I received this thoughtful piece from a Biased BBC reader and wanted to share.
“On Monday (7th of October) the BBC informed us – or at least James Gallagher did – that “Nobel Prize winner John O’Keefe” has a big problem with the the government’s rules on immigration. More precisely, O’Keefe “has warned the UK government [that its] polices on immigration” are “risking Britain’s scientific standing”.
The BBC – or at least James Gallagher did – then backed up its pro-immigration position with a kind of positive ad hominem. It told us that “Prof O’Keefe, 74, was awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine on Monday”. And then came the politics. The BBC quotes O’Keefe as stating: “The immigration rules are a very, very large obstacle.”
Now I’m willing to accept that much of what John O’Keefe says may be true or accurate. However, this piece isn’t about O’Keefe’s position on immigration. It’s about the BBC using O’Keefe’s position (or words) on immigration to advance or support its own position on immigration. (That’s why I won’t be commenting on O’Keefe’s no doubt controversial position on animal experimentation.)
You can take the under-text of this piece to be the following:
Limiting immigration is a bad thing because a Noble Prize winner says that it is.
Or alternatively:
Why aren’t we allowing all these fantastic neuroscientists and other highly-qualified people into the UK (along with all those other super immigrants)?
As everyone knows, for every neuroscientist or scientist allowed into the UK there will be tens of thousands of unqualified people who are also allowed in (many of those end up on benefits).
Besides which, I doubt that highly-qualified people do find it (that) difficult to enter the UK. For a start, there’s no evidence in the BBC piece as to why it’s so difficult. In fact it’s all very vague. John 0’Keefe himself is quoted (twice) as saying: “The immigration rules are a very, very large obstacle.”
He continues by saying:
“I am very, very acutely aware of what you have to do if you want to bring people into Britain and to get through immigration, I’m not saying it’s impossible, but we should be thinking hard about making Britain a more welcoming place.”
Again, John O’Keefe says that he’s “very acutely aware of what you have to do if you want to bring people into Britain and to get through immigration”. Now is he talking about neuroscientists, scientists and other qualified people here or immigrants generally?
It becomes clear that O’Keefe ( as well as the BBC) must surely be talking about immigration generally (not the situation with highly-qualified immigrants) when you take on board what the Home Office says in response to these complaints. It states:
“Whilst the government has not shied away from taking tough action on abuse, the number of genuinely skilled people coming to the UK to fill skilled vacancies is on the rise.”
And that’s why I think this is yet another example of the BBC rather surreptitiously publishing another piece in favour of immigration.
Considering the fact that 5,466,000 – over five million – immigrants entered the UK between 1997 and 2007 alone (as well as the fact that O’Keefe says that “we should be thinking hard about making Britain a more welcoming place”), I can only conclude that O’Keefe and the BBC are in favour of yet more mass immigration. In other words, over five million immigrants have been allowed into the UK in the last decade and O’Keefe and the BBC are still deeply unsatisfied.
The BBC itself – rather than O’Keefe – shows us its bias (or the fact that it’s really talking about immigration generally) when it states the following:
“Prime Minister David Cameron has pledged to reduce net migration to less than 100,000 a year by 2015, while Home Secretary Theresa May has spoken about reducing it to tens of thousands.”
Now there’s not much in the above quote which is specifically about Noble Prize winners, neuroscientists and other highly-qualified scientists, is there? That’s because, underneath the fluff, this piece is really about the government’s recent statements on immigration (which surely can’t be believed anyway).
Actually, this BBC article is really about the BBC’s own position on immigration.
*The BBC’s Prose-style*
It’s the easiest thing in the world to display political or ideological bias without explicit editorialising or comment. You certainly don’t need to indulge in political rhetoric and polemics. Left-wing academics galore, for example, restrain themselves all the time (“academic standards” and all that). And just like such left-wing academics, the BBC also refrains from explicit political bias, rhetoric and polemics because that’s what’s expected of it .
Despite saying that, the BBC is often at its most extreme and biased when it comes to the subject of immigration. And it shows that bias in many and various subtle ways.
In this particular case, instead of an article with the title, say, ‘Why we should allow more immigrants into the UK’ or ‘Why immigration is a good thing’ (or ‘We are international community’), the BBC offers us this title instead: ‘Nobel Prize winner John O’Keefe concerned over immigration policy’.
