Author Archives: Alan

Another massive flood in Louisiana and a missing President.  The difference this time?  This time the BBC isn’t indulging in a huge moral grandstanding exercise as it did when it launched relentless attacks on Bush for not visiting the disaster areas.

At present Obama is too busy to visit Louisiana…busy on vacation playing golf.

The BBC’s Gavin Hewitt trembled with rage as he ranted about Bush.  Not a peep from the BBC as their hero goes awol and leaves Louisiana to its own devices…to sink or swim….despite reporting that this is…

 One of the worst US disasters in recent years

The BBC knows there is criticism of Obama…this is the single comment that they limit themselves to on this…

A local Baton Rouge paper has criticised President Obama for not visiting the affected area.

The BBC could have enlarged upon what that paper said….

We’ve seen this story before in Louisiana, and we don’t deserve a sequel. In 2005, a fly-over by a vacationing President George W. Bush became a symbol of official neglect for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. The current president was among those making political hay out of Bush’s aloofness.

But it didn’t.

I guess there just aren’t enough black people suffering to make it worth while for Obama to visit and for the BBC to get indignant about……because of course the real reason Hewitt and Co raged on so much was because it was apparently Blacks who suffered the most in Katrina….the BBC tried to say Bush was racist and didn’t care about Black people.  The BBC naturally refused to point the finger of blame at the black mayor of New Orleans for the failure to organise evacuation and an effective response to the hurricane that he knew was on its way.

We should reject and denounce this behaviour with “extreme prejudice ” People need to understand that if you behave in this manner you will have a high price to pay.

As the lefty think tank Demos sanctimoniously denounces Britain as ‘racist’ and Islamophobic the only comment on its page is this….note the threat to use ‘extreme prejudice’ extracting a high price from the West…that’s a threat to use violence….’terminate with extreme prejudice’ is a well known phrase meaning ‘kill’.   A racist and anti-Western Muslim raging against the UK where he has been safely harboured for 50 years and still doesn’t want to be part of society…in fact wants to be completely separate…where is the Demos report on such feelings in the Muslim community?

1 Comment

Iftikhar Ahmad3 hours ago

British society and schooling is the home of institutional racism. Native teachers are chicken racists. This is one of the main reason why Muslim community has been demanding state funded Muslim schools with Muslim teachers. There is no place for a non-Muslim child or a teacher in a Muslim school. Muslim children must develop their cultural, linguistic and spiritual identities before they are exposed to wider world, otherwise, they would be lost in western Jungle.

Muslim Community has been a victim of Paki-bashing in the past and now it is a victim of Islamophobia. The Tsunami of Islamophobia is a blessing in disguise. The greatest Urdu/Persian poet of Pakistan, after studying in Cambridge and Germany said that the Tsunami of the west made him a Muslim. I know a couple of Muslim ladies who never covered themselves in Pakistan but their daughters born and educated in the west, not only wear hijab but Niqab also. This is the fruit of Islamophobia suffered by these girls in state schools with non-Muslim monolingual teachers. It is a fact that British schooling is the home of institutional racism and British teachers are chicken racist.

For too long we have put our heads down. I will no longer be a victim. Its not a question of behaving like her…Its a point of meeting this kind of behaviour “head on”, we should reject and denounce this behaviour with “extreme prejudice ” People need to understand that if you behave in this manner you will have a high price to pay. Making excuses or seeking the high moral position might make you feel superior or above this base behaviour but what does your position do to stop it ?If I am abused in this manner I would have a response that would impact the aggressor in a physical or extremely verbal manner. My children are taught to respect “everyone ” to make a positive contribution to society BUT if someone attacks them verbally or physically they should “deal” with it so as to ensure it does not happen again to them or others. I have been in London for the last 50 years and still this problem exists. Obviously the “namby pamby,softly softly approach has failed.Time for something else ???

