The Brand wagon keeps on rolling courtesy of the People’s BBC.

Kind of ironic really, a multi-millionaire living the celebrity lifestyle complaining about the plebs not having a voice, excluded by the Establishment…and yet it is not Joe Bloggs from Peckham who is given the chance to air his views, it is that multi-millionaire celebrity who has decided we all want a revolution and has been given the privileged position of a platform on the BBC to make sure we have to suffer one whether we want one or not….Brand apparently ‘giving voice to the populist resurgence of a serious but controversial idea: anarchism.’

Can’t say I have ever heard anarchism on the ballot sheet coming up as a topic in conversation…so just how ‘populist’ is it?

Brand has once again been thrust upon us by the BBC on Start the Week which tells us that…

Here you go, a new Open Thread,  detail the bias here!

The BBC has been hitting us hard in the last week with what is without any shadow of a doubt pure Labour Party propaganda about living standards, the minimum wage and ‘breadline Britain’….the central message at the heart of Labour’s election strategy

More on that later but as a run up to a more indepth look at the BBC’s coverage in which we are presented with ‘Jason from Stockport’ who has nothing to eat in his cupboards, you might like to hear what Stephanie Flanders, now off the leash, admits in the Sunday Times today……

The Treasury likes to point out that overall earnings figures make things look worse than they actually are, at least for people who have been in jobs for a while.  On average, people in full-time jobs who have been in work for at least a year have seen their wages go up faster than inflation from 2012 onwards.

But…

It’s a lost cause trying to get people to admit that they feel better off than before.

A decade of reporting on the economy for the BBC proved to me that it was incredibly hard to get people to admit on camera to having become richer.  That was true even in the boom years, let alone now.

I could be standing in a supermarket, surrounded by ‘lowest ever’ price signs, on the day wages werer rising at the fastest rate in a decade and inflation had fallen to a record low:  everyone who talked to us would doggedly insist their grocery bills were heading through the roof and they were haiving trouble making ends meet.  British people find it difficult to be upbeat on television.

So when the BBC wheels out those poverty stricken families and the ‘Jason’s in Stockport’ as evidence of ‘Breadline Britain’ it all needs to be taken with a huge pinch of salt.  We are being very deliberately lied to and manipulated.

Flanders tells us that the economy is 15% smaller than it would have been had we ‘trundled along at our long-term average rate of growth since 2007.’

Bt that’s not the fault of this government….she tells us ‘we are not alone.  Nearly every advanced economy is facing the same shortfall…[but]….we have handled this difficult new reality better than many.’

Flanders also tells us that….

Labour will want to play down Britain’s relative economic success to focus on the ‘crisis in living standards’.  What it is easy to miss is that it’s the squeeze in living standards that as largely made that relative success possible by pricing British workers into work.

That fall in wages has one  enormous beenfit; it helped make it affordable for business to keep workers and hire new ones, even in very tough times.

That made for a very different kind of recession and recovery from what we have seen before.

In previous recessions the pain of the downturn fell on the relatively small chunk of the population who lost their jobs.  Anyone laid off saw their living standards collapse.  Everyone else saw their earnings tick along much as before.  Not this time.

This time we really were ‘all in it together’.

Lower wages have kept people in work and allowed more to be employed……..Labour and the BBC are pushing the line that benefits are higher because people are in low paid wages which conveniently neglects to say what the bill would have been if all those on lower wages had no wages and had to receive full unemployment benefit…never mind the effect on their standard of living.

Last week on Peter Allen’s show(11:10) we heard that the top 20% of earners had seen a large fall in income of 5.2% whilst the lowest 20% had seen growth of 3.5%.

We were told that the average UK disposable income level was £28,700….now the BBC’s Panorama told us a family who had an income of £29,000 including benefits were on the breadline…..as a result of this government’s policies…and yet average incomes have only fallen by 4% compared to pre-crash levels.

A fall of 4% does not suddenly put people into poverty as the BBC seems to be claiming.

That’s, as I said, just a warm up for the real exploration of the BBC’s coverage of ‘Breadline Britain’ as it pumps out material like this…

Low-paid Britons now number five million, think tank concludes

…on behalf of the Labour Party.

The BBC seems fatally drawn to outspoken, controversial and ultimately, mistaken, flawed characters, otherwise known as charlattans, whom they can rely upon either to make headlines and help them chase ratings, ala Russell Brand, or to ensure the schedules are filled with left wing drudgery ala Owen Jones or Giles Fraser.

Giles Fraser, that turbulent priest with inclinations towards the radical, has some interesting thoughts.  Not all of them thought out perhaps.

