Monthly Archives: October 2009

QUESTION TIME?

  By Robin Horbury | October 31, 2009 - 1:39 pm |
14 Comments

I see that the BBC’s strange version of political ‘balance’ was in evidence again in this week’s edition of R4′s Any Questions? It was time for an appearance by UKIP (Marta Andreason, the former chief accountant of the EU,now an MEP for UKIP), so who is lined up against her? The ridiculous (but fanatic europhile) Charlie Faulkner, Shirley Williams (ditto) and from the Tories, one of the last remaining europhile MPs Kenneth Clark. Not only that, they chose an audience from Cambridge University that, judging from its reactions, was also madly pro-EU. Predictably, the three panellists had a joint love-in about how wonderful the EU was, while Andrea – though giving as good an account of herself as possible in the circumstances – was pushed to the margins. According to my sums, parties with eurosceptic policies amassed almost 60% of the vote at the June elections, not 25%.

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Blowing the Whistle

  By Sue | October 31, 2009 - 12:17 pm |
24 Comments

Did anyone else read Nick Cohen’s disturbing piece about whistleblower Derek Pasquill. He is bringing a case of unfair dismissal (hopeless) against the FCO.

It isn’t true to say that the BBC hasn’t reported this subject, they have. But they focus on the ethics of whistleblowing itself rather than what was ‘blown.’
Things more scandalous than several duck houses and home-flippings put together.

Putting aside the fact that many people are skeptical about whether there can be truly moderate Muslims, if there really are, it would undoubtedly be a good thing. After all, Muslims have fitted into U.S. society without all the difficulties we have here.

Our government recognises the necessity of befriending the Muslims it deliberately brought here. But rather than encouraging and supporting moderates they have chosen to appease and support the likes of the extreme MCB.

It seems Jack “I-come-from-immigrants” Straw was complicit in all this. Sitting there on the QT panel telling us all about that, he looked half deflated; likely to shrivel up altogether at any moment.

Hazel Blears was beginning to get it. She made a stand, then she was sacrificed in the expenses row.

Instead of debating the morality of whistleblowing, shouldn’t the BBC be debating the morality of appeasing, funding and fêting extreme Islamists?

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NUTT OUT

  By Robin Horbury | October 31, 2009 - 11:10 am |
23 Comments

The BBC, of course, loves the idea of liberalising the drug laws, or better still, making hard drugs legal so that the boys and girls at White City can have oodles of their favourite white powder and waccy baccy. So when Alan Johnson – under pressure from dear Gordon – sacks Professor David Nutt for over-stepping his brief and lobbying to have cannabis re-classified (again) as a class ‘C’ drug, there’s no question where their loyalties lie.

The whole row is cast as a matter of freedom of expression and opinion, with batteries of experts wheeled out to say a) that Professor Nutt is a jolly good all-round egg and scientist who should be allowed to say what he wants, and b)the government is being repressive. Naturally, in support of the good professor in the BBC’s coverage are charities such as Drugscope and Release, which for years have been pressing for legalisation of all kinds of drugs, and who believe that methadone is a ‘cure’ for heroin addiction.

But what’s completely missing from the equation is any consideration that Professor Nutt and his colleagues have been a joke for years because the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs – which he chaired – has been hijacked by liberals like him. Also, that – although Alan Johnson has actually done something right for once – the whole of the government’s policy towards illegal drug use is a shambles, and it is they that caused the current climate of ill-judged and highly dangerous liberalism.

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Party Posturing (Part 2)

  By Robin Horbury | October 30, 2009 - 8:56 am |
20 Comments

Credit where credit is due. Following Today’s attempted ambush of William Hague yesterday over the alleged Nazi sympathies of Michael Kaminski, the leader of Poland’s Law and Justice Party who are the Conservative party’s new European allies, the programme invited on this morning Michael Shudrich, Poland’s chief rabbi, to clarify whether or not – as David Miliband alleged yesterday – he believed Mr Kaminski was anti-semitic. Very cooly and precisely, Mr Shudrich said that, although Mr Kaminski had in his youth belonged to a neo-Nazi party, he had long since moved on and was now strongly pro-Isreal and “anti anti-semitic”in his beliefs. Not only that, again despite what Mr Miliband disgracefully alleged, the Law and Justice Party was not right-extremist (ie racist), but a respectable centre-right party.

