Thanks to #88 who draw my attention to the snakelike Andy Burnham….who lives by the motto that in every disaster there is opportunity.

Burnham, he who ducks and dives when questioned about Stafford Hospital, has suddenly found the time to be ‘outraged’ about something…the altering of the Hillsborough Wikipedia page….and the BBC are happy to give him plenty of …er…rope you might call it……..

In fact the BBC joins in with his mad conspiracy theories about this as he suggests it goes all the way to the top.

The BBC presenter asks ‘Given the location of the computer just how damaging do you think this is?’

Talk about a leading question….how damaging to whom exactly?  The present government? Why is this damaging to government at all…it’s just some herbert with time on his hand and a grievance…..it’s not MI5.

Burnham tells us that this is coming from ‘the heart of government….who’d have thought the authorities could stoop so low in their treatment of Hillsborough victims and survivors…sickening and appalling that someone within government could aim this type of abuse at them….and it shows what I have been up against from government and the Establishment…it may have been a rogue individual but perhaps it is more than that….but it shows just how high up those attitudes went!’

The man is barking…the same man who blocked a public inquiry into Stafford Hospital now complains about the ‘Establishment’ conspiring to silence him.

Here’s the BBC giving credence to his madness:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1zQwak1_5Y

The BBC is employing that old trick of hyping and hyping a very dubious allegation and making loose associations with whomsoever it is targeting, in this case the present government, knowing that mud sticks whatever the final outcome….perhaps it was merely a cleaner in a government office but the BBC, and Burnham, would no doubt be happy if David Cameron is dragged into this in whatever capacity and have his name suddenly mentioned alongside such allegations smearing him however tenuous the link.

Today the BBC announced that a report that someone, from 2009 to 2012, using a government computer, had altered the Hillsborough tragedy’s Wikipedia page  adding insults to it, was the BBC’s lead story.

Indeed it did seem to be so with a not inconsiderable amount of coverage for what might seem a small story in the scale of things…though naturally distressing to the families….. though the abuse was removed almost immediately from the page when posted.

The Liverpool Echo broke the story:

Exclusive: Shocking Hillsborough insults added on Wikipedia from Government computers

A series of sickening revisions to the site began on the 20th anniversary of the 1989 tragedy, when “Blame Liverpool fans” was anonymously added to the Hillsborough section of the encyclopedia site.

Computers on Whitehall’s secure intranet were used again in 2012 to change the phrase “You’ll never walk alone” to “You’ll never walk again” and later “You’ll never w*** alone.”

The words “nothing for the victims of the Heysel stadium disaster” were also added to a description of the Hillsborough memorial at the Reds’ stadium.

The BBC, as said, has been highlighting this all day.  This is its web page:

Hillsborough Wikipedia posts: Government pledges ‘urgent inquiries’

I have heard only a single mention of Heysel…in a text message read out on 5 Live suggesting we don’t forget it….that suggestion didn’t spark any interest in the presenter and was indeed instantly forgotten.  It was rare to hear a mention at all during the BBC’s coverage of Hillsborough recently.

Hillsborough seems to have caught the BBC’s imagination….no doubt who was in government at the time, the police mistakes and coverup, and Murdoch Sun’s infamous frontpage all contributing to it being so keen to keep this one running.

No headlines or lead story from the BBC about this…not hard to find the culprit…or which ‘government office’ seems to find it OK:

Or how about the BBC’s own involvement in a ‘disrespectful’ insult….remember ‘Ding Dong The Witch Is dead’ chart manipulation after Mrs Thatcher’s death?……..

“The BBC finds this campaign distasteful, but does not believe the record should be banned.

BBC director general Tony Hall said: “I understand the concerns about this campaign. I personally believe it is distasteful and inappropriate.

“However, I do believe it would be wrong to ban the song outright as free speech is an important principle and a ban would only give it more publicity.”

However even the Guardian thinks it may have gone too far in some of its coverage of Hillsborough:

Mix and Match of the Day turns tragedy to cliche

Adam Curtis did a brilliant piece on Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe on BBC4 last week about “Oh Dearism”, the trend for television news to show shocking events about which we can do nothing but feel helpless and sad, and to which the only possible reaction is “Oh dear”.