But still, the BBC seems to think he has something important to say so much of the time.

He is of course, being a Christian, tolerant of the enemy religion…Islam.  However he is not tolerant of those who would criticise Islam…

Islamophobia is the moral blind spot of modern Britain

The dinner party bigot’s attack on Islam as a creed can all too easily become an excuse for an attack upon an ethnic group

Yep…not only are you a bigot for criticisng Islam but you are using it as a covert means to attack a particular race…not sure which as there are so many different races who are Muslims…and of course he forgets to mention Sikhophobia and Hinduophobia and Whirling Dervishophobia and so on…all practised mainly by people of a non-white persuasion….so why aren’t these bigoted, secret racists denouncing those religions as well around the dinner table?

People like Fraser like to tell the lie that Islam is the religion of peace, that Islam means peace, that Islam wasn’t spread by the sword.

However when it comes to Christianity he is more open about the connection between religion, fanatics and violence…..

The English, of course, have always been a little bit awkward when it comes to full-throttle Christianity…It wasn’t always this way. Thousands were butchered during the Civil War in the name of their different understandings of God – probably the last flowering of popular religious fundamentalism in England.

When religious ideology got as toxic as it did, it was an act of genius to redefine religion as being primarily about pastoral care. From the 18th Century onwards, Christianity ceased to be about pike-toting revolutionaries hoping to rebuild Jerusalem in here in England.
Instead, through the Church of England, it increasingly became a David Cameron-type faith: the religion of good deeds.
It served the English well. It was dignified, socially useful and largely undemanding. The big society in action.

Fraser admits religion can inspire violence…even Christianity, a religion in which there are no exhortations to conquer the world or to kill your enemy.

Religion had to be neutered in order for a peaceful, tolerant society to blossom.

However Fraser hankers after the old school  hellfire and damnation interpretation of the Bible….

….. it is offensive and scandalous stuff. It means being brave, taking risks, standing up to wrong, even when – and this is bound to happen – it is personally distressing for us to do
that. It means real belief and absolute commitment. It is so much more than a brief nod to Sunday school truisms.

‘real belief and absolute commitment’….dangerous, foolish stuff….if he’s advocating this for Christians how can he deny the same to Muslims or any other religion or belief such as Fascism or Communism?  It would be a nation at war with itself.

Real belief is nothing less than fundamentalism, extremism, oppressive institutionalised tyranny.

Real belief is bigotry of the purest kind…‘I am right, you are wrong…and so you are going to hell…and I might just help to speed you on your way there.’

Fraser expands on his desire for hellfire on earth with the thought that terrorism might have his divine sanction if in a ‘just’ cause….curious when he admitted above that religion had become toxic and led to thousands being brutally butchered in the name of God and yet he now justifies it……

If we can have just war, why not just terrorism?

I was criticised for suggesting there could be a moral right of resistance to oppression but Christianity has thought a great deal about the idea of just resistance.

The weird thing about this is that Christianity has thought a great deal about the idea of just resistance. The Reformation, for instance, saw a flurry of moral justifications for resistance to the state, when that state is seeking to impose on its subjects its own particular understanding of religious faith. In 1574, for example, Theodore Beza published his The Right of Magistrates in which he affirmed the right of resistance – and violent resistance in the final instance – to state tyranny.

Ah…there’s that Christian inspired violence again….‘Christianity has thought a great deal about the idea of just resistance.’  I wonder if Islam has ‘thought a great deal about the idea of just resistance’?

However Fraser isn’t keen on ‘Just’ Torture, even if it were the kind that might save lives whilst not killing the person being tortured, merely being ‘enhanced interrogation’.…

It was called “tortura del agua” by the Spanish Inquisition. The Nazis used it, as did the Japanese and the Vietcong. We now call it waterboarding, and all reasonable people would also call it torture. That is, except — because it is a technique now widely practised by the CIA, and because the United States wants to claim that it does not torture prisoners — that the current US administration calls it an “enhanced interrogation technique”. Once again, Mr Bush’s dodgy dictionary finds new ways to lie.

This is what makes the war on terror such a well of moral evil.
I love the United States, but its moral conscience has been diseased by the war on terror. It is now time for American churches to speak out more clearly.

 

So…torture, however much it might save lives, is a ‘well of moral evil’ that is condoned and practised by minds diseased by the war on terror….but terrorism that deliberately, knowingly and cold bloodedly kills thousands, men, women and children, at a stroke, is a ‘just’ terrorism if in a morally justifiable cause.

