All fairly obvious stuff from Matthew Goodwin in the Spectator…except to the BBC and fellow liberals who, as noted below, continue to frame Brexit solely as an economic problem failing to understand or believe, despite being told again and again, that it was about immigration and culture in the main…communities did not like being ‘swamped’ by thousands of foreigners turning up practically overnight making them strangers in their own land…the BBC merely brushes such concerns aside as ignorant, bigoted and racist and claims it is all about economics…if the poor [who all voted for Brexit says the BBC] saw that the economy was doing well and there was money for more schools and hospitals and houses they wouldn’t care if all their neighbours were foreign….that’s just not true though is it?….

What has led to the rise of populism? The conventional answer involves inequality, flattening wages – and general economic malaise. In Europe, one year after the vote for Brexit, Martin Wolf of the Financial Times claimed that the global financial crisis had ‘opened the door to a populist surge’. In America, thousands rushed out to buy J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, a coming of age story about down-and-outs in poverty stricken Kentucky, as a blueprint on the Trump voter. Yet this take is deeply misleading. If populists only required economic hardship to thrive then they would be rocking in Portugal and Spain while collapsing in states that have had some of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe, such as Austria and the Netherlands. The reality is that they are tanking in the former and surging in the latter.

So what’s going on? One possible answer (anathema to economists) is that people do not only care about jobs and GDP and that something else is having a much stronger effect. We might think back to an innovative experiment conducted in the 1990s by Paul Sniderman and his colleagues to find out why the Dutch were hostile toward rising immigration. Contrary to conventional wisdom they found that it was a sense of cultural rather than economic threat that had ‘by far the largest impact’.

We found [in our own studies in Britain] that worries over cultural threat overshadow concerns about the economy. So even in the shadow of a major financial crisis, recession, austerity, wage stagnation, squeezed living standards and an increasing number of terrorist attacks, it is still worries about culture –specifically, a belief that ‘British culture is threatened’ – that mattered more.

In both 2011 and 2016, feelings that British culture is threatened were most closely linked to hostility toward minority groups. This sense of cultural protectionism had the largest effect on explaining hostility toward Muslims.

This cultural rather than economic backlash is absolutely central to making sense of why millions of citizens across the West are pushing back against immigration and turning to parties that want to curb this rapid ethnic churn in the name of defending traditional national values, ways of life and identity. Our political world is dominated by transactional debates about jobs and resources yet it is clear that voters put an equal if not greater value on something that is more diffuse yet politically potent if it is seen to be under threat – a shared history, culture, tradition and way of life.

This not only goes some way to explaining why the ramblings of an economic elite and jobs-focused Remain camp fell flat during the 2016 referendum but also why the centre-left across Europe has steadily been drained of support by voters wanting to mobilise in the name of defending their culture and values, whether from a refugee crisis or political, business and many media elites who celebrate internationalism and seemingly feel no real allegiance to a national community.

So cultural backlash erupting across the West is distinctly unlikely to evaporate in the near future, even if economic growth is somehow restored. As societies continue to become more ethnically and culturally diverse, and as the populist right gives one side of this debate a much greater sense of political agency, these revolts may yet have a long way to run.

Who’d have thought?….

Gunpowder featured the most violent and visceral scenes of execution ever screened on primetime television. 

This star- studded BBC1 drama about the November 5 plot was not so much brutal as psychotic in its quest for historical accuracy.

It might seem hard to understand the need for this exceptionally graphic, nine-minute sequence… until you realise that the writer, Northern Irish novelist Ronan Bennett, is a Left-winger from a Catholic family, once wrongly jailed for the murder of a policeman during an IRA bank robbery. [Conviction ‘unsafe’]

(You might not be completely amazed, by the way, to learn that Bennett is a dedicated disciple of Jeremy Corbyn and worked for him as a researcher in the Eighties.)

Describing Bennett’s politics, respected US radio giant NPR says that in his work: ‘Ireland’s centuries of struggle against British rule are always there as a subtext.’ Now the ultra-violent executions take on their real context. 

The king’s Protestant thugs are the oppressive English state, while the Gunpowder plotters led by arch-Catholic Robert Catesby (Kit Harington from Game Of Thrones) are the Republican freedom fighters.

From NPR interview….

