5 Live is having a shake up and a reshuffle  …..women are getting thinner on the ground and not much to keep Lenny Henry happy.

Derbyshire and Bacon are out….Adrian Chiles and Peter Allen doing Derbyshire’s shift on a job share basis….any bets Derbyshire won’t be working from Salford anymore?  Peter Allen slipping into Derbyshire’s high heels means there will be no shortage of comment on this site.

Sheila Fogarty is also off unfortunately, and no mention is made of Campbell.

Derbyshire told us of her departure today and said we could find details in the Press and on the Guardian’s website….not sure why anyone at the BBC would be promoting the Guardian website.

Richard Bacon and Victoria Derbyshire to leave 5 live

Richard Bacon and Victoria Derbyshire, two of the biggest names on 5 live, are to leave the station later this year.

Shelagh Fogarty will also move on in the autumn as part of a daytime shake-up for the BBC talk radio station.

Derbyshire said it would be “a huge wrench to leave”, while Bacon said he would “always be grateful” to 5 live.

The new schedule will see Adrian Chiles and Peter Allen host a new mid-morning programme, 5 live Daily, and a new afternoon show on every day but Friday.

Chiles will host 5 live Daily in the 10:00 to 13:00 slot on Mondays and Tuesdays, with Allen hosting for the rest of the week.

BBC Sport presenter Dan Walker and BBC Northern Ireland’s Sarah Brett will co-host the other new show, Afternoon Edition, from 13:00 to 16:00 on Monday to Thursday.

Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode’s Film Review show will retain the afternoon slot on Fridays after a new Friday Sports Panel between 13:00 and 14:00.

Tony Livesey will take on Allen’s current role as co-presenter of Drive, with Chris Warburton taking over Livesey’s slot on Weekend Breakfast.

Punditry show Fighting Talk will also have two new hosts in Georgie Thompson and stand-up comedian Josh Widdicombe.

“Victoria, Shelagh and Richard have all played such key roles delivering fantastic live radio and I wish them every success with their future projects,” said 5 live controller Jonathan Wall.

“This Autumn feels the right time to refresh parts of our schedule as we follow on from what’s already proving to be a wonderful sporting summer.”

“5 live has been a spectacular place to work, I’ve got nothing but good things to say about it,” said Bacon, whose new projects include a BBC One talent search for “Britain’s best amateur painter”.

“It’s been a hugely important part of my career and life, and I’ll always be grateful, and a listener.”

In her own statement, Fogarty said 5 live had given her “some of the happiest times and richest experiences” of her working life.

“I’m very sad to be leaving but it’s definitely time to do so,” she went on. “I’m spending the summer exploring a number of opportunities, before deciding what’s next.”

I tuned into the BBC Today programme this morning before 7am. I was informed that the savage murder of the three young Israeli boys “may” have been “an unauthorised kidnapping” that “went wrong” and thus is no reflection on the good name of Hamas. This is EXACTLY how the BBC responded to the IRA’s bombing of Canary Wharf if you will recall – they instinctively default to the position that any terrorist act carried out is somehow a rogue one, not planned and most certainly not authorised. Just wait for this story to develop when Israel responds to the Hamas barbarism and John Humphrys can sigh about how this “sets back the peace process”.

“Three dead Israeli teenagers responsible for innocent Palestinian deaths….”

The BBC moves on swiftly. It most certainly annoyed Cameron’s humiliation over Juncker and will give Labour one more chance today to rub as much salt into the wounds as possible. But the BBC is keen to allow Germans such as Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble to suggest that the UK can now trust Merkel to be more sympathetic to our aims. He was on Today this morning being given a very sympathetic hearing so that his siren voice could add to that chorus of those europhiles around Cameron who seek to delude us that things will somehow, magically, be different the next time the UK seeks to stop “the project” The BBC is deeply committed to the EU and plays a very clever and treacherous game.

I am sure you will have seen this from the BBC.

Islamist militant group Isis has said it is establishing a caliphate, or Islamic state, on the territories it controls in Iraq and Syria. It also proclaimed the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as caliph and “leader for Muslims everywhere”. Setting up a caliphate ruled by the strict Islamic law has long been a goal of many jihadists.

