Whittingdale backs away from putting the BBC in its place
The BBC should pay the price for its blatant anti-Tory and more importantly its anti (small c) conservative bias in the upcoming Charter Review.
But under John Whittingdale, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport , who just weeks into the job has revealed himself to be just another wet Tory, I fear it won’t.
We have a consultation process that is ignoring the issue of the BBC’s editorial standards (or lack of them), its blatant bias and growing ineptitude – sustained and pushed by annual £3.7 billion revenues from the licence fee.
This surely, as well as the BBC’s adaptation to and unfair exploitation of the new commercial technological landscape, is what matters.
Yet the review document assiduously avoids the issue of its liberal left leaning producers, editors, and reporters.
Has he in a matter of weeks accepted as inevitable the political bias that has become more apparent and more blatant with each passing year, which BBC executives have shown not the slightest inclination to address?
The last Charter was granted in 2006 when Labour was still in power. It seems pretty ironic that the one moment the Tories have the power to put the BBC in its place, they are backing away.
Like Rod Liddle, I fear a fudge.
And there’s this from us in March…though perhaps I got the reason wrong….maybe the BBC had other inducements to make Whittingdale more conducive especially as he is more pro-Brexit…..
Guess the BBC’s pro-EU coverage is paying off handsomely.
Judging by this speech by the Culture Secretary, John Whittingdale, the BBC has little to fear from the Charter review…..indeed much to win as it is going to be able to charge for the iPlayer now.
If the agreement is not legally binding that makes it worth diddlysquat doen’t it? So in effect we have absolutely nothing back for voting to stay in the EU. The EU is ‘reformed. LOL LOL LOL.
Next…the BBC has spent the last week attacking Cameron for not telling us that he didn’t avoid tax….and yet they ignore the fact that Labour’s leader didn’t disclose his pensions in his tax return….
Jeremy Corbyn is facing questions after failing to include thousands of pounds of income from his state pension on his tax return. Mr Corbyn, who turned 65 in May 2014, received a state pension of around £6,000 a year but did not include details of the income on the hand-written return he published on Monday. He also failed to declare on the form income from a pension from his time in local Government, although Labour insisted it had been taxed at source. Labour yesterday said that all tax due on his pensions had been paid and insisted that details of his income from his retirement funds had been included on a separate sheet.
Friends who teach the equivalent of high school seniors in the predominantly Muslim districts of Molenbeek and Schaerbeek told him that “90 percent of their students, 17, 18 years old, called them heroes,” he said.
The BBC likes to suggest that there is little support for the terrorists and indeed gloated about the Sun being rebuked for its entirely accurate story on Muslim sympathy for jihadists in the UK, well accurate if underplaying the level of sympathy in fact.
Always interesting what the BBC misses out from its news stories (and we haven’t included the BBC angle in the Whittingdale story here)…always points the way to what the BBC is trying to use the news to do…to manipulate the viewers’ perceptions and beliefs.
Impartial, accurate, transparent, honest and balanced? Don’t make me laugh.
The Today programme (0730) does an indepth investigation of the Whittingdale story. LOL.
It’s all newspapers, newspapers, newspapers. Just why didn’t they publish the story on Whittingdale and just how much did it influence government policy on Press regulation?…asks the BBC’s Norman Smith. Trust is why this matters, its impact on government policy. The charge is this, he says, the redtops chose not to publish and you can contrast that with how they now want to publish the story about the celebrity threesome.
Yeah but…..the BBC chose not to publish and you can contrast that with their eagerness to publish sensationalist allegations of sex abuse about Tory ministers…and their reluctance to publish anything to do with Jimmy Savile.
At 08:19 we get more on this story….just why did the newspapers behave in this manner? Newspapers, newspapers, newspapers.
Not the BBC then?
The BBC reminds us that Whittingdale has always been an advocate of light-touch Press regulation…so where’s the story?
Whittingdale’s romance would hardly have been a career killer….If anyone had tried to use it to pressure him I’m pretty certain he would have said ‘Publish and be damned’…I don’t see any claim that he asked for a ‘super injunction’ to gag the media….the public would have just shrugged…it’s a nothing story really and he is highly unlikely to have been cowed into doing whatever anyone wanted on the back of it.
Still, it raises a lot of questions as to why the BBC itself didn’t reveal the story, their own involvement in Leveson wasn’t exactly minimal and with the Charter review they have a vested interest in any leverage they think they can get over the Culture Secretary. So why only expose Whittingdale after the Byline story?
Labour knew about Whittingdale in 2014 and we must presume the BBC did too. Why the silence? Did they try to use it to influence Whittingdale’s decisions?
“I’m sorry this has happened. I’ve always been open and honest about my private life but never sought to make an issue of it. “I’m saddened that others have sought to do so. The important thing is the work that I do for my constituents as an MP. “I will not myself be distracted from standing up for the people of the Rhondda.”
It was alright for him to be shadow culture secretary once it was in the open but Whittingdale’s position is compromised by revelations of a fling 2 years ago now that that is in the open big style?
