Stop the world, but Mandela is ill, again, and BBC instantly go into full panic. I dread to think what their coverage will be like should this ancient communist loving terrorist commander pop his clogs.

Here you go, a new Open Thread! Wasn’t it fantastic that Her Majesty put John Humphrys in his place the other day?

Seems to be a slightly different tone from the BBC when reporting the same story, that of the US PRISM electronic intelligence gathering revelations.

This side of the Pond the Brits get this headline:

GCHQ US spy claims ‘chilling’….allegations that Britain’s electronic listening post GCHQ has been gathering data through a secret US spy programme

and the report adopts a pretty negative attitude towards the intelligence gathering….nothing to do with who is leading the charge?…

Labour’s Keith Vaz said the claims were “chilling” and shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper demanded an inquiry.

Across the Pond its seems the BBC think Obama was taking difficult decisions, doing a difficult job, and all for the safety and security of the American People and the programme is closely monitored by good, trustworthy people:

Obama backs surveillance programmes….saying they are closely overseen by Congress and the courts.

The report spends 95% of its coverage ‘defending’ Obama’s position.

They insert this one negative comment from a Republican right at the bottom of the piece…but then counter that with a positive one from …another Republican and a Democrat:

Republican Senator Rand Paul called the programmes “an astounding assault on the Constitution”.

But his colleagues Republican Senator Lindsay Graham and Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein both defended the phone records practice on Thursday. 

I  imagine if this guy was still in charge the headlines might have been a tad different:

The BBC’s World At One  (7 mins 30 secs) dignifies and white washes Mau Mau terrorism.

The BBC’s Gabriel Gatehouse talking to one of the, as he calls them, Mau Mau veterans:

‘I must say sir you sound very magnaminous considering what you went through.’

…the ferocity and barbarity of what went on at that time has left deep scars…on the victims of torture.

Not the ferocity and barbarity of the Mau Mau but of the Brits.

Max Hastings on the programme suggests Gabriel Gatehouse ought to die of shame for the one sided report that he just delivered.

Gatehouse thinks its all a big joke:

Gabriel Gatehouse ‏@ggatehouse 6h  @Nowheria Max Hastings said on Radio 4 I should “die of shame” for my reporting on the story

Gatehouse  highlights claims that ‘London’ implicated in  Kenyan local decisions;

Gabriel Gatehouse ‏@ggatehouse 7h Those involved in the case say the decision of the court and the settlement do point to “systematized” violence orchestrated from London

Not one sided at all, no shilling for the Mau Mau terrorists by Gatehouse:

Gabriel Gatehouse ‏@ggatehouse 5 Jun Mau Mau: UK thought to be offering around £14m for 5,200 claimants. That’s £2700 each. Some had their testicles ripped off with pliers.

Gatehouse seems keen to ‘encourage’ others to make similar claims:

Gabriel Gatehouse ‏@ggatehouse 6h  Seems inevitable today’s settlement will encourage other people with colonial-era grievances to come forward. Malaya? Cyprus? Palestine?

Tim Stanley in the Telegraph takes a line that the BBC obviously doesn’t:

The British must not rewrite the history of the Mau Mau revolt

Spot the difference:

From the Daily Mail:

Cashpoint card snatches treble: Romanian crime gangs responsible for 92% of thefts from cash machines, police believe

• Number of thefts carried out by cashpoints has trebled in the past year
• Police intelligence suggests 90 per cent are linked to Romanian immigrants
• Cost of card fraud expected to total £400million by the end of this year

From the BBC:

Bank card thefts ‘soaring at ATMs’

The BBC tells us of ‘thieves, ‘gangs’ and ‘pepetrators’…but who are they?  The BBC doesn’t tell us that.

These are crimes that wouldn’t have happened if the BBC’s favourite political party hadn’t deliberately and knowingly imported these criminals…..along with all the rapes, murders, shop lifting, drugs and vehicle theft etc that were also imported on the coat tails of Labour’s ‘ethnic cleansing’ of ‘hideously’ white British people.

And all supported by the BBC….a support the BBC is still giving by deliberately covering up the true cost of immigration……no mention of ‘Romanians’…because the BBC doesn’t want to associate this with the probable influx of new Romanian migrants coming our way soon.

Still, I’m sure the BBC is only waiting until tomorrow before they report this:

Beggars and thieves from across Europe are flocking to the streets of Britain, Theresa May warns the EU

• Home Secretary warns of ‘unacceptable burden’ on schools and hospitals
• Uses speech to EU ministers to demand changes to border rules
• Highlights how EU nationals are fleecing the British taxpayer

This is a response to some of the points raised in the comments about the last post on A&E …a good debate …thanks to everyone who had a go.

