“You can either wage Jihad by the tongue and by the mouth – that is ideological jihad – or by the hand and the sword. Those are the official categories of jihad…..And jihad by the hand and the sword can be done here in France [& the UK] with cars and knives.”  BBC

This is a post just to remind ourselves, and to inform the next post, about what kind of person Sadiq Khan is and the lies, hypocrisy and appeasement of Muslim extremism, the playing of the race card, that someone, Yvette Cooper, who might very well be the next leader of the Labour Party, used to deal with those she opposed……and what all this means for Western civilisation, no less.

Sadiq Khan had close links to some extreme-minded people and once said that Muslims who work with the government to tackle Muslim terrorism were ‘Uncle Toms’.  Yvette Cooper criticised Corbyn during her bid for the Labour leadership for his links to extremists saying it gave legitimacy to such people…she then proceeded to accuse Zac Goldsmith of racism when he said the same thing about Khan associating in public with extremists.

Here is Cooper in the Telegraph laying into Corbyn….

She is not prepared to stay silent, she says, while Mr Corbyn sends out an ambiguous message about Labour’s stance towards extremism.

Ms Cooper is particularly horrified at the stance he took in support of the hate preacher, Raed Salah. Britain tried to deport him for “virulent anti-Semitism” while Mr Corbyn described him as an “honoured citizen” who should be allowed to stay.

“I think we have to be very firm about the fact that those who are involved in terrorism, or extremism or anti-Semitic abuse, you shouldn’t be legitimising them, or inviting them to parliament, or those kinds of things. The Labour Party should not be associated with Salah in any way.”

All change though…..Here she is attacking Tory Zac Goldsmith for using a tactic he could very well have copied from her….

Zac Goldsmith’s dog-whistle is becoming a racist scream

Anyone who thought the nasty party was dead has been proved wrong by Zac Goldsmith’s desperate campaign for the London Mayoralty.

Rather than try to persuade Londoners with a positive vision, the Goldsmith campaign is increasingly resorting to disgraceful, divisive tactics as the polls show the Tories falling further behind.

What started as a subtle dog-whistle is becoming a full blown racist scream.

Michael Fallon has attacked Sadiq as a “Labour lackey” who supports extremists. And in the last few days we’ve seen Michael Gove, Theresa May, and Boris Johnson each try to link Sadiq in people’s minds with Islamist extremism in different and deeply dodgy ways.

It’s the campaigning equivalent of pointing and shouting ‘don’t vote for him, he’s a Muslim’ – a nasty approach straight from the Lynton Crosby playbook.

Plenty of sensible Tories have been appalled. Baroness Warsi tweeted: “If Sadiq Khan isn’t an acceptable enough Muslim 2 stand for London mayor, which Muslim is?”

Shazia Awan, a former Conservative Parliamentary candidate described the Tory campaign as “‘divisive’, ‘colonial’, ‘sectarian’ and the return of the ‘nasty party”.

Hang on though…..Goldsmith didn’t actually attack Khan for being ‘Muslim’, he attacked him for associating, again and again and again, with extremist Muslims….it was Khan himself who campaigned ‘as a Muslim’…and indeed tried to do so as the anti-extremist candidate…so Goldsmith was right to tackle the hypocrisy and lack of judgement of a man who said he was against extremism and yet who shared the same platform with extremists again and again…..and who called ‘moderate Muslims’ Uncle Toms……so, if anyone, who was the divisive, racist hate monger using ‘fear and innuendo’ to campaign?

Hey @ZacGoldsmith. There’s no need to keep pointing at me & shouting ‘he’s a Muslim’. I put it on my own leaflets. pic.twitter.com/EGeRXlPWAa

— Sadiq Khan (@SadiqKhan) April 11, 2016

And look….guess who else defends Khan….the BBC’s James O’Brien on his LBC radio show….O’Brien dismisses the criticism of Khan’s use of the phrase as a campaign tactic by the Right…..

And who else doesn’t get it as he tries a bit of moral grandstanding but is on slippery ground?

