The BBC is still ignoring this:

From the Independent:

NHS means British healthcare rated top out of 11 western countries, with US coming last

From the Guardian:

NHS is the world’s best healthcare system, report says

From the Telegraph:

Britain’s NHS is the world’s best health-care system, says report

From the Metro:

Hate the NHS? Well, apparently Britain now has the BEST healthcare system in the world

One thing to note is the level of funding…..the UK’s being one of the lowest whilst being top for quality of care and efficiency, the US has the highest budget….and yet the US is the most inefficient, and only 5th for quality of care.

Nothing from the BBC…oh hang on…in June 2010 they did report this from the Commonwealth Fund:

UK health system is top on ‘efficiency’, says report

Why might they do that a month after Labour have been booted out of office?  Could it be they hope a bit of credit might go Labour’s way….Labour’s Andy Burnham seemed to think so in 2009 in reaction to a Commonwealth Fund report:

“This is fantastic news for the NHS and a worthy recognition of the professionalism of NHS staff, but it also shows the danger that the Tories’ ill-judged policies pose to patients.

“It is Labour that has put the NHS in the strong position the Commonwealth Fund shows it is in today.

“The experts’ judgement is telling – Labour NHS policies are working. The Tories’ policies would put patients at risk.”

Why report the very same thing in 2010 but not now?

Guess the BBC isn’t too keen to let the public see that the NHS is thriving under the Tories…sorry, the Coalition.

Instead of trumpeting the fact that the NHS may well be the best health service in the world the BBC has concentrated on this negative story all day in detail:

NHS ‘facing funding gap of up to £2bn’ in England

Curious editorial decision as to what to report and what not to report.

Guess there must be an election coming.

What is happening in Iraq causes problem for the BBC ‘s idol, Obama. ISIS attacks in Iraq have skyrocketed ever since the retreat was sounded by Obama in 2011 and he declared the war a success. Rather than examine the consequences of US withdrawal (which the BBC fully supported) it keeps going back to place blame on Bush and Blair. Furthermore, why doesn’t the BBC explore why Iran supports Assad and why other Arab states have funded ISIS? The issue is complex but the BBC seems determined to ensure that Obama gets a bye. And as for ISIS, why doesn’t the BBC ask why devotion to Islam creates such inhuman savagery? As is so often the case, the BBC uses bias by omission to sustain its own narrative.

Here you go, on-time and for your completion. Is the BBC bias bothering you? This is the place to detail it!

I suppose the opportunity was too great to resist? I saw John Simpson slobbering on about how Iran represents our best chance to “save” Iraq on the BBC news. Given that Obama and Cameron have thrown their weight in behind the Mad Mullahs as the salvation of Iraq, it was inevitable that the likes of the BBC would then row in extolling the virtues of the same regime that keeps Assad in place in Syria and which seeks to wipe the Jews off the map.

Did you hear of this on the BBC this morning?… I must have missed the enormous fanfare announcing the good news:

NHS pushes UK’s healthcare to top of the league table out of 11 western countries, with US coming last

Conducted by The Commonwealth Fund, the report ranks the UK first overall, scoring it highly for its quality of care, efficiency and low cost at the point of service, with Switzerland coming an overall second.

The US came last, as it has done in four other editions of “Mirror, Mirror” since 2004.

Looking hard on the website…but can’t find a report.

If the NHS had been last pretty certain that would have been headlining and Derbyshire et al investigating the ‘issues’ at length.

John Humphrys wasn’t having a very good morning today as he tried to manufacture a link between the 2003 invasion of Iraq and ISIS whilst interviewing US diplomat Paul Bremer who ran Iraq after the invasion.

Humphrys has history on Iraq being fervently opposed to the invasion and consistently making that clear throughout the time the US was in Iraq starting of course with his and Andrew Gilligan’s misleading allegation against Tony Blair…an allegation that may have coloured future public perception of the war and subsequent determination of politicians to execute it in a manner that would have brought a swifter and more complete conclusion…and less cost in lives, including our own British troops.

Humphrys made the uncategorical statement during the occupation that one million Iraqis had been killed, at a time when not even the most pessimistic were coming up with a figure anywhere near that.  Humphrys also told us wrongly, that a recommendation to adopt the ‘surge’ of US troops into Iraq was not in the ISG report….unfortunately it was…..

We could, however, support a short-term redeployment or surge of American combat forces to stabilize Baghdad, or to speed up the training and equipping mission, if the U.S. commander in Iraq determines that such steps would be effective.

Humphrys then went on to tell us that the ‘much vaunted surge’ was failing…despite the fact that only a few troops had actually arrived at that time and it was planned to take a considerable length of time to accomplish….and in the end the ‘much vaunted surge’ was indeed successful.

