This is what the Guardian and the BBC would prefer you to see:

A savage attack on the offices of a satirical, left wing magazine.  Ten staff are murdered as well as two police officers, and many others are injured.  This wasn’t just an attempt to kill these people, it was an attack on the very basis of Western civilisation…that of essential freedoms.

Or freedoms we should have but which are curtailed by the thought police…prime guardian of the right to define what we should think and enforcer of that is of course our very own BBC.

The reaction to the murders was depressingly all too familiar…the hypocrisy piled upon hypocrisy, the weasel words, the burying of the truth by politicians, the Media and the Muslim organisations which were wheeled in to assure us that this has nothing to do with Islam.

On hearing the news of the attack I’m certain many of you reading this would soon have been wondering just how long before we would start to hear the subtle insinuations that this is blowback, that ‘Charlie Hebdo’ brought it upon themselves, that we must not do anything further to upset Muslims, we must not ‘provoke’ them, that Muslims are the first victims of this attack.

And you’d have been right.

Cameron at PMQs told us he stood four square behind democracy and freedom of speech…this is the man who denied people a referendum on Europe and has said he will sack any minister who doesn’t support his view on Europe.

Merkel told us this was an attack on freedom of speech, a core element of Western democracy…and yet she has spent the last week denouncing protestors who march against the Islamisation of Germany calling them racist and people with ‘hate in their hearts’.  Will there be ‘lights out in Cologne’ tonight?

Malcolm Rifkind came onto the BBC and told us this was all about IS and Syria ( in fact the gunmen claim to be from Al Qaeda in the Yemen) trying to disassociate this from Islam in general, he told us the magazine went out of its way to criticise Muslim extremists…is he saying it’s their fault? He then essentially accepted the basic premise of the Islamic terrorist’s case by saying we should negotiate with them….this is one of the men who failed to intervene in Bosnia with disastrous results.

Then we had the pleasure of hearing Mohammed Shafiq, head of the Ramadan Foundation, on 5Live who told us that the cartoons published by Charlie Hebdo were ‘despicable’ and ‘insulting’…but of course he condemned the murders.  However the real problem was that the attack would make it harder for Society to deal with Islamophobia and attacks on Muslims….and that we need to be less melodramatic about ‘freedom of speech’ being under attack.  Of course we had the inevitable BBC presenter’s genuflexion towards political correctness when he asked ‘Are the killers Muslim?’…obviously trying to elicit the equally inevitable answer that ‘No, they are not…nothing Islamic about any of this at all…honest.’...an answer which indeed was quick in coming.  Harry’s Place illustrates the slippery nature of Shaifq’s rhetoric.

Naturally no news story about Islam on the BBC is worth hearing without a quote from the extremist MCB….the MCB which many might believe was at the heart of the Trojan Horse affair where ‘conservative Muslims’ tried to hijack and Islamise British schools.  In 2007 the MCB sent out a policy document to education authorities up and down the country urging them to ‘Islamise’ their schools…to make them Islam friendly…this was to be done in order to allow Muslim pupils to integrate properly by fully practising their religion in school….’ The result of meeting Muslim needs in mainstream schools is that Islam and Muslims become a normal part of British life and that we become fully integrated in this way’.…..the threat was implicit…if you don’t allow this the Muslim pupils will not integrate and will become alienated and angry and then…well, who knows.  The BBC refused to mention this document when reporting on the ‘Trojan Horse’ plot as it gave the lie to their own assertion that the ‘Trojan Horse’ plot was a ‘provocative hoax’….and that people who were concerned about the Islamisation of schools were paranoid and racist.

Then of course we have the BBC itself…we are hearing a lot about the horror of this attack but also about  freedom of speech and the freedom of the Press…and yet it was the BBC who were one of the leaders of the attack on News International, an attack that was intended to close down if possible and certainly to muzzle as much as possible, a political and commercial rival which propagated ideas and thoughts that were abhorrent to the good, liberal, tolerant, folk at the BBC, amongst others.