I wonder if anybody in BBC Sport saw it. I only ask because Saturday’s Football Focus and Match Of The Day used the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster to indulge in the kind of crass grief tourism that has become a media staple since Princess Diana’s death.

Had the coverage dealt with this issue, there might have been some point to it, but interviews with the parents of two teenage girls who died on the terraces were there merely to fill our eyes with pointless tears. It is a kind of pornography. Anybody who knows anybody who has lost a child to sudden death or can imagine what it might be like to lose one’s own knows how unspeakably sad it must be. But what can you do, other than say, “Oh dear?”

At Heysel in Belgium in 1985 (May 29) Liverpool fans caused 39 deaths and around 600 injuries…so just a reminder to put things in perspective:

Just a few days earlier on May 11 Bradford City’s stadium burst into flames…in the 5 minutes one stand took to burn to the ground 56 people died and 250 were injured despite the best efforts of police officers to rescue many stricken fans putting themselves at great risk to do so.

Bradford fire: forgotten tragedy of the Eighties

“All of a sudden, a sheet of flame went up to the roof and along the entire length of the stand. Within five minutes of it starting, the whole stand was burnt down. In fact, I think it was timed at 4min 35sec. The strong wind was fanning it from the end where the blaze had started.

“It didn’t receive much comment at the time, but the roof was bitumen, with slats, and as the flames ran along the top of the stand the bitumen started melting and falling on the people below. People were coming out of there with their hair and clothes singed and big drops of bitumen all over them.

The tragedy lacked both the global reach of Heysel – a European Cup final, between Liverpool and Juventus – and the outrage and sense of injustice that came with the Hillsborough disaster. Bradford was commonly regarded as a product of widespread ignorance about general safety at football grounds, and the lethal combustibility of wooden seats (there was an echo here, in wider society, with the King’s Cross fire -itself blamed on the presence of wooden escalators on the London Underground).

With Bradford there was no stampede by drunk and belligerent fans (Heysel), and no policing or stewarding issues of the sort that keeps the Hillsborough Campaign in sad and grinding motion to this day. Put the three calamities side by side and you wonder how football ever emerged from the Eighties. With so many dead in four short years, our national game had become a killing field. The Popplewell and Taylor reports into Bradford and Hillsborough, respectively, were among the most important social documents of our times.

My thanks to David Keighley and Andrew Jubb for this most interesting report on BBC bias over at Civitas. Make sure you read it….

Yesterday, the BBC obligingly ran with the Labour line that Comrade Ed and the gang had taken the moral decision to move away from the long historical link to the Co op Bank. However it seems not all was as the BBC reported;

Have a read of this if you will!

“So is the BBC in crisis? The consensus seems to be, not yet – though it soon may well be. Steven Barnett predicts a gathering tide of anti-BBCism from Tory politicians and newspapers in the runup to the charter renewal. He writes: “If Britain wants to sustain a cultural institution which is still trusted and enjoyed by the vast majority of its own citizens while being praised and admired throughout the world, we must have the political will to make the resources available.” In other words, an inflation-linked licence fee must be restored (and wisely spent). That, rather than the history of the sexual predators it once employed, will be the BBC’s make or break.”

The weekend approaches and so a new one of this to take us off into the wild blue yonder!

A low key look by the BBC’s Gavin Hewitt at probably one of the most important and interesting questions in politics at the moment:

Europe braces for first EU-wide vote since 2008 crash

In many countries this will be a referendum on the European project.

Many voters will have the chance to support parties disenchanted with Brussels and all its powers. The last few years have seen the rise of anti-establishment parties both from the left and right, some nationalist, some extreme and most of them drawing their support from being Eurosceptic and anti-immigration.

So the battle will be fought less over the minutiae of policy but in broad strokes about Europe itself.