The real point is to ask whether the BBC should have taken the King’s Fund’s press release at face value or should it have questioned the figures more deeply.

Looking at the King’s Fund’s report it seems to be more an opinion piece than about conclusions based on the facts…and the crucial piece of information is missing…how many people were treated at minor injury units pre 2004 and how many after the new GP contracts were introduced….these figures were just lumped together….making the report useless…at least for gauging the effects of the GP contracts…..

Though possibly looking at the graph you could calculate that perhaps one half of the walk-in centre data, shown in red, (but only that in 2004 as it’s a one off increase),  could be attributed to patients diverted from GP surgeries…the other half being the previously unrecorded data.  The King’s Fund makes no such calculation.

Dez in the comments raises some points stating:

‘The actual number of people attending A&E units has hardly changed since 2004.

In fact the number of people turning up at A&E has remained fairly constant since 1987.

Or in other words, the longer waiting times for people in A&E have nothing to do with GP contracts or increased demand.

Got it yet?

There – has – not – been – an – increase – in – demand – at – A&E – units.’

Well firstly the walk-in centres and minor injury units were A&E’s by another name…they were created to take patients with less serious ailments out of the major A&E units to allow more serious cases to be treated quicker…but they are still ‘A&E’.

Major A&E unit patient numbers remained apparently ‘stable’ …but that hides the truth…it may be the same number of patients but they are more seriously injured or ill people….the less serious have been ‘diverted’ to the walk-in centres…so overall numbers have risen.

Next…well common sense should immediately say that Dez’s claim that there has been no rise in numbers going to A&E can’t be right.

Between 2001 and 2011 the population increased by 3.7 million in England and Wales….7.1%.

And between 2004 and 2011 the population increased by 3 million.

Dez….you are saying not one of those 3 million extra people went to A&E….John Bercow yesterday said that immigrants were harder working than Brits…he didn’t tell us that they were also so remarkably healthier!

So you say there has been no rise in numbers at A&E units….. the NHS’s College of Emergency Medicine says something different in 2013:

‘A&E departments have seen a rise in the number of patients they are seeing in recent years, with an extra 4 million people a year using emergency services compared with 2004.’

The very King’s Fund report you quote even tells you that numbers have risen enormously:

‘The NHS has experienced a phenomenal increase in accident and emergency workload over the past decade.’

So does the BBC….a trustworthy advocate for you Dez surely ? Not only does it state that numbers have grown substantially but that the GP’s refusal to do out of hours work led to part of that increased workload at A&E:

‘It has been clear for some time that pressures have been growing in A&E.

For the past decade the numbers attending the units have been rising year by year. There are now more than 21 million visits annually – up 50% in a decade.

There is a combination of reasons why they have grown, including a rise in number of people with chronic conditions, such as heart disease, that end up having emergencies; the ageing population; and problems accessing out-of-hours GP care.’

And look, the BBC says it again:

‘GP consultations are up by a third since the mid 1990s.

Some of this workload has been passed on to hospitals with referrals for non-emergency care at one point during the 2000s rising by 15% a year.

There are signs the GP workload has had an effect on A&E too.

Amid complaints that doctors could no longer cope, they were allowed to relinquish responsibility for providing out-of-hours care in 2004.

This has been taken on by agencies, but with confidence in the system low there are large numbers of patients now attending A&E who do not need emergency care.

The College of Emergency Medicine estimates up to a third could be treated elsewhere.’

And here even one of the radical BMA’s representatives admits numbers have risen whilst rigorously denying his members had anything to do with that:

Dr Buckman told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme:

“People who go to A&E are not going because of GPs. There is no doubt some of it is because people are confused about how to get access to out of hours services and some of it is because NHS 111 is sending people there.

“But some of it is about a rapid rise in demand.”

Surely he’s not in the pay of the government is he…nor the BBC or The College of Emergency Medicine?

And yet more evidence:

‘Nationally, 20 per cent of patients attending A&Es during normal GP opening hours require an admission. But at some primary care trusts the average is as low as 6 per cent, suggesting significant numbers of patients are visiting A&Es in place of GP surgeries – even when practices should be open.

NHS Alliance chief executive Mike Sobanja said: “At its simplest these figures may show that patients are ringing up for an urgent appointment and cannot get one, and so go to A&E.”’

GPs are under pressure even when they are ‘open’…because of immigration and the vast numbers of new patients…resulting in people not being able to get appointments during the day…so they go to A&E….and in out of hours times patients go to A&E as well… immigrants often going straight to A&E treating it as a GP practise.

So Dez, your point:

There – has – not – been – an – increase – in – demand – at – A&E – units’

…has been comprehensively debunked.