Using the excuse of the phone hacking scandal, a crime not just perpetrated by Murdoch journalists though you might have thought so from the BBC’s partisan coverage, they set out to remove that allegedly treasured freedom of speech and freedom of the Press from one organisation in particular.

‘Leveson’ in effect is no different to the terrorists who try to intimidate people into silence, into not saying anything they disapprove of.  An FBI agent once said that the only difference between the Islamist terrorist and the Islamist is that the terrorists carry AK47’s….meaning that their aims were exactly the same,  just the methods were different….as with Gerry Adams who has given up the bullet for the ballot…but his aim is exactly the same…a united Ireland….the fight goes on.

You may remember this when Islamic countries tried to silence critics of Islam….

UN-acceptable censorship: The United Nations tries to outlaw criticism of Islam

What is the difference between the terrorists in France murdering people who criticise Islam and those who use other methods to silence them?  Are these countries also ‘unIslamic’?

The only difference is the lack of AK47s…however that threat was implicit, explicit even, as the head of the OIC stated….

“If the Western world fails to understand the sensitivity of the Muslim world, then we are in trouble,” he told the AP. He said provocative insults are “a threat to international peace and security and the sanctity of life.”

 

Sadly nearly all commentators refuse to admit that ‘peaceful Muslims’ can have the same aims as the violent ones.  Here is a comment from today’s Spectator which tries to make that split:

Mohammed Moussaoui, head of the French Council of the Muslim Faith, said his organisation deplored the magazine’s treatment of Islam ‘but reaffirms with force its total opposition to all acts and all forms of violence’….

As Muslim leaders know, one of the jihadis’s aims is to persuade others that they speak for Islam – to promote the idea or a war between Islam and freedom.

 

The Spectator is trying to make a case that Islam promotes freedom of speech and religion.  It does not.  Until commentators and politicians  begin to admit Islam has a problem with certain freedoms there will be no solution.

Let’s remember what a British Muslim thought of freedom of speech…it’s all a bit fascist….

Sarah Joseph, editor of the British Muslim lifestyle magazine Emel, wrote in the Guardian: “Some countries that have reprinted the images – Spain, France, Italy and Germany – have a nasty history of fascism . . . Now the great shape-shifter of fascism seems to have taken on the clothes of ‘freedom of speech’.”

 

 

Back to the BBC and their resident expert on all things Islamic and terrorist, Frank Gardner, who speaks up telling us that there have been several attacks in France…mostly by psychologically disturbed people who have their own personal issues and problems…nothing to do with Islam you understand.  He goes on to tell us that the cartoons in Charlie Hebdo were ‘insulting’….no, they were not intended to insult Muslims but to raise serious issues in a satirical and comic manner.

Then I heard a presenter ask ‘How much of an issue are the disenfranchised Muslims who become jihadis, go to Syria and then return?’

Now just where did the presenter get that word ‘disenfranchised’ from and why does she associate it with French Muslims who become Jihadis?  It is almost BBC policy to make that link. Right there you see the problem with many at the BBC who blame society for the ‘anger and alienation’ of Muslim youth rather than putting the blame where it belongs…in Muslim teachings and with the Muslim terrorists themselves…..a tendency to shift the blame that  the Telegraph notes…

[Some ] contextualise the attacks against the backdrop of alienation felt by many French Muslims.

Underlying all this was a persistent assumption. Islamist attacks are only ever reactions, only ever brought about by provocation from the West. All the way back to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s contract on the head of Salman Rushdie in 1989, we have accepted the idea that it is up to authors, artists and cartoonists to justify themselves in the face of threats and real violence.

“What a shame this much blood has had to be spilled for us to realise, finally, that we are digging our own graves when we allow thought to be crushed by accusations of unbelief, calling people infidels, and when we allow opinion to be countered with violence.”

