The BBC never seems to miss a chance to try and portray the Miners as heroic victims of a callous Thatcher…despite Labour closing more pits and putting more miners on the Dole than Thatcher ever did.

And here we have what is blatantly just pure propaganda of the same kind paid for by you and me.

Any bets that there’s no mention of Scargill who led his miners on a merry dance to their doom just as Unite did for the workers at Grangemouth ?(again ignored by the BBC…see today’s Sunday Times).

Thanks to Disgruntled of Enfield who spotted this:

Maxine Peake has said that she jumped at the chance to play Anne Scargill in a new radio drama.

The Silk actress, 39, has written and stars in the Radio 4 play Queens Of The Coal Age, about four miners’ wives who attempted to save pits from closure by occupying a mine.

She told the Radio Times: ” People talk of (Margaret) Thatcher removing the glass ceiling for women in this country, she’s even been labelled a feminist, but I strongly disagree. These were the real Iron Ladies. “

The Village actress, who grew up in Bolton, Lancashire, told the magazine: “I was 10 years old when the miners’ strike started in 1984 and it’s the sole event that plotted out my political landscape.

“Even at that young age I knew, somehow, that this wasn’t just an attack on the miners, but on working-class people in general.

“The strike was a potent and historic event: the country on the brink of civil war and miners fighting for their community’s survival.”

Maxine said that her grandfather, a member of the Communist Party, was “on the receiving end of police victimisation” after collecting for the miners in 1984.

The Shameless actress said that she “always had a burning desire to tell the truth, but at the time I had no idea how.”

Maxine’s first radio play, about the cyclist Beryl Burton, was broadcast last year.

When asked whether she would like to pen another play, she said that she “didn’t hesitate” to suggest the occupation of Parkside Colliery at Newton-le-Willows in 1993, led by Arthur Scargill’s then wife.

Queens Of The Coal Age will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 2.15pm on Monday November 4.

As said…this is nothing more than socialist propaganda dressed up as ‘art’ by BBC leftwingers indulging themselves on the licence fee payers shilling.

Was ever thus:

As stated in the last post Miliband gets a free pass from the BBC when it comes to real criticism of his policies…and it seems that the BBC aren’t so keen even to give airtime to those who do have critical things to say.

This was a widely published story:

Miliband in No10? It raises hairs on the back of my neck! CBI chief’s anger as Labour leader pledges to bring back socialism

Even the New Statesman felt moved to respond:

John Cridland’s assault on Miliband completes the CBI’s divorce from reality

The CBI head presents the Labour leader’s plans as dangerous Bolshevism. But in an age of market failure, most businesses won’t agree with him.

Miliband relaunches his abysmal ‘predistribution’ policy and the BBC give it 2nd highest billing on its frontpage and plenty of airtime.

And yet it is an old story from over a year ago:

Ed Miliband unveils ‘predistribution’ plan to fix economy

For 2013 Miliband has rejigged his plan slightly:

Ed Miliband pledges living wage tax breaks for firms

Some of Britain’s lowest-paid workers could get pay rises under plans drawn up by Labour leader Ed Miliband.

If the party wins the next election, Mr Miliband plans to offer firms a 12-month tax break in 2016 if they agree to pay the so-called “living wage”.

Although the BBC reports this:

Labour claims the plan will save money because benefit bills would go down and tax revenues would increase.

…it misses the essential point that claim raises….

If benefits are going down, and this ‘predistribution’ is merely a replacement for those benefits….then actual cash in the hand doesn’t go up for the ‘poorest’…in fact it might go down….

Labour claims the plan will save money because benefit bills would go down and tax revenues would increase.

Miliband will take the plaudits and credit for supposedly ‘increasing pay’ and then tax the workers on it.

The ‘poorest’ will remain the ‘poorest’ and in fact may be made poorer by Miliband.

And what about the big companies that now subsidise the small ones…..as the taxes of the big companies go towards funding tax allowances and benefits now used to top up low wages will those companies get a tax cut?…..Is Miliband cutting Big Businesses tax payments whilst imposing huge costs on small business who may well find themselves no longer in business?

