Category Archives: BBC bias

Why is the BBC using the term ‘right-wing’ to describe Breivik in their news bulletins and on the web?

Jailed Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik has given a Nazi salute upon returning to court to argue that his isolation violates his rights.

The right-wing extremist says he is being held in inhuman conditions but the state rejects this.

Why is he not ‘Far-Right’?  The BBC spends a lot of time and effort to disassociate Muslims from Islamist extremism and frequently doesn’t mention the words ‘Islam’ or ‘Muslim’ in many reports on Islamically inspired extremist and yet here they are casually associating Breivik with the general ‘Right-wing’ when no ‘right-wing’ person would condone his actions or incite them whereas the Koran specifically charges Muslims to kill and conquer to please Allah and make his religion supreme.

If the BBC is going to fence off Islam from criticism despite what it teaches and what so many of its followers do, as Islamic governments, as groups that represent Muslims, as individuals, and as violent extremists, then it should make even more of an effort to not smear those on the ‘Right’ by linking them by association to Breivik as they in no way condone, incite or encourage violence such as his.

The BBC is deliberately linking mass murder with ‘Right-wing’, encouraging people to make that association and thereby attempting to discredit and undermine anyone subsequently described as ‘Right-wing’ however innocuous their views actually are.

How different the BBC’s tone to the one they used with self-confessed Muslim extremists Moazzam Begg and Babar Ahmad who were feted as victims of an unjust war on terror having fought against the brutal oppression of the Muslim world by the West.

Can’t imagine Victoria Derbyshire will be giving Breivik a lovely little interview that hardly breaks the mask.

Just by coincidence I came across this by Daniel Hannan…

Leftists become incandescent when reminded of the socialist roots of Nazism

Leftist readers may by now be seething. Whenever I touch on this subject, it elicits an almost berserk reaction from people who think of themselves as progressives and see anti-fascism as part of their ideology. Well, chaps, maybe now you know how we conservatives feel when you loosely associate Nazism with “the Right”.

My beef with many (not all) Leftists is a simpler one. By refusing to return the compliment, by assuming a moral superiority, they make political dialogue almost impossible. Using the soubriquet “Right-wing” to mean “something undesirable” is a small but important example.

Next time you hear Leftists use the word fascist as a general insult, gently point out the difference between what they like to imagine the NSDAP stood for and what it actually proclaimed.

The BBC reports the CBI saying its members overwhelmingly support staying in the EU…..what the BBC makes no mention of is that the real reason they want to stay is the flow of cheap labour that is made available to them to import which saves them the cost of paying proper wages and of having to train British workers as they can poach those already trained by their home countries….odd how the pay and conditions and the ability to get work is suddenly of no concern to the BBC which spent the run-up to the election peddling Labour’s economic narrative of low wages and a work force on the scrap heap….and on another subject, funny how Osborne’s daft adoption of Miliband’s ‘predistribution’ is now not such a good idea raising costs for businesses and costing jobs when it was never so criticised when proposed by Miliband.

The BBC doesn’t report this survey of global businesses that suggests Brexit will have little effect on how they deal with the UK….

‘Brexit’ won’t hurt our trade with UK: Global CFOs

A British breakaway from the European Union this summer will do little damage to the country’s business ties with the rest of the world, according to a new survey conducted by CNBC.

Chief financial officers (CFOs) from some of the world’s biggest firms were largely sanguine on the outcome of a “Brexit” and how that could affect any current or future trading conditions with the island nation.

Over 70 percent of global CFOs – across a wide range of industries – said there would be “no change” on their perspective on how likely they would be to do business with the U.K. in the event of an exit.

However, 14.6 percent of respondents said they would be “slightly less likely” to do business with the country and 2.1 percent said they would be “significantly less likely.” Conversely, 2.1 percent said they would be “slightly more likely” to form ties with a breakaway nation.

Babar blacksheep do you have any wool to pull over the eyes of the liberal media?

