Category Archives: BBC bias

The Today programme decided it had to do a routine on the Magna Carta, (08:22) the BBC being then BBC they had a not so subtle undercurrent of disdain and amused contempt for the whole thing much as Gavin Esler did when talking of ‘British values’…‘whatever they are…smirk smirk’.

Historian David Starkey didn’t let them get away with their patronising attitude saying that ‘Tradition’ was a word that ‘you [Evan Davis] and this programme always treats with such contempt.’

Davis had begun by telling us that some people say that the signing of the Magna Carta was one of the defining episodes in the building of our democracy.

He immediately had to qualify that with a question as to what is ‘our’ and what is ‘democracy’?  Nothing is absolute with the BBC, an attitude designed to allow them to make equivalence with other cultures and say they are just as acceptable as ‘British values’…whatever they are.

David Starkey corrected Davis and said the Magna Carta had nothing to do with democracy, which is two a penny, but was important because it was the foundation of limited and responsible government.

Davis went on to ask ‘In a sequence of events would you put it [the Magna Carta] at the number one of importance or would you put it along the lines of…..’

David Starkey had to jump in there and exclaim…

‘Oh dear…this is like a Guardian football list of your 10 best favourite armpit scratching records…this is vulgar way of approaching this…..it’s immensely important.’

Starkey goes on to provide great value and more pokes in the eye for Davis and the other ‘expert’  Nicholas Vincent, medieval historian…..though a ‘Tudor expert’ Starkey seems to know more medieval history than Vincent…though perhaps Vincent’s thoughts are coloured by his less than impressed attitude towards the Magna Carta despite grudgingly admitting its ‘importance’.

Apparently David Starkey is making a series on the Magna Carta for the BBC next year…should be interesting.

From the Magna Carta website:

Magna Carta matters. It is the foundation stone supporting the freedoms enjoyed today by hundreds of millions of people in more than 100 countries.

Magna Carta enshrined the Rule of Law in English society. It limited the power of authoritarian rule. It paved the way for trial by jury, modified through the ages as the franchise was extended. It proclaimed certain religious liberties, “the English Church shall be free”. It defined limits on taxation; every American remembers that “no taxation without representation” was the cry of the American colonists petitioning the King for their rights as free men.

For centuries it has influenced constitutional thinking worldwide including in France, Germany, Japan, the United States and India as well as many Commonwealth countries, and throughout Latin America and Africa.  Over the past 800 years, denials of Magna Carta’s basic principles have led to a loss of liberties, loss of human rights and even genocide. It is an exceptional document on which democratic society has been constructed.

Nearly five hundred years later it was central to both the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution.  The newly-independent United States included many of its concepts in the 1791 Bill of Rights. In 1870 Bishop William Stubbs asserted “the whole of the constitutional history of England is a commentary on this Charter.”  In 1965 Lord Denning, the most celebrated English judge of the 20^th Century, described Magna Carta as “the greatest constitutional document of all times – the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot.”

Another lasting legacy is seen in the UN Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948. Speaking at the UN General Assembly as she submitted the UN Declaration, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt argued that “we stand today at the threshold of a great event both in the life of the United Nations and in the life of mankind. This declaration may well become the international Magna Carta for all men everywhere”.

And:

In a 2005 speech, Lord Woolf described it as “first of a series of instruments that now are recognised as having a special constitutional status”, the others being the Habeas Corpus Act, the Petition of Right, the Bill of Rights, and the Act of Settlement.

Some reaction to Starkey from his fans:

Here you go, a new Open Thread for the new week!

Mark Mardell made one of those casual but deliberate comments that lazily feed into the anti-Western flow of the BBC’s narrative blaming the West for everything wrong in the world:

After the first world war the imperial powers of France and Great Britain, greedy for oil, carved up the Ottoman Empire between them

Well no…and ‘carved up’?…the post war negotiations were intense and protracted and included Turkey.  Not only that but they attempted to take into account the various competing demands from different groups in the affected regions.

