The BBC has a pretty rigid set of social and political preconceptions that people, politicians, activists, commentators and Joe Public have to conform to or be cast out into the wilderness as ‘untouchables’.  The BBC is not a tolerant organisation, it does not accept difference despite its own grandiose self-proclaimed celebration of diversity.

Janet Daley in the Telegraph expands on the Left’s intimidation and bullying tactics…

In the end, what does the Left (and its army of media friends) accomplish by all this activist pressure on public opinion? In a circle of mutually congratulatory agreement, the liberal establishment may demonise the social attitudes of the majority until they are blue in the face. They may succeed – as indeed they obviously have – in making ordinary people afraid to utter their real views. But there is a dreadful price to be paid: if you browbeat people into withdrawing from the debate, then you will never know how robust their convictions are – until it is too late and you have catastrophically lost an election, or staked your professional credibility on unsound predictions.

This is the danger of the activist trap. As I said last week, if you are surrounded by a crowd of people whose opinions are identical to yours then together you can make a great deal of noise. But what you don’t hear is the silence of those outside the crowd. If parties of the Left are ever to become electable again, they will have to stop shouting and listen.

I won’t list the things we are not allowed to discuss on the BBC, the list is long, numerous and full of the usual suspects.   The BBC’s worldview is extremely narrow and uninformed, it sets the parameters of debate and limits what you can say in the hope that it can limit what you think…so far so Orwellian.  Of course the Internet has helped break the BBC’s stranglehold on free speech, free thought and the democratic, free flowing use of information…knowledge being power…giving strength to the arm….perhaps the Tories won a majority because of that…hard to prove but a quite probable likelihood that the BBC’s narrative was broken and the social media got its message out.

Here are a couple of examples of narratives that the BBC will not accept and in fact actively works against…the first a ‘peacenik’ who offered herself as a human shield to Iraq in 1991 but who now, after working with American forces in Iraq after the last invasion, has become a supporter of ‘liberal interventionism’ and the use of military power to maintain the peace.

The second is a female Pakistani, brought up in Saudi Arabia and now safely living the dream in Canada who talks of her conversion to the idea that free speech is absolutely essential and, well…

‘It’s important because religion.. all of it… needs to be questioned – too many humans blindly put their faith in it. It’s important because an instance from Mo’s life was used to justify the killing of 132 children in Pakistan last December.

It’s important.’

The ‘peacenik’ is Emma Sky who says in the Sunday Times (you need to read the whole thing really to appreciate the full import of what she says) that…

‘My opinions have changed…I understand more now what you can achieve with forcer.  I was aware before of the problems of force, the limitations of miltary force.  I have now seen first hand what it is that can be done.

I had no interaction with the American military before.  I had always been concerned about the US propping up dictators in the Middle East.  Now I am more concerned about disorder.  Before, I was worried about state violation of human rights; now I have seen what happens when the state collapses.

I am much more concerned with order.  I have come to appreciate what the US military can do, its capability.  You look at the world for the last 70 years and think stability was kept by Pax Americana.

Now I have a much deeper understanding of the role that America has played in the world.  When you look at American withdrawal from the Middle east, and look at the consequences of that withdrawal, you go ‘oooh’…the consequences of disengagement are tragic.’

Here she is in an interview….one thing of note is that she says the major mistake that was made in Iraq was not encouraging the notion of being ‘Iraqi’…rather there was a tendency to encourage identity politics, multiculturalism based upon religion or ethnicity…Sunnis, Shias and Kurds……which led to tension and infighting that might have been avoided….

MARGARET WARNER: You said you thought the big mistake was for the Americans and the British to try to get Iraq to reorganize on the basis of ethnicity and sect. What was the alternative?

EMMA SKY: I think the alternative was to create the sense of Iraqiness.

And you organize based on regions and towns. And so you don’t say we will have 20 percent Sunnis, 20 percent Kurds, 60 percent Shia. You actually think, we will have representatives from Basra, from Anbar, from Irbil. And that way, you’re building up geographical representation, not based on the sect and ethnicity.

Instead, we wanted to build a pluralistic society, but what this did was institutionalize sectarianism. So, there was nothing about being Iraqi. It was all about being a subcomponent.

Here is the second person who overturns the BBCs preconceived prejudices about Islam, racism, free speech and Charlie Hebdo…..

