I see the BBC is playing down the fact that this was a MUSLIM who cut the head of a fellow worker having tried to convert others to the religion of peace. The name for this is Fort Hood syndrome.

A thread to take us across the weekend. Detail the bias as you see it HERE!

Well, it must have been such a tough one for the Comrades. I am referring to Red Ed’s absolutely woeful keynote speech at #lab14 and that unfortunate business of “forgetting” to discuss the Deficit and Immigration! How to spin THAT one, then? As we get closer to next May, the BBC are going to have their work cut out portraying Miliband as the next Prime Minister. It’s a bit like Michael Foot all over again.

How’s about THAT then, boys and gals?

The BBC’s Dominic Laurie laments the British union’s lack of commitment and fervour when compared to the Frenchies:(50 mins)

‘What we know is that workers for French companies are willing to go all out in industrial action and to prolong it and do it for a long time…Air France will have to back down if the pilots are this adamant.

As we know in the history of France when you strike for a long time you tend to win…it works!’

Peter Allen interjects….‘It used to in this country…we should remember that’.

Presumably Allen was looking back nostalgically to the era before Thatcher and the days when there was no legislation to control the wildcat strikes that destroyed British industry….good old unions in the 70’s…the interests of the workers at heart not their paymaster’s in the Kremlin….LOL.

It did seem that Laurie had just a little bit too much admiration for the French strikers and was more than a little bit rueful that such belligerent attitudes didn’t manifest themselves more here in the UK.

Good for the BBC…standing up for the oppressed and downtrodden worker!

Here is a new Open Thread for your attention and focus!

Oh…Just seen it…beats dancing outside Buck House I guess.

The BBC has been making up the news and doing it in a way that paints David Cameron in a bad light….

From the Telegraph:

BBC criticised over coverage of David Cameron’s Queen gaffe

BBC accused of ‘speculation’ after claiming David Cameron said that the Queen cried when told about Scottish Independence

The BBC is facing criticism after suggesting that David Cameron said it was great to hear the Queen ‘tear up’ after he told her Scotland had voted against independence.

Peter Hunt, the BBC’s Royal Correspondent, said on Twitter that the BBC’s “finest ears” believed he had said: “I’ve never heard someone tear up like that. It was great”.

Lord Stern is an ardent climate change proponent, never happier than when painting the doomiest, blackest, most alarming scenarios when predicting the future due to climate change…all so that we are ‘encouraged’ to jump aboard his band wagon and back the rush to renewables and the end of fossil fuels.

Stern is paid for his troubles by hedge funder Jeremy Grantham, who set up the Grantham Institute and is intent on combating all that sceptical climate misinformation defeating their efforts to save the world……though ironically he tells us that nothing is more important than the oil that funds his climate institute….

Our first responsibility is to make money for our clients….and nothing is more important than oil.

Stern is in a double act with the Institute’s media ‘communicator’ Bob Ward, who isn’t a scientist, and yet gets lots of time on the BBC…and was responsible for the attacks against Lord Lawson after his appearance on the Today programme.

So by no stretch of the imagination could Stern be called a climate sceptic.

Which was why I was somewhat surprised to hear Evan Davis describe him as ‘remaining pessimistic about the science of climate change’ when introducing him this morning on the Today show. (08:51)

Several issues with that….there is no way anyone at the BBC could come to that opinion that Stern was a climate sceptic, certainly not one of the BBC’s ‘top’ current affairs journalists on the BBC’s ‘prestige’ news programme.  You might conclude that the labelling of Stern in such a way might be deliberate in order to make the audience think..‘Well if such an eminent man is sceptical about the science and yet he thinks we should deal with it anyway…perhaps I should too.’

Call me cynical.

Another issue is that Stern is not a scientist, he deals with the economics just as Lord Lawson does…which is why Lawson’s think tank is called ‘The Global warming Policy Foundation’.  Therefore why is Lawson persona non grata whilst Stern gets a privileged place at the microphone?