Andrew Gilligan thinks he does…

Babar Ahmad – a convicted terrorist – is pulling the wool over the liberal media’s eyes

From Tony Blair over the Iraq dossier, to the parliamentary expenses cheats who ended in jail, the last resort of any scoundrel is to claim that he acted in “good faith”.

Today, we witness this age-old excuse in daring new territory. The Victoria Derbyshire show on BBC Two will introduce us to Britain’s first-ever “good faith” supporter of Osama bin Laden.

Not the first time the BBC has allowed itself to be gulled….

Islamism in Birmingham schools: how the BBC is selectively reporting the ‘Trojan horse’ plot

The Trojan Horse plotters and their allies on Twitter have been getting touchingly excited about a BBC report into a secret meeting on Wednesday between officials of Birmingham City Council and the heads of the 21 schools involved. Alas, their claims that it “proved” the plot was a “hoax” don’t stand up to scrutiny.

And its biased reporting to be used in the defence of Islamists……

This despite the BBC report clearly stating,

“We still don’t know whether it’s genuine or a fake”

Victoria Derbyshire interviews convicted terrorist enabler Babar Ahmad…but not too hard.

Ahmad gives us two excuses for pleading guilty…one that it was a plea bargain….and two that he was guilty under US law so he had no choice really….which is it?  He also compares himself to Nelson Mandela….but then again so did Mark Easton who thinks ‘extremists’ like Ahmad have a lot to teach us.

He also told us that he wouldn’t believe a non-Muslim when deciding if Bin Laden did 9/11….he’d rather go with the extremist, presumably however bad he was, just because he was Muslim…..kind of tells us where the loyalties really lie.

He claims he has PTSD caused due to how the British police treated him as they arrested him….and yet this is a man who fought in Bosnia and must have seen, and possibly done, some bloody deeds….speaking of which he claims that his support for the Taliban arose out of the way Muslims were treated in Bosnia…the massacre at Srebrenica…..Derbyshire didn’t intervene.

We’ve already looked at how the BBC have misled the public on Srebrenica but let me just remind you of why Srebrenica happened….it happened because the Muslim forces slaughtered the non-Muslims in surrounding villages….

In 1995 around 8000 Bosnian Muslims were killed in a massacre by Bosnian Serb forces.

This has become a ‘genocide’, a ‘Holocaust’…..a deadly narrative pushed by Muslims and picked up by the BBC and promoted with a relentless and deadly determination….a narrative that serves to radicalise Muslims.

There is another narrative….’the crimes were quite “extraordinary in the region committed by those Muslim soldiers made the Serbs’ desire for revenge inevitable…… the Muslim commander in Srebrenica, Naser Oric, “engaged in attacks during Orthodox (Christian) holidays and destroyed villages, massacring all the inhabitants.  He stated… “One can’t be bothered with prisoners”

Shortly before the Bosnian Serb attack on Srebrenica, the Muslim troops stationed in that enclave carried out murderous attacks on nearby Serb villages. These attacks were certain to incite Serb commanders to retaliate against the Srebrenica garrison.

And…

Here is the report of French General Philippe Morillon, the UNPROFOR commander who first called international attention to the Srebrenica enclave, he is adamant that the crimes were quite “extraordinary in the region committed by those Muslim soldiers made the Serbs’ desire for revenge inevitable. He testified at The Hague Tribunal on February 12, 2004, that the Muslim commander in Srebrenica, Naser Oric, “engaged in attacks during Orthodox (Christian) holidays and destroyed villages, massacring all the inhabitants. This created a degree of hatred that was quite extraordinary in the region.”

Morillon also recounts how “the Serbs took me to a village to show me the evacuation of the bodies of the inhabitants that had been thrown into a hole, a village close to Bratunac. And this made me understand the degree to which this infernal situation of blood and vengeance […] led to a situation when I personally feared that the worst would happen if the Serbs of Bosnia managed to enter the enclaves and Srebrenica…I feared that the Serbs, the local Serbs, the Serbs of Bratunac, these militiamen, they wanted to take their revenge for everything that they attributed to Naser Oric. It wasn’t just Naser Oric that they wanted to revenge, take their revenge on; they wanted to revenge their dead on Orthodox Christians.”