I have yet to see an entire BBC News piece about either a single individual’s problems with immigration or the problems with immigration in the abstract. Though – and here comes that BBC subtlety again – people’s problems with immigration are sometimes covered. Of course they are. The problem is that they’re rarely – or never – the central point in any BBC pieces. (Except in extreme and exceptional cases such as the infamous Gordon Brown Bigotgate case.)
Sure, there’s no explicit pro-immigration pontificating in this BBC News piece. The BBC rarely does that. Instead the bias is displayed in the very fact that the BBC has chosen to cover this very minor story in the first place: a story which it thinks is worth turning into news. After all, no other newspaper has featured this particular case.
As I said, the BBC doesn’t go in for extreme or blatant editorialising/commentary on its website BBC News…. The BBC’s a “public service broadcaster” funded by the taxpayers of the UK – remember? So the BBC publishes articles like this instead. It also fills BBC audiences (such as Question Time) with ethnic minorities, Leftist lawyers and other professionals who support unlimited immigration. It quotes the ideologically-correct people more extensively than it does “bigots”.
The way the BBC once described its position on anthropogenic global warming can be applied – pretty much untouched – to the case of immigration. For example, the BBC once said (in 2009) the following:
“…. given the weight of scientific opinion [on climate change], the challenge for us to strike the right balance between mainstream science and sceptics since to give them equal weight would imply that the argument is evenly balanced.”
That can be paraphrased into the following:
Given the weight of expert opinion on immigration, the challenge for us to strike the right balance between experts on immigration and immigration sceptics (or those against immigration) since to give them equal weight would imply that the argument is evenly balanced.
In response to the first quote, Christopher Booker said:
“In other words, in the name of reporting impartially, [the BBC] saw no need to report impartially.”
The obvious point to make about the latter paraphrase is the majority of British people are indeed “sceptical” about the benefits of immigration – and they’re certainly sceptical about mass immigration. That is the case regardless of what the “experts” think.
*Conclusion*
This isn’t about stopping neuroscientists, Noble Prize winners and other qualified/skilled people from entering the UK and even from becoming citizens. It’s about British governments – with the tacit support of the BBC – attempting to “alter the social and political make-up” of the UK; as well as the concomitant attempt to “rub the face of the Right [or the white working class?] in diversity” (at least under New Labour). So how do I know all that? I know all that because some of the people who were responsible for these things have explicitly admitted as much – if only after they left government!
*Does the BBC think that most immigrants are Noble Prize winners & scientists?
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Two points:
1) O’Keefe should have retired years ago. He’s actually one of a number of academics who carry on working, in well paid, jobs after retirement. Doing so prohibits young British academics from being recruited by institutions such as the UCL, because the University has to continue paying a salary which could be spent employing two young scientists.
2) Perhaps O’Keefe’s ire should be directed at the British education system which seems unable to produce the high calibre students/researchers he requires.
The British public doesn’t want a lax immigration just because some greedy academic who belongs to a system which endorses grade inflation can’t find suitable candidates for a research post.
The problem is not the lack of high caliber young Brits but the tremendous difficulty they find receiving funding for post graduate research towards a PhD or Masters. There are far more scholarships and bursaries available for foreigners, usually set up years ago in trusts and so on at a time when grants were freely available for Brits and those who bequeathed such legacies for foreigners often did so on the basis that British students would continue to enjoy this advantage. How wrong they were.
Many of these grants and bursaries too would be racist by modern day standards being designated for certian ethnic groups alone.
I mentioned previously that the BBC give a great deal of publicity to Mo Farrah, a Somali who has achieved much since coming here. The BBC give no publicity at all to his younger brother who has 15 criminal convictions and has just been sent to prison. I am afraid his brother is more typical of Somalis in the UK with unemployment rates about 90% and many with criminal convictions.
When the Belgium authorities got a bit ”tough’ on Somalis there, i.e. expecting them to learn the language, get a job etc. some 6000 upped sticks and came to the West Midlands mostly Coventry, as EU citizens!
A scheme that cost the government and Birmingham council £millions, to give them housing had to be abandoned when the money went missing, much of it thought to have been channelled back to Somali.
One good immigrant doesn’t mean the other half a million are just as praiseworthy.
