Would have thought this was wrong at any time and is merely the BBC pandering to its own inner fantasies:

BBC are ‘wrong’ and insensitive to broadcast book about Margaret Thatcher’s assassination, Tory MP says

BBC bosses are under fire over plans to broadcast a controversial story imaging the assassination of Margaret Thatcher.

Tory backbencher Nadine Dorries said the former prime minster’s family are still “grieving” from her passing last year and said the Corporation should have “taken stock” of their pain.

It comes amid outrage that BBC Radio 4 has picked Hilary Mantel’s controversial new novel for serialisation in its prestigious Book At Bedtime slot.

The Booker Prize winner’s new book, titled The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, has been criticised for insensitivity over imagining the former Tory leader’s murder so recently after her death.

Laughed long and loud this morning as Labour’s Keith Vaz came onto 5Live (11:40) and congratulated the BBC for its focus on immigration and the foreign national offenders being allowed to slip into the country by the chaos at Border Control as the BBC ‘discovers’ that one in seven people arrested in Britain today is a foreign national….and a listener involved in charity work stated that 75% of rough sleepers in London are foreigners.

The only reason the BBC focuses on it now is that it is embarrassing for the government…the ‘Tory’ government.

Vaz says its important that these foreign offenders aren’t allowed into the country in the first place…if we check and cross check we can run the border control sytem much more effectively.

Of course no link to Labour’s disastrous open door policy and Europe by the BBC that allowed untold numbers of criminals, not to mention foreign nationals sent to gather intelligence, both government and commercial, to enter the UK.

You might have thought that Labour’s part in all this would get a mention especially as last year the very same Keith Vaz said this:

Keith Vaz, the chairman of the influential home affairs committee, said the roots of Britain’s problems with immigration lie in the last government’s failure get to control the borders while issuing ‘jingoistic messages’.

And he ridiculed a speech by Labour’s immigration spokesman Chris Bryant for failing to provide answers to how to deal with the numbers of people moving to Britain.

In an article for the Leicester Mercury, Mr Vaz added: ‘The challenges with our immigration policy will not start on this day; they started a long time ago.

‘Seven years ago a Labour Home Secretary, John Reid, described the UK Border Agency as “not fit for purpose”, yet it limped along for another five years before being abolished.

‘The previous Government oversaw the disastrous contract for E-borders, the method by which we count people in and out, which so far has lost the taxpayer £750 million.’

The BBC does report this shameless piece of deception from Labour without any comment:

“Stronger checks” will be carried out to stop foreign criminals from becoming UK citizens if Labour wins the next election, Yvette Cooper has said.

The shadow home secretary told the BBC it was “shocking” that killers had been given British passports because “the Home Office failed to do basic checks”.

Immigration is one of the major issues in the next election as the same BBC report admits…and very important for Labour:

BBC political correspondent Alan Soady said immigration would be one of the big election issues and Labour was trying to convince voters that they can be trusted to tackle it.

 

So you might be asking why Labour isn’t being put on the rack about their record...as even one of their own MP’s admits is abysmal…not only that but has led to increased danger to the UK on many different levels…criminal, cultural, socially, political and commercial.

The BBC thinks the problem is not the actual immigration but that we don’t talk about it….we know that the BBC believes that people are anti-immigrant because they are uneducated and ill-informed not because they have been able to formulate some reasoned and coherent thoughts on the matter themselves.  We need to debate this more…but only on the BBC’s terms…once you have had the chance to listen to and absorb the BBC’s narrative you will then understand the benefits of immigration and that your previous ‘thoughts’ on the matter were misinformed and prejudiced.

Here they illustrate that thinking….

Defining the problem – Bigotgate

His {Brown’s} private comments afterwards suggested that he thought to even raise the subject made someone a “bigot”. He apologised but the damage was done.

Have things changed under Ed Miliband?

The easiest way to sum it is up is from this speech a couple of years ago where he said “to put it simply I think we became too disconnected from the concerns of working people”. He sought to define himself against the low point of the Brown years, saying that worrying about immigration did not make people bigots.

So the problem with Labour wasn’t their actual immigration policy but that they decided that anyone who criticised it was a bigot.  Now apparently Labour has agreed we can talk about immigration without being called racists….as long as you support their policies on it.

In the Sunday Times (paywalled)  today John Humphrys talks in an interview with Camilla Long about this….

