THE MILIBAND JIHAD…

Quite remarkably, the BBC leads is news coverage AGAIN with a pro Ed Miliband anti Daily Mail story. It seems to me that the BBC has lost all perspective on this non-story and had decided to run with it as hard as possible with the intent of a/Seeking the head of  Paul Dacre b/Cowering the Mail from running future such stories on hardline Marxists c/Damaging the Mail in as many ways as possible d/Promoting Ed Miliband as the advocate of all that is noble and good.  Alastair Campbell has not been off the BBC with his smearing of Dacre and the Mail’s editorial line. The behaviour of the BBC on this story  has been breathtakingly BIASED and just as worrying, effective. The LibDems have put the boot in and the Conservatives seem embarrassed and unwilling to stand up and say that Ralph Miliband DID hate British values. The sanctimonious preening of the Left in general and the BBC in particular on this issue has been astounding. What say you, gentle reader?

Coming Up Smelling Of Roses…Red Ones Of Course

 

 

At Mrs Thatcher’s funeral

 

A few times this week I’ve listened to John Pienaar intone in reverent awe that ‘The Boy done good….he’s on a winner’.

Of course I paraphrase, but Pienaar likes to tell us that Miliband is coping admirably, showing strength and principled leadership as he battles the pervidious right wing rag that is the Daily Mail.

 

 

Now you could take a less charitable view and interpret the situation maybe more realistically…that Miliband is a ruthless political opportunist who will use any trick to gain political advantage, even going so far as to use his own father’s death as a prop in his campaign for election, his father’s coffin as a soapbox from which to spread his message.

Naturally you are not going to hear the BBC even take a step in that direction despite it telling us that Miliband is quite obviously going to benefit politically from this….but they avoid suggesting he is using his father’s death for his own advantage, suggesting instead that it is his ‘principled’ stand against the Mail that will make people connect with him.

Labour are old hands at using family tragedy to garner sympathy and votes….remember Gordon Brown just before the election coming onto television to do an interview and crying about his son?….utterly ruthless theatrics for an audience.

Miliband’s own ruthless streak stands in stark contrast to the cowardice of Cameron and many on the government side, Gove aside, who cower on the sidelines attacking the Mail rather than taking a deep breath and their own principled stand to denounce Ralph Miliband’s politics and beliefs.

 

And astonished the Mail doesn’t make use of Unite leader Len McCluskey (Miliband’s pay and puppet master) and his speech in which he said he would implement Ralph Miliband’s vision for Britain:

Whatever the upshot of electoral politics, working-class politics must grow and develop, based on the socialist education Ralph Miliband called for.

In the midst of an unending economic crisis, with what Ralph would have called a discredited ruling class at the helm, it is past time for the working class to step forward with its own vision and alternative.

Our values are eternal.

 

That speech backs up everything they said about Ralph Miliband and his dangerous influence on politics…note the ‘whatever the upshot of electoral politics’…..yeah, let’s just ignore the democratic process and use strikes and conflict to resolve things…or as Ralph Miliband said…’there is no Parliamentary road to Socialism.’

 

 

Here are some interesting reactions to the Mail article and the subsequent left wing barrage:

 

Rod Liddle in the Spectator:

If George Osborne’s dad was as far to the right as Ralph Miliband was to the left, and this fact was reported (having read interviews with Osborne’s father, this might not be far from the truth), nobody would howl in anger that this was a smear, would they? The BBC and Channel 4 News would, instead, leap in and kick the living daylights out of Osborne Sr and think themselves entirely justified in so doing. Ralph Miliband may have been a lovely dad, but he was a damaging and unjustly revered influence. It should not be a crime to say as much.

