When it’s not being used to spread Project Fear, BBC Radio 4 likes to relax by continually expressing its disgust at the success of Donald Trump and this morning was no exception. The BBC just cannot understand how a man like Trump – with his “awful” views – has had such a successful SuperTuesday! I can’t wait for him to become President, just as the UK exist the EU. It will bring on the collective collapse of the rancid BBC.

Here you go, a new Open Thread to welcome the middle of the week! Detail the bias here please!

Always amusing how much effort the BBC puts into avoiding mentioning or downplaying immigration and its effects.

Just why did the BBC decide to frame Macedonia’s actions in protecting itself against the attempt by mostly young, male Muslims to invade Macedonia using brute force as something Macedonia had to ‘defend’….Macedonia doesn’t have to ‘defend’ its actions, it has to defend its, and Europe’s, borders against vast numbers of people who have no intention of integrating and who will in the course of time demand that their families be let in and that they be allowed to practice their religion as they see fit.

Back in Blighty yesterday the world was looking at the shortage of school places.

The BBC’s report tells us what the problem is…

With a population bulge about to hit secondary schools, councils want powers to open new maintained schools and to compel academies to expand.  

The population bulge which has put primary schools under pressure will start hitting secondary schools this year, according to official figures.

And that’s it…no talk of immigration or anything connected to it just that euphemistic ‘population bulge’.

The BBC in a What the Papers Say article report the Sun saying…

“One in six schools are full”, is the headline in the Sun, which says the “classroom crisis” is set to worsen because of “Britain’s immigration-fuelled population boom”. In its leader column, the paper says “overcrowded classrooms and the challenges of accommodating myriad different languages will nobble attempts to drive up standards”.

And the Mail saying…

The Daily Mail agrees, saying the number of children who are “non-native speakers soared by nearly 400% from 51,955 to 190,506 in seven years, stretching teachers’ time”.

Rather selective choice of Mail quote as the Mail’s main headline was…

British children ‘neglected’ as migrant pupil numbers soar with 1.2 million children in school whose first language is not English

Then scroll down to the video of Author Matthew Green and Jenni Russell of the Times reviewing the front pages and you will get an EU love-in where they find the arguments for the EU ‘quite convincing’.

What’s also remarkable is that the BBC, other than to show the page itself, doesn’t discuss the Mail’s front page which looks at Blair and the Iraq War …a very sore subject with the BBC…we’ve mentioned this a few days ago when the Mail had Blair’s secret plot to import millions of immigrants on its front page and the BBC ignored that…..I’m guessing the BBC ignore this because it would link to the story on immigration…and then they would have to explain why they didn’t expose Blair at the time of his plot and when Andrew Neather blew the doors off it all and revealed everything….

Conman Blair’s cynical conspiracy to deceive the British people and let in 2million migrants against the rules: Explosive new biography lays ex-PM’s betrayal bare

Look at the selected quotes the BBC plucked from the Mail yesterday….

The Daily Mail agrees, saying the number of children who are “non-native speakers soared by nearly 400% from 51,955 to 190,506 in seven years, stretching teachers’ time”.

The Daily Mail says it has been a “disastrous year for some charities”, with interventions from the prime minister and a committee of MPs, the latter warning charities “are now looking at their ‘last chance’ to put their own house in order”.

The Daily Mail adds a disclaimer to what might otherwise appear to be a good-news story, that while people were “significantly happier at 69”, this was “despite most of them developing chronic diseases such as arthritis, diabetes and high blood pressure”.

Daily Mail – Back to uni on helicopters, private jets and in flash cars: Rich Kids of London show off their favourite transport as they ‘sneer at peasants outside Primark’ and clean their shoes with £50 notes

The Daily Mail reports the hedgehog population was thought to be about 36 million strong in the 1950s, but has declined to less than a million since 2003.

And what about this….

‘Eye-catching headlines’

What would be that ‘eye-catching headline’?…..one about the BBC…

Now the good news: we’re all in the BBC survivors’ club – the Daily Mail reports on how seasoned BBC hacks Frank Gardner, Andrew Marr, Nick Robinson and George Alagiah formed the Survivors’ Club, having been through serious illness or injury.

Incredible that the actual headline story plastered across the frontpage of the Mail is not even mentioned….not a peep about Iraq.     It’s almost as if the BBC doesn’t want you to read the book on Blair and his betrayal of the British people….which the BBC silently consented to.