‘Lawrence of Arabia’, who was no friend of Imperialism, and was deeply involved in the negotiations, said in a letter to the new commissioner of ‘Irak’ in 1928:

‘Bagdad requires the diplomatic, so much more than the adminsitrative understanding.’

So immediately you can see that concerns about diplomacy were a high priority.  In other words dealing with the demands of various factions within and without Iraq was recognised as the main challenge.

Good though that some liberal commentator, not having the close personal relationship with the area or the extensive knowledge of it that Lawrence had, feels better able to pronounce judgement on events of the day with that extraordinary hindsight they all have.

Lawrence believed that the negotiations and final plans drawn up by the allies were the best that could be achieved and were a ‘success’:

‘As I get firther and furhter away from things the more completely do I feel that our efforts during the war have justified themselves and are proving happier and better than I’d ever hoped.  And some of this good progress is surely due to my keeping out of an area that I care too much for?’

By coincidence the Sunday Telegraph has a book review of ‘Baghdad’ by Justin Marozzi.

Baghdad, long portrayed as the centre of the Muslim ‘golden age of science’ had, of course, a much more chequered history, most of it soaked in blood…and much of that ‘science’ being inherited by the Muslim conquerors fom the previous civilisations and kept alive by Christian and Jewish scientists and scholars….‘much of this was in spite of Islam, not because of it.’

What it also says, which is of interest here, is that after WWI the British took over and ‘busily set about improving things, from sanitation, bridge building and road repairs to irrigation, constitutions and government’….also stopping cruelty to animals and abolishing slavery that was still rampant there.

History is not what the BBC so often likes to portray.  Which brings us onto Mardell’s ‘greedy for oil’ comment.

Oil played little part in the thinking. The only known oil was in Iran at the time.  Iraq was suspected to have oil…only found in 1927, and the Brits, so greedy for oil, gave Iraq independence in 1932.

The Arabian peninsular was also known to have areas where oil was seeping from the ground and yet was not added to the Imperial ‘want list’, being allowed to form its own government.

Exploring the issues about oil exploration and exploitation I came across this BBC article which claimed that:

For nearly 50 years the Iranian oil industry was controlled by the British Anglo-Persian Oil company.
You can still see the names of British companies on some of the older plant. But the British only paid $75,000 (£40,000) for the original 60-year concession – and a small share of the profits.
To this day, that is the source of enormous bitterness in Iran.

Just the usual deliberately uninformed BBC attack on the British at play in the Middle East.

The truth about oil production in Iran/Persia tells a completely different tale:

Sir Arthur Hardinge, then the British Minister in Tehran, helped D’Arcy’s team to meet with Persia’s Prime Minister Amin al-Sultan. Marriott is reported to have paid £10,000 to the Persian government officials to secure a concession.  

On 28 May 1901 the concession was signed by the Shah. It granted D’Arcy to explore, drill, produce, and export petroleum in Iran (with exception of five northern provinces close to Russia) for a period of 60 years. D’Arcy was required to form a company within two years for this purpose. The Persian government was to receive £20,000 in cash, £20,000 in shares from the company, and 16% of profits made by the first or any other company formed by this concessionaire. Kitabchi Khan was rewarded too; he continued to be on D’Arcy’s payroll (£1,000 a year) but acting as representative of the Persian government! D’Arcy formed the First Exploration Company in May 1903 with a capital of £600,000, half of which belonged to him. 

Reynolds had to hire local laborers and security guards and pay to tribal chiefs for their cooperation. He also put together a technical team of Polish and Canadian drillers, an Indian doctor, and a wiry American engineer C.B. Rosenplaenter as his deputy. 

The first concession to explore for oil was given in 1901, it was only in 1908 that oil was actually found after huge expense and many unproductive drilling attempts.

The commercial enterprises that set out to drill for oil did so at enormous cost to themselves, funding all the equipment, manpower, expertise and other operating costs, risking huge losses if the drilling was unsuccessful, the costs being born by the investors whilst Iran took a profit as well as concession payments.

