Good start to day on R4…BBC journo’s all asking what should the ‘new governement’, the ‘next government’ and the ‘new Prime Minister’ do to resolve current issues…all rather suggestive that Cameron and Tories are going to be out. Why not just say ‘What do you want the government to do?’

We also hear that rural life is in meltdown with communities rapidly collapsing with all services such as shops, pubs, post offices and bus services being closed.  Might have been relevant to suggest that the country isn’t a museum with pretty little shops and so on being there to make the place look idyllic….perhaps if people used those shops, pubs and post offices they wouldn’t close…..and have to say plenty of such rural services available where I live.

Then they got onto Rural Payments to farmers….slipped in was the comment that farmers desperately ‘need the EU subsidies’.

Hmmm…EU subsidies?  Do they mean the money the EU sends us back from the billions we send them but not before the EU bureaucrats rake off huge salaries with lavish expenses that they pay themselves before generously handing some of it back to us…with the demand that we thank the EUists profusely for their largesse?

The BBC’s biggest story of the day seems to be the Guardian smear that Grant Shapps may have altered his Wikipedia entry….shock and horror!

The BBC’s Norman ‘utterly terrifying’ Smith was delighted with this tale saying ‘This story brought a big smile to my face’.….telling us that Shapps thought it was a Labour Party smear which Smith dismissed with a joke denying it could possibly be a Labour smear operation…..they’re too computer illiterate and lack a sense of humour….leaving it up in the air as to who did alter the entry…suggesting Shapps perhaps?  Even if true…so what?

The Guardian’s evidence?…

The site’s administrators, selected Wikipedia volunteers who patrol the site, told the Guardian that they “believe that the account Contribsx is a sockpuppet of Grant Shapps’ previous accounts on Wikipedia … and based on the evidence the account is either run by Shapps directly or being run by someone else – an assistant or a PR agency – but under his clear direction.”

Oh hang on….anyone can edit it and the administrators can in fact almost be anyone….who is the admin who claims Shapps is guilty and what’s the evidence?…the Guardian fails to enlighten us….the BBC is admitting that that particular admin. ‘can’t be sure of who edited the account‘…..so a non-story about a non-story based on the word of one man who admits he is speculating. Big news!

R4 ignores the Mail story about Unite controlling half of Labour’s candidates…but then again why would we expect the BBC to cover that when they ignored the story when it arose before and even Labour sites attacked Unite and Miliband?  That’ll be the Unite Union that wants to impose Ralph Miliband’s Marxist utopia upon us.  Might be important…especially as Unite Leader, Len McCluskey, says Democracy is over-rated and he wants to use ‘direct action’ to force his views upon society.  Something that might be of interest to anyone thinking of voting for Unite funded Miliband.

Just heard that America is guilty of creating ISIS…never mind it existed in Afghan under a different name long before the BBC’s Peter Taylor claims it was created and the idea to create an Islamic State was always the dream.  The BBC happily ignores the reality that ‘ISIS’ was smashed by the US in Iraq and resurrected by Assad who released them from prisons and attacked their rivals whilst protecting them for his own purposes….not a mention of that key Syrian angle in this write up by Taylor.

The BBC is relentless in trying to blame the West or the US for what is happening in the Middle East…never mind that it was the Arab Spring that set off events in Syria and created the circumstances that allowed ISIS to rise again.

Even Jeremy Bowen admits that the self-immolation of the Tunisian fruit seller was the spark that began the uprisings across the Middle East…Syria would not be self-destructing if that hadn’t happened and ISIS wouldn’t have had the opportunity to rise again…nothing to do with Iraq.

It’s an odd thing isn’t it?  Muslims flock to the infidel and despised West to take advantage of the benefits provided by that infidel and despised Western society, including the ability to practise their religion more freely than when back in their ‘Islamic’ homelands, and yet the West is not allowed to go to Muslim lands to depose secular dictators hated by those same Muslims and to bring religious and political freedom to the oppressed people of those lands as well as to oust regimes like the Taliban…. the sort of Jihadi ‘Muslims’ that ‘real’ Muslims, sat comfortably in their Western homes, tell us aren’t real Muslims…and yet the West is somehow guilty of a crime against Muslims… which drives those ‘Real Muslims’ to be radicalised and to join up with those ‘Non-Islamic’ Jihadi Muslims to fight the Infidel and despised Western oppressor.