Or…will small business be forced to fund Labour’s new ‘benefits tax’  on the poorest(see what I did there….just as the Tories introduced the ‘bedroom tax’ by cutting benefits….) and Big Business continue to be taxed at the same rate….thereby increasing massively the tax burden on the nation’s businesses?

The BBC doesn’t provide that analysis…though strangely reports the words of Union Dinosaur, Bob Crowe, who does at least see part of the problem….

“Offering employers a tax break to try and drag them into paying a decent rate just smacks of corporate welfare.”

Yet again another laughably ruinous idea from the Two Eds to add to the list…..

Miliband’s craven U-turn in tackling the Unions….

Miliband’s grand plan for ‘apprentices’…roundly panned….and no longer heard of…

Miliband’s freeze on Energy prices….again roundly panned as unworkable…

and now his ‘Predistribution’  or  as rebranded, the ‘living wage’ scheme……again totally unworkable in the real world.

(and let’s not forget the green taxes imposed on us by Miliband)

And yet none of these have received the critical and rigorous scrutiny from the BBC that would show them to be no more than the headline grabbing hype that they are clearly intended to be but which the BBC so obligingly co-operates in highlighting for Labour.

Ex Beeboid Rosie Millard….a voice from the trough…

The BBC left leaning?…..All an agenda by the right wing Press.

The BBC isn’t watched by the Northern Labour voting working classes…and therefore it isn’t Left Wing because it must reflect its audience….(So it’s the type of audience which watches the BBC that defines whether the BBC is biased?….therefore Question Time is biased?)

The Daily Mail’s front cover sets the BBC’s news agenda (presumably to deny and counter everything the Daily Mail reports)

Question Time is gone through with a fine tooth comb to check for bias…..but it does reflect the BBC culture…David Dimbleby is absolutely the voice of the BBC.

Vast majority of BBC voices  are from Oxbridge….they are promoting the status quo…batting for the Establishment…conservative, small C.

The BBC attracts a certain creative type….you could say they were Liberal…but not really…most send their children to private school.

The BBC tries to give  a viewpoint…er…access to all people who pay the licence fee…it leaves out the working class…it leaves out people from the North…you hear the same commentators all the time…it’s not left leaning…may look that way but only because it wants to have an argument against the government…which happens to be right wing.

The BBC makes sure all other broadcasters maintain a certain standard of broadcasting…it is a rising tide (red?) that lifts all broadcasters.

and it aims to spread its spending to keep taxi drivers and hairdressers employed in the sticks.

That’s socialism…well,  good.

“In a world where people can choose their news when and where they want it, and from a huge range of sources, we want to understand how best the BBC can retain their trust and confidence so that it remains clearly their number one choice.”

Probably by not being the broadcast arm of the Labour Party, the European Union, Climate fanatics and Al Qaeda.

Trust begins service review of BBC News and current affairs

The Trust has opened a public consultation today seeking views from audiences on the BBC’s News and current affairs output.

The review, announced in February, is the latest in the Trust’s rolling programme of service reviews.  It will examine the performance of the BBC’s network news output against the commitments set by the Trust in the BBC’s service licences and its broader public service role. 

The review will cover the BBC’s network news and current affairs for UK audiences across TV, radio and online, including:

• On TV, the daily national bulletins on BBC One, relevant weekday morning output (such as the Daily Politics) and Newsnight on BBC Two, 60 second news on BBC Three and World News Today on BBC Four. The review will also follow up on our 2012 service reviews of the News Channel and BBC Parliament.
• On radio, news bulletins and Newsbeat on Radio 1 and 1Xtra, news bulletins on Radio 2 and 3, Radio 4’s daily news programming (Today, World at One, PM, The World Tonight) and daily politics output, 5 live’s daily news output (largely its weekday daytime schedule) and news on the Asian Network.
• Online, the news sections of the BBC’s website and the Red Button, including mobile apps and social media. Current affairs output includes Panorama, This World and around 40 hours of output on BBC Two and Three, as well as political strands such as Question Time and the Daily Politics.  On radio this includes the range of Radio 4 and 5 live’s current affairs and politics programming. 