The oil companies were hardly exploiting Iran which in no way could have found or utilised the oil itself.

The investment by a western, commercial company of at least £600, 000 in 1903 was of course an enormous sum of money….making a mockery of Mardell’s casual assertion that this type of thing was just ‘greed’ and gives the lie to the BBC article that claims that Iran was somehow shortchanged in its dealings with the oil companies…they after all negotiated the deals themselves with the companies.

The BBC makes it sound so easy…just wander into a country at will, scoop up the oil, flog it at a high price, keep profits for yourself and dish out a few glass beads to keep the natives happy.

Not quite the truth.

Seen this?

Kirsty Young’s castaway this week is the Palestinian author and human rights activist, Raja Shehadeh. Born in Ramallah in the West Bank, his life and writing has been dominated by displacement, struggle and a search for justice. His father was murdered in 1985 and aside from chronicling the unhappy history of his family and his homeland, he’s also co-founded the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq – which monitors and documents violations by all sides in the Middle East conflict, publishing reports and detailed legal analysis on its findings.

Quite.  See he threw in a bit of Wagner…..

‘….a country that cannot tell its own stories; a land so debilitated by anxiety and stupefied by relativism…’

We had a quick look at the BBC’s ‘Dateline’ before [H/T Is the BBC biased?] and its denouncements that any investigation into the Trojan Horse schools is divisive and Islamophobic.  Gavin Esler made no attempt at impartial adjudication, his mind already made up that there is no such thing as ‘British values’…however he declared that to promote such values would be at the expense of Muslim values….so figure the logic of that if you can.

One comment did stand out, from American commentator Jef McAllister, who claimed that ethnic minorities all lived together in Britain because they were afraid of the native’s racism.

No…they live together because that’s where the work is, where the cheap accomodation is and because they want to be amongst their own kind.  So if there is any ‘racism’ surely it must be their own, wanting to live with ‘their own kind’….if that is ‘racism’.

That aside the attitude of see nothing, hear nothing and say nothing concerning the Trojan Horse scandal is something that has been around a long time and in fact is what allows such events to happen as the ‘Liberal Establishment’ looks away and refuses to condemn such behaviour if it possibly can.

In 2008 Nick Cohen wrote this:

Self-Censorship And The BBC

It looked at those very same attitudes that silently endorsed extremism in our midst:

• It makes no sense until you understand the moral contortions of the postmodern liberal establishment. In the past few years, the Foreign Office, the Home Office, the West Midlands Police, the liberal press, the Liberal Democrats, the Metropolitan Police, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Lord Chief Justice and the Archbishop of Canterbury have all either supported ultra-reactionary doctrines or made libellous accusations against the critics of radical Islam. All have sought to prove their liberal tolerance by supporting the most illiberal and intolerant wing of British Islam, and by blocking out the voices of its Muslim and non-Muslim critics as they do it.
• As the sorry history of The London Bombers shows, they have left us a country that cannot tell its own stories; a land so debilitated by anxiety and stupefied by relativism that it dare not meet the eyes of the face that stares back at it from the mirror.

Cohen’s article was based upon a film the BBC commissioned but never made, one about ‘The London Bombers’ of 7/7…..not made because it was deemed ‘Islamophobic’.

• The reporters convinced the families of three of the four bombers to cooperate. By the end, they agreed that the BBC’s account of their sons and brothers’ lives and deaths was accurate. Cafolla submitted five versions of the script. He was working up to a final draft when the BBC abandoned the project.
• The official reason is that the drama didn’t make the grade. The script is circulating in Samizdat form, which is how it reached Standpoint, and every writer and director who has read it disagrees. The journalists, however, say that BBC managers told them they were stopping because it was “Islamophobic”.

