Category Archives: BBC bias

Here you go! A brand new thread to start another week of BBC bias! Detail it here!

A world of hidden wealth: why we [The Guardian] are shining a light offshore

Though there is nothing unlawful about using offshore companies, the files raise fundamental questions about the ethics of such tax havens.

Since the 2008 crash, there has been a clamour for everyone to pay a fair share of the tax burden.

Unsurprisingly, the public is questioning – perhaps more than ever – whether a system that provides advantages only to the wealthy is immoral. And the political climate that once tolerated this inequality has changed decisively.

A vast leak of documents that allegedly open up the world of offshore tax havens is getting lots of attention. Although 107 news organisations were handed the material the BBC links specifically to the Guardian on the Today programme and on the website. The BBC and the Guardian are of course interested in framing this as a debate about fairness and equality…the rich getting richer whilst the poor get poorer.  And yet offshoring is legal.  There are criminals involved as in any industry or sphere of life, that doesn’t make offshore banking immoral anymore than the BBC as an institution is immoral for having had so many paedophiles within its ranks.  It is entirely down to the politicians who make the rules to produce some that reflect what they think are the appropriate considerations.  The Guardian even admits that offshoring has legitimate purposes….

Are all people who use offshore structures crooks?

No. Using offshore structures is entirely legal. There are many legitimate reasons for doing so. Business people in countries such as Russia and Ukraine typically put their assets offshore to defend them from “raids” by criminals, and to get around hard currency restrictions. Others use offshore for reasons of inheritance and estate planning.

What have we learnt so far?  That the world’s rich use offshore tax havens. Blimey. The Today programme was trying to sensationalise it by intimating that it wasn’t just the usual suspects but that worryingly it stretched into democratic societies as well….though the Telegraph’s list of suspects didn’t raise any eyebrows here…

Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson

prime minister of Iceland

Mauricio Macri

president of Argentina

Petro Poroshenko

president of Ukraine

Salman bin Abdulaziz bin Abdulrahman Al Saud

king of Saudi Arabia

Ayad Allawi

former prime minister of Iraq

Bidzina Ivanishvili

former prime minister of Georgia

Ali Abu al-Ragab

former prime minister of Jordan

Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani

former prime minister of Qatar

Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani

former emir of Qatar

Ahmad Ali al-Mirghani

former president of Sudan

Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

president of UAE

Pavlo Lazarenko

former prime minister of Ukraine

There is a lot of attention on Putin as $1 billion looks to have been sent offshore by friends and associates…but what’s the problem…this is a man who stole the Crimea, who is trying to annex Ukraine and who hijacked the Syrian war to support his friend and ally Assad.  Not only that but he stole Russia itself and has taken it as his own personal fiefdom, locking up or killing off opponents and critics……and the BBC is worried about a few dollars that  may or may not be avoiding the tax rules in Russia.

The BBC is also going large on the Icelandic PM suggesting he used his position to protect his, or his wife’s, offshore investments by fixing how Iceland reacted to the banking crisis…saving Iceland’s banks to save his wife’s investments….

Court records show that Wintris had significant investments in the bonds of three major Icelandic banks that collapsed during the financial crisis which began in 2008. Wintris is listed as a creditor with millions of dollars in claims in the banks’ bankruptcies.

Mr Gunnlaugsson became prime minister in 2013 and has been involved in negotiations about the banks which could affect the value of the bonds held by Wintris.

He resisted pressure from foreign creditors – including many UK customers – to repay their deposits in full.

If foreign investors had been repaid, it may have adversely affected both the Icelandic banks and the value of the bonds held by Wintris.

But Mr Gunnlaugsson kept his wife’s interest in the outcome a secret.

However the Guardian has a completely different take.…..his wife’s company, foreign based as it was, would actually lose much of its investments due to Iceland refusing to pay foreign creditors….

The Guardian has seen no evidence to suggest tax avoidance, evasion or any dishonest financial gain on the part of Gunnlaugsson, Pálsdóttir or Wintris.

