The BBC are very, very selective in reporting critical comments about Party leaders.

Today they have relentlessly been ‘reporting’ the words of Sir Richard Shirreff about Cameron….

Downing Street has rejected claims by a former senior army officer that the UK has become “irrelevant” in attempts to resolve the conflict in Ukraine.

Sir Richard Shirreff, until last year a top Nato commander in Europe, suggested the UK was a “bit player” in Europe’s “most serious crisis” for 50 years.

 

Curious that when Miliband is criticised in just as dramatic tones by a major business leader the BBC didn’t bother reporting that at all on the radio, I heard not a word…and buried what they couldn’t justifiably ignore in another completely different report…..

General election 2015: Labour promises ‘no PM pictures’

 

The Telegraph trumpets the story though…

Boots boss: Ed Miliband would be a ‘catastrophe’ for Britain

A Labour government under Ed Miliband would be a “catastrophe” for Britain, the head of one of the UK’s biggest businesses warns.

In a significant blow to Labour’s general election campaign, Stefano Pessina, the boss of Boots, says Mr Miliband’s plan for power is “not helpful for business, not helpful for the country and in the end it probably won’t be helpful for them”.

Under Mr Miliband’s leadership, Labour has pledged a series of reforms that have prompted accusations that it is “anti-business”. The party has campaigned against high levels of executive pay, described capitalists as “predatory”, announced plans to restore the 50p top rate of income tax, pledged a “mansion tax” on homes worth more than £2 million and promised to freeze energy companies’ prices for 20 months.

In an interview with The Telegraph, Mr Pessina said: “If they acted as they speak, it would be a catastrophe.”

 

 

Andy Burnham…the new Messiah

• 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.

You’d never guess would you if you listened to the BBC…the NHS is a disaster according to them…and remember this is the BBC that failed to report that the NHS was voted the best in the world for its service….

Did you hear of this on the BBC last June?… I must have missed the enormous fanfare announcing the good news:

NHS pushes UK’s healthcare to top of the league table out of 11 western countries, with US coming last

You’d never know that though if you only listened to the BBC……and A&E is a disaster as well…today they are harping on about missed targets and have their ‘tracker’ back on the frontpage and yet….

For accident and emergency (A&E) services, satisfaction increased from 53 to 58 per cent between 2013 and 2014, after fluctuating in previous years.

But what does the BBC prefer to highlight?……

The King’s Fund has lobbed a high explosive grenade into the path of the Tory election parade….and the BBC has been uncritically reporting their conclusions all day…

NHS reorganisation was disastrous, says King’s Fund

Radical changes to the way the NHS in England is organised have been “disastrous” and “distracted” from patient care, leading analysts say.

The evaluation by the King’s Fund think tank says the coalition government’s changes had wasted three years, failed patients, caused financial distress and left a strategic vacuum.

Labour has called for a personal apology from David Cameron.

But Labour itself is accused of “crying wolf” over privatisation.

 

 

During the day I heard only one mention of a response from the Government on this,  the BBC preferring to highlight the extremely damaging comments from the King’s Fund instead….without any analysis or critique of the claims.

You have to wonder at the timing and tone of the King’s Fund claims…..seemingly carefully timed to do as much damage as possible without being so close to the election to seem ‘political’…however the King’s Fund admits it seeks to ‘inform the debate’….

Our assessment of performance over the period since 2010 – published next month – will set out in detail what the balance sheet looks like to help inform debate on the public service that matters most to the public.

They will be releasing more, probably ‘inflammatory’ conclusions, in March now that they have opened that debate….an election in May…go figure.

What else has Ham been saying recently?…from the Guardian last week…

Chris Ham, chief executive of the King’s Fund: “Andy Burnham has set out an ambitious and wide-ranging vision for the NHS and social care. It throws down the gauntlet to the other parties to set out their plans ahead of the general election. Burnham is right to put integrated care at the heart of this vision. This echoes the prescription for a single budget and single commissioner for health and social care set out by the Barker commission. His emphasis on mental health was also very welcome.

What did Ham say in 2013?

Responding to the Shadow Secretary of State’s speech launching the Labour Party’s health and care policy review, Chris Ham, Chief Executive of The King’s Fund, said:

‘Andy Burnham’s diagnosis of why the NHS and social care needs to change is the right one. The demands of an ageing population, changing burden of disease and rising patient expectations mean that fundamental change is needed.

‘His prescription for change is ambitious and his vision of delivering integrated care, co-ordinated around the needs of the individual, will be widely welcomed.