But there is one more important revelation that the BBC would not want to gain general acceptance…..that ‘radicalisation’ is not due to foreign policy as is so often claimed on the BBC, but is a result of other influences:

• The London Bombers, one of the most thoroughly researched and politically important drama-documentaries commissioned by British television. A team of journalists, at least one of whom was a British Muslim, reported to Terry Cafolla, a fine writer who won many awards for his dramatisation of the religious hatred which engulfed the Holy Cross school in Belfast.

• The reporters spent months in Beeston, the Leeds slum where three of the four 7/7 bombers – Sidique Khan, Hasib Hussein and Shehzad Tanweer – grew up. Unusually for journalists working within BBC groupthink, they didn’t find that the “root cause” of murderous rage was justifiable anger at the “humiliation” America, Israel, Britain and Denmark and her tactless cartoonists had inflicted on Muslims.

• Instead, they inadvertently confirmed the ideas of Ernest Gellner, the late and unjustly neglected professor of anthropology at Cambridge. In Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (1992), Gellner asked why a puritanical version of Islam was in the ascendant when godlessness was flourishing everywhere else. His answer was that Wahhabism and its ever more zealous theocratic variants could appear as modern as secular humanism. They represented the pure religion of scholars and the city, which would free Muslims from their peasant parents’ embarrassingly superstitious faith. Accepting fanaticism was a mark of superiority: a visible sign of upward mobility from rural idiocy to urban sophistication.

So perhaps it was the attraction of a pure, fundamentalist Islam that was in the eyes of its proponents an ideology as compelling and progressive as the ‘Enlightenment’ is for the sockless, loafer wearing chatteratti of the BBC (unless that is it clashes with ‘Muslim values’).

Not foreign policy then?  Bit awkward for the BBC to put that forward….no Bush to blame, no empire and colonialism to blame, no alienation or disenfranchisement, just a powerful wish to identify with their own values, which happen to be polar opposites to Western ones.

Many Muslims became ‘radicalised’ long before 2001 0r 2003…hence of course 9/11….but it should be noted that after 9/11 many British Muslims suddenly became ‘devout’ and practising Muslims, identifying not with Britain, or British values, but with Islam and its values…..Islamist Salma Yaqoob admitted that 9/11 turned her into an ‘activist’ for Islamic issues.

9/11 was intended to do exactly that, to recruit Muslims around the world to ‘the cause’, not necessarily to be violent but ‘awakening’ them and ‘radicalising’ them to give them the confidence that whilst in small enclaves in ‘foreign countries’ they were not alone…the ‘Umma’ was out there and waiting for them to join.  ‘Rise up’ and demand your Islamic rights was the message.

9/11 was a battle cry.

Lawrence of Arabia said of the Arabs:

• Such people demanded a war-cry and banner from outside to combine them, and a stranger to lead them, one whose supremacy should be based on an idea: illogical, undeniable, discriminant: which instinct might accept and reason find no rational basis to reject or approve.  This was the binding assumption of the Arab movement; it was this which gave it an effective, if imbecile unanimity.

Exactly what Osama Bin Laden with his ‘big idea’ provided Muslims with.

Shame the BBC is in full-on denial mode about the truth.

The Sunday Times says that tomorrow the BBC is going to announce its initiative to give all British Primary School children access to classical music.

It will send ‘ambassadors’ to promote the music in schools, its orchestras will visit schools, composers will talk to children and the BBC will make a documentary specifically to be played in schools.

This was first announced in October last year in Tony Hall’s ‘vision’ speech about how he saw the BBC inspiring the nation….

And then there are the Arts. You would expect me to care deeply about the Arts and you would be right.

We’ll launch a nationwide initiative to inspire school children with classical music, using our orchestras to bring the music to life.

It all sounds lovely and worthy but there are a couple of points which you could raise:

This is a Tony Hall project essentially inspired by his own interests, as admitted above, in the Arts.  Nice that the licence fee providers are funding his own passion.  What if he liked football or Hip Hop, would the BBC be touring the country promoting those activities and interests?