Here is the Sky News video telling of the Muslim atrocities and the infiltration of Europe by fanatical Islamists….long before the Iraq war that the BBC blames for radicalising Muslims……..

When you think of those Islamists seeking to infiltrate Europe via the Balkans [Ignored by the BBC], the British Trojan Horse plot carried out by a senior MCB official  [denied by the BBC] and the mass migration of Muslims into Europe now consider this Islamic State strategy that Der Spiegel spells out…how to infiltrate and take over a society…….naturally this being ISIS having the use of guns is a handy shortcut to power….but it is the use of Islamic educational and information institutions that should be of interest in the way they are used to spread the word and establish an Islamic ‘bridgehead’ in a society much as the Saudis do in the UK and elsewhere…..

An Iraqi officer planned Islamic State’s takeover in Syria and SPIEGEL has been given exclusive access to his papers. They portray an organization that, while seemingly driven by religious fanaticism, is actually coldly calculating.

What Bakr put on paper, page by page, with carefully outlined boxes for individual responsibilities, was nothing less than a blueprint for a takeover. It was not a manifesto of faith, but a technically precise plan for an “Islamic Intelligence State” — a caliphate run by an organization that resembled East Germany’s notorious Stasi domestic intelligence agency.

This blueprint was implemented with astonishing accuracy in the ensuing months. The plan would always begin with the same detail: The group recruited followers under the pretense of opening a Dawah office, an Islamic missionary center. Of those who came to listen to lectures and attend courses on Islamic life, one or two men were selected and instructed to spy on their village and obtain a wide range of information. To that end, Haji Bakr compiled lists such as the following:

• List the powerful families.
• Name the powerful individuals in these families.
• Find out their sources of income.
• Name names and the sizes of (rebel) brigades in the village.
• Find out the names of their leaders, who controls the brigades and their political orientation.
• Find out their illegal activities (according to Sharia law), which could be used to blackmail them if necessary.

The spies were told to note such details as whether someone was a criminal or a homosexual, or was involved in a secret affair, so as to have ammunition for blackmailing later. “We will appoint the smartest ones as Sharia sheiks,” Bakr had noted. “We will train them for a while and then dispatch them.” As a postscript, he had added that several “brothers” would be selected in each town to marry the daughters of the most influential families, in order to “ensure penetration of these families without their knowledge.”

The spies were to find out as much as possible about the target towns: Who lived there, who was in charge, which families were religious, which Islamic school of religious jurisprudence they belonged to, how many mosques there were, who the imam was, how many wives and children he had and how old they were. Other details included what the imam’s sermons were like, whether he was more open to the Sufi, or mystical variant of Islam, whether he sided with the opposition or the regime, and what his position was on jihad. Bakr also wanted answers to questions like: Does the imam earn a salary? If so, who pays it? Who appoints him? Finally: How many people in the village are champions of democracy?

The agents were supposed to function as seismic signal waves, sent out to track down the tiniest cracks, as well as age-old faults within the deep layers of society — in short, any information that could be used to divide and subjugate the local population.

The expansion of IS began so inconspicuously that, a year later, many Syrians had to think for a moment about when the jihadists had appeared in their midst. The Dawah offices that were opened in many towns in northern Syria in the spring of 2013 were innocent-looking missionary offices, not unlike the ones that Islamic charities have opened worldwide.

When a Dawah office opened in Raqqa, “all they said was that they were ‘brothers,’ and they never said a word about the ‘Islamic State’,” reports a doctor who fled from the city. A Dawah office was also opened in Manbij, a liberal city in Aleppo Province, in the spring of 2013. “I didn’t even notice it at first,” recalls a young civil rights activist. “Anyone was allowed to open what he wished. We would never have suspected that someone other than the regime could threaten us. It was only when the fighting erupted in January that we learned that Da’ish,” the Arab acronym for IS, “had already rented several apartments where it could store weapons and hide its men.”