Then there is the issue of Stern’s association with Jeremy Grantham and his institute which went unmentioned by Davis.  Grantham isn’t just supportive of the idea of climate change,  he is yet another fanatic and one who puts his money, millions of it, where his mouth is…funding attacks on climate change sceptics, such as Lawson, with the intent to shut them up…which, courtesy of the BBC, is what has happened and Lawson is in effect banned from the BBC’s airwaves.

And curiously that turns out to have been a probable motivation behind getting Stern onto the programme, his job to counter comments by Bjørn Lomberg, once a green guru but now more sceptical….an ‘old foe’ of Stern’s as described by Davis…whom, he ‘suspects’, Stern doesn’t much respect,  a curiously second hand insult there from Davis.

Lomberg said countries with high GDP growth have high emissions of CO2…cutting that CO2 will cut GDP and stop the lifting of millions out of poverty….China’s growth is based on coal.

Davis interprets…‘He’s saying the richer countries pollute more and produce more CO2…’

No, he didn’t say that.  He said those countries with high GDP growth…meaning those countries with developing  economies with high GDP growth, because they are growing…that is not the same as talking about established economies like those in the ‘West’ or Japan, Korea etc….China high GDP but per capita it is very poor….the government is rich, the people still poor.

Stern tells us that, well, Lomberg is not an economist (A good thing I’d suggest), and anyway he’s wrong about China.

Except he’s not.  China’s growth was based on enormous expansion of its coal fired power generation.  It’s famous for that, you don’t need to be an economist to know that….as the BBC told us in 2007…and China isn’t described as ‘rich’ then but growing…..

China is now building about two power stations every week…. Rich nations had to set an example of low-carbon development for China to follow

It’s not just semantics…the developing nations charge for growth is more polluting than established economies trundling along at a steady pace..having already polluted to get there…but the way Davis phrases things it seems the ‘guilt’ is being firmly placed on those established economies…the ‘rich’ ones….China is of course still ‘developing’ but already the world’s biggest polluter…and now quite rich as a nation but, as said, per capita very poor….and so under Davis’ interpretation it is not rich and therefore not a ‘polluter’.  If you call CO2 pollution that is.

Some double standards from the BBC when it comes to who it lets onto its programmes to discuss climate change and an Orwellian approach to interpretation of many aspects from Davis.

Here you go, pretty much on-time and awaiting your informed comments! It’s the Labour party conference this week so THAT should be interesting to watch how the comrades at the BBC cover their dear friends…

Alex Salmond inner self after the referendum

I’m still of the opinion that the BBC was leaning more towards Scottish independence than the Nats give them credit for…it would suit the BBC pro-Europe stance….divide and rule…splitting up the UK into small parts that are easy to pick off.

Throughout the run up to the referendum Salmond and Co were given an easy ride without too much rigorous questioning whilst the pro-Union campaign was ripped into.

When Cameron announced the new deal for Scotland before the referendum the BBC roundly panned it…based it seemed on the fact that a few Tory backbenchers opposed it…the same backbenchers who the BBC normally dismisses as a fringe bunch of rightwing backbenchers out to make trouble.

The BBC decided that the legislation for this deal could never be pushed through…however you might have thought that with all three leaders backing the promises and whipping their colleagues in to vote for it, it must stand a good chance of getting through the House….I can’t quite see why the BBC is so pessimistic.

After the referendum the BBC devoted most of its coverage to the impossibility of Cameron fuflilling his promises and the hopelessness of the No campaign.  I didn’t hear anything about the credibility of Salmond’s promises nor of the way he ran his campaign, hearing next to nothing of the bullying, intimidation and lies that the SNP indulged in….could Salmond fulfill those promises, were his figures on North Sea oil, the NHS and the economy credible?  The BBC didn’t seem too excited about exploring such issues.

The BBC did seem intent on stirring up Scottish nationalist’s anger by presenting the referendum as somehow undemocratic…er…because one side lost the vote…by a good 10%.  Apparently we now have to think of the 45% who wanted independence and not the 55% who don’t, and mould our policies to suit that 45%…there is much ‘negative anger’ out there we were told…and the BBC will not miss a trick in trying to whip that up into yet more anger about the result…Alex Salmond is already claiming ‘we was robbed’…the BBC’s asks…‘With all that anger the big question is ‘Can the Yes campaign work together for a united Britain?’….apparently we can no longer be Britain despite the vote to be British….Viewpoint: What now for Britishness?   Curious how democracy doesn’t work for the BBC.

