Just been listening to Today (around 07:35) where they’ve had on a couple of cheerleaders for the TV Tax…Former chairman of the BBC Lord Grade and shadow culture secretary Harriet Harman …..Justin Webb suggesting that if the BBC had called it a ‘Tax’ it would have been OK to throw people into jail..they’d have understood and accepted that….tipping their caps and exclaiming ‘Gord bless ya gov’nor, I done wrong!’ as they were carted off to the slammer.

Harman tells us she, and Labour, are unswerving supporters of the BBC, I’ll bet they are, and that not just those who have a telly must pay the tax but everyone, regardless of whether they watch the BBC or not, will have to cough up.

Grade didn’t like the technology/subscription route and suggested adding the Tax to your council tax….so again…you pay regardless of whether you have a TV.

They both of course liked the idea of not implementing any changes to the criminal status for non-payment of the tax….they liked the ‘let’s just see how it effects the BBC before change anything’ approach...in other words you know nothing will change…especially if the change in the law is merely a negotiating device for government in the charter review process.

Never mind the public and how it effects them.  Labour has said it will support the change in the law, though as above only a political move…the same old Labour trick of trying to look populist whilst imposing the dead hand of government..in this case still really supporting the old system of TV tax and criminal sanction.

Independent of political influence?  How can the BBC claim that when they have made themselves so reliant on their friends in the Labour Party to keep funding their gravy train in the way they prefer?

Having said that, Cameron of course is terrified of the BBC, having prostrated himself in front of them and disemboweling his Party with the aim of getting the support of the unelected masters of propaganda at the BBC….and naturally folding under immense BBC pressure not to actually implement the new law…..

The BBC has said a “proper review” of future options must be carried out.

Ask and it shall be done, and indeed was done thus.

The BBC’s strategy director James Purnell said: “We are happy to work with government to see if it can be improved or whether there is an alternative that could be better.”

He said the present system “works pretty well” and warned the proposed change would be a “huge risk” which would increase instances of non-payment.

Earlier this month, Mr Purnell warned BBC channels could close if non-payment of the licence fee were decriminalised.

Sounds like they are ‘happy’.  Still, Labour man Purnell knows he has the unswerving support of his ex-colleagues when the real vote comes.

Via Bishop Hill and the Mail:

BBC boss gags ‘sceptics’ from climate change debates

A BBC executive in charge of editorial standards has ordered programme editors not to broadcast debates between climate scientists and global warming sceptics.

Alasdair MacLeod claimed that such discussions amount to ‘false balance’ and breach an undertaking to the Corporation’s watchdog, the BBC Trust.

Mr MacLeod, head of editorial standards and compliance for BBC Scotland, sent an email on  February 27 to 18 senior producers and editors, which has been obtained by The Mail on Sunday.

It reads: ‘When covering climate change stories, we should not run debates / discussions directly between scientists and sceptics.

If a programme does run such a discussion, it will… be in breach of the editorial guidelines on impartiality.’

Mr MacLeod wrote that the reason the Trust decided that there should be no attempt by the BBC to give equal weight to opposing sides on climate change was that sceptics’ views were ‘based on  opinion rather than demonstrable scientific validity’.

Last night a Trust spokesman said: ‘We agreed that there should be no attempt to give equal weight to opinion and to evidence in science coverage, but we said specifically that this does not mean that critical opinion should be excluded.

‘We did not specify that the BBC should not broadcast debates/discussions between scientists and sceptics.’

A BBC spokesman added: ‘All viewpoints continue to be given due weight in our output.’

Asked  whether the BBC was prepared explicitly to disavow Mr MacLeod’s email, both officials failed to comment.

Did laugh this morning as Justin Webb gave Lord Dannatt a hard time over his suggestion that perhaps we should beef up our military….Webb suggesting that military force doesn’t work anymore.

Has anyone told the Ukrainians?

We also had Thought for the Day with Bishop James Jones who told us  that Jesus loved immigrants…and that we are all immigrants really….we must open our hearts and our borders.

Carrying on the religious theme I had the misfortune to listen to ‘Sunday’ for the first time ever…normally the territory of ‘Is the BBC biased‘ I’m moving my tanks onto their lawn, for one day only…I don’t think I could listen to the torrent of lefty outpourings of this one programme for long.

First off we were treated to yet another example of Muslims being persecuted, this time in the Central African Republic where Christian militias are hounding Muslims.

The BBC never showed so much interest in the war in Congo where over 5 million have died, or indeed in the fate of Christians around the Muslim world…but coincidentally, I’m sure,  they suddenly found themselves fascinated by Buddhists and Muslims when they began fighting each other…or rather, as the BBC put it, the Buddhists were attacking the harmless Muslims.

