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…

Today (0810) ventured onto the ‘frontline’ in the immigration debate as John Humphrys went to Sheffield to look at the ‘Roma’ question.

Interesting as you got a clear picture of one problem in the immigration ‘debate’…those closely involved with immigrants have no intention of actually having a debate….immigration is ‘good’ for better or worse.

Humphrys at least had a reasonable stab at balance…except no he didn’t…the things he said raised the problems and issues….and yet nowhere in the piece had there been time allocated to those with genuine concerns about immigration.

A group of people did have a say…but Humphrys admitted he had been ‘ambushed’ by the local residents…in other words there had been no plan to talk to them…just the local council official dealing with immigrants and an immigration help service representative….in other words two people who had no intention of saying anything negative about the issues and wanted to sweep all the problems under the carpet…‘it’ll all turn out OK in the end’….well that’s OK then…just when is the ‘end’ going to be?  There is no end in sight….as immigration continues to swamp the country….it doesn’t stop, it’s a never ending problem, even if one group did ‘integrate’ they are immediately replaced by another…so no, there will never be an ‘end’.

We then came back to the studio….and who pops in for a chat…Mark Easton…the BBC’s very own ‘Open Borders’ PR guru who thinks we should all just learn to love and accept immigrants and luxuriate in the benefits they bring to our country.

Easton’s thought for the day….We should have a calm, reasoned and sensible debate…just as proposed by that (Tiny) Tory group which opposes all measures to limit immigration, oh, and the Libdems of course….and we know their opinions….not forgetting Labour’s part in all this…the cause of the problem.

So all who want no limits on immigration are ‘reasoned and sensible’,  all who actually want a calm, reasoned and sensible debate, aren’t at all calm, reasoned and sensible…they’re all fascist, xenophobic little Englanders….. is the implication from what Easton suggests.

The BBC has been wonderfully generous with its time and money indoctrinating, sorry, ‘mentoring’, 30,000 school pupils from around the country and tutoring them on how to become journalists.

Gord help us!

Gord help us if this is what they are teaching them:

Fiona Bruce mentors pupils for Michael Gove interview

Fiona Bruce reveals the BBC’s greatest trick for eliciting sympathy for a ‘victim’ of whatever oppression the government is guilty of now in the BBC’s eyes and making things unreasonably and impossibly difficult for a politician….and thereby altering the viewer’s perceptions of the full narrative…….‘love me, love my dog as well’ type of thing….love the individual immigrant…love, or at least grudgingly accept mass immigration.

That secret is to demand answers for the ‘personal’ circumstances.

Bruce said the pupils should be asking questions directly relevant to them…‘and we were talking about this….for a politician it’s very easy to talk in general terms’ but if the interviewer asks questions about their own personal circumstances saying ‘Your policies are making things worse for me..how are you going to help me’…then that is a bit harder for the politician to answer.

Of course no politician can possibly provide an answer for everyone’s personal circumstances and so such a line of questioning is essentially dishonest and designed to embarrass the politician…he can’t possibly know the full circumstances and even if he did he can’t make policy decisions there and then, and certainly not for one person or one particular group.

The BBC of course loves this as it puts the politician on the spot, generating tension or conflict and the BBC knows that and it will file his answer away for another day only to raise the matter later demanding answers as to why such and such hasn’t been done.

The BBC’s greatest trick…make it personal…immigration?…never mind the massive downsides, ignore them, promote the ‘benefits’ but in particular get personal, get the immigrants individual story, the hardships, the poverty, the ‘appalling’ lives they escape from, the terrible dangers they endured as they risked all to come to Britain..passing through all those countries with the same religion, culture or language to get to a completely foreign and alien UK, which is the only one that will pay you benefits……oh….and most of all tell us how they have come to work and have no intention of claiming any benefits at all…..get the sob story and the listener’s sympathy for one immigrant will then transfer to the narrative on immigration as a whole….let’s fling open those borders.

Remember….‘The enemy is only someone whose story you haven’t heard yet.’

I don’t know about a ‘full house’ but own a big house and you’re toast…if the BBC has its way.

Listening to Today (around 07:25) and the BBC journo was interviewing Lord Turner, in charge of not regulating the banks at one time.