While Wintris was shielded from some of this turmoil, it had invested in bonds issued by three Icelandic banks and was owed more than 500m Icelandic króna (£2.8m) when they all collapsed. Only a small fraction of that sum is likely to be recovered.

Revelations from the Panama Papers about Gunnlaugsson and Pálsdóttir’s offshore activities are awkward for Iceland’s prime minister……He has dismissed suggestions that his wife’s ownership of Wintris compromised him as prime minister. On the contrary, he suggested, his consistently tough approach to foreign creditors, including Wintris, demonstrated that his wife’s financial interests had never affected his decision-making.

The BBC looks to be jumping the gun and making loud accusations when so far the evidence doesn’t stack up and it looks like the BBC is slinging mud hoping it will stick and is stirring up a controversy where there may not be a genuine one…nothing like inventing news to generate a sensationalist ‘scoop’.

Interestingly the Guardian tells us that:

While much of the leaked material will remain private, there are compelling reasons for publishing some of the data.

So presumably the vast amount of the information relates to legal transactions and the ones the Guardian and the BBC will investigate are those that reflect their own political interests and narratives about ethics and immorality….all of which is highly subjective and relies upon your own ideology….and never mind the legality.

The Guardian tells us…note only the ‘Conservatives’ get a specific mention though I’m certain many Labor donoors and politicians could be caught as well if they cared to  look…..

Six members of the House of Lords, three former Conservative MPs and dozens of donors to UK political parties have had offshore assets.

What the Guardian doesn’t tell us is that the Guardian itself has used offshore holdings….as Guido revealed:

Perhaps that’s why they are a bit more circumspect when coming to condemn those who use them and makes sure we know that offshore tax havens are in fact legal…if ‘immoral’.

The ICIJ isn’t a purely disinterested party in all this…it often works closely with the Guardian and the BBC and has taken a moral stand over offshore banking…as this previous revelation in 2014 shows…

ICIJ director, Gerard Ryle, said: “We make this information available not because what we found is illegal but because we think most people would think it unfair. Tax havens allow some people to play by different rules.”

Different rules?  They’re actually the same rules we all live under….just that we don’t have the resources to need  to use them….just as most of us can’t afford a Lamborghini….does the buyer of one of those ‘play by different rules’ or is he just happen to be rich enough to buy a Lamborghini?  You or I can buy a Lamborghini, or put our money in offshore accounts…if only we had the money….not different rules, just different sized bank accounts.  Life’s so unfair.

The BBC always wondered out loud, mainly in the context of the Coalition government must be failing appallingly and yet unemployment keeps falling!!???!!, about the apparent puzzles of ever rising employment and the apparent lack of productivity.

The BBC never bothered to go out and just ask the businesses why they were employing people, that would be too easy.  The BBC preferred to speculate and tell us that these weren’t real jobs, they were low paid, part-time, zero hours contracts that didn’t contribute to the economy.

The reality was that the open border meant that an endless supply of workers could be imported and employed on low wages. This is why employment kept rising and the low wages gives the clue as to why productivity was apparently so low…..it wasn’t low at all, it was just that the BBC used, knowingly, the wrong measure to judge productivity by comparing the number of workers with output when in reality they should have been measuring pay against output…the employers got the same level of output from more people but for less money meaning there was no fall in productivity in terms of cash….the companies did not have to invest in machinery and skills to drive up productivity.

On wednesday the Resolution Foundation confirmed that on 5Live (11 mins) and following that we had the BBC’s Rob Young (12 mins) talking about job losses due to the introduction of the national living wage…..what he had to say was interesting in light of the furore about the claims of job losses if we vote for Brexit and also in light of Port Talbot.

Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph says this about the potential job losses due to the Living Wage…

The Living Wage could make Port Talbot look like a drop in the ocean

David Cameron is mulling direct intervention to save Tata’s giant plant. Some 1,000 jobs are at stake, most in a part of Wales unlikely to recover easily from such setbacks. To hear Tories even discussing nationalisation gives an idea of scale of the panic.