After all the years Paul Mason worked for the BBC has the Tory Party just woken up to the fact he is somewhat left of left?  Just why did the ‘impartial’ BBC employ him when he was so obviously way off any norm?

Via Guido…

“The fact that the Labour Party is now getting its advice from Yanis Varoufakis and the revolutionary Marxist broadcaster Paul Mason does not suggest to me that they’ve got an answer to economic security. Presumably they chose those two because Chairman Mao was dead and Mickey Mouse was busy.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipLFZ41xtm8

Business Insider have unearthed a 1987 ITN clip of a dashing Paul Mason handing out the Workers’ Power newspaper and talking about “building revolutionary politics within the Labour Party”. Workers’ Power were a militant Trotskyist entryist group which infiltrated Labour in the eighties when Mason was working as a music teacher – his economics is all self-taught. The same year Mason was distributing their material, they published a pamphlet commemorating the Russian revolution and praising Lenin. It has taken nearly thirty years to achieve his entryist ambitions, now finally Labour’s Shadow Chancellor has signed him up to help with Labour’s economic policy…

It seems the BBC has shut up shop, it has burnt itself out reporting so enthusiastically about the letter (written by No10) from a group of businessmen cheerleading for the EU and another from some military types who hold the same views.

Odd, if we are supposed to vaue the opinions of such people, that the BBC ignores views from similarly statuesque figures on the Brexit side of things…such as the ex-Governor of the Bank of England whose opinion on the EU seemed to be of absolutely no interest to the BBC at all despite making the somewhat important judgement that the Eurozone is doomed.

Today we have Maj Gen Julian Thompson who expresses yet more critical thinking about the value of the EU…and again no sign of any BBC interest in his views… the one about Obama being a lameduck president no doubted grated somewhat…

Today, membership of the EU weakens our national defence in very dangerous times. Why? Clear-sighted understanding is obscured by four common myths.

Myth One is that the EU has kept the peace in Europe since 1945.

Myth Two is that the Americans want us to stay in the EU.

Myth Three is that if Britain takes back control of her own destiny it will help Putin.

Myth Four is that the EU helps us defeat Islamist terrorism.

Finally, some say: “stay in to rescue others as the EU founders.” I say we’ll do that better from a seaworthy lifeboat than shackled to a sinking deck.

I know from my lifetime’s experience in the service of my country that delusions about what actually keeps us safe, threaten us all. So let us put an end for good to these myths about the EU helping security. The facts show the very opposite.

Both Mervyn King and Julian Thompson have important things to say, things that undermine ‘Project Fear’ and give  support to Brexit…..and yet the BBC doesn’t give them the prominence it gives to the voices of Project Fear, if any coverage at all.

Here you go, a new Open Thread to start the week and end the month! BBC bias bothering you? Detail it here please.

Jude Law’s security team was attacked and mugged by migrants when the cameras stopped after the Hollywood star left the jungle camp in Calais

Security guards hired to protect Jude Law when he visited the ‘Jungle’ migrant camp were reportedly targeted by rock-pelting migrants just moments after the actor boarded the coach home.

But moments after the celebrities had boarded the production team coach back to Britain, their security team was ambushed, according to the Sunday People.

The attackers reportedly hurled stones at the men before stealing their mobile phones. 

A source told the newspaper: ‘We were shocked to see some of the migrants acting like football hooligans. The security team had stones thrown at them and two had phones smashed and stolen.’

Let ’em all in…they can squat at Jude’s place…places…or Mark Easton’s.

A nice gaff in Malibu or how about the £14 million one in Highgate?……

‘I am struggling a bit to see where the crisis is.’ 

John Humphrys in his own interview on the BBC’s nursing shortage ‘crisis’ in the NHS

The BBC has been headlining with the news that there is a shortage of nurses in the NHS and foreign nurses are having to be recruited, at great expense, by the shipload.

Trouble is, much like its claim that Jeremy Hunt was misleading us on the figures for deaths at the weekends, this is a story generated, it seems, only in the minds of the BBC itself for its own reasons and purposes.

Here is their web report….a report which misses out the absolutely crucial information that we only found out on the Today programme….trouble is, it seems the BBC only found out at the same time, found out that their story is complete bunk….hence John Humphrys’ reaction….’I’m struggling a bit to see where the crisis is?’  Yeah…that’s because there isn’t one.  Clearly either the BBC reporters did not research the story properly or they didn’t care that it was wrong and went ahead anyway in the hope that it was a ‘scoop’.

