The BBC brings us a celebration of girl power:

Wonder Women: busting stereotypes across the world

On 28 October the BBC will host a day of events focusing on the power of women – those who have changed the world around them and inspired others to do the same.

Our keynote speakers include Joyce Banda, president of Malawi from 2012 to 2014 and named by Forbes magazine as the most powerful woman in Africa.

They obviously forgot to tell John Simpson….

John Simpson: BBC run by tough women is grotesque

BBC’s John Simpson has criticised the ‘tough women’ running the organisation saying it is ‘grotesquely managed’.
The World Affairs Editor, who has reported from war zones around the globe been with the BBC since 1988 said it is now a ‘ghastly outfit’.
Mr Simpson was speaking to former BBC correspondent Denis Murphy on stage at Ireland’s Happy Days Festival, which celebrates writer Samuel Beckett.
Mr Simpson, 69, was quoted in The Sun newspaper saying: “The BBC is even more grotesquely managed now than it was then — tough women running the place now. It was nicer and gentler then. The BBC is such a nanny — and ghastly outfit.”

Joan Bakewell is not impressed by Simpson nor by the BBC’s empty promises on ‘old girl power’….

Joan Bakewell laughs at BBC contract for ‘old elephant’ John SImpson

Given that John Simpson had only two months ago laid into what he called the “tough women” who run the “grotesquely managed” BBC, Dame Joan Bakewell can see the irony in the corporation awarding its 70-year-old world affairs editor a contract that will enable him to work for it for as long as he wants.
“I don’t dispute that John is one of the great old elephants at the BBC – and nobody else does quite what he does – but wouldn’t it be great if, just for once, this organisation that he feels is dominated by tough women would allow a woman to grow old there, too,” says Bakewell,
Mandrake disclosed in 2010 how Bakewell had been involved in brokering a deal with the then BBC boss Mark Thompson that allowed Julia Somerville, Fiona Armstrong, Carole Walker and Zeinab Badawi – all then over 50 – to take turns presenting on the BBC’s 24-hour rolling news channel, but the arrangement soon petered out.
“Since then, people at the BBC have made all the right noises about allowing women to work for longer, but it always comes to nothing,” says Bakewell. “There is this idea that the viewers like the craggy, Hemingwayesque faces of old men on television, but they don’t care for the faces of old women.”

And Miriam O’Reilly is still seething….

Ageism row presenter Miriam O’Reilly attacks BBC for giving John Simpson new indefinite contract ‘because he’s a man’ 

Former Countryfile presenter Miriam O’Reilly who won a landmark ageism case against the BBC has attacked the corporation saying John Simpson has been given a new indefinite contract ‘because he’s man’.

The 57-year-old, who successfully sued the BBC for age discrimination after she was dismissed from the programme, hit out on Twitter after learning of the new contract awarded to the broadcaster’s world affairs editor.

The 70-year-old journalist, who has worked for the BBC for more than 45 years, has been given the new deal that will see him work for the corporation for as long as he likes. 

We know that Labour’s mass immigration policy was a secret scheme to ‘brown Britain’, to rub the Right’s nose in diversity, and that it was to be done without alerting the working classes who would undoubtedly see it for what it was…a policy designed to eliminate them from their place in Britain…to be replaced by a compliant workforce who will work cheaply and come ready educated and trained….something Labour failed to do for the British working class people they abandoned.

Today we can see that attitude blatantly on show on the BBC (20 mins) ….when Bill Oddie opines that Brits should be put on the scrapheap and their jobs, homes and school places taken by lovely immigrants……..

Bill Oddie claims working-class Brits should be ‘contained’

The Springwatch presenter claimed the answer to Britain’s over-population problem was not curbing immigration, but instead restricting the size of British working-class families.

Oddie made his controversial comments on BBC1’s Sunday Morning Live during a debate entitled: “Is the UK too hostile to immigration?”

The 73-year-old said: “There should just as likely be a restriction on the number of children that British people have because over-population is what you are talking about here, the big problem.

