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 This will be the last from me on Mrs Thatcher and the BBC….her death has allowed them to air all the old canards about her ‘legacy’….from the Belgrano, the Miners, the cause of the 2008 crash, the apparent rise of greed and individualism/selfishness and the destruction of the manufacturing base.

The BBC has long kept such myths simmering away, a constant repetition no doubt bringing them to a new audience of  trusting young listeners and viewers. With the death of Mrs Thatcher clearly this is going to go into overdrive and bore everyone senseless….so I’ll make one last comment on their coverage of Mrs Thatcher and move on to other subjects.

Plenty of nonsense being spoken about Mrs Thatcher on the BBC, and no doubt elsewhere today…a lot of it by the BBC itself.

Ken Clarke fought hard against the tide of Leftwing historical revisionism presented as fact on the Today programme…..

Ken Clarke on the Today programme says that both Left and Right are building their myths about Mrs Thatcher….he suggests ‘someone will have to write a sensible history of her time in office’…but not by the BBC whose political correspondent Nick Robinson is continuing to write the myths and keep them going says Clarke.

The same Nick Robinson who said he ‘sensed’ that those out ‘celebrating’ the death of Mrs Thatcher were in fact merely protesting the ‘Thatcherite consensus’ in politics today.  That’ll explain the ‘Rejoice rejoice rejoice the Bitch is dead’ type slogans then.

The problem is that BBC presenters nod along in agreement with much of the nonsense as well as letting the most outrageous comments go unchallenged. There is a distinct lack of context to help judge the truth of many of the anti-Thatcher comments and which serves only to perpetuate the myths and legends that have built up, with not a little help from the BBC, over the years….for instance the Belgrano was not a ‘troop carrier’ but a fully armed battleship, and was sailing towards the Falklands…and even the Argies admit she was a legitimate target.

The first bit of nonsense comes from an ex BBC employee, Judith Stamper, who once interviewed Mrs Thatcher in 1983 for BBC North and accused her of running an ‘uncaring government’.

Stamper is now a political communications lecturer at Leeds University and spoke on 5Live ‘Morning Reports’ (17 mins 30 secs) where she ‘discusses how Margaret Thatcher brought advertising, marketing and public relations into politics and its impact on her campaigns and image.’ 

Stamper told us that Mrs Thatcher invented the photo  opportunity, the walk about, the selling of politics and that ‘spin doctoring’ started with her….she was a manufactured product….Labour’s spin doctoring was a response to that of Mrs Thatcher…er…by then long out of government.

Only problem with all of that is it’s baloney….the first political image making?  How about all those Emperors who had their faces on coins, or Elizabeth I who strictly controlled her own image and the paintings of her, or Churchill who used his fame as a soldier and war correspondent to get his foot in the door of politics…or Monty in the desert with his two cap badges…and who can forget Goebbels….or indeed Chamberlain and his ‘piece of paper’.  Walkabouts?  Try WWII again with the King and Queen touring the blitzed areas to raise morale….and to uphold their own image as people who care about the ‘ordinary people’. 

Spin doctoring, image control and self promotion have long been a feature of any political ‘regime’…..Thatcher certainly changed her image to suit her role but her policies were not ‘crowd pleasing’ ones moulded by focus groups…Ken Clarke saying she was a conviction politician who took no notice of polls or the newspapers, her politics were based on her ideology not just designed to stay in power …unlike Blair and Co who sold out their principles to take power and couldn’t make a move without checking with Murdoch first…as indeed Cameron sold out to appease the BBC.

Next bit of nonsense was Mickey Clark on Wake Up To Money….and blaming Mrs Thatcher for the Crash in 2008…’sowing the seeds of disaster’ with the ‘Big Bang’. (16 mins 30) and when a text comes in saying businesses closed in Scotland due to strikes Mickey asks ‘Is that fair?’. …preferring to blame Mrs Thatcher? and not the Unions  

The Big Bang being the cause of the Crash is a constant theme on the BBC…and completely unjustified….happening over 20 years before the Crash….and with the economy brought back under control and actually running a surplus rather than a deficit in 1998-2000 before Brown went for broke….clearly something else broke the banks…and that something was Brown’s much more extensive deregulation of the financial industry and the failure of his FSA creation.