Then we had a piece on African immigrants to Europe where once again we had some thoughts that we must treat these people as if they were Jesus himself….and that open borders, welfare, and housing must have no limits….we must have a ‘globalisation of love!’.

Then we had Muslims and Christians joining together to fight slavery….trouble was we had no indication of just who was doing the slaving these days.

Then….it must have been National Islam day on R4…they asked ‘What can feminism do for Muslims?’

Then we had Steve Chalk, an evangelist Christian (normally hated by the BBC except when bringing us the good news about Christian misdeeds presumably), but he told us that the Christian Church has misused the Bible…..justifying slavery and Apartheid….what still?

The sacred text of the Bible is being used to enforce prejudice…a tool of repression and exclusion when it should be a tool of liberation….perhaps he means ‘open borders’ and an immigration free-for-all with houses and welfare handed out as you cross the border.

We must rewrite the Bible for modern times…to bring clarity to what the Bible means he tells us.

So no one knows what the Bible says, what Jesus preached, what the basis of Christianity is?

What do all those Bishops do all day then?  Apart from pontificating on R4.

And you wouldn’t mind but when has the BBC had someone on with a similar message about the Koran…that it is ‘used to enforce prejudice…a tool of repression and exclusion’?

There’s more but I really couldn’t force myself to listen….enjoy…….Sunday

Here you go, what better way to start the week than by detailing the BIAS that oozes out of the BBC?

The BBC is up to its old tricks….attacking the Daily Mail for its ‘dodgy past’:

Curious it is so sanguine about the dodgy past of one in its own ranks:

Newsnight reporter faces call to quit over secret links to BNP: Controversial Left-winger tried to cover up role in racist demonstrations

A BBC journalist faced calls for  his sacking last night for attempting to cover up the extent of his involvement with the far-Right British National Party.

Duncan Weldon, the controversial new economics correspondent for Newsnight, took part in a racist leafleting campaign in 2000 which made scaremongering claims about refugees being ‘shipped’ to Newcastle.

The leaflets alleged that a London council planned to move 16,000 asylum seekers to the area, saying the ‘shipping’ of refugees would ‘change the ethnic make-up of the area’, lead to ‘whites living in fear’ and cause Newcastle to become ‘riot-torn’.

A BBC spokesman said last night that Mr Weldon ‘is a highly respected professional who has assured us he has not been a member of the BNP’.

Nick Griffin might be interested…..renounce the ideology and get yourself a job at the Beeb….no questions asked….as long as you’re good at your job.

“This should be dragged out into the open and be discussed.”

Make no mistake, Taliban devotees are in our schools, playgrounds, homes, mosques, political parties, public service, private firms and universities.

And if we are to have any hope of combating them, we need to stop this attitude of appeasement and understand why so many Muslims are attracted to the most punishing forms of belief, suppressing women and children.

Those who hold the reins of power are all too complacent….in fact they all too often aid and abet those who would undermine our society.  The Law Society, as with the BBC, and you suspect many other organisations such as schools that force feed non-Muslim children Halal meat, bends over backwards to accommodate demands made by Muslim groups regardless of the consequences in wider society…..

Law Society publishes practice note on Sharia wills and inheritance rules

The future?:

The Jordanian Women’s Union, along with lawyers across the Hashemite Kingdom, expressed shock last week after a ruling discriminating against women who do not wear the Islamic hijab was issued by the Amman Sharia Court of Appeal, according to Al Medanah News.

The court announced late last week that it agreed with one lawyer’s statement – based on a fatwa – that says a woman who does not cover up or wear a hijab is considered a “slut” and shouldn’t be allowed to testify in court.

or this?:

Jordanian Women Raped with Legal Impunity

The Jordanian Penal code…. encourages rape perpetrators to marry their victim as a means of avoiding prosecution or punishment – which ranges from imprisonment and hard labor to execution.

Just how much Sharia is acceptable?    It’s already here:

The Talibanisation of British childhood by hardline parents

The rapid spread of rigid, diehard Islam [In the UK] is deeply worrying. Yet those in power, focused on terrorist cells, seem oblivious to this other peril.

For many of us Muslims, this creeping Talibanisation of childhood is unendurable.

I could never have imagined that the Taliban would be claiming to have ‘won the war’ in Afghanistan.

Or, much worse, that our politicians and Muslim ‘leaders’ here would allow their twisted ideology to spread across Britain.

Make no mistake, Taliban devotees are in our schools, playgrounds, homes, mosques, political parties, public service, private firms and universities.

And if we are to have any hope of combating them, we need to stop this attitude of appeasement and understand why so many Muslims are attracted to the most punishing forms of belief, suppressing women and children.

If this was happening in any other nation, we would be condemning it loudly.

Yet here, curtailed and deficient education endured by many Muslim children is seen as a religious entitlement, which, if opposed, apparently confirms Islamophobia.