 

As the New Statesman says there is an essential discussion to be had about society and what it should look like…..the question is will an influx of people with an ideology at odds with a secular democratic society endanger the cohesion and stability of that society?:

We have to stop mistaking healthy criticism of religion for racism, and must not let discussion of immigration and security elbow out the more important debate on secularism and citizenship.

 

David Goodhart, on the BBC, said we must stand up for our values and remind ourselves that the open, liberal society is superior to any other….

Is Britain becoming too diverse to sustain the mutual obligations behind a good society and the welfare state?

The nation state remains irreplaceable as the site for democratic participation and it is hard to imagine how else one can organise welfare states and redistribution except through national tax and public spending. Moreover, since the arrival of immigrant groups from non-liberal or illiberal cultures it has become clear that to remain liberal the state may have to prescribe a clearer hierarchy of values.

The gulf between conservative Islam and secular liberal Britain is larger than with any comparable large group….for those of us who value an open, liberal society it is time to explain why it is superior to the alternatives.

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.

‘Love is stronger than hate’

Ten people from Charlie Hebdo lost their lives in the pursuit of a civilised society.  Let’s hope their sacrifice, knowing the dangers they faced, is not forgotten and all too soon turned back upon them by the voices of compromise and submission.  Let’s hope that their values and beliefs are not buried with them.

Peter Allen on 5Live told us that this was an ‘attack on our fundamental beliefs’..…good for him…but just how long will that attitude last?

The Boston Bombs were, according to the BBC, the work of right wing white supremacists….as ‘all the evidence pointed to’ according to Evan Davis and Mark Mardell.

Similarly a mosque is allegedly firebombed in Sweden and the implied culprits are ‘far right, anti-immigration, neo-nazis’…never mind no one has been arrested and there is absolutely no evidence that indicated this….and what is more the BBC refuses to investigate the well known violence of the left in Sweden…or that of Muslim immigrants…instead we have one sided reports such as this:

Swedish mosque hit by arson in Eskilstuna, injuring five

An arsonist set fire to a mosque in the Swedish town of Eskilstuna on Thursday, injuring five people, police said.

 

Who is to blame…the BBC are quick to leap to conclusions:

The incident comes amid a fierce debate in Sweden over immigration policies.
The far right wants to cut the number of asylum seekers allowed into Sweden by 90%, while mainstream parties are intent on preserving the country’s liberal policy.
Police are treating the incident as arson but no arrests have been made so far, Mr Franzell added.

 

The BBC is pretty keen on telling us of the ‘threat’ from the Far Right in Sweden….

Sweden protest after three mosque fires in one week
Swedish anti-racism campaigners have staged a big rally in central Stockholm after three arson attacks on mosques.

Swedish neo-Nazis: Moves to de-radicalise amid far-right rise
Sweden is still home to an active and at times violent neo-Nazi movement, and there are fears that rising popularity of the Sweden Democrats will also benefit the extremists.

 

However all is not as it seems, never mind the BBC’s refusal to warn us about Muslim violence in Sweden, specifically anti-Semitic violence.

Did the Far Right fire bomb the mosque in Eskilstuna?

It seems not.  Police now say the fire was an accident….and note the words of a Shia Muslim who states that the danger to him and his brethren comes from other Muslims not the Far Right….

Swedish police: mosque fire was an accident. Muslim leader: threats comes from other Muslim groups, “not from extreme right”

“After the whole Twitter Left mobilized, including a couple of Ministers, who collectively screamed “racism” and blamed the Sweden Democrats, the Police announced that the fire in Eskilstuna mosque was not the result of an attack nor did it have a political motive. Today, the state Police says that it believes it was an accident. …

Meanwhile, Ali Hussein from the Shiite community in Malmo said in an interview with Sydsvenskan regarding threats to mosques:

‘- For large celebrations, we usually have guards out there but thankfully we have not had any direct threats. Possible threats come from other Muslim groups and not from the extreme right. And we of course hope that we avoid threats,’ he says.”

