“It is our view that the Labour government has masterminded the unnecessary imposition of competition, backdoor privatisation and the undermining of all postal services.”    said the CWU….a union affiliated to Labour!

The National Audit Office has released its report into the partial privatisation of Royal Mail.

The Privatisation of Royal Mail

The Department was successful in floating Royal Mail. But its approach was marked by deep caution, the price of which was borne by the taxpayer.

The BBC has given this headline status and has been giving the lions share of coverage to the critics, Labour in particular….we do get defenders of the share price but they do not balance the critics.

That aside there is one glaring hole in the BBC’s coverage gives Labour plenty of airtime to say things like this:

The government “botched” the privatisation of Royal Mail, short-changing taxpayers by hundreds of millions of pounds, by selling shares too cheaply, Labour has said.

….and yet, once again, as with mine closures, and the economic crash, the BBC conveniently forgets the history and context behind events…when they are uncomfortable and embarrassing  for Labour….or so it seems.

Chuka Umunna was given free rein by Sheila Fogarty (13:09ish) claiming that ‘Labour would never have privatised Royal Mail……it doesn’t make sense…the government has privatised the profits and nationalised the debts’

He went on….‘The taxpayers have been disgracefully shortchanged and are owed an apology…ultimately the person who is responsible is the Prime Minister and he should apologise.’

[Well…when we get an apology from Gordon Brown for his ‘ultimate responsibility’ for the economic apocalypse he left us with perhaps Cameron might consider one.]

However….‘Labour would never have privatised Royal Mail?‘…em… they had every intention of doing so.

Not only that but their imposition of a disastrously strict regulatory regime brought Royal Mail to its knees….from a profit making, pension paying success, it became an economic disaster zone having to go to government with a begging bowl.

And there’s always room for Labor’s Margaret Hodge to add her ‘independent’ assessment on the BBC:

Margaret Hodge, chair of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), said the sharp rise in Royal Mail’s share price since the sale showed “the department had no clue what it was doing.”

What about that glaring hole in the BBC’s coverage though?

Labour now says that Royal Mail was sold off too cheaply…..the Public are shortchanged and Cameron must apologise.

Would that be the same Labour party that had already, in effect, privatised the Royal Mail for free, giving its most valuable assets to its private competitors at prices, enforced by Labour’s Regulator, that meant Royal Mail made huge losses as it was forced to deliver competitor’s mail at below cost.

What did the bosses at Royal Mail think?

“regulation gone mad”…the new price regime would “choke the company” and the universal one-price service.

What did the postal worker’s union, the CWU, think?

“It is our view that the Labour government has masterminded the unnecessary imposition of competition, backdoor privatisation and the undermining of all postal services.”

You might think that was relevant to the debate today….but not a single mention on the BBC today of this rather embarrassing history for Labour.

Or that Labour ‘masterminded’ putting 60,000 postmen and women on the jobs scrapheap…..

Modernisation – Royal Mail is needs massive upgrading and staff cutting

It’s already happening under public ownership. Over 60,000 jobs have been lost from Royal Mail in the last five-six years with more disappearing as machinery and delivery revisions are brought in.

Labour had already privatised Royal Mail…it allowed private companies to asset strip and cherry pick the best bits of Royal Mail’s business for peanuts….putting it and the universal service in jeopardy and destroying a once solvent pension fund…now a very hefty charge on the public purse.

And Labour claims the sale was rushed to get in ahead of industrial action…so that would be strike action by the CWU union, affiliated to Labour, which forced the ‘premature’ sale of shares at a low price…costing the tax payer, god bless ’em, millions?  Hmmm..dodgy argument there I might have thought.

So who is responsible for ‘giving away’ Royal Mail and ‘nationalising the debts’?

First and foremost it’s the Labour Party in reality.

Just a shame the BBC isn’t doing its job properly and challenging their own narrative rather than allowing them to grandstand as the defenders of the Public Finances….LOL!

For a more balanced and indepth look try this site for a view on the privatisation:

Taking Stock…Royal Mail’s IPO in HIndsight

It’s always a bad idea to compare ‘independent’ sites with the BBC…they are all too often far better at providing indepth information and analysis….you realise just how bad the BBC can be despite the massive resources.