Trump did a wide-ranging interview with the Associated Press which discussed his first 100 days as President….it was quite clear, lucid and coherent, no doubt as to what he was saying…it all made sense though admittedly the 9/11 comment was always going to be a hostage to fortune.  However there were several occasions when the interview has been marked ‘unintelligible’ where whatever Trump has said cannot be made out or put into words.  The anti-Trump brigade has leapt upon this and almost totally ignored the actual content of the interview whilst raving against a President who is ‘unintelligible’…apparently….well ignore is the wrong word, they address what he says but not in any reasoned or sensible way…it’s merely the usual liberal Trump trauma on show as they blast absolutely anything he says as ‘bonkers’ or lies.

If you actually read the transcript you can see that where it marks something as ‘unintelligible’ it is actually more often than not where someone would naturally pause in a sentence and perhaps make a transitional noise….er’s and umms or where they are trying to think of a suitable word…as they think and move on to a different thought.

It’s not as if no President before has not been so ‘inflicted’ with this terrible problem…

Obama: I think Utah has a pretty good claim. They’re undefeated. And Florida and Oklahoma both are well … (unintelligible).

Obama: Right. Well, by the time that G-20 meeting takes place, we, I believe, will have presented our approach to financial regulation. I think some international coordination has to be done. But right now, we just have to take care … (unintelligible) .

Obama: Well … (unintelligible) … if you look — as you might imagine

Wasn’t it an absolute nightmare that the US had a President for 8 years who was ‘unintelligible’…why, why, why?

Trump’s reached his century and of course they all hate him for it.  Why hasn’t he been assassinated yet?

The BBC has been filling the airwaves with a relentless barrage of anti-Trump sneering and mockery, what’s new?, on Friday we had Malcolm Rifkind deriding Trump and telling us how dangerous he is to the world whilst going on to boast about how wonderful Malcolm Rifkind is because he stopped the Americans interfering in the Balkans…yes what a hero Rifkind is, in his own head…even the Guardian agrees…or not…

The BBC’s News Quiz mocked Ivanka Trump for being booed and jeered at a G20 women’s summit in Berlin as she defended her father’s attitude towards women, the same claim was made on Any Questions…..and on BBC News….

Ivanka Trump booed at women’s summit

Trouble is that’s completely untrue…there may have been a few groans but no booing or jeering as the BBC suggests….which is odd really as the BBC has put a video out on Youtube which tells the truth…..

Groans at Ivanka at G20 women’s summit – BBC News

So on the mainstream BBC news and on its ‘comedy’ shows there is a narrative that there was a loud, angry and indignant reaction to Ivanka’s comments when that is just not true….it was merely a few mutterings from the crowd.

BBC spreading fake news just because it’s Trump?  Of course they are.  Why change a habit so ingrained it’s absolutely natural to them.

From Bild….

There was no booing of Ivanka

At the “Women20 Summit”, there was in fact a moment during the panel discussion when the audience began murmuring. Panel moderator Miriam Meckel asked Ivanka whether she was speaking as the First Lady – in Melania Trump’s place – or as the new advisor to the President. Ivanka replied in a disarmingly honest way:  “This role is quite new to me, it has been little under 100 days.” She said that she would be happy to bring what she learned here home with her and that she would discuss it with her father.

She also said: “I am very proud of my father. Long before he came into the presidency, he has been a tremendous champion of supporting families and enabling them to thrive.”

At this point, there was some unrest in the audience. There was no booing or heckling at all, however.

Despite Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, suggesting the NHS is Labour’s “comfort zone” at a speech in London on Saturday, 43 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement: “Theresa May and the Conservatives would do a better job than Jeremy Corbyn and Labour managing the NHS this winter”. Around 30 per cent agreed that Mr Corbyn and Labour would do a better job than the Tories, while 26 per cent responded “don’t know”.

 

Apparently the Tories are now more trusted on the NHS than Labour.  Perhaps that’s why the BBC is blitzing us with so many tales of crisis in the NHS just now…and hardly blinking as ‘Big Pharma’ tried to blackmail the government into spending more on its drugs demanding £20 billion be pumped into the NHS or else….Normally ‘Big Pharma’ is the evil face of capitalism writ large…not now, during an election, as it demands more money for the NHS.