The Labour government underestimated by a factor of 10 the number of people who were going to move from Poland,” a vast uptick in numbers that, among other changes in population, was not sufficiently “interrogated” by the corporation. “We were too institutionally nervous of saying, isn’t immigration getting a little bit out of hand? And can we be critical of multiculturalism,” he says.
“We didn’t interrogate immigration rigorously enough. We failed to look at what our job was.”

[The BBC] was “arrogant”, he says, employing people who “thought they knew what was best for the country. It was and still is relentlessly middle-class. Unfortunately. There was a predominant voice and that was the liberal Oxbridge male.” Exactly the sort of people who would fail to interrogate immigration, he says.

The BBC is still exactly the same…it professses to have changed and yet it hasn’t, it still fills the airwaves with pro-immigration propaganda.

On the 30th of November Frank Field stated that we would need a city the size of Birmingham every 30 months to be built to deal with the mass immigration we are suffering now….from the Daily Mail:

We’re adding a migrant city the size of Birmingham every 30 months reveals MP who co-chairs migration group

Almost immediately the BBC set up a counter argument to try and undermine the concerns….the Today programme decided to look at the issues…(07:40)

Attempts to measure whether immigration is on balance good or bad for the country are usually hijacked by the different political interests in the debate.

All, yes all four, ‘Establishment’  interviewees were pro-immigration.  Not a single ‘official’ critic was allowed onto the programme.

The BBC field reporter, Matthew Price,  summed it up with the new pro-immigration line of defence…..whilst most studies show that immigrants bring little benefit, if any to the country, Price decided to state that the problem is that the benefits they do bring are being hijacked by national government and resources are being removed from the area they are created in….the problems are created by government not immigrants.

So the BBC presents this as a problem created by….government cuts to local services.  The number of immigrants isn’t the problem, it’s the ‘fact’ that government doesn’t cough up enough money to house, feed, school and treat them on the NHS.

Three days later the BBC finaly gets round to talking to Frank Field……where the Today programme wants to talk about Britishness. (07:33)

Britain is becoming less and less British….BBC reporter Matthew Price dismisses people’s concerns and local experience…he tells us ‘statistics show’ nothing to worry about….but the importance of this debate, as stated above, is shown when people say they will never vote Labour again due to immigration.  Important then for the BBC to prove the benefits of immigration….and by default Labour’s open door policy.

Frank Field tells us that the BBC is part of the discussion and implies that it needs to provide accurate and impartial information about the debate, on immigration and the economy…good luck with that…..He says that no MP knows how to cut the deficit, and pressures on state services from immigration needs budgetting for and yet we don’t know how many will come here….he asks how can we fund a city the size of Birmingham every 30 months when budgets are so constrained?

Frank Field is also concerned about the watering down of Britishness saying we’ve been careless of our national identity and says we’ve never been brave enough to make immigrants conform to our values.

The BBC when criticised about its coverage of immigration will point to interviews with Frank Field and say that they prove the BBC is balanced in its reporting.  However such interviews are mere drops in the ocean compared to the massive tidal wave of pro-immigration material the BBC broadcasts…not all of it obvious but subtly inserted into programmes  ostensibly about other subjects but designed to educate ‘us’ about the wonders of the ‘immigrant’.

Here Muslim immigrant, Mona Siddiqui, and favourite of the BBC,  speaks about Islam and immigration. (from 14:20)

Siddiqui has written a book about Islam and the West ‘through the prism of her experience as both a Muslim and a modern woman’ and tells us her audience is not the Muslims really….presumably she must be trying to educate us Kufrs about the benefits of Islam.

She tells us most people see Islam solely though the prism of the veil, terrorism or extremism but most Muslims look at Islam through everyday events…living their lives by it….trouble is many of them don’t live the ‘full Islam’…which is where the fundamentlist ‘extremists’ come in who do want to live a life fully informed by the Koran.

She says radicalisation is not a generational thing…so does that mean it comes from a basic ethos then, such as a certain ideology, an is not merely young Muslims engaging in some adolescent rebellion?

She claims she does not know why it happens.

The BBC interviewer and chief fan it seems, Sarah Brett, asks….  Is it because people don’t understand Islam that they are frightened by it?

[Remember this from David Goodhart….Some claim that if people understood Islam more everything would be fine, they would be more tolerant, I think quite the contrary….the more they understand about it the more alien they would find it…authoritarian, collectivist, patriarchal, misogynist…..all sorts of things that Britain might have been 100 years ago but isn’t now.]