So the programme definitely went out of its way – by tracking Mr Shudrich down to be interviewed – to demonstrate that David Miliband’s claims were preposterous.

However, and there is always a big ‘however’ when the BBC finds something that supports a view to the right of centre, Nick Robinson came in on the act at the end to say that – despite the clarification over Poland -problems still were in store over the new Conservative grouping in the European Parliament, because there were big (unspecified) questions about the Latvians, another member of the new group. The menacing innuendo in his claims was so strong that he virtually nullified all that had been said by the chief rabbi.

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QUESTION TIME LIVE-CHAT TONIGHT

  By All Seeing Eye | October 29, 2009 - 5:37 pm | ,
8 Comments

Tonights Question Time live-chat will be here. The programme itself comes from Llandudno and the panel will consist of the former home secretary Jacqui Smith MP, Shadow Welsh Secretary Cheryl Gillan MP, the leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats Lembit Opik MP, Plaid Cymru’s Elfyn Llwyd and John Sergeant.

As usual, we’ll be staying open for business through This Week as well…..and hoping for gems like HobNobGate from last week. The BBC have been trying very hard to avoid a race controversy by removing all evidence of Andrew Neil comparing Diane Abbott to a chocolate biscuit from websites and iPlayer. There were, apparently, 15 complaints. Regular contributor and blogger Dazed and Confused has other ideas though. Enjoy.

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Party Posturing?

  By Sue | October 29, 2009 - 2:20 pm | , ,
18 Comments

I listened with astonishment to the interview with David Miliband and William Hague on Today.

Halfway through the interview about the uselessness of having a referendum after ratification, they started chatting about the spat over the Tory party’s partnership/ alliance with Poland. David Miliband is furious because he thinks remarks made by Polish MEP Michal Kaminski are antisemitic, even though the Chief Rabbi of Poland has come to Mr. Kaminski’s defence.
I don’t know whether Mr. Kaminski is antisemitic by Polish standards, and I know very little about the implications of David Cameron’s relationship with his new best friends, but was surprised about Mr. Miliband’s outrage.

Considering the the government’s pro Muslim position – in general, and regarding immigration, not to mention their non vote on the Goldstone resolution, his outrage looked a bit disingenuous. I couldn’t find the promised statement on the Today website either. Can anyone help?

John Humphrys might have given them a more penetrating grilling than James Naughtie’s limp questioning, though maybe not in a good way.

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HOBNOBGATE

  By Robin Horbury | October 29, 2009 - 9:22 am |
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There’s a good analysis here of ‘Hobnobgate’ – the ridiculous BBC hypocrisy over Andrew Neil’s lighthearted (and even affectionate) remark on the BBC1 programme This Week that panellist MP Diane Abbott was like a “chocolate hobnob”, while her companion Michael Portillo was more like a “custard cream”. As Christopher Hart eloquently points out, the PC police at the BBC go into flatspin panic the minute 10 Guardian readers complain about alleged racism, while they do virtually nothing at all when an oaf like Jonathan Ross mounts a nasty, vicious, spiteful attack on the gentle Andrew Sachs. And what steps are our revered senior managers at the BBC taking to rid us of genuinely offensive parts of their output, such as using the f-word at every opportunity, or getting Andrew Marr to present an analysis of British history (as he did last night)? His programme was so full of crass class-hatred judgments that the best comparison is with 1066 And All That (although not nearly as funny).

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QUESTION TIME LIVE-CHAT 29th OCTOBER

  By All Seeing Eye | October 28, 2009 - 9:02 pm | ,
5 Comments

As is usual, Biased-BBC will be holding a live-chat in parallel with Question Time tomorrow night starting at 10:30pm UK time.

The panel in Llandudno will consist of the former home secretary Jacqui Smith MP, Shadow Welsh Secretary Cheryl Gillan MP, the leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats and meteorite-man Lembit Opik MP, Plaid Cymru’s Elfyn Llwyd and John Sergeant.

Yours truly will, in the absence of David Vance, be promoting myself from assistant moderator into the big seat for the evening. Please join us!

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Water Water Everywhere. Except in the West Bank.

  By Sue | October 28, 2009 - 8:04 pm |
7 Comments

There is little doubt that the BBC hierarchy doesn’t like Israel. If they did, they wouldn’t obsess about every report, summary, or pronouncement condemning Israel that can be presented as a war crime, human rights abuse, or other misdeed. Furthermore, if they did report such perfidious findings, they wouldn’t sensationalise them in a way likely to cause maximum outrage amongst their trusting viewers.
Yet another report from Amnesty International condemning Israel, picked up and run with by your BBC.