Mo Farrah has been and gone. He lives in the USA now, his only connection with Britain is the flag he runs under.
And his continued ownership of the passport he was granted.
How irresponsible are the elite to tolerate dual citizenship in those who are not of British descent.
Mo Farrah can run , that’s it. He must be grateful that he got his training in the UK, all possibly on the tax payer’s penny.
Well dissected, David.
Apparently we are stupid enough to believe that ‘migrants’ ( nice word – sounds like a migratory bird) are largely doctors, nurses, teachers, scientists etc.
Look at the election results and polls Ed and Dave – we ain’t stupid.
Sadly far too many are stupid enough to believe what we are told.
The BBC has vaults full of banked trust, and while it is dissipating fast, there is stilla long way to go.
UKIP (one of the BBC’s intended targets in this attack) could be more generous in immigration of global talent as they wouldn’t have to allow free movement of non-workers from the EU.
The good professor, who has made a great contribution to the UK, recognised the success of the coalition’s targetted immigration scheme for exceptional scientific talent. His criticism was a rather vague concern about possible future talent in the form of foreign students. He wasn’t very convincing, and was unchallenged by the interviewer. He might be right, he might be wrong, you couldn’t tell.
There is no need to be ‘more generous’, Britian is already way too generous even to ‘talent’ from outside the country, to the great disadvatage of British ciotizens who are forced to compete in a far more fierce market than citizens of more protectionist countries.
How , if at all, would British people gain by being even more ‘open’?
I’m sure the BBC will be rushing to give us the thoughts of an even more eminent Nobel prize winner, James Watson.
Oh hang on a minute, he went off message and started telling the truth didn’t he.
No room for him on the BBC then.
I am a scientist (with a PhD), I was unemplyed for a while, one of the problems is that employers recruit from around the world, This is OK up to a point but it floods the market and geuss what wages get driven down. There is also an assumption that immigrant workers will work harder and be more servile than the indigenous population. Most of this is the same drivel you see in other professions
Particularly problematic in academia since researchers from Third World countries are happy to take a relatively low paid job in universities in dull towns in Europe and the US just to get the passport. This makes it easier for them to build up the experience to get the highly sort after jobs in Britain and the most desirable US locations.
For many years now, career politicians have thought only about their own jobs and not about Great Britain. The “Liblabcons” have dictated to the ordinary man and woman on the street or in the pub what they want, not what the electorate want. For a long time now “the tail has been wagging the dog”. Al Beeb has been behaving the same, telling us what we should be thinking and attempting to ‘brainwash’ its viewers.
Yesterday’s results are beginning to show the manipulators of truth, freedom and justice, that “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time”, thanks to social media and Biasedbbc. The broadcasters’ control of the people of this country is slowly coming to an end.
Vote UKIP
she has been awarded the nobel peace prize for what,maybe i am missing something here but where exactly has she brought peace to,the arab world is in flames,her home country pakistani goverment sponsors the taliban just over the border,iraq,syria and libya are locked in a brutal jihadist war.birmingham has its boko haram jihadist trojan horse plots,where exactly has these hero of the bbc and the liberal left brought peace to,i just cant work this one out
Standing up to the Taliban is quite worthy, and certainly more worthy than Barak Obama who was awarded it just for winning an election. In fact, Obama’s award was the final nail in the coffin of the Nobel Peace Prize’s credibility.
Effectively it doesn’t matter whether she deserves it or not, the prize is irrelevant junk.
Less so when she did it at eleven years of age as the naive puppet of her father, who still appears to supervise her every move.
The Nobel Peace Prize went down the pan when Al Gore was awarded it! This young lass deserves it!
The rot set in two years before Obama got one for the anticipation that Americas first black president would obviously bring peace to the World, when Al Gore and the IPCC got one for promoting the worlds greatest ever scientific fraud, and three years later the EU got one for succeeding, up to now, where Hitler and Napoleon failed.
So she is living in the UK with her whole family. Presumably she and her family are “asylum seekers” (not made clear).
She is a very brave young girl and I have great admiration for this and her ability to articulate her desires. The more important fact, lost to our left wing media and politicians, is that Pakistan should be holding her up and protecting her, as a beacon of how women should be treated.
The reality is the Pakistan does not share her values and is incapable of protecting and promoting her beliefs. This is what the BBC should be banging on about.