 

 

Makes you wonder if those other attacks were real or engineered for effect…..much as the ‘arson’ attack on the Darool Uloom school in London may have been just after the murder of Lee Rigby….any possibility it was done to incriminate the EDL and ‘remind’ people that Muslims are the real victims of terrorism having to suffer the enormous backlash and resultant, irrational, Islamophobia.  We’ll never know as the police haven’t released the identities of those arrested, nor have they been charged…..possibly in the interests of ‘communtiy cohesion’ ala returnees from syria.….  ‘The police and MI5 are being careful about how to handle the returnees because they don’t want to disturb community cohesion.

No sign of a correction from the BBC yet concerning the cause of the mosque fire.

The BBC has been blitzing us with tales of doom about the ‘crisis’ in the NHS…a target of 95% of patients seen to inside of 4 hours at A&E….the crisis being that only 92.6% has been achieved.

The NHS is crumbling…never mind it was recently named as the best health service in the West and other health services do not have anywhere near as stringent targets.

Notably the BBC completely ignored the good news about the NHS being the best.

And kept on ignoring the story.

No coincidence that Labour launched their election campaign with its central theme being the NHS  a day before the figures for A&E targets were released….but the BBC doesn’t seem to have noticed that engineered ‘coincidence’ merely saying the timing could  ‘hardly be worse  for David Cameron’, as if it was a matter of luck.

Also curious that the Macmillan Cancer Support charity has today released a broadside at the NHS demanding more money for the looming disaster that is approaching as cancer rates rise….and the BBC has been giving this claim plenty of airtime.

You remember the MacMillan Cancer Support charity…the one that teamed up with Miliband at PMQs in 2011……As Guido noted:

Labour Cancer Stitch Up Unravels

With Miliband using all of his questions at PMQs to pin down the Prime Minister on figures from Macmillan Cancer Care that suggest 7,000 patients will be losing out on benefits, the attack was clearly planned in advance. Suspiciously quickly, as in within three minutes after the PM sat down, Mike Hobday from Macmillan was on the Daily Politics defending Miliband’s use of their figures.

 

Is the BBC being biased?  In reality it doesn’t have to be openly biased…it just  has to highlight and possibly exaggerate the problems that the NHS is suffering and keep them in the headlines for as long as possible…..helped by charities and other groups that seem to daily be revealing new ‘crises’ in the NHS and all reported by the BBC with little to no challenge.

Doing so will create an air of panic and doom and the belief that the NHS is under threat even if it is not in reality.  With an election coming the BBC knows that is a powerful message.

An example of the BBC’s desperate twisting of the facts…..The BBC is making a huge fuss about these A&E figures…the targets not being met…and yet here their health correspondent, Nick Triggle, asks the question….‘Is the obsession with NHS targets justified?’    He concludes they have good and bad points but are a blunt instrument that can have detrimental effects on other parts of the NHS that suffer as resources are concentrated in one area to meet a specific target.

Curiously a week later, as Labour launches its election campaign, he has a change of heart asking ‘A&E: Does missing the target matter?’   This time he concludes they very much matter….‘It is these figures that are sending a shudder across the NHS and government.’

Curiously as I listened to various discussions on this subject during the day the condition of the Welsh NHS, under Labour control, was dismissed as irrelevant by Norman Smith, and other BBC reporters, telling us the situation has gone beyond party politics and is about who has a grip on the NHS in order to deal with the crisis…..erm…so it is political then…..it was after all Norman Smith who stated that the missed targets in A&E would have ‘profound political ramifications’.  The BBC then went on to defend the Welsh NHS telling us of the wonders that the Labour government had done to try and restore a proper service.  The A&E figures from Wales are seemingly irrelevant to the BBC.

Something to chew on as you watch, listen or read BBC reports on the NHS.

Labour claims about the NHS and what the Tories intend to do with it are even less credible than claims Man Utd will sign Ched Evans.

The BBC  rather disengenuously tells us that

Reports over the weekend suggested that Labour is set to make the health service a key election battleground should come as no surprise – nor should the timing.