Multiculturalism is not about integration but about cultural plurality. It is not about separation but about respect and the deepening awareness of Unity in Diversity. Each culture will maintain its own intrinsic value and at the same time would be expected to contribute to the benefit of the whole society. Multiculturalism can accommodate diversity of all kinds – cultural, philosophical and religious – so that we can create a world without conflict and strife. Britain can assume the role of accommodation and concern for all peoples, for our planet and indeed for our survival. Multi-Culturalism is even more important and crucial after 9/11 and 7/7. Muslim youths are also likely to feel alienated by a focus on shared Brutishness, rather than multicultural diversity. Rather than promoting a single British “us” teaching should acknowledge that “us” can be diverse and plural. Children should be encouraged to explore differences in appearance, history and religion to reduce social and educational fears.
IA
londonschoolofislamics.org.uk

Interesting how the BBC completely ignored Owen Smith saying he would negotiate with ISIS…Derbyshire just swept on despite the remarkable statement and the BBC made no mention of it in its news bulletin summarys of the interview until the Tories started to attack Smith.  Corbyn dodged the question by saying he wouldn’t hold talks….openly…suggesting he would have a cosy chat with what will no doubt be his ‘friends’ in ISIS behind closed doors…just not sure what they will negotiate.

The Today programme this morning (0840) seemed to be promoting the idea of talks…this is the BBC that thinks people like Anjem Choudary are the next Nelson Mandelas and who went to a lot of effort to give the killers of the IRA a voice, that thought it was time to talk to the Taliban and who excuse Muslim terrorists by saying they didn’t have a job, or were a bit stressed or suffered discrimination and disenfranchisement…as so many are from well-to-do families and/or are students hard to see the discrimination and disenfranchisement.

Just listen to the complete waffle from David Harland from the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue on the programme. He doesn’t have a clue what he will negotiate with ISIS for….at most it seems for a cessation of violence.  The BBC’s Lyse Doucet thinks talking with such groups about local ceasefires and to get hostages freed is some sort of equivalent but that’s hardly the geo-political negotiations that Owen Smith means.

Smith backtracked a bit and tries to suggest he’d only talk once ISIS renounces violence…and then what?   What do you negiotiate?  Is Smith going to let them keep the land they have captured and we’ll all just forget how that happened?  What will Iraq and Syria have to say about Smith handing over their land?

The BBC covering a potential Labour leader’s, and ex-BBC man’s, backside?

The BBC is blitzing us with ‘Islamophobia’ today in the wake of a Demos report on what it says is a wave of Islamophobia on Twitter.…but the Tweets were from across the world not just in the UK.  And you have to ask what is Islamophobia in Demos’s and the BBC’s eyes?  You may get an idea from this report today:

BBC Islamophobia discussion interrupted by Islamophobia

An interview by BBC reporter Catrin Nye on Islamophobia has been interrupted by Islamophobia.

A passer-by named Paul told her interviewee Ruqaiya Haris: “There’s no Sharia law here”.

Hmmm….that’s not ‘Islamophobic’ is it?  It’s a statement that says ‘Paul’ doesn’t want Sharia law in the UK.  A perfectly legitimate stance….Sharia law is an unpleasant, backward and oppressive, racist ideology that itself spreads hate and division….why would any right thinking person not raise issue with it?

If the BBC had been interviewing a Far Right person and someone had shouted ‘No Fascism’ here they would have been cheered to the rafters on Twitter and in the Guardian.

As for ‘Islamophobia’ on Twitter…even Demos admits this was in the wake of the Nice attack where a Muslim, in the name of Islam, killed 84 people…many of them children.

Demos and the BBC are unable to explain why this is a problem of any real and genuine note….a few thousand tweets from around the world that are, on Demos’ definition, ‘Islamophobic, in the wake of mass killings by Muslims who deliberately target Westerners asdn seek to undermine Western society hardly seems a surprise nor a threat to world peace…on the other hand a mass Islamic movement that is trying to impose islam upon everyone and is persecuting, killing and attacking Christians and anyone who criticises Islam around the world might just be considered a threat…if you don’t work for the BBC.