Hi folks! The PAYPAL button is now live and awaiting your generosity. We  appreciate every £ you can find as we seek to pay for our hosting independence! Thank you.

The BBC…‘too white, too male, too leftwing’….said Labour’s James Purnell in an interview with The Times (Paywalled)

Well….I may have exaggerated…I leave it to you to filter out the unlikely words though a clue might be this statement from him:

‘Sometimes we are at our most politically successful when we are least inclined to give people what they want.’

Sorry…another typo…not the BBC is most ‘politically successful’ but most ‘commercially successful’….an understandable, easy mistake to make….though Parnell makes absolutely clear….

‘What I love about the BBC is being impartial.  Politics was a great interlude but now I’m back where I belong.’………and of course the staunch Labourite has given all that dirty politicking up now!

He does make an interesting remark about the Charter renewal…..the BBC has a campaign to influence politicians…well we knew that, having seen their massed mobilisation to try and prevent decriminalisation of the licence fee dodgers.

Purnell says about the in-joke comedy W1A:

‘It’s funny.  I love the fact that the BBC, as its first salvo in the charter review, decides to put on a programme about how ridiculous it is.’

The BBC uses its programming to slip in political and social messages all the time so it’s no surprise to see them using the licence fee to pump out propaganda to allow them to keep raking in the licence fee and spending it on their pet  projects…..giving us what we don’t want but the BBC feels we need.

Purnell doesn’t seem keen to use subscription funding…or maybe is just unaware of the technology….you can bet he has Sky at home though.

‘We need a system that allows people to pay easily for something you can’t stop them consuming.  There needs to be some kind of deterrent.’

You mean like cutting them off from the service as Sky can do?  Easy, no?

Purnell proclaims that the BBC is worth it…40p a day for all you can consume…we must keep the licence fee!

But that surely isn’t the BBC’s job….to campaign for the licence fee…..the job of management is to provide the programmes within the funding framework set up by Parliament…the BBC could advise what they believe would happen under different funding scenarios but to campaign for a particular one is definitely beyond its remit.

It must be no coincidence that the BBC has re-employed their once head of corporate planning and then a senior Labour politician, ‘coolly ambitious and ruthlessly well-connected’,  as its ‘doorkicker’ in the charter renewal negotiations:

His role “brings together communications, future media, marketing, policy, research and development and strategy”…his aim…‘to discover, define and deliver the future of the BBC.’

In other words he’s there to keep the money rolling in and the BBC the dominant media provider using his bulging contacts book.

On competition with other broadcasters and print media he claims, as usual, that the BBC improves other sources by forcing them to raise their game…without the BBC we wouldn’t have such quality programming or news.

He claims the USA is a prime example of that with no equivalent of the BBC there (em…PBS?.…’PBS is the most prominent provider of television programs to public television stations in the United States, distributing series such as Sesame Street, PBS NewsHour, Masterpiece, Frontline and Antiques Roadshow. Since the mid-2000s, Roper polls commissioned by PBS have consistently placed the service as America’s most-trusted national institution.)…and presumably no quality television or films or news journalism because there’s no BBC….despite many programmes on PBS coming from the very inspirational BBC…..and all available on T’internet.

He says:

‘I start from what is right for audiences, our polity and the national conversation.  I think people having a choice between different types of voices is a really good thing.  We want competition and choice.’

No…you don’t James.  There was no national conversation via the BBC about Europe, climate change, immigration, Islam or Labour’s part in smashing the economy…..maybe I was right…‘Sometimes we are at our most politically successful when we are least inclined to give people what they want.’

And competition?…. The BBC tries hard to kill off all competition….just look at how it actively campaigned against Murdoch, and still rails against News Corp newspapers…and the Daily Mail….and presses hard to limit Press freedom whilst having Labour politicians protecting the BBC’s own position of dominance.

The important reality is that these aren’t competitors in a commercial sense, or that is not the main reason or the BBC’s assaults on them….the real reason is political…the BBC is leftwing, despite Owen Jones’ fantasy wet dream, and believes it represents a world view that is the correct one…and far from welcoming ‘diversity’ it aims to enforce its own belief system upon the world, without discussion….as with climate change.

