorism and Russia has meant that European countries still want the UK’s help.

With a marked increase in the number of attacks in Europe, the committee said the government should be more forthcoming on any potential risks associated with Britain leaving the EU.

The annual report of the Intelligence and Security Committee provides the most detailed overview of the work of Britain’s spy agencies.

The committee, chaired by Dominic Grieve MP, said that the last two years had seen a rise in attacks in Europe leading to questions over the capability of some countries to deal with the threat.

So the BBC’s headline and opening narrative is that MI5 has said Brexit is a threat to security.   Hmmm…except this is a report from a Parliamentary committee [and of its 9 members 7 look to be Remain voters] not MI5 and its press release makes absolutely no mention of Brexit….what it does make a big deal of is the major threat of islamic terrorism and cyber terrorism from Russia, China and Iran.  Why does the BBC lead on Brexit then?

What does the full report say on Brexit?

MI5 has assured us that the UK’s decision to leave the European Union will not adversely impact on its membership of, and participation in, the CTG [ Counter-Terrorism Group ].

MI5 told us that there are currently “unprecedented levels of cooperation with 5 EYES, CTG and a [tri-Agency] approach”.

The BBC and Remainers like to suggest any hint of a border will mean terrorism will begin again in Northern Ireland…and yet we know that the terrorist threat has been severe for years and has never gone away…as MI5 admits in this report:

MI5 told the Committee that Northern Ireland represents the “most concentrated area of terrorist activity probably anywhere in Europe”, with terrorist activity disrupted on a weekly basis.
The threat level in Northern Ireland remains SEVERE, meaning an attack is highly likely. The threat to Great Britain from Northern Ireland-related terrorism, which is assessed separately to the threat in Northern Ireland, was raised to SUBSTANTIAL in May 2016. This means an attack in Great Britain is a strong possibility.

We commend the efforts of MI5 and the Police Service of Northern Ireland in limiting the number of Northern Ireland-related terrorism attacks……it is important that they are able to maintain the current pressure on the ‘new IRA’, in particular.

You might think that merited the headline not Brexit fantasies.  The IRA are still out there, Corbyn’s mates, a severe and substantial threat to the UK.

There is no real concern about Brexit at all in the intelligence services…most dealings are between countries not with the EU….and it is in fact lack of cooperation between EU countries that is the real concern…

We have asked the Agencies how Brexit could affect their relationships with European partners. GCHQ reiterated the importance of these relationships, but was relaxed about the direct implications: I think all our partnerships have been bilateral over the years. So we have never done anything through the European institutions, except some cyber security advice.

The threat from international terrorism transcends national borders, and the recent attacks on the European mainland have clear ramifications for the UK. The attacks have led some European countries to question the capabilities of their security services, particularly regarding their ability to work collaboratively.

The only concern is that data sharing is continued…but that is merely a legal process to be properly carried through…not a major problem…after all we share data successfully with many countries such as the US and Australia and Canada.

GCHQ did have concerns as to how European data sharing would work after Brexit: The only area where I think there will be some implications, yet to be decided, is on data legislation and how that develops. I imagine, once we are not part of the EU, there will need to be some provision, as the US have with their privacy shield, or whatever it was called, Safe Harbour, because… companies, the big companies, will need to be able to share data in a way that is legally compliant on… both sides, the UK and the EU.

It should be remembered that the chair of the committee, Dominic Grieve, is a hardcore Remainer….and this perhaps shows in his political point….which the BBC takes as a neutral piece of concerned advice from the committee….

Whilst we accept that the Brexit negotiating strategy is not a matter for this Committee, the decision to leave the EU clearly has direct and indirect implications for the work of the Agencies – and these are well within this Committee’s remit. We therefore disagree that this is purely a political matter.
European mechanisms play an essential role in the UK’s national security, particularly at a time when the Agencies have all emphasised the importance of enhancing their cooperation with European counterparts. We urge the Government to be more forthcoming with its assessment of the associated risks of the UK’s impending departure from the European Union, and the mitigations it is putting in place to protect this vital capability.

Yet another example of the BBC choosing to emphasise and concentrate on issues that it wants to sensationalise when the truth is there is no real story there at all…This is BBC scaremongering and the continuation of the anti-Brexit Project Fear.

The BBC is utterly corrupt, dishonest and untrustworthy as a ‘news’ agency.

Only the BBC could call an article ‘Nine charts which tell you all you need to know about North Korea‘ and then fail to mention communism, socialism, or even the North Korean Marxist ideology ‘Juche’ even once.