The situation was similar in the towns of al-Bab, Atarib and Azaz. Dawah offices were also opened in neighboring Idlib Province in early 2013, in the towns of Sermada, Atmeh, Kafr Takharim, al-Dana and Salqin. As soon as it had identified enough “students” who could be recruited as spies, IS expanded its presence.

The BBC never goes beyond the face value that Muslims like Babar Ahmad presents to them…Derbyshire in particular is extremely reluctant to challenge Muslim speakers who are clearly not your everyday members of the Public so slick and practiced are their arguments….the BBC in fact supports the very narrative put forward by the Islamists of it being Western foreign policy that is to blame for all the world’s ills and thereby feeds the propaganda that drives the recruitment of yet more radicalised Muslims.

The BBC needs to start asking what are the consequences for Western society that has an ever increasing number of Muslims within.  Of course it won’t ask that as the answer is one they don’t want to hear or to be allowed to be heard.

The BBC seems entirely unconcerned, and indeed seems to want to hide, Labour’s problems with anti-Semitism and other extremist beliefs.

Last week the BBC ignored a very high profile comment from Cameron on PMQs denouncing Labour for allowing Gerry Downing back into the Party but this week as the storm builds they have had to report a similar instance of someone with very dubious views being, not only allowed back into the Party, but placed in a senior position after she Tweeted that ISIS should attack Israel amongst other nasties.  The trouble is you have to look fairly hard to find the report of that and the one about yet another investigation into Labour related anti-Semitism… buried as they are on the ‘Politics’ page.

Corbyn has many links with various dodgy Islamists, as does Labour’s London Mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan, Livingstone also has such links and is known to make unpleasant remarks to Jewish reporters, McDonnell is a fan of the IRA and Shameless Milne….well let’s not go there.

Any news organisation worth its salt would be tearing Corbyn’s Labour Party apart….the BBC would certainly be putting the Tories on the rack if there were people with similar views about Muslims as Labour Party members have about Jews….it would be front page news for days, if not weeks, with freedom of information ‘scoops’ and leaks of more horrors being reported with relish.

Not so with the Labour Party and the Jews…..why not?   Does the BBC have a ‘secret’ liking for Labour and a dislike of the Israelis?

Just what could be the reason for the lack of interest?

Monday arrives and so time for a new one of these. Wonder what you make of the Top Gear story that is in the news today? I was talking to Jon Gaunt about it just now and my view is that whoever decided it would be wheeze to perform car wheelies stunts near the War Memorial in Whitehall should be sacked. They won’t of course, but they should. Anyway, over to you…

Destroy-Deny-Degrade-Disrupt, living up to his name perhaps, says in the comments that….

‘I don’t rely on Alan to think for me, nor speak for me’

Uhhh…OK…I’ll fold my tent and bugger off to the desert to read the Koran and play with my harem before coming back to separate DDDD from his head….or…..or I could just write a long whinge to the Guardian about how unloved I am and how everybody should be forced by law to appreciate just what a bleeding genius I am…..oh shit, look, someone’s beaten me to it…..the evil right-wing Press have been force feeding children Mein Kampf and it’s just not on you know!….

Line of Duty creator hits back at ‘weak and bullying’ critics of BBC

The creator of Line of Duty, Jed Mercurio, has launched a passionate defence of the BBC before the return of his acclaimed police corruption drama to BBC2 this month.

“I think we all know there’s an anti-BBC agenda in certain areas of the press,” says Mercurio. “Sometimes it’s just boring in its inevitability and then every now and then it really crosses a line. I think comments about The Great British Bake Off – the chocolate mosque comments – really crossed a line and I think that comments about London Spy have crossed a line.