So let’s get Fraser right…religion can be a toxic, brutal, murderous tyranny and yet anyone who dares link Islam to the violent exhortations and ‘racism’ in the Koran is an Islamophobe?

Waterboarding, stress positions, shouting at prisoners and other intensive interrogation techniques are morally evil but butchering the Fogel family, hacking off a baby’s head, is a ‘just’ terrorism?

Fraser is a classic example of Doublethink…when you can hold two opposing and contradictory views and yet believe totally in both of them….

To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.

The BBC must adore little Fraser…pro-Muslim, anti-Bush, anti the war on terror, anti-interrogation, anti-capitalism, anti-Islamophobia……he could have a channel all to himself….a circus dog indeed, all too happy to jump through the hoops, peddling the codswallop,  and needing no commands to do so.

Shame he’s such a hypocrite, such an advocate of violence, intolerance and religious fanaticism.

What can I say?

There isn’t much you can say about the BBC’s fawning submission to the unstoppable prophet of kooky pap, Russell Brand.

What could say it all is that this, em, genuine, ‘exclusive extract’, from Brand’s new booky wooky, courtesy of Michael Deacon at the Telegraph, isn’t the authentic Brand revealing his deepest and most cherished, fantastical imaginings but you’d be forgiven for thinking it was……Katz must be thinking how lucky he was to have had the bearded one in person on his show…and I suppose that’s what Newsnight is now….Showtime.

None so totalitarian as the BBC;

The BBC is using laws designed to catch terrorists and organised crime networks to track down people who dodge the licence fee, it emerged yesterday. The publicly-funded corporation uses the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), designed by the last Labour government to fight terrorism, to catch those who evade paying the £145.50 fee. Now, however, its ability to use sweeping surveillance powers could be stopped by a new review announced yesterday by culture secretary Sajid Javid. Mr Javid’s independent inquiry into TV licence fee enforcement will examine the corporation’s use of covert surveillance operations on those it thinks have not paid the obligatory licence fee.

Well then, the weekend beckons and so time for a new one of these for your edification!

Racism is ’embedded into our [white] culture but people don’t even think of themselves as racist.’  Peter Allen 5Live

I did laugh when I heard Jim Naughtie’s schoolboy crush on the Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee….

No-one took on the aura of the swashbuckling newspaperman with more style than Ben Bradlee, who became one of the great editors. He loved the life, but he was also a man of steel.

It wasn’t chance that made Watergate a turning point in the modern American story, but grit and ambition….It made him a hero for two generations of journalists.

Explaining to a later generation why Watergate mattered so much is sometimes difficult, because it’s hard to recapture the mood of the early 70s, when the Nixon White House believed it could crush any opponent and would do whatever it took to do it……In the end it was Richard Nixon who resigned as president, in August 1974, and the Post had brought about a convulsion in American life which is still being felt today, by bravely challenging those who’d forgotten that power brings responsibility.

Bradlee was able to turn it into a crusade in part because he was a dazzling figure – a handsome, high-living lion of a man, who exuded an air of supreme confidence but also, as one of his colleagues put it, had something of the Mississippi riverboat gambler about him……he combined glamour with the rough spirit of a streetwise reporter, who’d tell stories from the US Navy, Paris after the liberation or the White House with the same raconteur’s relish….always exhilarating…….  At a table or in a bar, he was a magical presence…The kind of editor every journalist dreams about.

 

 

I didn’t laugh because of Naughtie’s gushing eroticism but because he is part of an organisation that shows none of that swashbuckling flair and fearless searching for the truth that drove Bradlee on to tackle the highest power in the land and hold it to account that Naughtie so admires.

The BBC in a sad comparison is itself that dishonest power, an organisation that has forgotten about responsibility and which has chosen instead to attempt to shape Society so that it conforms with the BBC’s own vision of how a ‘good society’ should look and think.  Rather than challenge and expose those corrupt politicans it sides with them and hides their crimes.

Today we had two classic examples when the BBC’s Big Brother politicking has caused untold harm to Society.

The BBC has given a lot of airtime to the story that the National Audit Office has criticised the government on its lack of success at deporting foreign criminals.  Naturally this is a Labour led story with Yvette Cooper asking an ‘urgent House of Commons question‘.

The Guardian headlines with this….

UK government has ‘blood on its hands’ over failure to track foreign criminals

Paul Houston, whose daughter, Amy, died six weeks after she was knocked down by an Iraqi-Kurdish asylum seeker, Aso Mohammed Ibrahim, in Blackburn in 2003, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the failure to keep track of foreign offenders had ruined lives. “Ultimately, the responsibility falls on the politicians because what’s happened in the last 10 years has been a social experiment and we are the guinea pigs. The politicians have blood on their hands because families’ lives have been ruined and people have died because of this,” he said.