This morning John Humphrys mentioned that there had been a backlash against Miliband’s ambush on Cameron at PMQs when Miliband tried to exploit the disabled as a political football.

Unfortunately there was no sign of the man himself who cobbled together this tissue of lies…Miliband, as ‘Thoughtful‘ said in the comments, has lit the blue touch paper and disappeared like the proverbial Cheshhire Cat, grinning at the chaos that has ensued.

Judging though by the adverse reaction of the Public to his claims it is probably just as well that he ducks any interrogation on the issue…assuming of course that the BBC would ‘hold his feet to the fire’ on this.

Just how bad would it be for the Labour leader?  Well even the Question Time audience has turned on him, or rather his representative…in the lovely shape of Angela Eagle…

The Spectator likes what it saw…for once…

Eagle tried to make everyone feel outraged, but instead the audience turned against her, accusing the MP of distorting Freud’s words for party political gain; it was like watching the crowd turn against Ceausescu in Bucharest, and the first time I’ve ever seen a QT crowd react like this. I think I may have to move to Newbury: If that’s what their Question Time audience is like, imagine how sensible the population as a whole must be.

 

What was noticeable was the reaction of some of the other speakers…LibDem Menzies Campbell and the BBC’s favourite trendy vicar, Giles Fraser [Parish priest and broadcaster…not a politician nor interested in people’s votes]…neither were willing to give the time of day to the thought that Freud might have had a point.

Campbell waffled sanctimoniously trying to claim the moral highground, sounding above the fray, concerned purely with the problems of the disabled, it’s all about ‘dignity’, whilst in fact saying nothing that could come back to ‘haunt’ him  later.

Fraser, New Labour trendy in his open shirt, used the occasion, not to talk sensibly about Freud’s words,  but to chose instead to attack ‘the real problem’, the government’s policies for the disabled…as he saw them…naturally the disabled were suffering, targeted by a tyrannical, heartless government.

The BBC in many respects has seen the light on this story and not taken Miliband’s narrative as Gospel…however the culprit, the architect of this steaming pile of tripe, has been allowed to slip off into the night unchallenged leaving it for his minions to take the flak for him.

Paris has the Eiffel Tower, we have the Matthew Parris, a tower of Piffel.

Matthew Parris, the wettest of wet Tories, the great mouldering tower of Piffel that he is, doesn’t like criticism….his critics, all rightwing fanatics….a bilious, bigoted, resentful underworld of fomenting Fascism given voice by the affable Nigel Farage….

Reading the comments on my Ukip columns, I finally understand the Nazis

It’s these voters’ opinions about their fellow countrymen, about foreigners, about immigrants, about Muslims, about MPs (all MPs), about the rich, about London, about culture, about business people, and about anyone of a liberal disposition, that have offered me the dismaying glimpse I describe. It’s a dark, bilious and resentful world down there among the readers’ posts.

I am coming miserably to the conclusion that a kind of collective mental illness can whip large numbers of people into a Gadarene rush — and reason is helpless in its path.

So no, these people aren’t Nazis and I’m sure never will be. But I have begun to understand the mass psychosis we call populism and, rather late in my life, almost to despair.

 

Remarkably, considering the title of his piece, he disengenuously claims he isn’t calling UKIP Nazis…..but, and there is always a but…they are really.

But I’ve had recently a glimpse into the psyche of populism in our era and country; and this has helped me understand how things might have felt in another.

 

That ‘other country’ of course being Nazi Germany.

Parris is conveniently offering us a ‘glimpse into the psyche of the liberal mindset’ as exhibited so well by those employed by the BBC…Parris so often being one of those.

The hatred of ‘populism’, which is a bit inconvenient in a democracy where the voice of the People is sacrosanct, the lofty condescension where someone of such superior intellect and morality has to ‘understand’ the mindset of the lower, inferior, less intellectually able classes…dismissed as ‘mentally ill’ by Parris, and the BBC’s so often aired narrative along the lines of its ‘Warning from history‘,   a narrative that gratuitously links UKIP to the ‘Far Right’ and Nazism.