This suggests that only Jihadists want to see a global caliphate but surely this is not quite the case. Many Islamic scholars around the world also advance the idea of a caliphate, it’s just that the Jihadists are the cutting edge to achieve this. I wish the BBC was not so dhimmified that it fails to confront the core dynamic behind Islam – Dar al Harb.

Here you go, on-time and all ready to go, a NEW Open Thread. Please detail the bias here….

The BBC has a new series, The Honourable Woman, starting next Thursday.

It is about a Jewish woman on a one woman peace mission to the Middle East.  Wonder who the villains will be.

Here’s the Telegraph’s take:

Gyllenhaal plays Nessa Stein, a British citizen but an Israeli Jew by origin, whose father– a Zionist gunrunner – was murdered in front of her when she was a child. She has inherited his ill-gotten fortune and used it to create a foundation that forges relationships between Israel and Palestine. When we first see Nessa, she announces a contract to lay fibre-optic cables in the West Bank, but the ghosts of the past haunt her and the internecine plot shows that her father’s murderous legacy is a curse.

Another daunting aspect of The Honourable Woman was its subject matter, bound to provoke strong reactions. “[The Israel-Palestine question] is so polarising because everyone has such a tight grip on their feelings. Throughout the eight hours we veer from one way to another and people will say, ‘Oh my God, they are being totally pro-Israeli or totally pro-Palestinian.’ But because the piece has been written with such compassion, I hope people will loosen their grip on either side.”

This may sound naive but Gyllenhaal is aware that a few hours of drama is unlikely to aid the peace process and she was sensitive to the intransigence of the situation throughout filming.

Here’s the Guardian’s:

“It’s about Israel and Palestine, refracted through the prism of a family,” Blick explains, fully aware that this sounds like a tough sell. He reveals that he took the idea to Janice Hadlow, the controller of BBC2, who made two recommendations. “She said, ‘Not too much sand’, by which she meant, ‘Make it make sense to a UK audience,’” Blick says. And the other? “The other was, ‘Don’t kill too many children…’” he says, laughing.

It casts Gyllenhaal as Nessa Stein, a British businesswoman with a bird’s-eye view of the intractable conflict in the Middle East. Her father’s company sold munitions; Stein, though, wants it be a force for good, and has moved the company into telecommunications. It’s an eight-part thriller that finds as much drama in affluent London as it does in the West Bank, and articulates the conflict there in personal as well as political terms. It travels back and forth in time, revealing ghastly truths in a beguilingly casual way.

I am certain that it would be foolish to prejudge the BBC and the arts world when it comes to creating the ‘ghastly truth’ about Israel and the Palestinians, and all without killing ‘too many children’….based upon the nefarious activities of a Zionist father who flooded the Middle East with arms, a daughter who wants to right his ‘wrongs’, and a murdered Palestinian businessman.

Any bets there will be a Palestinian suicide bomber blowing himself up in a restaurant,  ‘driven’ to do the deed by the oppressive and vicious illegal occupation of the West Bank by the nazi-like, Zionist IDF.

Enjoy.

Mail: Police hunting for group of ‘Asian men’ who took a 17-year-old girl into woods and gang-raped her

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2673311/Teenager-17-taken-woods-gang-raped-group-Asian-men-Berkshire.html

BBC: Police seek group of men in Slough after teenager raped

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-berkshire-28072433

Muslim men might be more precise…..

The BBC’s early morning Labour Party Indoctrination broadcast, Wake Up To Money, is always worth a visit if you need a good laugh, the two usual presenters offering us a resolutely unusual world view….fortunately most of the guests, with some exceptions, talk a lot of sense…which is then completely ignored by the dynamic duo in charge.

Tuesday was an exception (34 mins) when the guest was brought in to bolster the BBC’s pro-HS2 stance and we had a bit of a love-in and not many hard questions about HS3, the newly proposed East/West high speed line.  As the guest, Sim Harris from Rail News, is a hardened advocate of HS2 we were hardly likely to get a reasoned and measured line from him….as his own thoughts on objectors to HS2 show.

