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When Dr Jerry Brotton, then an English lecturer at Royal Holloway department and now part of BBC favourite Lisa Jardine’s English department at Queen Mary’s London, came out two years ago with his “It’s The Turks Wot Won It” theory – that action by the Ottoman Empire at the request of Elizabeth’s spymaster Francis Walsingham had “fatally weakened” the Armada, the Guardian were quick to follow up, seemingly claiming in a rather garbled editorial that the incident strenghtened the case for Turkey’s accession to the EU.

I noted at the time that we were seeing a new liberal myth in embryo.

A couple of months later Trevor Phillips repeated Dr Brotton’s claims in a lecture delivered at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies (he also name-checked the Islamic King Offa myth – I’m surprised the BBC haven’t picked that one up). The myth was starting to run.

Only one problem – the complete lack of evidence for the claim. For the theory to be tenable evidence for three things would be necessary :

1. That Walsingham had asked the ambassador to encourage Ottoman action against Spain
2. That Harborne, the ambassador, successfully induced the Turks to harass Spanish possessions or otherwise threaten Spain, over and above the existing semi-endemic warfare between them
3. That this had a decisive impact on the Armada

Unfortunately only the first of these – Walsingham’s letter to the ambassador at the Ottoman court – is supported by any evidence.

There is no evidence that the letter resulted in any movements by the Ottoman fleet or army – or by any Ottoman allies.

There is no evidence of any impact on the Armada.

I did mail Dr Brotton to ask if such evidence existed, but he didn’t reply. In the absence of any supporting evidence I can only conclude that Dr Brotton’s making it up as he goes along.

What’s this got to do with the BBC ? Because they’re repeating this myth.

British history should be rewritten to make it “more inclusive”, says Trevor Phillips, the head of the new human rights and equality commission.

He said Muslims were also part of the national story and “sometimes we have to go back into the tapestry and insert some threads that were lost”.

He quoted the example of the Spanish Armada, which was held up by the Turks at the request of Queen Elizabeth I.

No. The Armada was not ‘held up by the Turks’. The BBC are perpetuating an untruth. Don’t take my word for it :

Dr Simon Adams, co-author of “England, Spain and the Grand Armada” argues the Ottoman Turks were not threatening the Spanish in the Mediterranean.

“The Walsingham letter had been sent in 1584 or 1585 and although England might have hoped the Turks would cause the Spanish problems, nothing really happened,” he told Reuters.

“The Turks were not really doing anything (against Spain) in 1588. They were busy in the near east,” added the University of Strathclyde academic.

Adams said the Armada failed because the expedition was poorly planned and the English had an effective navy helped by favourable weather.

So Dr Adams thinks there’s no evidence for a theory the BBC are presenting as fact. And who’s he ? Well, he’s the guy who wrote the BBC History pages on the Armada.

Why is this so important ? Because the Armada story is a key component of our history – of the English national story, which still carries enormous cultural significance. As CLR James put it :

English people, for example, have a conception of themselves breathed from birth. Drake and mighty Nelson, Shakespeare, Waterloo, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the few who did so much for so many, the success of parliamentary democracy, those and such as those constitute a national tradition.

The motives of Dr Brotton and Trevor Phillips in seeking to present a politically correct travesty of a key moment in English history – an attack on the English national story – are outside the remit of this blog. But it is shameful that the BBC are repeating their claims as fact.

UPDATE – surprise surprise – Dr Brotton is a Newsnight reviewer.

doesn’t mention the devastating article in yesterday’s Mail on Sunday quoting Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, a former BBC Governor, speaking about the BBC. I am sure this is just a simple oversight, so, ever helpful, I’ve sent them an ‘e-mail’ (as they put it) using the form on the BBC Editors Blog page:

Hello, I see from your BBC In The News section today that you’ve omitted the Mail on Sunday article quoting Dame Pauline Neville-Jones. Why is that? Surely the comments of a former BBC Governor speaking about the BBC count as BBC In The News?

Thank you, Andrew.

P.S. Let me know if you need the URL, or you can get it from the Biased BBC blog.

See this Biased BBC post from Saturday night for more details.

. Yesterday morning they started off a new [Don’t] Have Your Say thread with the following question:

Will this year’s Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool enable the Tories to regain support from Labour?

With rumours of a possible snap election, a poll for the Observer suggests that just 13% of voters view party leader David Cameron as the party leader most able to handle a crisis – compared to 60% for Gordon Brown.

However, Mr Cameron has told the BBC’s Andrew Marr that he is ready for a snap election.

At the start of the conference, the party has pledged to scrap stamp duty for first-time buyers on homes worth under £250,000 and offer tax breaks for families with children worth up to £2,000 a year.

Other items on today’s agenda include urban regeneration and a speech by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Can David Cameron regain public support? What would you like to see on the agenda? Are you attending this week’s conference?