I’m sure Whittingdale will not be distracted from standing up for the People of Britain and I’m sure Bryant is saddened that people want to make an issue of Whittingdale’s private life. LOL.
Maitlis begins by asking ‘Is this a story about breach of privacy or a fatal conflict of interest?’ Telling us ‘We bring you what we know’. Now that’s just not true from the off.
We hear that this was a story that ‘all the British newspapers did not run’…..no mention of the BBC not running it either.
We hear that ‘The story first surfaced on Byline.com’. Again that’s blatantly not true. The infamous Natalie Rowe has been very publicly making it known that Whittingdale had something to hide since 2014. At the end of 2015 this was bubbling up again very publicly with a story about the Independent…now that’s 4 months or so ago. Did the BBC not see that?
Byline published its story in the 1st of April…so what took the BBC so long?
John Sweeney on Newsnight says that ‘This is a story about why the newspapers didn’t run the story and why that matters’. Again no mention of the BBC or the fact their knowledge of Whittingdale’s romance gave them leverage over him.
Then we had Hacked Off’s Brian Cathcart on to tell us that this was a story about the newspapers and a compromised Whittingdale in relation to Leveson……again no mention of the BBC and the Charter Review.
Maitlis finishes by asking if Whittingdale is compromiseed and can he still oversee the regulation the newspapers? Not the BBC’s Charter review then also?
Quite extraordinary omissions of major parts of this story by Newsnight which tells us that they ‘Bring us all they know’.
That has to be a blatant lie…they know full well the real source of the story and when it originally broke back in 2014….the BBC and friends are clearly trying to hide the fact that the BBC knew and also didn’t publish the story and that this is linked to Charter review as well as the hacking inquiry.
Again you have to ask why the BBC is not revealing the truth….did they put pressure on Whittingdale, along with the likes of Labour’s Tom Watson, to ensure he toed the line on Press regulation and later on the Charter Review (bet they couldn’t believe their luck when he got that job.)?
Perhaps Lord Hall Hall should be asked a few questions about what he knew.
Byline can reveal a year long relationship between a senior figure in David Cameron’s government and a dominatrix which potentially jeopardized government security and left ministers open to blackmail. John Whittingdale, now Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport was involved in a long relationship between at least November 2013 and January 2015 with Olivia King, a well known escort who specializes in domination and sado-masochistic practices. It is unknown whether the relationship continues.
Whittingdale says he did not know she was a sex worker and the evidence is that he had no idea as he openly travelled with her in public and to very public events where the media would have been omnipresent…
Whittingdale was accompanied by her at locations including the MTV Awards in Amsterdam in November 2013, the SportBall, attended by Kate Middleton, also in December 2013 and a New Years Eve party at the House of Commons in 2014/15.
Not sure Byline can have its date right…claiming it was a year long relationship and at a new years party 2014/15 as Whittingdale says…
“Between August 2013 and February 2014, I had a relationship with someone who I first met through Match.com. “She was a similar age and lived close to me. At no time did she give me any indication of of her real occupation and I only discovered this when I was made aware that someone was trying to sell a story about me to tabloid newspapers. As soon as I discovered, I ended the relationship.
The newspapers are being accused of a cover-up and using the story as a lever to pressure Whittingdale over Press regulation…it’s a right-wing conspiracy…but then the Mirror refused to publish as did the Independent…no story in the Guardian and of course nothing on the BBC.
Here is the Mirror’s Kevin Maguire on the appointment of Whittingdale to Culture Secretary…
‘Tory press barons’? Who they? Murdoch supported Labour for a decade, the Telegraph is more and more left-wing and the Mail is purely commercial and will take anyone down if there is a story in it.
Here is Roy Greenslade of the Guardian defending him…
BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg said it raises questions about his role in press regulation, given some papers had the story but did not publish it.
The BBC claims the story first surfaced on Byline but that’s not true, the BBC itself must have known about the story as it has been widely circulated on the internet for over two years…revealed by a well known person, Natalie Rowe, also a dominatrix, who published a book on Osborne and ‘kinky pasts’…..
John Whittingdale MP- google him, familiarise yourself , and in the coming days , I’ll be exposing him and what Press have been hiding
12:03 p.m. – 6 Aug 2014
Considering the very obvious public nature of the relationship, and Whittingdale was single at the time, it is obvious he knew nothing about her job….unless he is very slow to catch on, which I doubt.
Amused to see the odious Max Mosely sliding into view deriding Whittingdale for having done the same thing as him….well no, he didn’t pay for sex with several prostitutes dressed up in what were definitely not Nazi uniforms.
Despite not liking the licence fee funding method Whittingdale was always in fact rather friendly towards the BBC ….
At its best, the BBC is the finest broadcaster in the world. Its reputation for quality and creativity as well as accuracy and objectivity is rightly admired across the world.
The BBC plays a crucial role in projecting Britain’s image across the globe. And it provides programmes which are enjoyed by millions every day.
Did the BBC have the ‘sword of Damacles’ hanging over Whittingdale’s head pressuring him to toe their line?