Said journo stated that he thought the housing market was creating inequality and that we must surely have a ‘mansion tax’.

Nice, as always, to have a BBC journo’s opinion inserted as ‘fact’ into a news programme along with his solution….nothing to do with Cameron clearly stating in PMQs that he would fight this unjust tax?

The BBC have a warning for you about the Far Right:

France election: National Front gains trigger alarm

It is always an oddity that the BBC is never ‘alarmed’ about the Far Left taking power…there is no ‘warning from history’ about them….as Stalin erased his enemies from the archives the BBC erases Stalin and his ilk and their massive crimes….apparently communist North Korea is a Nazi state…and Putin is of the ‘Far Right’.

However it is not only the Far Left who get left out of this scenario.

The French Far Right have teemed up with ‘conservative’ Muslims and indeed ‘conservative Catholics’…

Here is Harry’s Place:

Domestically [in the UK] the far-left continues to ignore the reactionary and regressive nature of many of their Muslim allies, bolstering them in the process at the expense of liberal Muslims.

In France things are quite different as the far-right has begun to reach out and develop an alliance with conservative Muslim factions. Far-right elements in France have never been pro-Muslim but, in the grand scheme of things, they have decided that gays and Jews pose a greater threat to the French way of life. It is not unusual to see conservative Catholics, Muslims and far-right elements joining arms to protest on the streets of France condemning same-sex marriage and Zionist domination in the same breath. This new movement is represented by the anti-Semitic comedian Dieudonne and the inverted nazi salute he helped to popularise, known as the quenelle.

Why no mention of the connection of ‘conservative’ Muslims or Catholics in relation to the French Far Right?

After all a warning from history is self evident for that:

‘Islam And Judaism’……wonder what it says inside.

Middle of the week and time for a new Open Thread! Enjoy!

Via Guido:

Labour Send “Solidarity” to New Newsnight Editor

Just what the new Newsnight economics editor needs when he is being accused of being too close to the Labour Party, the Labour deputy leader sending him public solidarity on Twitter:

@DuncanWeldon sorry to c Mail attacks on you. Sending u solidarity Hang on in there. Horrid but they’ll give up after a bit. H—
Harriet Harman (@HarrietHarman) March 25, 2014

 

 

All smiles

The canny Andrew Neil makes a wee joke about Tuscany Toynbee…and the Poverty Queen isn’t amused (via Guido):

Bit of a sense of humour bypass there.

Oh…where’s that smile gone?

Oh…and it was appalling bias by Neil against grandstanding social reformers campaigning for the poorest and most downtrodden in society using the conveniently highly paid media jobs as the vehicle to deliver the message and who also have a lovely little villa in Tuscany for those well needed revitalising rests after spending so much of their valuable time lifting the poorest out of the gutter, kicked there by a callous, cold hearted Tory no doubt.

Dreadful.

The BBC completely ignored Labour donor John Mills’ claim that Miliband will not actually honour his promise to freeze energy prices….a pretty damning claim as that policy was central to Miliband’s politics….his ‘flagship policy’.

However the BBC have immediately jumped on SSE’s announcement that they are going to freeze prices for a year slamming it on their frontpage as the second most important story and are claiming this as a victory for Miliband.

Evan Davis on Today linking the two and ‘The BBC’s industry correspondent, John Moylan, says the freeze has echoes of Labour’s flagship energy policy, which promises to keep prices at the same level for 20 months after the next election if Labour are elected.’

Not much outrage about the 500 jobs going at SSE as a result:

SSE said it expects lower profits as a result of the freeze, but it would be “streamlining and simplifying” its business to cover the shortfall.

The company announced it would cut 500 jobs and shelve three planned offshore wind farm developments.

Only it doesn’t have anything to do with Miliband…these companies have been offering fixed price tariffs for a long time, well before Miliband piped up.

Every company offers them…npower offers this:

    Fixed 2 year

  Fix & Control Aug 2015

Online Fixed Price Energy June 2015

ScottishPower   Fixed Price Energy April 2016

  Fixed Price September 2015

   iSave Fixed v18 May 2015

Prices fixed until 30th June 2015

etc etc etc

Always a puzzle as to what catches the BBC’s imagination when they sit around in their editorial meetings to decide what is ‘News’, and what isn’t.