The Thick Blue Line

 

 

Victoria Derbyshire has been talking  (11:09) to a senior police officer, Detective Chief Superintendent Mick Duffy, from the Metropolitan Police about its reforms and efficiency drive.

Two things of especial note that he said:

1.  The Met. will be putting 26,000 constables on the streets of London….more than at any time in its history…due to its efficiency changes.

2.  The main priorities for police are gang crime, foreign national offenders, proceeds of crimes and sexual exploitation.

 

Terrible Tory ‘cuts’ reducing police on the frontline?

‘Foreign national offenders’….A ‘priority area’?… makes you wonder just how much crime is being committed by these ‘foreign nationals’….. good old Labour Party open border policy…actively supported by the BBC.

Still, at least we can deport them when they’re caught can’t we?  

 

Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true!

 

 

 

 

Did laugh this morning listening to Rachel Burden on 5Live (07:53) interviewing David Cameron.

 Cameron was reeling off statistics about how Tory councils save you money and suggested any expert would back his figures up.

Rachel Burden, presumably unequiped with the necessary facts to contest his claims, thought fast and resorted to the slipperiest of get outs I’ve heard in a long time:

‘You can ask two separate experts the same question and get two very different answers can’t you? I think we’ll have to agree on that!’

 

So now you know….don’t like what’s being said then  just claim the other person is making it up…which is essentially what Burden was saying to the PM….and all without having to back your own argument up with those inconvenient ‘facts’.

 

She ruined all her good work a few minutes later by saying:

‘Well you asked for experts..this is what the Joseph Rowntree Foundation said…’

 

I don’t need to say anymore to that…I can imagine the eyes rolling already.

 

Imagine If Politicians Had The Power To License BBC Reporters

‘Hacked Off’….Andrew Gilligan says that they have engineered a ‘coup…..one of perhaps the most important constitutional change yet of the 21st century.’

A ‘coup’….’constitutional change’?  Shouldn’t the BBC be asking who Hacked Off is, and is it fit and proper that they had such influence over such an important and consequential piece of politically contrived ‘legislation’?

I don’t know what you think about Hacked Off’s successful campaign to create that political fix intended to  muzzle the Press but Andrew Gilligan may have hit the nail on the head:

‘This was a sort of coup, by people even more unaccountable and unrepresentative than the average newspaper owner.’

 Hacked Off wants to “force the press to serve defined social and political objectives – at the expense, if necessary, of the right to free expression.”

Who are Hacked Off? And how did Brian Cathcart and a small group of even more obscure allies come from nowhere to write perhaps the most important constitutional change yet of the 21st century?’

He’s not wrong is he?  Three hundred years of Press freedom sacrificed in some sort of ritual slaughter to appease a few washed up celebrities, their secretive millionaire backers and  venal, unscrupulous politicians.

You might have thought that such a historic, momentous and politically significant event would have attracted far more scrutiny from the BBC than it has.

They might be more interested if they found that their own journalists were only able to report when ‘approved’ by a government minister.

Who are the mysterious millionaire backers that helped fund this grubby deal?  Who indeed are ‘Hacked Off’?
Why is it that a highly political pressure group is able to not only influence but sit in on the actual negotiations, in Labour Party offices,  without serious comment questioning the appropriateness of that?

In the end we have to ask, as always, who benefits?  Is it the Press?  The Public?  Or is it someone else entirely?  Was this just a charade exploiting the Millie Dowler story in order to force through a highly contentious deal on Press regulation that would allow politicians, in the end, to say what can and cannot be published…all guided by left wing  concepts of ‘human rights’ and a convenient ‘respect’ for privacy…when it suits?

Janet Daley thinks she knows the answer to that….

The ‘BBC Left’ is using hacking to get revenge
Left-wing politicians and broadcasters do not want to debate ideas but they do want to remove their opponents.

