Ian Duncan Smith tore a strip off the BBC this morning for orchestrating a politically motivated campaign against government welfare reforms: 

‘Cabinet minister Iain Duncan Smith today accused the BBC of launching a ‘politically-motivated’ attack on government plans to cap benefits at £26,000.

In an extraordinary on-air blast, the Work and Pensions Secretary accused the Corporation of using ‘lots of little cases’ to claim that limiting welfare payments would not get people back to work.

The confrontation live on Radio 4’s Today programme marks a significant escalation in the political row between Mr Duncan Smith and the BBC over reforms to the benefits system.’

IDS’s claims that the BBC use ‘little cases’, that is highly personalised cases which supposedly show the disastrous consequences of the reforms on the ‘vulnerable’ and which therefore illustrate no less than the futility of the whole policy ….or so the BBC hopes.

Of course the BBC rarely bothers to present the other side of the argument, those who suffer under the present regime or those who will benefit from the new one.

It’s one of the BBC’s favourite ‘tricks’.  The ‘little case’.  Used to especial effect in any debate about immigration or asylum.  The BBC briing on ‘an immigrant’.  The BBC paints a picture of dire need and danger if that person is not allowed to stay….and uses that single story to illustrate how immigration or asylum are vital and necessary if we are to be a humane, caring society.

Curiously today, by coincidence, on the Sheila Fogarty show we have the perfect example of that in action.

In support of refugees she brings on not one but two advocates…Maurice Wren, Chief Executive of the British Refugee Council and Maria Hennessy, the Senior Legal Officer at the European Council on Refugees & Exiles.

Think we know what they will be saying.

Then Fogarty plays her ace card, or should that  be the ‘Grace card’?

At 12:37 Fogarty introduces ‘Grace’s story’ a refugee from the Ivory Coast.  She came here in 2000 but her claim for asylum was rejected…she appealed three more times…each one rejected…she made another appeal and is awaiting the result.

Fogarty is concerned at how long it is all taking….she basically ignores the fact that ‘Grace’ has been refused entry 4 times already…and all funded by legal aid….her claim based upon the fact she is Muslim and will suffer female genital mutilation on return to the Ivory Coast….she feels safe here..nobody gets killed, nobody’s after you.

Fogarty is thoroughly on board and accepts totally that ‘Grace’ should be here….the sole concern seems to be how she is treated here and the speed of the asylum process.

Personalising the story is intended to elicit sympathy and make you think ‘oh my god, she must be allowed to stay’….and thereby also think differently about the immigration/asylum debate as a whole….in other words…. fling open the borders.

It is in essence, bluntly, a BBC propaganda drive to brain wash you into agreeing to allow anybody and everybody into the country.

At 42 mins Fogarty reads out an anonymous text from Glasgow in which someone claiming to be an ‘Asylum decision maker for the Home Office’  says that they are on a productivity drive,  being forced to make more and quicker decisons about cases…he/she claims this leads to bad decisions….he/she says the Home Office is only interested in the numbers….which is counter productive and morally repugnant.

Astonishing that Fogarty can use an anonymous text to then provide evidence of  the ‘human suffering’ caused by the asylum system.

The irony is that the programme was based upon the premise that the asylum system took too long to deal with cases…the text claimed this was being dealt with one way or another……but Fogarty still wasn’t happy….speed meant ‘human suffering’…but so apparently does slowness.

A paradox but what to do? 

The BBC has the answer…open the borders…agree to every asylum claim and hand out houses and money….simple.

“This item on Radio 5Live at about 0800 ‘ish attracted my attention mid-shave this morning (13th of July). Amidst the standard  BBC deprecation of the repatriation and ‘overhang’ problems (much of which I agree with, to be honest) who should appear but Keith Best. His brief is to oppose repatriation on the grounds of the dangers of torture of the returnees, should the repatriation process become successful. Again, difficult to be in support of torture but hard also to support a blanket acceptance of anyone who pleads fear of torture as a reason to come here and to stay.

CCE in the comments pointed out this offering from the BBC:

NHS failings ‘suppressed for electoral reasons’

An independent expert on mortality rates has suggested that ministers have suppressed details of NHS failings to avoid losing votes.

Prof Sir Brian Jarman said a “basic problem” with the NHS was that the government both provided health services and monitored them.

In a report out on Tuesday, he says 14 NHS trusts totalled 13,000 more deaths than the national average in 2005-10.

Note  the present tense despite the dates provided at the end giving the impression that the present government is possibly to blame.

‘Labour’ doesn’t get a namecheck until halfway down the page despite this being a story about them.

But even when it does get a mention it’s almost as if they are merely commenting on something that’s happened but which had nothing to do with them really…they aren’t actually  answering for their atrocious record on the NHS.