Must be a full moon again in Parris’ Piffel Towers.

Here’s a little backup for Parris from a soul mate, Giles Fraser, as he retweets this…

and oh look who said it originally…Michael Rosen, that voice of sanity and reason…..

 From DB’s archive…..

Michael Rosen, BBC Radio presenter First tweet on Margaret Thatcher’s passing:

Parents, be careful when explaining to your children tonight who Thatcher was. Horror stories often best left till the morning. — Michael Rosen (@MichaelRosenYes) April 8, 2013

The BBC broadcast this recently…

Rudyard Kipling is described as an imperial racist by the BBC which can prove that contention by quoting to us Kipling’s poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’.

This poem supposedly encourages Imperial conquest and obliges White people to go forth and civilize the more brutish and barbaric parts of the world….or you could interpret it as…if you are going to invade and turn a part of the world into a bit of your empire then it is your duty to serve the native population well….a subtle but entirely different take on the poem.

‘Imperialist racism’ is a very simplistic and prejudiced view of the poem if you read its sentiments as Kipling probably intended them to be read.

However it is ironic that the BBC should denounce Kipling for jingoistic imperialism and his apparent call to ‘Whites’ to do their duty and civilise the world as surely the BBC Charter itself proclaims the same values  The BBC World Service and its Media Action arm are the poem in motion subversively encouraging democracy, freedom of thought and expression, environmentalism, as well as ‘good governance’ and people power, through development of a sophisticated media and use of campaign groups…in other worlds bringing ‘civilisation’ to the barbarous, unruly nations of the world….and of course that obligation for the BBC extends to the wilder parts of the UK where unreconstructed Tories, UKIPPers, members of the EDL, any member of the  white working class, Islamophobes, Euro and climate sceptics lurk…all in need of re-education courtesy of the white liberal class ensconced at the BBC.

The Royal Charter guarantees the editorial independence of the BBC and sets out its Public Purposes. These are defined as:

• sustaining citizenship and civil society
• promoting education and learning
• stimulating creativity and cultural excellence
• representing the UK, its nations, regions and communities
• bringing the UK to the world and the world to the UK

When we hear people denouncing the West for not heading out to Africa and curing Ebola, or not tackling ISIS or not sorting out the Middle East are those people then racists?  Surely they would be if judged on the same basis that Kipling is….and Kipling was a man of his times…what excuse do these paragons, these latter day saints, of the modern Liberal society have for their advocacy of the imperialist supremacy of the Western nations?

Melvyn Bragg & Co had a look at Kipling and it was interesting how they all took it for granted that Kipling was racist and an imperial propagandist…Bragg describing him as ‘a major apologist for the British empire’.

Well first, why should anyone need to apologise for the British Empire?  That’s a very prejudiced view taken by a very select group of people and Bragg seems to be guilty of being trapped in group think rather than thinking for himself.  Kipling wasn’t an apologist for Empire, he just lived through it and wrote about it as it happened….and he was critical of it much of the time…indeed ‘White Man’s Burden‘ is a call to treat the native populations well…which obviously leads to the idea that he believed they might not always be so treated.

We are told Kipling’s poems and stories have a stigma attached to them by virtue of Kipling being a supporter of the British Empire…and his poems and stories are ‘contaminated by his politics‘.

Kipling’s politics, his race theories were ‘unendurably horrible‘.

But….we are told…if we can look beyong his ‘unendurably horrible racism’ and his apologia for Imperialism then we can see the merits of his writing, in a technical sense.  How very good of them to so condescend.

I have the sneaking suspicion that none of them on the show have a clue what they are talking about. They weren’t there with Kipling, they haven’t experienced ‘Empire’ as he experienced it, they haven’t moved amongst the natives, or amongst the maharajahs or the colonial officials.

They are imposing their own views of what they think the Raj was and how people such as Kipling ‘must’ have really felt about it…and doing so from the comfort of their ivory towers in academia and the media far from India and so very far from the times that Kipling wrote about.

Kipling’s ‘racism’ or imperialism are purely the concerns of a very select group of people who make it their job to search through history to denounce anything or anyone they feel has offended the censorious Liberal morality.