 

I’m guessing he is quite along term fan of Burnham and Labour…but then Ham was an advisor to Labour on NHS reform from 2000 to 2004 when he was seconded to the Department of Health, where he was Director of the Strategy Unit, working with ministers on NHS reform.

In 2006 the FT tells us that NHS productivity under Labour……

‘…has fallen by between 4 and 8 per cent in every year between 1997 and 2003.’

 

The article leads with this statement from Ham….

The Treasury was right to focus on National Health Service productivity and on big variations in the cost of treatment, length of stay, and how intensively hospital resources were used, Chris Ham, professor of health services management at Birmingham University, said yesterday……there is a need “to drive higher productivity and efficiency through the system”.

 

 

So Labour may have been struggling but they were on course and doing good work….Good that Ham thinks productivity is so important…as apparently it has improved under the Coalition..

….productivity has increased at a faster rate than in recent years.

Let’s see what the BBC could have hghlighted from the King’s Fund….

• 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.
• GP services remain the most popular NHS service in terms of satisfaction, with 71 per cent satisfied in 2014.
• Outpatient services experienced an all-time high in satisfaction levels of 69 per cent in 2014, almost rivalling general practice as the most popular NHS service.
• Inpatient services showed little change with a satisfaction rating of 59 per cent.
• For accident and emergency (A&E) services, satisfaction increased from 53 to 58 per cent between 2013 and 2014, after fluctuating in previous years.

What we’ve had instead is a relentless barrage of claims from the King’s Fund on the BBC without any critical challenge to those claims and hardly a word from government or anyone else in opposition to those claims……Perhaps Newsnight has shaken the tree a bit on this?…I haven’t watched it…but a day long BBC pro-Labour narrative almost completely without challenge on one of the most important and contentious issues in the lead up to the election is not an approach to news that one could say was balanced and impartial.

Been a busy few days so here’s the new OPEN Thread to see us off into the wide blue yonder of the weekend!

Last week Labour Brent councillor Zaffar Van Kawala was found guilty of dangerous driving and ABH after he drove his car at a female fellow councillor.

Today UKIP councillor Robert Ray admitted drink driving after police found him behind the wheel of his car in a hotel car park.

Guess which of the above stories is the only one you’ll find on the BBC’s website?

Yup.

Incidentally – 266 words from the BBC on the UKIP councillor, but only 107 to report the fact that 20 men were today charged with rape and child prostitution in the North East. (The list of names of those charged may give an indication why the BBC isn’t making a big deal about it.)

And while I’m on the subject, spot the only mention of “Labour” in this report about the scandals in Labour-led Rotherham council. 36th paragraph, and then only in an oblique way. Imagine if a similar scandal emerged under a UKIP-led council – the BBC report would be littered with the party name from headline to final sentence.

Listened this morning to Mishal Husain interview (08:44) Rabbi Arnold Saunders on the subject of anti-Semitism in the UK.

Was left wandering who it was committing all those anti-Semitic acts….other than the Rabbi mentioning ‘Morons’ it was left unsaid.

Now the Rabbi might be shy about broaching the subject especially with a Msulim interviewer (Why did the editor choose Mishal Husain for the interview?  Perhaps Tim Wilcox should have done the interview) but surely a hardened journalist with fearless integrity could ask just who might be the worst offenders?….is it white neo-Nazis, Muslims or maybe it’s very left-wing anti-Israeli Jews?

Who knows.  None of us do after the less than enlightening interview.

Did anyone else see Ed Ball’s car crash interview on Newnight last evening? Here is it for your enjoyment and a great example of accidental public SERVICE broadcasting. Poor Ed.

Middle of the week and time for a new thread. I noted that Jeremy Bowens was referring to the Islamic savages that burned the Jordanian pilot alive as “fighters” last night, although on the Today programme this morning I heard the word “terrorist” used, which was welcome if overdue. Anyway, here’s a thread for your use!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyuYGMeyJUQ

Islam and Neo-Conservatism in unholy allliance…once again……apparently…

We have another of the BBC’s favoured sons, Adam Curtis, who once told us that Al Qaeda didn’t exist, purely an invention of the government to keep us frightened and obedient, again given a platform on the BBC to spout his obsessive conspiracy theories and anti-Western rhetoric.

He has now produced a continuation of that theme first aired in his ‘The Power of Nightmares’ with his latest effort  ‘Bitter Lake’ in which we get his very own special intepretation of history… as his introduction reveals:

Increasingly we live in a world where little makes any sense, events come and go like waves of a fever leaving us confused and uncertain.  Those in power tell stories to make us make sense of the complexity of reality but those stories are increasingly unconvincing and hollow.  This is a film about why those stories stopped making sense and why that led us in the West to become a dangerous and destructive force in the world.

