Category Archives: BBC bias

Canon CHRIS CHIVERS ‘I’d previously worked in South Africa, in Cape Town, which is of course emerging from an apartheid history which was deeply divided and deeply divisive, and I think I can honestly say that I’ve never worked in such a segregated community, or lived in one as this’…..in Blackburn, UK.

 

When Paul Sabapathy, CBE, Her Majesty’s lord lieutenant of the West Midlands, said that British Pakistanis must be taught “basic common courtesy and civility” and subsequently resigned because of those comments the BBC reported his comments but always made sure you knew he was Indian and not Pakistani because of course he is ‘Asian’ and the BBC seemed desperate to quickly undermine his comments because they relate to Muslims of Pakistani descent….the ‘untouchables’ in the BBC’s eyes.

Here is the BBC reporting his resignation…

The Queen’s representative for the West Midlands has resigned after an email written by him making derogatory comments about Pakistanis was leaked.

The email, written after an appearance at the Pakistan consulate in Birmingham on 14 August, was leaked to The Guardian newspaper.

Indian-born Paul Sabapathy CBE said Pakistanis needed to be taught “basic common courtesy and civility”.

He has apologised “unreservedly and wholeheartedly” for the comments.

The Guardian reported Mr Sabapathy’s email said: “Pakistanis are lovely people individually but there is a lot of work to do to teach them basic common courtesy and civility.

“They talk to themselves and do not engage with the wider community. They are living in the UK not Pakistan.

“Whilst being rightly proud of their Pakistani culture and heritage they need to explain better and engage more with their non-Pakistani brothers and sisters if they want their children to succeed as British Pakistani citizens.”

The trouble is of course that what he says is true, not only that but the BBC has itself reported the phenomenon of Pakistani Muslims living entirely separate lives [As usual by Panorama and not the wider BBC which refuses to touch this subject generally] and today we hear that Sabapathy is supported by Labour MP Khalid Mahmood…

Khalid Mahmood, the Labour MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, said he would be writing to Buckingham Palace to ask the Queen to refuse Sabapathy’s resignation.

“I will be making representations to the palace to urge them to reinstate him,” said Mahmood, who was born in Azad Kashmir in Pakistan and became England’s first Muslim Asian MP in 2001.

Mahmood said Indian-born Sabapathy – the first non-white lord-lieutenant – was an “honourable man with noble intentions” who had been made a scapegoat simply for telling the truth about the Pakistani community in Britain.

He suggested that the underachievement of Pakistani children in British schools was down to “isolationalism” in the Pakistani community, which was getting worse, not better, down the generations.

The BBC’s Panorama has twice [at least] looked at the subject of the failure to integrate though in the first film, whilst they acknowledge there is a problem with Muslims failing to integrate, they blame the whites for moving out whenever Muslims move into any location in large numbers….hence the chosen film title ‘White Flight’.  That title doesn’t really reflect the real problem which is those large numbers of extremely different Muslims who move into an area and change it beyond recognition….the film should really have been called ‘Asian Invasion’ [or ‘Muslim’ but I couldn’t think of a nice catchy rhyme for ‘Muslim’ as the BBC opted for with ‘White Flight’] to reflect the real problem but of course that would never get approval.

Here’s the first Panorama in 2007:

Panorama visits Blackburn in Lancashire to investigate how increased separation and segregation between Muslim Asians and whites is dividing communities.

A transcript here.

Canon CHRIS CHIVERS I’d previously worked in South Africa, in Cape Town, which is of course emerging from an apartheid history which was deeply divided and deeply divisive, and I think I can honestly say that I’ve never worked in such a segregated community, or lived in one as this.

Here’s John Ware’s Panorama report from 2010….He’s found a rhyme...’British Schools, Islamic Rules’

Integration

The Muslim population of Britain has been rising rapidly and research by the economics department at Bristol University shows that Muslim children are the most segregated in Britain.

Faith schools are growing in popularity. Which way will Muslims be pulled – towards or away from the mainstream?

