This morning the BBC were trumpeting on the radio some research by a think tank called ‘Centre For Cities’ that said London was growing much faster than other UK cities as the much vaunted ‘Recovery’ left them behind as economic also-rans…presumably hinting they were being ignored or abandoned by the Government.

The BBC said it was an independent think tank, but admitted that it had been set up by Labour peer Lord Sainsbury…the man who donated nearly £20 million to Labour.

Apparently…. Centre for Cities was launched in March 2005 as part of IPPR and became independent in November 2007.

So independent of the IPPR now…Labour’s very own think tank?

The Chief Executive of Centre for Cities is……

Alexandra Jones

Chief Executive

Alexandra worked as a private secretary for the Permanent Secretary at the former Department for Education and Skills and as a researcher at the Institute for Public Policy Research.

What’s odd, apart from the ‘independent’ label is that after trumpeting this ‘research’ early on in the day, it being the lead story on the news bulletins, it suddenly vanished….almost as if someone responsible had come on shift and pulled the story as  headline news….due to it being a Labour Party stunt?

There is no doubt London is massive compared to other regions but this story has been knocking around for a long time now….so why is it being pushed once again…the thought that the Coalition’s ‘Recovery’ is leaving other regions behind?  Will Miliband be announcing a new policy on cities in the next few days?

Who knows…at least it seems to have been pulled by the BBC as a lead story…or as a story at all in fact on the radio….after being bombarding us with it early on it vanished.

The story seems to ignore some other truths about ‘the Regions’…the streets may not be paved with  gold but things are moving:

Record growth for business activity

Business activity rose at a record rate in the West Midlands in December according to the latest purchasing managers report for Lloyds Bank Commercial Banking. West Midlands private sector companies reported increases for the eighth month in a row with the rate of expansion the strongest in the 16-year-old survey’s history.

This is from Manchester which they tell us is doomed:

It’s double joy for regional growth

10 Jan 2014 05:59

So why is the Centre for Cities claiming, and the BBC reporting this:

Manchester ‘underperforming’

The Now Show was a proper lefty rightwing-bashfest on Saturday laying into the rich and privileged:

Council house comic buys £2m mansion… but John Bishop says: ‘I will never forget where I am from’

You have to laugh.

Toby Young at the Telegraph spotted this and wasn’t impressed:

BBC comedian says Cameron ‘wants your kids to die’

Perhaps Hound is trying to compete with his fellow NHAP member Marcus Chown who is :

NHA Party executive member is the most influential tweeter about David Cameron

Our own executive committee member Marcus Chown has been named  the “most influential tweeter about David Cameron” by academics at Imperial College who’ve created a new  index for  ranking tweeters.

“I am just pleased to be getting the message out that David Cameron is dismantling our NHS while lying that he isn’t.”

Rufus compounds the alarmist language with a bit of incitement to violent revolution….

Interesting that Hound opts for the National Health Action Party…..a single issue party that ensures he doesn’t have to think very much and come up with any tricky policies for all those other issues…such as the economy, or education, or welfare….which is why the money can’t all be spent on the NHS…despite the vast, vast sums that are already.

Seems that Rufus has some way to go before competing fully with Chown in the Twittersphere as others are also less than impressed with Rufus:

Oh dear…still not top billing even though shit always floats to the top apparently….that’s a joke Rufus….smile…

Ta

Rufus Hound, less better known as Robert James Blair Simpson…educated by the £5,930 a-term Frensham Heights……the same school that Domino Harvey, Bounty Hunter, went to….

She gets my vote..and yes that’s a real photo not a pseud actor/comedian…Rufus not so much.

Ruf likes to think of himself as one of the ‘people’…. not a privately educated, self indulgent, over privileged, over paid, loudmouth playing at politics ….he’s just a chav really…no really…him an’ Owen hang out all the time…baby….

As said ‘The 100 Worst People on Twitter’ aren’t fans……

‘….the grand posturing, ill-judged and out-of-sync opinions, doing a corporate gig to present an award to G4S, deciding to call out the members of a fucking forum, proudly declaring his Lib Dem voting intentions in 2010, getting booed by Keith Lemon – it all adds up to what should’ve been seen as a string of embarrassing failures by a deeply unlikable man, even by comedian standards. As it is, he’ll collect a bigger pay cheque to present something even more low-brow, whilst turning up for an overacted bit-part in the occasional drama to soothe his ego, and there’s nothing you or I can do about it. If we get the television presenters we deserve, then the rapture is fully underway.’

These are not of course the opinions of management.

Rufus has delusions of grandeur…

Trouble is Henry V isn’t what the People need, it’s the BBC, the Voice of the People….but it’s failed them in their hour of need….some are very concerned it has abandoned their cause…apparently…..