The blurb to the film tells us…..

The film reveals the forces that over the past thirty years rose up and undermined the confidence of politics to understand the world. And it shows the strange, dark role that Saudi Arabia has played in this.

But Bitter Lake is also experimental. Curtis has taken the unedited rushes of everything that the BBC has ever shot in Afghanistan – and used them in new and radical ways.

He has tried to build a different and more emotional way of depicting what really happened in Afghanistan. A counterpoint to the thin, narrow and increasingly destructive stories told by those in power today.

 

 

Very nice that the BBC provides a platform for someone who is an ardent, and very obsessive, conspiracy theorist to peddle his theories.

The Guardian asks…

In his latest iPlayer-only film Bitter Lake, furtive filmmaker Adam Curtis uses his dreamlike documentary style to make sense of the west’s involvement in Afghanistan. But is he an audacious auteur or a dangerous contrarian?

 

 

Here is an example of his take on history…

Curtis is about to return with a new film, a two-and-a-half-hour BBC iPlayer-only epic called Bitter Lake. It takes as its premise a meeting in February 1945 between the then US president Franklin D Roosevelt and King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. Sitting on a yacht on the Great Bitter Lake of the Suez Canal, the pair struck a deal: the US would support this newly formed state and, in return, the Saudis would ensure a continuing stream of oil to the west. From that one point, argues Curtis, came the spread of Wahhabi Islam….

 

 

 

A very simplistic and childish view of history from Curtis with the benefit of a rather unreliable but convenient hind-sight.  He seems to think no one should do anything as a single action might have terrible unforeseen consequences…or that is what he must infer following his own logic and scathing conclusions in the wake of historical US actions and their repercussions as he sees them.

Does Curtis think that the oil would have stayed in the ground had there been no agreement?  Saudi Arabia would still have raked in the cash whoever bought the oil and provided ‘protection’ for the Saudi regime…..the USSR would have quickly stepped in as it did with Syria and Egypt….and the funds to spread fundamentalist Islam around the world would still have flooded into the Saudi coffers….no coincidence that the Russian state broadcaster finds ‘Bitter lake’ a superb bit of TV….BBC documentary ‘Bitter Lake’ is ‘too dangerous’ for TV

The film  concentrates on Afghanistan and adopts the BBC’s approach of painting the war there as an utter failure…and uses the ‘prism of Afghanistan’ to illuminate the tumble of world events over the last few decades.

Once again we have a confirmed lefty telling us we understand nothing, that we are being lied to, and he has the answers.

Well, People understand quite a lot thanks…People understand the BBC has been lying to them about immigration, Europe and Islam for years now…they understand that and vote UKIP.

People understand.  They don’t need some self-appointed left-wing, intellectual film maker patronising them and ‘teaching’ them what to think.

They know what is going on….despite all the BBC’s best efforts to kid them.

And this Curtis film is just more evidence that the BBC doesn’t get it…or rather does, and doesn’t like what it sees as people flock to UKIP….and I have to say it is just another example of the Left’s hypocrisy over Islam….attacking Saudi Arabia, which is the spiritual and actual home of Islam, and yet telling us that the Saudis don’t really represent the authentic Islam….and then telling us that Muslims in the UK who follow the same Saudi traditions, are ‘moderate, tolerant Muslims’.

What did the Americans think about the Saudi King in 1945?…..

In the estimation of Colonel Eddy, who knew the

Arabs probably better than any other American of

his generation:

‘The Guardian of the Holy Places of Islam,

and the nearest we have to a successor to the

Caliphs, the Defender of the Muslim Faith

and of the Holy Cities of three hundred mil-

lion people, cemented a friendship with the

head of a great Western and Christian nation.’

Sounds pretty certain that Saudi Arabia is the epicentre of the Islamic faith and not some propagator of a false version of Islam…they should know after all….Muhammed having come from that very region himself.

Curtis’ film is essentially a YouTube polemic…scratchily put together made up from clips of film that he has taken a fancy to and supposedly tell a coherent tale….each one no doubt has meaning to Curtis but the viewer is left in a certain amount of bewildered confusion…ironic for a film that is supposed to bring the world into focus.  What do the clips mean in the context of the film?  Difficult to tell much of the time….you just wait until the narrative restarts and you get a semblance of order once more.