A BBC spokesperson said: “We’re looking forward to working with the new secretary of state.”
Newsnight finishes its piece with the sanctimonious …..’Whatever happened to the public’s right to know…Not only in Fleet Street but in Westminster too?’……..they missed out the obvious……and in the corridors of the BBC.
BBC political correspondent Ben Wright says the fact the story stayed out of the press has raised questions about a potential conflict of interest involving the man in charge of media regulation and the motivation of newspapers and broadcasters not to report it.
‘Broadcasters’? Welll yeah…but not just Sky which I’m sure is what the good Ben Wright was alluding to really.
The BBC covered up this story as much as anyone else….and they had very good reason to. The BBC has tried every dirty trick in the book to undermine the Charter review and yet not published anything about Whittingdale’s private life….why? They must have known about it and seen the photos. The BBC monitors all the possible sources of news and scours the social media for stories….how did they miss this from someone who was a very high profile source whose story was picked up by so many others in the media business? Rowe was still publishing stuff about George Osborne just before her tweet about Whittingdale…she was in Vice news the day after her tweet. The BBC seriously didn’t know anything? The same BBC that in 2011 was reported to be going to make a film with her about Osborne? They really weren’t keeping tabs on her?
A member of the flagship Panorama investigative team met Natalie Rowe, 47, with a view to making a film about her links with the Chancellor and former Downing Street spin doctor Andy Coulson.
The meeting was part of a new BBC probe into claims about phone hacking on the News of the World when Mr Coulson was editor.
Maurice Obstfeld, economic counsellor to the International Monetary Fund and the organisation’s chief economist, says there could be “severe regional and global damage” if Britain were to vote to leave the European Union.
An exit would present “major challenges” and a prolonged period of uncertainty which would “weigh” – that is have a negative effect – on confidence and investment.
Market volatility could increase, trade could be damaged and economic growth undermined.
Mr Obstfeld, an expert in international finance, is a former economic adviser to President Barack Obama.
And, as one of the top 40 economists cited in the world for his research, has muscle in this arena.
So the world will collapse if the UK leaves the EU…never mind that most trade agreements will continue until new ones are agreed.
Germany’s Angela Merkel and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso’s comments come amid debate over whether the next IMF chief should come from the developing world.
Ms Merkel said a European was needed in light of the eurozone’s problems.
A spokeswoman for Mr Barroso was quoted as saying it was “only natural that the member states of the European Union, as the biggest contributor to the fund, agree on a strong and competent candidate who can rally support from the IMF membership”.
But what of the IMF’s Mr Obstfeld? He’s clearly not head of the IMF but is a very, very influential friend at the court..being the economic counsellor to the International Monetary Fund and the organisation’s chief economist.
The euro area is moving quickly to correct one flaw in the Maastricht treaty, the vesting of all financial supervisory functions with national authorities. However, the sheer size of bank balance sheets suggest that the euro area must also confront a financial/fiscal trilemma: countries in the euro zone can no longer enjoy all three of financial integration with other member states, financial stability, and fiscal independence, because the costs of banking rescues may now go beyond national fiscal capacities. Thus, plans to reform the euro zone architecture must combine centralized supervision with some centralized fiscal backstop to finance deposit insurance and bank resolution.
The EU imposed the euro on a linked system of national economies with well-known structural rigidities in labor and product markets. Within each country, powerful national vested interests protected existing distortions.
Banking union must repair the discipline deficit that allowed unrestrainedborrowing and lending to set the stage for the current crisis….if it is to succeed, banking union requires some pooling of national fiscal resources. Likewise, collective EMU support of sovereign borrowers also justifies stricter centralized fiscal oversight, as a matter of political necessity as well as incentive compatibility.
Or how about this unmistakeable pro-EU centralised state passion of his……the EU must be very happy to have him on board….
Maurice Obstfeld, who’s just been appointed chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, has followed the common European currency project for decades — since it was a relatively loose association….His policy recommendations for Europe, however, have been clear and consistent: If the monetary union is to work, the euro zone needs more integration. If Europe’s leaders cannot do an end run around domestic opposition in the name of European integration, EMU could prove unstable.
If you vote for remaining in the EU you should know what to expect….ever more integration, the subsummation of the UK into the EU with political and economic power handed over on a plate….meaning that the UK loses the power to decide its own fate as best it can and that its treasury can be plundered to fund whatever the EU decides is in the best interests of the EU…whether that’s handing over billions to other states or using it to promote the glories of the EU itself.
I’m sure the BBC has pointed all this out to us in its report on Obstfeld’s remarks…or maybe not.
To put that in plain English, the Fund is saying that countries with their own currencies (i.e. not in the eurozone) don’t have to worry too much about international lenders charging them higher interest rates because of increases in government borrowing and/or debt.
It is an irony that as her husband, Brad Pitt, playing a UN official, once again saves the world from a flood of Zombies, Angelina Jolie, Special Envoy for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, is saving the world from….hmmm….us.
The 40-year-old actress will give the address on migration and its impact on the world in the programme World On The Move – which will be broadcast from the BBC Radio Theatre and across several BBC shows on May 16.