Marcus Chown being a supporter of, a worker for, the NHAP….their ‘Twitter Lead’…whatever that is…presumably twitter propagandist.

It’s that right wing, Tory supporting BBC again….good of them to allow so many left wing comedians to dominate the airwaves though.

Well folks, a new week dawns. And the BBC is meticulous as ever in making sure that EVERY Conservative announcement is balanced with a Labour statement. Hence Cameron’s “bonfire of regulations” for small business is balanced by Chukas “let’ set up a new quango”. Anyhoo, the day beckons me and I bid you adieu and leave this new open thread for you to complete!

Via ‘Is the BBC biased’:

BBC  Dressing to the Left

In my 12 years with BBC News, I worked for many of the people who, for the past quarter century, have decided what the BBC broadcasts. Three of them went on to become Director-General. Almost without exception, they were decent, honest and fair, thoroughly convinced of their own political even-handedness. So why have they apparently been incapable of recognising, let alone addressing, the corporation’s rampant left-wing bias?

Unless the Right can think of ways of making the BBC’s feedback loops work effectively, or the BBC spontaneously recognises its responsibilities to license-fee payers who don’t share its equalitarian instincts, Europe’s most significant left-liberal broadcaster will continue – shamelessly – to dress to the left.

That last paragraph gets to the crux of the problem….it’s OK if they’re left wing as long as there are processes in place that prevent that from colouring the BBC’s output with a pinkish tinge…unfortunately any such processes which the BBC might have in place are completely inadequate and ineffective, probably because those overseeing the processes are themselves of the same mindset…..the output is irrevocably left wing, Labour supporting.

You only had to look at Justin Webb’s reaction to criticism of the BBC recently to realise the problem…..they just don’t accept that they are doing anything wrong.

It doesn’t help of course that the BBC Trust is on the inside and sees its job more to protect the BBC than to scrutinise, check and moderate any such tendencies.

As mentioned before we are often told that there is no such thing as the ‘British Identity’…no such thing formed by 2000 years of history, of culture, of traditions, language, industrial and scientific innovation as well as the new political ideas that spring from all that…such as liberty, freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of association, democracy…never mind the humour and way of looking at the world.

The elusive search for Britishness

In the course of the debate about what British identity is, the multicultural argument has been championed particularly vocally and been given prominence, especially by the BBC. The multiculturalist position is one that essentially wishes to reduce British identity to being, by definition, diversity. In other words, that multiculturalism is the very essence of Britishness.

Under this view British identity becomes simply the sum total of a cacophony of a vast host of other often divergent cultures from around the world.

“It always strikes me that the BBC’s output has disproportionate coverage of the cultures and national identities of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

“The one aspect of our national story that people seem to be scared of is a discussion of England and Englishness.

“I think it is born out of a misplaced paranoia and a desire not to offend.

With that in mind here is one to watch from the British Broadcasting Corporation, starts tomorrow:

Liberty

Bettany Hughes examines changing ideas of liberty by allowing a neuroscientist to take control of her brain and by perusing the pornography of the French Revolution.

The Ideas That Make Us is a Radio 4 series which reveals the history of the most influential ideas in the story of civilisation, ideas which continue to affect us all today.

In this ‘archaeology of philosophy’, the award-winning historian and broadcaster Bettany Hughes begins each programme with the first, extant evidence of a single word-idea in Ancient Greek culture and travels both forwards and backwards in time, investigating how these ideas have been moulded by history and have shaped the human experience. In the first programme of this series, Bettany examines changing ideas of liberty with neuroscientist Professor Patrick Haggard, classicist Professor Paul Cartledge, historian Dr. Stephen Pigney and Ruth Porter from the Institute of Economic Affairs.

Other ideas examined in this series are comedy, hospitality, wisdom and peace.

The BBC is so anti-capitalist  it is trying to wipe  out private companies…by taking over the world once more….

From the Telegraph:

Classic FM claims BBC Radio 3 ‘apes’ its output for more listeners

Classic FM claims its rival, BBC Radio 3, has ‘aped’ its successful programmes to help build its audiences

The accusations have been made in written submissions to a Culture, Media and Sport Committee review into the “future of the BBC”, ahead of the government reconsidering the licence fee in 2016.

The commercial station is supported by its parent company Global Radio, which has used a separate submission to claim the BBC has “abandoned” its distinctiveness in order to focus on gaining peak-time audiences, making it “poor value for money”.

The BBC is up to its old tricks….’educating’ us on the delights of immigration…but oh so subtly.

Yesterday we had ‘Reimagining the City’…

Musician Soweto Kinch offers a different vision of a city he’s loved all his life – Birmingham.