The BBC seems to think the problem is the people who are under attack by the Muslim supremacists…and note the supremacists are not just the terrorists but also those who use the media, the law and political blackmail to press for more Islam.

This campaign on Islamophobia is such a case…it is intended to make out that Muslims are under attack, under siege and this is intended to pressure politicians to silence critics of Islam and also to sideline the anti-terror policies of the government such as Prevent.

Look at the Twitter feed of the interviewee…how pleased she is to have the BBC front this campaign against ‘Islamophobia’….

Hypocrite and now Muslim political activist?

Ruqaiya ‏@ruqxx Aug 15

I remember judging hijabis so much before I ever wore it :/

   Ruqaiya ‏@ruqxx Aug 15

Isn’t that weird? I was a non-practising Muslim judging the way other Muslims practiced

‘As a Muslim’ she has no interest in being ‘cute’ for the boys….

Had to laugh as the BBC has consistently blamed every negative event on Brexit…not quite everything….the Today programme’s editor claims its latest listener figures are nothing to do with listeners tuning in for information about Brexit….have to say the BBC is probably right…after all who would rely on the BBC’s premier disseminator of tripe for unbiased news on Brexit?

Jamie Angus Verified account ‏@grvlx001

There’s always one…

Nice to see Mason admits his true loyalties:

The real challenge is to make this leadership campaign the springboard for winning a general election. That, in turn, demands we spell out an alternative political strategy to the one inherited from Blair, Brown and Ed Miliband.

But just what is about Corbyn that has the Establishment running for cover?

They are not scared of Jeremy Corbyn…They are scared of YOU

People power.  Precisely what terrifies the BBC as well….look how they react to Brexit.  Curiously the BBC is unfazed by Corbyn and is almost totally uncritical of him whilst others, most others, have serious, serious concerns about his policies, not least his attitude towards Jews and his friendship with Islamist terrorists.

Contrast that respectful tone they adopt for Corbyn with how the BBC attacks and demonises Trump who is on a roll for the same reasons Corbyn is but perhaps coming from the opposite side of the argument.  Trump is anti-Establishment, anti the status quo and he’s stirring things up saying things that the Left want to suppress and keep out of the public debate….and he’s very popular.

The video below is a perfect example of the way that the liberal, self-professed elite sneer at Trump and wilfully ignore the paradox, the self-contradictory claims the video maker produces as he elaborately dissects a Trump interview in which Trump speaks perfectly normally, coherently and rationally.  This is interpreted as a childish and deviously manufactured manner of speaking…designed by Trump to raise emotions without imparting facts or reasoning…personally I thought Trump was telling the unvarnished truth and was explaining himself clearly and simply.  Such a way of speaking is apparently dishonest and manipulative….and apparently you can’t call him smart or well informed.

Note at the end the video maker say that the Public is reacting against all those politicians who sounded sophisticated but achieved nothing…and yet he believes that such sophisticated politicians are still the credible way forward.  Ironically his own video is a perfect example of his own argument…a polished, sophisticated presentation by an intelligent and articulate speaker that is essentially using all that sophistication as a veneer to hide the ugly truth…that this is a video that is solely intent on being a hatchet job, a sneering, thuggish, elitist put down of Trump.  There is no real intelligence behind the argument…there is no real argument….it is contradictory…telling us that sophistication is a sign of authority and credibility and yet telling us that the politicians who are sophisticated achieved precisely nothing, they did not carry out all those promises they so glibly fed the masses in order to get elected.  Trump comes on and tells it like it is, hiding nothing, speaking the language of the ‘common man’, not dressing up his controversial policies in fine sounding words and sentiments, and he is attacked for his honesty…and his ability to get things done…..

I have no doubt the man who made this video will be welcome on Newsnight anytime as a presenter…..