Yep…The Mail’s [What not the Mail!!!] Amanda Platell is the voice of the Devil as she disembowels the BBC with her satanic discourse…

Poor Flora wasn’t PC enough for Beeb

When this series of The Great British Bake Off began, the BBC was proud it was the most inclusive, multi-cultural line-up ever.

Now we’re down to the final three, it’s certainly a PC triumph. We are left with Muslim mum Nadiya Hussain, gay doctor Tamal Ray, and New Man Ian Cumming. Poor Flora Shedden never stood a chance. She was far too middle class — and was booted off this week after her chocolate carousel was deemed sub-standard.

Perhaps if she’d made a chocolate mosque, she’d have stood a better chance.

Or she could just be making a salient and truthful observation of fact.

Mercurio attacks the Telegraph for criticising his adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover…and yet the article was in fact praising another BBC programme….

Another week, another classic about illicit spooning at the dawn of the 20th century. Where the BBC’s fresh take on Lady Chatterley’s Lover hollowed out the original and injected its own up-to-date agitprop, The Go-Between (BBC One) kept faith with LP Hartley’s devastating story of love denied. This was what creative fidelity is meant to look like.

So is Mercurio’s whinge more about him and his ‘art’ than defending the BBC?  The Guardian itself admits that Mercurio has chopped and changed the story to heighten the ‘agitprop’….

Mercurio has done that – added bits here, borrowed there, taken plenty away. No doubt people will be cross…….The accident at the mine provides a dramatic opening and is powerful and exciting even on a small screen budget, as well as quickly getting to ideas of injustice and social conflict.

The well known right-wing rag, The New Statesmen, says…

In Mercurio’s hands, the narrative was – quite a rare feat, this – at once clichéd and anachronistic.

How about WalesOnline?…

This offering of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by the BBC seemed intent on trying to avoid offending anyone, but it ends up being offensive in its treatment of the classic novel

Sexy? Not really. Poignant? Nah. Good? Oh no.

Mercurio goes on to say that criticism of his show ‘Cardiac Arrest’ was political…and yet he admits that the programme was ‘a pretty controversial piece’.….

I certainly know that when I did [the 90s medical drama] Cardiac Arrest, which was a pretty controversial piece, there was a lot of negative coverage in the Daily Mail and the Daily Express. The rightwing press really slagged it off and that was a political decision, nothing to do with the artistic quality of the programme.

He quotes nothing from the Mail or the Express to illustrate his claim…and no proof that such negative coverage was ‘political’….. were the left-wing press being ‘political’ in their praise this being the early 90’s and a Tory government in charge of the NHS…wouldn’t the left delight in a production from the BBC that paints the NHS as falling apart?

Only positive, ego stroking criticism in future for the sensitive and clever Mr Mercurio please!

Still, another bit of pro-BBC agitprop to chalk up for Lord Hall Hall’s campaign.

The BBC, in its search for edgy, new and original comedians, has turned up someone called Stewart Lee, presumably someone also thought he was a bit ethnic with a name like Lee and booked him having seen him perform…..

Only joking…he is of course tried and trusted by the Liberal intelligentsia to be a reliable purveyor of right-on comedy to the Guardianista in-crowd since the 90’s…..here he is recently with his little, very little, red book of the Regime’s best jokes…or is that John McDonnell?

but where did it all go so wrong Stew?…..

He’s gone from the bright young thing to that bedraggled tramp shouting abuse at people on the streets.

Steve Martin had some good advice for budding comedians…..

Still, don’t worry Stewie, the Guardianistas don’t have a sense of humour so not having any jokes isn’t much of a problem for you is it?

The BBC is disinterring the old faithfuls such as Alf Garnett but reconfigured for the modern age…anyone want to bet that the new BBC version will be, snigger snigger, ‘Nigel Farage’?…and keeping Stewart Lee on the books seems to be in line with that policy of keeping the oldies on life support despite the fact he seems to have run out of decent material….never mind this recent series had not one, not two, not three but four writers.