Read the main story [Tories to make stamp duty pledge]

– a fairy typical BBC Views Online approach (i.e. from the left), for instance:

Paragraph 1: the presumption that increased support can only come from Labour voters – ignoring other parties and the biggest party of all: those who stay at home;

Paragraph 2: Yes, lets select and quote a poll that we like from the Observer;

Paragraph 5: Again, the presumption that Cameron does not have public support, i.e. that he has lost it, rather than the reality – that polls go up and down.

But that’s by the by. The real shocker is that having asked that question yesterday (and published hundreds of replies), BBC Views Online has changed the question completely today! The question is now:

Are Tory tax cuts a vote winner?

Shadow chancellor George Osborne has pledged to cut inheritance tax and stamp duty in a speech to the Conservative conference.

The Tories want to raise the inheritance tax threshold to £1m and scrap stamp duty for first-time buyers on homes worth under £250,000.

The Conservatives would pay for the cuts by introducing a £25,000 levy on “non domiciles” – business people who register abroad for tax purposes.

With rumours of a possible snap election, a Observer poll suggests that just 13% of voters view David Cameron as the leader most able to handle a crisis – compared to 60% for Gordon Brown.

Are the tax cuts a good idea? Can the proposals boost support for the Tories? Does Mr Cameron have the right qualities to be PM?

Read the main story [Tories would cut inheritance tax]

…with all of the answers to yesterday’s question displayed under the new question – a question just as loaded as before. I expect if we wait a bit longer it’ll become Why have racist Tories lurched to the right?

Just for the full slippery BBC Views Online ‘stealth edit’ effect, one of the answers to yesterday’s question has been removed – it was the top answer, the one most recommended by readers, and by a big margin. That answer was:

Added: Sunday, 30 September, 2007, 08:45 GMT 09:45 UK

the BBC interviewed david cameron this sunday morning, asked clearly “you are behind in the polls! how are you going to change this?”

david cameron replied “polls go up and down, you should ask a polster about this, im here to present a real change for the british voter.”

he then went on to list policies and answer questions on the individual points.

at the end of the interview, the program went to latest news headlines, the first headline was read out, “david cameron has said he is worried and faces a big challenge to reverse his party’s poor showing in the polls!”

come on BBC, disgraceful reporting!

how can you tell us you are not pro labour biased when you report like this?

[denzil69]

That top answer was online for most of yesterday, and does not appear to contravene any of the BBC’s House Rules. How come it has gone now? On what grounds was it removed?

Same old Tories? More like same old BBC…

Thank you to Biased BBC reader Notasheep for preserving the complete text of the real top answer. You can verify that it has definitely gone by looking through the answers in chronological order: from the timestamps it should be somewhere around page 96 at the time of writing.

reports the Mail on Sunday:

BBC Five Live’s award-winning presenter Peter Allen has been snubbed for a job fronting Radio 4’s flagship Today programme “because he is too much of an Essex boy”.

Friends of Allen – who left school at 18 to work for his local newspaper and did not go to university – believe he is a victim of “Oxbridge snobs” who control the BBC.

According to a friend, Allen was rejected at the last minute because:

He has a blokey, populist style, so the liberals who run the BBC probably assume wrongly that he is a Tory. He is in fact fiercely independent.

Why is that not a surprise?

See below for an audio clip of Allen with fellow presenter Jane Garvey as she reminisces about the morning after the night before when Tony Blair deposed John Major at the general election in May 1997.

Thank you to Biased BBC reader Lurker in a Burqua for the link.

*, hangout of sundry lefties, ‘activists’ and ‘edgy’ wannabes, among others:

I has a new job!

For the next three months, anyway. I will be helping shape the views of middle England on the Jeremy Vine programme on Radio Two.

Most importantly, it means that I will have all weekends and evenings free, and will be able to attend more Urban events. Hurrah!

I hope the BBC will identify this twerp and ram home the message that their tellytax funded role is to educate, entertain and inform, not to “shape the views of middle England” or anyone else.

Another fine testament to the quality of BBC recruitment and their successful candidates.

* Registration (followed by manual approval) required just to view.

reports Saturday’s Daily Mail:

First her kitchen turned out not to be her kitchen. Now it seems Nigella Lawson’s trip to the shops on a London bus for her cookery show wasn’t quite what it seemed either….

Producers have admitted that they hired the bus Miss Lawson rode on, filling it with extras pretending to read the newspapers as normal passengers.

So while Miss Lawson, 47, was telling viewers to “take the express way to deliciousness”, she was not travelling on public transport at all. Instead she was being filmed by a crew in studio conditions.

“We chose to hire a bus for the day of filming rather than disrupt customers on a normal bus route,” admitted a BBC spokesman.