[Many] Muslim schools we encountered seemed in varying degrees to want to stay separate, leading separate lives in separate enclaves. 

It is curious that the BBC in reporting Paul Sabapathy’s resignation doesn’t try to explore the issues he raises and instead seems to want to class his comments as an Indian being racist about his Pakistani neighbours.  All the more curious when the BBC itself has reported exactly the phenomenon that Sabapathy talks of…the high degree of separation and the refusal to integrate.   The main factor driving that failure is of course Islam which may explain the BBC’s current approach, John Ware aside, who goes against the BBC’s usual policy of either ignoring or downplaying any problem issues that arise due to Islam being practised in the UK.

Maybe others are beginning to see the light as borders go back up in Europe.   Funny how this is suddenly possible when it seemed so impossible for the UK to prevent mass immigration to it’s shores and the EU, and the BBC, laughed in contempt.  Odd how the BBC doesn’t try to class the German’s as thuggish racists when they close the borders but did label the Hungarians and the Czechs as such when they attempted to stem the flow.

So, we have a Labour Leader who won’t condemn the IRA and a Labour Shadow Chancellor who has fantasised about assassinating Margaret Thatcher. What a crew. Anyway, time to start the week with a new Open Thread. The floor is yours, comrades.

If you believed the BBC you’d think the UK was the cause of most of the world’s problems, Yemen a case in point…however the truth might in fact be a lot different than the impression given by the BBC…from 2014 but it seems all too relevant today:

From the Economist…

A new index ranks national decency

It ranks countries based on how much they do for others globally. Ireland and Finland come on top; Libya is rock bottom. The measure is based on 35 datasets broken down into seven areas, such as technology, health and culture. The idea is clever but the execution is tricky. The index often scales countries on a GDP basis to give poor countries a chance against rich ones. That’s nice, but is Cyprus really a tech leader or Malta a cultural paragon?

And the “peace and security” area is flawed: it penalises countries involved in armed conflicts abroad or that sell arms. Couldn’t one argue that this fosters a stable world? Still, the index is a worthwhile pursuit by imagining how countries might compete when they aim to serve others. 

On the basis of that last comment, that engaging in ‘ethical’ armed conflict and selling arms fosters a stable world, the UK must in fact be ranked much higher than 7th…surely!  The BBC of course thinks the opposite and believes all war, and the associated arms sales, must be de facto bad regardless of the necessity, intent or outcome.

Something a bit more light-hearted…A Channel 7 newsreader with an unfortunate look-a-like:

And I’m sure this was useful to know on 9/11:

Liked this [via Bishop Hill]….the Media Bubble popped:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=3&v=Oxxx03_JHlM

Haven’t had time to watch this video with the same fellow, Hans Rosling, starring, but it looks interesting:

Just seen the first bit…lol…if you rely on the news to inform you will actually become more ignorant than chimps who get the right answer more often by ‘guessing’!

Paul Mason or chimp?  Paul Mason or chimp?  Who’d you believe?

Labour Party member David Goodhart has taken a look at the impact and meaning underlying Corbyn’s leadership win. Just the other day I heard a Labour MP state that Corbyn won because he essentially had the backing of London intellectuals and Goodhart seems to take a similar perspective and that Corbyn’s win does not reflect a leftward trend in the country…a trend that the BBC keeps insisting is happening for some reason despite the Tory majority!?

When reading Goodhart’s analysis you can’t help thinking he could also be talking about the BBC which is similarly detached from the majority of the population and run by a left-wing intellectual ‘elite’ [so called] or if you prefer ‘semi-alien lefty liberals’.  Reading the article and you have to note that the BBC is by default in his firing-line and that many of the narratives that they promote are just wrong….such as the population is moving to the left intellectually or that politics is in a crisis.

Here’s a taste of what he says:

There is no evidence that his election represents any significant shift in political opinion—a British version of Syriza in Greece or Podemos in Spain is not emerging.