Siddiqui says that religion of all types struggle in the West..there’s no definition of religion…people do not understand religion….no distinction between private and public practise….People want to live their religion to the full not just in the privacy of their homes.

Hmmm..no, the problem is that people all too readily understand religion and don’t like it……and the fact that Muslims want to live their religion to the full is a problem…hence the Trojan Horse scandal.

Brett makes the usual uninformed claim that Christianity is characterised by violence…crusades and warrior popes….but that isn’t ‘Christianity’…nowhere in the New Testament, Christianity, does it tell you to go out and smite your enemies and conquer their lands as it does in the Koran.

Brett goes on….. there have been significant holy wars in the history of mankind….You could argue Islam isn’t the issue, religion is.

Siddiqui demurs…slightly, saying…here Islam is the issue….but not the religion of Islam, more the political, social and cultural strands behind it which can create a them and us conversation and attitude amongst Muslims.

Brett suggests that Muslim women are not radicalised by Islam…they are just misled by men

MS agrees with that…they like the excitement and glamour.

Brett gets to the meat of the intended lesson for today asking…How damaging is the narrative of ISIS and AQ being linked to mainstream Islam by media or a misguided public perception?

Siddiqui says….yes they are Muslims in ISIS but asks what are the causes of radicalisation?…nothing to do with religion..Islam is a short cut for the media to cast blame which disregards the geopolitical and cultural aspects of events…its the West’s fault then?

Brett then links immigration and Islam and Siddiqui says there is an atmosphere created by the   politics of reaction and suspicion.

She tells us we can’t go back to some golden age of Britishness….native Britons will have to adapt to immigrants…not the other way round.

Brett then suggests we shouldn’t talk about immigration in the interests of community cohesion with only 6 months to an election and the topic is going to be immigration….she asks….how damaging is it to people who already feel marginalised, especially muslims, by all the talk of  Muslims being seperate and Brits wanting to keep people out who aren’t originally from here?

Siddiqui calims she isn’t an immigrant…but, yes, she is..she came here aged 5.

She tells us all this talk about immigration creates a fundamental problem with the reinvigoration of a different kind of them and us attitude…too much divisive language.

We must cater for those who come here and we must have inclusive language…it is, apparently, quite dangerous at the moment.

But….she doesn’t want unlimited immigration….but then again….yes let’s have unlimited immigration on the quiet.

She says there is a deepseated fear of too many people and Brits just want to keep their own culture and society….it’s just not on you know!  You’ve got to progress and adapt.

She says multiculturalism was an experiment….but not one that has failed just because of a few bombs….it’s a success really.

Notably she states that when growing up the converstaions you have, the upbringing you have, stay with you for ever….and shapes you into the adult you will be.  All very relevant when Muslim children are culturally isolated and brought up to read and regard the Koran as the literal word of God.

How will such people develop, as Siddiqui says, a sense of loyalty, purpose and contribution to wider society?

She tells us we are too lost in political narrative of identity…not Muslims but government and all those who oppose immigration….but would she then abandon her Muslim faith…no…as she showed above when she stated that Muslims want to live their religion to the full and not compromise it.

There is the real BBC in action….trying to damp down any criticism and anger about Islam and the actions of Muslims, as well as promoting immigration and the idea that any criticism of it is from a group of Little Englanders wanting to recreate some golden age instead of welcoming and adapting their lives, society and culture to suit the immigrants…..ala foreign policy…now to be run by a few radical Muslims who threaten to bomb us if we don’t do as they say.

John Simpson, no doubt grateful to be handed an extended employment contract with the Beeb, does his usual fawning pro-BBC, ‘it’s not biased’, shameless promotion:

John Simpson: “The BBC faces an existential crisis”

It has always been an article of faith among a certain type of Conservative politician and in the right-wing press that the BBC is instinctively left-wing. It started as early as 1926, when the BBC was only four years old, and Winston Churchill tried and failed to make the BBC toe the government line in its reporting of the General Strike. Interestingly, the counter-view, that the BBC is always instinctively pro-Conservative, began at the same time and is held no less strongly. That’s what happens if you’re balanced.

I do believe that we are now facing a genuine existential threat. And knee-jerk, ill-thought-through decisions could do us and Britain’s national life as a whole irreparable damage.

 

Just the usual self-serving, uncritical, dismissive of criticism, type of response we have come to expect from those reliant on the BBC shilling.

“Well, having worked for BBC news for 40 years, I’m immensely proud of its rock-solid culture of honest, balanced truth-telling.

