Mark Mardell must have dropped dead when he saw this piece by Nick Bryant…and if so will be steadily rolling in his grave at the blasphemies being uttered by Bryant….The decline of US power?

Its fairly standard stuff about Bush and his wars, Guantanamo and economic woes dragging the US’s reputation down and its influence in the world down with it.

However there is a long blast at Obama, the usual stuff about his lack of interest in foreign affairs and unwillingness to engage….but there is one thing of unique interest….

One of the reasons why the world has become so disorderly is because America is no longer so active in imposing order……Washington has lost its fear factor.

World leaders nowadays seem prepared to provoke the wrath of the White House, confident that it will never rain down on them.

It explains why the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, after unleashing chemical weapons against his people, continues to bombard them with barrel bombs.

Why Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea, and also offered a safe haven for the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Assad’s flouting of American warnings is especially noteworthy.

In killing so many civilians with chemical weapons, he flagrantly crossed the “red line” imposed by Obama, but escaped punishment.

The president was unwilling to carry through on an explicit threat, in what was the biggest foreign policy climbdown of his presidency and also one of the most significant in the past 50 years.

Even supporters of Barack Obama believe he made a fatal strategic mistake, because it demonstrated endless flexibility and a lack of American resolve.

Needless to say, despots around the world took note.

Powerful stuff and a ‘damning indictment’ as the phrase goes.

But there is something missing from the picture. No mention of the man who promised to tackle Assad but then backtracked on his promise and told his party to vote against taking any military action against Assad.  That man being Ed Miliband…the man who claimed it was a great victory and whom the Left has applauded for his cowardice….a cowardice that then spread to Obama who also backtracked on his determination to bomb Assad leaving him free to continue his murderous rampage.  Not tackling Assad also had the unfortunate side-effect of boosting ISIS as Assad released members of that group from his prisons and left them to their own devices as they became a proxy army for him attacking the other ‘Free Syria’ forces who were fighting Assad.

So Miliband’s betrayal has allowed Assad to continue his vicious war and led to the rebirth of ISIS…..Just think, he could have been our Prime Minister!  Obama has followed on and used Miliband’s betrayal as cover for his own reluctance to tackle Assad in any meaningful way.

And the result is….as said above by Nick Bryant…’a fatal strategic mistake of which, needless to say, despots around the world took note.’

The BBC always seems reluctant to mention Miliband’s role in the Syria vote….I wonder why?

Good that the BBC uses its own ‘news’ and analysis resources to once again promote its case for maintaining the licence fee and its privileged, pre-eminent position…

Free-to-air broadcasters around the world are finding it tougher to afford the spiralling costs of sports rights at a time of mounting competition and demand from pay TV. In the UK, the emergence of BT Sport as a true challenger to Sky has pushed up the value of rights.

Sport has become one of the few remaining ways of offering must-see content in today’s fragmented, multi-media environment, enabling broadcasters and advertisers to reach significant audiences. It is the ideal way for media companies to drive subscriptions towards other related services such as broadband and phone lines. The result is inflation. As recently as the 1970s, the BBC was able to pay just £5,000 for each rugby international it showed live. Those days have long gone.

Many worry about sport’s migration towards pay TV. They argue the country’s biggest sporting moments are cultural events, like a royal wedding or Last Night of the Proms, and should, by their very nature, be available to as many people as possible.

Sport, by this logic, ultimately belongs to us all. The concern is that taking sports away from free-to-air platforms invariably means smaller audiences, a lack of visibility and the removal of a crucial source of inspiration for young people who don’t happen to have parents who can afford pay TV.

The BBC has its supporters though…

It is instructive that in the wake of the Six Nations deal, Clive Efford MP, Labour’s shadow minister for sport, said: “In the face of significant cuts to the BBC’s budget this sort of partnership between broadcasters may be the only way that major sports events will be shown on free-to-air TV.”

The BBC wants more sport to be handed to it on a plate…

But as well as more collaborations between rival networks, another result of this will be a renewed debate around regulation, and the list of ‘crown-jewel’ events the government ensures must be shown on free-to-air television. Currently, only the Olympics and Paralympics, football’s World Cup, European Championship and FA Cup final, the Grand National, the Derby, Wimbledon singles finals, the rugby league Challenge Cup final and the Rugby World Cup final must be broadcast on free-to-air TV.