It is in fact a good listen, if you can get over the fact that confusingly he sounds just like Lenny Henry.  However the subtext is obvious….. immigrants are loveable and British….you have nothing to fear from immigration.  This of course is a rather rose tinted view of things that neglects the hard nosed political issues….such as religion and race.  Sure immigrants bring with them music, food and other different experiences to enhance our appreciation of life and it’s a delight I’m sure to have all these new cultural imports….but you can’t just look at the good and sweep the bad, sometimes the very bad, consequences under the carpet….Islamic terrorism for instance and the riots of 2011…kicked off on racial grounds.

We are told how important identity is…and how that identity is formed by the community around you….something that the Left always denies of course when it suits…then there is no ‘British’ identity…there is no such thing as a ‘British person’ shaped and formed by the culture, society and history…..when of course there is…a very individual British identity.  If there is no ‘British’ identity then you can’t complain that Britishness is being lost as the land is colonised by mass immigration.

A slightly less subtle, but still coming from a tangent, is a programme about immigration to Germany….clearly meant to ‘inform’ the so-called debate here…..

We are told that without immigration the Germans will die out and the country will become an empty, economic wasteland.

No alarmism there then on behalf of the immigration lobby by the BBC.

It is odd how immigration is all one way from the BBC’s point of view…it is all one big rosy picture of a beneficial inflow of people…no reference to the massive downsides that also come with all these mass, uncontrolled immigration.

Germany’s New Children

John Laurenson explores the flaw at the heart of the German economic miracle…. the Fatherland can make the euros but it can’t make the babies.

Business leaders and some politicians say the current high-level of immigration into their country is a God-send for Germany.

What might raise eyebrows but doesn’t?

The UK will have the biggest population in Europe by 2050…and immigration of course means emigration from somewhere…all those ‘highly trained, expensively trained professionals’ that are boosting our economy or the NHS are being plundered from developing nations….they are hit by a double whammy…the costs of training are lost…and then the people and their skills are lost to their own community.

Poland for instance is now suffering a labour shortage.  Who are they going to import?

The Sunday Times tells us that the government’s apprenticeship scheme is being exploited by foreigners so rather than Brits getting the training and the jobs as intended we are paying for unskilled people from abroad to come ere and yet again take their jobs.

Where’s the outrage at this exploitation of the scheme that is supposed to help get Brits onto that icon of the left..the social mobility ladder? That ladder that we are told, again and again by Poly Toynbee sound alikes,  has been pulled out from under the working class.

The Sunday Times last week told us that migrant voters are being recruited to ‘rise up against the Tories’.

Did you see that story on the BBC?  No of course not.

Migrants mobilised for British European Parliament vote

They are sending letters to Polish migrants stating: “This may be your last chance to vote in Britain” and “Your future and that of your family, community and friends may depend on it”.

We always knew that Labour imported a new voting base…and indeed African newspapers even urged immigrants to vote Labour.  One reason for allowing in so many East Europeans unnecessarily early was to allow time for them to become UK citizens and therefore entitled to vote…the fact that as Europeans they were likely to vote to stay in Europe in any likely referendum, and for Labour in a national election, must have been a big consideration in Labour’s thoughts.

Apparently 450,000 Poles in the UK are entitled to vote.

Turn out at these European elections is often small…so mobilising even a small number of pro-voters can swing, or steal, the election and therefore have an enormous impact on British policies and sovereignty.

You might have an argument to say that in effect Britain has been politically taken over by European or other growing communities who don’t necessarily have any loyalty to Britain.

But the BBC makes no investigation of that aspect of immigration…preferring instead to tell us that economically we are all better off…despite study after study suggesting that isn’t true…and ignoring the fact that most Brits and indeed many immigrants themselves think immigration is too high.

Your Country Needs You…just which country?

Had to turn off the radio yesterday….seconds into ‘Saturday Live’ and being told we were going to be treated to  a Dutch environmentalist who tackles Japanese whalers, a descendant of a former slave owning family, a Romanian gentleman lost in London for 4 days and worst of all…the inheritance tracks of Cdr Chris Hadfield…haven’t we had enough of him?

Is there no ‘Top Gear’ for the radio?

The papers are full of the outrage that businessmen and industrialists are expressing at Balls’  class war tax hike.

But you’d almost never realise the extent of that anger if you relied upon the BBC.

Here is the BBC investigation of the issue:

Balls insists Labour is not ‘anti-business’ after 50p tax pledge

Sounds sort of promising…the headline perhaps hinting at the level of anger at Balls but there the promise stops.

Who are claiming that Labour is ‘anti-Business’?  The BBC tells us it is just the same old Tories and a nebulous they name ‘Critics of Labour’.