It raises an interesting question: how would the Prime Minister react if another event were to cause at least 60,000 job losses among the low-paid? Because this is precisely what his new Living Wage is expected to do….. it risks dumping tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Britons on the new scrap heap of globalisation.

The BBC’s Rob Young says this…

‘Remember 60,000 jobs would be awful for those individuals but in the grand scheme of things it’s not a huge number given we’ve seen a pretty big and rapid fall in unemployment in Britain that many economists call a jobs miracle….’

Remarkable isn’t it how suddenly 60,000 job losses isn’t much to worry about and that we’ve had a jobs miracle.  There was a time on the BBC when every little job loss was railed against and the government hung out to dry and the rise in employment was all smoke and mirrors hiding the real, dreadful, state of the economy.

I’m guessing the BBC likes the living wage or rather it’s been reconvinced of its value.  When Miliband proposed it, first as the ridiculous ‘predistribution’, and then as the living wage, the BBC were all ears and cheered him on uncritically.  When the Tories stole Labour’s thunder suddenly it was the worst idea out there and the criticisms never stopped…however it seems the BBC is swinging into line as its urge to undermine the Tories looks to be losing out to its liking of the living wage especially as groups like the Resolution Foundation back it, though with a few reservations.

Funny how the BBC seems to have overlooked the crucial role played by their former darling Ed Miliband in hiking UK energy costs to the point where making Steel here is fundamentally uneconomic. Still, they love making the hapless Conservatives look as bad as possible. Anyway, it’s Friday and time for a new one of these…

The BBC that won’t tell you that a Sunni Muslim killed an Ahmadi Muslim in a religiously motivated attack, the BBC that so often won’t admit that Jihadists are primarily and genuinely motivated by religion and so often refuses to mention the word ‘Muslim’ in reports on terrorism, sorry, ‘militancy’, has now decided that it it will after all link Islam to the motivations of a Muslim….

Kenya honour for Muslim hero who protected Christian bus passengers

A Muslim teacher in Kenya who protected Christians on a bus after it was attacked by Islamist militants has been posthumously honoured for his bravery.

Salah Farah was shot in the attack in north-eastern Kenya in December and later died from his bullet wound.

The insurgents told the Muslims and Christians to split up but he was among Muslim passengers who refused to do so.

President Uhuru Kenyatta said he was awarding the Order Of The Grand Warrior to Mr Farah “for his act of courage”.

The BBC insults everyone here…the non-Muslims  by patronising them with a story about a ‘hero Muslim’ as if that should make them recognise the real nature of Islam instead of wrongly and ignorantly thinking it was a backward, violent and unpleasant religion, and insults Muslims by suggesting that it should come as any surprise for ‘a Muslim’ to protect other people…..did he do it because of his religion or because he was just a decent human being?  Are the BBC saying a Christian or an atheist would not have done the same thing?  What  a complex web the BBC weaves as it tries to engineer our thoughts.

SPIEGEL: You have suggested using weapons at the border.

Petry: I would hope that you would know better than that! But I’ll happily explain one more time: In response to numerous questions, and after listing off various options for securing the border, I mentioned that the use of armed force in the case of an emergency is consistent with German law, a step which I personally, explicitly do not want. To turn that into an alleged proposal for a “firing order” takes a significant amount of desire for a faux scandal. Or, to put it another way, apparently people wanted to willfully misunderstand me.

When the head of  the AFD in Germany said “I don’t want this either. But the use of armed force is there as a last resort.”  the Media went overboard to condemn her…the BBC and Guardian of course had to report her words.

Strge how quiet they are when Islamist Turkey actually does shoot immigrants on it’s borders….from the Mail….

Turkish troops ‘are KILLING refugees’ as they try to cross border from Syria

Refugees fleeing Syria’s civil war are being shot dead by Turkish border forces, it was reported last night.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 16 migrants, including three children, had been killed in the past four months as they tried to cross into Turkey.