 

Stephen Glover in the Mail:

How typically hypocritical of the Left, who danced on the grave of Mrs Thatcher, to be upset about debate over Red Ed’s Marxist father

 

Sean Thomas in the Telegraph:

The Guardian and Left-wing mass murderers: a love story

 

And of special interest after David’s last post Peter Oborne in the Telegraph about Campbell:

Alastair Campbell treated politics with more contempt than any Daily Mail journalist

This protestation that he treated politicians with respect is so completely contemptuous of the truth that I feel a kind of moral obligation to correct it. No political journalist in my lifetime has treated politicians with such utter, total and complete contempt as Alastair Campbell did during his career for the Daily Mirror and Today newspaper (and later as a government adviser inside Downing Street).

His personal conduct was far, far worse and more demeaning than any Daily Mail journalist.

I have an old documents file somewhere where at the time I kept details of these smear campaigns, who the victims were, and exactly how Campbell’s New Labour publicity machine put their slurs and lies into the public domain. I am going to look out that old file now, but it will take a few days to get the material together and in a fit state to print. I intend to publish it by the middle of next week.

 

 

And here, ending on a comedy note is Priyamvada Gopal in the Guardian:

The Daily Mail may not realise, but Marxists are patriots

[Hmmm of course they are…they just want to dismantle the nation state, erase national identities and abolish ‘races’ as well as the family]

The traducing of Ralph Miliband is a reminder of how far we now are from understanding socialism

Whatever their views of him, most decent people backed Ed Miliband this week as he defended his father against jingoist attacks on him by the Daily Mail. The Labour leader angrily described Ralph Miliband as a British patriot, and correctly noted that he does not share his father’s principled commitment to socialism.

 

And here is the top comment…note as chosen by the Guardian staff themselves…on that article by Gopal:

LongDanSweeney

02 October 2013 8:26pm

This comment has been chosen by Guardian staff because it contributes to the debate

Recommend 444

As a socialist for all of my adult life and a public servant of a quarter of a century I fully agree. Those who wrap themselves in the flag never understand that patriotism is love of people first and country second and monarchy and privilege never.

Ed and his labour cronies are no more socialist than Michael Gove or Danny Alexander. However, his dad was. A socialist, who served in the military, loved this country and educated it’s children.

What has Dacre done for his £500,000 a year?

 

DOES THE C IN BBC STAND FOR CAMPBELL?

It seems that the BBC has decided that Alastair Campbell is the new champion for journalistic integrity and decency in public life. He hasn’t been off its’ major news programmes in the past few days, castigating Paul Dacre and The Mail in general. It is truly nauseating to listen to Campbell being given such prominence as he heads up a full on assault on The Mail. IF ONLY we all read The Mirror and The Guardian, and listened to the BBC. Right?

We Think, Therefore It Is

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We Think the Earth is warming, Therefore it is a man made disaster.

It is incredible to think that the only journalist with any integrity in the climate debate at the BBC is not Harrabin, Shukman or McGrath but Sheila Fogarty.

She has been the one asking the awkward questions about the much hyped ‘ocean warming’ explanation for the ‘pause’.

Harrabin et al should hang their heads in shame.

On Friday Fogarty was raising those questions though still coming down on the side of the ‘settled science’ as any good BBC employee should.

However she is still holding the fort now…and holding Harrabin himself to account when he breezily asserts ocean warming is the cause of the pause. (Any coincidence this line of thought suddenly became popular shortly after Harrabin’s old mucker and AGW propagandist Richard Black joined the ocean research side of things?)

Today on her show at around 13:55 Fogarty, presumably reading from the script provided by the environment journos, said…‘Whilst they have been protecting us from climate change we’ve been taking them (the oceans) for granted.

Harrabin then came in and told us that :

‘We’ve been dumping our problems into the oceans’ and that ‘global warming has paused on land but the oceans have continued to warm and we’re not going to get away with it forever.’

Fogarty jumped in with a ‘hang on….is that true?’ question making Harrabin squirm and come up with a fudge of an answer.

Very amusing.