Why are we fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan and indulging Taliban values here?

Even if it offends liberal principles, the powerful must find a way of stopping Islamicists from promulgating their distorted creed.

Yesterday an expert commentator on the BBC told us that Putin ‘operates under a different set of rules to us in the West’….and that ‘the West has had a shock and has had to adapt as Putin undermines them politically and economically’.

Many Muslims also seek to operate under a different set of rules…Sharia Law…rules that will undermine the hard fought for secular democracies and our way of life and will take us back to the Middle Ages.

‘Trojan horse’: Radical group ‘aims to convert’ UK schools to strict Islam

The BBC seems to be entirely unconcerned…or rather, as with gays and Muslims, concerns for all things Islamic trumps all other considerations.

The BBC have so far failed to report this issue.….limiting its coverage to a small paragraph in ‘What the papers say’.

That’s despite concern raised in Parliament as the Telegraph reports:

Barry Sheerman, the Labour MP for Huddersfield, cautioned against legislation on the issue but called for a joint investigation by the Commons Justice and Home Affairs Committees into how widespread the use of Sharia law now is in Britain.

Which you, and Barry Sherman, might be a bit disappointed about as he states:

“This should be dragged out into the open and be discussed.”

Louise Mensch, the former Tory MP, described the guide as “utterly unacceptable”.

“There could not be a clearer case for ministers and government to step in than the Law Society’s breathtakingly sexist Sharia law guidelines,” she said.

Meanwhile Peter Tatchell, the human rights campaigner and patron of Tell Mama, the group which combats anti-Muslim hate crime, said: “The Law Society is wrong.

“It should withdraw its guidelines assisting or promoting Sharia Law in the UK.”

Other publications have managed to find the time and space to bring us this news:

The Huffington Post:

Islamic Sharia Law Effectively Enshrined In UK Legal System With New Will Guidance

The Independent:

Islamic law to be enshrined in British law as solicitors get guidelines on ‘Sharia compliant’ wills

The Mail:

Sharia Law to be enshrined in British legal system as lawyers get guidelines on drawing up documents according to Islamic rules

The Metro:

Islamic legal principles to be integrated into UK law for first time

And many more…just not the UK’s most powerful and dominant news broadcaster.

Any bets this will be the topic for discussion on Nicky Campbell?  Ideal you might think, just up his fatwa.

Having said that maybe he just might, thanks to Guest Who for putting this our way:

…about Mohammed Naseem (the one who thought 7/7 might have a silver lining if it got Islam talked about…amongst other interesting views)….

This is a response by Milverton to this rather self-indulgent attempt at humour……I might suggest he represents the views of most people who read this site and puts them across very well and concisely….namely that the BBC is, in concept, a good idea, that in reality it provides much of value but falls down seriously by ‘polluting’ its output with its own political and social agenda and that privatisation is not the answer to providing many vital, and necessary almost regardless of cost, public services.

‘Very nice site, but filling a pothole is a somewhat simpler prospect than filling every second God sends with programming. Forever.

Look, it is plain to see that there are certain parts of the BBC that need urgent action, and those aspects involve what are clearly poor journalistic standards led by a liberal groupthink, and the demands of rolling news, the most evil invention of the post-war period, including the atomic bomb.

Five Live, for example, are, by dint of the sheer amount of airtime dedicated to it, an absolute bastion of unchallenged left wing opinion. From Campbell and Burden on a Monday morning to Stephen Nolan on Sunday night its non-sport output picks up and runs with issues taken straight from the Guardian’s Comment Is Free section to fill in the time between Labour talking points and press releases from left of centre think tanks and charities.

Biased BBC exists to point out these sorts of issues. This apparent conflation of all private sector is good and all public sector bad is simply bias in the opposite direction.

It is noticable that the one BBC employee who is regularly praised here is Andrew Neil. He is the last remaining example, now Paxman has given up the ghost, of the sort of BBC journo I grew up watching. Neil disdains our political classes equally. That is exactly how it should be. I don’t want leftwing bias replaced by rightwing bias. I want evenhandedness. I accept such things are in the eye of the beholder, but the BBC used to be far better at it, if never perfect.

I don’t expect to watch a BBC news programme and see someone who should be impartial and should take professional pride in being so seemingly wilfully abrogate that responsibilty to push their own agenda. It is the anithesis of what the BBC should be.

I’m going to come out and say it. I like the BBC. For the most part it fulfils its remit. It shows many programmes I personally don’t like. My wife does, and my children do. The BBC have to be all things to all people, and away from the news output broadly do so.

No, I don’t think it is realistic for every British Army General, senior police officer or High Court Judge on Doctor Who to be by default black, but nor is it realistic for a one thousand year old alien to be chased around the galaxy by sentient pepperpots.

