Category Archives: BBC bias

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…

“It really matters that our news and current affairs is the best, the highest top-level journalism you can have.”  Gwyneth Williams, Controller Radio 4

If this is the best they can do gawd help us.

Remember Asad Shah, the Ahmadi Muslim killed in Glasgow?  The BBC are doing their best to disremember him and all the inconvenient truths that his death brings out into the open.

We’ve looked at the BBC’s reluctance to examine the reasons behind the killing a couple of times now but it’s worth looking again at a classic example of how the BBC edits the news to suit its own agenda and will refuse to discuss issues that raise awkward questions about one of the BBC’s favoured groups that it protects regardless of what it does.

The Today programme, the BBC’s prime news and current affairs outlet, the one that sets the agenda for the rest of the day for BBC News, gave only a token mention of Asad Shah’s murder, limited to the basic fact of his death and what a nice bloke everyone thought he was.

Compare that to the coverage Today gave to boxer Nick Blackwell who was hospitalised.  We got a long discussion on what happened in his fight and on the dangers of boxing.  This was followed up on 5Live at 0900 with a phone in on the subject…and there’s more…from Newsbeat…

Nick Blackwell: What are the rules for stopping boxing bouts?

Boxer Nick Blackwell was put into an induced coma after suffering a bleed on the brain during his British middleweight title defeat to Chris Eubank Jr.

The referee stopped the fight after 10 rounds, saying Blackwell couldn’t carry on.  Two rounds earlier, Chris Eubank Snr asked “why hasn’t the referee stopped the fight? ” Some agree with him, others side with the referee. So what are the rules?

A serious event for Nick Blackwell and one that deserves some discussion but where is the similar level of concern for a man who has been killed in the street, the killer kicking him in the head and sitting on his chest laughing….killed in a hate crime….so often the BBC’s call to arms.  This wasn’t a random killing, it wasn’t one of Mark Mardell’s ‘senseless tragedies’, this was a targeted attack, targeted for a reason.  Where are the discussions about the likely causes of his death…that being the fact Asad Shah was an Ahmadi Muslim?  Where are the discussions about hate crimes against Ahmadis and who is inciting them and why?

Interesting to see that the young girl who was killed in an accident on a bouncy castle is still frontpage news whilst  the mass killing of Christians in Pakistan is slowly disappearing…it hasn’t been on the frontpage all day and is slipping down the order on the world page now…tomorrow it will no doubt have vanished into the Asia section to be flushed down the memory hole and forgotten till the next mass killing.

The BBC reports on the frontpage that the family of the little girl are heartbroken at the cruel death of their girl….absolutely no mention that the family of Asad Shah are living in fear of being killed for their beliefs in a British city.

Just what are the BBC’s news priorities?  They can’t seriously expect us to swallow the guff that “our news and current affairs is the best, the highest top-level journalism you can have.”

A bit of a diversion from the usual……I’d watch it with your eyes shut if you don’t like heights…

Just remember…no smoking…it’s bad for your health…..