Category Archives: BBC bias

This post shows the difficulty in using statistics to ‘prove’ anything…especially if the two sides are not singing off the same ‘hymn sheet’…i.e. not using the same sources of information or the same definitions…..especially so when one side knowingly uses  statistics that don’t agree because they come from a different source or are based on a different definition in order to confuse the issue.

Victoria Derbyshire interviewed Nigel Farage on Friday and using statistics provided by BBC bean counters, tax experts in the BBC business unit, she lays into his figures on Europe and Quangos amongst other things.

This is what the Guardian says about Victoria:

Victoria works hard and doesn’t want her efforts ruined by a slack quote.

She is sensitive about her public persona, aware – possibly because she interviews so many politicians – that reputation is everything. So what is hers?

You know, I’m not super-intellectual, I work really hard at my job, but I enjoy it and it seems to come naturally.”

In an unguarded moment, she tells me she’d love to present Question Time in the future.

This interview can’t have done her reputation much good…she very stridently claimed that quango costs were only £30 bn whilst Farage said they were £60 bn…it is clear immediately that how you define a ‘quango’ is the baseline that needs to be the same for comparative purposes.

Derbyshire obviously was using a very narrow definition….whilst at the same time knowing exactly where Farage got his figures…and yet she compared as if the two figures were comparable and yet knowing they weren’t based on the same starting point.

It seems she was merely intent on deliberately trying to make Farage look like a liar, a fool or incompetent by using figures she knew to be ‘wrong’.

The Tax Payers Alliance was straight onto to her……

Robert Oxley ‏@roxley 2h ‘@vicderbyshire heard quango cost discussion this morning. Here is our paper quoted by @Nigel_Farage http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/sapb.pdf

Victoria Derbyshire ‏@vicderbyshire 1h @roxley thanks, will hve a look at weekend – is this the most upto date doc you have

Robert Oxley ‏@roxley 1h @vicderbyshire Yes, Nigel was quoting earlier report. Main reason for difference is cabinet office have more narrow definition of quango 

Robert Oxley ‏@roxley 1h @vicderbyshire but if it quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck we call it one… e.g carbon trust

As soon as the interview was over I googled ‘quangos costs’ and immediately came up with Farage’s figures in a Telegraph report that was based on the Tax Payer’s Alliance’s own report….the figure the Telegraph came up with for 2010 was £60 bn.

The fact that it took 30 seconds or so to hit on Farage’s figures and the explanation from the TPA as to how they defined a quango tells us that Derbyshire could easily have found that also…or rather her ‘tax experts from the BBC business unit’ could have.

Derbyshire says she was using government Cabinet figures but this report from the House of Commons Library, which tells us that ‘This information is provided to Members of Parliament in support of their parliamentary duties’, gives a different picture showing the ‘Executive NDPBs (one type of quango) alone cost £46.5 bn:

‘Quango’ is an abbreviation of the phrase ‘quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation’ and is often used as an alternative to the abbreviation NDPB which stands for ‘non-departmental public body’.

As at 31 March 2009, there were 766 NDPBs sponsored by the UK Government. Of these: • 192 were Executive NDPBs;

In 2008/09, total expenditure by Executive NDPBs was around £46.5bn.　

405 were Advisory NDPBs; 19 were Tribunal NDPBs and 150 were Independent Monitoring Boards of Prisons, Immigration Removal Centres and Immigration Holding Rooms.

The report goes onto to quote the TPA report which states that in 2007-08 spending was over £90 bn in total if you include many bodies not officially called Quangos but which are to all intents and purposes:

The Taxpayers Alliance has published a list of public bodies which is much wider than that published by the Government as it includes bodies sponsored by the devolved administrations as well as local and NHS public bodies. According to its figures, in 2007-08 there were 1,148 Semi-autonomous Public Bodies operating in the UK, with Government spending over £90 billion on or through these bodies that year.33

The UK’s contribution to the EU Figures　

Derbyshire then launches into Farage’s figures on the cost of EU membership saying we only pay a net sum of £7 bn and that Farage says it was £20 bn…unfortunately again she is playing fast and loose with the figures…despite saying that getting the numbers right was ‘absolutely crucial’…..Farage’s £20 bn was the gross payment and that figure came from 2011…not 2012 as Derbyshire compared to….Derbyshire’s £7 bn was the net payment…from 2012.…but Farage was quoting, again, 2011’s figure of £8.2 bn.

