Category Archives: BBC bias

Seen this?

A left-wing comedian has said he was told by the Labour party that he could not vote in its leadership election. Jeremy Hardy said he paid £3 to become a Labour member in order to become eligible to vote, but that he has supported other parties in the past. He said he received a letter sent to people who are turned down, which said Labour had reason to believe that he “didn’t support the aims and values” of the party.

Hardy supports Corby – shock horror – and is a stalwart of what passes for comedy on the BBC. This is the funniest thing he has ever said.

It strikes me that the BBC are now fully paid up members of the Jeremy Corbyn fan club. His latest suggestion that if he becomes Leader he will apologise for the Iraqi war has the comrades in a paroxysm of pleasure. He is saying so many of the things the BBC approves of that I believe they are now repeating his propaganda on a daily basis with such frequency that it makes the prospect of his getting elected all the more likely. This is odd since they must know he is unelectable as PM but I suppose five years of hard left rhetoric and agenda setting pleases them?

Friday arrives and time for a new Open Thread! The floor is yours – please detail the bias here!

Here’s something that should shame many a BBC journalist, all those, such as Mark Mardell and Kevin Connolly, who report with all too much pleasure the rise of ISIS and the destruction of the nations of Syria and Iraq, those nations they tell us with disdain that were so carelessly ‘carved out’ by France and Britain, the border lines drawn so imperiously and casually and now being erased by the reincarnation of the Muhammedan blitz on the Middle East 1400 years ago.

At least one man had the guts to stand up for something he believes in, and to die for it…

Remembering Khaled al-Asaad, the Syrian archaeologist who dared to stand up to Isis

Erudite and bespectacled, he was the sort of Arab the Islamic State loathed. Khaled al-Asaad, an 81-year old archaeologist, was for the past four decades inseparable from Palmyra’s ancient ruins.

Beheaded in part for his role shielding them from the militants, they strung his headless body up on Graeco-Roman columns he once restored. His remains dangle there still.

On the coat-tails of a pornography of violence which saw the immolation of a captured pilot and the sexual enslavement of a captured aid worker before her murder, Isis still found, somehow, a way to shock.

In all this, one humble octogenarian dared, as the West has not, to defy the most chilling murders the present century has yet seen. And when a new Syria one day confronts the impossible task of rebuilding itself, one elderly academic’s quiet resistance in the name of antiquity, like David against Goliath, will provide a stark example of dauntlessness and civilisation amidst the rubble of its bleakest hour.

Whilst the BBC seems to cheer on ISIS in its own inimitable anti-Western way, others recognise the real dangers to the world and, in their own little way, try to fight it.  Not the BBC and its journalists who all too often are seen to be the ‘friends’ of such ‘radical’ groups and their grievances.

The BBC couldn’t resist for long.  There was their ex-economics editor, Paul Mason, announcing the wake for Capitalism in the Guardian ad nauseum and they’d missed out.

No matter, one phone call to their old mate and it’s all fixed and up he pops with Dutton and Sarah (1 hour 16 mins) being put on the rack, his feet to the fire and his most cherished illlusions and delusions being challenged and dashed….well, not really.

Mason had a lovely benign time on the programme in an ‘interview’ that lasted a good 40 minutes or so, the bit about capitalism anyway.  The problem with interviews like these where the guest is treated as a ‘friend’ and there is a reluctance to upset them with tough questions, is that the guest is allowed to get away with murder, and indeed Mason was allowed to ramble on in fantasy land about the brave new world he proposed.

Sure the interviewer will ask a relevant question but then lets the guest ramble on and evade giving an answer if the question puts him on the spot.  Humphrys would continue digging, usually, but in interviews like this the presenter lets it slide, its almost like they feed the guest a question about something controversial or problematic but only in order to allow them the chance to explain it away…the presenter then doesn’t challenge the answer and moves onto the next ‘feeder’ question.

That’s essentially what the Mason interview sounded like….the presenters just wanted him to keep talking and to ‘get along’, can’t upset a guest who is supposed to be there for an hour or more.

For instance no challenge came when they asked if he was a Marxist and he said no, but then said he did believe in what Marx said.  Or when he said because he was a public sector broadcaster he had to be neutral, before giving Corbyn a good talk up…or when he started backtracking on his thesis….apparently Capitalism is broken and needs replacing….or is it?….. now it’s just ‘parts’ need refurbishing, or when he laid out that grand thesis on on his alternative economy…..with time banks, alternative currencies and co-operatives….don’t all those exist already in one shape or another and aren’t they just different forms of the same thing, it’s still trading, manufacturing, buying and selling, capitalism?

Sarah Brett was quite happy quoting a commentator saying that the EU had ‘smashed Greece’ and she raised no objection to Mason adding that ‘the democratic will had been overturned and the EU is unaccountable’.