But at a time when terrestrial broadcasters are under unprecedented pressure over the cost of sports rights, some would now like the government to step in and help by having a longer list.

A clue as to what sticks in the BBC’s throat…..

For some, Australia provides a sound example. There, much to Rupert Murdoch’s annoyance, 1300 sports events – including Test cricket – appear on an ‘anti-siphoning list’, which must be offered first to free-to-air networks.

The government must do what the BBC wants…

New Sports Minister Tracey Crouch is working on a landmark new sports strategy for the UK, designed to tackle falling participation rates……perhaps Crouch should also look at the way sport is delivered to us, via a broadcasting environment that is changing before our very eyes.

And then what?  Fix it so that the BBC gets the ‘Crown Jewels’?

All that’s missing from this bit of special pleading is an explicit final plea for you, the Public, to contact your MP and push the BBC’s case for them…..I imagine though that is what is expected of you,that being the whole point of this ‘analysis’.

Judging by the headlines today I’d be pretty hacked off if I was Joe Root….the BBC is far from alone in pushing this line….you have to ask why so much is made of Moeen Ali’s contribution….

Ashes 2015: Moeen Ali gives England the upper hand in Cardiff

Apparently Moeen is the ‘main man’…. Pint-sized Ashes: Moeen the main man …….he scored 77 and took two wickets.

What of Root?  England were pretty much in free fall and it looked the usual story until Root, and Ballance, stabilised the team and set them back on the road  to respectability with Root scoring 134….almost double what Ali scored.  The BBC acknowledges that Root was actually there and scored some runs but that is the only mention in this match report….

In the bowling Ali took two wickets but cost 67 runs in 14 overs whilst Anderson, in 16 overs, cost only 36 runs with 6 maiden overs….so is the BBC’s assertion really true?…..’Moeen is England’s key man’

To paint Ali as the saviour of the England team seems somewhat disengenuous when his record, in comparison to his team mates, whilst good is not quite as inspiring as the media are portraying.

Can only think ‘pressure’ has been applied on editors by certain activists to show Muslims in a good light and the result is a higher profile for a Muslim player and the attempt to turn him into a role model…play cricket not Jihad.

Never mind his open support for Hamas and a ‘free Palestine’.…of course it’s only natural that he show concern for the outrages inflicted upon the world by the dastardly Jews/Israelis…such as this……

A good role model indeed.

As the Egyptian intellectual Abd al-Munim Said once observed, “The biggest problem with conspiracy theories is that they keep us not only from the truth, but also from confronting our faults and problems.” They also make us look like loons. Can we give it a rest, please?

That’s a quote from a Mehdi Hasan article about conspiracy theories and why Muslims are so in thrall to them.  Which is pretty funny when you know Hasan’s record of whinging about the grand and terrible conspiracy against Muslims such as this in the Guardian by him…Misreporting Muslims, …and of course who can forget this massive whinge...Mehdi Hasan: sanctions for ‘dishonest, demonising press coverage’ of Muslims….and today we have another….Life for British Muslims since 7/7 – abuse, suspicion and constant apologies

Mehdi is starting to look like a loon…please can you give it a rest!?  Try confronting your faults and problems and stop blaming them on the immoral, stupid Kafir cattle.

Why examine the honourable Mehdi and his ranting?  Allison Pearson in the Telegraph tells us that:

We have failed the victims of 7/7

Ten years after the 7/7 bombings, the threat from terrorism is real and deadly – yet many Muslims still fail to accept our British liberal values, says Allison Pearson

Against that horrifying background, consider the complaint this week in the Guardian by the writer and editor, Mehdi Hasan. He says that since 7/7, British Muslims have met with discrimination – “subject to unprecedented scrutiny; tagged as a suspect community, the enemy within, a ‘fifth column’ (to quote Nigel Farage)”.

Well, yes. If substantial numbers of men from a certain group in society are presenting an unprecedented threat to a country, then scrutiny and suspicion do tend to be the result. As for discrimination, try lying on a beach in Tunisia and being shot dead for no reason other than not being Muslim.

