Earth Hour vs Human Achievement Hour

On Radio Five Live’s Morning Reports today Nick Bryant ended a piece about Earth Hour with a quick reference to the Competitive Enterprise Institute counter campaign, Human Achievement Hour. The response from the newsreader in the studio (Vicki Sperrey?) amused me. Just in case listeners were in any doubt whose side the BBC is on…

Small Icicle in Hades

On this week’s Now Show Jon Holmes took advantage of Marcus Brigstocke’s absence and actually did a segment mocking climate change alarmism. Hard to believe, I know. A sop to the show’s critics, perhaps?

Another interesting little point. Brigstocke’s replacement for the week was Paul Sinha whose routine was based – with stunning originality – on a Daily Mail article. However, he referred to it only as “a major national newspaper”. Has criticism of lazy right-on comedians using the words “Daily Mail” also hit home?

The story in the Mail was about a naughty word nearly appearing on Channel 4’s Countdown. For Sinha it was an opportunity to use another tiresome comedy cliché, namely the “Have you seen those crazy comments under right-wing newspaper articles?” bit. He riffed off a comment on the Mail’s website from Doreen in Dorset who had written of the near-scandal: “More evidence of how moral standards have fallen in Brown’s Broken Britain.” If you look up the post by “Doreen” you’ll see she also adds: “When will they scrap the awful licence fee TAX?” This is clearly someone taking the piss out of Daily Mail readers. There are other comments like it, such as “Dave” in Maidstone: “Another idiotic waste of taxpayers’ money by Jonathan Ross and the BBC.” One wonders what percentage of comments on the Daily Mail website are actually written by crappy comedians stuck for things to joke about.

A better comedian might have questioned why so many newspapers covered this non-story (Guardian, Telegraph, Sun, Mirror) rather than take the all too familiar – and clearly fake – Daily Mail readers’ comments route.

Fun With Immigration Figures

From the Let’s Compare Headlines Dept, we have another example of counter-spin in action. Via Channel4s FactCheck we hear that:

“Gordon Brown has done it again. The statistics he used for 2009 are an under-estimate, because they don’t include all migrants. The figures he used for 2007 and 2008, however, do. So he’s misled the public by comparing the most flattering data for the latest year with the most unflattering data in the previous years.”

That gives us a stark insight into the subject of a surprisingly wide spread of headlines:

“How Gordon Brown’s podcast turned an immigration rise into a fall” – Daily Mail

“Gordon Brown accused of fiddling immigration figures” – Daily Telegraph

…a wide spread, because BBC doesn’t seem to think it’s that big a deal…

“Row over Gordon Brown immigration figures podcast”

A “row” sounds so much less interesting, eh? Move along, nothing to see.

Hat-tip to GeorgeR in the Comments

"We No Longer Own It"

The following, by BBC presenter Dotun Adebayo, was, according to ‘Damon’, a commenter at the Pickled Politics site, printed in the Voice newspaper in September 2008.

Damon’s view of it : “It seems all kinds of people can feel this ”loss of hegemony”. When it’s articulated by the white working class (in places like East London) it’s usually called racism.

I’ll let it speak for itself, but I wonder – what would have been the career trajectory of a white BBC presenter writing such a piece, lamenting the loss of an earlier (John Major’s ?) Brixton or White City and complaining that “all the shops are now owned by“? Would they still be at the BBC ?

WAVE BRIXTON GOODBYE.

There used to be a time when everyone knew that Brixton belonged to us.
We fought for it, and made love for it.
Some of us even died in that corner of the landscape that would ever be black.

It didn’t mean that white folks weren’t welcome, all that it meant is that they KNEW it was ours, the same way as when I go to Norfolk or Suffolk, or any of the shires, I know that it’s NOT ours.
I’m on my ‘p’s and ‘q’s when I go up country, because I don’t have the backative to claim it as mine. And all the youts know this, so they’ve got the bottle to shout out ”N*****!” from across the road when they see you walking down one of their village streets or quiet country lanes.

I don’t have a problem with that because I KNOW when I venture out there I’m in a white mans country and the white man makes the rules.
Brixton was different though. Babylon THOUGHT he made the rules until Brixton made a stand against the so-called Operation ‘Swamp 81′. As the late Bernie Grant MP would say, the police got a ”bloody good hiding” that time.