‘….that great edifice of self-regarding, mutually affirming soft-Left orthodoxy which determines the limits of acceptable public discourse – of which the BBC is the indispensable spiritual centre. The influence of the BBC as a monitor of what is politically admissible is almost incalculable: the entire Tory modernisation project was effectively made necessary (as its chief architects often admit) by the need to get a fair hearing on its news coverage.

This is as close as the BBC gets to criticising Hacked Off and its grubby deal set up in the dark hours of the night……by James Landale, BBC Deputy Political Editor

‘There is an old trope about sausages and law. You don’t want to see how they both are made. Here is why.
The deal was agreed in the early hours in Ed Miliband’s office at the House of Commons. The Labour leader was there alongside his deputy Harriet Harman. The Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg was present as were four members of the Hacked Off campaign group whose leading light, Hugh Grant, describes as “a few dandruffy professors…a slightly insane chess champion ex-Lib Dem MP and a couple of threadbare lawyers”.
Representing the Conservatives was Oliver Letwin, the minister for policy, a man who once left parliamentary papers in a bin in St James’s Park.
No one from the press was present. There were bleary eyes all round.
So there was no white paper. No pre-legislative scrutiny. Just rushed, late night law driven as much by politics as by principle.
Thus is law made. Perhaps we should inspect the sausage for horsemeat?

 

So the BBC knows that there is something possibly slightly sinister about all this….but doesn’t want to go to town on it.

These are some of the choicer cuts from Gilligan’s article…but read it in full:

‘Brian Cathcart has become a lot more black-and-white. In his new role as director of the Hacked Off campaign for a controlled press, he now claims that “most British national newspapers ruthlessly chose to exercise their great power for evil”.

Press inaccuracy has become a disease curable only by a state-backed regulator, and the McCann case is Exhibit A in what Hacked Off calls the “atrocities” perpetrated by the press.

Who are Hacked Off? And how did Brian Cathcart and a small group of even more obscure allies come from nowhere to write perhaps the most important constitutional change yet of the 21st century?

Hacked Off did it by using all the red-top tricks they claim to hate – broad-brush condemnations, simplistic arguments, distorted facts, behind-the-scenes political deal making, celebrity stardust and the emotive deployment of victims.
Their key skill was in presenting the crimes of some newspapers as the responsibility of all, and defining the issue as what Gerry McCann, on the Hacked Off website, called “a binary choice: the newspaper barons or the people they abused in search of profit. It is as simple as that.”
It is of course nothing like as simple as that.

Hacked Off is a campaign not just to tame the press, but to claim the country for the authoritarian Left. It does want to stop newspapers victimising individuals. But it also wants to force the press to serve defined social and political objectives – at the expense, if necessary, of the right to free expression.

As its key intellectual inspiration, Prof James Curran of Goldsmiths College, put it: “The problem is that the press was the principal cheerleader of the deregulatory politics that landed us in the economic mess we’re in.
“Our concerns should be confined not only to individual abuses, but to media moguls who distort the national conversation.”

Newspapers to be forced to reflect “a fair selection of the day’s events”; a regulator, in other words, would decide what stories they covered.
At the May 17 event, numerous Left-wing speakers outlined their view of how the “public good” or the “public interest” as defined by a press regulator, should override freedom of expression

Leveson has been persuaded to embrace unquestioningly a profoundly ideological description of the relationship between the British press and democracy, previously held only by a small group of Left-of-centre academics.”

“These are likely to be people you intuitively distrust, dislike and despair of. If they are what we need to win, however, we must understand their value and not confuse their values with our intentions.”

This was a sort of coup, by people even more unaccountable and unrepresentative than the average newspaper owner.

Prof Natalie Fenton, another Goldsmiths academic and a key member of CCMR, is a director of Hacked Off. She co-chaired the meeting with Cathcart and is seen on the platform at most of Hacked Off’s events.
Writing on the “New Left Project” website, Fenton attacked the “excessively liberalised press” and the “naive pluralism” of “assuming that the more news we have, the more democratic our societies are”.

