Labour’s pink battleaxe bus is on the road fighting for wimin’s rights and the BBC is naturally ready to explore the issues, raised by Labour, using the controversial pink colour as its ice breaker to get the converstaion going in the right direction.

That ‘controversy’ about the bus’s colour was pretty much dismissed by the BBC…can’t imagine them doing that if it had been the Torys who had come up with such a vehicle to campaign for women’s rights.

Forgetfulness is what preserves our dignity…from 2009….

“Harriet Harman was making a very serious point actually about how we ensure that we as parents give girls the best possible opportunities and that we don’t stereotype girls into forever taking a very passive and pink role in life.

 

The presenters I heard discussing this had obviously read Harman’s interview in the Huffington Post where she replies to one question  “Well it doesn’t have big eyelashes on the front.” as they mentioned the eyelashes….they also mentioned the fact that there were three drivers, and that two were women….and they thought that Labour must have had lots of focus group discussions….all points out of the interview…..“We’ve had lots of doctrinal discussions, such as: should we be alright with a male driver?”

What they didn’t bother telling us was who provided at least one of the drivers as Harman revealed in the interview….

“Unite has provided us with a driver and blow me down they’ve managed to find a woman with one of these licenses.

So Labour’s puppet master and banker, the Unite Union, provided a driver……just how much more help is Labour getting from Unite and other Unions?  And how much of this help is provided in a way that is designed to get around the rules on election funding for political parties?

One little point and it raises many more serious issues…..Labour’s favourite tactic is to make a lot of noise about Tory donors and the BBC is happy to mention that in passing…..so here is the BBC’s chance to do some investigating of just how the Union’s are funding Labour under the radar.

A discarded idea for a colour schematic for the bus….

You can’t really get a better analysis of this effort by Labour than Dan Hodges’ ridiculing of it...as he says whilst Harman is off having chats with wifies around their kitchen tables Labour’s men are at the British Chambers of Commerce, setting out Labour’s vision for business and plans for the macroeconomy....The idea the Labour Party is blazing a trail for women is one of the biggest jokes in British politics.

Just another idea for the BBC to explore.

Back in 2009 pink was bad…

She went on: “It’s about not funnelling girls into pretty, pretty jobs, but giving them aspirations and challenging them to fulfil their potential.

Let’s face it. Nichola Sturgeon’s speak a language the BBC really loves and no, I am not talking Scottish! Her third rate socialism, driven by a hatred of England, resonates with the BBC and it encourages them to puff out this glowing item on her demands of the Westminster Parliament.  She waffles on about how “austerity” isn’t working and yet the BBC does not deign it fit to simply point out that with the UK being the best performing economy in the G7, “austerity” would seem to be delivering something other nations are proud of. The truth is that the BBC and the SNP can rally around these illiterate meme about “austerity” not working. Here in Northern Ireland where there has bee NO Welfare reform(!!!) the BBC faithfully repeats the mantra about the crushing austerity and voices like my own who point out that this is incorrect are simply ignored or mocked. The BBC itself has a culture of Spend Spend Spend and so I suppose it feels a sense of kinship with the goons in the SNP and Sinn Fein who all seek to subvert economic common sense and live outside of what can be afforded.

Time for a new one of these. Here you go, the floor is yours! Detail the egregious bias of the BBC here!

We had a look at the BBC’s FOOC’s report on the looting of China’s Summer Palace in 1860 and concluded they had neglected an essential part of the story…the torture and killing of British hostages by the Chinese that led to the burning of the palace.

FOOC has revisited this story (17 mins 30 sec) and expanded on the events to include the killing of the hostages.

Kind of important as China itself refuses to admit the killings and uses the destruction and looting of the Summer Palace as an anti-Western diatribe to stir up the Party faithful and keep them onside.

Shame the BBC felt obliged to toe the Chinese line originally.

Dreadful revelations about tax avoidance facilitated by HSBC….thank God for the BBC and the Guardian who have exposed this scandalous state of affairs.

That’ll be the HSBC tax avoidance scandal story that is at least 5 years old and actually first surfaced in 2007/08.