My point is this. Many of us on this site seem to see ourselves as representative of all of society. For good or ill, and the jury is still out, that simply isn’t the case. There are things on the BBC that simply aren’t meant for me and you. We would disagree amongst ourselves as to the good and bad. The thing that the BBC do for everyone, the news and current affairs, however, are in a parlous state. That is the battleground, not whether lessons can be learnt for the BBC from a potholes hotline. (The answer, by the way, is “No”.)

The BBC doesn’t need a wreath, it needs a Reith. Now, where you find one, perhaps standing next to the modern day Churchill over there, is a different matter.’

The BBC produced a programme recently following the lives of some ‘girls’ who are already, or are thinking about becoming, members of the EDL….they began filming before Tommy Robinson jumped ship.

EDL Girls – Don’t Call Me Racist

The English Defence League has gained notoriety as the far-right street movement with racist and extremist members whose protests often end in violence. Many of its members feel misunderstood and misrepresented by the media. This film explores the lives of some of the females living within the EDL’s ranks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZacuNY6vYmY

On one level it is purely a fly on the wall film with little intervention from the producers.

AA Gill in the Sunday Times said it was an ‘odd documentary, part fly-on-the wall and part structured inquiry’…and so it was.  The question you might ask is just how much of that ‘structure’ was designed to nudge the viewer into a certain view of these girls and in particular of the EDL and its views?

Gill suggested the BBC was editorially rigorously neutral about the politics, saying this was refreshing and quite brave (hmm…shouldn’t that really be the whole purpose of such a programme….or is Gill suggesting the normal BBC practice is to manipulate what the viewer sees and thinks?…which if course it does.)

He suggest that showing the EDL girls in a not unsympathetic light might not please the BBC bureaucrats…which is a telling comment……if they don’t like your politics you probably won’t get a ‘like’ from the BBC and all the subsequent user friendly coverage the BBC bestows upon its ‘friends’.

Gill says…‘It was far closer to allowing people who don’t normally get a shot at explaining themselves on television a fair, structured but unmediated slice of airtime than they can normally expect.’

Well….I suppose it was ‘more than they could normally expect’ but that isn’t really saying much because there was a vast amount of necessary background left unsaid……the politics, the ideology, any sophisticated argument about what the EDL is opposed to, is left off the record…..which makes the whole programme worthless really….it becomes just a voyeuristic ‘reality TV’ film that teaches us nothing.

Which is perhaps ironic because one of the reasons behind the film was, as the BBC kept telling us, that these girls were fed up with being misrepresented in the media….but the BBC failed to mention its own part in demonising the EDL and making it legitimate to attack EDL members in the street….as happened to one of the main characters who was severely beaten up by anti-EDL ‘protesters’….curious the BBC never examines the violent thugs of the UAF…controlled by Unite…the Union that also controls Miliband.

The BBC set out from the creation of the EDL to vilify it and undermine its credibility…..such as Andrew Neil’s vicious and malign attack on Tommy Robinson, at the instigation of Mehdi Hasan (Islamist….why does Neil not question his motivation and beliefs?) and Sarah Montague’s  remarkable assertion that the EDL’s beliefs are ‘poisonous’….

‘It’s one thing to say these are extremist groups on the fringes…but it’s the extent to which they pollute the rest of the population I suppose in terms of how you deal with it is the concern and how much pollution do you think has gone on?’

Is the London School of Economics ‘polluting the rest of the population’ with their Islamophobic views?

“Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here”: the human rights struggle against Muslim fundamentalism

Gill finishes with   ‘And that is what a liberal public-service broadcaster should be doing.’

Well it should be doing that, providing a voice for the underdog …but it failed on this occasion….missing out any indepth look at the background politics, missing out the BBC’s role in demonising these people and always the ‘innocuous’ slights in the commentary or linked footage that might pass you by or might just be seen as attempts to edge your opinion against the girl’s views, though, as Gill said, the girls themselves did get a ‘not unsympathetic’ hearing but the programme also gave prominence to a girl who decides not to join the EDL in the end…..because she didn’t want to be labeled a racist.

Is that a condemnation of the EDL and its views or of the likes of the BBC which has portrayed the EDL as racist?

In case you missed it and don’t want to plough through 3 hours of ‘Sport Relief’ here’s the ‘Only Fools and Horses’ bit…at 2 hours 38 mins on the actual show:

Sport Relief – 2014

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9H6Yxq1-EQ

We cough up 145 beer/irn bru tokens every year for the privilege of being patronised and manipulated but what has the BBC ever done for us?

Is it worth the cost? Does it do anything useful?

Here, via the Telegraph, is a site that provides, at no cost whatsoever and completely unadulterated by political spin, a sterling  public service of immense usefulness:

http://www.fixmystreet.com/

How to get potholes repaired

Honest John hears of a very efficient way to get potholes repaired