 

LOL

The BBC’s flirtation with radical politics and ideologies continues…whilst still promoting radical Islam as an antidote to supposed Western hegemony the BBC also continues its experiment in promoting extremist left wing politics, having backed Occupy, student riots and recruited Giles Fraser to their ranks, as they put a great deal of time and effort into brand Brand.

It looks like the BBC are trying to create and shape him into a political figurehead for all the Marxist malcontents in Britain spouting all that good stuff about bankers, capitalism and overturning democracy and the social order so often heard on the BBC.

They brought him onto Question Time last night where he got a good drubbing from the audience…but you’d hardly know that from this piece of puffery from the BBC….

Russell Brand: Can an outsider challenge the status quo?

 

Rather disingenuously, and as the last line in the article, the BBC only admits to this:

Many in the audience seemed dissatisfied with the response but it seems unlikely the flamboyant firebrand will ever put that claim to the test.

Try a different perspective:

Russell Brand Was Terrified on Last Night’s Question Time

Brand left the studio having lost much of the audience, sunken into his chair, almost reclusive compared to his usually extrovert eccentricities.

What happened? Put simply, Russell Brand was frit. Worse than that, he looked terrified. After Brand strayed from his notes – which at times he clung onto for dear life – and accused Farage of attacking the disabled, the microphone came to a gentleman in the audience wielding a walking stick.

He demolished Brand’s ill-judged smear and called his bluff: if he is the saviour of the masses, why doesn’t he have the nerve to stand for parliament? Brand stuttered. This was the question he feared most.

“Because I’m afraid I would become one of them,” he whispered, barely convincing himself. Howls of derision from the room. They all knew the truth, audience, panel and Brand together.

For all his bravado, this is a man scared of having to face the scrutiny of the people at the ballot box, scared that his hackneyed, teenage ideology will be resoundingly, humiliatingly rejected by the people he claims to represent.

 

 

The BBC is having a ball with the Senate committee’s report on interrogation……all too often forgetting to tell us that it is a partisan report produced by the Democratic party…

A scathing Senate report two days earlier said “brutal” methods like waterboarding were ineffective.

While he [John Brennan] was speaking, Senator Dianne Feinstein, who heads the committee that produced the report, was rejecting his arguments on Twitter.

 

 

…..and it was an investigation that did not bother to interview anyone from the CIA itself.

Who did the BBC get in to comment?  James Rubin, a Clinton era democratic politician, a well known Islamist, Moazzam Begg, who was asked for ‘his thoughts’ on the report, and other democrats.  Haven’t heard a single ‘off message’ voice supporting the CIA on the BBC….I’m sure there are one or two somewhere.

The BBC are playing fast and loose with facts…here failing to mention why Bush said terrorists shouldn’t be considered parties to the Geneva Convention…

September 2001: After the 9/11 attacks, President George Bush authorises the capture, detention and interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects.

February 2002: President Bush signs an executive order which says the Geneva Conventions – which prohibit mutilation, cruel treatment and torture – do not apply to al-Qaeda or Taliban suspects.

 

The reason the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply to terrorists is  because it says it doesn’t….

Convention (III) relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. Geneva, 12 August 1949.

A combatant, even one in a militia, can be considered a prisoner of war and be treated in accord with the Geneva Convention but only if some conditions are met…the combatants…

….having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance;

…. that of carrying arms openly;

…..that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.

….And in particular that they treat nationals of the Occupying Power who may have fallen into their hands, according to the provisions of the present Convention.

 

None of those apply to terrorists or the Taliban.

However…..The BBC’s Jon Sopel bucks the trend and sounds a sceptical note about the Senate committee report..not something you would have got from Mark Mardell:

A whiff of hypocrisy about CIA report?

The really big picture is legacy. In 50 years’ time when the history books are written and children are sitting at their desks in Duluth, Des Moines or Detroit, and turning to the chapter marked “9/11”, what are they going to read? Here are two versions.

On 11 September 2001, the United States came under attack from al-Qaeda terrorists, claiming the lives of 3,000 people when planes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania – a war on terror was declared, and those responsible were hunted down and detained, and there were no further attacks on US soil.

Or:

On 11 September 2001, the United States came under attack from al-Qaeda terrorists, claiming the lives of 3,000 people when planes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania – a war on terror was declared, but the torture tactics used to hunt down and detain those responsible brought condemnation and America lost its moral authority in the world.

Remember Winston Churchill’s adage that “history is written by the victors”? This is a battle between Bush-era officials and the Obama administration over which narrative of these events should prevail.