But essentially that is the problem with the whole IPCC process…whatever you believe, whether global warming is happening, whether it is man made or not, the presentation of the IPCC’s case must make you doubt that case.

It seems more based on hope and hype, faith that events will prove them right in the end….let’s face it, they’ve just ‘discovered’ third world cooking fires produce soot, and they have no idea how much aerosols effect the climate, never mind explaining the ‘pause’.

There are so many inconsistencies and contradictions, so many obvious lies, so many obvious claims based purely on speculation, hypothesis, guess work and wishful thinking, like Harrabin’s dodgy assertion above, that you cannot possibly support the IPCC’s claims, still less the resultant, enormously expensive political action based upon them.

The post below takes a look not only at some of the BBC’s coverage but also those contradictions and claims made in bad faith by the Science fraternity.

It’s a long one so get yourself a big mug of something and pull up a sandbag.

 

 

MoS2 Template Master

 

The BBC liberally plastered its news bulletins after the IPCC release of its latest report with repeated assertions that we could suffer what it predicts would be a catastrophic 5° C rise in global temperature and a sea level rise of 1metre by 2100 even though these are the absolute, and unlikely, maximums…and all the while completely ignoring the massive increase in ice in the Arctic this year.

When they propagate such alarmist scenarios in order to scare people into accepting the ‘science’ is it any wonder the BBC is the least trusted news provider…..and unfortunately, perhaps paradoxically, the most utilised as a source for news…

 

More than half of people in the UK regard the BBC as their single most important source of news, according to new figures released by media regulator Ofcom

The report said television remained by far the most important platform for news, used by 78% of adults against 40% who read newspapers, 35% who turn to the radio and 32% who look to the Internet.

The BBC website remains the most popular online destination, used by 52% of people who go online, against 19% of people who use Facebook and 10% who turned to Twitter for online news updates.

In total, 53% of people regarded one of the BBC’s news outlets, across TV, radio and online, as their most important source of news.

But while BBC TV was regarded as important, its viewers scored it marginally lower in terms of accuracy and reliability, and trustworthiness, than viewers of Sky News.

Asked whether it was impartial and unbiased, and offered a range of opinions, BBC TV scored less highly (among their respective viewers) than Sky News, ITV and Channel 4 News. 

In the Guardian Will Hutton attempted a pre-emptive and emotive strike on the Sceptics who might find fault with the IPCC report:

To fight climate change, we must trust scientific truth and collective action

Sceptics will rubbish a new report on climate change, dismissing calls for governmental action. Don’t be swayed

BBC attempts to broadcast its findings in as impartial way as possible will be portrayed as yet more evidence of BBC bias, even though the BBC will pack its coverage with lots of sceptical voices, notwithstanding their marginalisation by world science, to try to cover its back.

 

Packed with sceptical voices’? Well not so far…one or two given a couple of minutes, the BBC journalists certainly don’t show a shred of interest in questioning the orthodoxy, and are more likely than not to promote it.

Thomas Stocker, co-chair of the IPCC working group producing the AR5 report said:

We’re not here to make headlines but we’re here for the science.’

But of course, the politics and headlines, that’s precisely what they are here for…the point of the summary was to guide government policy…it’s in the title… ‘A Summary For Policymakers.’

The BBC wasted no time in making the IPCC headline news, in fact they turned over 5live for a day to the ‘reporting’ of the summary.

But when you start looking, thinking and comparing what they say with what is happening in reality what is being reported as fact just doesn’t make sense.

There are many apparent, to a layman’s eye, contradictions in the ‘science’, contradictions and quite obvious fabrications to make the science fit the desired policies.

The Climate Change bandwagon based on bad Maths?

We are told that the scientists are being open and transparent with their data…but it seems that they still don’t like questions that ask how they calculated their alarming predictions.

The Met. Office has refused to answer questions raised in the House of Lords about a figure upon which the whole basis of the IPCC’s venture is based…that the world has warmed by 0.85° C in just over 130 years and that this is ‘serious’ and indicates man made influence.