The Tories introduced the Cancer Drug Fund in 2010 to provide drugs that were not considered to be the most cost effective by NICE to patients.  Today the BBC has been bombarding us with loud criticism of the fund from the Prof. Richard Sullivan who tells us that the fund is an expensive and maybe even dangerous waste of time…

The Cancer Drugs Fund in England was a “huge waste of money” and may have caused patients to suffer unnecessarily from the side effects of the drugs, according to UK researchers.

The fund ran from 2010 to 2016, costing £1.27bn, following an election promise made by the Conservatives to pay for cancer drugs the NHS was not funding.

The choice of words by Sullivan indicates this attack on the Tory policy is highly political….

‘A huge waste of money’…’patients suffering unnecessarily.

“policy on the hoof” because of the way it was announced.

“Populism doesn’t work when you are dealing with complex areas of policy like this. When it was launched it was not monitored properly. It was politically and intellectually lazy.”

‘Populism’?  Hmmm…it has been the BBC itself that has helped drive politicians to take such measures.  The BBC has relentlessly given a platform to campaigners who demand drugs that NICE would not approve and fund….the BBC has provided massive publicity and backing for these campaigns…and undoubtedly half those radio awards that Victoria Derbyshire got, who specialised in these sort of stories, were for such reports.  The BBC has driven that ‘populism’.

You might also ask why this has suddenly made the news headlines….because this study by Sullivan was released in March this year….and only now making BBC headlines as an election is under way……any chance this is a bit of flagrant opportunism by Sullivan who knows that the BBC will lap this stuff up and give it an enormous profile?…Whatever you think of the CDF the criticism here is politically motivated, certainly by the BBC….

Do patient access schemes for high-cost cancer drugs deliver value to society?—lessons from the NHS Cancer Drugs Fund

Boris is in the BBC’s bad books, as usual…he’s insulted and demeaned poor old mugwump Corbyn…have to say his humorous description was perfectly apt describing Corbyn’s naive and gormless operating style to a T.  The BBC of course would never stoop to such mockery…..despite having spent years abusing Boris, and indeed once calling him a ‘nasty piece of work’…not much humour there….and of course spending the last two years deriding, mocking and insulting Trump…the sneering is of course ongoing.

Emma Barnett told us Boris was a ‘joke’ for saying such a terribly demeaning thing about Corbyn….not herself seeing the hypocrisy in her claims as she uses a personal insult to criticise him.

Then there’s UKIP and their ban on Burkas….the BBC can’t help reporting, again and again, that ‘people think they are racist, Islamophobic, nazis and BNP-like’…..never mind Merkel has just announced something similar…and of course France has its own ban….

Germany agrees to ban female civil servants, judges and soldiers from wearing the full-face burka at work

A draft law to ban German civil servants, judges and soldiers from wearing full-face burkas at work has been agreed by the country’s parliament.

The move comes after Chancellor Angela Merkel called in December for a ban on full-face Muslim veils ‘wherever legally possible’.

The BBC has also spent the day mocking Trump for his ‘achievements’ in his first 100 days in power…never once admitting that he had 95% of the media against him as well as the Democrats and much of his own party, never mind a good portion of the intelligence and security agencies and Democratically aligned Establishment…including politically motivated judges acting outside their powers.  Personally I think Trump has done pretty well and certainly put America back on the map internationally in so many respects.

And what did Obama achieve?  Obamacare…..and that was forced through by Democrat shenannigans…To quote Democrat Rep. Alcee Hastings of the House Rules Committee during the bill process: “We’re making up the rules as we go along.”…The American system of governance was shafted.

How Obamacare Became Law

It was the trickiest legislative move ever accomplished in the Congress.  Here’s my best play-by-play:

Obamacare was signed into law in March 2010.  If you recall, Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic majority in the House of Representatives was unable to pass their version of a healthcare law. Because all revenue bills have to originate in the House, the Senate found a bill that met those qualifications: HR3590, a military housing bill. They essentially stripped the bill of its original language and turned it into the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), aka Obamacare.