His 1999 novel, The Catastrophist, takes place in post-colonial Congo, but is an allegory of the situation in Northern Ireland, Bennett tells Renee Montagne as part of a series of conversations on war and literature.

“I was thinking very strongly of Ireland,” the author says. “I was thinking, how can I write about what the wider responsibilities of the artist in general are to the society he or she comes from? And how do you express that … role without the politics taking over the art?”

The BBC getting two for the price of one…normally they use the Gunpowder Plot, and the Fire of London, to warn us of the dangers of falling prey to ‘fake news’ demonising the ‘other’, false stories circulated by the Daily Mail and its like telling us about Muslim terrorism, radicalism and the failure, the wilful failure, to integrate….it’s all just not true just as the Catholic threat to Britain wasn’t true….it’s all dangerous black propaganda by sinister, powerful forces with malign intent.  This time they’ve doubled up getting a pro-IRA message in there as well apparently.

Trouble is of course the Catholic threat to Britain and its Protestant rulers was all too real just as the threat to British democracy, society and culture comes from those who not only preach against it but actively work to undermine it, the most extreme opting to use violence in order to force the breakdown of this society.

A new series of the BBC’s ‘Blue Planet’ and of course we get the adverts, sorry, discussions about it liberally scattered around the BBC.

Interested to hear that they see it as their ‘mission’ to change people’s minds about climate change.   Attenborough, now a convinced believer, told us that he thought there couldn’t possibly be any sceptics left…it was abundantly clear that the planet was warming…and that it was Man’s fault.  Well, the Sceptics didn’t oppose the idea of climate changing, it always does, it is in fact those who seem to think that it should stay the same eternally that are wrong.  The Sceptics were sceptical about what the over-riding cause was.  There is still no  proof that CO2 is a cause or the main driver of climate change and yet that is the BBC’s accepted narrative.  But it is a political if anything narrative…..designed to blame the West and make western countries hand over billions of pounds to the ‘victims’ of our recklessness.

‘Blue Planet’ may be a technical triumph and stunning television but it comes prepackaged with a highly political message hidden within.  Great that the climate change lobby has such a powerful and well funded propaganda tool in the BBC.

Jennifer Lopez brands Sarah Palin ‘a b***h’ in Spanish slang on TV

R4 treated us to NBC’s Katy Tur who expressed shock and horror that Trump had introduced misogyny to America and that female reporters and politicians could no longer appear in public without abuse and threats.  Naturally the BBC presenter lapped it all up without demurring in the slightest because of course no female politician has ever been abused in the US before the Trump Era….Sarah Palin doesn’t count coz she’s a stupid, crazy Republican Tea Party bitch…so it’s only right to abuse her….no?  What’s even more shocking is that so many women joined in the abuse of Clinton…treachery!   And yet so many women are happy to do exactly the same to Palin…but without the liberal angst….

Libs Threaten to Beat & Kill Sarah Palin… Media Silent

This piece artwork designates Sarah Palin as a “M.I.L.P.” (Mother I’d Like to Punch).

And of course back in Blighty we have the Left’s visceral hatred of Margaret Thatcher and the furious rage and anger towards her…..the BBC being party to much of that in the way it reported on her and indeed went so far as to play some of a record [and they had to be pressured into restricting the playtime to even that small amount] that was driven to no1 in the music charts by people celebrating Thatcher’s death….would they have done that if it had been Obama or even Corbyn?  Never.

Just another random drive-by attack on Trump by the BBC, completely meaningless and without merit intended purely to heap abuse [ironically] and discredit upon him and the ‘Right’.

Funny world where the BBC seems to be in love with hard-line socialists who frequent the studios of RT but shout loudly about Russian interference in the US election…apparently it is OK for a terrorist supporting marxist to get into No10 with Putin’s help but Trump was too much….he’s clearly no friend of Putin, if Russia did help get him elected they did it because Putin hates Clinton…personal not ideology.

Speaking of political interference in the democratic process by rogue ‘enemy’ [h/t Phillip Hammond] states…..the EU leaked information about May in order to undermine her during the election and today we learn this has happened again…possibly the ‘leak’ highly embellished in order to do as much damage to her as possible.

Here’s the thing…Corbyn goes to the EU and conducts some form of negotiation about his position on Brexit should he be elected and a few days later the EU tries to torpedo May once again, perhaps with the hope that to do so would restart the leadership challenges and thus trigger an election if May was toppled….coincidence?