I’m not sure that Hasan and commentators like him fully grasp the widespread dismay at the failure of many Muslims to accept the values of our society.

Indeed….what first peaked my interest was this in the New Statesman...the title annoyed me…

A decade after 7/7, our anti-terror efforts stopped attacks but lost the battle for hearts and minds

The writer of course means Muslim hearts and minds…but isn’t the truth that Muslims have lost the hearts and minds of the rest of the population, not just with the bombs that went off and the seemingly endless attempts to carry out more attacks but the relentless barrage of Muslim rhetoric, intimidation, threats and hectoring, the attempts to force Islam down everyones throat whilst crying out that they, the Muslims, are the real victims of 9/11 and 7/7?

Allison Pearson by coincidence has expressed exactly what I was thinking….and Hasan has popped up with the usual special pleading and claims of victimhood to confirm the thought.

The New Statesman article wasn’t what it initially seemed, yet another Hasan type litany of Muslim woes at the hands of the Kafir.  What we actually got was a condemnation of the government strategy but not in the way Hasan and his cronies might want…it says we must change the narrative and make more of our Western values and emphasising what Muslims have here that they won’t have even in a notional ‘Muslim’ state……

The government’s Prevent strategy has one overarching goal: dissuading young British Muslims from supporting terrorism against the UK. That approach seems reasonable but has been poorly calibrated.

The focus on achieving security at home left the jihadist campaigns abroad largely unaddressed. Moreover, some preachers in the UK were allowed to promote radical views, in the hope that this might act as a “safety valve” for otherwise angry men, dissipating and deflecting their energies.

Some of the most basic ideas that define our society and our whole way of life were never promoted with enough vigour or conviction. Freedom of speech, religious liberty and protections for minorities have all been secured only because of Britain’s secular values. This is what gives religious conservatives the opportunity and right to practise their faith as they see fit while allowing others to live in freedom and dignity, too. This has never been robustly explained by our government, let alone celebrated by it.

“Regardless of being born and bred in the west, the epitome of democracy, our Islam was not washed away,” the Mannans said in their statement from Syria. Yet it was secular Britain that allowed them to live as free Muslims, pursuing whatever version of Islam they saw fit. Will such religious pluralism be tolerated in their new land?

This of course is what the BBC should have been doing all along…after all it is charged with maintaining civil society and cohesion…instead of which it has served to widen the gap between Muslim and non-Muslim, pandering to the rhetoric of the radicals and peddling their propaganda whilst all the time variously condemning the West both as it is today and its history telling Muslims they have been victims not just through present day actions in the Middle East but throughout history at the hands of the West.

To finish I’ll just raise a few points about Hasan’s latest article in which he uses the most blatant images and rhetorical tricks to try and twist the narrative his way.

He says ‘How about the Muslim residents of the three areas in Birmingham that in 2010 were to be surrounded by a “ring of steel” of 218 “spy cameras” as part of a counter-terrorism operation?.

Now Muslims and their apologists often make a comparison with Northern Ireland, Nicky Campbell is especially guilty of this, and yet there is no comparison…NI was about land and politics not religion.  However Muslims often complain that no other group is treated as if they were terrorists….hmmm…have they not heard of NI?  If they want to know what real anti-terror policies look like try NI when it had its 30,000 strong security force, its watch towers, its SAS ambushes, its military patrols, its peace walls, and yes, its CCTV…..and why not have all that if it keeps the peace on our streets on the Mainland?  After all the good Giles Fraser suggests it might not be such a bad idea…in order to protect a ‘tolerant Islam’…

It might feel a little more convincingly like a Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, commissioned perhaps as a celebration of religious plurality, were it not for the seven tonnes of Russian-made BRDM-2 armoured personnel carrier stationed outside.

And maybe they are right to do all this. For Kazakhstan has, within its own set limits, developed a properly deserved reputation for religious toleration. For instance, a huge blue synagogue has been built on the outskirts of town, one of many. Forget all that rubbishy racist stuff about Borat and “The Running of the Jew” – this is a place of genuine diversity, where different faiths rub along remarkably well. Despite all the off-putting pomposity of the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, it’s not a totally unrealistic reflection of how things are here. Maybe there is something for that tank to protect.