The BBC are taking liberties as they hijack George Orwell and try to present him as if all the things he represented are the same values and beliefs that inspires and motivates the BBC.

They are not.

What Orwell represents and fought for is the exact opposite of the highly fabricated news output that the BBC shapes and constructs in order not to provide us with genuine information but to alter our perceptions, views and behaviour so that they fall into line as near as possible with the BBC’s own or at least make stepping outside the BBC’s self-approved narrative a dangerous action as you soon find yourself labelled a right-wing,  Facist, racist, Islamophobic, homophobic, sexist little Englander.  Your career will be over as you suddenly become ‘tainted’.

All of which makes the following the most ridiculous and ironic thing you may have heard in a while….

No longer ‘too left-wing’ for the BBC: George Orwell to stand outside original ‘Ministry of Truth’

He was the great scourge of faceless bureaucracy, political propaganda, doublethink, waffle and pretentious language.

So it seems apt that George Orwell should be honoured with a statute outside the headquarters of the BBC.

The work, expected to be unveiled next year, will show the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four – whose real name was Eric Blair – looming over the entrance to the building where he once toiled fruitlessly, deep in thought, a cigarette in one hand.

A quotation carved into the wall next to him will offer timely advice to contemporary BBC staff reading: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

The BBC think it their job to make sure people don’t hear what they need to hear…you won’t get the truth about immigration from the BBC, you won’t get the truth about Islam from the BBC, you won’t get the truth about the EU from the BBC, you won’t get the truth about Israel from the BBC and you won’t get the truth about Jeremy Corbyn from the BBC.

Perhaps the quote carved into the wall should be altered slightly to reflect the true state of BBC ‘journalism’…

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what the BBC does not want them to hear.”

And that’s why sites like this exist…as the BBC might say itself…….

The bronze would be a powerful reminder of the role of the citizen journalist in “holding the BBC to account”.

 

‘The assumption that many extremists had mental health problems was wrong.  Instead terrorists recruiters ‘vet out’ those with such conditions.

“Only 2% of members of terrorist organisations suffer from mental health problems compared with an average of up to 30% of members of the public.”

MI5

 

As terrorists roam Europe, and the world, the Sunday Times two weeks ago titled its editorial ‘Living with the murderous enemy within’  suggested that Merkel’s open door policy was ‘fraught with risk’ and imposed ‘severe difficulties on Germay’s EU partners.’  No kidding.  As with 7/7, it says there are two fears…one of many more terror attacks, and that there would be a backlash and an increase in racial tension.  Again, no kidding.

The BBC on the other hand blithely continues to campaign for open borders and mass, uncontrolled immigration, and naturally doesn’t connect such a policy with that ‘increase in racial tension’...whereas it rapidly and insistently associates Brexit with any hate crime it can.  In other words it looks the other way or downplays the conflicts when genuine problems are caused by immigration but exaggerates and politicises hate crimes by blaming them on something like Brexit that it abhors.

In the same way the BBC instantly connected the murder of Jo Cox to Brexit and has blatantly ignored the fact that the killer had mental health issues whilst at the same time instantly claiming that any killing by a Muslim is due to mental issues…the police of course are also complicit in this…glaringly self-evident in the case of the Russell Square attacker in which there was an instant announcement that this was nothing to do with Islam and radicalisation but was a mental health issue.

That may or may not be the case but it is hard to see how the police came to such a conclusion and stated it so confidently almost as they turned up on the doorstep of the attacker’s home especially when you know the background facts…which might indicate there is more to this than a man with mental health issues, a term which covers a whole range of issues from the very mild to very serious problems.

Looking on the BBC website the stabbings in Russell square seem to have been tidied away…the BBC isn’t going to be doing a follow up and a background investigation of the killer.

The Mail though is keeping an eye on the story….and ironically it is a BBC presenter, a Sikh, so not afraid to speak the truth about ‘race’ matters, who upsets the carefully contrived police and media narrative that this was purely a mental health issue and that Zakaria Bulhan, the killer, was a devout Muslim who pledged support for Moazzam Begg, now one of the ‘leading lights’ of Cage…the extremist, Islamist group.