 

Here is an update by Gilligan:

‘Arrogant, entitled, lying and hypocritical, in Brian Cathcart and Hacked Off I think I’ve found my new Ken Livingstone. What fun we’re going to have together!

When Hacked Off talks about making the press “accountable,” what they mean is making it accountable to people like them.

 

Whilst on his blog you might want to read his reports about Tower Hamlets…something else the BBC conveniently ignores, or covers superficially.

Two Heads Are Better Than One

 

This is a bit off the usual beaten track for this blog, nothing to do with ‘bias’, but I think we can spare a little space for such an astonishing story…one that shows the BBC at its best treating what might be seen as a sensationalist Tabloid ‘freak’ story with sensitivity…I guess this is one of those stories that by exposing people to not just the condition but also the actual person/people behind the story and their personality and life, that ‘acceptance’ and an attitude that such things are an unusual but still normal part of life is encouraged.

Living a conjoined life

Abby and Brittany Hensel are conjoined twins determined to live the normal, active life of outgoing 20-somethings anywhere. They have been to university, they travel, they have jobs. But how easy is it for two people to inhabit one body?

 

Abby and Brittany Hensel with their friends

 

And it is incredible how ‘normal’ their life is all considered….guess America can’t be all that bad after all.

 

 

Riddling Whilst Crime Turns

 

Another quandary for the BBC….they’ve had the problem of Thatcher’s success to cope with as mentioned in the last post, they’ve had the inconvenient fact that unemployment has been going down…’the great puzzle’….and now they are confronted with another bothersome fact…crime is going down.

Mark Easton has decided this too is a riddle…though never when Labour was in power.

The riddle of peacefulness

All a bit of a conundrum apparently.

He jumps about looking at various academic theories as to why this might be.

One thing of note might be ‘The correlation between policing levels and violent crime in the UK is “very weak”.

 

But anyway, no matter, Easton, the reporter, has his own theory which he isn’t shy about sharing with us.

‘Could it be that global communication, particularly the internet, is having a civilising and calming effect on people’s behaviour? We live in an age when, for the first time in history, people from all backgrounds can get an understanding of how the rest of the world lives without needing to leave the comfort of their living room.’

 

Ah yes…multi-culturalism….can’t let that old hogwash be consigned to the dustbin of historic failures.

This is precisely what we need from BBC journo’s…philosophy and creative theorizing….personally I’d just prefer a few facts from which I can dream up my own wild conjectures without a BBC hack trying to ‘educate’ me and mould my thoughts.

 

Surely it is Coca Cola that is the real crime reduction catalyst, the ‘real thing’ furnishing the world with love and perfect harmony from darkest Africa to the Steppes of the Ukraine….

 

 

 

And we know the BBC loves Coke.

 

 

Thatcher Who?

 

There is a new, at least to me, theme that it might be worth listening out for on the BBC, and elsewhere.

There are no links  for this but I have heard this new theory several times now on the BBC.

For over thirty years the BBC has attacked Mrs Thatcher’s policies and record,  blaming her for destroying manufacturing, the mining and steel industry, rising unemployment, social breakdown…and added to that is now welfare dependency and the economic crash in 2008.

But suddenly there is a new theory of ‘Thatcherism’…..whilst her critics  still blame her for anything seen to be bad in their eyes, they can’t help but recognise that a very great number of people believe that Thatcher and her policies ‘saved’ Britain from being an economic basket case.

Tricky one that…how to get around it?

The answer they’ve come up with is that Britain’s economic recovery had nothing to do with Thatcher….it was going to happen anyway….all those old, inefficient industries were on the brink of a productivity revolution anyway, the Unions were about to introduce self regulation and rein in their wildcat strikes, a spirit of entrepreneurship was about to sweep the country and rejuvenate its businesses and finances.

Thatcher was just in the right place at the right time and she has taken the credit and the plaudits for something that had nothing to do with her.

On Nicky Campbell’s show a while back it was suggested she was ‘lucky’….But I guess the harder you work the luckier you get…and I would reckon Thatcher made her own luck.