The BBC are gleefully reporting the apparent leak in all its technicolour glory hoping mud will stick.  I haven’t heard them once suggest this is an EU dirty trick to undermine May…all we get is the EU side...we didn’t do it…it is a dirty trick to attack us...which is patently absurd.

The EU…the Soviet Union…Russia today….brothers in arms?…birds of a feather?  The EU, an unelected government that uses every trick in the book to maintain and increase its power and influence including the free and extensive use of threats to crush dissent….such as punishing those who want to leave.  You might have freedom of movement but if you don’t have political, social, cultural, economic freedom what do you really have?  The Berlin Wall may have gone but in spirit it lives on in Brussels with the BBC being one of its willing propaganda mouthpieces.

The irony is that it is RT that is attacked by the ‘liberals’ when there are parallels closer to home…here’s The Times’ Oliver Kamm…the EU supporting Times…..

Time to crack down on Russia Today and its destabilising propaganda

 

Putin’s propaganda channel should be completely ostracised from polite society

Why does Russia Today get away with spreading such flagrant falsehoods?

Russia Today is the agent of a hostile foreign power

With a record like his, the Russian president has an incentive to shut out scrutiny and spread disinformation. And he does. His tools include the English-language state propaganda organs Russia Today (RT) and the Sputnik agency. These purported news outlets are agents of a hostile foreign power; civil society as well as democratic governments should say so and treat them accordingly.

 

Well OK….but why just limit yourself to RT?

He goes on….

I’ve kept an eye on the output of RT and Sputnik and periodically written about it in The Times and (with particular reference to RT’s promotion of neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers) the Jewish Chronicle. What I didn’t foresee was that, as social media has become more important in the way that people read and watch news, outrageously fabricated stories would become more potent in their consequences.

Could not the same be said of the BBC which promoted the IRA, today promotes a man who is a hard-line Marxist and terrorist sympathiser, and of course the BBC which promotes Jihadists and Muslim radicals and their false narratives justifying their murderous actions.

Kamm continues…

RT has the trappings of a normal news channel but not the substance, ethos or ethics.

Putin’s foreign policy aims to disrupt and if possible sever the system of alliances that Western democracies built up in the decades after the defeat of Nazism. It’s had extraordinary recent success, exemplified in the vote for Brexit and the election of President Trump, who disdains the international institutions in which the US has voluntarily subsumed its power: the UN, Nato, the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organisation.

What?  Brexit was won by Putin.  Talk about conspiracy theories.  Brexit was won by the terrible prospect of an EU superstate that forced even more migration upon us…..who the hell watches RT?  Hardly anyone really.

There’s more…

RT’s slogan is “question more”, to which you can only hoarsely laugh. There is no questioning and no debate. RT and Sputnik are propaganda stations. Their targets are not only western institutions and alliances but the very foundations of modern Western civilisation: reason, science, tolerance, liberal political rights, and sexual equality.

‘The very foundations of Western civilisation’…under attack by Putin?   How about closer to home….such as the BBC…a BBC which promotes Islam even as it literally attacks us and our values….Islam opposed to all those ‘foundations of Western civilisation’ and yet protected and championed by the BBC.

The BBC World Service is the equivalent of RT…it is well known as ‘soft power’ and that was the reason the government funded it….its task was to undermine those regimes that were opposed to the Western liberal way of doing things.  The Russians think they are in the right as much as BBC liberals think they are in the right….so if you’re going to condemn the Russians for using ‘soft power’ to influence political outcomes in other countries you have to do the same when looking at the BBC.

Here’s some RT propaganda…makes you wonder why we are ‘at war’ with the Russians when we have so much in common and are essentially the same as opposed to some allies who, like the Russians perhaps, try to undermine our society, but do so with the willing connivance of so many of the Establishment as they pour billions of petro-dollars into promoting their own ideology in the West, but are radically different to us in their ideas of what society should look like…unlike the Russians who, post-Communism, are so much more like us.

It’s not just that the BBC is biased but that the bias is profound, insidious and damaging to our Nation state. A daily anti-Brexit story a day is de rigeur. One could be forgiven for thinking that the EU entirely funds the BBC output such is the globalist spin it puts on every major issue. Anyway, here is where you detail the bias!