If that figure is wrong and the risk assessment based upon that is wrong…then the whole thing is a charade based upon a lie…no wonder the Met. Office doesn’t want to answer any questions.

Here is the Met. Office’s reply when asked to explain their data:

Via Bishop Hill

‘As indicated in a previous Written Answer given … to the noble Lord on 14 January 2013 (Official Report, col. WA110), it is the role of the scientific community to assess and decide between various methods for studying global temperature time series. It is also for the scientific community to publish the findings of such work, in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.’

Thus, in the opinion of the Met Office, Parliament has no right to ask scientific questions of government scientists.

But perhaps they should be made to answer for some are questioning their conclusion:

‘The model used by HM Government should be rejected, in favor of the driftless model. With the driftless model, however, the rise in temperatures since 1880 is not significant. In other words, the correct Answer to the Question (HL3050) might be No.’

But just how reliable is the IPCC?

We’re constantly directed to understand that its findings are the result of hundreds of the finest scientific minds coming together, without sleep, examining, inspecting, evaluating and rigorously testing the science.

That might not be the whole truth…for example we know that the false claims that the Himalayas would disappear by 2035 were taken from a WWF tract….Spiked magazine investigates further:

‘…there’s the idea that the IPCC report is the product of the world’s top experts. But in reality, knowing a subject well is not nearly as important, it seems, as having a face that fits. So, leading IPCC contributors sometimes do not even have PhDs in their subjects, never mind being world-class experts, while other researchers in charge of chapters had expertise in a completely different area to the one they were working on. Meanwhile, the nature of the review process means that when leading experts are critical, they can safely be ignored by chapter authors.

In March 2010, Laframboise decided to take on the task of working out just how many references in the 2007 report were to non-peer-reviewed sources. With the help of volunteers from her blog readership, her audit found that 30 per cent of the references were from newspaper and magazine articles, unpublished masters theses, reports produced by green groups and even press releases.

Laframboise lists 78 people involved with the IPCC who are also members of WWF’s parallel climate panel. Of these, 23 are IPCC co-ordinating lead authors – the people in charge of individual chapters of the reports. ‘Ladies and gentlemen’, she writes, ‘the IPCC has been infiltrated.’

The BBC however isn’t interested in questioning the orthodoxy

…it never has been as this email from BBC man Alex Kirby shows, Alex Kirby who was very, very close with Phil Jones et al at the CRU:

So nice and cosy was the relationship that in 2004, Mr Kirby wrote to Phil Jones (email 4894) in the build up to COP-10:

Yes, glad you stopped this — I was sent it too, and decided to spike it without more ado as pure stream-of-consciousness rubbish. I can well understand your unhappiness at our running the other piece. But we are constantly being savaged by the loonies for not giving them any coverage at all, especially as you say with the COP in the offing, and being the objective impartial (ho ho) BBC that we are, there is an expectation in some quarters that we will every now and then let them say something. I hope though that the weight of our coverage makes it clear that we think they are talking through their hats.

Once the ‘Summary for Policy Makers’ was released we then had a long line of scientists and commentators queuing up to promote the IPCC’s line on the BBC…which readily swallowed everything they said and faithfully regurgitated it almost without question.

Here is one statement that is meant to support that line, but which means nothing on its own:

We (Met Office) run computers with and without CO2 forcings….and when we include CO2 in the model, temperatures rise.

Of course they rise…..because they programme the computers to do that!

The IPCC are proclaiming increased confidence in their models, without explaining why they have increased confidence, (in the AR4 Summary for Policymakers, the IPCC admitted that the reported 90% confidence was simply based on “expert judgment” i.e. conjecture.) and all just at a time when the discrepancies between their models and realtime observations increase…..in other words they can’t explain the ‘Pause’.