A Former Apologist on Free Speech & Tribalism

Being a Pakistani child, raised in Saudi Arabia left me feeling like I never really belonged in Pakistan. My upbringing in Saudi was too westernized for me to ever fit in, in my motherland. I have never felt more alien anywhere else, in fact. Yet I shared the same pigmentation, the same struggles with a strict, patriarchal culture, the same language, the same history…. I didn’t belong in Saudi because they have strict rules putting foreigners in their place. We have no rights there, regardless of how many years we call it home. My siblings were born there, and knew no other place, but Saudi ..they were still told at every step that they were foreigners. It’s kind of hard to feel a sense of belonging in a place like that.

In teenage years, I searched for my tribe through subculture. The place I fit in terms of interests and ideas was predominantly white. Dog collars and fishnets, were fun for self-exploration…the ‘goth’ subculture gave me a huge sense of belonging when I needed it most in young adulthood. But I was still the ‘token’ brown girl. Despite many in the ‘scene’ having similar values and ways of thinking to mine, no one really understood the struggles of belonging to a culture like mine.

When we moved to Canada, I felt like I was home for the first time in my life. Only because my city (Toronto) embraces the diversity I’ve always been accustomed to (as an expat amongst other various expats). Anyway, I digress… my point is, that these constant instances of ‘unbelonging’ everywhere helped me dismantle my tribal feelings. It took a while, and I still have feelings I recognize but try not to cave to.

She says she used to think that critics of Islam shouldn’t be so vocal and should raise matters within the community…..

How naive I was. No… Ayaan, could not take it up internally within the community. Obviously, she would be killed for even trying. Anyone that raises their voice from within – in any context…is at the very least, collectively shunned (I would soon learn this for myself). Any critic, or any challenger of Islam is shut down on many fronts. You’ll lose liberal Western support in this regard for standing up for women’s rights (bizarre, I know), you’ll lose progressive Muslim support too. You’re basically left with conservatives, anti-immigrants and conspiracy theorists as allies. This happens because many of us internalize blasphemy concepts to some degree…if we perceive someone as challenging something ‘sacred’, even with the most valid reasons, we just cannot offer support. We don’t like to hurt people’s feelings, even if that means politely tolerating homophobia, misogyny, oppression.

At large, we are taught to think of imperialism as a white-on-colour occurrence. Rarely do we acknowledge the Arab imperialism spreading throughout the Muslim world, even today.

And so on…read the whole thing…..and when you next hear the BBC piously lecturing us about white racism, Islamophobia or the evil British empire think of what this girl says and compare.

Maybe we’re not so bad, as the BBC tars us, after all.

‘Overall, television coverage of the whole election has not covered itself, or anything else, in glory.  Too often it has bought the line fed to it by pollsters and pundits on one hand and been childishly confrontational on the other.

This should be the last time that Television attempts to force the political reality into a preassigned format.

The BBC needs fewer gimmicks, more real journalists and a new helmsman; ITV needs to be less deferential to the BBC; Channel 4 needs to grow up.’

AA Gill in the Sunday Times today.

Listening to the BBC news in the car and I heard that Mandelson had pilloried Miliband for not laying out Labour’s plan for economic growth… the web report doesn’t quote him on growth but limits itself to this….

Comparing Labour’s economic strategy to a polo mint “with a great hole in the middle”, he said it gave the impression it was “for the poor, hate the rich, ignoring completely the vast swathe of the population who exist in between who do have values like ours”.

Mandelson’s words reminded me of something from earlier in the week that I let go by at the time, a Nicky Campbell debate on Tuesday in which he asks ‘Are the politicans failing to talk about the issues that are important to you?’

Now if he had asked that back say in January you might have thought yes, let’s stick our oar in and make ourselves heard but two days before the election, you have to be kidding!, and is the BBC really trying to lay the blame for a lack of debate over a wide range of subjects at the politician’s door?

Surely it was the BBC’s job to broaden the debate and ask those relevant questions about subjects the politicians want to skirt around such as education, foreign policy and immigration…and yes Labour’s plans for growth….the one subject they did want to get their teeth into was the Tory’s plans for welfare reforms and the £12 bn of savings/cuts….funny that.