Here’s a headline from 2010…

Mass Leak of Client Data Rattles Swiss Banking

And the Guardian in 2012 about the money laundering scandal:

Lord Green ‘regrets’ HSBC scandal but still refuses to answer questions

Note that the Guardian makes no mention of the tax evasion that HSBC was already known to have been involved in.

Indeed here we have the proof of that involvement, also from 2012…

The £200m question: Trade minister Lord Green linked to Swiss HSBC tax scandal

And we know that at the latest Labour knew of the tax evasion in 2010..

The HMRC in 2010 received data smuggled out of HSBC by a former bank IT worker, now under arrest in Spain and facing possible extradition to Switzerland, that contained details of 6,000 UK-linked individuals, companies and trusts.

 

And yet Labour didn’t object to Stephen Green being made a Peer or a Trade Minister…and said nothing about tax evasion and HSBC in 2010.

How can they now demand an explanation from the Government about Green’s elevation without admitting they must have turned a blind eye themselves…after all they were in government for 13 years, regulating the Banks all that time, and they probably knew about HSBC’s activities since 2008…..they were sent information from the ‘whistleblower/thief’ but now deny having received any information…can that really be true?

Maybe the BBC should ask a few questions.

And the BBC’s ‘bombshell revelation’ that HSBC boss Stephen Green was made a peer in 2010 by the Tories (Did Labour object then  I think not) was clearly known in 2010….yep, not a peep from Labour at the time…

HSBC chairman Stephen Green named Trade Minister

It would be ridiculous to suggest that the timing of these latest revelations was deliberate and the BBC and the Guardian has sat on them until a time as near to the election as they dare go without looking blatantly like they are pushing a Labour propaganda stunt….ridiculous maybe, but it does look that way.

Just pure coincidence that this BBC/Guardian investigation times its publication  a few days after this blast from Labour…

Ed Miliband issues warning to UK-controlled ‘tax havens’

The BBC tell us that the information came to light when ‘leaked by a whistleblower in 2007.’

But he wasn’t a whistleblower at all, he was a thief whose original sole intention had been to sell the data to other competing banks…

Whistleblower? Thief? Hero? Introducing the Source of the Data that Shook HSBC

According to Falciani, he made attempts to interest authorities in other countries about the data and the wrongdoing it revealed.

The bank and Swiss officials tell a different story: that Falciani stole the data and hoped to profit from it, first by shopping it to banks in Lebanon and then by offering it to authorities in countries outside of Switzerland.

 

The BBC tells us Labour denies all knowledge of this…

Labour’s Rachel Reeves, shadow work and pensions secretary, defended the Labour party against accusations of inaction against tax evasion when it was in power.

“This behaviour by HSBC wasn’t unearthed until 2010 so it’s not something Ed Balls [City minister in 2007] or the last government could have done anything about,” she told Radio 5.

 

However Falciani claims to have sent information to many governments…

Once Falciani and Mikhael returned from Lebanon, they contacted European tax authorities and intelligence agencies, offering “the client list of one of the world’s largest wealth management banks,” according to Swiss police reports. “Tax evasion: client list available” was the subject line in the emails, according to The Wall Street Journal, which also noted that the emails didn’t ask for money.

And that included the UK….

The anonymous emails carried a tantalizing subject line: “Tax evasion: client list available.”

The messages, sent two years ago to tax authorities across Europe, made an audacious claim: The sender could provide a large client list of a Swiss-based private bank, plus access to its computer systems. The emails were sent to Germany’s secret police, the French police and the U.K.’s tax authorities and foreign ministry.

Why is the BBC not questioning Balls and Co rather than accepting outright denials from Labour?

So the BBC makes a great splash about tax avoidance days after Labour and Miliband announce their policy on tax havens and tax evasion.

Just a coincidence that when Miliband goes into battle on ‘inequality’…Ed Miliband: wealth creation means tackling inequality  the BBC’s, son of a Labour Peer, Robert Peston, is banging the drum for them with some programmes on ‘The Price of Inequality’

Robert Peston speaks to leading policymakers and opinion shapers as he charts the new consensus that inequality is the biggest economic challenge we face.