A battle between most Democrats, who think that there are NO circumstances EVER when coercive interrogation techniques can be condoned; and most Republicans who say America was under attack, there was intelligence that there could be a second and third wave of attacks and we did whatever we could to prevent that.

But is there just a small whiff of hypocrisy here? What if it had been a Democrat in the White House when America came under attack on that dreadful September day. Would the response have been that different?

I’m sure there were sadists, oddballs and bad people out there. But weren’t the overwhelming majority of CIA operatives at that time just driven by one thing – a patriotic duty to keep America safe, by whatever means?

And this is where it gets uncomfortable. Of course I can sit here at my keyboard and pronounce that torture can never be justified. It is an absolute. I do totally believe that. But what if a child of mine had been kidnapped, and the police arrest the kidnapper, but say to me, “Well we’ve got the guy who took your kid, but despite us asking him really politely where he’s being kept, he’s not telling us… However there are these things called enhanced interrogation techniques – we could give them a go.” Would I say no? I’m really not sure.

 

Now that’s just something that you would never expect from the BBC….an entirely nuanced piece that suggests, in the circumstances, use of harsh interrogation methods might be justified.

Then again there’s the more usual fare we expect from the BBC in the shape of Frank Gardner’s highly partisan and wilfully blind interpretation of what is effective interrogation techniques….

Why interrogators prefer the soft approach

“At no time did the CIA’s coercive interrogation techniques lead to the collection of imminent threat intelligence, such as the hypothetical ticking time bomb,” says the report.

In other words, all that mistreatment, all those hours of waterboarding, of dragging people hooded and shackled, up and down corridors, depriving them of sleep for days on end and subjecting them to white noise, did not actually yield any real information that stopped a terrorist attack.

Here quoting expert British interrogators…..telling us torture doesn’t work…and of course they never use it do they?…because it doesn’t work, does it!….and no hint of gloating and professional rivalry from the Brits…remember these were the ‘experts’ at counter-insurgency warfare…who got their arses kicked whilst the Yanks steamrollered through and wiped out Al Qaeda in Iraq.

So was there a better way for the US government to acquire this information without risking breaking international law and committing a moral outrage?

Yes there was. Talk to almost any trained British army interrogator and they will tell you that in the long run it is the “logical friendly approach” that yields the best results.

An experienced British army interrogator, who questioned high-value Iraqi POWs, says when a detainee is seized, often as a result of a violent struggle or firefight, there is the inevitable shock of capture and the fear of what is going to happen to them.

Often they imagine the worst – remember the Royal Navy sailor who broke down in tears when he and his crew were captured in the Gulf by an Iranian patrol boat and briefly held in 2007.

 

That sailor was not a high value prisoner…just a ‘callow youth’ way out of his depth.  Most of the prisoners, like him, that would react to the soft approach and the slightest pressure are the humblest of recruits probably just there for the money and would know little information of any value.

Curious Gardner doesn’t quote ‘Andy Mcnab’ who tells us that everyone cracks in the end under intense interrogation…just a question of when and trying to hold out long enough to make any information you do have out of date and useless.

Gardner quotes this….

“They are hungry for affection,” says the former interrogator about prisoners he questioned. “Eventually, they will be willing to co-operate in exchange for safety and comfort.”

 

Gardner thinks such a statement means the interrogator is saying harsh interrogation doesn’t work….but he isn’t really saying that…..the subtext to that comment is that the prisoners are made to feel ‘unsafe and uncomfortable’...and only cooperate when to do so would bring such suffering to an end…in other words…..don’t be nice to them.  Gardner reads into things what he wants to see…enhanced interrogation, or torture, doesn’t work when the subtle words of the interrogator suggests it does.

Perhaps the BBC should retrain its journalists so that they don’t have the wool pulled over their eyes…what does he expect the ‘expert’ interrogator to say…‘Yes we torture prisoners’?

Low level, non ideological recruits may well be more susceptible to less rigorous approaches, but then they know very little of value…… the hardcore  jihadists are far more radical and determined…and not likely to compromise themselves for a cup of coffee, a cigarette and few kind words….or indeed the suggestion that their cause is hopeless.

The only thing that would work to any degree at all is those good old ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, locking them up out of troubles way or removing them permanently from the battlefield once and for all.