The BBC had a bad election as I said before….it showed clear bias in what subjects it concentrated on, who got the headlines and who it sought to undermine….but it also had a bad election in its role as a news and current affairs broadcaster just from a professional point of view, failing to explore all the issues and challenge the politicans of all colours and creeds about them.  It had a very lazy election.

Just as Mandelson says Labour was intent solely on bashing the rich and presenting itself as the party of the poor the BBC followed the same agenda telling us that inequality was THE major political narrative of our time.  How often did the BBC report from the poorest areas of a city or region, from foodbanks or concentrated on Zero Hour Contracts when such contracts make up a very small portion of the employment market and around 2/3rds of people on them are happy to be so?  This was the BBC that painted the bleakest picture of the NHS as a failed or failing enterprise rather than having a balanced look at what it provides…certainly it is under strain but not as a result of Coaliton changes.  Then we had the ‘living wage’, non-doms, the bedroom tax and the apparent lack of productivity.

All Labour policy concerns given headline status by the BBC.

What did the Tories get?  The sole big Tory splash that I can remember the BBC going big on was the Tory NHS announcement…but that of course was only to try to rip it apart with claims that the promise was unfunded.  However, despite a couple of interviews when Miliband was on the rack over his NHS plans, the BBC machine ignored the fact that Labour’s own plans were unfunded…the Mansion tax and tax avoidance money making schemes ridiculed by most commentators.

Labour promised to spend £2.5 billion above whatever the Tories promised….and yet even that £2.5 bn was, as said, unfunded….so how on earth would they fund the rest?

That takes us to growth and Labour’s lack of plans to increase it…central to funding all its promises, and especially in addressing the ‘living standards crisis’, unless they aimed to fund it all by soaking the rich…..where were the BBC questions asking about this important factor in Labour’s utopian dream?  How was Labour going to fund that improvement in living standards that was the backbone of its attack on the Tories?

The IFS, led by a man with links to the Labour party, told us that Labour could make very few cuts, borrow more and still cut the deficit…just how would that work?  The BBC didn’t ask.  Even when the BBC did quote something from the IFS that criticised both parties the criticism of Labour was soon massaged out of the news.

The BBC failed both in its remit to be impartial and also just from a professional stand point…failing to explore the issues, failing to challenge the Parties on subjects they didn’t want to talk about and failing to really get what the Public thought important into the debate…which is all a bit ironic as the BBC claims it was at the heart of it all…

Election 2015: TV debates ‘most influential’ for voters

More than a third of voters were influenced by the TV debates between the political leaders in the run-up to the election, a survey has found.

According to a Panelbase survey of 3,019 people, 38% were influenced by the debates, 23% by TV news coverage and 10% by party political broadcasts.

The research group said TV was “by far the most influential media source”, outscoring newspapers and social media.

Of those surveyed by Panelbase, 62% said TV coverage overall had been the most influential in informing them about the general election, the parties and their policies – helping them form their opinions.

TV wielded far more power on those surveyed than newspapers at 25%, websites at 17%, radio at 14%, and speaking to family and friends at 14%.

A paradox there….if TV coverage is so influential why is there not a Labour government?  Perhaps the answer is that  we would have had an even bigger Tory majority if the BBC had been less, far, far less, biased.

Anyone else seen Chuka Umunna interviewed by Andrew Marr this morning? I was amazed at the easy ride he was given by Marr and how he was even able to get away with saying that Labour had NOT mismanaged the economy the last time they were in power! London-based liberal elitists such as Umunna appeal to the BBC – even better that he is black. Whether the trade unions are quite as indulgent we will see. It was touching to see Umunna and Mandelson unite around the vital need for the UK to stay in the EU  – with Andrew Marr’s smiling agreement.

I can see that the AFTERMATH thread is overflowing. So, here’s a new one. BBC still distraught and have decided it is timely to hype up Conservative splits over the EU as well as continuing to pander to the irrelevance of the SNP. The floor is yours…

What would the political landscape be after a PR driven ‘earthquake’?

The BBC has kindly provided us with a breakdown…

UKIP would have won 83 seats and the SNP only 25.

Leave you to express your thoughts on that one.

DB on this site (h/t Craig at Is the BBC Biased?) noticed that the BBC’s Hugh Sykes was in a frenzy of sefl-righteousness about the Times using the word ‘earthquake’ as Craig reveals…

I hope the @thetimes will apologise to the relatives of the recently dead in #Nepal for describing the #UK #election2015 as an earthquake.