The Senate at that time had 60 Democrats, just enough to pass Obamacare.  However after the bill passed the Senate, Democrat Senator Ted Kennedy died.  In his place, Massachusetts elected Republican Scott Brown.  That meant that if the House made any changes to the bill the Senate wouldn’t have the necessary number of votes to pass the amended bill (because they knew no Republicans would vote for Obamacare).  So Senate Leader Harry Reid cut a deal with Pelosi: the House would pass the Senate bill without any changes if the Senate agreed to pass a separate bill by the House that made changes to the Senate version of Obamacare.  This second bill was called the Reconciliation Act of 2010. So the House passed PPACA, the Senate bill, as well as their Reconciliation Act. At this point PPACA was ready for the President to sign, but the Senate still needed to pass the Reconciliation Act from the House.

Confused?

We all were.

And it got worse.

Remember that the Senate only had 59 votes to pass the Reconciliation Act since Republican Scott Brown replaced Democrat Ted Kennedy.  Therefore in order to pass the Act Senate Democrats decided to change the rules.  They declared that they could use the “Reconciliation Rule (this is a different “reconciliation” than the House bill).  This rule was only supposed to be used for budget item approvals so that such items could be passed with only 51 votes in the Senate, not the usual 60.  Reconciliation was never intended to be used for legislation of the magnitude of Obamacare. But that didn’t stop them.

So both of the “Acts” were able to pass both houses of Congress and sent to President Obama for his signature without a single Republican vote in favor of the legislation.  The American system of governance was shafted.  To quote Democrat Rep. Alcee Hastings of the House Rules Committee during the bill process: “We’re making up the rules as we go along.”

The BBC is up to its usual tricks doubling up on ‘disaster’.  The GDP figures were out yesterday and showed a slight slow down….this ‘disaster’ the BBC has been trumpeting all day in every bulletin is because of inflation, due to the pound falling, due to Brexit.  They topped off the narrative, just in case you hadn’t got the message, with a clip of Sturgeon telling us we’re all doomed, doomed she tells you!!  Not at all sure why the BBC chose someone who has such a vested interest in stirring up trouble to comment on something that needs sensible, expert comment rather than shrill, highly political ranting other than they could guarantee she would provide the necessary anti-Brexit angry bombast.

When the news is good you don’t hear a peep out of the BBC let alone a day long blaring prophecy of coming apocalypse that is the usual BBC soundtrack to the slightest bad news.

Britain is still doing better than most countries and what the BBC bulletins weren’t letting on is that the vast majority of inflation [over two thirds] is due to international commodities rising and the price of oil increasing due to OPEC pumping out more as they failed to destroy the US fracking industry in the economic war the Muslim oil countries launched against the US.

The BBC’s reluctance to admit that is strange as they said this about the cause of Europe’s rising inflation in March…

Eurozone inflation has risen above the European Central Bank’s (ECB) target rate for the first time in four years.

The increase in inflation is largely due to rising energy prices, and analysts do not expect the ECB to alter its current stimulus programme.

However Britain’s inflation is due to Brexit, the fall in GDP due to shoppers ‘tightening their belts’ as Brexit hits them in the bank balance…they are feeling the pinch as they also feel the squeeze….

UK growth slows as shoppers tighten belts

Consumers have been feeling the pinch since the beginning of 2017, with inflation sitting at its joint highest level for more than three years at 2.3% in March.

The squeeze on household spending power has led to weaker retail sales, which recorded their biggest fall for seven years in the three months to March.

The BBC’s interpretation, that this is ‘belt tightening’, consumers ‘feeling the pinch’ or a ‘squeeze’ on household spending’ is just that, an interpretation….compound that with the fact that inflation is mostly due to world price factors and not Brexit and you have a very skewed and political picture being painted by the BBC….consider this…look how the BBC explains away the fall in US growth and then comes back with a much more positive picture for later in the year….and yet no Brexit and no rapidly falling dollar……

US growth rate hits three-year low

The US economy slowed dramatically in the first three months of the year, according to official data.