They have confidence that with much of Western media on their side and numerous human rigths organisations and pan handling lawyers advocating on their behalf not much will happen to them…..which is why the CIA used techniques that were intended to break that confidence and make them think that they were beyond help, no Seventh Cavalry coming to the rescue…..to break their defiance and mental resilience.

And as a contrast to Gardner’s one sided view there’s this from the Mail:

Did torture stop UK terror attack? Al-Qaeda terrorist captured in London after CIA spies interrogated Guantanamo Bay detainee

Al Qaeda’s top British terrorist was captured after CIA spies tortured former Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg, it was claimed today.

Crucial information provided by Mr Begg while he was being held helped identify ‘dirty bomber’ Dhiren Barot who was plotting terror attacks on London, according to the long-awaited publication of a report into CIA torture programmes in the wake of 9/11.

The report claims that drawings by Mr Begg – who claims to have been beaten and deprived of sleep in Guantanamo Bay – helped lead British security services to Barot, who had gone to ground in London.

Begg, a confirmed Islamist extremist who admitted to training in terrorist camps, naturally denies he grassed on his fellow Islamists….

Mr Begg has also reacted furiously to the claim. In a letter to The Independent last night, lawyers for Mr Begg rejected any suggestion that he ‘volunteered or co-operated in the provision of information to any intelligence service’.

They added: ‘Insofar as he was tortured and under extreme and unlawful continuing duress for three-and-a-half years in Bagram and Guantanamo he, as every other individual subject to such treatment, cannot be regarded in any proper sense of the words to have ‘given or provided information’ voluntarily.’

‘……cannot be regarded in any proper sense of the words to have ‘given or provided information’ voluntarily.’

Yep….that’s the point….he was made to talk…not that he did of course!

This is a pretty decent exposure of BBC bias! Give it a read. It concerns the Shrien Dewani case.

Here you go, a new Open Thread for you to complete. The BBC has been quite hysterical in recent days, wallowing in the Senate Democrat attack on the CIA, trying to suggest that Miliband’s woeful speech on the economy could represent a leap forward for the glorious leader in waiting…..and the rest. The floor is yours.

I hadn’t been able to check the background to the BBC’s hyperbolic reports on the NHS this morning…every news bulletin I heard announced that the NHS had practically been privatised….

A third of NHS contracts awarded to private firms – report

The only clue (other than a lot of past experience) that the BBC might be misleading us was hearing Nick Clegg on PMQs responding to Labour’s claim, as above from the BBC, that 1/3 of NHS contracts had gone to private companies.

Clegg told us that a mere 6% of NHS spending had gone to private companies…a figure not dissimilar to Labour’s 5%.

The BBC’s web report confirms this…

The government says the data is misleading.

It’s unclear how much the contracts were worth because the CCGS would not disclose this information citing commercial sensitivities.

A Department of Health spokesperson said: “Official NHS accounts show that use of the private sector amounts to only six pence in every pound the NHS spends, slowing the rate of increase to just one penny since May 2010.

 

Which makes you wonder how the ‘hyperbolic’ and highly political headline was chosen.  The ‘privatisation’ of the NHS is one of Labour’s favourite narratives and one they aim to use to buttress their supposed position as ‘defenders of the NHS’….which makes the choice of headline by the BBC hugely suspect as it is so highly political.

I guess ‘6% of NHS spending has gone to private companies’ is just too lacking in drama and fails to paint a picture of Tory rampant capitalism destroying a national treasure….as so eloquently and ridiculously stated by Labour…

“These figures show what is at stake at the coming election. David Cameron’s Government is stealthily hiving off NHS services without the permission of the public.”

 

 

The BBC’s Director of BBC News and Current Affairs, James Harding, has launched a counter-blast to Conservative complaints of BBC bias. Harding’s response shows how quickly new recruits to the BBC absorb the dominant cultural and political orthodoxy of the organisation and so rapidly adopt the unquestioning obedience to the hand that feeds them.

Rather than admit what was a clear-cut case of bias and intemperate language by a BBC reporter Harding sets out to trivialise and sidestep the seriousness of the complaint.

He makes his case in the Telegraph starting off with this….

 Apparently the “Tories are at war with the BBC”. Rows between the BBC and the Government of the day are nothing new. They go back decades to the very birth of the BBC. And few would argue that a cozy relationship between the BBC and government – or indeed any news organisation – would be a good thing. Scrutiny and accountability can sometimes be a bumpy ride.

Immediately you can see he has no intention of genuinely dealing with the complaint instead dismissing it as ‘nothing new’, merely part of an age old game played by politicians….then trying to imply that taking the complaint seriously would be bowing to political pressure compromising BBC independence and integrity.