Here is their ‘evidence’ related to us by a scientist on the radio that the world is warming and it is caused by man:

‘…evidence from the last 15 years… the, the warming ocean, the retreating snow and ice, the changing rainfall patterns, the continuing sea-level rise, and this evidence is so strong, of the dominant role of human influence on the climate system.’

That might be evidence of some changes in climate but it in no way indicates the cause.

But what is real is the pause (and they don‘t know the cause of that either)…the IPCC  grudgingly admits there is a pause, Phil Jones in 2005 admitted it, but also gave a clue why many possibly sceptical scientists stay silent:

“The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. Okay it has but it is only seven years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.”

 

Thomas Stock tried to wriggle out of the importance of the ‘Pause’ by claiming that a climate relevant period would be 30 years….in other words 15 or more years is not statistically significant.

 

Well in 2009 Professor Phil Jones of the CRU told us:

‘Bottom line: the no upward trend has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.

I guess they are worried…but only because their careers, reputations and multi-million dollar grants are at risk if global warming is proven to be wrong.

 

So far there is no proof that it is CO2 that is the culprit, or the main culprit, causing any climate change.

Phil Jones admitted that temperatures show a rise 800 years before CO2 rises….so is the rise in CO2 now in fact a result of warming caused by something else?…Jones et al say whatever…a rise in CO2 even if caused by something else will produce undesirable ‘feedback’ and cause more warming.

The IPCC tells us that CO2 is at the highest level for 800,000 years, it has risen 40% since the 1950’s, and that there is a lag of 25 years between CO2 being emitted and its resultant effects.

They also tell us that CO2 is enormously powerful….one scientist, from the Met. Office I think, boasted that he had been asked by a government minister why CO2, if it was in such small quantities in the atmosphere, was so important?…he said well, if I sprinkled a tiny amount of arsenic on your dinner you would soon find out just how powerful a tiny amount is.

Well…if CO2 has risen a massive 40% why is it that temperatures have risen a mere 0.85° C since 1880 and have now stalled?

They tell us that it is a linear relationship…..the BBC’s Matt McGrath  pushing the point backed up by the Met. Office‘s Peter Stott: ‘….and it is a clear linear relationship, so that the more you pump into the atmosphere, the more the temperature goes up, its… in a very complex system it is as simple as that?’

Stott: ‘There is this very clear linear relationship between the overall emissions of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, and the global temperature rise, so the more we emit, the more the temperature increases.’

Well that is clearly not the case here, maybe in the science lab but not in real life…..both with the small scale of temperature rise compared to large, relatively, emissions of CO2, and the ‘Pause’ at a time when CO2 has reached its highest level for 800,000 years.

Clearly no linear relationship in real life.

And what of that ‘highest level of CO2 in 800,000 years’?

The IPCC now admits that the Medieval Warm Period, did exist, thank you very much.

 

Continental-scale surface temperature reconstructions show, with high confidence, multidecadal periods during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (year 950 to 1250) that were in some regions as warm as in the late 20th century.

 

How does the IPCC avoid the rather difficult problem, the inconvenient fact of global warming  1000 years ago, that the earth warmed to the same degree it has now, and all without the Industrial Revolution and the benefit of massive quantities of CO2?

The IPCC tells us it was warm but only in parts…unlike the earth now.

These regional warm periods did not occur as coherently across regions as the warming in the late 20th century.

The problem with that is they now tell us that though some regions of the world will warm, others, like the UK, will get colder.

So in other words there will be regional differences in temperature…just like the Medieval Warm Period…if that was indeed the case.

But they also tell us that 1983-2012 was likely the warmest 30 year period of the last 1400 years.

Now maybe my maths is not up to it but 1400 years would take you back to the year 613 AD…whilst the Medieval Warm Period was from 950-1250 AD…..a ‘multi-decadal warm period’ at the least surely….300 years by my maths.

So once again the MWP seems to have gone missing.