Here Sir Brian Jarman is quoted but it is still unclear who he is talking about

Sir Brian told the BBC: “One of the basic problems is that the government is responsible for provision of the health service but also for the monitoring of it.

“The NHS is very popular, and quite rightly so, in the country, and they don’t want a bad news story for electoral purposes.”

In an interview with Sky News, he said: “When they had a problem with quality, they couldn’t really say what it was, so things were suppressed…. spin.

“Effectively they had to deliver good news for the minister. The minister then indicated that the pressure came from Number 10. Although he then denied it.”

In response, Mr Burnham said the last Labour government had “established independence” by setting up the independent regulator and that “was not the move of a government that wanted to hide”.

Note that first paragraph:

‘Sir Brian told the BBC: “One of the basic problems is that the government is responsible for provision of the health service but also for the monitoring of it.” ‘

The Telegraph tells a slightly, but significantly different, version:

“The government was in the position of providing the health service and monitoring it, it was a conflict of interest. Ministers have an electoral interest in getting out good news.”

Now as the BBC mentioned the correct tense at the beginning of the report….‘a “basic problem” with the NHS was that the government’….is it possible that the author changed it for the second quote but forgot to do the first one?  Changing the tense changes the whole meaning of the sentence and the sentiment.

The BBC end with a final quote from Sir Brian Jarman:

‘”We have another group of Mid Staffs hospitals.”

Which leaves a lot of questions….does he mean that in the historical sense…that more problem hospitals were hidden…or does he mean that the problems still exist and are ongoing under this government?

The BBC have left that very much open to speculation.

BBC seem to have gone out of the way to allow Labour MP and former Health Minister Andy Burnham to try and distance himself and his Party from the scandalous behaviour of the NHS on his watch.

Labour is accused of operating a ‘Denial Machine’….welll yeahhh…it’s called the BBC.

The NHS is safe in Labour hands….just not perhaps your life.

The BBC is going to be paying out some overtime to spin this one:

Andrew Marr once said:  “The BBC is not impartial or neutral……It has a liberal bias, not so much a party political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.”

Hardly true…the bit about ‘not so much a party political bias’ [Ta to Pah] I mean of course….we know huge swathes of the BBC casts its vote in favour of Labour…most of the senior journalists reporting on politics  and economics are Labourites…and some have close ties to the Labour Party.

So it’s more than an ‘innate’ sense of their own ‘rightness’…..there is a deliberate, conscious effort to present a certain Labour friendly world view.

If that is so you might ask just how far would they go?  If we turned over some stones, looked in a few dark corners, would we find some emails or texts between the Labour spin doctors and the BBC?

Would a call from Labour HQ ‘set the agenda’ for the day’s news?

If Tom Baldwin, Labour’s spinner in chief, contacted, quietly, oh so quietly, an editor at the BBC and suggested that ‘We, Labour, are going to oppose the government’s decision on plain packaging for cigarettes and will use this to attack Lynton Crosby to deflect attention from our Union woes….will you be on board?’…do you think the BBC would play ball?

Hell yeah!

Er…I mean…We’ll never know….but it looks like Labour needn’t bother on the price of a phone call…the BBC did a splendid job stitching up Crosby yesterday on the flimsiest of evidence…well, no evidence except the mutterings of Labour spinners.

Despite denials that Crosby had any input into forming ‘policy’ the BBC has turned legend into fact.  Only this morning on 5Live I heard a presenter almost telling Vince Cable he should be demanding  the resignation of Crosby…..based on what?  Rumour and innuendo and the fact that ‘this just won’t go away’?

Why won’t it go away?  Because the BBC et al will keep flying that kite for Labour as long as it takes to embarrass Cameron…as they did with Coulson.

Coulson..now there’s a thing…..he worked for Murdoch so is clearly an evil person….but not a mention of Labour’s own spinner…Tom Baldwin…also a Murdoch man…one who was the Labour Party’s bagman at the Times where he would place stories that Labour wanted planted during their time in government.

hmmmm….wasn’t that where we came in….stories planted in the media for political advantage?

So the BBC ignore Baldwin….they also ignored the proven conflict of interest that the chairman of the Energy and Climate Change Committee, Tim Yeo,  having many fingers in many green industry and renewables pies.  Guido Fawkes for months listed those conflicts of interest…..but the BBC took no notice.

But look…..it took less than half a day to be on the trail of the Tory’s electoral and political advisor, Lynton Crosby.