His worldview is a rare mix of economic statism and radical egalitarianism and a rather extreme version of the metropolitan liberalism that is generally hostile to tradition and suspicious of national borders. These views are shared by a tiny proportion of the voting public. (My own former accountant Richard Murphy is one of them: the tax/economics adviser to Corbyn is a middle class radical in a conservative profession who liked to represent artists and writers.)

And the young people who are flocking to the Corbyn banner seem to be mainly middle class, university educated idealists. They are not representative of British young people in general who are increasingly liberal on race, gender and sexuality but, if anything, shifting to the right on welfare issues and economics.

In any case, Corbyn leads the Labour Party not as a result of any leftward shift in public opinion but because of a quirk of internal Labour politics at the end of the Blair/Brown era and the utterly uninspiring alternatives.

Normal service will presumably be restored at some point though given the magnitude of his victory it is hard to see when. A semi-alien group of leftists now sit astride the party and will be able to direct its day-to-day positions in parliament and in responding to events but they will have to live with much of the policy inheritance from more centrist times.

[Corbyn’s] election is a symptom of the withering of mainstream social democracy experienced across all rich countries.

This decline has been well documented and has essentially three causes. First—and most visible—the changing class and industrial structure has largely eliminated the old industrial working class. Second, as touched on earlier, centre left parties have become increasingly divided between low income voters who often have quite traditional views on cultural matters and the increasingly dominant liberal middle class (public sector professionals and Guardian readers in the newspaper shorthand) who occupy the other end of the values spectrum on many of the biggest issues of the day such as immigration, welfare, Europe, family. This divided base is one of the reasons why so few Labour politicians have been able to speak with any conviction in recent years. Corbyn has not resolved the conflict he simply ignores it.

Third, and least discussed, is the notion that social democracy has been a victim of its own success. Social democratic ideas have become completely mainstream and, indeed, many have been adopted by the Conservative party.

Ideas associated with the centre left will remain an important current in British public life even without Labour to implement them—consider the recent Conservative plans for a living wage and an apprenticeship levy on big companies. Centre left ideas are also institutionally entrenched in British society in much of the public sector, in the education system, in parts of the media[No kidding].

The idea that without Labour as a contender for office to defend social democracy the malevolent Tories will grind the faces of the poor is just the sort of blinkered, tribal, self-regarding assumption that lost Labour the last general election and elected Jeremy Corbyn.

One of the cliches of British political life in recent years is that it is in crisis due to low levels of participation.

It is true political parties have far fewer members and election turnout has been falling, though there seems to be a turnout floor of around 65 per cent. But British political culture is in rude health: consider the rise in recent years of the SNP and Ukip, the evolution of the Tory Party, the rise of mayors, a noisy and opinionated media.

Gabriel Gatehouse ‏@ggatehouse Sep 11   Would you care to be more specific? What did you feel was misleading? And what was amateurish?

When Tory MP Daniel Kawczynski criticised the BBC’s reporting of the war in Yemen Newsnight invited him onto the programme, not it seems to actually tackle his concerns but to insult and publicly try to humiliate him.  To do this they employed the less than honourable services of James O’Brien who jumped ship from his position as a motor-mouthed shock-jock at LBC…..O’Brien has ‘car crash’ written all over him…still unsure why Newsnight were attracted to him and his talents…though of course the uber marxist Paul Mason also lurked within their hallowed portals.

When Kawczynski stated that the Newsnight film about the war in Yemen was incredibly one-sided and did not reflect the complexities of the situation and failed to deal with atrocities by the Houthi rebels O’Brien made the claim that this one-sided stance was justified because the film was actually about Britain’s involvement in the war in relation to its arms sales to Saudi Arabia who are commiting war crimes.

There is a slight problem with that, in fact many problems, all of which revolve around the fact that O’Brien’s claim is a complete lie.

If you watch the programme, entitled ‘Yemen’s forgotten war’, so even the title seems to suggest a focus on the war in general, you will hear very little about British arms sales to Saudi, though Gatehouse does try to make that connection.

Gatehouse tweets a question advertising the programme asking if Britain is complicit in a ‘humanitarian disaster’ which is not the same as being complicit in war crimes as O’Brien is claiming as justification for the BBC’s one-sided approach….the ‘humanitarian disaster’ has been wrought by both sides but was initiated by the Houthi.