Well if you believe Labour.

Any coincidence that as reports come in that Labour are losing the Middle Class vote…It’s the guilty, middle-class voters will finish off Labour…the BBC is once more banging the drum to a Labour tune with programmes like this  ‘Clinging on:  The Decline of the Middle Classes’

Is the middle-class in terminal decline? Writer David Boyle, author of Broke: Who Killed the Middle Classes?, explores the split between a small rich elite and those who are argued to be clinging on to a deteriorating lifestyle and falling expectations.

 

Any coincidence that the BBC makes headline news of anything that might be construed as damaging to the Tories but downplays or ignores similarly damaging news on Labour?

Why did the BBC make so much noise about this story that no one but a poltiical geek would bother with?….

Tories’ £100,000 a month Facebook bill

Perhaps this from the BBC’s Ross Hawkins can explain…

“The fact they are outspending the Labour Party many, many times over because of the support from millionaire donors is going to have an impact.

“That’s something the Labour Party can respond to by out-organising the Conservatives.”

That message suits Labour, whose supporters like to emphasise that the Conservatives have more cash.

 

Why did the BBC make so much noise about the King’s Fund claims about government reforms of teh NHS when patient satisfaction is at an almost record high?

Overall public satisfaction with the NHS increased to 65 per cent in 2014 – the second highest level since the British Social Attitudes survey began in 1983. Dissatisfaction with the service fell to an all-time low of 15 per cent.

 

I think you can make a good case that the BBC is providing Labour with an invaluable propaganda service in the run up to the election…or that is certainly the impression you might get from even the most cursory examination of the BBC’s coverage of recent events.

Curious how soon people forget…..lots of noise about the Bond sale for pensioners….

George Osborne: Pensioner bond scheme to be extended

Apparently this amounts to inter-generational theft or some such nonsense as said by people who should know better.  The BBC does little to dispel that notion…indeed it has several times wondered why the youth haven’t been out on the streets protesting about their lot in life.

That old anarchist, Joan Bakewell, from the class of ’68, whom even the BBC thought wanted to bring down the government, is manning the barricades again with this bit of tripe….With his bung to pensioners, George Osborne is stoking intergenerational war

Are we coughing up for her pension every time we hand over our hard earned licence money?….

BBC ploughs £740m into pension deficit

Is that also ‘theft’ then?

Or how about this as the BBC happily quotes Labour spokesmen demanding answers today from Osborne?…..

Brown’s raid on pensions costs Britain £100 billion

And just to reinforce that….

The man who stole your old age: How Gordon Brown secretly imposed a ruinous tax that has wrecked the retirements of millions

Never mind that Brown and his Labour cronies presided over the greatest financial crash this country has probably ever seen….a crash that destroyed the pension industry and ended most final salary schemes forever….people now work longer for less when they come to retire…if they ever will.

And let’s not forget the ultra low interest rates that destroyed saving’s income that so many retired people depend upon….those utlra low interest rates made so in order to recover form the disastrous financial crash that came courtesy of Brown’s ‘Golden Age of Finance’.

And of course when the BBC brought in a fella from the Institute of Economic Affairs to tell us Osborne is behaving disgracefully by ‘bribing’ pensioners the BBC had no one else to put any opposing views. Indeed the BBC presenter was himself on the warpath raising the suggestion that perhaps we should have a maximum voting age to prevent pensioners voting.

No such thoughts that Labour are bribing the electorate with any of their policies…such as two weeks paid paternity leave announced today.

Must be an election coming.

Monday morning arrives and with it the Today programme on BBC Radio 4. The first 30 minutes have been one sustained leftist howl from the State Broadcaster. First up, the BBC hypes up the alleged tax evasions of HSBC, dating back to Labour’s period in power. On comes Margaret Hodge to remind us how evil the “banisters” are. Then we had an item on WHY British business must be made to double the amount of paternity leave for fathers if Labour gets in. Then we had an item begrudging the VICTORY of Tony Abbott in Australia over those who would unseat him. The BBC have never liked Abbott and their coverage makes this clear. Oh and the ONE item the comrades managed to miss was a mass gathering of Muslims at the Cenotaph in London demanding an end to free speech in the UK. I guess the BBC are no longer #jesuischarlie?