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Fearless Frankie

  By Sue | October 28, 2009 - 3:59 pm | ,
12 Comments


Our friend Frankie Boyle has been defending his freedom of speech. Or his right to insult Rebecca Adlington’s appearance. Why he ever thought that was funny in the first place escapes me, but he puts the rebuke he has had from the BBC Trust down to a clampdown on cutting edge satire.
What his quip about Ms. Adlington’s nose has to do with satire also escapes me, but he has a point about the directive that the BBC has issued which he calls the “don’t frighten the horses” edict.

I’m all in favour of frightening horses if it means we get something good on TV. But not from Frankie Boyle. His views on Afghanistan and other political topics we can do without.

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HUDD "SACKED TO MAKE WAY FOR ROSS"

  By Robin Horbury | October 27, 2009 - 5:29 pm |
8 Comments

The News Huddlines (Radio 2) was one of the BBC’s last old-style comedy shows, with fine roots that could be traced back back to the great days of shows like ITMA and Beyond the Fringe. Despite being hugely popular with its audience, it was axed unceremoniously at the end of 2001. Roy Hudd, its presenter, has just revealed why. He was taken to lunch by an (unnamed) BBC senior executive and told bluntly: “We’d like you to be more like Jonathan Ross”. The executive, says Hudd, then explained that Wossy’s flashy blend of “smut and smugness”, was what was now wanted of Radio 2 performers – “cool, edgy, relevant”.

Now I’m all for making change when change is due and maybe after 26 years, the News Huddlines was a tad tired. But it had a loyal older audience, and it surely speaks volumes about today’s BBC that its senior executives prefer the obscene, in-your-face Ross to steely veteran professionals like Roy Hudd. And instead of the deceptively gentle, genuinely humorous satire of Hudd and his crew (which included brilliant performers such as Alison Steadman) we now have, disguised as BBC ‘comedy’, the blatant left-wing cant of idiots like Marcus Brigstocke.

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HUMPHRYS IN FART SCARE

  By Robin Horbury | October 27, 2009 - 9:50 am |
13 Comments

Lord Stern, a self-appointed expert on ‘climate change’ who in reality is nothing but a jumped-up economist wrote, back in 2006, a deeply flawed report that contained a tissue of extremist political untruths – dressed up as scientific ‘truth’ – about what he claimed were the threats facing mankind. His work was comprehensively debunked at the time by the doughty economist Ruth Lea, who rightly observed that like all the outpourings of greenies, this was in reality yet another call for higher taxes and more central government oppression.

For the BBC, though, his lordship is still a figure of worship. So when he makes the loony suggestion that we all become vegetarians because farm animals fart too much ‘dangerous’ methane, he’s invited on the Today programme and treated with fawning reverence by John Humphrys. To be fair, Mr Humphrys did acknowledge there were “deniers” out there who disbelieved his scare-mongering, and also suggested that his climate change beliefs were only based on computer models, but when Lord Stern persisted that the science was proven, simple and definitely settled, the supposed Torquemada of the BBC rolled over and purred in agreement. Not only that, Mr Humphrys just sat back and listened as Lord Stern spouted nonsense about moves to “zero carbon electricity”. And he concluded by suggesting that Lord Stern was not being tough enough in pursuing his loony agenda.

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PUSHOVER FOR MILIBAND

  By Robin Horbury | October 26, 2009 - 6:43 pm |
13 Comments

The boy David Miliband has been revealing the real post-Lisbon EU agenda today; that he and the rest of his rotten party want Tony Blair to become president of Europe, and the UK itself to be a vassal state in the pursuit of EU goals. As usual, the BBC gives him acres of space to push his federalist views, both on the website and on most major news programmes such as World at One.

And what’s almost completely missing from this fawning coverage? Any idea – as was clearly expressed on June 3 in the European elections – that the whole vast EU edifice stinks, that Britain hates Tony Blair and that what the EU is doing is against the wishes of the British people.

The only opposition that WATO could muster to the Miliband’s mad dash to crown Tony Blair was French foreign affairs spokesman Bernard Kouchner, whose only objections were that Blair had not joined the euro and that us Brits did not like the EU enough.

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