Yesterday we were treated to a never ending barrage of news and comment about the government’s decison to postpone introducing plain packaging for cigarettes…..and gradually we were introduced to rumour and suggestion that this was all down to Lynton Crosby because his lobbying firm worked with tobacco companies…..no evidence that he lobbied for those companies on this subject or that he influenced the policy decison in any way…just Labour Party innuendo taken up with gusto by the BBC.

Is anybody interested in the packaging of cigarettes to any large extent?  No.  So why did the BBC give it such a big news profile?  This is a story that was always a ‘trojan horse’, packaged and shaped to allow Labour to attack Crosby.  As Grant Shapp’s said:  ‘This is looking like a smear campaign’.

There is no proof as yet of any undue influence by Crosby whilst there was very definite proof of a serious potential conflict of interest with Tim Yeo….who has now suspended himself from his role….which suggests that seriousness….not enough for the BBC to take early notice of though.

Yeo has got well known interests in green industry and he made decisions that had enormous effects on that industry as Chair of the energy committee….so a proven cause and effect here….Yeo defintiely worked on Green policy…..what should have been investigated was if his decisions also benefitted him financially in his other capacity as a green industry baron.  

The BBC is of course devoted to the Green cause and it looks like it compromised its journalism to help promote that and hide any possibly embarrassing problems like Yeo….no such qualms about a man who is the Tory’s electoral guru….the Devil incarnate for the BBC….straight onto his trail hunting him down…after having set the scene with wall to wall negative reports about the decision.

But this is of course nothing new…the BBC conveniently failed to investigate Unite’s election rigging allegations…..even as the story broke the BBC played it down trying to limit the allegations to Falkirk whilst there was laready evidence that up to 41 other constituencies had been targeted by Unite and to suggest that Miliband knew nothing of this…and that heroically he is determined to clean out the stables.

But that ignores the fact that highly regarded Labour supporting websites had been complaining about the Labour Party ignoring the allegations and indeed threatening disciplinary action against some who complained about Unite….in Falkirk the local Party officlas who noted the large number of Unite members joining suddenly were told to keep quiet and sign them up anyway by Party HQ.

Miliband almost certainly knew of and supported Unite’s policy and actively tried to block those who wanted to raise the issue.

The BBC ignore that previous stance by Miliband as it would completely destroy Miliband’s credibility and tear Labour apart for the forseeable future.

They also ignore Miliband’s ridiculous claim that Labour is the Party of the Working Class…the very people that for 13 years the Labour Party ignored and sidelined…when they weren’t calling them racists for their attitude towards Labour’s immigration policy…..Labour going so far as to import a whole new working class that they hoped would vote Labour in their gratitude whilst undercutting the wages of the existing British workers and forcing them out of housing, schools and hospitals.

The BBC ignores the real stories if they don’t fit with its agenda, they ignore the thoughts, desires and needs of a vast majority of the populace, and of course they ignore your complaints.   The BBC is out of touch.

Charles Moore in the Telegraph has some thoughts along those lines for the BBC:

Why does the impartial BBC not tell the story of the great majority?

Our self-righteous national broadcaster is woefully detached from voters’ real lives

The one entity, in short, in which the BBC feels permanently uninterested is the individual citizen.

It is not surprising that the BBC takes him for granted, because it can. It takes his money by law, and without his consent, in the form of the licence fee. Until this ends, the BBC will, with the finest impartiality, refuse to tell his story.

All pretty ironic when you think the BBC constantly backs attacks on Cameron and Co as millionaires ‘out of touch’ with the real people.

‘George Zimmerman’s  innocent?????’

Say that in the tone of ‘Flash Gordon’s Alive!!?’  and you get the idea of the BBC’s incredulous reaction I just heard on the radio news announcement.

WHAT!!???  An almost whitish sorta man kills a ‘unarmed  black boy’….surely he’s got to be guilty?

All the President’s men and all the President’s horses couldn’t jail ‘Whitey’.

Even though they tried to pin a charge of ‘child abuse’ upon him in the dying moments of the case…not bothering to inform the defence.

A charge which the BBC seems to have ignored.  Could it be that the charge was so obvoiously ridiculous, drummed up  in a last desperate measure to get Zimmerman for something, anything that the BBC knew it would discredit the prosecution’s case and how the public view this.

It could also be why the BBC have ignored the wider perspective of the US government’s determination to find Zimmerman guilty and the lengths they went to to try and ensure that….not least the shameful manipulation and interference by Obama when he said of the victim , Trayvon Martin:  if he had a son he’d look like Trayvon.

Mark Steyn elaborates:

Mark Steyn: Zimmerman case’s legal absurdities astound

Anyone catch Andrew Marr interviewing David Miliband this morning? Any more sycophantic and Marr would have been on his knees. The BBC obviously prefer David to Ed but in both cases their innate bias towards the left shines through.