Scotland Yard believe Zakaria Bulhan, 19, a Norwegian national of Somali origin who moved to the UK in 2002, was not ‘motivated by terrorism’ but its officers are trawling his possessions for extremist material.

Neighbour Parmjit Singh, a BBC radio DJ known as ‘DJ Precious’ on the Asian network, said he had known ‘impressionable’ Bulhan for seven years, adding: ‘His mental health problems are a scapegoat.’ 

The 36-year-old said: ‘They said he had mental health issues but that was not the boy I knew. 

‘The news of his mental illness is completely new, we never heard that. Honestly, I think his mental health problems are a scapegoat.’

Asked what he thought motivated the attack, Parmjit said: ‘I think peer pressure, hanging around with gangs. He wasn’t working, he was hanging around with Somalian boys and I think they had possible links to serious ISIS people – not directly, but they see all this stuff and are inspired by it.

‘Why would he attack an American woman tourist in a random attack? I think boys have put pressure on him to go there and do something. He was very impressionable growing up’. 

Friends have described their shock at the knife attacks, describing him as a ‘teacher’s pet’ and a ‘devout Muslim’ who would love debating religion.

Online postings show a man named Zak Bulhan is interested in Islamic study, and in another he pledges support to former Guantanamo Bay inmate Moazzam Begg. 

Rakesh Naidu, 18, said: ‘I can’t believe it, I’m just telling myself it must be a mistake. We used to get really competitive over grades in maths and debate religion all the time.

‘He was a devout Muslim and he would passionately defend it, but he respected my opinion too. He was a bit socially awkward but as far as I knew he didn’t have mental health problems.

The other side is that the attacker suffered from depression…

Today it has emerged that Bulhan, who was held miles from his south London home clutching a knife, appears to have been depressed and had tried to kill himself three times in the past six months, family friends have said.

One told The Times: ‘He has been very unwell. He wanted to kill himself. I saw his mother with an ambulance outside their flat and she said Zac had called it because he wanted to hurt himself. He’s called the ambulance about two more times because he was feeling unwell. His mother was very afraid’.

The police and the BBC have opted to only propagate the last narrative as the cause of this attack.  This may be so but what was the trigger that made him do this?  His sister was ‘westernised’ and suddenly became a very devout Muslim.  What influenced her?  Was it the same influence that lead to the attack by a man who was also very devout?

Such awkward questions seem to have been forcefully sidelined and buried in favour of a line about a man with mental health issues who acted violently because of them.

However people who deal in mental health issues will tell you that violence is very, very infrequently a result of mental illness….how do I know?  The BBC itself says so:

The Myth of Mental Illness and Violence

Violent crime statistics tell a different story, though. One survey suggested that only 1% of victims of violent crime believed that the incident occurred because the offender had a mental illness. In the UK, between 50 and 70 cases of homicide a year do involve people known to have a mental health problem at the time of the crime – but these perpetrators make up a tiny minority of the 7 million people in the UK estimated to have a significant mental illness at any given time.

So people with mental illness are very unlikely to commit murder.

The BBC also notes that just because someone has a mental health problem it may not be the actual cause of their crime:

Those who have examined the issue in detail point out that the figures don’t prove that mental health problems actually led the offenders in prison to commit their crimes.

And

The trigger for these attacks may have been frustration, not mental illness alone. The study showed that only a minority of patients behaved aggressively in the absence of aversive triggers.

And yet every Muslim who commits a terrorist attack or an attack that on the face of it looks very likely to be one is ‘excused’ by the BBC on the grounds of mental illness.  What is the BBC saying?  What is the connection between Islam and mental health?  The BBC seems to be suggesting that Muslims suffer very disproportionately from mental illness and that they are more likely to be violent if the stats are to be believed.