Her heartfelt words will be heard in a session hosted by the Today programme’s Mishal Husain which will be broadcast live on Radio 4, BBC World Service and BBC World News.
The mother-of-six, who is a Special Envoy for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, said: ‘The debate on the refugee crisis is often polarised and based on fear and misconceptions.
Ahh…yes, that’s the problem, us…people who want to control immigration are bigoted, have unfounded fears driven by misconceptions and a lack of knowledge. Just as well the BBC is having a special one day blitz on our misconceptions promoting open borders and mass immigration.
I wonder if Trevor Phillips will be one of the speakers. Will his warning that Muslims have no intention of integrating and that if the Muslim population continues to grow, as it will, given demographics and the influx of millions of Muslims forcing their way into Europe, this will lead to immense and dangerous problems…more than are already apparent?
Apparently we are to be enlightened by new insights into the problem…..in other words we are to be told that people all around the world are suffering in their own countries and want to come to Europe, or America…and it is only fair that we let them come…
The BBC’s director of news and current affairs, James Harding, said: ‘If the Today programme ran all day on one story, what new insights would it throw up? We’ve put together a day of programming involving BBC News and some of Radio 4’s biggest programme strands to look at a key story of our time.
‘An age of unprecedented mobility is shaping the world we live in for better and for worse.’
That’s not true though is it…..Harding makes it sound as if it is all unstoppable when the fact is the only reason it is happening is because of people like him who propagandise for the immigration lobby and open borders and make politicians terrified of speaking out against it and doing anything genuinely meaningful and effective.
There is a war going on around the world, the BBC may have noticed. Muslim ‘militants’ have launched a worldwide attack on just about every country intending to force their religion upon all. This is a war not just fought with bombs and bullets, it is fought in the law courts, in the media and in the political arena as activist Muslims use every means possible to close down criticism of Islam and the actions carried out in its name and to pressurise societies to adopt ‘Islam friendly’ narratives and policies so that Muslims feel loved and wanted…or else, we are told, they will become angry and radicalised…a threat constantly made by ‘moderate’ Muslims in the UK. This is a war not just limited to the usual suspects that the BBC so often likes to blame, the violent jihadis, this is a cultural war being fought right now in the UK by mainstream Muslim organisations like the MCB which was the driving force behind the Trojan Horse plot. Mosques up and down the country preach anti-Western messages that are lapped up by many in the community and preach against integration and of the decadence of Western society…As articulated by Ali Kettani, one of the first Muslim writers to actively explore the ramifications of Muslim communities in the West, “Believing that all religions are the same is the first sign of religious assimilation” and needs to be discouraged. Instead, he wrote:
A Muslim community should try to move from a position of mere defensive concerns, and try to spread the message of Islam outside the community. If successful, such a community would grow constantly in influence and numbers as to become a majority community in course of time. To become a “successful community” should be the aim of every “Muslim minority.” This is an ideological necessity without which the entire presence of the minority would be Islamically unacceptable.
Eventually, the community may seek to gain political rights as a constituent community of the nation. Once these rights are obtained, then the community should seek to generalize its characteristics to the entire nation.
‘In other words, Shari’a should replace Western law, and Islam should dominate. This matches the contemporary vision of Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Qaradawi as expressed on Qatar television in 2007’:
The conquest of Rome—the conquest of Italy and Europe—means that Islam will return to Europe once again. But must this conquest necessarily be through war? No. There is such a thing as a peaceful conquest … The peaceful conquest has foundations in this religion, and therefore I expect that Islam will conquer Europe without resorting to the sword or fighting. It will do so by da’wa and ideology.
The BBC are currently broadcasting a programme on the Deobandis which looks at the radical messages being preached by some Muslims…but the intent of the programme is to whitewash that and again, as usual, suggest that such actions and beliefs are not representative of mainstream Muslims….
How widespread and representative is this sympathy with militancy?
The programme explores the current battle for control in some British mosques, speaking to British Deobandi Muslims pushing back against the infiltration of Pakistani religious politics in British life.
As one campaigner says, this is ‘the battle for the soul of Islam’ and the ‘silent majority’ must speak out – but can moderate Muslims build the institutional power they need to really enforce change?
That’s just not true….and note the slippery framing of the question…..the sympathy with militancy….it should have been the sympathy with the extreme beliefs that is questioned….and then ask just where those beliefs originate. Once that is discovered they will find all this talk of a British Islam, a Moderate Islam, that can reform the extremists is liberal wishful thinking. Islam is Islam and is unchangeable, to suggest otherwise is either a delusion or a lie, but then you would have to question the compatibility of Islam within the West and deal with the questions that raises…not a discussion the BBC genuinely wants to enter into preferring to say that the problem isn’t with Islam itself but with the misguided interpretations the ‘Militants’ place upon it.
Once again the BBC uses a supposed ‘exploration’ of the issues to hide the real problems and to promote the idea that Islam can adapt to a Western society when the evidence is starkly against that…what hope that we will get a full and open debate on immigration on the BBC on May 16?