The elections matter and not just because of the growing power of the parliament. The vote touches on deeper questions about the health of democracy, such as whether the governing elites are perceived as on the side of the people or their own political ideas. Is there a decline in political trust between the governed and those in power?

Despite a couple of slights against UKIP and the Front National and some praise for the EU such as this….

The European Parliament, although often derided, is a much more important institution than it used to be. Only last week it was taking important steps towards banking union, voting on greater transparency for lobbyists and setting up a new European Fisheries Fund.

….the article raises that important question about the EU’s democratic legitimacy and how accountable it is to the voters.

However it only does so in a general way with fairly abstract suggestions of concerns about democracy or identity….or ‘the fears of the workers’.

The question is how much further down this line of inquiry will the BBC go? 

Here it raises those questions:

For the disillusioned this is not just a chance to cast an angry cross or tick against austerity. For many it goes much deeper. It is about insecurity and identity….ordinary workers are not just wary of further immigration but suspicious of an elite that does not address their fears.

…..but will it do the usual and dismiss them as just that, unjustified ‘fears’…. fuelled by extremist tub thumping politicians whipping up public anger and discontent?

Or, will it give credence to people’s concerns and accept them as legitimate rather than dismissing concerns about immigration as racist, or  people who might want to control the sovereignty of their own country are ‘little Englanders’ dreaming of a mythical lost past in a non-existent ‘golden age’ of Britishness?

Naturally no mention of the BBC as a large and important part of that ‘elite’ providing the propaganda that props up the privileged and unaccountable EU cabal.

The usually reliable Sheila Fogarty yesterday makes you doubt the BBC will ever change.

Talking about UKIP and its posters she asked (12:25) a UKIP spokeswoman if she didn’t see that there could be,  not saying there is, Fogarty assures us, a correlation between posters like that and racist attacks…and if not could she explain why she thought not.

So the default position is that UKIP generates racist attacks….and UKIP must defend/explain itself.

Fogarty had previously had on some ‘Brits’ to talk about their ‘fears’ on immigration. It was the usual BBC trick of only asking white working class people to comment and therefore limiting the concerns about immigration to a small ‘suspect’ group….and they are ‘suspect’ in the BBC’s eyes…often portrayed as prejudiced and racist due to their ignorance and, well, horrible whiteness..all white people are inherently racist.  Thus such concerns can be dismissed as the result of prejudice and ignorance.

The one immigrant they brought in was a Romanian, of course, who ran a building business apparently..and ‘had never claimed benefits in her life’…..Of course we just have to take such claims on trust….and judging by the BBC’s past record that’s not a good idea.

Trouble is….she is far from typical…how that one immigrant can be presented to us as typical and representative of the 4 millon who have come here in the last decade is hard to imagine.

Where are the unemployed, where are the unskilled, where are the workers undercutting British workers, where are the criminals who fill our prisons, where are the people crowding the schools and NHS, where are those who do claim benefits?

The BBC didn’t see fit to make an example of those immigrants.

Fogarty didn’t let us down, or rather she did…asking later ‘are the people who complain about immigration are necessarily right?’

The BBC is always on hand to ‘prove’ just how wrong you are on immigration.

A couple of Tweets from Roger that shed new light on ‘science’ and certainty:

So Roger thinks ‘expert groups’ may be lying to us about just how certain they are about their projections…due to the politics…and Roger himself objects to claims of ‘certainty’ or over confidence in ‘the numbers’….though not when economist Stern tells us we are all going to die in 100 months or so….. but when ‘maverick’ Professor Tol (the green’s new hate figure) Tweets some ‘green’ figures about the costs of global warming suddenly certainty is a questionable virtue.

So the next time the climate lobby tell us global warming may not be scientifically proven beyond all doubt but the risks of not doing anything are just too great to ignore it…..think on…..they’re probably lying.

Here you go, a new Open Thread to see us on through the week of relentless bias!

Sorry about the title but I think I can’t really take much more of his low brow, lightweight,  twaddle….considering the job he is supposed to do.