In the Sunday Times today the likes of the BBC’s claims about terrorism and mental health are rubbished as nonsense…by people who are steeped in the subject and don’t rely on a degree in English to help them interpret the world.

The Times reports on a specialist group in MI5 that helps to predict which terror suspect is likely to actually ‘go live’ and try to follow through on the talk and carry out a terrorist attack.  The group is expert in behavioural analysis and seeks to identify those moving on from rhetoric to violence.

What stuck out from the report was this:

‘The assumption that many extremists had mental health problems was wrong.  Instead terrorists recruiters ‘vet out’ those with such conditions.

“Only 2% of members of terrorist organisations suffer from mental health problems compared with an average of up to 30% of members of the public.”

The BBC ignores its own evidence about the ‘myth of mental health and violence’ and that of the experts in the subject.

A Brazilian illegal immigrant who came to this country and got a job at Byron Burgers using false documents and a forged National Insurance card complains on the Today programme (0840) that Byron Burgers used and abused him.  Not sure why the BBC felt the need to give him a platform to air his nonsense…it was he who abused Byron Burgers taking a job using deception putting them in  a very difficult position…facing a potentially ruinous £700,000 fine for employing illegal workers….unknowingly.

Perhaps the BBC should be talking to anti-terrorist police as left-wing extremists launch economic terror attacks intended to scare off customers from the burger chain….and the Black Lives Matter group is steadily going down that route also.  Protests or sabotage and economic terrorism?

The Today programme had an astonishingly dishonest report from Manchester this morning (0819) ostensibly looking at the effect of Brexit upon the city….the city that is wonderfully cosmopolitan and so European the BBC announces as it headed for a pavement cafe table full of foreigners to ask if they had noticed a difference in how they were now treated.  The report was entirely one-sided and aggressively anti-Brexit, painting a picture of a raicst Britain on the verge of econoic disaster because of Brexit.  Since 2010 the BBC has presented  Manchester as a failing city abandoned and neglected by the Tories, now it is a thriving, cosmopolitan success story…thanks to the EU and immigration naturally.

And naturally the foreigners were all now under attack from new born neo-Nazis given licence to be racist by Brexit….they just aren’t welcome here in Brtiain due to Brexit.  On the other hand apparently British people now feel ashamed of the vote and how it has treated our foreign legions.  So are the British racist bastards or are they all really Remainers and regretful Leavers who wish they’d voted to stay as the BBC would like you to believe?  Curious how a few comments and some actual attacks are taken as representative of all Brits…and of course blamed absolutely on Brexit.

A similar tone was taken by Sir Richard Leese, leader of Manchester City Council as the BBC told us.  What they didn’t say was that he was a Remain campaigner and a Labour man. 

Manchester is to lead other major UK cities to campaign to stay in Europe , the M.E.N. can reveal.

City council leader Sir Richard Leese has agreed with chiefs in Leeds, Sheffield, Cardiff, Glasgow, Nottingham, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol and Newcastle that remaining in the union is in their best interests.

He told us of the terrible rise in racism since Brexit and the dire effects of Brexit upon the city….we must be more tolerant and welcome people from all over the world…hmmm….no one said we shouldn’t…so that’s just lie calling Leave voters racist.

Interesting that the BBC pointedly asked about ‘European’ funding being cut off by Brexit.  ‘European’ funding?  This is from a BBC that insists the Leave campaign lied throughout its campaign telling everyone that we sent £350 million a week to Brussels. In exactly the same way if the Leave campaign was lying then so is the BBC by claiming this is ‘European’ funding.  It is not…it is UK money sent to the EU and then sent back to us.  We could, as the Leave campaign pointed out, cut out the middle-man and his enormous EU cut, and keep the money in the UK and decide how best to spend it ourselves.

The BBC went on to wonder about the ‘Northern Powerhouse’, something which they had derided and mocked for so long.  Now apparently it is essential to the North…but is it to be abandoned due to Brexit?