The review will particularly focus on what audiences think about the quality and distinctiveness of BBC News and current affairs, the ways that audiences consume and access BBC News, and how well positioned it is to deal with future challenges such as changing audience viewing habits and technological shifts.

Remember only talk about ‘quality and distinctiveness’ because:

This review will not look at impartiality, because the Trust already has a rolling programme of major impartiality reviews underway, or at the market impact of BBC News, because that is outside the scope of all the Trust’s service review work. 

Which is at odds with the earlier statement:

[We] will examine the performance of the BBC’s network news output against the commitments set by the Trust in the BBC’s service licences and its broader public service role.

Judging by past reviews by the BBC perhaps we should be judging the quality of those reviews…..

From Seesaw to Wagonwheel....which didn’t look at all at its coverage of Israel/Palestine…one of its most contentious areas of journalism.

Or The Balen Report…..into the Israel/Palestine conflict…..so contentious that the BBC spent £300,000 hiding the conclusions…presumably because it shows that the BBC has been working on the side of the Palestinians and providing anti-Israel propaganda.

Or the BBC’s Impartiality Review…Israeli-Palestinian Conflict…which found that the BBC was biased….in favour of Israel.

Or its science review….done by a man who is basically a BBC employee and a fundamentalist pro-manmade climate change fanatic, Steve Jones.

Let’s guess what the BBC’s final analysis of any review might be…..

Yes some issues need looking at…but overall we are doing rather well, and the People love us.

BBC faces new bias row over charity given millions by EU

The BBC is facing questions over the impartiality of its coverage of the European Union after its charity arm received millions of pounds to promote the EU’s political agenda.

Rob Wilson MP: Time to scrap unfair poll tax on television

The writing is on the wall.

The Telegraph tells us that:

49% of people questioned wanted the BBC licence fee scrapped….

and 21% want it cut.

Only 18% wanted it frozen…

and 10% want it increased.

The BBC tells us:

‘…the licence fee is the most popular means of funding the BBC, ahead of subscription and advertising, the spokesman said.

“With 96 per cent of the UK population using BBC services for more than 18 hours a week on average, the licence fee model has shown itself resilient and continues to remain good value for money to the public,” the spokesman said.

As 2016 is post Election….I wonder what sort of coverage the Tories will be getting now in the run up to 2015 from the BBC.

The same wilful blindness that allowed girls to continue to be abused by Muslim gangs is still in operation…..it is a wilful blindness that refuses to examine some harsh realities about Islam.

From Harry’s Place:

The Quiet Death of Moderate Islam

These days, one can happily believe and even state publicly that the death penalty should apply to anyone who has sex outside of marriage, takes part in a homosexual act, insults the Prophet or leaves Islam without being ‘extreme’.

As long as one says “in an ideal Islamic society”.

HP ran a piece about Abdul Qadeer Baksh, Chairman of the Islamic Centre in Luton. Baksh asserted on BBC 3 Counties Radio that every moderate Muslim believes that gays would be executed in an ideal Islamic state. Whilst the presenter, Olly Mann did challenge him on this, I couldn’t help but feel irritated by Mann’s lack of outrage – the challenge was far too polite almost to the point of being deferential – “Er, I do accept that you said in an ‘ideal’ Islamic state”.

How does ‘ideal’ make any material difference to the hatefulness of what was being said?

It’s ironic that in modern Britain, it is far, far more dangerous for me to state my beliefs in public in than it is for Baksh to state his.

What chance do people like me have when the ‘great and good’, the liberal media and the ‘anti-fascist’ organisations that ought to be supporting and defending us, instead support and defend those who believe we should die? In an ‘ideal’ world.