Ocean Warming

What of those claims, the legend that has become fact, that the oceans are soaking up the heat?

Seems all of a sudden doesn’t it?

Only last week we heard from the BBC that the oceans, as proved by studies of Clams, had been warming for a long time, at least 100 years.

So how come, how come, suddenly, in 1998, the oceans are supposed to have started sucking up even more heat at a much higher rate than before…so much so that suddenly, the global warming stops? What caused the oceans to do that?

Answer me that.

Answer me this…..

The IPCC tells us that from 1971 to 2010 60% of the energy increase went into the oceans. OK….1971 (we’ll ignore the warming for at least 100 years claim)..not 1998 as a start point….so why didn’t the ‘pause’ start in 1971?

Here’s another thing….they tell us that ocean heat content on the surface increased more slowly from 2003 to 2010 than from 1993 to 2002.

Yes that’s right…..More slowly

…..so the oceans have been taking up less heat, not more…..so …well…you ask the question.

There is also the misdirection by scientists and BBC journos…they say well, the pause, hiatus, or as the BBC prefer, slowdown in warming, started in 1998, or that is the period that the ‘sceptics’ choose to base their calculations on…this is wrong they tell us…because 1998 was the hottest year and so distorts the figures….anything cooler than that is not necessarily cooler…and could still be warming.

That of course is a misdirection… 1998 was a result of El Nino and was an unusual high because of it…but the 15 years following that have been flat regardless of the 1998 temperature….there is no escape from that….Prof. Phil Jones told us that 15 years was statistically significant…they are now trying to move the goalposts to suit the politics not the science.

 

But on what data had this ‘ocean warming’ been based?

Harrabin and his cohort of scientists have been saying that it is the deep ocean that has been absorbing the heat….but the IPCC tell us that it is the surface that absorbs by far the greatest amount…not only that but the IPCC’s Thomas Stock told us  (09:58) that the current warming hiatus could not be predicted because:

There are not sufficient observations of the uptake of heat, particularly into the deep ocean that could explain this hiatus.’

‘Likewise, we have insufficient data to establish a relationship between the causes of the warming….There is not enough published literature to allow us to study this.’

So no data.

But plenty of er, less than convincing facts from the BBC.

So there are some very major questions to be raised about the ‘facts’ presented to us by the IPCC and unquestioned by the BBC…Sheila Fogarty aside.

The IPCC has no proof that the oceans are absorbing the heat and yet the BBC has now started broadcasting it as fact, the IPCC cannot prove that CO2 is the cause of global warming, they cannot explain the ‘Pause’, they ignore the inconvenient Medieval Warm Period which completely destroys their argument, they do not explain the inconsistencies in the supposedly linear relationship between CO2 and temperatures rising when that doesn’t happen. They cannot explain why when CO2 levels are rising rapidly, at their highest level for 800,000 years temperatures are static.

At the end of the day it maybe that the earth is warming naturally as it continues to emerge from the last ice age….and that manmade particles from fires etc slowed that warming….and when clean air legislation was introduced those particles which reflected sunlight and kept us cool vanished…and the natural warming continued apace.

As they admit they have no idea how much effect aerosols have on temperature so you have to assume such a scenario hasn’t been properly investigated.

Ironically the reduction of fossil fuel burning and cleaning up of the air in order to reduce warming could in fact raise temperatures.

Well..maybe.  It’s an amusing thought.

Quite a few questions any good environmental journalist would like to get his teeth into…unless of course he supinely rolls over and has his stomach tickled by the IPCC like any good little lapdog would.

The BBC’s Patrician Elite

 

That old anarchist has blown his cover now the shackles are off. 

Paul Mason has stuck the knife into the BBC:

A ‘patrician elite at the BBC is failing audiences’: Former editor claims  executives are more worried about ‘messing up’ than making interesting programmes

  • Paul Mason was Newsnight’s economics editor for more than a decade
  • He’s warned websites like Twitter could become ‘more believable’ than the BBC because they are more receptive to corrections from readers

 

The BBC is led by a ‘patrician elite’ that fails to listen to its audiences, one of its former editors has claimed.