There were of course casualties on both sides. But at least the message was clear all around the country that Brixton belonged to us. And so did Tottenham. And so did Hackney and Stonebridge and Peckham and Handsworth and Moss Side and Cheetham Hill and St Paul’s, so on and so forth.

ROOTS

Where ever you had an inner city, you had a corner of England that would be forever Jamaican or Nigerian or Bajan or St Kittian. We didn’t just put down roots, we put down down-payments on those areas, or at least our parents did. And like the law states, if you own a piece of this green and pleasant land, it’s yours.
Nobody can take it away from you (unless you divert the mortgage payments to buy a Ferrari).
But 27 years on, Brixton no longer belongs to us. I went down there the other day and discovered another country. Oh, we were still evident. It wasn’t like ‘’spot the black man” but we no longer own it.
The bars, the clubs, the resturants and shops no longer belong to us. With the exception of a pattie shop or two, Brixton belongs to everybody but us. It’s the same in Tottenham and Hackney. We spend most of the money, but virtually the only things we own are barbershops and hairdressers.
We’ve got ourselves to blame. Look at the Asian community. They came here at more or less the same time we did. They didn’t just put downpayments on the areas they claimed, they bought them outright.
Often jointly, communally, together as one family. So when you go to Southall, Alperton, Ealing, Whitechapel, and the other London areas they own, it’s all about Indiashire, Londonistan and Bangla-Brick Lane. They own the houses, the businesses AND the councils.
So who do you think makes the rules in those areas? It’s not the Women’s Institute and the Rotary Club and the Freemasons, I can tell you. Forget the local parish church and the sound of Bow Bells, it’s the Hindu temples and the mosques that call the shots, and if the Imam wants to call the belivers to worship at five in the morning, that’s up to him.

Like I said, we’ve got ourselves to blame. We had it all in the palm of our hands and we threw it away. We could have been contenders. We could have controlled entire neighbourhoods, businesswise and otherwise.
We should be in control of our local councils in those areas where we are/were the majority.

VICTORIES

But after the street battles that won us our victories of the past (and not just us, because let’s face it – Asian communities benefited from the blood we shed in the eighties (the two Asian people burned to death in Handsworth Post Office didn’t – LT)) we rested on our laurels. Like ex-slaves, we indulged our new found freedoms far too long and partied until it was 1999. By then of course it was too late.

During the eighties and nineties more drugs were pumped into the black communities of Britain than ever before. I lived in and worked in Brixton at the time. Previously it had been all about the good sensi (or collie or lamb’s bread, as it used to be known). After the riots of 1981 and 1985, we began to see the emergence of hard drugs – heroin, speed, then cocaine, and then, of course, crack.

The drugs did their job, They subdued our people into submission. Those very same crack addicts that you see in ‘black’ neighbourhoods are the same guys who used to live on the frontline ready to protest at the injustices we suffered. Those injustices are still here, but if you ask the warriors of old to come out and demonstrate, they’ll fall prostrate, begging for one more hit.

You see, in winning the streets we really didn’t win anything. The streets belong to everybody, whatever your local gang might think. Real power and real wealth is all about who controls the means of production, the judiciary and executive.

The Nigerians of Peckham know this. They are the new Jamaicans. It remains to be seen whether they will be seduced into not buying the freehold of that corner of south east London that will forever be ‘Lagos’.

Question Time 25th March

Question Time this week comes from Glasgow, home of the Red Clydeside socialist movement and not home to a Tory MP since 1982.

On the panel we have Chief Secretary Treasury and Unite member Liam Byrne MP, the Conservative Shadow Minister for Communities Baroness Warsi, the Liberal Democrat communities spokesman Julia Goldsworthy MP, the First Minister of Scotland Alex Salmond and businessman Sir Martin Sorrell.

Liam Byrne is a late replacement for Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy who has pulled out – just possibly because last time he did something significant in Glasgow it was attending a Labour Party fundraising dinner with Gordoom and Steven Purcell, who then mysteriously resigned in a cocaine and financial scandal which has oddly not gained the prominence the story deserves.