Hasan tells us that ‘Depending on which poll you believe, a majority of Brits believe “Muslims create problems in the UK”, link “Islam with extremism” and would be “bothered” by the building of a big mosque in their neighbourhood.’

and Tweets this:

• Mehdi Hasan ‏@mehdirhasan 5 hrs5 hours ago

  “Express delete story claiming ‘half of British Muslims support ISIS'” – sheesh. http://politicalscrapbook.net/2015/07/express-delete-story-claiming-half-of-british-muslims-support-isis/ …

Trouble is there is this research from the Pew Foundation that suggests British Muslims are at odds with British society, if not supporting ISIS, or their methods….

Muslims Distrust Westerners More than Vice Versa

In particular, British Muslims stand apart from their coreligionists elsewhere in Europe. They receive the highest religious-cultural negativity score, indicating more negative attitudes.

Britain’s score, based on the perception of British Muslims of Western non-Muslims with regards to these  characteristics, was higher than other European Muslims, and in  fact, closer to the score (opinion) of Muslims in Muslim countries. British Muslims are more inclined to see a conflict between Islam and modernity; more likely to self-identify along religious lines than national lines; and more deeply concerned about the future of Muslims in Britain. When asked, “Is there a conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a Modern society?”, almost half of British Muslims (49%) felt there was.

Sheesh!!!

Hasan trumpets this.. .’In 2007 a fresh-faced MP spent two days at the home of a Muslim family in Birmingham and then wrote boldly of how it wasn’t possible to “bully people into feeling British: we have to inspire them”; “you can’t even start to talk about a truly integrated society while people are suffering racist … abuse … on a daily basis”.’

Indeed…let’s change that narrative from Muslims as victims and start to highlight all the good things the West has done for Muslims both here and abroad…..the BBC should start the ‘presses rolling’ straight away.

For the BBC there seems to be no ‘why’ for 7/7.

Or at least when listening to their coverage of the anniversary one thing is missing….the question asking what was the motivation for the attacks, why did 4 Muslims attack ‘The West’?

The BBC looks even to have put aside its normal infantile, dangerous and highly politicised reason…the Iraq War….The BBC knows this is a false message, a deliberate lie by the BBC intent on hiding the real reasons for ‘radicalisation’.

In its place there is a constant stream of remarks about ‘young British lads’, though not ‘Muslims’, and thoughts that we musn’t ‘demonise Muslims’. …repeatedly emphasising this quote from Baroness Manningham-Buller, ex-director-general of MI5:

“I think we’ve got to be very careful not to demonise the Muslim community, quote unquote – I’m not sure there is a Muslim community – there are a lot of British Muslims from all sorts of communities.

“From the time I was in the service successes often depended on British Muslims giving us information in confidence – often at risk to their lives – and Muslim members of staff helping us to understand these issues. And therefore I think labelling whole communities is not wise.”

[Always odd how it is always claimed that the Jihadists are not Muslims and yet the cause of radicalisation is Muslim anger….so at what point do ‘angry Muslims’ become ‘apostates’ and join the ranks of the infidels? Just where is that line when a Muslim becomes a non-Muslim?]

Is it demonisation to ask why the ‘Muslim community’, and it is ‘credible’, mainstream community leaders who push this message, consistently sends out a message about being angry about British foreign policy and that this is the cause of radicalisation….in effect reinforcing the message of the Jihadi recruiters with the same message…..the same Muslim community that thinks 9/11 and 7/7 were conspiracies by intelligence agencies, the Jews or this government….so much so that the BBC had to put out a film showing such beliefs about 7/7, spread by mainstream Muslim leaders, were completely wrong.

Here is an image from a BBC report into 7/7 many years ago titled ‘It starts here: Street campaigning and agitation, late 1990s’…..  ‘It’ of course being Muslim radicalisation…..