• Gabriel Gatehouse ‏@ggatehouse Sep 10

  Coming up now on @BBCNewsnight: our report from Yemen. Is Britain complicit in a humanitarian catastrophe?

But watching the programme you are not given the broad perspective of both sides being guilty of stoking the war and causing a ‘mere’ humanitarian disaster due to general warfare….the narrative it was glued to was that Saudi Arabia was definitely committing war crimes by deliberately targeting civilians…the BBC stated this without any evidence that civilians were being so deliberately targeted.  Certainly civilians are being killed, but deliberately?  And all by the Saudis? Where’s the BBC’s proof?  They have none and yet they categorically make that claim and used it in that small clip to suggest that Britan is complicit in those ‘war crimes’.

The BBC’s Gabriel Gatehouse seemed all too ready to accept everything he was told and looked as if it was in fact what he wanted to be told as he breathlessly, naively, amateurishly lapped it all up.  He was less than objective in his report and used witnesses whose own impartiality might well be suspect…many of them being either the rebels themselves or those who are sympathetic to them…for example near the end of the film we have a Shia in a bombed mosque telling us this is all the fault of Saudi Money and US weapons…these people are all criminals he tells us…no bias there then from an Iranian backed pro-Houthi man then…and very convenient for the BBC narrative which happily ignores the fact that the Houthi started this war by engineering a coup.  Gatehouse looked as if he came with an agenda and fitted the ‘evidence’ around it.

Another of the BBC’s defences of its one-sided narrative was that the Houthi are not as well armed as the Saudis which somehow makes their killing of civilians somehow more palatable for the BBC.  This is the Houthi who have tanks, artillery, anti-aircraft missiles and aircraft….so all airstrikes may not be by the Saudis and the Coalition…

The Houthis have since called for a general mobilisation of forces to fight the Hadi government. Backed by armoured forces loyal to Saleh, they took control of Taiz.

More than a dozen soldiers from both sides were killed in the fighting. That was quickly followed up by airstrikes targeting Hadi’s palace in Aden, presumably in fighter aircraft flown by Saleh loyalists.

The BBC film claims that damage to buildings in Sanaa is probably the result of Saudi bombing…but where’s the proof?   If anything evidence points to the Houthi being responsible for some of the damage….including to a ‘military complex’ otherwise known as a university…

In the last few days, the Houthis have been targeting buildings owned by the Sunni Islah party, including the Iman University, which has been surrounded.

O’Brien sneared when Kawczynski said that Al Jazeera’s coverage was far more impartial than the BBC’s, O’Brien claiming that it obviously wasn’t because it was a news outlet funded by one of the Gulf States involved in the war.  However if you read Al Jazeera’s reports you can understand why many now use this organisation for a broader and truer perspective on events in the Middle East than provided by the BBC.

Here is just one example as it reports on the war in Yemen… you can read voices and perspectives from both sides, the Saudi-led coalition not escaping criticism at all….

‘Declaration of war’

Speaking to Al Jazeera from Sanaa, Houthi spokesman Mohammed Al Bukhaiti called the military action a declaration of war on Yemen, adding that reports alledging that Mohamed Ali Al Houthi, President of the Revolutionary Committee or Revolutionary Council, had been injured were false. Ali Al Houthi is a cousin of Abdul-Malik Al Houthi, the group’s leader.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif demanded an immediate halt to the military operation, as Iranian state media called the airstrikes a “US-backed aggression”.

“Military action from outside of Yemen against its territorial integrity and its people will have no other result than more bloodshed and more deaths,” he told the Iranian-owned Al-Alam television channel.

“We have always warned countries from the region and the West to be careful and not enter shortsighted games and not go in the same direction as al-Qaeda and Daesh,” he said, referring to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Iran denies providing money and training to the Shia Houthi militia in Yemen as claimed by the Saudi-led coalition and some Western officials.