For those who wish to take part in the Biased-BBC Buzzword Bingo, we will be playing by the “Blatantly Political Budget Rules” meaning that anyone with “Spending Up“, “Taxes Up” and “Borrowing Up” on a diagonal line will win Greece, which is in much better shape than us now. Please note that for the duration of this game, living in Belize will result in your tax status being randomly targeted.

At the helm of the ship once again TheEye and David Mosque will be scanning the horizon for icebergs, and we look forward to the pleasure of your company at 10:30pm UK time.

CONSPIRACY (PART2)

Following up the COMplus post, something that those who do not work in television might not realise is that organisations that are linked to it, such as the Television Trust for the Environment (TVE) would not exist unless they were adept beggars and propagandists and because of the BBC. TVE poses as an independent production company but it is not; the organisation is only economically viable because it receives lavish support from a clutch of warmist NGOs, including WWF, Oxfam, Christian Aid and World Vision.

All of these, of course, as I noted in the original post, have a massive climate change/political agenda, and they receive funds from governments and the EU. They turn to TVE to make films (supposedly “independent” but rigidly sticking to the warmist agenda) because it’s cheaper to fund a specialist producer on a collective basis. They might not get exactly what they want, but it’s damn close.

It’s also true that TVE could not exist unless it had a guaranteed outlet – and the BBC has provided that certainty for 25 years. In turn, the BBC itself leeches on TVE’s subsidies because it uses its capacity often, not only on regular slots like Earth Report, but also to make material for programmes such as Newsnight, where TVE’s alleged “environmental expertise” is judged to be the reason why it is qualified to make and publish such material. The reality, of course, is that the resulting programming spreads the greenie propaganda message – exactly in line with the NGO agenda. Time and time again, in such BBC programming, spokesmen for warmist NGOs appear, but sceptics never do.

Thus the BBC does far more than work with TVE. It provides it with its very lifeblood, access to airtime. In turn, the BBC – by using TVE programmes – gets access to the millions of pounds of donor cash that go to NGOs. I wonder how many of the donors that so generously give to charities such as Oxfam know how their hard-earned cash is actually being spent? To me, it’s fraud on a massive scale.

CONSPIRACY?

B-BBC has already established that the BBC World Service Trust is an organisation that exists mainly to spread climate change lies. Now, the redoubtable EU Referendum has gone a very important step further. The so-called trust is a founding partner of a body called COMplus, which describes itself as a “diverse global alliance of organisations committed to scaling-up the impact of sustainable development communications through partnership and collaboration.” Thus the BBC is a prime mover in shadowy – but highly organised – international efforts to foist the greenie ethos upon us all. To add insult to injury, COMplus, surprise, surprise, is funded by your money, via the Department for International Development (and of course through WST itself).

The scale and modus operandi of this activity beggars belief, and the BBC is in every sense a key component, putting it firmly in bed with the main greenie activists around the world.Look for example, at just one of the COMplus partner organisations, the Television Trust for the Environment (TVE). Naturally, its main goal is to make greenie propaganda (the annual report is a manual about the chilling art). The main outlet is on the BBC World television service; its programmes such as Earth Report reach 172 countries and notch up audiences of 100m plus. Principal funders of TVE include the World Wildlife Fund, Christian Aid, and Oxfam – the usual suspect NGOs who, in their pursuit of climate change nonsense, have become polticial activists whose main aim is to spread the lie that the West is to blame for all the developing world ills. Predictably, TVE is run by one Cheryl Campbell, a former BBC journalist (and greenie fanatic) who was also communications chief of Christian Aid.

Also in on the act is the Reuters Foundation, which, as B-BBC also established in a previous post is the founder of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. This body is run partly by BBC journalist James Painter, a climate change activist who is a model of his type; Goebbels would have been proud of him.

Before the AGW myth was formed, I was not a great believer in conspiracies. But in every stage of investigation of climate change, there’s evidence that this is a propaganda exercise on and unprecedented scale. And the BBC is at the epicentre of it all. It’s no coincidence that men like snout-in-trough and ultra Blairite Stephen Byers are also involved as one of the main cheerleaders for COMplus.

Update: Hat Tip to B-BBC reader Cassandra King, who (I had not seen) had posted on this earlier; also to EU Referendum’s Richard North, who told me last night about COMplus and also ensured that the previous B-BBC postings on WST were linked to his post.