He goes on to say…

The economy is one of the key issues at the heart of the election. The BBC has played a leading role in covering the financial crisis and the return to economic growth. We have made huge efforts to give balanced coverage and reflect all sides of the argument from the fall in unemployment and the rise in private sector jobs, to the challenges caused by persistently downward pressure on wages and the resulting lower-than-expected tax receipts.

The economy is indeed one of, if not the most important, issues in the coming election which is why the BBC has a duty to report impartially with all the facts…something it has patently failed to do.

He tells us the BBC has played a leading role in reporting the economy in a balanced manner…is that true? No.

The BBC, as reported so often on this site, pushed Labour’s Plan B relentlessly, it pushed ‘Keynesian’ economics, it pushed the Occupy movement, it recruited Occupy acolytes like Giles Fraser. The BBC consistently reported we had a double dip recession, its journalists still do, despite the fact we had no double dip….the BBC reported with an all too evident eagerness that we were heading for a triple dip recession…the fallacy of that is all too obvious.

As for reporting the ‘the challenges caused by the persistent downward pressure on wages’ they certainly did report on that subject…but no-where near the truth….you will be hard pressed now to get a BBC journalist to link immigration to low wages and the subsequent fall in tax revenue and the increase in welfare payments.

The BBC repeatedly told us there was a puzzle as to why employment was increasing when productivity wasn’t increasing…but that fails to understand that wages are a part of productivity…..if wages fall and output stays the same then productivity, per pound not per worker, has gone up.

The BBC never bothered to knock on a factory door and ask why they were employing more people preferring instead to spin a tale of an economic mystery that apparently gave a lie to the face value facts of an improving economy. Let’s face it no employer would employ someone unless they had a reason to…they aren’t charities…and yet the BBC persistently insisted they were doing so, flying in the face of economic wisdom.

Harding defends the BBC by saying….

 In fact, it is not the BBC that pointed out that reductions in public spending proposed by the Chancellor on Wednesday amounted to a return to state spending on citizens last seen in the 1930s.

Indeed he is right…except the OBR referred to 1938 specifically not the ‘1930’s’ and definitely not the Depression era early 1930’s that the BBC decided to use as its comparison claiming this was the OBR’s reference…a blatant attempt to encourage a view that the Tories were going to lead us into an era where poverty and misery would be ‘stalking the land’, to coin a phrase.

He tells us that…

Through the course of the past week, we reported the run up to the Autumn statement as the Government made a series of announcements: a £2bn commitment to the NHS on Sunday, a package of infrastructure investments on Monday, a flood defences plan on Tuesday and the Autumn Statement on Wednesday.

Trouble is the plans were pretty much dismissed by the BBC as electioneering hype by the Tories and that once the election was over would be quietly shelved.

Here we get to the heart of the matter….

Just after 6am on Thursday morning, Norman Smith, the BBC’s Assistant Political Editor, was pointing out that while many headlines were around the changes to Stamp Duty – the big new news of the Autumn Statement – the issue that would dominate in the months ahead was the OBR’s prediction that Britain could face a return to 1930s public spending per capita. And if some people thought his reference to George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier was a tad strong, his editorial judgment was exactly right: spending cuts to reduce the deficit will be a central argument of the election. It’s clear it will be an issue irrespective of whichever party wins.

Note Harding makes no mention of Smith’s toxic reference to the economic outlook as ‘utterly terrible’ and dismisses his other comparison of the economy to an era of slump and depression, starvation, joblessness and misery.

He then helpfully and unintentionally spells out why the BBC’s biased reporting should not go unchallenged saying ‘spending cuts to reduce the deficit will be a central argument of the election.’…unwittingly admitting that by reporting in a biased manner Smith is misreporting one of the most important issues of the election.

And yet the BBC’s head of news’ trite, self-serving response to complaints of bias is to say ‘Well, look how clever my journalist is, he’s spotted that the deficit might play an important role in the election. He may well have spun a tale of doom and gloom that favours the Labour narrative but any Tory complaints are just the usual unfair criticisms we expect from politicians.’

This is a typical BBC response to criticism, brush it under the carpet, dismiss it paradoxically as other people’s bias and not the BBC’s, and to proclaim the BBC’s integrity and genius.

One day the Tories will have the guts to disembowel the BBC and bring it to heel. Until they do every election will be a battle not just against other parties’ political machines but also against the BBC’s hugely powerful and influential propaganda machine.