The whole piece began at 08:13:32 where we heard that patients were getting the care they needed with the help of agency staff, but John Humphrys interviewed Ian Cummings (08:19), chief executive of Health Education England who gave the lie to the BBC narrative.

The reason there is a ‘shortage’ of nurses?  Not because there is a lack of recruits, not because nurses are fleeing the profession but because……because the government is looking to recruit far more nurses, 24,000 more, in response to Mid-Staffs and other quality failings that have been found.  The ‘shortage’ is man-made if you like…in fact it is a ‘shortage’ in part generated by the BBC which has campaigned relentlessly for more nurses.

Are we recruiting more overseas nurses now as a response?  No…in fact we had more foreign nurses here in 2004/05 than we do now…and the level of overseas recruitment has been dropping.  Is there a shortage of applicants to be nurses?  No…there are 20,000 training places and 60,000 applicants.  Will patients suffer (as John Humphrys asked numerous times)..No.

It was at this time (08:22) Humphrys gave up and said he was struggling to see where the crisis was.  That’s because there isn’t one.  The NHS is coping until the new recruits filter through…the timescale is that it takes 3 to 4 years to recruit and train a nurse…hence by 2019-2020 the NHS should have all the homegrown staff it needs…and until then it will employ agency and overseas staff.

This is a non-story about a crisis that isn’t a crisis…a shortage of nurses that is only a shortage because the government is looking to recruit 24,000 more nurses in order to improve the quality of service.

The BBC should be applauding, instead it fabricates an entirely ficticious, negative tale about a crisis.  Why?

Thanks to Notafanofpoliticians for this:

Shame Rotten wasn’t as full of principles as he suggests…

Elsewhere…Paul Merton denies a transcript of him abusing Savile is real…..

Here’s the transcript….put up not by its writers but by someone else….who got the HIGNFY teams wrong….Savile did appear on the show but with Hislop.

The real writers admit to it being a hoax.

So who wrote it and why?

Comedian Richard Herring, who knows most things, told me it was some people calling themselves SOTCAA and, indeed, it was. Two of them.

Around 2005, when they were writing on the Cookd and Bombd forum, they were calling themselves ‘Alan Strang’ and ‘Emergency Lalla Ward Ten’.

Now I’m told I should call them Joseph Champniss and Mike Scott.

“At the time this all took place,” Joseph Champniss told me yesterday, “SOTCAA was hosted by NotBBC.

“Sometime in 1999, we started pondering on how affected stories get attached to ‘classic’ shows and films over the years which go down well in pub conversations but also blur any kind of factual coverage – stuff like the rushes of The Wicker Man being buried under the M4 motorway and so on.

“Faking some Have I Got News For You out-takes was originally going to be part of that initial plan. We probably decided on it after watching the Unbroadcastable Have I Got News video, which itself features rushes material… but mainly because we enjoy the idea of rushes per se.

“The original idea was to stick the page on the site in Hidden Archive and see if anyone noticed/cared. Emergency Lalla Ward went off and wrote the actual page – based on a tape of the broadcast itself. If you watch the show in tandem with the fakery you’ll note that he’s specifically ‘filled in’ stuff where there was an obvious edit-point. However, this was really only ever a first draft. Something to build on and re-write later in a less obvious/explosive fashion.

‘I saw that letter from business leaders this week saying we should stay in. Some of them are the same people who said Britain should adopt the euro. Why on earth should we listen to them?’  Mervyn King

So the world will implode if Britain leaves the EU.

Funny that the Deutsche Börse doesn’t think so…

London Stock Exchange in merger talks with Deutsche Börse

The London Stock Exchange is in talks to merge with Germany’s Deutsche Börse in a £21bn deal that would seal an alliance first discussed at the turn of the millennium.

The LSE said on Tuesday it was in detailed discussions with its German rival about an all-share merger. Under the proposed structure, the balance of ownership favours Frankfurt, with Deutsche Börse shareholders owning 54.4% of the combined company and LSE shareholders holding 45.6%. However, the merged company’s board will have equal numbers of members from each business.

The UK exchange said: “The boards believe that the potential merger would represent a compelling opportunity for both companies to strengthen each other in an industry-defining combination, creating a leading European-based global markets infrastructure group.”

