DEATH ON OXFORD STREET

The BBC coverage of the murder of a youth in Oxford Street has already proven less than complete, leaving out the pesky detail that Seydou Diarrassouba was himself a member of the notorious London street gang ABM, which stands for ‘All ’Bout Money’and was facing charges of robbery and assault, Notwithstanding that, the BBC carries on with the meme that jail doesn’t work. They wallow in a slough of liberal cluelessness, never once confronting the fact that black gang crime is a major problem in the UK, and in London in particular.

About time too

David Cameron writes about the Beeb in the Sun today. In it he supports the license fee, but begins thus: I am a slightly rare creature — a lifelong Conservative who is a fan of the BBC. I think that tells you something. And although much of the piece is about the need to cut salaries and the size of the BBC – all good stuff – and the need for a properly independent regulator instead of the Trust (welcome, too), the key passage for readers here is this:

But, I can hear the cry, what about the left-wing bias?

My answer is: yes, the BBC does have what even Andrew Marr called an “innate liberal bias”, principally because it does not have to behave like a commercial organisation and make its money from scratch every year.

That tends to make the BBC instinctively pro-Big State, distinctly iffy about the free market and sometimes dismissive of a conservative viewpoint.

Dave doesn’t really say what he’d do about that, but this does seem to suggest that the issue is now on the table. If I worked at the Beeb, I’d be a bit worried.