The true number is believed to be higher, according to a Syrian police officer and a Syrian smuggler who lives in Turkey, but it is impossible to say exactly how many because the bodies of those who fell on the Syrian side of the border were dragged back to be buried in the war zone.

Douglas Murray in the Spectator makes the connections I made in the last post….only written much better….

The questions nobody wants to ask about Asad Shah’s murder

On Maundy Thursday a Muslim shopkeeper in Glasgow was brutally murdered.  Forty-year-old Asad Shah was allegedly stabbed in the head with a kitchen knife and then stamped upon.  Most of the UK press began by going big on this story and referring to it as an act of ‘religious hatred’, comfortably leaving readers with the distinct feeling that – post-Brussels – the Muslim shopkeeper must have been killed by an ‘Islamophobe’.  Had that been the case, by now the press would be crawling over every view the killer had ever held and every Facebook connection he had ever made.  They would be asking why he had done it and investigating every one of his associates.

But it soon emerged that although the Asad Shah murder was being treated by police as ‘religiously motivated’  the suspected killer was in fact another Muslim who allegedly struck just hours after Mr Shah had posted a message on Facebook wishing a very happy Easter to his ‘beloved Christian nation’ and suggesting people follow in ‘The Real Footstep of Beloved Holy Jesus Christ’.  The murdered man’s family have now been advised by police to watch what they say and to disguise where they are in Britain because it is believed that they too could now be targeted.

Mr Shah was an Ahmadiyya (Ahmadi), a member of – against some stiff competition – one of the most persecuted sects within Islam. 

As I said, if the suspected killer of Mr Shah had been a non-Muslim things would have worked out differently.  But since he was reported to be a Muslim the story has now effectively gone dead.  The media aren’t that interested in follow-up and the politicians seem unbothered about following the hate-trail.  Like all other stories in this area, they don’t know what questions to ask and they don’t want to ask them anyway.  It’s a familiar pattern.  Last Friday it turned out that the Imam of the Grand Central Mosque in Glasgow (Scotland’s biggest mosque) had been caught posting messages on the net praising the Muslim extremist who murdered Pakistani governor Salman Taseer for opposing blasphemy laws. This is the mosque that First Minister Nicola Sturgeon went straight to after the Paris terror attacks in November.  Did she ask whether the Imam was an Islamist? Perhaps she didn’t know how to ask.  Like most people in our public life she is too willingly ignorant to ask such questions and wouldn’t like the answers anyway.

It is the same after the death of Mr Shah.  Ms Sturgeon went straight to a vigil in his memory.  But neither she nor any other politician so far as I am aware has bothered wondering why Ahmadiyya Muslims like Mr Shah might be targeted.  Of course in the days ahead we may hear the usual blandishments, but no blame will be apportioned.  So for instance nobody will ask which Muslim leaders in the UK stoke hatred of Ahmadiyya Muslims.  Either because they do not know, or because they do not care, nobody will ask Sadiq Khan about the killing of Mr Shah on Saturday.  If they did then Sadiq Khan would doubtless express horror for the killing and then talk (as he always does) of the need to ‘root out’ all such hatred.  But would anyone press on and ask whether the man most likely to be the next Mayor of London has ever ‘rooted out’ such hatred himself?

As it happens, the Imam of the mosque that Sadiq Khan himself attends in Tooting is one Suliman Gani. This is a man who has in the past openly acknowledged that he uses his position to agitate against Ahmadiyya Muslims.  Indeed Sadiq Khan’s Imam has sat on a platform from which calls were made for Muslims to boycott shops owned by Ahmadi Muslims: Muslim shopkeepers, that is, like Mr Shah who was murdered last week.

As I say, nobody will ask about this, because almost nobody knows, or cares to know, or cares to hear the answers.  They would care deeply about webs of association if the man arrested for Mr Shah’s murder had been a non-Muslim.  But there is little to ask now it seems to be a Muslim.  That is how these things work in modern Britain, and that in a nutshell is why things are going to go so very wrong in the near future.