Humphrys wasn’t alone of course, many BBC journalists presented us with their own prejudiced opinion rather than facts… Fergal Keane tells Jay Garner his opinion:

’Iraq was a reckless adventure that has destroyed the lives of millions and killed 10’s of thousands, you must feel guilty about it.’

Humphrys in his latest interview with Bremer pushes the same narrative but seems remarkably unaware of the facts which undermine his own views as Bremer shoots him down every time…on top of that he keeps trying to make that link with ISIS.

Humphrys uses that old journalist’s trick of using ‘Some people might say’  when they are merely putting their own views forward.

Here Humphrys claims ‘some people might say‘ that Iraq was a catastrophic error and we are reaping the rewards of that today….and that democracy has deepened sectarianisms and lead to what we are seeing today.  ( The BBC likes a good old fashioned dictatorial Empire…the Raj excepted of course…communist, european, Islamic…just loves them)

He continues that theme in a following interview with William Hague (08:13) when he asks ‘Do you accept that the invasion was not only a mistake but a catastrophic mistake?’

He starts from the premise that it was a mistake rather than asking a neutral question.

Hague makes the point that you can’t link 2003 to today saying that we shouldn’t always see events in terms of Western intervention, there are other major forces at work in the world.  The BBC of course always applies the doctrine of Justinian’s Flea and narrows historic consequences down to a guilty moment in time…usually one where the British have a footprint.

Humphrys then turns to Hague’s ‘red carpet’ moment with Brangelina claiming Hague must have been embarrassed to be photographed with them…saying he looked starstruck and must have been diverted from real issues of the day.

This was the photograph…hardly starstruck, nor indeed anything really remarkable about the photo especially if you know the circumstances.

Humphrys could of course have talked about the below photo from the same conference, but chose not to…or could have mentioned that Hague was co-hosting the conference on sexual violence with Jolie…the same Jolie who is a UN special envoy….so why not ask the UN why they use a ‘film star’ to front their events?:

He could have used this photo from the BBC’s own report:

Sexual violence in war: Jolie praises leaders at summit end

Angelina Jolie has said sexual violence in conflict is now “firmly on the top table of international diplomacy”, as a global conference on the subject ended.

The actress and UN special envoy praised male leaders prepared to confront “the taboo” around the issue.

Ms Jolie was speaking alongside UK Foreign Secretary William Hague, who co-hosted the London summit with her.

Here’s Hague and Jolie again…pretty glam huh?

Or again…….

The conference was a major event in international diplomatic terms…as the BBC report above admits…and yet Humphrys makes a cheap attack on Hague based upon a single photograph of him walking into the conference centre with his co-host.

The Daily Mail reports the interview:

Hague dismisses ‘ridiculous’ claims he was starstruck hobnobbing with Pitt and Jolie while war raged in Iraq

William Hague today dismissed ‘ridiculous’ criticism of his decision to spend four days with Hollywood star Angelina Jolie while war raged in Iraq.

The Foreign Secretary appeared to accuse Radio 4 presenter John Humphrys of not asking intelligent questions about his appearances with Miss Jolie and her husband Brad Pitt.

Mr Hague insisted the star-studded summit to end sexual violence against women in war did not divert his attention away from the crisis of the day, stressing the UK government was ‘entirely capable of doing both’.

Last week the pair hosted a four-day summit in London, which culminated in a new international protocol which they hope will ‘shatter the culture of impunity’ around sexual violence in war.

However, it meant that as Islamist jihadists swept through large areas of Iraq, Mr Hague was posing for photographs with two of the world’s biggest film stars.

Today Mr Hague insisted the government was capable of focussing on immediate problems while also addressing long-term issues, like sexual violence in war at the summit.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘Anybody who thinks that should have been there, should have come along to it… This is about conflict prevention. 

‘It brought together most of the world. We’re not going to solve conflicts of the many sorts we debate on this programme unless we address these appalling crimes. 

‘The idea that you can never deal with long-term issues because there’s always something short-term, I always find rather ridiculous.’ 

And in apparent swipe at Mr Humphrys for even asking the question, he added: ‘With respect, I think the basis of your question has less basis than most of the highly intelligent questions.’

You could I suppose, using Humphrys’ criteria,  ask why Humphrys wasted so much time during the BBC’s prestigious news programme making facile, point scoring, cheap shots when so much more important news is competing for his attention.

Then you could ask when Humphrys said this a while back…..

“If abuse that went on in Catholic Church had gone on in a lay organisation, it would be shut down”

…why he now thinks sexual violence used as a weapon in war, world wide, shouldn’t merit so much of Hague’s attention….or indeed if he thinks the BBC should be shut down…the quote coming before the Savile revelations.

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…..