“What I think is important about the Muslim Brotherhood,” British Prime Minister David Cameron said on April 1, while announcing a long-overdue investigation of the activities of Muslim Brotherhood in the UK and its involvement in February’s terror attack at the Egyptian resort of Taba, “is that we understand what this organisation is, what it stands for, what its beliefs are in terms of the path of extremism and violent extremism, what its connections are with other groups, what its presence is here in the United Kingdom. Our policies should be informed by a complete picture of that knowledge. It is an important piece of work because we will only get our policy right if we fully understand the true nature of the organisation that we are dealing with.”
The MCB is a Muslim Brotherhood organisation. Understand it and deal with it.
Peter Grimes in the comments notes the Today programme’s disgracefully one-sided and highly misleading account (08:32) of the causes of the closure of 17 schools in Scotland due to structural failures. Listening to the report you would have come away with the impression that the school structural failures were possibly all due to austerity and Michael Gove.
Edinburgh council chiefs have ordered the closure of 17 schools following safety fears over their construction. The schools were built under the PPP1 private finance initiative by the Edinburgh Schools Partnership (ESP).
Construction of the schools under the £360m deal was completed in 2005.
The closure of the schools, which are about 10 years old, was prompted after workers repairing serious structural issues at one city primary found “further serious defects” with the building on Friday.
Which makes it hard to understand how the BBC’s flagship political programme allowed the SNP’s pro-independence stooge, Malcolm Fraser, to blame the schools’ building defects on the Government and Michael Gove in particular who he quoted as saying ‘I’m not here to make architects rich’…the implication being that this careful use of resources has led to the failure….not enough money rather than the architect’s incompetence or the builder’s dodgy practices.
Fraser was the former deputy chair of Architecture and Design Scotland, the Scottish government’s design and build advisory body and is pro-independence and so has a distinct interest in pointing the finger of blame towards the Tories.
Mishal Husain, despite noting that Fraser resigned in 2007 because of concerns about the buildings, happily allowed him to spin his left-wing narrative about bankers and lawyers and the country being more concerned with financial processes than in building beautiful things….then getting on to Gove…only here, apparently, to make bankers and lawyers rich….Fraser tells us that architects care about these buildings and put their care and attention into them…well clearly not despite the huge, and ruinous, financing of the 2005 schools under PFI….how can he blame a shortage of cash?
Mishal Husain chips in and adds to his leftwing narrative by saying that part of the problem maybe that the desire for value for money is so paramount. A less than subtle attack on austerity and the Tories. Curiously the real reason Fraser resigned in 2007 was because…the financing was not value for money….he believes that PPP was “fundamentally flawed”….
It’s extraordinary how everybody seems to be of the opinion that PPP is not value for money, but nobody talks about it.
“Evidence overwhelmingly indicates that PFI/PPP procurement routes produce buildings that are more expensive, take longer to build and are significantly-poorer in quality than those procured by more traditional routes. Against this PFI/PPP has the single “advantage” of allowing the Chancellor [Gordon Brown] to defer payment for such crucial infrastructure, thus reducing his Public Sector Borrowing Requirement but putting us all “in hock” for decades” wrote Fraser.
If the buildings were more expensive than if procured by traditional routes that makes Fraser’s final message today somewhat ironic…perhaps we should pay our architects more in order to deliver environments where people learn better and have more alert, better educated children, that seems like a good investment.
Mr Fraser said: “The work we did is beautiful and important. However we have been unable to make it profitable.”
So he expects the government to stump up huge amounts of cash to make buildings beautiful but not ‘value for money’, or does he want ‘value for money’?, I’m confused, and yet he himself isn’t prepared to do the same and subsidise his artistic ambitions…having sacked 15 staff.
Any thoughts that he is panhandling for government handouts to subsidise architects’ flights of fancy? Maybe we could have seen his true motivation for his comments on the Today programme had we known more about his background.
Last week in a little known announcement, Moody’s, the agency that stripped the UK of its AAA credit rating, cut the ratings of three property companies that lease buildings to the BBC in London and Glasgow.
The three companies which were downgraded were Juturna PLC, Pacific Quay Finance and White City Property Finance, which all went down from Aa3 to A1. The companies finance buildings for which the BBC is the sole occupier and Moody’s believes there is now doubt over whether the BBC can meet future financial obligations.
The news prompted Newsnet Scotland to look into who owns the property occupied by BBC Scotland at Pacific Quay. The result of our research is that quite frankly we don’t know. Information to hand indicates that it is not the BBC, but this will not stop the licence payers paying dearly for it over a period of thirty years.
For some of the background to the structured finance vehicles used by the BBC we can turn to the National Audit Office report dated November 30th, 2009 entitled “the BBC’s management of three major estate projects”.
The report is highly critical of the BBC’s management of the projects and concludes, amongst other things, that “The BBC is not well placed to demonstrate value for money from the £2,000 million it has committed to spending on the three projects over their life”.
Here we have the magic of Private Finance Initiative (PFI) in action.