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The BBC in full-on pro-EU mode with this..heard it on the radio and knew what was coming...here it is in black and white, an ‘analysis by the BBC’s Andrew Verity….

The UK’s current account deficit widened to a record high in the final quarter of last year.

The deficit in the three months to December was £32.7bn, the equivalent of 7% of GDP, said the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Here’s the problem. If more money is flowing out than flowing in, companies and governments have to borrow from abroad to make up the difference. That’s fine, so long as there’s confidence in the UK’s economic future. Companies can borrow by issuing bonds, paying modest rates of interest (as can governments) and foreign investors will gobble them up.

If confidence takes a knock – if, for example, there’s a sterling crisis or other economic shock – then those foreign investors may be a little more reluctant to buy those bonds. In which case, those foreign investors may demand higher interest rates, which may well get passed on. Now can anyone think of any scenarios like that?

That bit speculation was followed by this in the main body of the report..

Stability fears

Earlier this week, the Bank of England’s Financial Policy Committee warned that uncertainty over the UK’s membership of the EU posed risks to financial stability, with implications for the current account deficit.

Howard Archer, chief UK and European economist at IHS Global Insight, described the fourth-quarter current account figures as “truly horrible” and “a particularly uncomfortable development for the UK economy”.

The BBC panhandling for Brussels spinning the scare stories?

Note this is from the BBC that has consistently supported borrowing and spending, sorry, investing, vast sums to stimulate the economy when interest rates are so low…now apparently that was all ludicrous bull.

Multi-culturalism in many respects does thrive in the UK  but not as the Left would like.  Many of those ‘cultures’ just get on with life not making a fuss nor demanding special treatment.  Others are not so peaceable and it is these that the Left pray upon, or rather become useful idiots for….Iran should be a lesson for them in how teaming up with Team Islam works out.

The BBC has demonstrated an increasing tendency to attack Indians, or rather Hindus, and it seems that this is not just limited to the BBC…its outhouse journal is also, it seems, guilty of a bit of racism……

Guardian’s racial hatred of British-Indians exposed as London looks for new mayor

A dash of political masala is spicing up an otherwise dull race for who will become London mayor after the May 5 election. Zac Goldsmith, the Eton-educated billionaire’s son who is the Conservative Party’s candidate, has been accused of inflaming Islamophobia and ethnic tensions here, after his campaign distributed leaflets that addressed concerns voiced by London’s NRI community.

The Guardian newspaper, compelled by its psychotic class-based racial hatred of British-Indians – a community that unforgivably thrived against the odds in Britain, and never needed rescuing by the luminous white saviours of the Left – is running articles that suggest Goldsmith is exploiting cultural divisions by telling Indian Londoners that they will be safer from crime under a Tory mayor, and that the Conservative Party is committed to improving India-British relations. In the deranged minds of the British left these anodyne and patently obvious statements are regarded as highly sinister developments….

…Corbyn has even gushingly referred to the lunatics of Hamas as his “friends”. And no fuss whatsoever was made by The Guardian or others on the left when the former Labour mayor, Ken Livingstone, tried to win an election by courting Muslims with the sectarian promise to make London a “beacon” for Islam.

Any hand reached out towards Indians in Britain will invite snarling attacks from the Left. Like Jews, Indians in Britain are increasingly suspected by a Left that both despises success and is increasingly dependent on a Muslim bloc-vote – of a heavily Pakistani nature – to secure a significant number of Labour seats. Labour’s relationship with British Jews is regarded to be at its worst in history; such is the virulent anti-semitism on the Left here.

Guido has been detailing Sadiq Khan’s very suspicious dealings with Islamists over decades…something the BBC seems to not be interested in for some reason.

Perhaps we can make a link here to the BBC’s refusal to mention that the murdered Asad Shah in Glasgow, was an Ahmadi Muslim and Khan’s candidacy for the London Mayorship….from Guido….