The first episode was on wealth and I gave up after 10 minutes or so….it is slow and torturous with pretend angst whilst naturally still targeting the same old, same old.

The funniest thing he said was ironically a right-wing joke about the pretentious language of the left as he talked of his own artistic ambitions…

‘[I aim] to create a secondary character driven narrative that runs both in tandem with, and in dramatic opposition to, the surface level stand-up.  I want you to laugh in spite of me not because of me…an example of theatrical practise known as Brechtian Alienation….an incredibly high risk performance strategy that few people seem to appreciate… and no-one is equipped to review me..’

In fact it wasn’t really a joke…that is genuinely the effect he seeks to create.  Wonder how that worked out for him.

Moving on from ‘Wealth’ he hits his stride with ‘Islamophobia’ in the second episode.   Clearly he left the house in a rush and forget to bring the jokes along….this set consisted mostly of shouting abuse at the ‘home audience’ of Islamophobes who are just ‘awful people’ and shouting out the names of the guilty ones in the Media who incite such hatred towards Moooslims…the Mail, the Sun, Rupert Murdoch, the Telegraph and of course John Whittingdale.

Lee naturally made no attempt to argue his case [He did admit ‘I’ve done no fucking research’], he would have lost, and instead made what he hoped was a poignant and powerful comparison of Quakers to Muslims and our ‘hypocritical’ attitudes and yet managed instead to make a completely spurious and very weak pointless point.  ….and the irony being that the Quakers decamped to the US and now are derided and sneered at by the BBC as ‘Bible Belt’ right-wing religious fanatics who probably vote for Donald Trump….however, no comedy routine from Lee defending them against the BBC’s anti-Christian crusade…or is that jihad?

He worked up that whole routine in order to finish on the pithy punch-line that we musn’t expect Muslims to integrate and be just like us.  Well no, we don’t expect them to turn into happy-clappy Christians, going to Barmitzvahs, and drinking Stella at the pig roast…the trouble isn’t us…it’s them, to generalise…wanting us, non-Muslims, to integrate with their Muslim culture.

Naturally Lee didn’t dare come up with any jokes critical and satirical about Islam or Muslims…..he’s not a gutless coward he’s just a righteous anti-Establishment lefty as he refuses to comply with BBC corporate orders…..the BBC’s head of religious programming, Aaqil Ahmed, insists on more jokes about Muhammed….so that we can learn more about him and his fantastic religion…

“The day we have people standing up and telling detailed jokes about Muhammad and have the audience understanding that humour, then we will have come a long way in society and we will have a lot more religious literacy about a major world figure.”

Go on Stewie….do it, take a deep breath and be ‘Charlie’….tell the one about Muhammed beheading all the males in a Jewish tribe and enslaving the women and children.

He ended with the line that he was ‘funny once’.….’once’…surely he exaggerates.

Anyway onto the next epsiode….need I tell you?   It’s about ‘Patriotism’ for those who have never watched the BBC or one of Lee’s routines….Mark Easton probably co-wrote this one…..should be a laugh….I joke.

Apparently there are three more episodes….as yet subjects unannounced….feel free to list the possibilities in the comments.

Listening to the BBC’s report this morning on the left wing thugs who disrupted a Trump rally you were led to believe that this was the fault of Trump’s supporters who were ‘angry’ and somehow it was they who caused the violence…and of course, paradoxically, it is Trump’s ‘racist and violent’ rhetoric, his use of ‘hate speech’ and fostering divison, and that incites a reciprocal response from the opposition.  The BBC of course is only ‘reporting’ the views of those who want to portray Trump as a racist….but do they have to ‘report’ it so often?

The ‘protestors’ were not to blame it seems for violence nor the attack on free speech…just as the Labour Party’s ‘Blackshirts’, the UAF, are never portrayed in their true light as violent, fascist thugs who set out to stir up violence for the cameras at ‘right-wing’ protests.