— HughSykes (@HughSykes) May 9, 2015

 

I hope the BBC will apologise for a similar use just one day ago…….

UK ‘political earthquake’ rocks EU

The words “political earthquake” have been translated into numerous European languages today, making front page news across the continent.

The mood is possibly best summed up in the Le Monde headline: Triumph for Cameron. Concern for Europe.

Of course the Times is from the Murdoch stable and no doubt the ever more dumb Sykes is not on a sanctimonious moral crusade but a political and ideological one.

Looking at Sykes’ Twitter feed he has this gem…which could indicate something…wishful thinking possibly….and ironically from the Times…..

The Miliband future will not be televised….not by the BBC, not by anyone.

That may come as a surprise to anyone who has been following the BBC’s election coverage and had been left with the impression that Miliband was a force to be reckoned with, one that was growing in popularity and stature as the momentum of his campaign grew and carried him inevitably into No10.

Nicola Sturgeon didn’t rate Miliband as PM material and even little Owen Jones is now pointing out that he wrote up Labour’s policies as lacking any real substance last year.

And that indeed was Labour’s problem, one the BBC did its best to bury.  Miliband was the eternal student, lacking any experience of the world outside politics he fought the campaign on clever wheezes designed to catch the voters eye with guaranteed headlines whilst hoping no one would challenge the viability and substance of each new populist policy.  In that he had a valuable ally, the BBC, which rarely bothered itself to examine in depth his policies whilst giving him massive headlines and a write up that suggested he was leading the way, shaping the political narrative.  Energy price freezes, mansion taxes, predistribution, paying for the NHS with ‘whatever it takes’ and claiming he had it all paid for, the ending of non-dom status, the Falkirk selection scandal, stabbing his brother in the back….all variously ignored, downplayed, bigged up or defended to the hilt by the BBC.

Jon Pienaar now says that he always knew Miliband’s non-dom policy ‘didn’t ring true’ and indeed he originally said that the revelation of Ball’s own defence of non-dom status was ‘The mother and father of all banana skins’ however as we pointed out previously the BBC then carried on as if Balls hadn’t said that or that if he had, then things had changed and Labour, with their ‘independent economic advisor’, not, had found a way to make the policy pay.

Pienaar is now also saying that he knew Cameron would get a majority and had been saying it around the office for a long time….why did he not share his thoughts with the public if this is what he believed would happen?….after all that is what he is known for…providing analysis using his own interpretation of the political situation…he isn’t normally so shy about giving us his thoughts.

Some interesting comments from others today….Uber lefty Ken Livingstone blamed New Labour’s legacy for the current failure…saying that millions of quality jobs were lost under Labour to be replaced by low paid, low status jobs.

Dan Hodges admits Miliband stabbed Miliband….‘There were other eyes watching him. From the very beginning, when he stood on that stage in Manchester and looked directly at his own brother and told him “David, I love you”. Straight after he’d killed him off.’

We also kept hearing today that Labour had moved too far to the left under Miliband….when did you ever hear the BBC raising that criticism of Red Ed?

The BBC was all too enthralled by the ‘new political landscape’ (as they were with Occupy)…..apparently we were all fed up with the old politics and there was supposedly a massive move to the left, it was definitely the end of two party politics…..and curiously this election was the first that would bring that about…ignoring the fact of the last 5 years having been a coalition government.  No one party would ever get a ruling majority again…..indeed even today after the Tory ‘landslide’ shock, relatively speaking, the BBC bods were pushing the line that Labour would never get a majority again after losing so badly in Scotland….they never learn…..filling the airwaves with endless speculation that is nearly always proved wrong by events.

We also hear from Labour that the problem was that they didn’t challenge the narrative that they caused the financial meltdown….bit hard to do that when they did cause it as even Miliband himself admits the recession was due to the lack of bank regulation..however the BBC has always preferred not to examine Labour’s record on that  if at all possible.

Labour lost despite the massive support of the BBC, and Russell Brand….his fleeting support now withdrawn as he blames the Establishment and the right wing Press for stitching up Miliband….but he’s just a comedian with a laptop and a bit of mouth he tells us, what does he know?….if you can’t beat the Establishment get compassionate with your neighbour….