The programme is worth listening to though as you get a far more reasoned and sensible analysis from the guests.

Another programme that came as a surprise, in my view, was from Andrew Neil, whom you might  have expected to be more balanced, in ‘The People’s Thatcher’ …but the programme painted a more negative picture of Mrs Thatcher than you might expect and slipped in a few barbed comments along the way….when talking about giving away council houses rather than selling them he quoted her as saying ‘That would do nothing for our people’…..meaning the middle class rather than the council house tenants who could benefit from getting a house cheaply….not such a ‘People’s Thatcher ‘ then?

Another quibble with BBC coverage, along with Thatcher’s Big Bang being the cause of the 2008 crash, is the great legend that the BBC help perpetuate  that Thatcher alone destroyed the mining industry with pit closures.

Rubbish…she closed uneconomic pits…but then so had previous governments for decades:

Pit closures in 1960s and 1980s….The loss of the collieries was devastating in such villages as Cwmparc, Clydach Vale and Blaencwm and it could be argued that these South Wales villages and many like them have not fully recovered from the colliery closures in the sixties.

The Fifties and Sixties 1950 to 1969….old ways had to be consigned to history. While oil refineries were opening at the mouth of the River Tees, the coalmines and railways were closing with huge consequences for the communities they supported.

What is interesting about the closures in Wales in the sixties is that they were sometimes caused by lack of available labour…the men didn’t want to work down the pits ….better paying jobs with better conditions were available in the factories.

Arthur Scargill in the eighties proclaimed that Thatcher was destroying jobs that belonged to the miner’s sons and daughters….but given a choice would they want to work down the pit?  Most of the evidence suggests not…it was a source of income first and foremost…and a dangerous one at that, dirty, hard work.  If they could get the same money elsewhere who would mine coal?

The BBC should do more to look at the history of coal mining and stop allowing the myth to be kept alive that Mrs Thatcher was the ‘Devil incarnate, a demon, an absolute devil’ as one miner called her on the Nolan show…going on to proclaim that the Jews celebrated the death of Hitler and he would celebrate the death of  Thatcher in the same way.

Whilst many of the guests invited on to various BBC programmes spend a deal of time giving fair and rational analysis of Mrs Thatcher’s policies and legacy it does seem the BBC presenters still can’t resist blaming her for everything….or not questioning the ‘received wisdom’ that she is to blame.

Look at one  last myth…We are constantly told that Thatcherism spread the blight of ‘individualism’ and promoted selfishness and greed, fragmenting society and destroying social cohesion.

As I understand it Christianity usually gets the credit, not the blame for ‘individualism’, and it was this that gave us the ‘Enlightenment’ and the enterprising individuals  who whilst seeking to improve their lives improved others along with it (along with the Protestant work ethic)….a feat not possible in societies suppressed and controlled by oppressive community values….and I believe ‘greed’ was mentioned in the Bible a couple of thousand years ago….so not Thatcher’s fault perhaps?

You can blame, in more recent times, the Sixties and all those anti-establishment types, in the Media and Arts especially, who ended the automatic respect for authority and the deference to ‘one’s betters’.

You can of course blame the Welfare State which broke communities and made people reliant on the State rather than helping each other…especially inside the Family.   The State has taken over the duties and role of the Family….people pay their taxes and abandon all further responsibilities for much that goes on in Society.

Human Rights laws and Health and Safety laws both kicked away the foundations of the civil society and encouraged a more antagonistic and aggressive and greedy society as people relied on State Law to settle disputes rather than common sense and mediation….they always see a profit now in any dispute.

And as for social cohesion…wasn’t it Labour that imported millions of immigrants who form their own societies within a Society unable to cope with such a large influx?

People, if not born with a silver spoon in their mouths, do get issued a ‘Ration Book’ of Rights that they can use to their own advantage…the one thing missing is a similar book demanding they fulfil their ‘obligations’ to Society and pay something back.