Farage claimed the gross sum was around £20 bn and the net around £10 bn.

Derbyshire shrieked away at him.

But again it is a complicated subject and again depends on where you start from.

Here are the Treasury’s figures for EU contributions:

Here, using the Office for National Statistics sources, are the EU costs:

Annual Costs of EU Membership

The net cost of the EU budget to Britain in 2011 was £10.8 billion* and rising. But the actual cost – direct and indirect – is much more than that.

Last time it was calculated, in 2008, the European Union was costing us £65 billion gross every year. That’s about £1,000 each every year for every man, woman and child in the UK. It increases every year, so it will be a lot more now.

* Source: Office for National Statistics “Pink Book”

Here are the hidden costs:

Direct and Indirect Costs of the EU

Estimates of the true cost of the EU are difficult to come by. MPs have called many times for a cost-benefit analysis, to prove or disprove the benefits of membership. Successive Governments, both Labour and Conservative, have refused, on the grounds that the “benefits” are self-evident. In truth they are afraid of what such a study would show. The Bruges Group finally produced an authoritative study in 2008.

(http://www.brugesgroup.com/CostOfTheEU2008.pdf)

The total gross cost to the UK of EU membership in 2008 they estimate at around £65,000,000,000* – including:

£28 billion for business to comply with EU regulations,

£17 billion of additional food costs resulting from the Common Agricultural Policy

£3.3 billion – the value of the catch lost when the Common Fisheries Policy let other countries fish in our territorial waters

£14.6 billion gross paid into the EU budget and other EU funds. (In 2011 this had risen to £19 billion)

Roger Helme UKIP MEP quotes these figures:

The Office of National Statistics published the annual Pink Book on July 31^st, showing inter alia the UK’s contributions to EU institutions in 2011. Gross contributions are now over £19 billion, while net contributions broke the £10 billion barrier for the first time — for a total of £10.78 billion.

And he tells us why using the gross figure is possibly more relevant:

‘….as Dan Hannan has pointed out, we should really focus on the gross figure. After all, if we look at the tax we pay, we don’t make deductions for the benefits we receive from the government in terms of health, education, welfare and so on. No. We just look at what we pay. And although some of our EU contributions come back from Brussels, it may well be spent on things we don’t value and wouldn’t have done ourselves. As I have said many times, they give us back a little of our own money, they tell us what to do with it, and then they expect us to be grateful.’

So you can see that it is possible to come up with quite different EU costs and contributions depending what you include in the data.

It is therefore somewhat unfair for Derbshire to ambush Farage using statistics that he wasn’t using…and not mentioning that EU costs vary enormously from year to year…and that they look to be going up quite considerably in the near future…and with the graphic below you can see the difference between net contributions and net payments….all adding to the confusion:

As Rod Liddle, then editor of the Radio 4’s Today programme, said: “The whole ethos of the BBC and all the staff was that Eurosceptics were xenophobes.” He recalls one meeting with a senior BBC figure over Eurosceptic complaints of bias. “Rod, the thing you have to understand is these people are mad. They are mad.”

I guess the BBC is still trying to get over that message…criticise the EU and you are either a knave or mad, mad, mad.

The story so far. Red Ed has problems with Red Len, so what to do? How about sending Harriet Harman onto the Marr programme on a Sunday morning so she can waffle her way through the Labour talking bite agenda? The BBC does gently point out that Unite is backing candidates in 41 other constituencies, but Harriet was allowed to claim that the problem is restricted to Falkirk and that Ed is showing his strength by dealing with the issue … in an article in The Observer.  Pure farce, of course, but the BBC seems keen to present Ed as a herculean figure, confronting the evil Union barons! You have to love their instinctive bias towards the left

Today is the 8th Anniversary of 7/7, the day the Jihad came to visit London and take 52 innocent lives. I note the BBC has nothing up to mark this sad anniversary. I suppose it is too busy marking Ramadan to consider such? The US media always marks 9/11, but our State Broadcaster has other priorities….

Is Miliband lying about his involvement with Unite and the stitch up of the selection of Parliamentary and MEP candidates?