The BBC is supposed to educate, inform and entertain but surely through its broadcasting and not by sending out ‘missionaries’ to preach the message….isn’t this a bit of mission creep by the BBC and a misuse perhaps of its funding however ‘worthy’?

Hall says that classical music’s future is at risk unless more children from all walks of life have the opportunity to learn about it, music must not be for an elite or a minority.

All very poignant you might think at a time when schools are being hijacked by Muslim extremists, which the BBC refuses to recognise as a problem, and in fact does everything it can to downplay the threat posed by such activities.

The BBC obviously doesn’t value democracy, liberty, freedom of speech, freedom to leave a religion, women’s and gay rights…never mind the whole panoply of Western culure and civilisation, including music, so often banned by Muslims….or doesn’t value them enough to send squads around schools promoting such values.

Instead its journalists promote those Muslim ‘extremists’ and suggest perhaps, if that’s what the parents want,  that’s what we should let them do.

‘Dateline’ from BBC London [H/T Craig at Is the BBC Biased? who has an excellent write up of the programme] is a perfect demonstration of the BBC rewriting the facts….there is a vast amount of evidence to back up the claims made about the ‘Trojan Horse’ plot, indeed the BBC even reports them at times, however the BBC when it comes to commenting on and analysing the claims it remarkably finds ‘nothing to see here’…..and drives home the age old narrative that investigating such claims alienates Muslims and radicalises them…therefore we should turn a blind eye to what the BBC declares wasn’t happening anyway.

From ‘Is the BBC biased?’:

In typical Dateline fashion, everyone agreed that Michael Gove was wrong and that his call risks hurting Muslim feelings in the UK.

Gavin Esler had started this off right at the start with his eyes-rolling-at-the-thought-of-it introductory tone, but it got worse, much worse…

The Daily Mail/Independent, ultra-liberal-Conservative guest [Ian Birrell] said it was “absurd”, “futile” and “puerile”, calling it “wedge politics”, then praising diversity and denouncing “Islamophobia”. “I think people should remember”, he said, “as studies have shown, the most patriotic people in this country are Islamic immigrants from Pakistan”. [Ian is surely the BBC’s dream Daily Mail writer. If they were all like Ian they’d love the Daily Mail].

The BBC Turkish correspondent [Safak Timur] worried about “the alienation of Muslim people in Britain” and praised diversity.

The pro-Saudi guest [Mina] agreed it risks “alienating certain people” and can be “very dangerous”.

The liberal American [Jef] called it “dog whistle” politics.

The denunciations of Michael Gove and the defences of Islam went on and on and on, and Gavin Esler didn’t make any effort to counter his guests’ opinions, instead goad them on, often backing them up, occasionally laughing at Michael Gove – though, in fairness, he very briefly remembered his duties to impartiality later and asked one question [ever so mildly] about extremism [of some unspecified kind].

I think you might agree that facts were few and far between and what the BBC is broadcasting is nothing more than Liberal chatterati angst and guilt mixed in with Muslim’s promoting their own religious and community interests.

There is a separation between what the BBC news has reported and what the BBC then feeds us as its ‘interpretation’ of that news…that interpretation filtered through their own anxieties about not admitting anything that might portray Islam negatively and hence generate concern amongst non-Muslims who will demand ‘action’.

It’s not just the BBC that plays this dangerous game of brushing uncomfortable truths under the carpet…the ‘Establishment’ all play the same game from politicians in power for only a few years and who therefore refuse to do anything that might cause a ‘riot’ on their watch, to police officers such as those who refused to tackle the Rochdale sex abusers due to their race or religion.

The Times  reports that there is a ‘riot alert’ as ‘Trojan Horse anger grows….Birmingham is braced for a backlash’

It reports a ‘Whitehall source’ saying ‘We want to make sure right-wing groups aren’t going to exploit the situation.’

There doesn’t seem to be a problem with Muslim groups exploiting the situation.

It can’t be long before politicians are loosening the purse strings and doling out yet more money to ‘deprived’ communities in order to assuage the ‘hurt feelings’ and prevent the angry youth being radicalised by nasty non-Muslim white people demonising the religion of peace.