Note though that government cuts to funding were on the cards long ago…

Leese talks about both these things with obvious enthusiasm, but there are caveats, not least when it comes to the cuts. At one point, he anxiously considers what might happen in Manchester thanks to Osborne’s looming spending review. Advance chatter, after all, has suggested cuts to local and city government budgets of between 25% and 40% – and even the lower number would cause the city no end of problems, leaving the council able to do little more than seeing to statutory social services.

And that success had little to do with the EU but a worldwide search for business partners…

…..relentlessly focused on developing necessary relationships, something seen latterly in the council’s close work with everyone from the Beijing Construction Engineering Group (who have a 20% stake in a huge new development around Manchester Airport), to Masdar, a set-up based in Abu Dhabi who have invested in work with graphene, the versatile industrial material pioneered at Manchester University.

The only mention of Europe’s contribution, not the EU, to Manchester’s success ifs how they tried to shape the inner city social culture in a Northern European style…

“From the late 80s, the council very consciously supported the notion of bringing people back to live within the city centre,” Leese says. “We very consciously supported creating pavement-bar culture. But it still needed people to come along and do it: it did need your Tony Wilsons and so on. But that was very much based on northern European cities. Stockholm is a good example. We looked at what was going on in other places and borrowed bits.”

Curious how the News is so fluid when the BBC comes to intepret it for us…one moment Manchester is a grim, failing Northern backwater, next it is the new Venice.  One moment we don’t send the EU ‘our’ money, the next the EU sends us ‘its’ money’ to kindly help us thrive and prosper.

And just to note this from Sir Richard Leese, Labour…a narrative that completely undermines Labour’s, and the BBC’s, narrative of the last 6 years about welfare and jobs…….

Leese became a city councillor in 1984, and eventually played his part in a convulsive debate between two tendencies within the Mancunian Labour party – the result of which, he says, set the city’s co-ordinates for the next 25 years. “There was the welfarist wing of the Labour party and the labourist wing,” he explains. “The welfarist view of how you tackled poverty was to just increase people’s benefit payments. The labourist wing said, ‘Well, hang on – what are the causes of poverty? The biggest cause is that people haven’t got jobs, or they haven’t got jobs that pay decent wages.’ The labourist side won the argument, when we were in the midst of very significant public sector cuts. Which meant that if we were going to create jobs and get people into them, it wasn’t us who were going to do that – it was going to be the private sector. And if we wanted to develop the city, the same thing applied.

“That debate probably took nearly four years. It went from 87, through to the introduction of the poll tax. But we came out of that period with the mantra of ‘jobs, jobs jobs’. And that’s been the driver of politics in the city ever since.”

And what does Leese think of Jeremy Corbyn’s policy for the North?

“It’s a load of rubbish,” Leese tells me. “First of all, there’s no coherent economic policy there. Second, it ignores completely the devolutionary route that Labour local authorities in the north have been driving. Nearly every solution in there has the word ‘national’ in front of it … And it ignores that northern cities, not just Manchester, are in a far healthier place than we were in the early 80s. We’ve all created new economic bases that we can grow from. You wouldn’t know it from that.”

Perhaps something the BBC could have asked him considering there is a Labour leadership contest ongoing.  But they didn’t.  Too wrapped up in peddling EU propaganda to report something useful.  Not that they ever seem too keen to report anything negative about Corbyn….and odd they don’t mention it as earlier (0725) in the programme they were asking…

What effect has the referendum and the leadership contest had in the labour heartlands?

 

The media have an important role to play creating this future; they are not just disinterested bystanders. Whether they like it or not, journalists are not just reporting a financial crisis, they are performing it.

The BBC’s new favourite goto expert voice, IHS Markit, the people who bring us the PMI figures that the BBC insisted showed we were definitely heading for recession, has released some figures on the jobs market that say permanent job recruitment has fallen as employers turn to temporary or contract workers in uncertain times due to Brexit.