So, kids, you can read Kipling and enjoy the stories, but as you read bare in mind that they are an anachronistic relic from a bygone age in which attitudes of casual racism, racial supremacy, colonisation, violence, misogyny, apartheid, homophobia and religious mania held sway.  Use the occasion to learn about the terrifying, and unendurably horrible, attitudes held by white people towards others merely because they do not have the same skin colour.

The Koran, by way of contrast, is a wonderful book, the cornerstone of a faith that brings peace and harmony wherever it is practised.  The BBC highly recommends you read it, grow a beard and learn how to shoot a gun…er…only to defend yourself against those appalling Kipling-like Islamophobes who, through ignorance, prejudice and hatred, link that lovely religion to untold misery and violence.

When you are reading this, I should be in Paris and so beyond the reach of the BBC! Here’s a new thread to see you off into the weekend. I’ll be back Monday night.

The Today programme had a look at the Freud affair this morning but there was an essential element missing….Wallace himself

.

John Humphrys at around 06:50 began by telling us what Freud had done ‘wrong’ and then we had a comedy sketch of Miliband ‘ambushing’ Cameron at PMQs.

This didn’t enlighten us at all and could, if that was the sum total of the Today programme’s coverage, be seen as feeding us Labour’s narrative as that was that, once the PMQ quotes were done with the ‘exploration’ ended and we moved on to Owen Paterson I believe.

There was no ‘Later we’ll be examining if Freud had a point.’  You could have finished up your cornflakes and left the house thinking what a bastard that Freud is, the Tories really are the nasty party….whilst on Newsnight Laura Kuenssberg admitted that ‘context was important’ and that ‘it might be a discussion worth having’ …and yet she kept defaulting to the position that Freud was wrong despite admitting that this attack was Labour ‘skulduggery’ and that the story fits well into Labour’s mantra of the nasty Tory party and was ‘perfect fodder for Ed Miliband’.…so where is Miliband on the BBC considering the controversial and incendiary nature of his claims?

Then at 07:12 on the Today programme we had another look and someone called Penny Pepper (also on Newsnight) told us that Freud’s words were symptomatic of this government’s attitude towards disabled people and the words were offensive and alarming. She asks how can you say one set of people are worth paying less than another?  Hmmm…well..I don’t earn what Wayne Rooney earns….or what a brain surgeon earns….I am, surely,  offended and alarmed by society’s discrimination towards me….surely, as Kirsty Wark points out on Newsnight, I am worth more to a business than the number of rivets I can productively insert in an hour!  I am not just a number.

Remarkably Penny Pepper on Newsnight admits that there is already such a policy in place that employs disabled people for lower wages..but she dissembles and waffles on…clearly determined to be offended and alarmed.

We then heard Christian May from the Institute of Directors defend Freud and explain the issues as we’ve looked at before.

But the thing that is missing from all this discussion, considering that Labour’s attack is widely seen as a shameful exploitation of the issue and a deliberate misreading of what Freud said, is any challenge to Miliband and his narrative…whwere is Miliband?

When Guido (H/t Mark II and David) reveals that Freud’s thoughts were in fact a policy that Labour adopted and was supported by charities for the disabled (H/T Sir Arthur Strebe-Grebling) you may have reasonably have expected the BBC to drag in Miliband who is making so much political capital out of this, and challenge him on his claims.

The Spectator tells us that ‘This is a stain on Miliband’s character. ‘

Trouble is, it is only a stain if it is brought to light and the Public can view it for what it is.

So far the BBC has dodged actually questioning Miliband’s integrity and motivations for this opportunistic, highly political and underhand attack on Lord Freud which feeds so conveniently into Labour’s desire to paint the Tories as the ‘nasty party’ again….a poisonous narrative for the Tories which the BBC is allowing to fester by default in not tackling Miliband….which may be considered ironic in light of Nick Robinson’s headline….

Ed Miliband facing sustained glare of scrutiny

Well not so far.