Go figure.

The BBC believes it unquestionably.

What brought that little rant on?  This from Craig at Is the BBC biased (yes it is) in which he tells of a complaint he made to the BBC about their lack of coverage of the fact that the father of a ‘Jihadi runaway’ was himself an extremist when they had previously given an enormous amount of airtime to him and his ilk to complain that it was all the Police’s fault or MI5’s fault that his daughter had gone off to join ISIS.

The BBC’s response was to say this…

BBC News is aware of the video material said to show Mr Hussen at a rally in 2012 and we have looked into the matter ourselves.

We didn’t consider it merited a report on its own, but it was included in a TV piece due to run on the evening of Friday, March 27th. Unfortunately, because of other news priorities, including the court verdict in the Amanda Knox/Meredith Kercher case, it didn’t make it to air.

I’m sorry, what was that?  ‘We didn’t consider it merited a report on its own’!

Are they kidding? Having flooded the news with sob stories about his daughter and her friends the BBC couldn’t find time for what is an important part of that story, the missing piece of the jigsaw that answers the question that the BBC constantly asks…Just what drives our young British Muslism to become radicalised?

Turns out its the way they’ve been brought up.  Suddenly though the BBC has lost interest in the answer.

Strange that.

The BBC does reassure us that….

However, it is something that we do intend to return to in the future.

Craig is doubtful…

When the BBC Complaints guy writes, “However, it is something that we do intend to return to in the future”, I afraid I don’t have any confidence in that pledge whatsoever. They clearly have absolutely no plans to update this story. The censorship will continue.

However I have every faith that the BBC will indeed return to the subject….the father will of course be the victim of Western oppression in his homeland that forced him, ironically, to flee to the West where he again suffered discrimination, disenfranchisement, alienation and Islamophobia, not to mention the trauma of watching his homeland being freed from the savage grip of a secular tyrant on the BBC each night…no wonder he became radicalised and turned to extreme measures when the much vaunted Western Democracy failed him.

LibDem Peer, Lord Palumbo, thinks that politicians are making promises that they can’t possibly fulfill and it’s bad for democracy…but who’s to blame?

Wild election promises, funded with Monopoly money – is it any wonder nobody trusts politicians?

I don’t entirely blame politicians for behaving in this way. Our short-term cyclical political process seems designed to generate this auction of electoral bribery and reality avoidance. Honesty doesn’t win seats, promises do. The problem comes later, when politicians have to live up to their commitments while keeping the country’s economy afloat.

This is, however, one of the reasons we hit the financial crisis in 2008 and why deficit reduction has been so difficult during the last parliament. The needs of our democracy run against those of sound economic management. The skills needed by a media-savvy politician are the opposite to those needed to run a large and complex organisation. The by-product? As Viv Nicholson might have said: debt, debt, debt.

I take the somewhat controversial view that democracy would be enhanced if there was a little less electioneering and a little more truth telling. More experts, fewer communicators.

[Democracy] only works if voters make an informed choice, balancing individual needs and national interest, and if politicians are able to operate in an environment by which difficult choices and honesty are not prohibitively costly to their existence.

The choice for voters at this election is a critical one. The wrong decisions afterwards could bankrupt this country or leave us even more vulnerable to global economic turmoil.

We will pay a very heavy price if short-term political needs are placed before the national interest. And democracy will be undermined in the process.

Of course he is right as I’m certain we all recognise, politicians often refuse to admit there are difficult decisions, difficult choices, to be made, they refuse to admit mistakes and make rash promises, say for example to keep funding the NHS regardless of cost, because to suggest anything else is ‘death by Media’ and, they believe, electoral suicide.

Palumbo blames the politicians and only touches on the real culprits, the Media, which drives the agenda and makes politicians afraid to say anything that may later be held against them.

How often have we heard on the BBC that politics is failing, that voters have lost their trust in politicians (such as it was) and that democracy is on the rocks?

If that were so how much blame could be apportioned to the likes of the BBC which rather than merely seeking the truth to inform voters and their judgements also seeks to cast its own moral judgement upon the politicians and their policies or seems just out to trash any policy regardless of merit?

