Here you go, a new Open Thread for the new week!

    Mark Mardell made one of those casual but deliberate comments that lazily feed into the anti-Western flow of the BBC’s narrative blaming the West for everything wrong in the world: After the first world war the imperial powers of France and Great Britain, greedy for oil, carved up the Ottoman Empire between them   Well no…and ‘carved up’?…the post war negotiations were intense and protracted and included Turkey.  … Continue reading →

Seen this? Kirsty Young’s castaway this week is the Palestinian author and human rights activist, Raja Shehadeh. Born in Ramallah in the West Bank, his life and writing has been dominated by displacement, struggle and a search for justice. His father was murdered in 1985 and aside from chronicling the unhappy history of his family and his homeland, he’s also co-founded the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq – which monitors and … Continue reading →

    ‘….a country that cannot tell its own stories; a land so debilitated by anxiety and stupefied by relativism…’     We had a quick look at the BBC’s ‘Dateline’ before [H/T Is the BBC biased?] and its denouncements that any investigation into the Trojan Horse schools is divisive and Islamophobic.  Gavin Esler made no attempt at impartial adjudication, his mind already made up that there is no such … Continue reading →

  The Sunday Times says that tomorrow the BBC is going to announce its initiative to give all British Primary School children access to classical music. It will send ‘ambassadors’ to promote the music in schools, its orchestras will visit schools, composers will talk to children and the BBC will make a documentary specifically to be played in schools. This was first announced in October last year in Tony Hall’s … Continue reading →

    This is from Labour Uncut…..I leave it to you to fathom out/enlighten the rest of us what is going on with the BBC, Labour in Wales and Julian Ruck:   UNCUT: Letter from Wales: Arts Council of Wales referred to Welsh Audit Office by Julian Ruck BBC Wales, whilst usually being keen to report on the minutiae of its director, Rhodri Talfan Davies’ day, is apparently not so enthusiastic about … Continue reading →

This is well worth a read as it checks the BBC for EU bias.    ‘UKIP regarded as ‘Incompetent, venal and racist’’

Wonder did anyone else catch the BBC coverage of the “Prison overcrowding” issue on Today this morning? It was on at 8.10am. First, the Chief Inspector of Prisons Nick Hardwick was brought on and tossed several softballs, allowing him to parrot the Labour “incompetence” meme. Hardwick is very much on the side of making life as good as possible for the convicts. The sympathy exuded towards the line being retailed … Continue reading →

The BBC have been to the fore in pushing the Labour meme about the alleged “incompetency” of Theresa May’s running of the Passport agency.  Now regardless of one thinks of THAT, isn’t it interesting that the BBC seem unable to deal with this partial explanation of the massive back up…. ‘A surge in applications from migrants is fuelling the Passport Office crisis, it emerged last night. A record 207,989 foreigners were … Continue reading →

I’ll admit my bias. I have been a fan of Rik Mayall ever since Kevin Turvey and was gutted to read of his death at such a young age.  Then I read this … and liked him even more.