In the Telegraph Andrew Gilligan tell us in a powerful and revealing article:

‘The Truth Catches Up With The Trojan Horse Plot’

Not on the BBC it doesn’t if ‘Dateline’ is anything to go by.

Here is the BBC’s most recent verdict from Gavin Esler on the Trojan Horse claims :

‘The education secretary Michael Gove has reacted to the row about alleged Muslim extremist infiltration of schools in Birmingham, allegations so far unproved.’

‘The allegations are so far unproved.‘??????

No…they have been proved and the evidence is vast and telling.

The BBC is deliberately misleading the public on this issue, an issue of enormous importance and impact upon the future of this country.

Once again it’s good we are funding not only Tony Hall’s pet projects but his ‘journalists’ prejudices and Pravda-like attitude towards the truth.

This is from Labour Uncut…..I leave it to you to fathom out/enlighten the rest of us what is going on with the BBC, Labour in Wales and Julian Ruck:

UNCUT: Letter from Wales: Arts Council of Wales referred to Welsh Audit Office

by Julian Ruck

BBC Wales, whilst usually being keen to report on the minutiae of its director, Rhodri Talfan Davies’ day, is apparently not so enthusiastic about broadcasting the culture of endemic greed that seethes through its nationalist hallowed corridors at Head Office, Llandaff.

On Monday, I attended the press conference at the Senate and not being inclined to exercise the habitual mealy-mouthed and pretty syntax of Welsh media sycophancy and deferential hero-worship, I well and truly went for it.

Naming and shaming BBC Wales presenters and staffers was the name of the game, exposing their taxpayer bungs and making sure certain matters were finally rubbed in to the Welsh political scene was the intention, and not to mention openly exposing all those Dick ap Turpins of artistic impersonation and poetic delusion at the Arts Council of Wales.

Mission accomplished.

Welsh politicos have already filed a report on the Arts Council of Wales with the Wales Audit Office, and if there is no satisfaction here I’m told, a Public Accounts Committee may well be the next step.

About time too!

And did any of the spineless Welsh media platforms report any of this? Like hell they did. What? Bring the Crachach into disrepute, can’t have that now can we? We’ve all got season tickets on the Taffia Express gravy train too!

So much for democratic accountability.

So much for democratic scrutiny.

This is Wales.

Wake up Ed, for God’s sake wake up and see what Welsh Labour is doing.

This is well worth a read as it checks the BBC for EU bias.    ‘UKIP regarded as ‘Incompetent, venal and racist’’

Wonder did anyone else catch the BBC coverage of the “Prison overcrowding” issue on Today this morning? It was on at 8.10am. First, the Chief Inspector of Prisons Nick Hardwick was brought on and tossed several softballs, allowing him to parrot the Labour “incompetence” meme. Hardwick is very much on the side of making life as good as possible for the convicts. The sympathy exuded towards the line being retailed  by Hardwick by the BBC presenter was palpable. It was interesting to then contrast that with the hostility shown towards Conservative Prison’s minister Chris Grayling, who all in fairness put forward some reasoned points  – but the BBC was not having it, of course. At every level, the BBC is doing its’ damnedest to echo the various Labour attack lines on the Coalition.

The BBC have been to the fore in pushing the Labour meme about the alleged “incompetency” of Theresa May’s running of the Passport agency.  Now regardless of one thinks of THAT, isn’t it interesting that the BBC seem unable to deal with this partial explanation of the massive back up….

‘A surge in applications from migrants is fuelling the Passport Office crisis, it emerged last night. A record 207,989 foreigners were handed citizenship last year – a huge rise on the 82,000 seen in the year 2000.  Their requests for papers are contributing to the delays at the Passport Office, which is struggling to clear a backlog of 500,000 applications.”

Perhaps the BBC could investigate what is driving this surge in Immigration applications? If staff are overwhelmed then we should all understand why.