Here is a classic example of BBC mendaciousness…it can’t have been an honest mistake…how could a professional journalist make such a mistake?  H/T George R:

“HOW THE BBC STITCHED UP CAMERON WITH A FAKE QUOTE ABOUT FOX-HUNTING”

Why is it that politicians refuse to contemplate reducing any funding to the NHS when it clearly has got out of hand?  If the BBC were responsible it would allow the case to be made for such reductions but instead of that reasoned debate it goes into attack mode and as with welfare reforms sets out to paint any such change as an appallling, callous and wicked attack on the poorest and most vulnerable in society even if the policy might in fact be beneficial for them.  The rants about food banks are another example…often cited as proof that poverty stalks the UK when the reality is that most of the recipients are those who are having to wait for their benefits to be paid for one reason or another…in other words not ‘poverty’ but a bureacracy that has failed. Britain is not starving.

There is a distinct lack of honest debate that would allow politicians to freely admit money is short and savings have to be made. How often do you hear the BBC criticise ‘austerity’ without reference to the causes…that being the worst recession in 100 years?  It’s as if it was instead a cruel and heartless experiment that the Tories imposed, not out of necessity, but because they wanted to….that of course being a narrative that Labour likes to run with…the Tory (coalition) austerity measures are purely a nasty small government, everybody fend for themselves, Right wing ideology and nothing to do with fixing the economy….a narrative that the BBC’s failure to highlight Labour’s blame for the recession allows to gain credence and keeps up the notion of the ‘Nasty Tories’.

If Democracy is failing its because the Media is failing…and one of the biggest players, and the biggest culprit, is the BBC.

Having watched the BBC website over the last 3 or so weeks I think I can agree with this from Guido…

BBC Website ‘Balance’ is a Joke

Everytime you look there is a Labour policy announcement being headlined or if the Tories make an announcement the headline can often be ‘Labour criticises Tory policy’ rather than a positive one for the Tories.

It isn’t just the website, the Radio news bulletins pull the same trick or that is my impression…it may just be that Labour make far more announcements and are better at getting them into the news cycle….you be the judge…here’s some more of Guido’s look at BBC bias…….

It reads like a Labour press release, with each election story given the best possible pro-Labour slant to it. Where are Cameron’s, Osborne’s or Major’s attacks on Miliband on the same subject? Why is Labour’s nursing policy presented without question? Where is any other party on the front page?

Click through to the BBC’s Election 2015 hub, and it’s even less balanced:

Not a single Tory or LibDem featured story.

Fascinating watching the Left turn themselves in knots in reaction to comments by Katie Hopkins about the migrant surge that is resulting in so much tragedy….as the Spectator says it’s the greatest game in town for the Lefties..

Hating Katie has become the speediest shortcut to the moral highground in this slacktivist age, when people prefer to make a virtual advert of their moral correctness than to do anything so tough as try to change the world outside their bedroom door. And if you aren’t hating Katie, if you aren’t partaking in this orgy of competitive benevolence, what is wrong with you?

It is an irony that, as said before, the real extremists, those who spout the irresponsible and dangerous rhetoric about immigration, aren’t the likes of Hopkins but those on the Left itself which demands open borders and mass immigration knowing full well the shattering consequences but willing to look away and ignore them as they seek to implement their grand project whilst at the same time grandstanding, mouthing ‘concerned’ platitudes about the ‘tragedy’ of the migrants dying in their hundreds, a faux compassion, a mockery of the humane principles they pretend to espouse so loudly.  To compound their crime, and to hide it, they work to silence their critics and those who propose controlled immigration that would benefit countries taking in the migrants and not least the migrants themselves…not only trying to silence their critics but to blame them for the deaths that are in fact the outcome of the ‘good men and women’ of the Left whose ideology overrides their professed humanity.

What did Nietzsche say?…

‘Good men are thus the most harmful type of men because they prevail at the expense of truth and at the expense of the future.’

‘Morality as a hiding place, a shield, a weapon…like a beast near death, crawl away and hide behind it.’

 

Those good men and women of the Left no doubt adhere to the principles of that famous socialist Adolf Hitler who didn’t believe in letting the facts get in the way of a good story either…..

‘What is important is not what the creator

of an idea of genius may mean, but what this idea

becomes in the mouth of whomever transmits it.’

                                                                                      Adolf Hitler

 

So let’s look at what those on the Left who retransmit the ideas of Katie Hopkins can turn them into……..

Let’s start with the Huffington Post which lays bare the raw anger that Katie Hopkins remarks apparently generated….