In fact, some commentators believe, after the economy, the NHS could be the most important issue in the election campaign.

 

Well far from ‘reports over the weekend’ revealing Labour’s plans to place the NHS at the centre of its election campaign, it has been well known for years that this would be the case…the BBC after all has been bringing us NHS ‘disaster’ stories practically everyday and has been running  an ‘NHS Winter Tracker’ which informs you of the state of the NHS in your region…why would the BBC do that?  Because it thinks the bare figures, unadorned by explanation and reasons, would lead you to think the NHS was in meltdown.

So let’s shed a bit of light on the subject ourselves as the BBC fails to do so….the NHS is important, and Labour claims the Tories will cut the NHS and privatise it…….but isn’t that just a little hypocritical of Labour when they themselves would spend less than the Tories and were eager to privatise it?

Labour has been accused of scaremongering:

Labour accused of ‘scaremongering’ after claiming the NHS will be ‘sunk’ if the Tories win the general election 

Labour’s Health Minister, Andy Burnham, says:

‘If the NHS stays on its current course it will be sunk by a toxic mix of cuts and privatisation.’

 

Now that’s pretty curious because in 2010 the same Andy Burnham in an interview with the New Statesman said:

Burnham:  Cameron’s been saying it every week in the Commons: “Oh, the shadow health secretary wants to spend less on health than us.”

NS:  Which is true, isn’t it?

Burnham:  Yes, it is true, but that’s my point.

 

So he admitted then that Labour would spend less than the Tories on the NHS.

But what of his claims that the Tories are privatising the NHS?

We looked at this earlier, ‘The NHS Has Been Privatised….Vote Labour!’, illustrating the BBC’s abysmal lack of truthfulness in their reports when using this headline,  ‘A third of NHS contracts awarded to private firms – report’ to lead into a report that actually admitted only 6% of NHS contracts by value were given to private companies.

But what did Labour say in its 2010 manifesto, when Burnham was still Health Minister?….bearing in mind that Labour complains loudly that just the act of reforming the NHS is problematic….

‘We will continue to press ahead with bold NHS reforms. All hospitals will become Foundation Trusts, with successful FTs given the support and incentives to take over those that are under-performing. Failing hospitals will have their management replaced. Foundation Trusts will be given the freedom to expand their provision into primary and community care, and to increase their private services – where these are consistent with NHS values, and provided they generate surpluses that are invested directly into the NHS.
We will support an active role for the independent sector working alongside the NHS in the provision of care, particularly where they bring innovation – such as in end-of-life care and cancer services, and increase capacity. ‘
Where changes are needed, we will be fair to NHS services and staff and give them a chance to improve, but where they fail to do so we will look to alternative provision.

Burnham claims that Labour only used private contractors to drive down waiting times but that clearly isn’t the case…the intent was to use them when they were more efficient and more effective than NHS services….Foundation Trusts themselves being semi-privatised services….never mind the budget busting PFI’s used to fund new hospitals.

So in summary…..Burnham, Labour, wanted to cut NHS spending and to privatise its services….and yet he claims….‘If the NHS stays on its current course it will be sunk by a toxic mix of cuts and privatisation.’

And just for fun, what did Labour want to do in its 2010 manifesto with the GP’s who now fail us so badly?

The GP access guarantee will ensure everyone has the right to choose a GP in their area offering evening and weekend opening.
We will ensure the NHS suits the lives of busy families expanding further the availability of GP-led health centres open seven days a week ‘8 til 8’ in towns and cities.

So they recognised that the lack of  access to GP  services was failing patients and needed reform.

And what about immigration….surely all this is a bit ‘bigoted’….

We understand people’s concerns about immigration – about whether it will undermine their wages or job prospects, or put pressure on public services or housing – and we have acted. Asylum claims are down to the levels of the early 1990s and net inward migration has fallen. We will use our new Australian-style points-based system to ensure that as growth returns we see rising employment and wages, not rising immigration – but we reject the arbitrary and unworkable Tory quota.

