When the story broke that Gary Barlow had been avoiding tax what was the one feature that the BBC emphasised first and foremost? That David Cameron didn’t think Barlow should lose his OBE.   This line led every report on this throughout the day and I thought at the time that it was probably a less than subtle attempt to link Cameron to the super rich and suggest … Continue reading →

It’s Friday and time for the final OPEN THREAD of the week. Has the BBC been annoying you? If so, share your pain here!

  When confronted by a story like this you might think the BBC would be all over it but you’d be wrong: It is a constitutional scandal of the first order. From the Telegraph: EU officials plotted IMF attack to bring rebellious Italy to its knees The revelations about EMU skulduggery are coming thick and fast. Tim Geithner recounts in his book Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises just how … Continue reading →

        A scientist who joined the board of the GWPF has been intimidated and hounded out by the climate lobby: Shameless Climate McCarthyism on full display – scientist forced to resign   But the BBC has remained resolutely silent about this. This is the same BBC that is more than ready to claim scientists are silenced by climate sceptic’s ‘vitriolic attacks‘, as Evan Davis put it… Is there … Continue reading →

      The immigration figures for the last year…ending september 2013: ONS estimates of Long-Term International Migration in the year ending September 2013 The latest ONS provisional estimates of Long Term International Migration (LTIM) show that there was a statistically significant increase in net migration to 212,000 in the year ending September 2013 from 154,000 the previous year. Net migration is the difference between immigration to and emigration from … Continue reading →

    Bold claims about how little effect the lifting of labour market restrictions will have on the numbers of Romanians and Bulgarians working in the UK over the next year are premature. Claims of this sort, based on a single quarter of evidence from one source, are nearly as risky as the predictions last year that lifting work restrictions would lead to a sudden “flood” of A2 migrants.     Oxford … Continue reading →

I happened to catch a BBC report on the imminent findings of the investigation into the Islamification of certain schools in Birmingham this morning just after 7am. BBC only managed to find parents and schoolchildren who PRAISED the schools they attended and who were shocked, yes shocked, at this outrageous slur that they were being Islamified. One pupil helpfully pointed out that in her school, the Muslim population attending the … Continue reading →

Middle of the week and time for a new one of these!Off you go…..

  Labour’s leader, Ed Miliband I should perhaps have to remind you, is having a torrid time…..the Tories have just overtaken Labour in the polls, he is being condemned left, right and centre, even from within his own labour ranks, he has no big policy ideas and the ones he does come up with are almost immediately shot down. You might suppose a grilling on the Nicky Campbell show would … Continue reading →

    Amnesty International seems to have forgotten all about this from Gita Sahgal: A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when a great organisation must ask: if it lies to itself, can it demand the truth of others? For in defending the torture standard, one of the strongest and most embedded in international human rights law, Amnesty International has sanitized the history and politics of the ex-Guantanamo … Continue reading →