Here you go, an on-time new OPEN thread to start the week. All YOU need to do is detail tha oozing bias.

John Pienaar was on the side of the Big Battalions this morning asking the Government’s Business Minister, Matthew Hancock, how he could justify a referendum on Europe when so many Big Business leaders were against it.

Curious irony there…now we must listen to Big Business when it suits the BBC’s pro-Eu agenda…however when Labour want to bring the Big Business ‘predators’ to heel it’s a different matter….they’re the tax dodging devils incarnate.

The pandering to Big Business and the sidelining of a democratic vote on Europe aside there is always one major question that doesn’t get asked.  So Cameron gets his reforms of the European system and the UK stays within the EU fold should the reforms be enough to persuade the voters to play safe and vote to keep the status quo…but then what?……here is Alan Greenspan in a BBC report on the inevitability of a Grexit…

“The problem is that there there is no way that I can conceive of the euro of continuing, unless and until all of the members of eurozone become politically integrated – actually even just fiscally integrated won’t do it.”

Note that well….the Euro, in his opinion, and many other’s, can only continue if it adopts complete fiscal and political integration.

In other words the EU becomes one country, a federation like the US.

The UK could not still remain attached but distant as now not adopting the Euro and so on.  The UK would have to choose…in or out, part of the EU currency, political and taxation regime or not.

The UK would be forced to join the EU and lose its sovereignty completely if it wanted to remain ‘in’ Europe.

The EU can only work as one, integrated union with a central government freely taxing and redistributing those taxes as it sees fit around the EU to countries that are economically stagnant and setting policies to ensure that happens…and that means, more than likely, a permanent drain of resources from the UK and Germany and other successful economies to the laggard nations in the form of welfare subsidies and infrastructure spending…more roads to nowhere and white elephants.

Can the UK stand more money being syphoned off to fund the Grand Project?  It already struggles to fund its own welfare…..the South had to suffer the hijacking of its revenues to fund Labour’s Northern heartlands as Brown and Co tried to buy votes up North.  Imagine how much more income will vanish into the self-serving EU politicians’ pockets as they try to buy votes in Spain or Greece or Lithuania etc etc etc.

Money that should go on the NHS, or housing or welfare or schools will disappear into the EU blackhole, lost in yet more grand projects, Spanish pensions, non-existent Italian vineyards and vast corruption.

So the question the BBC should be asking Cameron and Miliband is what are they going to do when the EU decides to integrate and form one big political and fiscal union with one government, one taxation system, one legal system and one welfare system?

Join or not?

It’s a question the BBC probably won’t ask and Cameron won’t answer, can’t answer, anyway because it makes a mockery of his EU reforms charade….after all what is the point of these reforms if it is inevitable that the EU forms a totally integrated union of which you can’t be an associate member and the UK becomes subsumed into the EU machine and the UK Parliament becomes totally irrelevant?

Such a question would totally change the narrative on Europe and possibly make it more likely that people would opt to get out of Europe when voting in an EU referendum if they thought staying in now would be the slippery slope to a total takeover of the UK by Brussels.

Can’t see the BBC wanting to make too much noise about that.

Listened to 5Live’s film review on Friday(23 mins 40)  and they were talking about ‘American Sniper’, a film set in Iraq about an American sniper killing Jihadis…apparently it is a ‘problematic’ film.

Mark Kermode’s thoughts on the film…technically no doubt good but problematic in that it is very one-sided.

Pretty much sums up the BBC mindset…there is always two sides to every story and no such thing as good/bad, right/wrong…unless of course you are a climate sceptic…..moral relativity is the only principle they abide by….the only conviction being that they should have no convictions.

No doubt Kermode would think that all those films about WWII are somewhat too one-sided for his liking…..The Dam Busters or The Great Escape….or Schindler’s List. Yep, there’s two sides to every story and though the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews and many other unfortunates they must have had a jolly good reason…only fair to give them a hearing eh Mark?  Never mind that ‘American Sniper’ is the personal story of one man and his view of the conflict.  It is not a political film just a film telling a story of one man’s war.  His story not history.