Our new Australian-style points-based system is ensuring we get the migrants our economy needs, but no more. We will gradually tighten the criteria in line with the needs of the British economy and the values of British citizenship, and step up our action against illegal immigration. There will be no unskilled migration from outside the EU.

We recognise that immigration can place pressures on housing and public services in some communities so we will expand the Migration Impact Fund, paid for by contributions from migrants, to help local areas.

Because we believe coming to Britain is a privilege and not a right, we will break the automatic link between staying here for a set period and being able to settle or gain citizenship.

 

I wonder if that all counts as part of the ‘race to the bottom’ as Labour now so rudely calls the competing party policies on immigration…except their own of course.

Judging by today’s Labour love-in at the BBC its going to be a very, very long 5 months or so till the election…..Perhaps we should just take it for granted that the BBC will be biased in Labour’s favour and shut up shop for the duration.

Today was pretty full on and it might indeed take the dedicated forensic skills of Hercule Poirot to untangle the web of intrigue and dodgy reporting emananting from the bowels of the BBC.

On the day that Labour launched its election campaign proper with a major keynote speech from Ed Miliband that was intended to set the tone and the narrative for Labour’s drive to No 10, rather than examine that, the BBC preferred instead to concentrate on discrediting the Tory claim that Labour have £21 bn of unfunded  spending plans….essentially dismissing it out of hand.

But hang on…here’s lefty Dan Hodges expressing some scepticism about Labour’s spending ‘plans’….

‘The ordinary voters  want a very simple answer to a very simple question: “Where’s the money coming from?”

At the moment they’re not getting it. They’re getting characteristic obfuscation and confusion and contradiction.

As I write, Labour’s line appears to be: “We will spend a lot more money than the Tories. But when the Tories say we will spend a lot more money than them, they are lying”.

The 2015 general election campaign started today. Britain is still waiting to hear from the Labour Party and its leader.

 

The BBC  for a long time ignored commentary by Hodges and the many Labour websites that were highly critical of Miliband especially when the furore over the Unions came up….guess they’re still fighitng shy of bringing such messages to the public notice.

A similar forensic approach by the BBC to Labour’s claim that the Tories are taking us back to 1930’s style poverty is egregiouslyand obviously missing…but then it was the BBC itself that fed the line to Labour with Norman Smith making the highly inflammatory comment that…

“It is utterly terrifying, suggesting that spending will have to be hacked back to the levels of the 1930s as a proportion of GDP.

“That is an extraordinary concept, you’re back to the land of Road to Wigan Pier.”

Let’s remind ourselves exactly what he is talking about….

Labour’s spending as a proportion of GDP in 1998?  36%

The Coalition’s projected spending in 2019-20?        35.2%

In 1998 Labour, using the inherited Tory economic plans, took the economy into surplus with government spending at 36% of GDP…..Labour, and the BBC, now claim that the Tory budget target of 35.2% is ‘utterly terrifying’ and will lead to the road to ruin.

The BBC’s Nick Robinson knows the truth but is being extremely quiet about it saying only this in his latest ‘analysis’:

Now it’s true that the OBR forecast that under Tory plans spending would drop to 1930s levels but there’s one crucial rider – that’s as a share of national income which is, of course, massively higher than back then. What’s more, the share of GDP taken by spending was almost as low in the year 2000 when both Eds worked in the Treasury. As I recall the NHS still existed back then.

Once again, though, what will matter is the impression left with the electorate.

My job in the next few months will be try to separate the facts from the claims and the spin.

Yours will be to decide who, if anyone, you trust more.

A small paragraph at the bottom of an article….and hardly indepth.