It’s one thing to build a replica set of Nigella’s kitchen for easier filming and less disruption of her household, but it’s entirely another to make a meal of taking a bus to the shops when it turns out the bus had been hired for the day and filled with actors posing as ordinary passengers!

This latest BBC hypocrisy and fakery will be even worse if it turns out it was cooked up after Nigella was criticised for “Her habit of taking seemingly endless taxis to Waitrose and upmarket delicatessens” as the Mail reports.

If the BBC is unable to film a short programme segment of a bus trip without unduly disrupting fellow travellers why did they bother with the pretension of a Nigella bus trip in the first place?

Read the rest of Alison Boshoff’s article for more details.

guide, first covered by Biased BBC back in June (see halfway down),

former BBC governor Dame Pauline Neville-Jones (a formidable lady with an immense record of public service at the highest levels) is quoted in today’s Daily Mail, BBC’s Newsround fed youngsters Al Qaeda propaganda, claims ex-spy chief, with all her guns blazing.

Speaking about the latest version of Newsround’s 9/11 explanation, a BBC concoction arrived at after a short sharp campaign led by Biased BBC with help from fellow bloggers and journalists, Dame Pauline says it’s even worse now:

It still says it’s all America’s fault, and now for daring to be involved in the Middle East at all.

It wasn’t ‘people linked to’ al Qaeda who killed 3,000 people that day, it was al Qaeda itself. Osama bin Laden even boasted of the attacks.

Is the BBC really saying that if you’re ‘unhappy’ it’s quite normal behaviour to murder people?

Is the BBC so naive as to take al Qaeda’s propaganda at face value? Or is there something more sinister at work here?

Daily Mail journalist James Chapman also quotes Dame Pauline saying:

Al Qaeda make the manifestly false claim that America is part of an enormous Jewish-Christian conspiracy to dominate the world and kill Muslims. This is no secret – Osama bin Laden has said as much himself.

We know that in the long run the struggle against terrorists is a battle for hearts and minds.

How can we expect to win when our national broadcaster is parroting their line to our own children?

There is only one set of people who are ever to blame for terrorist attacks and that’s the perpetrators themselves.

This very much reflects the view of Biased BBC – that our national broadcaster, paid for through a compulsory levy on the British viewing public, ought to serve our collective national interest – the interest of free people everywhere – when it comes to reporting on terrorism and covering terrorist atrocities.

Describing the BBC as a “national treasure”, Dame Pauline went on:

…from time to time I have found myself asking questions about BBC’s attitude to terrorism. It even orders its journalists not to use the word terrorist.

Mark Byford, the BBC’s head of journalism, responding to Dame Pauline’s complaint said that the current text is “clear and concise”. We’ve heard that before: during Biased BBC’s last campaign on this issue, Sinead Rocks, Newsround’s Editor, wrote on the BBC Editors Blog that “we stand by the more recent version”, before push came to shove from Biased BBC and its friends, followed by the BBC caving in and changing their 9/11 article to its current less than ideal version.

The annoying thing is that Sinead Rocks and the BBC in general have got away, so far, with so much obfuscation of the truth about CBBC Newsround’s 9/11 guide – neither Dame Pauline nor the Daily Mail seem to be aware of the real text of the original CBBC Newsround Why did they do it? page:

A lot of countries don’t like the way America gets involved with arguments in the Middle East.

They think that the US unfairly helps Israel in its conflict with Palestine. Israel and Palestine have been arguing for many years over who owns what land.

America is seen to be sympathetic towards Jewish Israelis, so some Arabs and Muslims think America does not like or understand them.

…an explanation that was online, misinforming and corrupting British children for five years, from 2002 until June 2007, when it was first complained about here at Biased BBC.

Lack of time prevented me from writing an intended summary of the recent CBBC Newsround 9/11 events, setting out the unsatisfactory explanations and obfuscations of the BBC and Sinead Rocks. With Dame Pauline’s stature and influence coming to bear on the BBC there may yet be a chance to write a timely recap of events with a more satisfactory ending than had been foreseen. Let’s hope so.