Shame the BBC does not do much at all to reflect such different perspectives on the causes of the perceived ills of our Society…..a start would be acknowledging that Thatcher inherited a broken economy and country….little mention is made of the conditions in the 1970’s which were the real causes of the gutting out of the manufacturing base.

Sounds grotesque.  From Finchley..

#bbcqt‘s back on Thursday with Ken Clarke, David Blunkett, @MingCampbellMP, @pollytoynbee and Margaret Thatcher’s biographer Charles Moore.

By way of balance, I came across this item on the BBC this evening;

Gerald Scarfe on how he loved to loathe Thatcher

Here’s a new one to follow on from David’s last one. Thatcher is still the BIG news story so detail it here. I can’t recall being this annoyed at the BBC in ages.

This tweet made me feel nauseous, from BBC 5 Live Presenter Ian McGarry. Nice chap, and of course this is his personal account, so nothing to do with his Employer…

garbosj Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead. 09/04/2013 00:11

I am finding it almost impossible to watch the BBC at the moment. Last evening, the BBC wheeled on Ken Livingstone, Gerry Adams and Neil Kinnock to pay “tribute to Lady Thatcher. I can only assume the Brighton bomber was unavailable for comment. This morning, the BBC leads with the view of the ANC.  This is stomach churning and I can’t take it.

They’re watching us now. Forget the petty definitions about Old Labour or New Labour, Blairite diehard or Miliband revolutionary.

Everyone on the Left is being scrutinised today. Does the compassion we claim to be our driving force extend to the passing of a frail 87-year-old woman?

Does the Labour movement’s dignity and discipline enable us to mark with appropriate solemnity the death of a former Prime Minister who successfully secured three independent mandates from the people?

Do we have the basic good grace and wisdom to set aside – for a short time – our political differences and acknowledge, however hard it may be, the achievements of the first women to hold the highest office in our land?

For all our sakes, I hope we do.

That was Dan Hodges in the Telegraph.

Baroness Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher, died yesterday.  Many announcements of her death were followed by the sentiment ‘R.I.P’.

Rest In Peace.

It seems many though, including the BBC, couldn’t allow her at least one day of dignity and grace.

In fact it took only minutes before BBC political commentators were performing the political autopsy…or ‘Tramping down the soil’ as George Galloway puts it so nicely….telling us Mrs Thatcher was divisive, highly polarising, highly controversial…..that her death will be celebrated…because she is so detested.

Tony Livesey ran a phone in…it began with the announcement that people in Brighton and Glasgow gathered to party and celebrate Mrs Thatcher’s death ..he wanted to know what our own views were of Mrs Thatcher…phone in, let him know, he said.  He knew full well that along with the tributes there would be many calls full of bile and hate….why stage a cheap, lurid, drama seeking phone-in on the actual day of Mrs Thatcher’s death?  It was a shabby stunt by the BBC to exploit any controversy and create interest in their programmes. 

The BBC is of course so much better than those lurid Redtops and the Daily Mail which seek sensation from people’s personal tragedy and miseries..isn’t it?

Some people do have feelings that run very high about Mrs Thatcher.  But we didn’t need to be told that on the day of her death.

One reason many feel like that is of course because the BBC has fed the legend itself….after 13 years of Labour we hear hardly a word about their disastrous time in Office….have you heard ‘Labour’ mentioned by the BBC in relation to HBOS when it has been frontpage news recently?  No, despite Gordon Brown engineering the ruinous merger of Lloyds and HBOS designed to ‘save’ HBOS.

Blair is only blamed for the Iraq War…indeed he was held up today as the equal of Mrs Thatcher.  Gordon Brown doesn’t merit a mention at all on the BBC, or it might just as well be so.  Which says a lot in itself.

However the name Mrs Thatcher is hardly off their lips…..she has been blamed again and again on the BBC for everything from ‘depression’ suffered now by the unemployed to the banking crash itself…despite the economy in 2000 being in credit with no deficit due to Tory policies….a legacy squandered by Gordon Brown with the usual profligacy of a Labour tax and spend government with the usual results….’B’ for Bust.