 

As I said for 30 years Thatcher was to blame for all the ills of society…..and now paradoxically it wasn’t her at all…it would have happened even if she hadn’t been in power.

Still, I imagine that won’t stop them blaming her for the 2008 crash.

Listen out for it.  The new grand theory. ‘Thatcher Who’.  Like the BBC’s other bit of imaginative fiction, ‘Dr Who’,  but even less plausible.

 

Careless Talk Costs Lives

 

The revelation that the Gay Girl in Damascus is actually a stubbly bloke in Edinburgh has sent shockwaves through the media.

That serious journalists fell for MacMaster’s fiction speaks to a profound crisis of objectivity in the modern media, and a preference for simplistic moralism over the tough task of reporting.

The trend for transforming other people’s struggles into self-serving morality plays has led to an alarmingly casual attitude towards the distinction between truth and lies.

 

Self serving morality plays.  Sums up the BBC’s journalism in one snappy little phrase….for instance events in Boston are being used by the BBC to ‘educate and inform’ us about the real Islam and the Muslim community and to suppress any criticism of the Islamic ideology.

 

Mark Mardell has played his part in this type of journalism but seems upset when called out on it.

 Here I have to assume Mark Mardell has wrongly named a post  on this blog as meriting this description:

 What a disgusting website ! Talk about lies and bias!

 

I guess when the BBC wrote this it should have included its North American Editor and itself in the firing line:

‘The trouble is, though, the British newspaper journalist has no history of taking criticism well… or working out what it is that needs to be done to turn a dysfunctional, distrusted press into something that performs a useful public purpose.’

 

I can only think Mardell’s lazy and careless journalism is emblematic of the BBC’s recent activity.

No explanation from Mardell as to where the lies and bias are in the post…or on the site for that matter.

Typical of the BBC these days when it relies more on views, opinions and comment than on facts….a BBC famously one of the most reliant on ‘Churnalism’…the use of verbatim Press Releases to pad out its own efforts…despite having as Mark Thompson said more journalists than any organisation outside of China.

We all remember Paxman telling us all about it in 2007:

In this press of events there often isn’t time to get out and find things out: you rely upon second-hand information-quotes from powerful vested interests, assessments from organisations which do the work we don’t have time for, even, god help us, press releases from public relations agencies. The consequence is that what follows isn’t analysis. It’s simply comment, because analysis takes time, and comment is free.”

 

 

Nick Davies in the Guardian tells us that :

Our media have become mass producers of distortion

An industry whose task should be to filter out falsehood has become a conduit for propaganda and second hand news

  

Although he only targeted the newspaper industry Davies could just have easily included the rest of the Media…including the BBC.

The BBC’s Kevin Marsh (Editor of Today when it made false claims about the 45 minute claims in the Iraq War Dossier…so should know about journalistic ethics!) in his new role at the BBC College of Journalism jumps on the band wagon showing no awareness of the BBC’s own  abysmal record……

Journalism, not ‘churnalism’

 

 

But here Marsh gets to the heart of the matter, the very essence of why the BBC so often gets it wrong…though of course he isn’t talking about his precious BBC…..

Trust resides in the journalist’s motivation in selecting the facts he/she does and in the realisation of that motivation.’

 

Every time you see a BBC report or article it is apparent that you also need to ask ‘What is the journalist’s motive for framing the report in this way?’  Is it anti-austerity, pro-immigration, pro-Europe or pro-Islam? etc.

 

You can no longer trust the BBC’s journalism, you can no longer believe that it comes to you impartial and unadulterated by the BBC’s own views and political prejudices. 

 

But you may say ‘So what, the BBC is biased…how does that effect my life or other’s?’

 

 

Mark Mardell might want to ask himself if he thinks this is disgusting……

 

How many Jews are attacked around the world because of anti-Semitism stoked and inflamed by the BBC’s reporting of Israel which demonises every Israeli action and turns Palestinians into eternal  and harmless victims?