Thanks to Dave S who pointed out this from Robinson:

UKIP immigration policy – the wife test

On a day when Nigel Farage launched a nationwide poster campaign warning that millions of Europeans were waiting to take your job, I asked him why he employed a German as his secretary….to my amazement the UKIP leader told me “nobody else could do that job”.

But is that because she is German?

Robinson take a cheap shot at Farage:

NR: No British person could work for you as your secretary?

NF: Not at the moment.

NR: You don’t think anyone’s capable of doing that job?

NF: What, of marrying me?

NR: No. Of doing the job of your secretary.

NF: I don’t know anyone who would work those hours, no.

NR: So that’s it. It’s clear – UKIP do not believe that any British person is capable of being the secretary of their leader?

NF: That’s nonsense and you know it.

NR: You just said it!

The problem with Robinson’s line of questioning and his conclusion, that Farage says no British person could be his secretary, is its complete facetiousness.

What Farage is saying is that no one but his wife could do the job because of the hours worked….his wife just happens to be German…married to that well known xenophobe Nigel Farage.

What Farage  is not saying is that no British person could do that job….so when Robinson concludes….

NR: So that’s it. It’s clear – UKIP do not believe that any British person is capable of being the secretary of their leader?

NF: That’s nonsense and you know it.

NR: You just said it!

…he is, the BBC’s top political journo mind you, making shit up.

When asking Farage how many immigrants could be a fair number to let in Robinson reports this:

So, what numbers would be acceptable? Mr Farage was reluctant to say but eventually suggested that between 30,000 and 50,000 immigrants a year might be the right figure (compared with well over 100,000 net migration now).

Another little trick….’net’ migration or not?  Is Farage saying 50,000 net or gross?  Big difference.  Sure the BBC’s top political journo isn’t trying to pull the wool over our eyes…again?

Robinson states that ‘As for immigration – the key issue of his election campaign – Mr Farage is calling for a “sensible, open immigration policy” in which Britain would “re-claim control of her borders”.’

In other words Farage is not demanding zero immigration but ‘a sensible, managed immigration system’.

In other words Robinson is trying to use the fact he employs his ‘German’ wife against him and claim it is evidence of hypocrisy is highly misleading by Robinson.

Here Robinson tries to write off Farage as someone not to be taken seriously (though the intensive attempts to malign and undermine him might indicate he is a serious threat to ‘their’ world):

His point, apparently, was that only his wife Kirsten – who as he often reminds us is German – would be prepared to work unsociable hours, seven days a week, helping him at “midnight, one o’clock, two o’clock”.

As so often, the UKIP leader was trying to make me and all those listening smile along with him. He’s an amusing and likeable guy and often I’ve done just that, but on this occasion I was determined to press on.

Farage explained exactly why he employs his wife and why it would be difficult for anyone else to do the job other than his wife…Robinson decides that’s a joke….but being the professional, hardnosed reporter that he is he determines to press on and get the real story.

Thank God for BBC investigative journalism  at  its best bringing us the dirt they don’t want us to see!

Robinson’s conclusion is that:

Mr Farage’s decision to employ his wife at public expense highlights two important questions he and his party now face – about what their immigration policy means in practice and their attitude to public money.

Really?  In what way does employing his German wife highlight anything about his immigration policy except in Robinson’s own little concoction of a story trying to nail Farage for something, anything…..it’ll be passive smoking from Farage’s cigarettes poisoning next door’s ‘immigrant’ children next.

And what does this mean?

You employ a German woman to work in your office. She happens to be your wife. She happens to spend many hundreds of thousands of British taxpayers’ money. How do you justify that?

Perhaps Robinson might like to explain that fabrication.

We’ve also had Robinson’s sycophantic interview with Miliband.

We’ve had Robinson’s less than informative report on the Farage-Clegg debate….Farage v Clegg – the verdict.

Is there any point to Nick Robinson?    I suppose we learn a lot from the BBC’s decision to employ him at public expense which highlights two important questions he and the BBC must now face – what do any of Robinson’s reports actually tell us in practice, if anything, about the world of politics, and the BBC’s attitude to public money as they squander it on him.