However when a film is political then a more nuanced and rounded approach should be taken and the various arguments aired otherwise the film is nothing more than a propagandist polemic.

And talking of Climate Sceptics and polemical propaganda….the same programme had a pop at the sceptics back in December when reviewing the pro-alarmist film ‘Merchants of Doubt’.

Apparently the sceptics are conjuring up, out of thin air, the appearance on doubt in regard to the science of climate change using snake oil salesman tactics and sleight of hand.  Not sure just how much of the IPCC’s ramblings Mark Kermode has read but judging by his claims on this programme not much.

Kermode tells us that after watching the film he was enraged by the subject and the level of filibustering by the sceptics who are in the pay of big companies with vested interests…..apparently they are all flat earthers.

So no position taking there then by a BBC chappie…all based on his indepth and learned scientific knowlege of the science of climate change..or at least his having read something about it….or not…in reality he’s just a victim of what is patently a very one sided propaganda film by the Green industry….is there no two sides to this story then?

Firstly of course much of the climate scepticism, and the most sucessful, comes from people who have absolutely no backing from any industry, many of them scientists themselves….and all of it based upon study, analysis and critique of the published science…..and a very small part played by this site in exploring the BBC’s failure to report the inconsistencies in the scientific claims about climate and their lead environmental journalist’s own admission that he has been campaigning on the issue for 20 years...’We Think, Therefore It Is’

The BBC’s Roger Harrabin admitted he was a climate change campaigner:

I have spent much of the last two decades of my journalistic life warning about the potential dangers of climate change.

 

Second Kermode fails to mention the backing for the Greens from enormously rich business propagandists, such as Grantham…not to mention governments who pay billions into the climate change campaigner’s fighting fund…and not forgetting the BBC itself which provides invaluable and almost pricelss pro-climate change propaganda for the cause.

Nor does he mention the often violent opposition to any hint of criticism of the Green pathology.

Kermode vividly demonstrates what we suspect is the ingrained BBC attitude towards what it reports….everything is relative and there are no rights and wrongs in issues that the BBC supports…until we come up against a subject that the BBC is institutionally against such as immigration control, criticism of Islam, at least by white, working class people who haven’t checked their privilege, and the aforementioned climate change.

That sort of atttude, where the BBC will only let you voice your opinion if you are deemed to have the correct credentials, and it is the BBC who judges whether you have or not, is starkly illustrated by this exchange that Sue from ‘Is the BBC Biased?‘ had with a TV reviewer from the Sunday Times in 2007……

Rant about right rant

 

In 2007 I  [Sue] wrote to the then TV editor of the Sunday Times to question a headline in that paper’s preview of an upcoming programme. The headline was: “Right Rant.” It was about Richard Littlejohn’s programme on C 4 about antisemitism in the UK.  The War on Britain’s Jews, broadcast in July 2007.

I was surprised that the editor responded promptly, and at length…..

“Hopefully, you have now seen the programme and can understand why our critics dismissed Littlejohn’s programme as an incoherent rant from an extreme right-wing perspective. He had some valuable facts, but was shoehorning his tired old polemic on top of an argument that raised disturbing matters about which every sane person in the country should be alarmed. Should we really blame the left-wingers for the BNP painting swastikas on synagogues?

 Simply put, Littlejohn does not have the credibility or authority to convince in a television programme arguing against violence towards one community when he himself has been guilty of prejudice towards other communities (have you ever read some of the things he has said about the Roma people, for example?). A serious journalist would have been able to put up an argument that was not simple bias riddled with holes. That’s not Littlejohn, though, is it?

 I, too, deplore the rising incidence of attacks on Britain’s Jews, and on any other community, but none of our critics wanted to be accused of siding with Littlejohn. The fact is, in the television section, it is our jobs to rate the programmes as such, not to support or attack their polemics. Littlejohn’s record as a television and radio presenter is pretty atrocious, I think it was obvious for all to see why last night. What might pass for intellectual debate in the pages of the Mail or Sun does not necessarily pass muster over an hour on Channel 4.