The gutless media. The unprincipled trade unions, universities and student unions that turn a blind eye to the wickedness being promoted in their midst. The hypocritical ‘anti-fascist’ organisations that enable and defend hate. Most of all, the lickspittle political class. Shame on them all.

‘Extreme’ has quietly become ‘moderate’ whilst Europeans have been too polite, too unprincipled or too cowardly to object.

There are those who say, “Islam needs a ‘Reformation”. To them I say “Look around you – the Reformation has already taken place”.

Moderate Islam is as good as dead. It didn’t stand a chance.

Throughout Europe today, someone can advocate a Utopia in which gays and apostates are killed and nevertheless expect to be considered a ‘moderate’, fully entitled to and deserving of tolerance and respect. They can even call themselves an ‘anti-fascist’.

As long as that Utopia is “an ideal Islamic society”.

Note BBC’s Olly Mann states Baksh is ‘playing into right wing hands’…….by revealing what Islam really means.

Better late than never, here you go, a new Open Thread to start the month and end the week!

Mark Easton, the BBC’s immigration cheerleader, has leapt upon some research about ‘Diversity’ and manages to put a classic BBC spin on it.

Unfortunately the ‘research’ tells us nothing that you couldn’t dream up yourself….i.e. that where communities are segregated, separated into different races and religions, things will fall apart as a ‘society’.

Conversely where there is no segregation and everyone mingles without adopting the identity politics so beloved of the likes of those employed in the BBC, people just get on with things and generally get on together.

Easton proclaims this as a break through revelation….and then adds his own spin…

What the new research calculates is that ethnic diversity helps improve community life…what this paper suggests is that where you have non-segregated and relatively prosperous communities, diversity is likely to improve community life, not damage it.

Diversity improves community life?  And yet where’s his evidence? In what way exactly does community life become improved?

Maybe he is comparing ‘community life’ in a non-segregated and a segregated society….then there is an improvement…by comparison….but is he actually claiming diversity itself is beneficial and improves a society?  That’s highly subjective.  What is he saying is wrong with the original community?

Is he saying that an all white community is somehow bad, deficient, morally wrong, dysfunctional?  Or an all black society…or a Japanese society?

A rather simplistic and naive, not to say insulting, assertion to say that a few black faces improves a society just because they’re black.

Even a completely white community is ‘diverse’….having a vast array of different ‘white’ people…not to mention body types, religions, political views, languages, accents, social groupings, fashions, music, football teams etc etc…and of course they may themselves not be ‘British’.

Ridiculous to lump all Whites together as one distinct and well defined group that needs to be leavened by a bit of colour to make them less racist…which they obviously are, being hideously white….and which is the real subtext to Easton’s comments about ‘improving’ a community.

Easton, with a complete lack of contrition, has finally come round to the realisation that Multi-culturalism is a disaster….because surely that is what this research is showing….the separation of communities into separate, well defined groups, is highly damaging to a society.

Shame the BBC has been pushing that narrative, of multi-culturalism, of identity politics, for years now.

Shame that the BBC has felt it is its job to push that narrative.

Once again the BBC’s interference in politics and society, trying to socially engineer that society in the BBC’s own image, has caused immense damage.

Shame that the BBC seems to be entirely unaccountable and shamelessly unprepared to take the blame for any of its dangerous actions.

Shame no one will take the BBC on and put a stop to their self imposed mission to ‘improve’ society.

Shame the BBC itself seems entirely confused about what its role is:

Mark Thompson proclaiming that:

The BBC is not a campaigning organisation and can’t be, and actually the truth is that sometimes our dispassionate flavour of broadcasting frustrates people who have got very, very strong views, because they want more red meat. Often that plays as bias.

However he also said this:

The BBC is no longer just a broadcaster, the corporation was to be a social force in the land, he said. The corporation was an “important builder of social capital, seeking to increase social cohesion and tolerance”, which in future would try to “foster audience understanding of differences of ethnicity, faith, gender, sexuality, age and ability or disability”…