Is that true?  Didn’t Greece smash Greece with massive overspending and borrowing?  Was the ‘democratic will’ overturned in Greece?  Hardly.  The Greeks wanted to have their cake and eat it, get rid of economic stabilisation and still reman in the EU….in the end the Greek Parliament ‘voted’ to stay in the EU and continue austerity.  And now the Greek people will have a chance to vote on that decision….hardly democracy overturned.  If you’re in the EU club you have to obey the club rules and the Greeks really, really want to be in that club.

And something for Mason and the BBC to consider….Just what did Capitalism do for China?…

China has almost wiped out urban poverty. Now it must tackle inequality

Yet-to-be-released data shows that China has all but eradicated urban poverty. For a country with huge numbers of poor people streaming into its cities, many of whom living initially in conditions of abject misery, this is an extraordinary success. It has been achieved, in large part, because of a government subsidy paid to urban dwellers to bring incomes up to a minimum level of 4,476 yuan ($700 or £446).

I have yet to hear Mason come up with the real problem with Capitalism…cheap and easily available credit.  We know full well that was the reason we had the last crash, made worse because our own government borrowed huge sums on the basis that the good times would keep on rolling, bankrolling their largesse….and in order to keep things going the government turned a blind eye to what the banks were up to and failed to regulate them…running a risked based economy as Gordon Brown boasted.

Mason has no solutions just naive, simplistic utopian fantasies, childlike in their optimism and failure to recognise the pitfalls and insurmountable problems that make such dreams unworkable.

Still good of the BBC to let him back to ramble on amiably.  Trouble is he probably left the studio thinking ‘that all went well, they seemed really receptive, maybe I’m on to something….better give Russell Brand a call’..  We’ll hear no end of this now….though he doesn’t seem to have the social media draw of Brand…his recent video winning a mere 10,175 views…which is amusing as Mason is pretty obsessed with the power of t’Web….didn’t it spawn the Arab Spring after all?  Looks like the Revolution is a long way off yet…….

Here you go, a new Open Thread to detail the bias!

The BBC broadcast a lecture by Katy Long.  Who is Katy Long?  She is an academic whose speciality is immigration and refugees.

What the BBC doesn’t tell us is that she is an ardent, if not fanatical, proponent of open borders and the unregulated, totally unrestricted movement of migrants and the destruction of the nation state.  She is also pretty much on the far left economically and is immersed in the language of equality and justice so favoured by the Left as a pathway to imposing their other political ideals….such as open borders and mass migration and the end of the nation state…all ideas with much BBC support.

Her thoughts on the nation state and citizenship…

Our interest in maintaining what are essentially inherited privileges – that 50% lifetime birthplace bonus – begins to look pretty selfish. At some point, borders are no longer self-preservation: they’re greed.

Yep…we’re all terrible people, greedy, selfish, protecting our ‘inherited privileges’….how dare we suggest that it might be welcome that we can get our kids into the local school, or that we can access a GP or the NHS without being put into a long queue or that our children can get a home of their own…especially as it is our taxes that have paid for all this largesse and not the migrant who waltzes in and gets the ‘free’ services from day one.  Odd how Long doesn’t label the migrants who come here for economic reasons in the same way as greedy and selfish without a thought for the locals.

She of course also works for that bastion of common sense and rational thought, the UN.  Which could explain an awful lot.

Her talk asked ‘What does it mean to belong?’, as in how do you define a ‘citizen’?  She very carefully avoided giving a clear understanding of her full intentions concerning open borders and the end of the nation state and merely tried to spin an argument that there is no such thing as a ‘citizen’….for such a thing is surely just an accident of birth which you’ve done nothing to deserve….hence why should not someone from anywhere in the world not also be allowed automatically to be a ‘citizen’ of your area of the world?  She neglects to mention of course the long history of a nation, the wars, the political and intellectual development, the science and industry, the thought, the inventiveness, the hard work, the character and spirit of a nation that has shaped both that nation and its people.  Nations and peoples have character and a long history invested in that country.

She makes a comparison between Russian oligarchs buying citizenship and the penniless immigrant who can’t buy his way into the country.  She asks why citizenship is up for sale.  But that is a false and blinkered comparison.  Oligarchs can buy citizenship but she neglects to mention the millions of ordinary people that have come here, many who have taken up British citizenship, and all without having to shell out the odd million.  Their currency is the skills and the desire to work that they bring with them, in return they are offered citizenship.  Where is her argument, especially as we took in over 300,000 immigrants last year alone?  Were they all Russian oligarchs?  She fails to mention the costs of migrants and why they have to make a contribution in some way.  The NHS, for example, is free at the point of delivery, but it ain’t free.

The real point about controlling immigration is numbers.  If there were 20 million oligarchs wanting to come here they would not get in regardless of money….it’s a numbers game and not ultimately about what they bring here although that is an essential part of the ‘rationing’ process to decide who is going to make a contribution to society and not just take from it.

It’s interesting what the UN says, and Long quotes…..

…by living and working abroad, such people effectively reduce the competition for jobs and other scarce resources in their country oforigin, and thereby contribute to the peacebuilding process. As far as countries of asylum are concerned, the continued presence of refugees…may make a valuable contribution to the growth and productivity of both local and national economies.