PFI was the Brown/Darling conjuring trick that swept vast amounts of public sector debt under the carpet where it could be hidden until it eventually emerged to grab us by the throat. The same PFI debt that extracts hundreds of millions of pounds annually out of Scotland’s health and education budgets, before a single nurse or teacher has been paid.
Guess somebody’s not happy…still, I’m sure the building is beautiful and provides an environment where the BBC staff can feel loved, alert and productive.
The BBC’s reaction to a survey that reveals what Muslims believe has, rather than to investigate and discuss, been to ridicule, mock and undermine the results of the C4 survey……the findings of which could neatly be summarised by this cartoon….
They are quite explosive and incendiary, unpleasant reading for the BBC.
Here is the BBC’s frontpage reaction to Trevor Phillips’ survey…
Muslims joke about ‘What British Muslims really think’ survey
All a big joke then. The BBC really doesn’t like the findings of the poll because they are very disturbing and demand a very difficult debate on what the solution is.
‘The BBC is wrong. Many Muslims have sympathy with the Charlie Hebdo killings. Far too many.’
The BBC of course famously misled the public about the results of its own survey on Muslim opinion and when C4′ Dispatches programme revealed explicitly what was going on inside some mosques the BBC completely ignored that and instead spent the same week attacking Jade Goody on C4’s Big Brother programme for her use of the word ‘Poppadom’ when referring to an Asian contestant she was having an argument with….so never mind the blood curdling threats against the West being propagated inside some British mosques…the BBC is more interested in a playground spat….and quite happy for Jade Goody to be called ‘thick, white trash’ on BBC programmes by an Asian.
The BBC is still peddling its own survey as an honest and reliable piece of work whilst trying to trash everyone elses…
A survey commissioned by the BBC in February 2015 found that 93% of Muslims living in Britain believed they should follow British laws. In the same survey, 27% said they had some sympathy for the motives behind the attacks on Charlie Hebdo in Paris.
Ironically that followed this attack on the Sun in the same article…
This isn’t the first time a survey about British Muslim’s opinions has stirred up controversy on social media. In December 2015 the Sun newspaper published the headline “1 in 5 Brit Muslims’ sympathy for jihadis”, triggering a huge backlash on Twitter. Its reporting of the results was later deemed “significantly misleading” by the Independent Press Standards Organisation following a slew of complaints.
The Sun was quite right, in fact they underplayed the numbers of potential terrorist sympathisers as you can see from the BBC’s own comment above…27% of Muslims had sympathy with the Charlie Hebdo killers…so that’ll be 1 in 4 not 1 in 5.
The Sun’s figures came from research carried out by polling company Survation, which conducted phone interviews with 1,000 British Muslims after the recent attacks in Paris. One of the questions was: Which of the following statements is closest to your view?
I have a lot of sympathy with young Muslims who leave the UK to join fighters in Syria.
I have some sympathy with young Muslims who leave the UK to join fighters in Syria.
I have no sympathy with young Muslims who leave the UK to join fighters in Syria.
Don’t know.
The BBC said this…
The word “jihadis”, which is used in the headline, does not appear in the question. This might be significant because not everyone who travels to Syria is necessarily going to fight for the so-called Islamic State or other militant Islamist groups – some could be going to join rebel groups opposed to IS.
That’s semantics crossbred with a lie….the poll did not mention Jihadis but in every question asked about those going to join fighters in Syria. We know they all go to the Islamist groups, and ‘rebel groups opposed to IS’ that they would join are Al Qaeda based such as Al Nusra. The BBC is desperately twisting the narrative and goes pathetically further in its attempt to attack the Sun saying….
When people answered the question, 4% said they had a lot of sympathy and 14% said they had some sympathy – a total of 19%, which is the figure the Sun used.
But the word “sympathy” is ambiguous and using it casts doubt on the result, says Manchester University’s Maria Sobolewska, an expert on polling minority groups.
In the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, the first two definitions of the word are:
Feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune.
Understanding between people; common feeling.
“Did [the respondents] simply mean that they felt the situation for Muslims is very hard around the world, with a lot of wars and conflict, and perhaps prejudice in Western Europe, and therefore, this particular person feels some sympathy with how desperation may lead some young people to terrorism?” asks Sobolewska. “Is it just an emotional understanding? Or is it actually weak or tacit support of terrorism? I really think making that leap in to the second conclusion is taking it a bit too far.”
So terrorism is in fact due to the poor little lambs being discriminated against, we just don’t know what the Muslims thought the word ‘sympathy’ meant.
The BBC excusing and sympathising itself with Muslim terrorists.
Remember this video from the Balkans from Sky News?…the video the BBC doesn’t really want you to see…the video that tells of the atrocities carried out by Muslims in Bosnia and the fact that many of the Muslim radicals stayed behind to propagate their Jihadist narrative….
Der Spiegel is reporting that those Jihadists have successfully been spreading their ideology and instilling a hatred of the West amongst the Muslims in Bosnia……
Bosnia, says the American Balkan expert and former NSA employee John Schindler, “is considered something of a ‘safehouse’ for radicals,” and now harbors a stable terrorist infrastructure. It is one that is not strictly hierarchical and is thus considered “off-message” within IS, but it nonetheless represents an existential threat to the fragmented republic.