WUTM has always been highly dismissive of the government’s claims about job creation and an improving economy, pouring large amounts of cold water, scorn and derision upon any ‘good news’….for instance still telling us we narrowly missed a triple dip recession even after we knew that there had not even been a double dip recession.

How different when it suits though.  On Wednesday the ‘Living Wage Commision’ pronounced that the government must ensure everyone gets a pay rise to a level determined by the LWC.

WUTM was doing a bit of cheerleading on Wednesday morning on their behalf. (05:47)

Some businessmen were brought in to tell us their thoughts…unsurprisingly they suggested it depended upon the state of the economy whereupon the BBC’s Adam Parsons leapt into action and said:

‘But we’re out of recession, there comes a time when we can’t keep saying we’re barely out of a recession…. because we are out of recession, there is growth’

Funny that the usual refrain  on the programme is just how ‘fragile’ the economy is…heard them say it several times this week.

Mickey Clark, the other presenter, added his thoughts and stated that we could afford to pay a living wage because the ‘jobs situation is so vibrant now’.

This is the same Mickey Clark who consistently, day in, day out, tells us that we can’t trust the government figures, that the jobs created are rubbish being all part time, ZHC or self employed, or worthless jobs like gardeners or painters.

How different when it suits.  Suddenly the economy is booming and the jobs market is vibrant and healthy.

And just who or what is the Living Wage Commission?  You might have thought from the way the BBC introduces it that it is an official government body….but it isn’t….it’s just the usual left wing pressure group campaigning for issues close to Labour’s heart.

The Church heads it, along with various charity leading lights, the head of the TUC, a Unison member, and one possible ‘righty’ from the British Chamber of Commerce.

The ‘Living Wage’ is of course a central Labour Party policy.

Good of the BBC to be so obliging in pushing the Labour Party agenda so discreetly.

Listening to BBC radio news I was outraged and astonished to hear Charlie boy had been bending the ear of those trusty yeoman charged with keeping HMS Britain on an even keel…the politicians.

The BBC revealed that David Blunkett told them that Charlie had been campaigning for more Grammar schools.

Imagine my surprise when looking at the Telegraph we find a different emphasis, or rather, a more honest report:

Prince Charles ‘consorted with Labour on climate change and grammar schools’

Former ministers reveal the Prince of Wales wanted tougher policies on climate change and the expansion of grammar schools

The BBC’s effort is more circumspect:

Prince ‘wanted more grammar schools’

The Prince of Wales tried to influence government decisions in areas including grammar schools expansion and GM crops, former Labour cabinet ministers reveal.

Why does the BBC dodge around the climate change part?  Could it be that the liberal BBC sees grammar schools as divisive and elitist whilst tougher policies on climate change meets with its approval and so a careful and less critical approach to Charlie boy’s  advocacy of this particular policy is warranted?

When climate change is one of the most contentious issues (despite the BBC trying to quash all debate) and the policies introduced to deal with the ‘problem’ are set to cost this country an ever increasing fortune surely the fact that Charlie has been putting pressure on government, with the willing co-operation of the Labour environment minister of the time, should be the headline news not grammar schools.

The BBC doesn’t want to stir up a fuss about climate and govenrment policies because it doesn’t want that whole can of worms opened up again and yet more doubts raised in the Public’s minds about what is being forced upon them.

The BBC  mentions climate but only as a minor point after complementary medicine…..

He discussed complementary medicine and climate with other Labour ministers.

and then again a long way down the report…and even then concentrates on GM crops:

Former environment minister Michael Meacher recalled that he and the Prince “would consort together quietly” to affect policy on climate change and genetically modified crops.

He said they worked together “to try and ensure that we increased our influence within government”.

“I knew that he largely agreed with me and he knew that I largely agreed with him,” said Mr Meacher. “We were together in trying to persuade Tony Blair to change course.”

Asked if there might be a constitutional problem in the Prince taking a political opinion, Mr Meacher replied: “Well, over GM I suppose you could well say that. Maybe he was pushing it a bit. I was delighted, of course.”