The genuinely ‘detestable’ Ken Livingstone is allowed a say on Mrs Thatcher….and comes up with something many in the BBC could have written themsleves:

‘Her legacy was all the great problems we face today. Her strategy was wrong. She destroyed the trade unions by allowing our manufacturing to collapse.’

Livingstone may be ungracious and politically opportunistic but is not quite as shameful and shameless as George Galloway:

‘Margaret Thatcher described Nelson Mandela as a “terrorist”. I was there. I saw her lips move. May she burn in the hellfires.’

They have every right to their views but I believe the BBC, of all News organisations, should have allowed a decent period of respect to have passed before airing such decidedly unpleasant opinions…all the more unpleasant for being based purely on political malice rather than a genuine analysis of her actions and legacy.

This of course is only the beginning.  The BBC now have endless years to pick away at Mrs Thatcher’s reputation and legacy. By the time the BBC have finished Mrs Thatcher will be cast as the worst Prime Minister of the Century…standing alongside the likes of Robert Mugabe or Saddam Hussein.

They come not to praise her but to bury her.

Dan Hodges knew he was onto a losing run with his plea.

He knows what we all know…the Left is a decidedly ‘Nasty piece of work.’

I have been away all day, in London.  The news of the death of Lady Thatcher is THE story of the day, the week. I am personally distraught at her passing. On the way back from the Airport I listened to the BBC and a programme which praised her as amongst the top 4 Prime Ministers of the last hundred years. Oh, just behind Comrade Brown perhaps? I cannot stomach the BBC coverage of her passing and will leave it with you.

Let this be the thread for catching BBC bias about one of the last of the giants of the 20th Century. Love her or loathe her, as the BBC says……

The BBC’s new Director General, Tony Hall, thinks the BBC is not left of centre.

If that is the case then what is the explanation for the atrociously one sided reporting that floods out of the BBC providing neither context, history or genuine analysis of any depth or originality? Are its journalists just bad or incompetent then?

What we get from the BBC is all too often what might be considered the verbatim reading of Labour Party press releases…BBC presenter’s insisting on mentioning the ‘bedroom tax’….now known as, after being called out on this, the ‘so called bedroom tax’ or the ‘bedroom tax as Labour calls it’. And yet they won’t call the Israeli ‘security barrier’ by that name…though they will call the NI walls ‘peace walls’….and they won’t call a terrorist a terrorist so as not to upset Palestinians.

The BBC will attack Osborne for parking in a disabled bay…despite the fact he wasn’t driving and knew nothing of it.

The BBC attack Osborne for raising the subject of Philpott and his lifestyle, though he didn’t connect it to the deaths of the children.

All things in perfect alignment with Labour attacks on Osborne….never mind the sweeping BBC attacks on any reform of the welfare system against which the BBC can muster an army of ‘victims’ and lobby groups all of which are allowed, indeed are encouraged, to give voice to their deepest hatred of any cuts and to raise the level of rhetoric to an astonishing height nearing insanity…one disabled rights campaigner suggesting Osborne didn’t like seeing disabled people and would like to make them ‘disappear’. When someone starts slipping in suggestions that Osborne is some kind of Nazi, a comment that went unchallenged by the BBC presenter, you know the debate has long ago lost any basis in reality or rationality.

This attitude has been encouraged by the BBC which has presented these ‘voices’ as if they were the ‘factual baseline’ from which to start any debate rather than highly strung opinions of vested interests…whilst the ‘voices’ went unquestioned, the answers were rigorously torn into and challenged.

The whole premise of the BBC is that it provides what the commercial sector cannot or will not….programmes that may not command vast audience figures but examine otherwise neglected or ignored parts of society, art, science and politics. Most importantly it has to provide news that is impartial, balanced in its reporting, favouring no political party or ideology.

The fact that it utterly fails in this regard, however Tony Hall deludes himself, should be raising ever more urgent questions about the funding of the BBC and possibly its continued existence in its privileged and oblivious state.