It increasingly looks as though a new sanctuary for IS fighters, planners and recruiters has been established right in the middle of Europe. In some remote villages, the black flag of IS is flown and, as a share of the population, more fighters from Bosnia-Herzegovina have joined IS than from any other country in Europe, except for Belgium.
Most recently, 64 illegal Muslim communities suspected of radicalism have been counted. Since March 1, security forces are empowered to take action against the renegades. Otherwise, chaos could ensue, warns Bakir Izetbegovic, the Bosniak member of the tripartite presidency of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
If Trevor Phillips is right it is something we should take a great deal of note of as Muslim ghettoes, mini-Pakistans, are taking root around the UK with many Muslims living completely separate lives and looking out at the rest of us with dislike and disdain….
Britain desperately wants to think of its Muslims as versions of the Great British Bakeoff winner Nadiya Hussain, or the cheeky-chappie athlete Mo Farah….we now know that just isn’t how it is.
Phillips is wrong….the only people who think that people like Nadiya as she represents herself on the show in public are the real face of Islam are the misguided and cowardly politicians and the BBC who set the show up to ensure Nadiya had a good chance of winning….so that we’d think how wonderful and nice Muslims are…look they bake cakes, so like us.
Phillips tells us of his survey…
What it reveals is the unacknowledged creation of a nation within a nation, with its own geography, its own values and its own very separate future….Britain is nurturing communities with a complete set of alternate values.
Some of my journalist friends imagine that, with time, the Muslims will grow out of it. They won’t….they really don’t want to adopt much of our decadent way of life.
He tells us that Muslims like the advantages that Britain brings to them but ‘many are not as enthusiastic about their non-Muslim compatriots.’ Well go to somewhere where they can be with like-minded souls then….such as ISIS.
Phillips says that..
Many of our elite political and media classes simply refuse to acknowledge the truth [See the BBC’s reaction to Phillips’ survey….they really don’t want to know the truth]
He states that the solution is not going to be easy if possible at all…
Integrating Muslims will probably be the hardest task of all. It will mean abandoning the milk-and-water multiculturalism still so beloved of many, and adopting a far more muscular approach to integration….deciding how to confront their thinking where it collides with our fundamental values.
Perhaps shutting Islamic faith schools, madrassas, even some Mosques, and cutting off the flood of Jihadi money from the Gulf states that fund the Islamic propaganda that encourages Muslims to rise up and look on themselves as very different and superior to their host nation would be a start….and how about the Koran being taught not by Muslim preachers but by non-Muslim teachers who have a secular outlook so that the young Muslims get a more rounded and enlightened view of life than provided by a strict Islamic education based upon the Koran.
The truth is too many Muslims will not ‘integrate’ and more and more do want to live their lives entirely governed by Islamic strictures without having to bother with the laws and social mores of Britain….they want to set up mini Pakistans, mini Islamic republics that will spread and spread as the Muslim population grows and the politicians, authorities, schools, the media and businesses all cower before them…scared both of being accused of Islamophobia and of a violent reaction if they don’t comply with the Muslim community’s demands. This will only, and inevitably, lead to conflict as people see their country being Islamised and taken over and themselves being forced to become virtual ‘Muslims’ as they are pressured to adopt practises that don’t ‘offend’ Muslims…no more pork, no alcohol, no short skirts, wear head scarves, no eating at Ramadan in case you upset a hungry Muslim and so on.
Eventually people will stop hiding their thoughts and start saying out loud what they think…that they are sick of Muslim intimidation, Muslim threats, Muslim blackmail, Muslim demands, sick of Muslim intolerance and oppressive attempts to force everyone else to comply with their values, sick of being told by the likes of the BBC that they must love Islam or else be marked as racist or Islamophobic if they don’t despite all the evidence pointing to the fact that Islam is a deeply unpleasant and backward ideology that will return Europe to the Dark Ages.
Boris Johnson might agree……
To any non-Muslim reader of the Koran, Islamophobia – fear of Islam – seems a natural reaction, and, indeed, exactly what that text is intended to provoke. Judged purely on its scripture – to say nothing of what is preached in the mosques – it is the most viciously sectarian of all religions in its heartlessness towards unbelievers. As the killer of Theo Van Gogh told his victim’s mother this week in a Dutch courtroom, he could not care for her, could not sympathise, because she was not a Muslim.
The trouble with this disgusting arrogance and condescension is that it is widely supported in Koranic texts, and we look in vain for the enlightened Islamic teachers and preachers who will begin the process of reform. What is going on in these mosques and madrasas? When is someone going to get 18th century on Islam’s medieval ass?