Curious, the rather leftie Tory, Rory Stewart, says of Jihadis… kill ’em…and he says it on the BBC…and yet I don’t seem to be able to find the story on the BBC website.  A British MP, a government minister no less, says kill British Jihadis and yet the BBC stays silent?  Extraordinary.  Probably checking with Labour to see what stance they take on it….shocked ‘outrage’ or resigned acceptance of a necessary evil.

From the Telegraph:

‘The only way’ of dealing with British Islamic State fighters is to kill them in almost every case, minister says

British Isil fighters should be killed in Syria rather than be allowed to return to UK, a Government minister has said. Rory Stewart said converts who leave Britain to fight for the terror group are guilty of horrific acts and the only way of dealing with them is to kill them “in almost every case”.

Asked by BBC Radio 5 Live’s John Pienaar if they had “brought on themselves what they are about to get?”, he said: “These are people who have essentially moved away from any kind of allegiance towards the British Government.

“They are absolutely dedicated, as members of the Islamic State, towards the creation of a caliphate, they believe in an extremely hateful doctrine which involves killing themselves, killing others and trying to use violence and brutality to create an eighth century, or seventh century, state.

“So I’m afraid we have to be serious about the fact these people are a serious danger to us, and unfortunately the only way of dealing with them will be, in almost every case, to kill them.”

The BBC was always keen to quote Rory Stewart when he criticised the Iraq War, not so much now though.

Even the Guardian reports his words…

Only option is to kill British Isis fighters in Syria, says minister

I’m guessing the BBC thinks all these returning Jihadis will turn out to be those Churchills, Ghandis and Mandelas that Mark Easton suggested they were telling us our society would benefit so much from their radical thinking…and the BBC would undoubtedly be interviewing the life out of them and asking ‘Just what was it that radicalised you?’….answer….British foreign policy and Islamophobia in Britain….exactly what the BBC wants to hear.

The BBC trying to build a sympathetic case for the returning terrorists?  You bet they will.

Talking of the BBC inventing history...here’s another example….the BBC is often keen on using the ‘Justinian’s Flea’ method of ascribing runs of history to very specific, singular events…such as the invention of the plough.  This apparently kickstarted civilisation and led to the misery we all have to suffer now with its capitalism, inequality, war and oppression…. and bad food.

The plough was a simple yet transformative technology. It was the plough that kick-started civilisation in the first place – that, ultimately, made our modern economy possible. But the plough did more than create the underpinning of civilisation – with all its benefits and inequities. Different types of plough led to different types of civilisation.

So not fire or the domestication of horses for transport and freight, dogs for hunting and herding, sheep, goats and cattle for food, not hand tools or weapons that improved hunting and war, not the wheel, not the science of the seasons, not water management such as dams, canals and terracing, not stone-working, not metal-working that made the dreaded plough, not science and knowledge passed on and developed continuously throughout the millenia that helped the spread of ‘civilisation’ then, or even, God help us, the rise of religion?  Just the plough.

Apparently we would all be much happier as hunter gatherers…you’d be nuts not to prefer a handful of wild nuts and berries to a toxic, sugar-filled Mars Bar practically force fed to you by the evil capitalist sugar industry that profits so grossly from feeding you this poison.

Just more anti-capitalist student tosh from the BBC…..and undoubtedly anti-Christian as well….

A hundred years since the Russian Revolution and apparently, according to the BBC, everything that has happened since has been our fault…..we are the reason the Russians are so bolshy.  Can’t help thinking the BBC are using this anniversary to push a bit of agitprop to help Corbyn out…telling us how wonderful Communism could have been given a fair chance and that revolutionary politics can transform your country for the better.

Presumably the BBC has never heard of the Crimean war or ‘The Great Game’….let me see…..arrhh yes…Crimean War…in the 1850’s….maybe Diane Abbott thinks that is post-1917 but I’d hoped better of the BBC.

Once again the BBC reinvents history to suit its own agenda…Orwell would be gratified to see ‘1984’ springing to life.

Still gotta admire the way the Russkies roll their R’s….

The BBC were boasting last week of the awards they had won for their radio shows…not too difficult when you have enormous resources that are guaranteed due the unique way the BBC is funded.