And does the BBC care?

This quote from a disaffected Labourite in April suggests Miliband may be lying:

The real question is: why was Ed Miliband’s team happy to let this happen?

Or how about this:

Perhaps the leadership thought no one would notice? That no one would care about the fixing involved in selecting Labour’s European election candidates?

Well the BBC certainly didn’t notice and even now seems inclined to ignore it as much as possible.

However there is more recent evidence….on the BBC itself no less:

Yesterday the BBC’s Norman Smith interviewed Razvan Constantinescu on World At One, a prospective Labour MEP candidate who was eliminated by the selection process in favour of a union candidate.

This story has been around since at least April…so the BBC are once again ‘slow’ in picking it up, especially considering the ramifications.

Constantinescu revealed that the selection process had been ‘engineered’ to ensure that only women were selected…the union choice being a woman…interviews then eliminated further candidates who were ‘threats’ to the chosen one.

Constantinescu said that many complaints were made to Party HQ and a petition personally handed to Miliband.

Miliband lies

The outcome of that? Labour’s Party Secretary, Iain McNicol, threatened the complainants with disciplinary action if they didn’t stop raising the issue….in other words they didn’t care about a union stitch up.

We were also told that the local party officials at Falkirk had raised the matter of the mass signing up of Unite members but were told by the ‘Party’ to keep signing them on.

Norman Smith raised a metaphorical eyebrow when told of the threat and clear knowledge of the possible union conspiracy, recognising that it was something that was significant in light of the Unite saga.

However immediately following the interview Nick Robinson came on to give us his thoughts on it…and failed to mention what was probably the most salient point raised in it….that Miliband knew about the complaints and not only ignored them but threatened to discipline those who complained.

Miliband hand in hand with McCluskey to rig elections?  Nothing to see there?

BBC Ignores big story

There has been no follow up on the BBC as far as I can see…despite this being possible evidence that Miliband is now lying through his remarkable teeth as he claims McCluskey must accept his responsibilities and that Falkirk is not typical and was the result of a few rogue officials.

Strange that World At One’s editor, Nick Sutton, should tweet that the Mail has picked up on the interview…and yet his very own BBC hasn’t…..

Nick Sutton ‏@suttonnick 19h Interested to see @ShippersUnbound on front of Mail picks up on @BBCNormanS‘s #wato intv with Razvan Constantinescu.　

The Labour Party are ‘managing’ the news:

Miliband has said: “I will not allow the good name of the Labour Party to be undermined by the behaviour of a few individuals.” And claimed Falkirk is an isolated case.

…and yet we can see from the above that it looks like he knew and approved of what was going on and on a far wider scale.

Chuka Umunna has said: “There is absolutely no place in the Lab Party for machine politics of this type …we find it we will root it out and stamp it out” and yet also dismissed the row over Falkirk as “Westminster soap opera“…the rigging of Parliamentary elections and the selection of MEPs a ‘soap opera’!

Labour’s Angela Eagle says: “We will not tolerate the kind of behaviour we’ve seen in Falkirk” and yet she too takes Miliband’s line pointing the finger of blame for Falkirk at “partic individuals” in constituency rather than an organised campaign by Unite.

She also says “Falkirk is unique” and says that claims that Unite were involved in “rigging” other selection contests are “rubbish…..hysteria“.

But back in April there were rumblings in the Labour heartlands……

Richard Angell ‏@RichardAngell 8 Apr @jonworth @annefairweather otherwise known as the members first choice!!! Where is the respect for members?

Jon Worth ‏@jonworth 8 Apr @RichardAngell Absolutely nowhere, by the look of it. And where’s the union stitch up? Everywhere by the look of it.

Here from some Leftist blogs comes evidence of that discontent and allegations of the union stitch up……

South West there’s brewing anger…..

‘It strikes me that some names were deliberately eliminated in order to give some candidates a more or less free run, and the number of candidates with very heavy trade union links is notable, while the number with considerable EU experience is rather fewer.

In the end all of this leaves a very sour taste for me. It might seem fine to do some sort of stitch up, to deny party members the very best candidates by eliminating strong people at the shortlisting stage.’

London Labour revolt over Euro-list fix grows

‘Perhaps the leadership thought no one would notice? That no one would care about the fixing involved in selecting Labour’s European election candidates?