So to have  a peaceful country it is best not to be overcrowded, best not to be competing for scarce resources (such as schools, the NHS and housing?), and to have as few unemployed people as possible.  The migrant countries export their unemployed and excess population and somehow we’re supposed to absorb that ad infinitum?

You have to laugh at this highly simplistic argument for mass immigration that she makes…..

It is relatively easy to make the argument that freedom of movement furthers global justice. The World Bank has estimated that up to 50 per cent of a person’s income is determined by only one variable – their country of citizenship.

So everybody should move to the UK and their income will automatically rise and life will be fantastic?  And what of Hong Kong, or Korea, or Taiwan or China, or India or Brazil…..did they all move here to improve their lives or did they build their own economies and create a more equal society, a richer and more prosperous society?  Is it not better to improve a nation than to label it a basket case and give up on it and say you know what, let’s bring the population here and, well, we’ll house ’em somewhere, and get ’em some sort of job, and give them vouchers for the food banks.  What of Germany and Japan after the war, did they move here or did they get on with it and rebuild their nations into industrial powerhouses, the envy of the world?  And that was a Japan with no natural resources apart from the knowledge and skills of its workforce.

Interestingly in the same UN paper Long reveals that many, up to half, of ‘refugees’ admit they are actually migrating for economic reasons whilst officially claiming the reason as seeking asylum.

Here is her argument in a nutshell:

Yet for champions of global justice, the opposite is true. In 2009, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) determined that migrants who moved from a low-income to a high-income country saw, on average, a 15-fold increase in income, a doubling of education enrollment rates and a 16-fold reduction in child mortality numbers. Framed like this, migration is no longer contributing to the problem of inequality. In fact, on a global scale, it’s the solution.

Immigration, she says, means the immigrant will have a much better life and the country that welcomes him or her will also benefit, as will the country that the migrants leave behind.

She admits that national interests make this argument hard to make…but that is because, she tells us, the people who oppose immigration are wrong, ill-informed, making their judgements based on ‘dubious’ information…

When it comes to politics, global justice arguments can’t simply trump national ones because – at an almost instinctive level – the vast majority of people would claim that nations – communities – are important, and effects of migration at a local level can’t simply be discounted.

It’s therefore important to recognize that the evidence for many claims made about the injurious effects of immigration upon locals is dubious.

Sounds a familiar argument….one that brings us straight to the BBC and indeed the answer as to why the BBC is broadcasting this talk by such an obviously biased, fanatically pro-immigration left wing ‘champion of global justice’ as Long.

The BBC is pro-immigration, it thinks, as Long does, that the British public are prejudiced, racist, and uneducated about the true facts on immigration.  They oppose immigration because they don’t understand the enormous benefits it brings them, nor do they have the humane principles and compassion that are the lifeblood of any half decent BBC journalist and which enables him or her to adopt the moral high ground and lecture them rather grandly and piously about the need to open the borders ever wider.

Where are the voices making the opposite arguments on the BBC?

The BBC, still on the immigration campaign trail.  News?…what’s that then?

The fall of Camilla Batmanghelidjh has distressed the BBC and I see they ran the following “news” story earlier today …

“Much of the focus of the collapse of charity Kids Company has been on its finances and its(cough) flamboyant founder Camilla Batmanghelidjh – what has increasingly been overlooked is the fate of the people who relied on it.

Part of the problem concerning those “helped’ by the Kids Company is precisely what they were helped to get.

“A teenager has boasted that she and pals used cash handouts from Kids Company to buy drugs. The youngster said they would queue up to collect an oyster card and £30 which they could spend how they wished. She claimed: “It was weed heaven on a Friday, you could smell it coming down from the landings.”

I thought that this was a strange item on the BBC earlier today.

“Large supermarkets are becoming a thing of the past – shoppers are increasingly using smaller shops, discount stores, and local retailers. What might those changes mean for our towns? We hear from retail consultant and broadcaster Mary Portas, and Matthew Price reports.”

The item sang the praises of the German discount chains, Lidl and Aldi. It also allowed Mary Portas to pontificate unchallenged – as if she were an expert. Is this the same Mary Portas…?

Retail guru Mary Portas has been branded as a ‘Queen of Flops’ by critics who say her plans to help struggling high streets are nothing more than ‘gimmicks’ that have failed. Traders in the seaside resort of Margate in Kent, which won a £100,000 government grant, claim the town’s high street is now in a worse state than when she arrived to help, as the Government-appointed ‘retail tzar’, six months ago.  Her plans for the town have included displaying art in abandoned shop fronts.

Great to see the Today programme focusing on issues that really affect our lives!

Labour leadership contender Yvette Cooper has called for a “feminist approach to the economy”. It has been a branch of economic thinking for a long time, but what does it mean in practice?

Feminist economics shows how the models and methods of traditional economics are biased towards masculine perspectives and masculine topics, said Oxford University’s Prof Jane Humphries (pictured above). “Equality is economic sense,” said Polly Trenow of the Women’s Budget Group.

Unbelievable that they actually devote time and resource to this male bashing tripe.