News International and papers like the Mail or the Express are targeted by the BBC because they have a more right of centre approach…a more populist approach…they reflect what the Public thinks in the main…and the BBC spends its time trying to re-educate the Public to accept its world view and believes these competing news and media sources are undermining its message….hence they have to go or at least be reined in, controlled.

Diversity?   Competition? A national conversation?

Not so far.

LOL

‘BBC Panorama whistle-blower reveals racist and Islamophobic programme

Criminal investigation underway as BBC Panorama whistle-blower reveals racist and Islamophobic programme on Tower Hamlets

I believe the programme is being used for political campaigning and electioneering purposes just weeks before local and Mayoral elections in May.’

Lutfur Rahman

The BBC seems to have overcome its inbuilt reluctance to deal with ‘sensitive’ communities and has set Panorama onto Lutfur Rahman (tonight 20:30 BBC 1)….to investigate claims that Tower Hamlets’ Mayor, Lutfur Rahman, has “used public funds both to promote himself and to create a political power base” and says that it has evidence “suggesting” the mayor has refused “to answer opposition questions about spending decisions involving millions of pounds of public money”.

A bit of a wasted opportunity really…a mere half hour programme looking at one very specific accusation….when there is so much more going on in Tower Hamlets, and all related to one issue….the BBC seems to be looking at things purely from a ‘technical and political’ point of view:

The programme exposes serious inadequacies in the checks and balances of a directly elected mayoral system, particularly when there’s a context of dysfunctional party politics.

Rahman doesn’t like the attention  via Guido:

The BBC and the undercover production company, Films of Record, have also been referred to the Information Commissioner and there is now a criminal investigation underway.

….the BBC, he pronounces, being racist and Islamophobic…

[Which must be a bit of a problem for our long term resident race card playing troll on this site who shouts racist and islamophobe whenever Islam is mentioned.]

‘A dossier passed to us by a BBC whistle-blower has revealed it to be in total breach of the BBC’s editorial guidelines as a public broadcaster. It has clear racist and Islamophobic overtones targeting the Bangladeshi Muslim community in Tower Hamlets.’

Not only that but the BBC is attempting to alter the result of an election he alleges:

The BBC’s targeting of our borough is nothing short of a direct intervention in the outcome of an election.

Just as most accusations of ‘islamophobia’ don’t bare scrutiny Rahman’s own racist reaction, they’re white/non-Muslim, so they must be racist/Islamophobic, doesn’t stand up to close, or even the slightest, inspection….the last ditched, desperate defence of someone who has no other argument, no evidence, no substance, to back up their own case.

Panorama doesn’t even mention Islam/Muslim in the web report….they base their accusation solely on particular communities receiving grants for votes….no suggestion it is an Islamic conspiracy.

I guess Rahman and Owen Jones must have a lot to talk about…the BBC being the tool of the Far Right producing islamophobic and racist propaganda.

The BBC though, should be investigating the politics and cultural issues within such communities and force them into the open, especially as many wish them to remain hidden:

‘I do know that many, many Bangladeshis are terrified about speaking out in public for fear of vilification in their own community.’

Eric Pickles says:

“There is a worrying pattern of divisive community politics and mismanagement of council staff and resources by the mayoral administration in Tower Hamlets.”

But that isn’t the BBC’s issue…it is ignoring that ‘divisive community politics’.

The BBC doesn’t report Pickles saying that, merely this:

“Panorama has unearthed some very serious allegations that demand an answer,” he said. “I think the allegations or questions that Panorama raise are of a completely different magnitude to worries and concerns that I have with other councils.”

Slightly different.

Playing the race card seems to be a theme in Tower Hamlets:

Alibor Choudhury, the man in charge of the borough’s £1.2billion budget thought he had a good gag when he wanted to accuse Labour’s Bow West councillor Ann Jackson of being a racist and a fascist. Heck, she was wearing a black cardigan, so, er, wow, like Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts she must be part of John Biggs’s “black cardigan brigade”.

How tasteful.

The problem was she was wearing a black cardigan because she was in mourning for her ex-husband, whose funeral she had attended the day before.