“They have a responsibility to protect society and its citizens – that’s their number one priority. I feel too much is given to the rights of the criminal and not to the protection of society and victims.”

 

 

The BBC has also given a lot of time to the story that a Taxi firm has provided white drivers when asked for by customers.

Both these stories centre around two major political, cultural and social concerns, immigration and Islam or multi-culturalism, that the BBC has consistently lied to its audience about or refused to investigate in order that its own narrative on the ‘benefits’ of immigration and the joys of Islam were the only narratives that dominated the discussions, such as they were.

Now today the BBC is all too ready to talk about the subjects having once deliberately sought to hide the truth about Labour’s open borders policy and the part played by race and Islam in places such as Rochdale….of course to talk about it only as a means to attack the government and to highlight the ‘racism’ of white Britons.

The NAO tells us that failure to control who comes across our borders is a major reason as to why we have so many foreign criminals (FNO’s…Foreign National Offenders) roaming the UK….

One important way of reducing the number of FNOs is to stop serious foreign criminals from entering the UK in the first place. The government[s] collectively did relatively little in this area before December 2012.

It is crucial that information on an FNO’s identity and circumstances is collected as early as possible to speed up removal.

The Department should build on the FNO action plan by evaluating fully the preventative and early intervention measures trialled so far and investing further in these where appropriate. In particular, early evidence suggests the Department should build its plan to prevent more FNOs from entering the UK at the border.

 

 

 

Clearly Labour’s uncontrolled immigration has allowed into this country untold numbers of serious and dangerous criminals that has led to death and suffering for countless thousands of victims who have suffered only as a result of that policy.

Blood is almost certainly on the hands of Labour politicians but also on the hands of BBC journalists who deliberately sought to hide what was happening and even today continue with that narrative about immigration and multi-culturalism.

On Sunday we had a blatantly one sided programme about immigration and today we have the BBC hunting down the taxi firm that offers ‘white’ taxi drivers on request to customers.

Peter Allen on 5Live (28 mins ) gave us a perfect illustration of BBC Think when he denounced this firm as racist and then went on to say that customers who asked for white drivers demonstrated that racism was ’embedded into our culture but people don’t even think of themselves as racist.’  Of course when Allen says ‘our culture’ he means White people.

That of course is a racist statement in itself…a sweeping claim that maligns all white people…if you’re white you are probably racist (the problem is Peter Allen doesn’t even realise he is racist).

That was the line taken by the Stephen Lawrence inquiry when it found that it could find no evidence of any racism in the way police fulfilled their operational tasks but that essentially, because they were white, there must have been some embedded racsm in the institution somewhere.

Allen laughed when told that Asian drivers were far more reliable and hardworking that white ones…and yet that is a sweeping, racist comment itself…I’m certain there are many hardworking and reliable white taxi drivers out there who would object to that statement.

The BBC’s failure to tackle the questions about race, Islam and immigration wasn’t a ‘failure’, it wasn’t just bad journalism,  it was a deliberate and orchestrated attempt to control the narrative and the public’s perceptions of those issues.  The BBC not only hid the truth but actively sought to lie about the issues and the hugely negative effects that resulted from the implementation of mass immigration and multi-culturalism policies.

People have died because of Labour’s immigration policies.  People have been raped, people have been attacked, people have been robbed and defrauded because of Labour’s mass immigration policies.

But the BBC doesn’t ever link the two together when talking of immigration preferring instead to tell us of the untold benefits of immigration, how wonderful and hardworking the immigrants are and how they suffer terrible racism from the white population.  The crime that comes with immigration is swept under the carpet excpet when the BBC can use it to political, pro-Labour, advantage as today.

There is a good case to be made that there is blood on the BBC’s hands.  People have been killed by immigrants who would still be alive now if Labour had been challenged on its open door, uncontrolled immigration policies, by the BBC.

So much for swashbuckling and fearlessly brave journalism ‘challenging those who’d forgotten that power brings responsibility.’

Mitch Benn on BBC Radio 4:

I got back from France late Monday evening and caught the BBC “Today” programme running a story about the “racist” song released by Mike Read in support of UKIP. The BBC oozes visceral contempt for UKIP and whether one supports them or not, this bias is self evidently wrong. Is it possible that UKIP’s views on our continued membership of the EU and its focus on enforcing immigration limits are so at odds with the BBC hive?