Remember this recent headline from the BBC?

‘Colossal’ spending cuts to come, warns IFS

When Osborne made his Autumn Statement the BBC went into overdrive to undermine any perceived good news. We know of its blatant comparison of the 1930’s depression to what they predict will be the outcome of his policies but they also hyped the IFS’s ‘revelation’ of those ‘colossal spending cuts’ after the election.

But hang on…isn’t that very old news? Haven’t we known for a long time that the majority of the cuts would come after the 2015 election? So why the hype from the BBC?

This was the New Statesman in 2013:

Austerity after 2015: why the worst is yet to come

This was the BBC itself in March 2013, reporting the IFS’ words….which have a familiar ring to them:

Budget 2013: ‘Cuts deferred’ until after elections

Or this from Politics.co.uk in 2012:

Never-ending austerity? More cuts to come after 2015

Nothing new there then…so why make such a song and dance about these cuts now in the run up to the election as if they are something new and terrible to be inflicted upon us completely unuspecting victims?

The IFS itself seems a bit confused as to what caused the slow reduction in the deficit….this is their analysis:

It is important to understand why the deficit hasn’t fallen. It is emphatically not because the government has failed to impose the intended spending cuts. It is because the economy performed so poorly in the first half of the parliament, hitting revenues very hard.

Oh right….poorly performing economy at the beginning of the Parliament…or is it?  Here is the other explanation…from the IFS in the same analysis by Paul Johnson:

The relatively modest fall over this parliament is largely explained by increased spending on social security, especially pensions.

 

So is it a poorly performing economy or welfare spending caused by low wages, caused by immigration, and pension raises that kept the borrowing figures up?

You might look at Robert Peston’s honest appraisal of our economic situation…..note in particular these words which have long since been forgotten… ‘The clean up will take years. And there is no quick fix…. What became clear in 2008 is that we will have to find a way of paying much of that debt back.

 That will take at least a decade.’

A decade…so by 2018…..as per the latest budget statement.

It is a very enlightening and honest look at the problem and consequences of debt, government spending and how it is funded….unfortunately it is an analysis that the BBC has always ignored, presumably as its diagnosis and prescription are a direct challenge to the BBC’s favoured narrative of high government spending on public services, welfare and infrastructure projects regardless of where the money comes from.

Here are Peston’s thoughts from his book ‘How do we fix this mess?’…..

How do we fix this mess? I don’t know. But don’t stop reading now. Perhaps if we have a clearer understanding of what went wrong, we’ll have a better idea of what needs to be done.

We will be right in the middle of the jungle, observing how bankers, regulators, politicians – and, oh yes, most of us – were by turns greedy, gullible lazy and short-sighted, and how we wilfully refused to see how our improving living standards were not being earned in a sustainable way.

We failed to rise to the challenge of globalisation.

We did not work harder and smarter.

Instead we borrowed.

And now as a nation, we have to pay back much of the debt, which inevitably makes us feel poorer, and will continue to do so for years to come.

The clean up will take years. And there is no quick fix.

We have allowed others, our governments and the so-called authorities, to take us from boom to bust.

I confess, during much of the journey, I had little idea we had taken a wrong turning….but as we headed for the swamp I succeeded in spotting the looming disaster and shouted out a warning: I was largely ignored and was even asked to shut up.

I am not going to pretend there is a road to Shangri-La, where we will suddenly find ourselves becoming richer and richer again.

We tried that road in the late 1990’s and early years of this century, and it was the road to ruin.

Boom and bust will be with us forever.

It was our foolish conviction that the smooth road to sunny uplands would go on forever which got us into such trouble.

The Future’s Overdrawn

Whether we own up to it or not, we can’t go on forever living on China’s credit.

What became clear in 2008 is that we will have to find a way of paying much of that debt back.

That will take at least a decade.

And when we repay debt, we’re spending less. Which means economic activity slows down, growth grinds to a halt.

It is reasonable to assume that growth will be as little as 1% in the coming 10 years….which wouldn’t look so bad after a contraction of 6.3% in output during the 2008-09 recession.

Cuts in public spending, including in benefits and tax credits, were almost certainly inevitable and have indeed followed.

Since 2008, the UK’s aggregate debt has been shuffled, not repaid.

The government kept spending to prevent recession turning into an extreme slump while tax revenues were shrinking.

When essential public services start to be financed through borrowing rather than tax, it is immensely difficult to cut the borrowing.