Readers will be aware of the murder of Glasgow shopkeeper Asad Shah, an Ahmadi Muslim allegedly killed by another Muslim for wishing customers a Happy Easter. The case has provoked debate about persecution of the Ahmadi community perpetrated by Islamic extremists like Corbyn fanboy Suliman Gani. Gani is the imam of the Tooting Islamic Centre, and has repeatedly called on his followers to discriminate against Ahmadis. Chillingly, the cleric was even reportedly involved in a boycott of Ahmadi shopkeepers.

When he isn’t calling women “subservient“, Gani campaigns side by side with Jeremy Corbyn and arranges segregated public meetings with Labour MPs. Interestingly, he’s also Sadiq Khan’s local imam – the two have shared a platform on numerous occasions. It’s worth reading this 2010 interview where Khan is grilled about anti-Ahmadi sentiment preached at the Tooting Islamic Centre. His Tory opponent at the time had to be locked in a room for his own safety after being mistaken for an Ahmadi.

Sadiq Khan is very close to this radical imam it seems.

The BBC would love to see a Labour man, a Muslim one at that, back in control of London…any chance they are not broaching the Ahmadi subject because it might reflect badly on Khan?

What’s really curious about the BBC’s absolute refusal to say that Asad Khan was an Ahmadi, and that is the reason the police state that his murder was ‘religiously motivated’, is that the BBC has been investigating a Mosque in Glasgow that has links to an extremist group in Pakistan...this is one line from that report…a report which is tucked away on the Scotland page for some reason despite being a significant story which made an appearance on the Today programme this morning….

Sipah-e-Sahaba is a militant anti-Shia political party formed in Pakistan in the 1980s.

The group and its armed off-shoot, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), have accepted responsibility for deadly sectarian attacks against Shia Muslims and other religious minorities in Pakistan.

Note that ‘Shia and other religious minorities’.…no mention of Ahmadi and yet a Sunni Muslim in Glasgow dressed in the full garb stabbed Asad Shah probably because he was Ahmadi…how does the BBC not make that link?  Did the killer attend that mosque?

Are the BBC helping Sadiq Khan out, are they suppressing information that they want to release as a ‘scoop’ themselves in one of their ‘exclusives’ or are they just doing the usual BBC thing in downplaying the Religion of Peace’s violent tendencies?  The BBC investigate a mosque in Glasgow but not an imam in London with links to Sadiq Khan, why not?

Whatever the reason it smells badly as the BBC hides the likely motivation for the killing of Asad Shah.

Of interest is Charles Moore in the Spectator on a similar thread….

You might expect that the murder of Christians would excite particular horror in countries of Christian heritage. Yet almost the opposite seems to be true. Even amid the current slew of Islamist barbarities, the killing of 72 people, 29 of them children, on Easter Day in Lahore, stands out. So does the assault in Yemen in which nuns were murdered and a priest was kidnapped and then, apparently, crucified on Good Friday. But the coverage tends to downplay such stories — there has been much less about Lahore than Brussels, though more than twice as many died — or at least their religious element.

The BBC correspondent in Lahore, Shazheb Jillani, was at pains to emphasise that the victims were not solely Christians but ‘simply Pakistani citizens enjoying a day out in the park with their children’, as if that made it worse. Western European politicians rarely protest about the plight of Christians in Muslim lands or offer to help them. Such Christians are perhaps regarded as a bit of a nuisance in countries Islam dominates.

The Jewish experience should warn us how insidious this way of turning the victims into the problem can be. Hatred of Christianity — as of Judaism — is central to the Islamist creed. In our secular societies in the West, we congratulate ourselves on our lack of zeal, and think that if we stay out of religious disputes, the angel of death will not select us. But the events in Brussels are a reminder that studied neutrality makes you weaker, and no safer.

 

Time for a new Open Thread. Here is where you detail the bias…