All in all the BBC does not have a case….they are claiming that Saudi Arabia is committing war crimes, and slipped in a claim that Britain is therefore implicated in this, but they present no evidence other than a water-bottling plant that had been bombed and which the Saudis say was used by the Houthi for military purposes…and just as the BBC saw no evidence of such use there’s no evidence that it wasn’t so used…just because it has one purpose doesn’t mean it cannot be used for others at the same time….there is no evidence that the Saudis knew it was purely a civilian plant and bombed it anyway.  There is no evidence that the Saudis are deliberately bombing civilians, the death of whom the BBC seems to regard as a de facto war crime regardless of intent.

O’Brien tries to justify the BBC’s one-sided reporting of the war which looked almost completely only at the Saudi-led coalition’s actions by saying this was because Britain was supplying the weapons that helped Saudi commit war cimes….but as stated above there is absolutely no evidence of such war crimes and the programme then went on to a second narrative…that the Saudi-led strikes against the Houthi were allowing Al Qaeda and ISIL to gain a greater foothold in the region…depsite it being one of AQ’s long established bases.

The BBC’s premise seems to be that we leave the Iranian backed insurgents in charge and let them take over the country and that will stop AQ and ISIL in their tracks.  Two points…one…why is it a good idea to let armed militants takeover a country, especially when backed by the dangerous Iranian regime? and second does the BBC really think that the Houthi will be able to stop AQ and ISIL?

Lastly, clearly Al Jazeera is more than a match for the BBC in the Middle East producing reports that actually do inform its audience about the complexities of events there……unlike the BBC which has long been on the side of the various ‘rebel’, many would call terrorist, groups in the region and produces reports that seem to favour their narrative as the ‘plucky underdogs’.

Just a coincidence that ‘O’Brien’ is the name of the sinister party member and Big Brother thought-police hitman in Orwell’s 1984?

“The very straightforward thing to do in the face of unacceptable governmental pressure and interference would be to say ‘fuck off, do your worst, we’ll fight that’.”

It may not have crossed Lord Bragg’s mind that Tony Hall might fall on his sword after his failure to fend off the government’s plans for the BBC but others do have issues with him……

Michelle Stanistreet: ‘BBC staff and the public have been betrayed again’

NUJ general secretary on preparing a strike at the corporation, why she thinks director general Tony Hall is foolhardy and BBC bullying

On the day she speaks to the Guardian, NUJ reps from across the BBC have gathered to discuss their response to the deal and the cuts that will follow it. “One of the outcomes of today’s meeting is that our members are prepared to take strike action to defend jobs and to defend members at risk as and when they have to,” she says.

The s-word has by no means been unheard-of in the various battles between the union and the BBC – and other media organisations. But this is the first time Stanistreet has been so clear about the union’s resolve to challenge the fallout from the deal that will see the BBC cover the roughly £700m cost of providing free TV licences for the over-75s.

“Staff at the BBC and the general public have been betrayed once again by the very person [Tony Hall] – and the very team of people – there to uphold the values of the BBC, its integrity and its relationship with the licence fee payers. It was beyond belief that another secret, shabby stitch-up was secured without due transparency and consultation and process.”

Hall, she says, “allowed himself to be shafted” by the government. But what else could he have done when he picked up the phone to culture secretary John Whittingdale – was Hall not simply securing the best deal possible in the face of overwhelming pressure? “The very straightforward thing to do in the face of unacceptable governmental pressure and interference would be to say ‘fuck off, do your worst, we’ll fight that’.” That, she says, would have earned Hall the respect and the support of BBC staff, the unions and the “vast bulk of licence fee payers”.

She also doesn’t like the way the BBC discriminates against women.

“You might turn on your television and there’ll be as many women as men presenting. But, if you look behind the screens, that figure becomes incredibly imbalanced. Or you might see women of a certain age on your screens but, once they hit their 40s or 50s, they suddenly become invisible again.”

“Every survey we do … produces anecdotes that continue to make me feel sick or ashamed of the reality of working life for far too many of our women members.”