Paul Mason – who was Newsnight’s economics editor for more than a decade – warned websites like Wikipedia and Twitter could soon become ‘more believable’ than BBC News because they are more receptive to corrections from readers.

‘To many people Wikipedia is news; Twitter is a news service. Our problem is when Wikipedia and Twitter become more believable than the BBC because they sound more authentic. Or because they are better peer-reviewed in real time: ‘that’s wrong, change it’. They are both subject to more peer-review than BBC output.’

 

 

 

The BBC And Ed Miliband In The Same Boat

 

 

 

BBC promotes ‘elitist’ view of sailing, says Sir Robin Knox-Johnston (from August)

“Come on BBC get that ridiculous elitist smear out of your thinking and support our young athletes in the maritime field.

“We were, at one time, a maritime nation but it’s impossible to engender interest in marine matters when our public broadcaster is so uninterested.”

 

The BBC ignored that….and only invited him in for an interview after Miliband’s little quip.

 

From the Telegraph (Reporting on Knox Johnston’s appearance on the Today programme):

During his address to his party in Brighton this week, the Labour leader argued that the economic recovery was only helping the elite, saying: “They used to say ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’. Now the rising tide just seems to lift yachts.”

But Sir Robin Knox Johnston denied the sport was as exclusive as the quip implied, insisting it had a broad appeal.

“It’s absolute nonsense. It’s not elitist at all.”

Sir Robin, who in 1968 became the first man to perform a single-handed non-stop circumnavigation of the globe, last month attacked the BBC for promoting a similar view of his sport and failing to give it sufficient coverage.

In a letter to Yachting World, he wrote: “It’s a sad reflection on the attitudes of our publicly owned national broadcaster that it can consistently refuse to provide coverage for one of the largest and most successful sports in the country.

“Without the oxygen of publicity our young sailors battle to find the sponsorship they need to compete at an international level.”

 

 

The BBC then published this after the Today interview:

Yachting ‘not just for posh people’

Sir Robin Knox Johnston, one of Britain’s most successful sailors and the first person to sail solo non-stop around the world, said people had got the wrong idea about the sport.

“I could run a yacht for less than it’ll cost you to watch a football team for a year,” he said.

 

 

Note they make absolutely no mention of his reference to the BBC’s part in demonising yachting as ‘elitist’ in his interview in August.

 

 

BBC SOAPBOX FOR BULLIES….

I had the misfortune to watch this classic piece of bullying from Alastair Campbell on Newsnight last evening. In my view, Maitlis let Campbell control the “debate”, she permitted hectoring, outrageous allegations and vicious ad hominem. Why? Because Campbell was saying what the BBC believe. I had an exchange myself with Campbell earlier today on Twitter. I suspect he is not a fan of me or this website.

Len McCluskey Tells Us The Daily Mail Was Correct

 

 

The BBC did another little puff piece in Ed Miliband’s favour:

Do people get their politics from their parents?

For some reason the lead in photo was this:

Statue of George W Bush and George HW Bush

 

That aside they come to the conclusion the Ed Miliband apple fell quite far from the Marxist family tree:

“There’s a volume of literature that says the more politicised your parents are, the more likely you are to become a politically engaged adult – but you’re also more likely to abandon your parents’ views,” he adds.

If true, this implies the best way to pass on your political opinions to your offspring is to keep quiet about them. In the Miliband household, this evidently wasn’t an option.

 

However also in Ed’s defence they perhaps foolishly linked to a speech by Len McCluskey:

Unite general secretary Len McCluskey once joked that Ralph Miliband “spent his life trying to convince our movement that there was no possibility of a parliamentary road to socialism, while his sons have been loyally putting theory into practice, and proving Ralph right”.