What about your other point…that a change in the way data has been recorded explains why it looks like there has been a rise in admissions due to GP contracts changing?…you say…

‘It shows that from 2003-04 the way the data was recorded was changed – so that it included visits to “walk in centres” & “minor injuries units”.

You haven’t read the King’s Fund report properly….it does say data gathering changed but not in the narrow way you suggest.

Previous to 2003/04 there were these walk-in centres in existence……the government then introduced the GP contracts….and set up a whole new set of walk-in centres….to cope with an expected increase in workload at A&E….an increase you must presume they believed would arise from the fact that they knew that a majority of GPs were going to opt out of working ‘out of hours.’

The change in methodology in recording data  included adding in these already existing walk-in centres….but it also included the newly set up centres as well…and as stated earlier the King’s Fund makes no distinction between the two…which is the crucial figure that you need if you want to know how GP contracts effected the data.

Here the King’s fund evades giving the actual figures just claiming ‘much of the increase was due to previously unrecorded data‘:

‘So, much of the increase [how much?] in 2003/4 was due to previously unrecorded attendances now being collected, but also additional – but less serious – work being carried out in the new units. From 2003/4 to 2012/13, attendances in type 1 units have remained more or less unchanged. It is attendances in type 2 and 3 units that account for all the increase.’

Here it tells us that there were new walk-in centres created in 2003/04 to divert less serious cases away from expensive major A&E units:

‘Until 2003/4, statistics on A&E attendances included ‘major’ A&E units only. But around this time more, smaller units – including walk-in centres (WiCs) and minor injuries units (MIUs) – were introduced with the intention of diverting less serious emergency cases away from the larger, more expensive A&E departments, and the statistical collection was changed to record attendances separately for ‘type 1, 2 and 3’ units. Type 1 essentially reflecting major A&E units and types 2 and 3 defined as the smaller, walk-in and minor injuries units, together with specialist emergency departments.’

So 2003/04 Labour created more walk-in centres to cope with an expected rise in attendances at A&E.

Immigration contributed massively to the rise in attendances at A&E.

GP contracts and opting out contributed to a rise in attendances at A&E.

And finally….

Yes in 2004 some of the initial rise in the data showing higher rates of attendance at A&E could be attributed to previously unrecorded data….but much of that was down to new patients in new walk-in centres….but that was a one off change in the data that couldn’t be replicated for any following year.

So what of the following years? How to explain patient numbers that continued to rise year on year…from around 16 million  in 2004 to just over 20 million in 2011 before levelling off?

Are you saying Dez that that rise was because, year on year, the NHS kept finding ‘forgotten’ walk-in centres whose data they hadn’t recorded and so each year these undiscovered centres had their data added to the charts?

Plausible….or maybe not.

The truth is a complex combination of things…mostly increased population due to immigration combined with the difficulty of getting access to GP services whether in opening hours or not.

And the point of all this? Perhaps the BBC should have been delving a bit deeper into the King’s Fund’s claims and not taken them at face value.

Dragon Den’s Khan was given plenty of airtime to make excuses about employing his daughters…but so far nothing on the Telegraph’s story of Labour donor’s tax dodge..helped by the Labour Party….

Anyway…another open thread….all yours….

Compare and contrast:

The Telegraph on the A&E targets:

The graph that shows Labour is to blame for the pressures on A&E

and

Migrants partly to blame for A&E waiting times, Tory MP says

In 2004 Labour introduced GP contracts that paid them more for less work…resulting in patients going to A&E instead…and of course immigrants were ‘swamping’ the country by then as well, making use of the NHS.

The BBC on A&E targets:

NHS ‘misses A&E waiting time target’

Right at the end, the very last sentence, it slips in this:

‘But the government has in part blamed a “disastrous” legacy from Labour, including the renegotiation of GPs’ contracts which allowed them to opt out of providing out-of-hours care.’

Clive Myrie talks to Sylvia Emenike

Hugely disappointed…been watching the BBC’s ‘Australia With Simon Reeves’ and it had been something different from the normal offerings we get which follow the usual beaten path showing us all the same old touristy sights and sounds.

Reeves put in some effort and dug up some of the more interesting corners of Australia….but then the BBC flipped the switch and we got a BBC ‘Stepford wife’…obedient and mindless, repeating the BBC mantra, the party line….on the subjects of Race and Climate Change.

The BBC is up to its old tricks of ambushing us with its propaganda inserted into ‘normal’ programming…you wouldn’t mind half as much…but it is pure misinformation, factually wrong and highly misleading,  and rather blatantly and jarringly levered into place to send us a ‘message’.

36 minutes in we came to issues of race…we were told that Australia was now probably less racist than America or Europe….not Japan, or China, or Nigeria or Pakistan or any non ‘white‘ country? No racism in any other country in the world?…just old whitey again….but despite that…’racial tensions still exist’.