The BBC knows all this and instead prefers to bury its head in the sand hoping it will all turn out alright in the end but knowing it won’t. The BBC has the pathetic hope that it can prevent a showdown by silencing the voices who raise awkward questions…questions that demand awkward answers that will inevitably lead to a solution that is unpleasant but the only one possible if Muslims continue to attack the host nation not only with actual violence but by usng the media, using the law, using emotional blackmail, playing the ‘race card’…they know the threat of young Muslims being radicalised if people don’t allow Muslims to do what they like is an effective means of getting their own way.
Muslim commnity leaders and agitprop merchants know all too well the truth of this….
‘One lesson well understood in both Stalin’s Russia and Nazi Germany was that propaganda is most effective when it is backed by terror.’
They may not plant the bombs or threaten violence themselves but they are quick to capitalise on it and demand special treatment for the Muslim community in order to ‘prevent radicalisation’….in other words the answer to Muslim radicals threatening to blow us up if we don’t allow them to practise Islam fully regardless of British law is to ….have more Islam. So the radicals get what they want anyway.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn knew how things go……
Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.
Are so many Muslims the innocent victims of the radicals or do many have sympathy with them? Similar claims of total innocence were made about the Germans after WWII…which the Guardian’s Madeleine Bunting rubbished…..
‘He acknowledged he was a “son of the German people” … “but not guilty on that account”; he then launched into a highly controversial claim that a “ring of criminals” were responsible for nazism and that the German people were as much their victims as anyone else. This is an argument that has long been discredited in Germany as utterly inadequate in explaining how millions supported the Nazis.’
Are the Jihadists just a tiny group of Muslims who in fact are not Muslim but are peddling a perverted interpretation of Islam…or is the truth more uncomfortable for some to hear? Do they have far more support than the BBC wishes to acknowledge?
Isn’t it odd how the BBC refuses to investigate the accusations made against London mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan who has close ties to extremist Muslims? Only yesterday the Home secretary said he wasn’t fit to be Mayor due to his Islamist links….did the BBC report that? No…
This is a story that has been going on for a long time now…and yet the BBC has totally ignored it…clearly they are so desperate for a Labour London Mayor that they are prepared to ignore his extremely dodgy friends…not to mention his own comments….such as politicising the police to make them defend Muslims in particular.
Sadiq Khan, another Lutfur Rahman, only on a much bigger scale? The BBC ignored him too for a long, long time.
The BBC would rather spend weeks chasing Cameron for being posh than expose Islamists in our midst.
The BBC has reported Dave’s comment on the BBC’s guilty secrets but hasn’t bothered to mention the fellow travellers nor curiously and unusually has it provided any video of the moment limiting itself to saying this…
He said a number of public sector organisations, including trade unions and the BBC, had similar investment arrangements, describing them as a “standard practice and not designed to avoid tax”.
Couldn’t very well avoid mentioning itself but where’s the Mirror and the Guardian and the Right Honourable Corbyn’s Republic of Islington? Why no mention of the gang?
However the BBC is happy to provide us with chapter and verse of Labour’s accusations…
Responding for Labour in the House of Commons, Mr Corbyn said the prime minister had failed to give a “full account of his involvement in tax havens until this week or take essential action to clean up the system”.
“The UK is at the heart of the global tax avoidance industry,” he said. “It is a national scandal and it has to stop”.
The prime minister released a summary of earnings and tax going back six years after being accused by Labour of misleading the public over money he had invested in his father Ian Cameron’s company, Blairmore Holdings.
Labour is continuing to press him to publish his full tax returns dating back to before he became prime minister and are questioning why the original investment was not disclosed in the register of MPs’ interests.
No exploration of any of that by the BBC which just accepts Labour accusations as credible….just how did Britian become so enamoured with Tax Havens? Perhaps Gordon Brown could answer that one…if he was asked. And just why did Cameron not disclose his investment (of £12,000) in Blairmore? Maybe the BBC, instead of slinging mud in the hope that some sticks, could do some digging….or just pop along to Guido who will happily enlighten them and save them the effort of doing some journalism…
What about the attack line Labour MPs are clamouring around, that Dave did not declare his Blairmore shares in his 2009 Register of Members Interests? MPs are not required to declare shareholdings in unit trusts, holdings below £70,000 or 15% of a partnership.
So yes, we do know exactly why Cameron didn’t disclose the shareholding, because he didn’t have to, but the BBC aren’t bothered about fact checking Labour’s accusation, they are just happy to keep on slinging that mud on Labour’s behalf.
And while we’re at Guido’s why not have a look at this…
Cameron’s taxes and the Panama Papers have led the BBC News bulletins for the past week, yet licence fee payers remain unenlightened about Auntie’s own offshore financial arrangements. What better place to start than the 2013 BBC Pensions report, which lists investments held by the Beeb’s £9 billion employee benefit scheme. Scroll down to page 16 and it is disclosed that the BBC used investment managers Nephila Capital Ltd to invest £84 million:
Nephila Capital is a wholly owned subsidiary of Nephila Holdings Limited and is a Bermuda domiciled company.
Will Lord Hall Hall be answering questions in the House any time soon? I should think he would given how his impartial news organisation has conducted a political witch-hunt against Cameron whilst all the time being ‘guilty’ of the same, apparently immoral, actions.
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