The Spectator has also noticed the lack of opprobrium for the anti-Trump ‘protestors’…

As lots of conservatives on social media have already said, just imagine if a bunch of violent Trump fans had disrupted a Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton event. They would be called fascists, and the condemnation would be global. Politicians across the world would issue statements expressing concern.

When the same thing happens to a Trump rally, however, the reaction is strangely mute. This unfairness causes resentment which causes Trump to win more votes.

In fact, lots of people who previously might have not voted for Trump will now do so precisely because they don’t want to be told what to do by a bunch of snarling, smug left-liberal millennials. If there was any chance of stopping Donald Trump becoming the Republican nominee, it was shut down last night in Chicago.

Did you hear Dr Adam Marshall, acting director-general of the BCC, on Wake up to money (34 mins) on Friday?  Interesting what he had to say.  He told us that what really concerned his members was the poor state of the global economy, what’s happening in the emerging economies, China, Russia, Brazil, the oil price, inflation and turmoil in financial markets, all of which ‘weigh the heaviest’ on their minds ….the EU referendum is of little consequence by comparison.

Isn’t that fascinating?   Here’s the pro-EU BCC saying that the outcome of the EU referendum has little bearing on our economic future.

Odd for one that he hasn’t immediately been sacked under pressure from No10 but also odd that the BBC didn’t see fit to rebroadcast his views on each and every news bulletin throughout the day as they are wont to do with selected interviews they take a liking to.  Odd how someone in what is now such a high profile position should make such a controversial statement and be ignored by the BBC.

I should give credit where credit is due…the BBC’s Adam Parsons did press Marshall to comment on the departure of his predecessor, John Longworth.

We’ve already looked at the BBC’s decision to put on a huge EU referendum debate just two days before the actual vote, concluding that it was likely that the BBC believed that such a circus would benefit the pro-EU campaign persuading, nudging, the ‘don’t knows’ into voting ‘stay’.

David Dimbleby front’s the BBC’s EU coverage and will lead a debate to be held at Wembley Arena just two days before the referendum.

This is pure showbiz from the BBC….there’s absolutely no need to hold such a major debate at such a massive venue and at such a dramatic time. The BBC’s description of the event is possibly more truthful than they intended to  let on….’The corporation’s biggest ever campaign event’.

We know that the vote might be close and the BBC has obviously ‘gamed’ this final debate and come to the conclusion that those crucial few votes may be swung by this debate, the über pro-EU BBC wouldn’t take the risk otherwise….As it is controlled and marshalled by BBC presenters who can define the limits of the debate, set out the arguments and choose the questions it is in their power to finesse their presentation so that it favours, they hope imperceptibly, the pro-EU side.  The audience is supposedly self-selecting, 50-50 pro-EU/pro-Brexit but of course that is all down to the audience’s honesty, how does the BBC select those who ask questions?  Do they pick the inarticulate, the working class, those with ‘extreme’ views about the EU?  How often have we seen that contrast on the BBC when the person giving the narrative that the BBC would seem to support is the educated, articulate, middle class professional and the opposing view is put by someone the BBC wants to portray as an uneducated bigot?

However it seems the ‘Inners’ are also rather doubtful about the debate and  the Times tells us they are out to ‘scupper BBC debate at Wembley’.

They think it will be a ‘circus’ and that the audience will favour the Brexit side.  They would like the venue to change to one more suitable for a serious debate.

What’s interesting is the BBC’s reply…

A senior BBC figure said:  “By going public on briefing against us, they have made it harder, not easier, for us to change position.  The last thing we can be seen to do is concede to one side or another.”

So the BBC would have changed the venue if the pro-EU side had come to them behind closed doors….it’s OK as long as the public don’t see the ‘fix’ going in.

I would suggest that such a debate about the venue be held in the open with both parties…it’s not hard to organise surely?  There would then be no question of the BBC being seen to be conceding to one side or the other and no secret deals being done behind those closed doors which we must now assume go on all the time between the BBC and the politicians…so much for independence, openness and accountability…and trust.