 

It was of course the Ralph Miliband Lecture.

 

It was foolish because it allows us to see exactly what McCluskey intends and where he gets his inspiration from….no need to guess…Ralph Miliband.

 

And who is the major donor to Ed Miliband’s Labour Party funds, who controls many Labour MP’s, who allegedly tried to rig the Falkirk elections?

The Unite Union.

 

This is how he started off:

 

‘Let me start on my subject, working-class politics in the contemporary world, with a quote from Ralph Miliband:

“All concepts of politics, of whatever kind, are about conflict──how to contain it, or abolish it.”

Let’s not pretend that we are “one nation”, or that we will become one without the conflict that Ralph Miliband placed at the heart of politics.

So if we are on a march towards “one nation” and ultimately “one world”, it is a road that leads through struggle and conflict.

 

 

What sort of Democracy does McCluskey believe in?  It would seem the power of  union militancy, strikes, ‘direct action’ and protest….

Guess he doesn’t mean to go down the road of bothering with elections if he can’t fix the candidate list.

He tells us exactly what he means by Democracy….

 

We are taught to believe that democracy is the cornerstone of a modern civilised society; but our Lords and Masters want to define democracy, limiting us to an ‘X’ on a Ballot Paper every 5 years.

This is not my definition of democracy.

They tell us strike action, civil disobedience, direct action and protest are all somehow unpatriotic.

Our history tells us they are not.

That is because our rulers are deeply afraid of Ralph Miliband’s assertion that politics is about conflict.

 

There will be those here tonight waiting to hear my message to the Labour Party.

Well I won’t disappoint. Here it is:

Put simply, workers need a voice, and they should not be taken for granted.

Whatever the upshot of electoral politics, working-class politics must grow and develop, based on the socialist education Ralph Miliband called for.

 

 

So let’s get that straight….McCluskey, Ed Miliband’s paymaster, the one who calls the tune in the Labour Party, is demanding they adopt Ralph Miliband’s Socialist Vision?

 

Strange that whoever in the BBC plucked out the one quote that they thought would be useful to Miliband but ignored the utterly damning 90% of the speech.

 

In other words the Mail was right to raise Ralph Miliband’s politics…they could have an enormous baring on events.

Hilarious….The Dark Side of The Daily Mirror’s Fascist Past

 

Many in the BBC frequently denounce the Daily Mail for having supported the Blackshirts, and proclaim it a right wing paper…..not so keen to similarly denounce the Mirror for the same past errors:

On Monday, 22 January, 1934 the Mirror ran the headline “Give the Blackshirts a helping hand”. The paper went one further than the Mail, urging readers to join Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, and giving the address to which to send membership applications. 

The Mirror’s Sunday sister paper, then known as The Pictorial, followed up with a Hello!-style picture essay showing uniformed blackshirt paramilitaries playing table tennis and enjoying a sing-song around the piano while off duty inside the Black House, Mosley’s barracks-cum-dungeon on London’s King’s Road.

 

The now editor of the Daily Mirror declares that this is irrelevant…there are no relatives of Lord Rothermere running the Mirror now…..

 The thing is the Left have always used the ‘smear’ of the Daily Mail’s ‘flirtation’ with Fascism as a stick to beat it with….not just now as a reaction to the Mail’s attack on Miliband…so it is hypocritical of them to now claim that article ‘offends the British sense of fair play’ when they have been doing exactly the same thing for years now.

 

Even the Guardian must be in two minds about all the fuss after publishing this in 2011:

Don’t damn the Daily Mail for its fascist flirtation 80 years ago

The Mail was not the only paper to carry articles supporting Oswald Mosley‘s blackshirts. The Daily Mirror did too.

In January 1934, he wrote – under his own byline – articles that appeared in both the Mail and the Mirror. The former was headlined “Hurrah for the Blackshirts”. The latter was headlined “Give the Blackshirts a helping hand.”