Labour’s Lord Bragg, Melvyn to you and me, has BBC Chair, Rona Fairhead, in his sights.  He states that “There are a couple of people on the board perfectly capable of taking over and she is a busted flush.  Grandees [no less] in arts and broadcasting have told me so.”

The reason Farihead is a ‘busted flush’ in Bragg’s opinion?  Fairhead failed to challenge the government in July when it made the BBC take on the burden of the free licence fees for the over 75s from 2018.  Bragg says “She has failed a major test.  She has no credibility at all.  It was disgraceful that the Trust was the dog that did not bark in the night.”

Hmmm…so what does he think of Tony Hall, the man who actually negotiated this deal?

Surely he is a ‘busted flush’ who failed a major test?  What do the Grandees think?

The Mail tells us that the little piggies at the BBC who are troughing away at licence fee payers’ expense must stop crying wolf about the Charter Review…

MPs tell BBC to stop crying wolf – and cut £52m pay bill: Backbenchers accuse Corporation of scaremongering and urge it to slash ‘bloated’ staffing costs

The BBC should stop crying wolf about the future of flagship services and instead get serious about slashing its £52 million-a-year bill for senior managers, say MPs.

Tory backbenchers are angry about the BBC’s suggestions that the only way it can save money is by closing flagship channels like BBC Four.

They have accused the broadcaster of scaremongering and want it to start talking seriously about cutting back on ‘bloated’ staffing costs.

But critics claim such threats are groundless and are simply designed to whip up public support for the BBC,

Damian Collins, a Tory member of the House of Commons media and sport select committee said: ‘There are all sorts of kites being flown suggesting popular services will be cut when we know that won’t happen.’

He added: ‘I think what they are trying to do is hit upon populist areas of the BBC where they know there is a vocal audience of people who will be appalled by the idea of them going.’

Once again Tony Hall is at the centre of things, this time as the driving force behind the alarmist campaign that the BBC has mounted…we know that he tried to blackmail the government before the budget by threatening to publicly say he would close BBC 2 so desperate as he seems to be to cling on to the BBC’s enormously privileged and entrenched position.  How can anyone trust a word this man says?  Not even those in the BBC trust him after his failure to block the licence fee move.

Looks more and more like a busted flush every day.

Tory MP Daniel Kawczynski has criticised a Newsnight report on the war in Yemen, or rather it reports on the role Saudi Arabia plays in that war and the supply of arms to Saudi Arabia by the UK……never mind that the airstrikes by the Saudi led coalition are backed by the UN…the BBC implication is that Saudi is deliberately bombing civilians and that the UK is complicit in this ‘war crime’…

The airstrikes are backed by a resolution at the United Nations Security Council. But the UN’s top humanitarian official in Yemen, Johannes van der Klaauw, says attacks on civilian infrastructure are violations of the laws of war.

“Schools and hospitals, markets, enterprises and factories should not be stricken, should not be shelled. Even in warfare there are certain rules, and they are being violated in this conflict,” he said.

Since the conflict started, more than 2,000 civilians have been killed.

They quote a UN offcial but it is they who suggested to him that the Saudis were deliberately targeting civilians and asked him what he thought of that…so the UN official is not talking about facts just a bit of BBC whatifery passed off as truth.

Kawczynski suggested that the BBC’s coverage was biased against Saudi Arabia…

As far as I can see Kawczynski has a case, and Katz a case to answer.  The BBC’s whole programme was set up to attack the Saudi’s role in the war and any British involvement in it.  This was not journalism but propaganda…and it is no different to the BBC reaction to the war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The war in Yemen was started by the Houthi who have ousted the legitimate president in a coup and tried to take over the country, it wasn’t started by the Saudis.

The BBC has always been anti-war, or rather, anti wars led by Western interests…and Saudi Arabia is closely linked to the hated US.  Wars by doughty rebels of course are loudly applauded and cheerled….witness the BBC’s coverage of the IRA and the likes of Hamas.