‘Critics of Labour’?…oh…they mean:

Labour’s City guru savages Ed Balls for 50p tax pledge

Economics behind Labour’s plan to bring back 50p top rate of income tax would not even get “a pass at GCSE”, says the party’s own former City minister

Lord Myners, who served as City minister in Gordon Brown’s government, attacked the policy, saying it would take the party back to the days of “old Labour”.

“The economic logic behind his [Mr Balls’s] thinking would not get him a pass at GCSE economics,” he said. “By contrast to Ed Miliband’s recent interventions on energy and banking, which tried to reconcile competitive markets with Labour principles, Ed Balls takes us back to old Labour and the politics of envy.”

And that of course is just one of many ‘critics of Labour’.

Here’s another:

A FTSE 100 boss said: ‘Ed Miliband doesn’t give a toss about business. He will say anything to get elected. It is economic vandalism.’

Don’t hear much of that kind of denouncement of Labour on the BBC for some reason.

The politics of envy….that is of course what the 50p hike is all about…it has nothing to do with the real economy and everything to do with Labour’s class war…they see a chance to paint the Tories as the friends of big business, regardless of facts, and they produce a policy, regardless of facts, to encourage that image, with Labour of course as the champions of the downtrodden and dispossessed….never mind that Gordon Brown in speeches to Bankers told them this was ‘the golden age’ of Banking.

Addressing the bow-tied ranks of money-changers, he paid lavish homage to ‘your unique innovative skills, your courage and steadfastness’. They had his personal thanks ‘for the outstanding, the invaluable contribution you make to the prosperity of Britain’.

‘A new world order has been created,’ he proclaimed. Britain was ‘a new world leader’ thanks to ‘your efforts, ingenuity and creativity’. He congratulated himself for ‘resisting pressure’ to toughen up regulation of their activities. Everyone needed to follow the City’s ‘great example’, emulate this ‘high value-added, talent-driven industry’. ‘Britain needs more of the vigour, ingenuity and aspiration that you already demonstrate.’

Thanks to their ‘remarkable achievements’, we had the huge privilege to live in ‘an era that history will record as the beginning of a new Golden Age’.

This is all to do with politics and an election…just as it was when they raised the rate to 50p just before an election in 2010…after the rate beuing 40p for all of their time in office.

We are told Ed Miliband is ‘channeling’ Teddy Roosevelt as his guiding voice from the past.

Unfortunately Roosevelt might not be impressed with Miliband’s ‘them and us’  rhetoric as in a BBC programme yesterday we heard that Roosevelt believed that the politics of class war would be the rock upon which society floundered.

I haven’t watched the Marr show but if he didn’t raise the matter and ask Balls if he is just a political  opportunist prepared to wreck the economy once again for party political reasons I would be surprised…possibly.

The BBC’s approach to Balls and his claims demonstrates perfectly their bias.

On Friday we had a day of forensic examination of Cameron’s claim that wages were inching ahead of inflation.

Every news bulletin led, not with Cameron’s claim, but with Labour’s own claim that Cameron was ‘misleading’ us….so what was the big news?  The so called ‘cost of living crisis’ was over…or Labour’s smear?

Contrast that with yesterday…Balls had the favourable headline that he was going to save the economy and put it back into surplus….the Tories were left with the claim that it was just back to Old Labour and tax and spend…Balls often then was given a long soundbite pushing his policy.

Friday night…you might expect Cameron’s wage claim would be top of the agenda on Newsnight…..but no…Balls’ policy was the main talking point….Cameron didn’t even get mentioned.

Strange when the BBC spent a day ripping into the government announcement….and Balls hadn’t even made his speech yet.

The BBC did mention once yesterday that at Davos businessmen were saying Labour were ‘demonising’ business…..but it doesn’t seem to have been repeated at all.

Not saying the BBC is biased in favour of Labour but it clearly bloody well is.

Boris Johnson once asked:

 ‘Should Gordon Brown Be Sent To Prison?’

London Mayor Johnson was answering a question on the issue of dodgy city workers being jailed for criminal banking acts.

“I think you should jail anybody who is guilty of criminal behaviour.

“You could probably frame a law for bankers, but what about the Labour government who were in power in the period leading up to the crisis?

“There they were sitting there deregulating. Gordon Brown went to the City of London in June 2007 and said we are entering a golden age of banking in the City of London. What kind of signal did that send? Now, should Gordon Brown be send to prison?” he asked to shouts of “yes” from the studio audience.

“Tessa Jowell (also on the panel) was part of that government – should she be sent to prison? I sincerly hope not. I would come and visit her in prison.”

…Brown and all those who aided and abetted in the crime that broke the Banks of England….that includes his cheerleading Media groupies perhaps.