I do note that the BBC is making a lot of noise about this, it being one of their top stories …..

First-time buyers will get priority, Labour promises

Curiously there is no link to the election and the thought that this is of course a Labour ‘vote catcher’ policy, more politics than substance.   The BBC religiously makes such a link to any policy or budget announcement from Cameron or Osborne and have done so for the past year ensuring the audience get the idea that any such moves are merely political tricks for short term political gain, designed to win votes rather than for genuine economic or social needs.

 The Independent has noticed the probable Labour motivation and says…[The Labour] Party denies policy is designed to look tougher on immigration and head off Ukip

The BBC’s report is one long Labour love-in.

The BBC announced that it, in the shape of The Media Show (13 mins), would investigate the ‘Media’s’ reporting of Europe….

A new report from the Reuters Institute of Journalism [John Lloyd] argues that the British media’s coverage of the EU is falling short.

In spite of increased column inches and headlines since the Eurozone crisis hit, the study claims mainstream papers and broadcasters still struggle to distil and dramatise the complexities of EU policy and process.

 

I immediately thought ‘Great…the BBC has finally turned the camera upon itself and was about to ask a few difficult questions about its infamously biased reporting on the EU.’

Naturally I was badly mistaken.

The problem, we were told, with reporting of the EU is the ‘Press’, the irresponsible newsapers which chose to spread fear and loathing of the EU using polemical rants and a focus upon the absurdities and errors of the EU that are preferred to fact.

So the EU is not absurd nor does it make any errors?…never mind its accounts have never been signed off as they are so not based upon those precious ‘facts’ but upon lies, fraud and corruption.

The report tells us that the newspapers attitude is one of misguided stridency unconcerned with details and unfortunately presenting a powerful message to the Public.

However their scepticism was useful as it did show a problem with the EU….it was set up to be a federalist state but is in fact run by individual, sovereign nations….there has been a failure of the federalist ideal.

I thought that the problem, as highlighted by the papers, was that the EU is all too powerful and continues to grow ever more powerful at the expenswe of the sovereign nations…that is the problem…the complete opposite to  what this report by John Lloyd tells us….Lloyd being a big fan of the EU.

Whilst Lloyd bashes the papers he thinks the ‘Broadcasters’ ‘do pretty well’….such as the BBC which even in its own report on its EU journalism had to admit it was institutionally inclined to be pro-European.

The problem for those Broadcasters, apparently,  is that the EU is a pretty dry subject….lots of men in suits, all very technical, repetitive, too complex and lacks drama.

If only it were more exciting the Public would take an interest in this vital subject and realise that it is very important for their own interests to pay attention to what is going on in Brussels….and of course don’t listen to those nasty, rude sceptical papers….hmmm…I thought the Public were only too aware of what went on in Brussels, that’s the problem, they know the truth.

When Kelvin Mackenzie said he wished the Sun was more sceptical and reported even more of the absurdities of the EU project the presenter stepped in to demand if that was being ‘responsible’.  So we know that reporting errors and absurdities of the EU is ‘irresponsible’ in the opinion of the BBC….an attitude it takes to much in life such as climate change and Islam.

The programme turned out to be the usual BBC half-baked, self-serving piece of twaddle as it tells us that the EU is great if only people realised that and didn’t listen to those dreadful, sceptical newspapers….the BBC’s job is such a hard one battling ignorance and prejudice whipped up by the Redtops whilst the complex and undramatic nature of events in the EU political sphere make reporting on it so much more difficult that they can’t get anyone to listen to their siren messages.

Good job then that Labour imported millons of EU citizens who will vote for the EU should Cameron actually, for once, do what he said he will do and hold a referendum.

Another reason the BBC loves mass immigration.

Alan has already covered the BBC onslaught against Lord Freud today. I wish to point out two further thoughts. First, isn’t is SO convenient that the BBC blasted this on the same day that the Government announced the biggest fall in unemployment in YEARS and at the same time as Miliband was given heat for dismissing the concerns of English voters re “English votes for English laws”. Oh, and then there was this….from Guido.

Who is the nasty Party?