How many elderly died during the extended cold spell because they had to turn their heating off due to its cost…a cost driven up by government green policies not just reported on favourably by the BBC but actively campaigned for?

How many people have been killed, raped, attacked, robbed or otherwise become victims of crime perpetrated by criminals who entered this country on the coat tails of the Labour Party open border immigration policy….once again supported by the BBC?

How many more patients will die in hospitals as the BBC supports the NHS unions in their battle to prevent reforms?

How many British soldiers and civilians died or were subject to attack because the BBC gave tacit support to extremist Muslims who propagated the isdea that they were merely bombing and killing because of ‘Western’ foreign policy and thereby encouraged radicalisation, especially by its angry attacks on the Iraq War?

 

 

Once you start thinking about it the BBC has been at the centre of many major political decisions in this country and has ‘aided and abetted’ in the deaths and disadvantaging of many people in this country and abroad as a result of those policies and decisions.

 

I don’t know what Mardell means by ‘disgusting’, but I know what I mean….it’s an organisation that puts itself and its own politics ahead of the interests of the people of this country, an organisation that has let its immense power and influence go to its head and is now politically, journalistically corrupt, functioning more as an arm of a ‘shadow’ state that has much of the real power in this land….subverting the elected government and ensuring the Left’s placemen in NGOs and in committees and foundations, that formulate and guide policy, get the right support and publicity…..Margaret Hodge may be a perfect example of someone who gets evermore supportive backing from the BBC.

As Janet Daley points out the BBC appointed itself the ‘official opposition’ in the 1980’s and seems to be carryng on in that stance ever since.

‘The BBC strategy of the 1980s when many of its spokesmen privately argued that since there was no opposition party worthy of the name – Labour having collapsed into internal division and Militant-inspired madness – the proper function of the media was to provide constant resistance to Thatcherism.’

 

In the 1970’s the Miners smashed and removed governments and intended to do so to Mrs Thatcher’s.   She drew a line in the sand and crushed the wreckers.

If it can be done to the overpowerful unions it can be done to the BBC by someone who has the nerve and will to do it.

 

 

 

Hier ist kein Warum

 

Primo Levi:

“Every age has its own fascism, and we see the warning signs wherever the concentration of power denies citizens the possibility and the means of expressing and acting on their own free will. There are many ways of reaching this point, and not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralyzing the education system, and by spreading in a myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned, and where the security of a privileged few depends on the forced labor and the forced silence of the many.”

 

‘Denying and distorting information…the forced silence of the many’.

Primo Levi called that….Fascism.

 The BBC seeks to deny and distort information about serious occurrences in our lives…..it forces, or tries to force those with ‘unacceptable views’ to remain silent….climate change sceptics and those who believe Islam has played a part in inciting terrorist activities around the world.  The result is a very unbalanced and out of kilter world where half the debate is silenced and a steadying hand at the tiller is missing.

 

What happens when you have a system that only listens to one side and thinks of itself as the only arbiter of what is good and right in the world, when there is no ‘why’?

 

An SS guard at Auschwitz was asked why he was doing such things to Jews…he replied ‘Here there is no why.’ ….  a phrase that became symbolic of the Holocaust’s careening away from rationality itself.

For the BBC there is no ‘why’ for Islamic terrorism, no rationality….there is no cause, no inspiration, no one to point the finger at…..excepting US and British foreign policy of course.

For the BBC there is no ‘why’ about Boston….just as there was no ‘why’ for the shooting of US soldiers by Muslim soldier Nidal Hasan. 

 

If there is no ‘why’ there can be no one to blame.  No one need be embarrassed or their religion questioned.  But that leads to other ’causes’ being blamed and the real cause left unchallenged and of course unremedied.   And so it keeps happening.

 

I imagine Mark Mardell is already penning a similar pack of lies about Boston as he did about that mass killer at Fort Hood:

The truth is of course cloudy. The alleged murderer was clearly a Muslim, but there is very little to suggest that he adhered to a hard-line interpretation of his religion or that he had political or religious motives.