Katie Hopkins Wrote This In The Sun About Migrants And Now Everyone Is Really Angry

“NO, I don’t care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad.

I still don’t care.

Make no mistake, these migrants are like cockroaches. They might look a bit “Bob Geldof’s Ethiopia circa 1984”, but they are built to survive a nuclear bomb. They are survivors.

It’s time to get Australian. Bring on the gunships, force migrants back to their shores and burn the boats.”

Here is John Wight, Guardian and Huffington Post writer, with a taste of his position on immigration…

Migration is as old as humanity itself, and attempting to impede the natural right of people to escape poverty, war, and social convulsion is both futile and cruel.

In other words…make no attempt to prevent immigration.

Here is his reaction on Twitter to Katie Hopkins…

A photo the BBC outrageously refused to publish….Ed Miliband Scottish Sword dancing to the Twin Tartan Terror’s Tune….

Better be careful with those sharp pointy things…may end up in your back!

Sorry for the delay in publishing this NEW Open Thread but I have been watching the euphoria with which the BBC greeted the SNP manifesto launch! The hard left Caledonian marxism from Sturgeon and co seems to stimulate the Comrades. I will now open the floor to YOU!

Remarkable what a pro-SNP filter will do to your perceptions.  The BBC interviewed the SNP’s deputy leader Stewart Hosie who told us that the SNP would block any spending it didn’t like and that included defence spending and especially Trident…and Labour confirmed it would make a deal with the SNP if it was the only way to get into power.

This is the BBC’s report…

SNP to launch manifesto as parties continue campaigns

SNP deputy leader Stewart Hosie said his party’s manifesto would “lay out incredibly clearly how we intend to see a genuine end to austerity”, and would “try to bring progressive politics to the rest of the UK”.

Er…and that was that…not a mention of holding the country to ransom unless it got its way on Trident, the BBC preferring to emphasise ending austerity and imposing ‘progressive politics’.

How different other news providers….

The Telegraph:

SNP prepared to paralyse Armed Forces unless Trident is scrapped

Labour admits it is willing to do a deal with SNP to get Ed Miliband into No 10 as SNP threatens to block defence spending unless it gets its way on Trident

The Mail:

SNP threat to hold UK to ransom: Nationalists say they’ll block any spending they don’t like if they hold balance of power

The Times:

The Independent:

It’s not as if the BBC doesn’t know what the SNP said and recognised its significance, after all it was said in a BBC interview….the best the BBC can come up with is a reference to the ‘ransom’ in its what the papers say section…

Newspaper headlines: Migrant tragedy and SNP ‘ransom note’

 

In other words Fallon was right…Miliband is prepared to betray the UK to get into power by dealing with the SNP who will be happy to wreck the armed services for its own ends….and the BBC ignores both the threat from the SNP and the ‘stab in the back’ from Labour for the UK.

The Left are happy…migrants from African are dying in their hundreds and their deaths can be exploited by the likes of the BBC to promote an open door immigration policy….regardless of the consequences for European society and civilisation that that entails….and regardless of the consequences for the immigrants...’luring them to their death’.

Exrpressing cheap sympathy for the death of these people the BBC, and others, refuse to analyse what is going on.  Their simple, convenient, equation, designed as emotional blackmail, is that migrants are desperate to come here, they are dying in the attempt, and therefore to prevent them dying we must fling open the borders and let them in…never mind that in Libya alone there are reportedly over one million migrants , with more coming, waiting for their chance to head to Europe, the land of milk and honey.

The real solution is to send ground troops to stabilise Libya, to destroy ISIS and to prevent the boats being launched in the first place but the BBC, and the ‘Muslim community’, are opposed to that….the ‘Muslim community’ don’t want us fighting Islamic extremists like IS apparently, but are happy if the West could topple Assad in Syria for them…funny that.

Here is a classic bit of emotional blackmail and extremist rhetoric from the UN…..

Anti-immigrant rhetoric from politicians across Europe, including Britain, is blocking attempts to introduce large search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean that would save large numbers of migrant lives, a senior UN official has warned.

Laurens Jolles said political expediency was preventing measures being taken to reduce migrant deaths.

Jolles, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) representative in Italy, said: “In many countries in Europe at the moment, the [political] dialogue and the rhetoric is quite extreme and very irresponsible.”