A handy list of Biased BBC’s Newsround 9/11 articles:

June 18th, 2007: Natalie’s first report (see halfway down);

June 24th, 2007: Natalie reports an update at CBBC Newsround;

Sept. 12th, 2007: Following Drudge Report publicity, Biased BBC re-joins the fray, the BBC appears to respond positively;

Sept. 12th, 2007: Our record of the 9/11 guide that the BBC removed and replaced with a new page that turned out to be temporary;

Sept. 13th, 2007: Sinead Rocks infamous non-apology apology, misleading people, provoking many questions and a request for a full explanation;

Sept. 13th, 2007: Sinead Rocks responds to Biased BBC’s request, leading to yet more questions about gaps and obfuscations in her explanation. The CBBC Newsround 9/11 Guide that had apparently been removed is put back unchanged;

Sept. 14th, 2007: A Biased BBC megapost – setting out the whole story, the unanswered questions and double-dealing of the BBC, kicking off a campaign supported by Biased BBC readers, many fellow bloggers and mainstream newspaper journalists;

Sept. 16th, 2007: A result. Sinead Rocks and the BBC cave in, changing the 9/11 guide to its current version, leaving many questions about the BBC’s actions, behaviour and accountability unanswered;

Sept. 17th, 2007: Screenshot and full text of the original even more offensive version of CBBC Newsround 9/11 guide ‘Why did they do it’ page, retrieved from Internet Archive, after being online at the BBC for five years until June 2007.

Please do read the rest of James Chapman’s excellent article. Please also ensure that this new development in Biased BBC’s campaign highlighting CBBC Newsround’s 9/11 coverage receives the attention it deserves.

Thank you to an anonymous Biased BBC reader for the Daily Mail link.

Please use this thread for BBC-related comments and analysis. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not (and never has been) an invitation for general off-topic comments, rants or use as a chat forum. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

programme on the departure of Jane Garvey from the show:

We’d like to offer a permanent audio memento, the essential Garvey collection. Tell us about your favourite Jane moments – on the form on this page, or by leaving a comment below – and we’ll try to dust off the tapes and put together a compilation which you’ll be able to get online (there’s a couple of clips available here already).

Here at Biased BBC our favourite Jane Garvey moment, though there have been many, has to be from earlier this year, as she fondly reminisced with co-host Peter Allen about the morning of May 2nd, 1997, the morning when Tony Blair became Prime Minister (click play to start):

Peter Allen: I want to hear what you thought of when, in 1997, on May the 2nd…

Jane Garvey: Ah, well, I had been up for most of the night, er, but I was doing this Five Live breakfast programme with a colleague at the time,

Peter Allen: Oh, you remember…

Jane Garvey: It was a bloke called Peter Allen

Peter Allen: Yes

Jane Garvey: So, I had to get a bit of sleep, and I do remember I walked back into, we were broadcasting then from Broadcasting House in the centre of London, all very upmarket in those days, and the corridors of, er, Broadcasting House were strewn with empty champagne bottles.

Peter Allen: (chuckles heartily)

Jane Garvey: I’ll always remember that, er, not that the BBC were celebrating…

Peter Allen: (still chuckling throughout) No, no. No. Not at all!

Jane Garvey: …in any way shape or form, and, er, actually, I think it’s fair to say that in the intervening years, uh, the BBC, if it ever was in love with Labour, has probably fallen out of love with Labour, or learnt to fall back in, or basically just learnt to be in the middle somewhere, which is how it should be, um, but there was always the suggestion that the BBC was full of pinkos who couldn’t wait for Labour to get back into power, that may have been the case, who knows? But as I say, there have been a few problems along the way over the last ten years. Wish I hadn’t started this now…

Peter Allen: Interested to hear people’s memories of May the 2nd 1997, you know the email, drive@bbc.co.uk, or text…

Classic Garvey indeed. I wonder if that’ll make it into John’s ‘permanent audio memento’ of Jane – feel free to nip over to the Editors Blog and suggest it!

To save yourself a copy: right-click on this link, Jane Garvey recalls May 2nd, 1997 at the BBC, select ‘Save As…‘, save it to your computer, and then play it using your choice of media player.

Update: My colleague Laban recalls:

Another golden moment was [Jane] asking the Chief Constable of Merseyside, as the Anthony Walker killers were convicted, “Has there ever been a white victim of a racist murder in this country?”

Thank you to Biased BBC reader Simon Taylor for the MP3 recording (adding new detail to our transcript) – our very own Biased BBC ‘permanent audio memento’ of Jane’s time at Five Lies – now promoted to our sidebar for posterity’s sake.

Thank you to Hotlink Files for free file hosting and mirPod for their mini MP3 player.

reporter John Kay spent more than two minutes on a jocular report searching in vain (on a nice sunny day out) for a place in Cornwall called Porthemmet – a spoof news report about a spoof tourist destination, also covered by BBC Views Online, Shock for visitors to fake beach (another fine example of Views Online headline writing).

Sadly, neither the Ten O’Clock News nor BBC Views Online were able to find room, even in passing, for an amusing story from the Telegraph so much more redolent of life in contemporary Britain: Asylum seekers ‘enter UK in Tony Blair’s car’ – a touching tale of the Dear ex-Leader’s new taxpayer funded £100,000 armoured BMW 7-series, arriving from abroad complete with its own crack team of four asylum-seekers accompanying it.

Heartwarming stuff. I can’t think why it escaped the BBC’s notice.