The BBC knew the real reasons for radicalisation and yet, despite that report, still pushes the message about the Iraq War so the same questions that are asked of the Muslim communty can of course be asked of the BBC and its  message about the Iraq War, a ‘war against Islam’ and Britain’s, the West’s, ‘history of ancient wrongs’ against Muslims.

Fresh from blaming the Jews for making themselves targets it may be somewhat galling for people to see the BBC now fawning over the survivors and the families of victims of 7/7 when the BBC has done so much to promote the Jihadi cause, just as some people may have been surprised if not angered by having the BBC’s Phil Mackie sent to report on and sympathise with the relatives of those killed in Tunisia…the same Phil Mackie who made it his job to downplay the Trojan Horse plot and attempt to dismiss it as the work of racist, paranoid Islamophobes….

…and who admitted that he tried to avoid using the words ‘extremist’or ‘Islamist’ in relation to the story…thus covering up the motivation behind the plot…and the fact that ‘conservative’ Islam,, ie Islam, is in relation to a Western democratic, secular society ‘extreme’.

Of course it wasn’t just Mackie but the BBC itself that tried to paint the plot as a hoax….the BBC coming up with this infamous lie…

It was alleged last year extremists had tried to take over several schools in Birmingham to advance radical interpretations of Islam.

A series of official investigations found the claims to be groundless.

Really?…….from yesterday….

Peter Clarke was head of the Counter Terrorism Command at Scotland Yard from 2002 until 2008

7/7 bombings: Why we can never stop tackling extremism

There can be no room for complacency.

Last year, I was asked to conduct the so-called Trojan Horse inquiry into allegations of infiltration of schools by Islamist extremists. The evidence was clear that there were people in positions of influence in some schools in Birmingham who held intolerant and extremist views.

Extraordinarily, the Commons education select committee published a report earlier this year saying that only one, isolated example of extremism had been found. This flew in the face of the evidence, and the Government has now firmly rejected the report, saying that it “downplays the seriousness of events in Birmingham and risks undermining our efforts to tackle extremism”.

The tragic irony is that this government rebuttal was issued on the day that 39 people were murdered on a Tunisian beach by a man whose route to terrorism may have started with someone telling him that intolerance of others’ beliefs and values is a virtue.

Despite that even yesterday’s BBC’s report of the Government reaction still plays the same game it played before…

The government has claimed MPs risked undermining efforts to tackle extremism by downplaying the seriousness of the “Trojan Horse” events in Birmingham.

Several inquiries and investigations were launched after an anonymous letter surfaced last March containing instructions for installing sympathetic school governors.

It has since been regarded as a hoax in some quarters and claims made about a number of schools named in the letter have been deemed groundless.

 

Perhaps the politicians are right and the BBC needs to pick a side…..the Jihadis or Western Society….many people might suggest the BBC already has picked a side…that of the Jihadis.

BBC ignoring this story so far which is in every other news outlet big and small since several hours ago…

HSBC employees sacked for ‘abhorrent’ mock Isil execution video

The bank has apologised after a video emerged online of staff dressed in jumpsuits apparently pretending to behead an Asian colleague

The Sun has the video here.

Most if not all the ‘colleagues’ seem to be ‘Asian’….This is a tale from Birmingham, home of the Trojan Horse.

Why would the BBC ignore a story about ‘Asians’ pretending to behead somebody?  If it was for some reason a Christian beheading a Muslim/Asian….you can imgaine the reaction.

The Guardian has just caught up….the BBC can’t be far behind.

Anyway…..here’s a Tweet from a while back that might be thought provoking and ironic in light of HSBC’s reaction…

Keep in mind that HSBC enabled 60,000 beheadings/murders in Mexico. Scots are right to want to see the back of them. http://www.salon.com/2012/09/26/mexican_drug_war_victims_us_is_responsible/ …

‘In Mexico, many of the drug war’s dead are innocents. In the six years of drug war that have ravaged the country, more than 60,000 are dead and more than 10,000 are missing. Because only 2 percent of cases are granted judicial review, families of the lost regularly become their own investigators. They find, too often, horrors tied to the authorities themselves.