Don’t remember this on the BBC….

‘We’re not CURRY PEOPLE!’ Amazing VIDEO of politicians erupting in Asian-White race row

THESE extraordinary videos show a town hall meeting descending into bitterness and chaos after an Asian councillor likened white colleagues to Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts, while another claimed his community had been branded “curry people”.

Playng the race card is a highly aggressive and political course of action that is designed to put the ‘guilty’ person on the defensive having to deny such an accusation or smear, knowing that ‘mud sticks’……but this shows just how convenient such a devious and malignant method it is as Asian members of Tower Hamlets had previously praised the designation of the area as the ‘Curry Capital’…..an ‘honour’ they called it…..

8.1       Question from Councillor Motin Uz-Zaman on the promotion of the       ‘Curry Capital’ during the Olympics:

‘What steps did the Mayor take to promote Curry Capital during the Olympics? What was the total budget allocated to promoting Curry Capital and Brick Lane and will the Mayor provide a breakdown of what this budget was spent on?’

Response by Councillor Rania Khan, Cabinet Member for Culture:

‘The Mayor was successful in ensuring Brick Lane and Spitalfields received the honour being designated Curry Capital 2012.’

Perhaps one day the BBC will start investigating the East London Mosque and the extremists it harbours despite reassurances from the BBC that it is a place of tolerance and peace….

Adherents of a multi-faith society looking for a good news story about Islam could do a lot worse than spend an afternoon at the East London Mosque.

Or you could compare that with what Harry’s Place says:

The East London Mosque: A Place For Hate

If only we had a BIASED BBC viewing tax! Joking. The great thing about our site is that it’s free to come here and you have no obligation to agree or differ! It’s all about opinion and choice. HOWEVER, the site is now hosted on a big server that copes (mostly) with the traffic we get and it is now time to renew that. The annual hosting cost is £540. This has already been paid on your behalf but I would appreciate it if you help share the burden. I’m going to put up a pay pal donate button thingy and hope you will find the generosity to help us keep things going for another 12 months!

Good Morning everyone. First of all, my apologies for the site availability over the weekend. This was caused by a server migration issue and is not resolved. It was not specific to Biased BBC but did cause us a problem.  Anyway, we are back in time for a whole new week of BIAS. I see the BBC have kicked off with the latest doom-mongery from the IPCC climate hustlers, you may have a view on that. The floor is yours….

(Bingo and Beer are only for ‘hard working people’ of course…CCHQ)

The ‘Spare Room Subsidy’ or as some of its critics call it, the ‘Bedroom Tax’…or as some are now calling it, the ‘Under Occupancy Penalty’.

Yes, a BBC presenter did say that yesterday…a new one from the BBC with impartiality in its DNA always wanting to give you every nuance and angle to a story, a grateful audience getting to hear every voice….of criticism.

Some dodgy semantics going on….the ‘critics’ know ‘Tax’ is strictly inaccurate and a weak point in their argument, so they have fished around for some other pejorative, negative word and come up with ‘penalty’.

Still don’t hear the BBC giving a similar treatment to the other side….when do we hear of the featherbedded ‘Selfish House Blockers’, as some might call them, keeping disadvantaged families living in appallingly overcrowded conditions because they want to keep receiving their state handout of the ‘I’m All Right Jack Subsidy’, as some might call it?

On a slightly different matter……This [reference the leaflet from Eastland Homes Housing Association above] should perhaps been a warning to Grant Shapps from coincidentally almost exactly a year ago:

10:04 – 18 March 2013

BBC in celebratory mood today as the moment draws nigh when “gay marriage” becomes legal thanks to nice Mr Cameron. But hang on a moment, there is a cloud on the horizon..

“About one in five British adults would turn down an invitation to a same-sex wedding, research suggests.”

Oh no. Homophobes! How VERY dare they not bow down to the new orthodoxy.

Nice to see that BBC enthusiastically “investigating” the Government’s removal of housing benefit aka “bedroom tax”. Labour must love the way the BBC sets the agenda on these issues so it can then row in behind.

Here you go, a new OPEN thread to see us all off into the wide blue yonder of the Weekend! Detail the bias here…