He may or may not have posted something on the internet defending suicide bombers. But he also appears to have been traumatised by the idea of being sent to a combat zone.

We search for certainty and for answers. Some will go down blind alleys: reports of his “religious attire”, for example, may turn out to be a red herring.

Still, searching for patterns and for answers is part of what it is to be human. I loathe cliche, but perhaps, for once, this is a “senseless tragedy”, devoid of deeper meaning.

 

 

It is odd though that Mardell takes a different tack when he wants to…here using Hasan’s now ‘obvious’ terrorist link to condemn the FBI:

‘If a soldier, a Muslim unhappy about waging war on other Muslims, gets in touch with a man well-known for advocating terrorism, shouldn’t that “raise a red flag”? What do you think?’

 

So, not such a ‘senseless tragedy’ when it suits Mardell’s politics….suddenly it was very clearly an Islamic terorist event that the FBI should have picked up on.

 

The BBC has been  quick to play down any Islamic motivation  in Boston, and is moving deftly to separate ‘Muslims’ from those it deems ‘extremist Muslims’ in the viewer’s or reader’s mind:

Boston attacks reignite debate on Islam and terror

Boston Muslims on the marathon-attack suspects

Boston bombings: Muslim Americans await bomber’s ID

Boston Muslims react to marathon bombs

Tamerlan Tsarnaev: A lone wolf between two worlds (A lone wolf?   There were two of them just for starters)

 

 

But how justified are the BBC’s claims that they do this to protect Muslims from an anti-Muslim backlash?

Brendan O’Neil in the Telegraph asks that and lays to rest some of the BBC’s myths and legends about ‘Islamophobia’:

Where is the mob of Muslim-hating Americans going crazy after Boston? It’s a figment of liberals’ imaginations

Crown Prosecution Service crime figures for 2005-2006, covering the aftermath of the 7/7 attacks, showed that only 43 religiously aggravated crimes were prosecuted in that period, and that Muslims were the victims in 18 of those crimes. Eighteen prosecutions for anti-Muslim crimes – all those crimes are unfortunate, of course they are; but this was far from an “Islamophobic backlash”. As the then Director of Public Prosecutions, Ken Macdonald, said: “The fears of a [post-7/7] rise in offences appear to be unfounded.”

 

 

 

Malcolm X once said ”The media’s the most powerful entity on the earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.’
 
 

The BBC’s knee jerk response to any Islamic terrorism is to deny any motive or reason for an attack….as Mardell claims…‘A senseless tragedy’……but you have to ask just how much damage this does to a society when an ideology that is being used to incite terrorism is used  also by an ever growing number of the population.

 

You can ignore it…but the question is just how long will it ignore you?  And then what?

 

MPACUK (Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK) might have the answer on its front page right now:

The Obligation Of Jihad

 

jihad

 

“Allah hath granted a grade higher to those who strive and fight with their goods and persons than to those who sit (at home). Unto all (in Faith) hath Allah promised good. But those who strive and fight hath He distinguished above those who sit (at home) by a special reward,”  Quran Chapter 4: The Women, verse 95.

The Prophet (peace be upon him) specifically mentions “Whoever of you…” this implies that the command is directed at every single Muslim, man or woman.

Those who do not observe Jihad are indeed committing a grave sin because there is much harm that emanates into society when it is abandoned. Those that neglect Jihad will be disobeying something God has commanded us all to partake in; they have not aided in protecting the Religion of God, they have not defended the Book of God, its messages and His law, they have not helped the Ummah against the enemy who wants to destroy them.

If any of us find our hearts at this stage; as a matter of urgency we must change for not only are we exposing ourselves to humiliation and harm in this life, but also in the Hereafter; for the Prophet (peace be upon him) said, “He who dies without having fought in the way of Allah or without having felt it to be his duty, will die having a trait of hypocrisy”