This summer, a Senate investigation found that HSBC was complicit in allowing Mexican drug cartels to launder billions of dollars through its U.S. operations. The Senate report also says U.S. regulators knew that the bank had a poor system to defend against laundering, but did nothing to demand improvement. While US forces were training and arming the Mexican military to fight cartels, US bankers were cashing in on cartel profits.’

Not really BBC bias other than an example of why the EU is so hopeless and yet the BBC still cheerleads relentlessly for it.

Doesn’t this from 2011 all look familiar…I had to keep checking the date to make sure I was reading it properly….

You’d have to be a completely heartless bastard to laugh.

The BBC has spent the last 5 years chastising the Coalition for its welfare reforms and in the run up to the election loudly demanded to know the details of the proposed £12 billion in savings from the welfare budget…and now we know, at least one bit….the BBC is going to pay a huge chunk of it itself!

Chancellor Osborne to hit BBC to fund welfare cuts – Sunday Times

Chancellor George Osborne plans to launch a 650 million pound raid on the BBC to help cover the country’s benefits bill, forcing the corporation to meet the cost of free television licences for the over-75s, the Sunday Times said.

It quoted senior government sources as saying a deal is close that will force the BBC to take on the cost of the 4.5 million licences — worth 145.50 pounds each — from the Department for Work and Pensions.

The move, it said, is part of a package of 12 billion pounds of welfare cuts, widely expected to be unveiled in a budget bill on Wednesday.

In return, the paper said, the BBC will be allowed to make up some of the lost revenue by charging for use of its iPlayer and other online catch-up services to try to stem the loss of licence fee revenue caused by people turning to the Internet and abandoning their televisions.

That will return at least 150 million pounds to BBC coffers, the paper added, but the 650 million pounds benefits bill represents the loss of around a fifth of the corporation’s annual 3.7 billion pounds licence fee income.

The details, including the timing of the change, are still under negotiation but it is likely to be phased in after 2017, when the number of over-75s claiming a free licence will have risen further, the paper said.

This was also proposed back in 2010 and presumably shelved under pressure from the LibDems or because, despite the amusement I greet it with, it is a bizarre concept….the BBC is after all supposed to be raising money from the licence fee not handing it out….it is the government that has decided that pensioners should get a free licence and not the BBC…I’m sure the BBC would be more than happy to lock up non-paying pensioners as well as the poverty stricken single mothers that it normally targets.

Does seem a bit daft….but apparently the BBC empire is getting too big…

Mr Osborne also said that the BBC’s website may be scaled back because it has become too “imperial”.

He said that the scale of the BBC’s online offering means that it is coming “the national newspaper as well as the national broadcaster”.

He said: “You wouldn’t want the BBC to completely crowd out national newspapers. And if you look at the BBC website, it’s a good product but it is becoming a bit more imperial in its ambitions.

After the attack in Tunisia I looked at Donnison’s Twitter feed to see his reaction…nothing.  I gave him the benefit of the doubt and thought he must be sleeping off his socialising with the Muslim victims of rampant Australian Islamophobia and would start the same sort of tweeting we are used to when he is constantly telling us of his sympathies for Hamas and the victims of Israeli ‘terrorism and war crimes’.

But no, he has all but ignored the murders in Tunisia…this being his sole tweet…or retweet, he couldn’t even be bothered to write his own…..

It is noticeable that he has succumbed to government pressure and is calling Islamic State ‘Daesh’…never mind that Daesh means Islamic State…..and of course it is in relation to his old mates in Hamas…

Jon Donnison ‏@jondonnisonbbc Jun 30

Daesh threatens to topple Hamas in #Gaza. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/30/islamic-state-threatens-hamas-gaza-strip … Hamas & Israel will find common cause and not allow that to happen.

The Guardian report he links to actually calls them ‘Islamic State’…

Islamic State threatens to topple Hamas in Gaza Strip in video statement

Why did he change it?

John Humphrys was in the Sunday Times last week giving us a great example of how the BBC thinks….the Greek tragedy?  It’s the fault of the Bankers, Big Business and Government…investment bankers and politicians on the make who green lighted Greece’s entry into the Euro…anything to do with the Greek people themselves?   No. No. No. says Humphrys as he ‘slays the big fat Greek myth’.