  I look forward to a serious film about the alarming growth of intolerance and prejudice in Britain, and I hope it is made by serious and responsible reporters. 

Yours sincerely,

A fascinating reaction from the Times….in black and white the ‘left wing’ visceral hatred of anyone who disagrees with them and the refusal to even register someone like Littlejohn has an argument…..the refusal to admit the Left are guilty of whipping up anti-Semitism and of siding with Islamists….which is more than proved by the evidence…and lots of it.

I thought the film entirely measured and well researched….the main voices in support were actually all left wing, Wilby, Cohen and Mann…and the chief constable of course said some damning things….and apart from the images of orthodox Jews the speaking heads were pretty normal people…’for Jews’!

The Times’ reaction was based upon it being Littlejohn and the nature of those he said were to blame for the anti-semitism….a statement that anti-semitism was said to be endemic in the Muslim community (recently backed up by Medhi Hasan…That ‘dirty little secret‘), the NUJ were slated for supporting the boycott of Israel and the Left were damned for joining forces with at least radical Islamists and at worst terrorists like Hizbollah.

The programme was no more a ‘right wing rant’ than Panorama’s recent investigation into ‘Islam in Britain’ and regardless of Littlejohn’s reputation amongst the chattering classes, who of course all secretly lap up what he says in their Daily Mails which they read assiduously and on the quiet, the programme was a worthy attempt at investigating the issues….dismissing it because of the ‘messenger’ smacks of the usual attempt to ignore those issues…the now famous culture of denial and political correctness that hides the inconvenient truths and pervades organisations like the BBC and others dominated by progressive leftwingers.

Having looked a bit further this might be of interest...Littlejohn in 2006:

He said:

‘None of it is particularly revolutionary. Anyone with half a brain could see that New Labour’s obsession with multi-culturalism, unlimited immigration and ‘human rights’ was destined to end in tears. And that the burgeoning health and safety bureaucracy was doing tremendous damage, not just to businesses, but to our way of life.

Yet we were dismissed, scorned and smeared as heartless, knee-jerk, Neanderthal Nazis. So you might think that after the amazing about-turn of the past week, we have the right to feel vindicated.

You have to understand that even though we were right all along, we were the ‘wrong’ kind of people, therefore our opinions were odious and illegitimate.’

 

‘The wrong kind of people’ reporting, dismissed conveniently as Neanderthal Nazis whose opinions were odious and illegitimate…how right he was…and how very Stalinist those who decried him.

But there’s more of great interest in his article…ala Farage and the Romanians…what did the Labour government say in 2006 about the expected influx of Romanians and Bulgarians?….

This from a BBC report  … they knew, even as they recently maligned Farage for his Romanian comments, that Labour had expressed the same concerns back in 2006….

‘Government departments have been told to draw up emergency plans to deal with pressure on public services from an expected “step change” in immigration levels when Romania and Bulgaria join the EU next year.
The document, entitled Migration from Eastern Europe: Impact on Public Services and Community Cohesion, was written by junior Home Office Minister Joan Ryan and leaked to the Mail on Sunday.
In the leaked report, Ms Ryan argues that many more English teachers will be needed to deal with a big rise in the number of eastern European children unable to speak the language.
Hospital beds are being “blocked” by east European patients because they cannot claim social care and benefits if they leave.
And towns and cities where large numbers of new immigrants have settled are now calling for millions of pounds of extra funding to cope, the report says.
The report, which is marked “restricted” and dated 19 July, came the day after Ms Ryan put out another document saying that 45,000 “undesirable” criminal migrants from Romania and Bulgaria could settle in the UK next year.’

 

 

45,000 ‘undesirables’…wouldn’t want them as neighbours? Racist to say so.

Farage was right then.

Or Labour is racist.

James O’Brien?  He’ll be ramping up the kangaroo court once again and no doubt putting all those Labour politicians in the dock…..and Newsnight will once again embrace him as one of their own.

Don’t hold your breath.