Jon Pienaar came out after the vote telling us that Cameron was targeting Labour, he had ‘weaponised’ the politics by announcing he would seek to answer the ‘West Lothian Question’…. he isn’t looking for a consensus according to Pienaar who seemed to be making it up as he went along and  interpreting things in a way that sexed up his reports never mind that their wasn’t as yet any evidence that what Pienaar was saying had any basis in truth…it was mere conjecture presented as fact by Pienaar.

Pienaar cornered a Labour MP (can’t remember who) and tried to get him to say this was Cameron playing politics but the Labour MP steadfastly refused to say that and seemed aggrieved that Pienaar would seek to politicise this himself.

Perhaps the MP had already had a memo with the official Labour line….. that Labour’s then policy was to support the idea of English votes for English laws.

How do we know that?  Because due to a bit of a cock up two Labour MPs repeated exactly the same lines in the same interview with Sheila Fogarty. (3 hrs 53 mins)

Fogarty had Frank Field in to give us some spiel…he stated that we know Scotland can look after itself, the big question is how England can look after itself, Cameron has snatched victory from defeat, Labour must put its Scottish privileges over the English (that Labour Scottish MPs can vote on English laws) on the table and that Ed Miliband must represent the English party in England.  This is the project where Cameron can screw UKIP.  (In other words his gameplan is not to ‘weaponise’ the WLQ and target Labour, in Labour’s opinion…it is to target UKIP)

Then in came Labour’s Siddique Khan who hadn’t heard what Frank Field had said and launched straight into the exact same spiel…in a different way of course…..Cameron snatched victory from defeat, Scotland can look after itself, Labour’s Scottish privileges must be negotiated, Miliband must represent the English Party in England…and he even said Cameron is out to screw UKIP.

Fogarty and Field leapt in to close him down eventually in a bit of a panic as they realised he was reading from the same Labour script.

This was clearly a template message that Labour had concocted and sent out to its MPs to deliver if buttonholed by the Media…in their own words obviously…or not so obviously to some apparently.

The main message?  Labour supports Cameron’s wish to have only English MPs vote on English laws….and that this is about ‘screwing UKIP’ not Labour….not the message Pienaar was trying to claim Labour had.

Of course that seems to have changed now with Miliband opposing such a move.

Fogarty failed her big test there…any reporter worth her salt would have leapt in and demanded to know if this was the official Labour position if we had two MPs parroting the very same lines, almost to the word.  It is after all the major question of huge consequence as Fogarty alluded to in the interview when she kept asking if such a postion was really in Labour’s interest.

Fogarty’s wish to change the subject may just have been panic when she realised the interview was going awry but Pienaar has always been Ed Miliband friendly, Labour friendly.  I can’t say I’ve heard him utter much in the way of criticism of Miliband, in fact he ususally praises him…for price freezes on fuel and his Syria policy (opportunistic cowardice)….it has always been thus…when Labour was in power Pienaar would tell us that any policy announcement by the Tories looked good on initial impressions but if you delved deeper it started to fall apart…however Labour’s policies were a marvel of success and genius….and the fact that 12,000 manufacturing jobs a month were being lost in 2005 at the time of the election never got mentioned.

All in all I can’t say the BBC’s coverage of the referendum and all that has been anything but  somewhat one sided giving the SNP an easy ride, and now looks to be targeting Cameron whilst Miliband once again opportunistically changes his mind, doing a huge u-turn on ‘English votes for English laws’ backpeddling rapidly into the muddy waters of ‘consultation’ (post election naturally), and the BBC doesn’t notice even when the evidence is literally right in front of them.

From the Telegraph:

Miliband cornered over home rule

Labour leader refuses to say whether he backs PM’s plan to ban Scottish MPs from voting on English laws after referendum

Ed Miliband refused 13 times to say whether he would back plans set out by the Prime Minister for “home rule” in England in the wake of the Scottish independence referendum.

Maybe he missed the memo Frank Field and Siddique Khan received.