Nor of course did HSBC as it decided to remain in the UK rather than flee to the Far East.

What of that ‘leap in the dark’ that Cameron and Osborne’s ‘Project Fear’ warns us of?  One moment Osborne is telling us how well the UK economy is doing and how it will be in surplus in no time at all…the next he’s warning us that it is about to go into intensive care…of course this has more to do with the referendum than anything else…we must stay in the EU or chaos will ensue.  But the real leap in the dark might be becoming ever closer tied to an imploding European Union.

The BBC presumably doesn’t want you to think there is any problem with the EU…look at this anodyne report on the thoughts of the ex-Bank of England Governor Mervyn King…..‘New crisis without reform’ warns ex-Bank of England boss..

The former Bank of England boss has warned in a new book that another financial crisis is “certain”, and may come “sooner rather than later”.

Mervyn King, who stood down in 2013, says reform of monetary and banking systems may help prevent the crisis.

But he says that failure “to tackle the disequilibrium in the world economy makes it likely that it [a crisis] will come sooner rather than later”

But what were his thoughts on Europe?  The BBC makes no mention of that for some reason….perhaps this is why….He says in essence that the Euro Zone is finished…..as the Telegraph headlines it…Mervyn King: the eurozone is doomed…..

With different political histories and traditions, a move to political union is unlikely to be achieved quickly through popular support. Put bluntly, monetary union has created a conflict between a centralised elite on the one hand, and the forces of democracy at the national level on the other. This is extraordinarily dangerous.

In 2015, the Presidents of the European Commission, the Euro Summit, the Eurogroup, the European Central Bank and the European Parliament (the existence of five presidents is testimony to the bureaucratic skills of the elite) published a report arguing for fiscal union in which “decisions will increasingly need to be made collectively” and implicitly supporting the idea of a single finance minister for the euro area. This approach of creeping transfer of sovereignty to an unelected centre is deeply flawed and will meet popular resistance.

In pursuit of peace, the elites in Europe, the United States and international organisations such as the IMF, have, by pushing bailouts and a move to a transfer union as the solution to crises, simply sowed the seeds of divisions in Europe and created support for what were previously seen as extreme political parties and candidates.

It will lead to not only an economic but a political crisis.

European Monetary Union (EMU) is the most ambitious project undertaken in monetary history. EMU has not proved to be an easy marriage, with the enterprise trying to navigate a safe passage between the Scylla of political ideals and the Charybdis of economic arithmetic.

How long this marriage will last is something known only to the partners themselves; outsiders cannot easily judge the state of the relationship.

The basic problem with a monetary union among differing nation states is strikingly simple. Starting with differences in expected inflation rates – the result of a long history of differences in actual inflation – a single interest rate leads inexorably to divergences in competitiveness. 

Some countries entered European Monetary Union with a higher rate of wage and cost inflation than others.

Instead of being able to use differing interest rates to bring inflation to the same level, some countries found their divergences were exacerbated by the single rate. 

The resulting loss of competitiveness among the southern members of the union against Germany is large, even allowing for some overvaluation of the Deutschmark when it was subsumed into the euro.

It is evident, as it has been for a very long while, that the only way forward for Greece is to default on (or be forgiven) a substantial proportion of its debt burden and to devalue its currency so that exports and the substitution of domestic products for imports can compensate for the depressing effects of the fiscal contraction imposed to date.

The inevitability of restructuring Greek debt means that taxpayers in Germany and elsewhere will have to absorb substantial losses.

Germany faces a terrible choice. Should it support the weaker brethren in the euro area at great and unending cost to its taxpayers, or should it call a halt to the project of monetary union across the whole of Europe? The attempt to find a middle course is not working. One day, German voters may rebel against the losses imposed on them by the need to support their weaker brethren, and undoubtedly the easiest way to divide the euro area would be for Germany itself to exit. 

But the more likely cause of a break- up of the euro area is that voters in the south will tire of the grinding and relentless burden of mass unemployment and the emigration of talented young people. The counter-argument – that exit from the euro area would lead to chaos, falls in living standards and continuing uncertainty about the survival of the currency union – has real weight…. leaving the euro area may be the only way to plot a route back to economic growth and full employment. The long-term benefits outweigh the short-term costs. Outsiders cannot make that choice, but they can encourage Germany, and the rest of the euro area, to face up to it.