Oh, hang on, what’s this he goes on to tell us…a woman who refuses to get married as she will lose the pension she has inherited from her father…pensions that provided a very comfortable old age….the electorate who were bribed by the political parties…and, yes, they took what was offered no questions asked….the price of that acquiescence?  Appalling corruption on just about every level.  Don’t want to pay taxes…slip the tax man a few Drachma.

And of course they all signed up eagerly to join the Euro…it wasn’t forced on them…as one Greek said ‘There is big blame’ on the Greek people for voting the way they did……and even now they demand to stay in…

Despite the budget cuts, euro membership is hugely popular in Greece, with polls suggesting that nearly two-thirds of the population are in favour of the move.

Humphrys started his piece by saying that Greeks would have no truck with debt before they joined the EU….this all changed with the advent of the Euro and ‘all hell broke loose’.…which is a subject I’m sure for another discussion about that other BBC bias…Europe.

So it was Greece entering the Euro that crashed its economy and led to massive debts?  They already had massive debts…

Blame It On Profligate Spending 

This could only lead to an inescapable conclusion as noted by the CFR (Council on Foreign Relations):

“Even if Greece had remained outside the euro zone, its dependence on euro borrowing would only have increased. A falling drachma would merely have brought the current crisis to a head earlier by accelerating the rise in Greece’s debt-to-GDP ratio (think Iceland)….the problem is excessive foreign borrowing, a problem with which Greece has struggled since the early 19th century.”

 

Well certainly the Euro hasn’t helped but the truth is it didn’t cause Greece’s problems merely compounded them…and made it more difficult to escape them….

The problem for Greece, and other countries in the eurozone, is that a single interest rate and exchange rate do not allow easy adjustment to external crises, and leave domestic devaluation through cuts in wages and prices as the only other option. The lack of institutional support for weaker members from the centre when the euro was created placed the entire burden at times of need on individual Euro governments. That came at huge cost to their economies.

Greece was broke before she entered…..Greece should never have entered the Euro as its economy was in no shape to hold its own and meet the stringent requirements of the Euro zone…as the BBC tells us…

How ‘magic’ made Greek debt disappear before it joined the euro

Greece is at the heart of the ongoing eurozone crisis, but is past sleight of hand by Greek statisticians to blame for the country’s current financial meltdown?

“We used to call him the magician, because he could make everything disappear.

“He made inflation disappear. And then he made the deficit disappear,” recalls Greek economist Miranda Xafa.

Greece fulfilled the Maastricht criteria and was admitted to the eurozone on January 1, 2001 – but by 2004 the deception was becoming transparent.

The difference between the published deficit and the real one was huge.

“[The gap] was about 7% of GDP,” Mr Doukas says.

“The budget said the deficit was 1.5%. The real shortfall was 8.3%.”

Certainly the politicians and bankers who signed off entry into the Euro can take much of the blame but to try and say Greeks themselves are completely innocent is false……Much of that debt was to pay for the massive public sector employment, there were more employees on the rail service than customers, and extremely generous pensions allowed Greeks to retire at 50 and live well, whilst a failure to collect taxes meant that paying for all this largesse was clearly going to be a problem…eventually…..but entering the Euro meant that Greece had sudden access to cheap money and could borrow even more…..an irony perhaps that the EU, part of the problem with cheap money and yet an economic policy straitjacket on Greece, should now be so hard on Greece.

Greece was always heading for a fall but joining the EU speeded that up and whilst forcing some reality upon the Greeks actually stopped them from doing the one thing that would have helped the most….currency devaluation.

The Greek people signed up to all of this and the structure of the Greek economy with its welfare dependency on government spending paid for by borrowing…and they of course signed up to the Euro and still want to be in the club.

Humphrys, who has a house in Greece and is a frequent visitor, with a son who lives and works there, is clearly twisting the facts to suit his own personal agenda…be nice to the Greek people in their moment of tragedy.  A sentiment that pervades the BBC’s own reporting on many subjects not least Islam with the BBC’s stubborn refusal to make any link to the violence around the world and the religion of Islam in cas eit upsest a few people.

News being manipulated to hide uncomfortable truths.  It always turns out bad in the end.