Not exactly shouting the truth from the rooftops when the BBC is at the same time making huge waves trying to dismantle the Tory attack on Labour….this being their headlining story right now on their frontpage:

Miliband hits back at spending claim

 

The BBC could do so  much better…it’s not hard…here the Institute of Economic Affairs has a go:

Is George Osborne really returning us to a 1930s government? Accurate comparisons suggest a definite ‘no’

As the Economist has pointed out, spending is not the same as provision of services. According to that paper’s analysis, in 1939 almost half of government spending at 30% of GDP was actually debt interest (14% of GDP). That left 16% of GDP for all other government functions, compared to a 30% of GDP net of debt interest forecast for 2019/20. Far from slashing spending on services to 1930s levels then, state spending excluding debt interest as a proportion of a much larger GDP will be almost double what was seen in 1939 by 2019/20.

 

The BBC’s lack of interest (listen to that lack of interest in this supposed interview with Miliband (07:50) by Rachel Burden where she ignores all opportunities to nail Miliband…preferring to ask if he thinks he’d make a good PM…what do you reckon he said?  Didn’t really need her there for all the use she was….suggesting Labour was in the ‘centre ground’…very suspect when Blair has just made his comments about this criticising Miliband)  in analysing the 1930’s claim is all the more surprising when it spent so much time trying to undermine the Tory poster launch which stated that the Tories had cut the deficit in half….the BBC immediately mobilised and told us that the Tories were lying…despite at the launch Cameron openly stating that the deficit cut was as a proportion of GDP.

Here’s Norman Smith in action today…..

Perhaps Norman Smith felt a bit guilty about his earlier slip and decided to do his job properly….

BBC journalist booed during Ed Miliband speech

The BBC’s Norman Smith was heckled as he asked whether Labour was “scaremongering” about the state of the NHS in England.

He was called a “pillock” and told to “go back to London” by members of the audience in Salford.

The BBC never fails to disappoint. I caught BBC radio 4 “Today” mocking the Conservative’s claims regarding Labour’s budget busting spending plans should they get back into power; then turned on BBC1 News to hear them give weird Ed Miliband a chance to rubbish the Conservatives. Not a sniff of bias there, no sirree. Anyway here is a NEW Open Thread.

You may have noticed the prominence the BBC gave on Saturday to Labour’s statements on the NHS….or rather statements to come, for Labour were supposed to be making those statements today.  The BBC chose to highlight Miliband’s future statements in preference to the Tories’ actual launch of its election campaign….oh for sure the BBC paid that some attention….delighting in telling us that the Tory poster was dishonest….using an article in the Spectator to inform us about this ‘porkie’ on the Deficit.

Will the BBC be similarly rigorous in their research and make headline news out of the latest from the Spectator:

And now a porkie from Labour: spending is not (really) heading back to 1930s levels

But to the real point of this post…another article from the Spectator:

How the NHS silenced a whistleblowing doctor

And in the Mail:

Demonising of a decent man: His sin? Expressing concerns about the NHS in the Mail. But the venom, bile and hatred this provoked from his fellow doctors will stagger many readers … 

Not a sign of interest from the BBC so far.

Curious really when they have paid attention to what the good doctor has said before…if only to dismiss it out of hand taking his critic’s side…..

‘…a line picked up by the BBC’s health correspondent Nick Triggle. Writing on the Corporation’s website, he said: ‘GPs have already made it clear they will not be “border guards”, and without a simple system to check eligibility there is a risk the crackdown will cost more than it saves.’

He also claimed: ‘Those working in the NHS are much less exercised about the health tourism “problem” than politicians.’ Note those quotation marks around the word ‘problem’, and the implication that it is far from established that there is any such thing as health tourism.

When BBC presenter Sarah Montague interviewed Jeremy Hunt, she gave the word ‘problem’ particular emphasis, employing the spoken equivalent of quotation marks.’

 

 

A ‘whistle-blowing’ surgeon is silenced by the NHS and abused by GPs who started a campaign of vilification against him and the BBC prefers to spend a day asking if Steven Gerrard was a great footballer on Friday.

Always interesting what the BBC decides is a story worth investigating.