Reeves heads off to Cronulla Beach where he joins up with a team of Muslim women who play Australian rules football.

He gushes along the lines of: ‘Look how fantastically willing they are to engage as Australians…to integrate into society.’

He then gets down to business…in 2005 there were riots at the beach between non-Muslims and Muslims….

Reeves doesn’t bother explaining what caused the riots we were just told that they were ‘race riots’ and the impression given was that it was Muslims who were the innocent victims.

His Muslim ‘witness’ said that the consequences of the riots were that they had reinforced the migrant theory that they didn’t belong in Australia and were not really wanted….totally ignoring all those other immigrants happily making a life for themselves in Australia…..around 6.5% of the population (of 23 million) are now Chinese and 6% are of Indian origin…with many more from the rest of Asia, Africa and the Middle East…as well as the UK of course and New Zealand.

Reeves then asked if she got much hassle for being Muslim and wearing a headscarf…she related a story of her being abused for ‘no reason at all’ at a petrol station…..but there was nothing to substantiate that claim at all.

Nor had there been any other voices to talk about ‘race’ in Australia…it was purely from one perspective…that of the Muslims.

What really happened in Cronulla? The truth puts a completely different spin on things….and it’s not hard to find…it’s all in this police report from the New South Wales Police.

The report shows that groups of ‘Middle Eastern’ men were frequently the cause of violent attacks previous to the riot….and there are plenty of other reports of Muslims assaulting and abusing residents of the area over several years…all of which built up a deep seated feeling of antipathy and resentment against them…which eventually spilled over in 2005.

Was the riot just an attack by ‘whites’ upon Muslims? These text messages intercepted by police show that both sides were looking for a fight:

The following are samples of the text messages that were being distributed:

[From the White side]

“Just a reminder that Cronulla’s 1st wog bashing day is still on this Sunday. Chinks bashing day is on the 27^th and the Jews are booked in for early January”

Every fucking aussie. Go to Cronulla Beach Sunday for some Leb and wog bashing Aussie Pride ok”

[From the Muslim side]

“All lebo I wog brothers. Sunday midday. Must be at North Cronulla Park. These skippy aussies want war. Bring ur guns and knives and lets show them how we do it”

“0 fight each Aussie. Yulleh. Lets get hectic and turn gods country into wogs country. Habib will be cookin victory kebabs after. Tell all your cousins”

At the same time intelligence was being received by police from a variety of sources that Caucasian males were planning to converge on Cronulla Beach area on Sunday Ilth December. Also, intelligence was received that Middle Eastern males were going to the same area to engage in a riot.’

From the evidence it looks as if this was a case of Whites ‘defending’ themselves against the racism of ‘Muslims’….rather than the other way round…..at the very least it was both ‘sides’ equally to blame …it certainly wasn’t a one sided racist assault by white Australians on innocent immigrants that Reeves portrays it as.

Reeves rounds it all up with a pious bit of patronising preaching from the BBC multicultural bible:

‘Racism is an issue that Australia must deal with if the communities are going to be a harmonious society that makes the most of Australia’s position the edge of Asia….other people may see them [Muslims] as outsiders but they see themselves as Aussie to the core and my goodness what amazing young women they are!’

He then moves on to climate change and tells us that Australians are some of the most evil people on the planet…they are one of the worst offenders for polluting the atmosphere with CO2. Not China then or India?

Australia produces around 1.4% of the world’s emissions of CO2, China 23.5%, India around 6%, Iran 1.5%. Per capita Australia is worse but not by other measures…by land mass for example…Australia produces only 0.17% per Sq Km, China 2.6% per Sq Km….take your pick how you compare emissions and ‘guilt’.

Reeves tells us that Australia is a heavy user of energy, a massive user of electricity generated mostly by ‘dirty old coal’…he goes on to say they are among the worst emitters of carbon in the world,  that they are among the most polluting people on the planet…charming…especially as he of course flew there, probably with a big BBC crew and is driving around in a large 4×4.

He says it is hard to know what the consequences will be…but will we heed the warnings?…he implies politicians are corrupted by the system…as democracy fails us because they only look to the short term to win votes by appealing to the ‘people’s’ baser instincts…greed and selfishness no doubt.

Reeves tells us we really need to think long term…and that of course entails putting a stop to all that CO2 ‘pollution‘…..Aunty knows best…just shut your eyes and do what you are told.

Funny the BBC’s version of ‘democracy’…it has nothing to do with what the ’people’ want…but what their ‘morally and intellectually superior’ elites, mostly those working in the Media, tell them they must have.

The BBC always sneers at ‘populism’…but isn’t that ‘democracy’?