If I want left of centre, biased reporting there is the Guardian or the Independent. Which kind of begs the question ‘What is the BBC for? What does it do that is unique? Does it fulfil its obligations?’

The BBC is almost worthless if you measure it by the obligations and duties imposed upon it…for it fails to fulfil those in any way that would seem, to an impartial observer, fit and proper.

The BBC is no longer ‘Fit for Purpose’.

If the BBC is not ‘fit for purpose’, if it no longer does anything that is unique, if it distorts the democratic system by favouring one party or ideology, then why should the Public be obliged by Law to fund this overpowerful, unaccountable and unrepresentative organisation?

The BBC has a contract with the Public…we pay our license fee and the BBC will entertain, inform and educate…impartially and with a depth only possible with a source of funding that is assured and abundant.

The BBC has broken that contract….the most obvious and sinister breach being its innate support for the Labour Party and ‘progressive’ policies. Sinister because the BBC has sought to close down debate and done so by demonising, vilifying or ridiculing those who oppose such policies….UKIP is frequently mentioned in the same breath as the BNP or the Nazis, Tories presented as the nasty, uncaring Party….and going so far as to declare climate sceptics in need of psychological treatment whilst dismissing their views outright.

If you or I fail to pay the license fee we will soon get a knock on the door and threats of police visits and court action.

If the BBC favours one political party, if it incites riots, if it supports terrorists, if its biased reporting encourages attacks on British troops or Jews, if it undermines national identity and unity….

….there is nothing you can do.

The BBC is to all intents and purposes unaccountable. It may lose the odd DG now and again but it sails on regardless in the same old way, if anything even more determined to cement its position and impose its will upon the world and prove itself ‘right’.

Its non-political output becomes ever more political with nary an opportunity missed to slip in a ‘message’ of some kind into the ‘entertainment’….that’s if it can be bothered to make original material more often than not just filling the airwaves with repeats or programmes about houses, antiques and gardening.

The ultimate question must be ‘does the BBC do more harm than good?’

The answer can only be one possible….that the BBC has an enormously negative impact upon British society and its way of life constantly attacking not just the politics or the Establishment but even the very identity of the native population, their beliefs and way of life.

A news provider in the form of the BBC as originally intended, impartial and objective, is essential for any democracy…the flow of information and ideas being the basis for all democratic ideas and decisions…but if it no longer provides that service what good is it?

If it cannot be reformed then you have to ask why should people be forced to pay for what is essentially the Labour Party’s mouthpiece and one which they may not watch at all given the proliferation of alternative news or entertainment material now available.

The BBC has long ago broken its contract with the Nation, betrayed a trust that it has inherited, neglected its responsibilities and duties…or rather not neglected but deliberately trampled under foot, as it seeks to impose its view of the world upon us and mould us into the kind of people that the BBC thinks acceptable…if you don’t conform to that view you suddenly become an ‘outsider’, a dangerous alien to be hunted down and silenced one way or another.

The BBC cannot be reformed, it cannot be made impartial, it is too set in its ways, its mindset organically bound to the Labour Party and the Left’s world view.

It no longer provides the unique service that would warrant the imposition of a license fee to fund it.

It is time to set the BBC free….to stand on its own two feet in the commercial world. If it acts as any other commercial organisation not just in the ‘market place’ but by adopting a particular political stance then it should not be given the enormous advantage of a constant and assured source of funds.

It is time to stop the license fee obligation and allow people the freedom to choose what they pay to watch knowing full well the politics of any publication or broadcaster rather than being forced to pay for what is essentially an extended Labour Party political broadcast.

The BBC is Political, it forces upon us its own world view, it fails to provide the original and experimental material that its funding system allows to ‘fail’ and try again, it does little that the Commercial Sector doesn’t provide or cannot provide.

It does nothing that merits its license fee.

The BBC believes that the license fee gives it license to do as it likes…..it is time that ‘license’ was revoked and order reimposed upon this organisation that has grown too big and become too powerful and too unaccountable for its actions.