No…. ‘anti-immigrant rhetoric from politicians’ is not killing anyone.  First it is the extremist pro-immigration, open border rhetoric that is encouraging people to try and come to Europe where they know they will be able to force countries to  look after them if they can make a landing.  It is the ‘come one come all’ rhetoric from the likes of the UN that creates these dangerous situations….you can see how Obama’s pro-immigration encouragement has resulted in a disastrous flood of illegal immigrants into the US…..The Spectator says...’The real culprit isn’t Triton but the EU’s tragic asylum and immigration policy. Though it is designed to save people, it instead lures them to their death.’

Second it is not the ‘politician’s’ rhetoric…they are expressing the will of the majority of the people that immigration should be controlled…and saying that immigration needs control is hardly ‘rhetoric that is quite extreme and very irresponsible’ as the UN claims.

Third the UN’s solution…ignore what the people think and impose draconian pro-immigration policies upon them.

Which is an irony….the UN tells us that these migrants are fleeing tyrannical, oppressive regimes and yet its solution is to create such regimes in Europe where the political ‘elite’ impose policies to deal with issues that the prejudiced and ignorant peasants, you and me, aren’t capable of understanding and who don’t have the capacity for intelligent thought and humane compassion in our sordid little lives that would allow us to empathise and understand these migrants.

The BBC thinks that hiding the realities of the situation will prevent an angry response as millions of immigrants continue to swarm across the borders….the reality is that the lack of debate and the lack of consent from the population for this immigration policy will result, eventually, in an extreme reaction against immigrants…the irony being that that is precisely what the BBC attempts to prevent.

In a Nicky Campbell phone-in we heard the accusation that anyone who opposes immigration would have opposed Jewish immigration in the 1930’s and thereby were themselves the equivalent of Nazis.

Campbell seemed to like that….but you could raise the inconvenient fact that the BBC blocked Churchill from the airwaves as he warned of the danger of Herr Hitler because the BBC didn’t want to upset Adolf just as they block or deride those speak of controlling immigration, or demand we change UK foreign policy so that we don’t upset the ‘Muslim community’.  If Churchill had been free to speak he may have influenced events and Europe may have done more to stop Hitler and prevented the war in which millions died.  The BBC’s good intentions helping to cause a war, just as their hiding of Assad’s chemical attack on a school before the crucial vote on Syria helped to create ISIS…..A ‘warning from history’….as is this…..

Terror on the streets of South Africa

Gaddafi also warned us…..

Back in August 2010, the Libyan despot went to Rome and made a blackmailing offer which many Italian politicians must now be wishing they had accepted.

Gaddafi said: ‘Italy needs to convince her European allies to accept this Libyan proposal – €5 billion [then about £4 billion] to Libya to stop illegal immigration. ‘Europe runs the risk of turning black from illegal immigration, it could turn into Africa. We need support from the European Union to stop this army trying to get across from Libya, which is their entry point.

‘At the moment there is a dangerous level of immigration from Africa into Europe and we don’t know what will happen.

‘What will be the reaction of the white Christian Europeans to this mass of hungry, uneducated Africans?’

‘We don’t know if Europe will remain an advanced and cohesive continent or if it will be destroyed by this barbarian invasion. We have to imagine that this could happen but before it does we need to work together.’

The BBC and their pro-immigration extremist ilk are storing up a dangerous and violent future for a Europe that is being  ‘invaded’ on many fronts.

Perfect example of how the BBC leaps upon race issues with glee…before checking what’s what…or as Breitbart says ‘Because of course the BBC can’t tell the difference between an outlandish, obviously fake social-justice obsessed parody account and a normal member of the public.’.….

Star Wars is ‘racist and homophobic’: BBC blunder as Twitter hoaxer is invited on air

Godfrey Elfwick

@GodfreyElfwick

Demisexual genderqueer Muslim atheist. Literal good guy. Itinerant jongleur. Pronouns are Xir, Xirs Xirself. Filters life through the lens of minority issues.

The perfect BBC interviewee.

A BBC spokesman said: “On this occasion, the Force was not with us.

“The guest presented himself as a 20-year-old who’s never seen Star Wars, and we put him on air under that pretence.

“WHYS producers always do their best to check guests in a live programme that invites global discussion from listeners.”

Sheeran has deleted her tweet inviting Elfwick on to the show.