Where is the BBC’s equally indepth coverage of Iran’s involvement in inciting and resourcing these wars?  Iran has been a dangerous provocateur in the Middle East for a long time and has frequently provoked wars that seriously destabilise countries…it has supplied the Taliban in Afghanistan, it helped create chaos in Iraq and stoked the civil war, it essentially created Hezbollah and backs the attacks on Israel and of course it now backs Assad in Syria.

The BBC though makes little mention of Iran’s baleful influence on events and its attempts to inflame Shia Muslims inside Sunni countries.  The BBC has always been somewhat pro-Iranian, often preferring to present it not as the aggressor but as a victim of the West…an excuse the BBC trundles out for everything really….blow up some trains in London and you’re a victim of racist oppression, kill Jews in a Paris supermarket and again you’re a victim of the West or its friends….so it’s OK to kill Jews if you are so oppressed!

The BBC’s excuse for not blaming the rebels and Iran?…

Houthi soldiers, some of them no more than teenagers, are accused of firing heavy weapons in built-up areas.

But it is the Saudis and their coalition partners, mainly Gulf Arab countries including the United Arab Emirates, who have overwhelming force.

 

So if you have the biggest army you must be guilty of something even if you didn’t start the war…sounds familiar…if you’re black you can’t be racist as you are ‘powerless’, if you’re a Palestinian you can’t be a murderous terrorist because the powerful Israelis have tanks and planes.

Sounds like the BBC is making up excuses in order to find a reason to peddle their own preferred anti-Saudi, anti- UK arms sales, narrative.

Kawczynski then gets invited onto Newsnight supposedly to allow him to voice his concerns….however it does look like this was just another set up to allow the BBC to attack him and defend itself rather than to do some serious journalism.

The BBC set their rabid attack dog James O’Brien onto him…now the BBC’s recruitment of O’Brien is visible evidence of its bias and intent.  O’Brien hardly merits the title ‘journalist’, his preferred method of attack is to hype a trumped up, malicious charge against someone and when they deny it and prove it is false, to then claim the charge is therefore proven and the defendant a liar….half truths, complete lies and fabrications are the stock in trade for O’Brien.  His infamous kangaroo court when he tried to smear Nigel Farage with a litany of falsehoods and nonsense was the thing that got him recruited to the BBC…as I said you have to raise questions about the BBC when it deliberately recruits someone who is so visibly prejudiced against UKIP and who clearly doesn’t let the facts stand in the way of a good character assassination.

His interview is arrogant, condescending and patronising.  When Kawczynski raises the question as to why the BBC is not also investigating Houthi atrocities O’Brien brushes that aside and claims that Kawczynski is trying to control what the BBC reports…..when in fact all he is doing is to raise a legitimate concern about the BBC’s very evident lack of balanced reporting.

The editor of Newsnight, the Guardianista, Ian Katz, intervenes with a Tweet claiming that Kawczynski is only complaining about BBC bias because he is paid to act in the interests of Saudi Arabia….

• Ian Katz ‏@iankatz1000 Sep 11

  Perhaps useful bit of context to tonight’s #newsnight interview with @KawczynskiMP from MPs’ register of interests

Curiously Katz doesn’t mention that Tory MP Crispin Blunt, who backs the BBC, has taken money from Jordan, also a member of the Saudi led coalition in Yemen…..surely, on the basis that if you receive money from one country you must therefore be representing their interests, Blunt should also be supporting the war.  Perhpas Jordan should ask for its money back…or Katz apologise for his deliberate libel.

He may have to apologise in court though…as Kawczynski suggests he may sue:

Mr Kawczynski told The Independent on Sunday, that he planned to write to the BBC’s  director-general, Lord Hall, to demand an apology and a correction about Mr Katz’s tweet.

“What [Mr Katz] is deliberately suggesting is because I’ve accepted hospitality from Saudi Arabia, I’ve somehow been in their pockets, spouting what they want me to spout,” he said. “That’s a huge, deliberate attempt to smear me and others, rather than engage in the debate … I consider it a libellous tweet and I’m considering suing him.”

Katz isn’t of course always concerned with details or too up to date on Middle East politics, being a sleepy little fellow…