Well, the evidence is that they were wrong. Very wrong.

The lightning rod for emerging discontent in London is Anne Fairweather. Ahead of the 2009 European elections she was the top choice for Labour members, securing almost 3,500 votes, comfortably ahead of the rest of the field.

As Peter Watt and Jon Worth have noted, this time round, she was rejected by Labour, without even an interview.

Her crime seems to have been to work in business and not be one of the chosen candidates of the unions and the left.

Out of seven members of the London European candidate selection panel, five are either serving officials in the unions or have been backed by Labour Briefing – a hard left publication committed to establishing the most left-wing policy platform for the party since 1983.

Three panel members in particular are understood to have been influential over the selection approach: Gary Doolan, Steve Hart and Joy Johnson.

Steve Hart is the extremely influential political director of Unite, lest we forget, Labour’s largest donor. Unite are just as clear as the GMB about using their influence to pick specific types of candidates. Last year, Dave Quayle, chair of Unite’s national political committee set out their priorities in an interview for the website of Marxist fringe group, the Alliance for Worker’s Liberty:

“We want a firmly class-based and left-wing general election campaign in 2015… We want to shift the balance in the party away from middle-class academics and professionals towards people who’ve actually represented workers and fought the boss.”

Quite.

The clear political imperative of the unions and Labour’s left is to recast Labour’s political representatives in their own image. In this context, the exclusion of Anne Fairweather is eminently predictable. No one involved has hidden their agenda or their objectives.

The real question is: why was Ed Miliband’s team happy to let this happen?’

The other question might be why the BBC is so ready to downplay this?  Rather than investigate and dig for dirt they seem quite happy to sit and wait for the story to come to them….at which point they will ensure that the picture we get is that Miliband has heroically seen off the unions but paradoxically the unions actually did nothing wrong being the victims of a smear…it turns out it was all the fault of a few misguided individuals who had the best interests of the party at heart….seeking, as Sarah Montague insisted on the today programme, to ensure that they could get more working class people into parliament and make it more representative….as it clearly isn’t with all those Eton toffs in there now.

DB in the last post had Labour’s Andy Burnham doing our work for us…criticisng the BBC.

Not sure what he’s worried about….perhaps he doesn’t listen to the BBC too often…they aren’t likely to be eulogising over Mrs Thatcher…as the other Tweet illustrated….and the marked reluctance it showed to investigate Labour and Unite’s latest little difficulty.

Burnham was referring to Nicky Campbell’s show…’Your Call’ in which he decided to discuss whether we should have a ‘Margaret Thatcher’ Day as a bank holiday.

Six minutes in and you can hear Campbell explain….they had decided to do either Wimbledon or Labour and the Unions as a call-in…..but when this latest subject came up they couldn’t resist…it is after all front page stuff and very current….unlike Labour and Unite or Wimbledon.

The reality is Campbell knew it would be an easy hit….Thatcher being so controversial and likely to get some very ‘animated’ callers.

It seemed like he couldn’t resist the opportunity to have yet another swipe at Thatcher knowing most calls would probably be strongly expressed expressions of hate.

Campbell did seem to be relishing and enjoying it all too much….if you ever had the thought that 5live was on the trashy tabloid side of  ‘journalism’ this more than proved the point.

A lot of people enjoy that…but it does make you laugh out loud at the hypocrisy of the likes of Campbell and Derbyshire who sneer at the Mail and The Sun….and yesterday Derbyshire was having a go at Farage for his EU salary of whatever it was…around £70,000 I think..when she ‘earns’ allegedly over £200,000…mostly for sitting on her backside…when she bothers to turn up.

 More of Derbyshire’s interview with Farage later….an interview in which she seemed intent purely on rubbishing him…using her own, what turned out to be dodgy, statistics.

BBC journalist Elettra Neysmith:

@andyburnhammp We all love the NHS; no debate. Can't really say the same of Mrs T….

— Elettra Neysmith (@Elettralux) July 5, 2013

Great to see the BBC telling us how Islam is changing soccer. This article gushingly proclaims “Premier League: How Muslims are changing English football culture”

Children playing football in the parks of Newcastle have even been spotted falling to their knees as if in prayer themselves after scoring a goal. They may not completely understand what it means, but it’s a sign that Muslim practices are becoming a more familiar part of popular British culture. 