The BBC got their campaign, sorry, reporting, massively wrong….the whole tenor of their reporting giving Miliband a substance and credibility he just didn’t have. Miliband’s policies were all show and no go, Miliband himself would never have been able to withstand the SNP assault and he’d have been reliant on them to stay in office…in other words Fallon was right to raise the concerns about what Miliband would compromise in order to stay in No10.

The BBC’s election reporting was ultimately one huge fail having set out to defend and prop up the faltering Miliband instead of sticking to reporting the facts. Every time Miliband made a cock up the BBC would desperately cast around for something negative about Cameron to balance out the negative press Miliband was getting…Miliband is massively slated for his ‘Edstone’ and suddenly all we hear on the BBC is that a Libdem has suddenly remembered an amazing conversation between Clegg and Cameron in which Cameorn said he thought he wouldn’t get a majority….non-news plastered all over the BBC….was someone trying to distract us from the Miliband farce?  Lucy Powell, Miliband’s strategist, admits damningly that the pledges carved in stone didn’t actually mean he would not break some of them….and Pienaar comes on to tell us she of course didn’t mean that at all, that wasn’t what she was saying…well yes it was Jon.

All in all the BBC had a bad election, not as bad as Miliband’s, but bad.  Their analysis of what is happening in politics proving to be way off course…..a single party has won a majority and the population is not moving to the left, Miliband would have been absolutely dominated by Sturgeon and his policies were so much smoke and mirrors.

If you’d relied on the BBC for your news you’d never have guessed the true state of politics in the UK.

The Mail says…

BBC must now pay the price for its blatant anti-Conservative bias

As the results filtered through, and the scale of the Tory victory became clear, the BBC seemed to go into official mourning over the phenomenal losses suffered by Labour and the Lib Dems.

It was as if the Corporation, in its despair over the collapse of the Left, believed the whole nation shared its anguish. 

Nothing could have been further from the truth, and once more the BBC missed the real story — the remarkable, historic triumph of conservatism.

This abrogation of its responsibility as a public broadcaster will, inevitably, have an effect on its future, as the BBC’s licence fee comes under increasing scrutiny.

Undoubtedly, a new and energised Tory Government will look closely at the issue of whether this Left-leaning, management-heavy behemoth should be subsidised by a compulsory tax on TV viewers.

Well then, the BBC are in mourning as the UK returns a majority Conservative Government. Thoughts on BBC coverage?

The BBC has spent a good deal of time either downplaying or ignoring the Muslim Trojan Horse scandal in Birmingham schools, often resorting to saying that the claims of a Muslim takeover were merely the deluded ramblings of racists, Islamophobes and the paranoid…..before suggesting that if that is what Muslim parents wanted then perhaps that is what they should have in the interests of that old dangerous standby ‘community cohesion’.

How different is the BBC approach to similar religious fundamentalism in Georgian schools…

The church’s conservative message is increasingly at odds with the country’s liberal, pro-Western direction, which paradoxically most Georgians also support.

Schools have become an ideological battleground.

Children under pressure

In 2012 Saakashvili’s government lost the election to the more traditionalist “Georgian Dream” coalition, which was enthusiastically backed by the church and grassroots Orthodox groups.

Since then, “collective prayers, preaching and indoctrination in public schools have been on the rise,” says Eka Chitanava from Georgia’s Tolerance and Diversity Institute, which recently conducted a survey of 33 religious minorities. All said their children are facing pressure at school, especially Muslims and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Ah….especially Muslims under pressure…..that explains the BBC’s concern.

Doesn’t this all sound familiar?…just replace Georgian Orthodox with Muslim, and Russia with Saudia Arabia….

The Georgian Orthodox Church denies being an instrument of Russia, saying the links are historical.

But it cites modern religious Russian literature in its teachings, and Father Iotame told me visiting Russian priests started organising annual religious “boot camps” in Georgia three years ago – where he learned about “paedophile parties taking over Europe”. He wants to save the young from “a wave of filth” from the West.

In weekly sermons, hundreds of priests are delivering the same message: Georgia’s Western aspirations are no longer compatible with its ancient Orthodox faith. And they are telling Georgia’s young people they have to make a choice.

All so familiar and yet the BBC has a completely different reaction to the same religious extremism in British schools.