“She is a very brave young girl and I have great admiration for this and her ability to articulate her desires.”
Brave or naive and manipulated by her domineering father who put her (though not his boys) int he line of fire by promoting her as an activist while still a young child of eleven years old?
Was she aware she was in great danger? I doubt it. Or even if she was, too downtrodden to defy her father like most Pakistani girls.
As for her speeches, again written ‘with the help’ of her father whose old fashioned style is alll too apparent not only int he wording but the delivery.
When she addressed the crowd at the Birmingham library the clue was in the word ‘Broomies’ as she mispronounced the word her father had obviously picked up. She wouldnt have heard it pronounced like that, indeed is unlikely to have heard it at all in her short time in England! Nor would she have seen the word written and mispronounced it. Her fathers error.
Who gets the credit for the swots plea for all girls to go back to school?
Is she a British Nobel winner seeing as we saved her life…or does Pakistan get the credit for raising our awareness of the whole issue of girls education…FGM…honour killings and all the usual sweet fruits of the Islamic experience?
Next-will ISIS get an award for raising the profile of Gillette and the need for a careful shave?…
“Groupthink: Can We Trust the BBC on Immigration? ”
by Ed West .
60 page report (pdf) here:-
Click to access bbc_immigration_report.pdf
A good read so far (link above): ‘As a state monopoly, the BBC’s influence in British society and beyond is awesome. Not only does it set the cultural and political agenda, but to a great extent it shapes the boundaries of acceptable opinion and public morality in a way that the Church once did. While Britain’s newspapers have been rightly criticised for their recent behavior, it is fair to say that they wield nothing like the cultural power of the BBC, and they enjoy little confidence among the public. By contrast, the BBC acts as a ‘gatekeeper’ of British public opinion; any opinion on the other side of that gate lies ‘beyond the pale’.’
That is in essence the problem with the BBC entirely. Plus that the fact that it has no morality, no science, no modesty, no charity yet openly sponsors terrorism. Claiming forced immigration (like torture) is good for you.
Most of the scientists with answers to the basics of Climate Change are foreigners, some come to Britain but none appear on the BBC.
They do not all want to come to Britain as immigrants or asylum seekers as the lefties seem to think, therefore it would not be cruel to force them to return to their homeland, as lefties seem to think countries abroad are all shitholes full of ethnics. But they would be far more welcome to Britain with a UKIP points based immigration regime.
They come by invitation to talk to Scientists, Mensa members and other intelligent people, then they return home voluntary, as they usually live in a country that is nicer than the multicultural shithole that they experience when visiting London.
The BBC does not invite these scientists on, because they are censored by the BBC. This is because of the need to justify the Orwellian term ‘Scientists versus Sceptics’. But some of them did appear on a Channel 4 documentary about seven years ago.
Although the BBC does interview Scientists in their homeland, in fact Horizon now seems to be almost exclusively set in the USA, which reflects badly on the state of science in the UK.
“They come by invitation to talk to Scientists, Mensa members and other intelligent people.”
Did you spot it? Did you?
It is a very dirty relationship thing here between people who want publicity and the B-BBC who wants ‘names’ to support their views. If a minor celebrity wants to be feted on the BBC, he has to say he believes in AGW, Immigration, Commie principles, “high taxes for rich people”, Liebour etc. That gets him all sort of paid opportunities to appear on chat shows, fill-ins, sports quizzes, Celebrity-this-and-that, Room 101, Strictly Come Dancing, etc. People who are anti-immigration, anti-AGW scam, Conservatives etc. do not appear in anything, ever. Unless you are Anne Widdecombe, and they allow you into SCD in the expectation that people will mock you.
It is a two-way deal – the brown-nose sprouts the BBC message at every opportunity, and they put him on the airwaves at every opportunity. And the sheeple lap it up.
Perhaps someone knows the answer. Does the UK have a preference system for excellence? If a genuine potential Nobel Prize winner from Russia, China, Japan or Israel (picking countries likely to win the prize) applied to move here would that advance his/her chances or be irrelevant?
Al Beeb reporting this morning’ More people trafficked for labour’ and ‘sexual exploitation’. The ‘benefits’ of illegal immigration, open borders and our membership of the EU. I Can’t see many Nobel Prize winners or scientists among that lot ?