Watch The Muslim Premier League on BBC1 on Sunday, 7 July at 12:20 BST or catch it again on Monday 8 July at 23:35 BST.

Essential viewing? Allahu Akhbar.

Poor Jeremy Bowen. He was hit by shotgun pellets as he provided us with his particular brand of impartial reporting from Cairo.

The Middle East editor was photographed with a bandage around his head and blood on his face. He tweeted after the attack: “Thanks for the messages. I’ve been hit by a couple of shotgun pellets. Am fine and heading out.”

Now, I wish no harm to anyone, and am genuinely sorry that Bowen was hurt, but the BBC continues to struggle with the idea that “the people” reject the brand of Islamism represented by the Muslim Brotherhood.  I’m not really sure what value Bowen’s presence in Cairo contributes to our understanding; his long years of biased reporting have undermined any merit in what he provides.  The BBC, and Bowen, have been to the fore in their fawning admiration for the “Arab Spring”, disregarding any pretence of impartiality in the process. It might be better for his health if Jeremy stayed at home.

The Telegraph gives Marcus Brigstock a comedy checkup and finds no sign of real life, breadth of vision or  common touch, and predicts a lifetime existing on the life support provided by the generosity of the BBC Licence fee donors….like Unite members, signed up without their consent to project Utopia.

The Telegraph explains the thinking behind the programmes….

 ‘…..little short of a licence-fee funded attack on Coalition policy and an ill-disguised rant against anyone so rash as to want to reform the NHS, damning reports into and criticisms of which he studiously avoids.’

And it turns out Brigstock adopts the classic BBC tactic of blaming people’s ‘ignorance’, they just don’t ‘understand’….but fear not, the BBC is here to educate them…..

‘What Marcus is doing, you see, is affecting a layman ignorance (although the shot of him on the related BBC web-page shows him pulling a face so imbecilic as to look like the sort of thing that’s been banned in playgrounds). That ignorance will be over-turned by the evidence he “unearths”, and hey-presto a whole bevy of moronic assumptions will be trounced. It’s not his stupidity that’s the issue, of course, it’s the stupidity of other people.’

The BBC uses the same method when it produced a series on the ‘White Working Class’, White,  examining their attitudes towards immigration and all that…of course the BBC found that their attitudes were all based on a misunderstanding…theirs of course…their ‘prejudices’, as the BBC saw them, were a result of ignorance and a limited education and intellect…..

Sarah Mukherjee, an environment correspondent at the BBC argued that the series reinforce stereotypes that the white working class were violent, racist and lived on benefits…. “I travel the country and most of the poorest people I meet say the BBC has little to offer them. If your article accurately reflects the series, is it any wonder?”

 Via Jihad Watch

Don’t know what you might make of this BBC report…but to me it seems the BBC has lost its moral compass in the search for a ‘scoop’.

A heart warming human interest story?  An explanation of an atrocious, murderous act?  Just something to fill the web pages up with a gruesome tale from the war in Syria?

Who knows what the BBC’s Paul Wood thought he was doing with this tale:

Face-to-face with Abu Sakkar, Syria’s ‘heart-eating cannibal’

Woods explains away the cannibalism as due to having seen too many horrors of war, or because the other side has committed atrocities…or simply that Abu Sakkar is ‘mentally disturbed’.

It does look like Woods was half way to excusing the act…and is set on ‘humanising’ Sakkar…as he reports Sakkar saying:

“Put yourself in my shoes,” he says. “They took your father and mother and insulted them. They slaughtered your brothers, they murdered your uncle and aunt. All this happened to me. They slaughtered my neighbours.”

And yet the CIA waterboarding a couple of terrorists to save many, many lives is ‘torture’ of the worst kind…or the EDL’s moderate reaction to the slaughter of a British soldier on the streets of Britain is ‘extreme’?

The BBC have lost all sense of reality and live in a world of relative values where speaking out against oppression, violence and discrimination is right wing extremism but killing people to defend the good name of a long dead war lord who invented a religion that gave licence ‘from God’ to plunder the unbeliever…as Tom Holland reveals in his book….‘In The Shadow Of The Sword’, is understandable if a little over the top.