Interesting how some very political stories are being given a very high prominence by the BBC….of course they make no mention of the election but you know that the reason they are running these stories is because they want to promote Corbyn [well, Labour] and damn the government. Many interest groups know this and are queuing up to get some airtime with their tales of woe.
A couple of weeks ago the police were making a lot of noise about lack of funding and the BBC gave them plenty of airtime, and today we have the BBC telling us of an alarming rise in violent crime, a very recent rise after 20 years of crime falling they are keen to mention. The BBC rely on police figures for this but also at the end of their reports reveal that the British Crime Survey says crime levels are actually static. Why is that of interest? Because the BBC has changed its tune…Mark Easton used to bang on about the British Crime Survey telling us it was far more reliable than the police figures which, he told us, couldn’t be relied upon because the basis for their collection was constantly changing whereas the BCS never changed, it was he said ‘a thing of beauty…unchanging, reliable, representative, independent and informative’. Trouble is that was wrong. The BCS changed all the time in how they gathered their data…the computers systems changed, the software changed, the company that ran it changed…and Easton trumpeted the fact that this was a survey of 40,000 people…but in fact of that only around 1,500 of these crime reports were counted once the unreliable ones were filtered out…and who made the final decision as to what counted as a crime in these surveys? The Home Office…hardly impartial. Easton was of course countering claims by the Tories that violent crime was going up under Labour….Easton was defending Labour….but now the BBC suddenly has a preference for the police figures….must be an election coming and the Tories are responsible for a rise in violent crime…as made clear by Police figures, says BBC. In 2010 Easton told us that the BCS was ‘regarded as the best measure of crime trends.’
How about the NHS? In the run up to the Stoke and Copeland by-elections the BBC was hitting the airwaves hard with tales of an NHS in crisis, the day before Corbyn was due to go on PMQs the BBC released a survey that condemned the government…Corbyn used that on PMQs…and Labour ran its campaign in Stoke and Copeland based on the NHS……any thought that the BBC were working hand in hand with Labour to help them out in the by-election and are now doing the same during the general election?
We have had blasts from junior doctors, again no direct link to the election was made and yet we know that was the intent. The other day the BBC hit the A&E wards and we were told that it had never been as bad as this in 20 years and was ‘dangerous’…absolutely no reference as to why there may be problems at A&E such as a massive increase in patients from around 14 million in 2004 to over 22 million now and seemed to take no account of the fact that the Tories are putting in more money than Labour said they would at the last election and indeed Burnham said he would cut not raise spending in 2010…
Curb NHS spending pledge to save other services, says Andy Burnham
Schools and social care ‘could be badly hit’ by plans to increase health spending year on year, says shadow health secretary
Conservatives ‘irresponsible’ to oppose cuts to NHS: Andy Burnham
Andy Burnham, Health Secretary has accused the Conservatives of being irresponsible by pledging to reverse cuts and changes to A&E and children’s services in the NHS.
Will the BBC be asking Labour if its plans now to massively increase spending will come at the cost of other services such as schools and social care? Irresponsible?
Today Guido has a perfect example of how the BBC engineers the debate by using supposedly neutral commentators who turn out to be hard-line activists…
BBC’s ‘Community Nurse’ is Prolific Corbynista Campaigner
Yesterday evening the BBC News Channel interviewed nurse Danielle Tiplady live in her NHS uniform. The on-screen caption described her only as a “community nurse“. Tiplady was highly critical of the government on NHS workers’ pay: “I know one friend for example who’s being forced to sell her flat because she cannot survive on a nurses’s salary.” The implication was that this is an ordinary nurse speaking on behalf of her colleagues…
Tiplady’s appearance was subsequently clipped and shared on Jeremy Corbyn’s official social media channels. The optics of an ordinary, uniformed nurse criticising the government would, of course, be irresistible for Labour. But neither the BBC nor Team Jez mentioned that Tiplady is far from your average nurse. While softly spoken on the news, Tiplady is, in fact, a vociferous hard-left campaigner…
- Until recently Tiladay’s Twitter account used the name “Danielle vote Labour”.
- Her bio still contains a heart emoji for the Labour Party.
- She has addressed dozens of protest rallies where her favourite chant is “Tories out!”.
- Addressed a CND rally alongside Corbyn while a student nurse at Kings College London.
- Writes for “revolutionary socialist website” Counterfire.
- Writes for the communist Morning Star.
- She is a leader of the “sack Jeremy Hunt” Bursary or Bust campaign.
Just the usual lack of due diligence by the BBC when finding someone to comment on highly political issues.
Reference Mark Easton’s attack on the Tories during the 2010 election.….in 2010 police figures bad, BCS good….now in 2017, police figures [saying violent crime rising] is good, BCS [saying crime static] not so good….
New figures released today have thrown an incendiary into the election debate on violent crime.
Analysis of hospital data for England and Wales, by academics at Cardiff University [191KB PDF], shows there were 64,000 fewer violence-related attendances in emergency departments last year than in 2001 – a fall of just over 15%.
This contrasts with Conservative claims that violent crime has increased by 44% since 2002. It also appears to contradict Liberal Democrat analysis that hospital admissions for assault are rising.
The BCS, which identifies more than twice as many crimes as the recorded statistics, asks more than 40,000 people each year about their experiences of violence and is regarded as the best measure of crime trends. It suggests the number of victims of violence has halved since 1995.
Police records of violence are thought more unreliable because they are affected by people’s willingness to report crimes, police activity and changes to methodology.
Or this…once again telling us not to trust the police figures and to rely on the BCS…
Want crime trends? Just ask people
Recorded crime figures have always been a lousy way to identify crime trends. They are really a measure of police activity, their priorities and the confidence of the public to report crime.
Now we know that the statistics watchdog doesn’t trust the police recorded crime figures, what faith can we have that crime really has been falling for the past 20 years?
The answer is plenty.
The UK Statistics Authority has said that police recorded crime data in England and Wales should no longer be designated as National Statistics because of accumulating evidence that they may be unreliable.
o how can we be confident about crime trends? Well, at a very local level it is hard but at a force or national level there is a much better way to measure what crime is really like.
Ask people.
Each year for more than 30 years, something like 40,000 people in England and Wales have been asked how crime has affected them in the previous 12 months.
The British Crime Survey (now the Crime Survey of England and Wales or CSEW) is a world-renowned invention. Using robust statistical modelling, it identifies far more crimes than are recorded by the police.