Curtis would have been better off sticking with a standard narrative form that told the story he wanted to get across.  Instead we have a ‘Tumblr’ type mash of images and themes that are more a stream of consciousness than a coherent and easy to follow story.

It would have been a lot shorter had he cut out the self-indulgent images that served only his own ideological purpose of protraying the West and its actions as ‘dangerous and destructive’.

For instance he related a tale about the construction of dams in Afghanistan…concluding that they caused the soil to become saline, which is true for some areas…and from that we were led to believe that poppies became almost the only crop that could be grown successfully there….so he blames the US for helping to build the dams and thence flood the world not with water but heroin.

Trouble is that’s not true….as this BBC article shows……a vastly different portrayal of Afghanistan and its history…..

Helmand’s Golden Age

Afghanistan once faced the future with confidence.
Caught here on film, it’s an era the world has forgotten

And despite the setbacks, Helmand began to bloom. Residents and visitors alike remember the bright green of the settlements and orchards along the Helmand river.

Farming increased, harvesting a surplus even at times of drought. Farmers grew and exported cotton for cash in thousands of tonnes. Few even recognised the flower of the opium poppy, according to Farouq Azam.

Agriculture, especially cotton and grain production, continued to expand until Helmand supplied a fifth of Afghanistan’s wheat harvest.

So already we have Curtis twisting history to his own purpose and painting Western aid to Afghanistan as the cause of much misery when that clearly was not the case….claiming that tribal and ethnic differences were stirred up by these projects….again the BBC’s own article refutes that…..

Approximately one million Afghans moved to the Helmand Valley at this time, drawn by the prospect of jobs, good schools and prospects. Very many of these were educated people – their children would be the first in Afghanistan to have the option of single-sex or mixed schools.

People of every ethnicity and many languages lived side by side in Lashkar Gah, some in modern American-built houses with lawns, low fences and front gardens.

“It was such a happy time,” says Saeeda Mahmood, daughter of Kamoliddin Mahmood, the civil servant who also ran the cinema:

The film is over two hours long and makes for a very hard watch….both from an aesthetic and technical point of view but also if you have any regard for the truth in history.

Curtis up to his polemical and dishonest tricks once again.

Not worth watching when there is so much out here of better quality and which doesn’t have such a hysterical and ideologically entrenched  view of history.  Life is too short to waste your time on this tripe.

Have a read of this scathing review in the Spectator of Curtis’ masterpiece...’the ‘televisual equivalent of a drunken late night Wikipedia binge with pretension for narrative coherence’…..it’s from an unlikely source…a Guardian journalist…

Adam Curtis’s Bitter Lake, review: a Carry On Up the Khyber view of Afghanistan

In fact Afghans have consistently demonstrated their wish to join the 21st century. After more than a decade of trying the Taliban have failed to gain more than a slither of popular support. Democracy in Afghanistan is flawed, but with Afghans continuing to go the polls, it has not failed, as Curtis baldly states.

As Lotfullah Najafizada, one of the country’s leading journalists, put it last year, a sneering western media might have written off Afghanistan’s ‘decade of war’. But, ‘for us, it’s a decade of peace’.

Jon Boone is Pakistan correspondent for the Guardian

Iimpressionist/comedian Rory Bremner tells us in the Sunday Times that…

‘I’m coming for you Cameron’

He went on to say that…

‘The Coalition has got away with colossal injustice’

He worries about Nigel Farage and the dark side of Boris Johnson…and yet he has nothing to say, in the interview at least, about Labour….sure he mocked ‘New Labour’ long ago…but was that more about their presentation (ala Alastair Campbell) rather than their policies?  It seems he has deep concerns about the Coaliton’s policies…and he is prepared to voice those concerns using his one-off comedy show…on the BBC….‘Rory Bremner’s Coalition Report’.

Apparently…

With a mixture of sketches, stand-up, songs and archive, Rory and the team take on the combined might of Cameron, Clegg and Miliband... and also Nigel Farage.

Perhaps he will do a hatchet job on Miliband’s policies as well…..just as the Now Show does week in week out….or not.

Here they concentrate on Miliband’s presentation not his policies…

Is this appropriate in the run up to an election……a show from someone who obviously has some issues with the Coalition’s policies and looks set to attack them?

As I said appearances count and this might give the appearance of anti-Coalition tendencies at the BBC…although a ‘one-off’ how many more such ‘one-offs’ will we be treated to in the next 94 days and counting?

Does look funny though…Tuesday night, BBC2 10 pm.

Sorry for the delay folks, but cometh the new week cometh same old server probs! Anyway, here is the overdue new Thread!