GDP expanded at an annual rate of 0.7% in the first quarter – the slowest rate since the first quarter of 2014.

The slowdown was down to stagnant consumer spending, economists said.

“Household spending was held down by a drop back in motor vehicle sales from a near-record high at the end of last year and the unseasonably warm winter weather, which depressed utilities spending,” said Paul Ashworth, chief US economist at Capital Economics.

But there’s a bounce later in the year….

The Trump administration may be reassured by the trend in recent years for growth figures to be depressed in the first quarter, but then pick up later in the year.

“US GDP figures are typically weaker in the first quarter, so this reading is in line with the seasonal trend,” said Nancy Curtin, chief investment officer at Close Brothers Asset Management.

But he thinks consumer spending will “rebound” as personal income showed healthy growth and data suggests that consumer confidence remains high.

Close Brothers’ Ms Curtin also pointed out that other data suggested strength in the US economy .

The weekend approaches and so we have a NEW Open thread on which YOU can detail the rancid bias of the BBC.

Interesting how some very political stories are being given a very high prominence by the BBC….of course they make no mention of the election but you know that the reason they are running these stories is because they want to promote Corbyn [well, Labour] and damn the government.  Many interest groups know this and are queuing up to get some airtime with their tales of woe.

A couple of weeks ago the police were making a lot of noise about lack of funding and the BBC gave them plenty of airtime, and today we have the BBC telling us of an alarming rise in violent crime, a very recent rise after 20 years of crime falling they are keen to mention.  The BBC rely on police figures for this but also at the end of their reports reveal that the British Crime Survey says crime levels are actually static.  Why is that of interest?  Because the BBC has changed its tune…Mark Easton used to bang on about the British Crime Survey telling us it was far more reliable than the police figures which, he told us, couldn’t be relied upon because the basis for their collection was constantly changing whereas the BCS never changed, it was he said ‘a thing of beauty…unchanging, reliable, representative, independent and informative’.  Trouble is that was wrong.  The BCS changed all the time in how they gathered their data…the computers systems changed, the software changed, the company that ran it changed…and Easton trumpeted the fact that this was a survey of 40,000 people…but in fact of that only around 1,500 of these crime reports were counted once the unreliable ones were filtered out…and who made the final decision as to what counted as a crime in these surveys?  The Home Office…hardly impartial.  Easton was of course countering claims by the Tories that violent crime was going up under Labour….Easton was defending Labour….but now the BBC suddenly has a preference for the police figures….must be an election coming and the Tories are responsible for a rise in violent crime…as made clear by Police figures, says BBC.  In 2010 Easton told us that the BCS was  ‘regarded as the best measure of crime trends.’

How about the NHS?  In the run up to the Stoke and Copeland by-elections the BBC was hitting the airwaves hard with tales of an NHS in crisis, the day before Corbyn was due to go on PMQs the BBC released a survey that condemned the government…Corbyn used that on PMQs…and Labour ran its campaign in Stoke and Copeland based on the NHS……any thought that the BBC were working hand in hand with Labour to help them out in the by-election and are now doing the same during the general election?

We have had blasts from junior doctors, again no direct link to the election was made and yet we know that was the intent.  The other day the BBC hit the A&E wards and we were told that it had never been as bad as this in 20 years and was ‘dangerous’…absolutely no reference as to why there may be problems at A&E such as a massive increase in patients from around 14 million in 2004 to over 22 million now and seemed to take no account of the fact that the Tories are putting in more money than Labour said they would at the last election and indeed Burnham said he would cut not raise spending in 2010…

Curb NHS spending pledge to save other services, says Andy Burnham

Schools and social care ‘could be badly hit’ by plans to increase health spending year on year, says shadow health secretary

Conservatives ‘irresponsible’ to oppose cuts to NHS: Andy Burnham

Andy Burnham, Health Secretary has accused the Conservatives of being irresponsible by pledging to reverse cuts and changes to A&E and children’s services in the NHS.

Will the BBC be asking Labour if its plans now to massively increase spending will come at the cost of other services such as schools and social care?  Irresponsible?