The BBC tells us:

Brexit hit recruitment in July, a new survey suggests

Which is an odd way of interpreting the data as IHS Markit tell us:

Data were collected between the 13^th and 24^th June, meaning the vast majority of responses were received prior to the result of the vote being known, so the survey illustrates the extent to which UK companies were pulling back on hiring ahead of the vote rather than after.

So not a reaction to the vote but to the Remain camp’s strident alarmism, strongly encouraged by BBC coverage, pre-vote.

And IHS Markit’s own graphs show a different tale to that being peddled…..to me they show that demand for permanent jobs has been on the decline since 2014…….with a couple of peaks on the way…but the trend is down…..Was Brexit on the radar in 2014 for employers?….

Did laugh to hear the Today programme suggesting that the Bank of England was talking the economy down with its interest rate cut.  The BBC has been doing that for months…and on the same programme that they criticised the BoE the BBC fed us a continuous stream of news trying to suggest that Brexit had destroyed the economy or was just about to.  [And what of the scare stories about the ‘plunging Pound’?  The interest cut meant that the Pound would again drop…if that was so bad why did the BoE implement a policy that they knew would make the Pound drop…whilst the .25% interest rate drop was in reality a political move and not an economically necessary one?]

Remember it was the BBC’s reporting that helped turn an economic problem into an ongoing disaster that nearly destroyed us all…

Peston has been blamed by many others for the Northern Rock bank run, most notably by members of the Treasury select committee.  Peston’s reactions to committee members suggest that he thinks he is being blamed personally for all of Northern Rock’s problems. Like the committee, I am not arguing this at all. The roots of Northern Rock’s woes quite clearly lie elsewhere. I am instead arguing that he had a role in causing sufficient panic among depositors for them to run on their bank.

Does the BBC’s continously negative reporting actually create a self-fulfilling prophecy and bring on a recession that might otherwise not have happened?  The tone and accuracy of reporting is important…..

Has Robert Peston caused a recession?

In recent weeks the BBC’s business editor Robert Peston  has come in for criticism about his role in breaking stories of banks in trouble.

Of course the title of this article is mostly a rhetorical flourish. It would be unfair and untrue to accuse Robert Peston of single-handedly causing a recession. However, it is very much the case that media stories on the current turmoil are not just reflecting events; they are also creating them.

Two ideas from social psychology and sociology can be helpful in understanding what is going on here: social amplification and performativity.

Social amplification of risk is the process though which public perceptions of risks can be produced and magnified as a consequence of the ways in which hazards come to public attention. A key issue in social amplification is the interest key parties have in the story. For example, media outlets have an interest in generating high circulation or viewing figures and ‘scare stories’ sell. This media focus on generating headlines can thus be a key factor in amplifying risk perceptions. 

If I drop a rock, it will fall to the ground (or perhaps on my toe) whether I believe in gravity or not. Gravity is independent of my belief in it. But many ‘facts’ I believe in are social facts and are true only so long as enough people believe in them; the value of money for example. What you believe does not just reflect our social world; it helps create it.

Performative statements or beliefs are those which help bring about the conditions they describe.

The beliefs we subscribe to about banks are performative. By trusting that banks are safe places to keep our money we help bring about the stability which makes this true. By trusting each other with funds, banks ensure the stable operation of financial systems which in turn helps make that trust justified. Equally though, when we withdraw trust we help bring about conditions in which trust would be ill advised.

What we all think and feel about our financial security will have important consequences over the next few months. If we mostly fear the future, stop spending, withdraw our savings from banks, this will be part of the process which makes our fears true. Likewise as businesses take a view on the future and take decisions about investment and disinvestment, new hiring and layoffs these decisions will have a part to play in bringing about the future market conditions which that view is based on.

The media have an important role to play creating this future; they are not just disinterested bystanders. Whether they like it or not, journalists are not just reporting a financial crisis, they are performing it.