The Today programme this morning is giving Labour two large bites of the cherry on its election campaign…that’s of course after an already very large bite of that cherry over the weekend:

Labour has moved to place the health service at the centre of its general election campaign with a warning that the NHS would not survive in its current form under another five years of David Cameron.  In what is being described as a “start of the race” memorandum to activists, the party’s election strategy chief Douglas Alexander has called for a four-month campaign to “save the NHS” in the run-up to polling day on May 7 (see 0710). Andy Burnham is the Shadow Health Secretary. Nick Robinson is our political editor.

Wonder how challenging will the interview be…will the Welsh NHS get a mention?

Alright folks, 2015 begins and here is the first new OPEN THREAD of this fresh year. It’s going to be a BIG year here in the UK as the Nation goes to the polls to elect a new Government. We can be confident of but one thing – the BBC will do everything possible to damage the prospects of UKIP and the Conservative party. The floor is yours…

The BBC were quick to spot these trends:

Sydney cafe: Australians say to Muslims “I’ll ride with you”

And this:

#BBCtrending: The racist video that’s shocked Australia

Strangely not so interested in this trending video:

“‘How to Stab a Jew’ Going Viral on Palestinian Authority Social Media,”

The “resisters of occupation in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem” are spreading on Arab social media a frightening video demonstrating tactics on how to stab a Jew to death quickly and efficiently.

The 1-minute and 13-second video, as seen below, shows the “teacher” calmly walking up to a “victim,” stabbing him, and walking away.

Is Lenny Henry racist?

Lenny Henry believes that the colour of your skin determines how you act and think.

That is racist.  Even Obama thinks it is:

There’s no “authentic” way to be black, President Barack Obama told a group.

Henry complains that ‘news in Britain comes from one perspective. A perspective that is almost exclusively white, and predominantly male.’

Henry is clearly a proponent of the belief that Blacks should ‘act, and think, black’.…and that alters the way they see world events.

Black people, apparently, have a different way of looking at the world, one that means a black news reporter would report a story in a different way to a white one.

This approach has long been one used by black activists, black race hustlers, to bully other Black people who they see as ‘acting white’.

Here a black girl tells us that Henry is wrong….there is no such thing as ‘talking white’:

He complains that the BBC is white and male…’British news is dominated by a white, male perspective.   There is a better way.‘   Never mind the Today programme he guest edited has two female presenters, one of whom is of Pakistani origin….and numerous black news readers and presenters on the BBC as a whole….not to mention the Asian network.

He tells us that ‘We’ve had one day of diversity on Radio 4. Now for the other 364’

Fascinating his idea of diversity:

No whites included in the ‘Henry Plan’.

Does his concern widen out into nationality, religion or ‘other’ gender, left handers or right handers, redheads and blonds….are there enough lesbian welsh newsreaders or Muslims with conservative views on the BBC?

And just who is ‘black’ or one of this new race created by the diversity industry…the ‘Bames’.  Just how ‘black’ do you have to be to be considered authentically ‘black’?

Does the news have to be delivered in a Jamaican patois, the Queen’s English being a sign of ‘acting white’?

Henry is just another celebrity who has jumped on the ‘protest’ wagon as a way of furthering their career and gaining some sort of street credibility and authenticity ala Russell Brand…both of whom the BBC has prostrated itself before and delivered up the schedules for their personal use to rant and rave about their personal pet hates, thinking not required.

Maybe one day we will have a guest editor from UKIP or the likes of Tommy Robinson..somehow I doubt it……only one perspective allowed on the BBC…..the one that is of real concern….the one Henry misses out, and the one that does in fact put him and others of his new race, the Bames, into prominent positions because of their race…that of being Liberal.

365 days a year we get the Liberal perspective rammed down our throats and anyone who thinks differently is not just sidelined as Henry claims Bameans are, but actively maligned and attacked by the BBC….how often does the BBC claim people with black skin are perhaps closet racists or nazis that want to shoot immigrants…or indeed joke about shooting people who have  ‘unacceptable’ views about limiting immigration or Israel?  When they start doing that you might have a point about discrimination and the BBC Henry old chum.