Today Guido has a perfect example of how the BBC engineers the debate by using supposedly neutral commentators who turn out to be hard-line activists…

BBC’s ‘Community Nurse’ is Prolific Corbynista Campaigner

Yesterday evening the BBC News Channel interviewed nurse Danielle Tiplady live in her NHS uniform. The on-screen caption described her only as a “community nurse“. Tiplady was highly critical of the government on NHS workers’ pay: “I know one friend for example who’s being forced to sell her flat because she cannot survive on a nurses’s salary.” The implication was that this is an ordinary nurse speaking on behalf of her colleagues…

Tiplady’s appearance was subsequently clipped and shared on Jeremy Corbyn’s official social media channels. The optics of an ordinary, uniformed nurse criticising the government would, of course, be irresistible for Labour. But neither the BBC nor Team Jez mentioned that Tiplady is far from your average nurse. While softly spoken on the news, Tiplady is, in fact, a vociferous hard-left campaigner…

• Until recently Tiladay’s Twitter account used the name “Danielle vote Labour”.
• Her bio still contains a heart emoji for the Labour Party.
• She has addressed dozens of protest rallies where her favourite chant is “Tories out!”.
• Addressed a CND rally alongside Corbyn while a student nurse at Kings College London.
• Writes for “revolutionary socialist website” Counterfire.
• Writes for the communist Morning Star.
• She is a leader of the “sack Jeremy Hunt” Bursary or Bust campaign.

Just the usual lack of due diligence by the BBC when finding someone to comment on highly political issues.

Reference Mark Easton’s attack on the Tories during the 2010 election.….in 2010 police figures bad, BCS good….now in 2017, police figures [saying violent crime rising] is good, BCS [saying crime static] not so good….

New figures released today have thrown an incendiary into the election debate on violent crime.

Analysis of hospital data for England and Wales, by academics at Cardiff University [191KB PDF], shows there were 64,000 fewer violence-related attendances in emergency departments last year than in 2001 – a fall of just over 15%.

This contrasts with Conservative claims that violent crime has increased by 44% since 2002. It also appears to contradict Liberal Democrat analysis that hospital admissions for assault are rising.

The BCS, which identifies more than twice as many crimes as the recorded statistics, asks more than 40,000 people each year about their experiences of violence and is regarded as the best measure of crime trends. It suggests the number of victims of violence has halved since 1995.

Police records of violence are thought more unreliable because they are affected by people’s willingness to report crimes, police activity and changes to methodology.

Or this…once again telling us not to trust the police figures and to rely on the BCS…

Want crime trends? Just ask people

Recorded crime figures have always been a lousy way to identify crime trends. They are really a measure of police activity, their priorities and the confidence of the public to report crime.

Now we know that the statistics watchdog doesn’t trust the police recorded crime figures, what faith can we have that crime really has been falling for the past 20 years?

The answer is plenty.

The UK Statistics Authority has said that police recorded crime data in England and Wales should no longer be designated as National Statistics because of accumulating evidence that they may be unreliable.

o how can we be confident about crime trends? Well, at a very local level it is hard but at a force or national level there is a much better way to measure what crime is really like.

Ask people.

Each year for more than 30 years, something like 40,000 people in England and Wales have been asked how crime has affected them in the previous 12 months.

The British Crime Survey (now the Crime Survey of England and Wales or CSEW) is a world-renowned invention. Using robust statistical modelling, it identifies far more crimes than are recorded by the police.

A supposed journalist, Jack Pitts from WalesOnline, who doesn’t want to talk to one of the most controversial figures in the UK even though he is happy to write stories about him behind his back and libelling him as being ‘Far Right’……astonishing…a story turns up on your doorstep and you turn it down.  Journalist or gossip columnist?

Definitely one for IPSO if not the courts….thanks to Mice Height for this….

Presumably Tommy Robinson is complaining about this report in Wales on Line which tells of a group of Muslims who wanted to talk to him…he is up for it and invited them to come with him…but they refused to get in the van and then accused Robinson of having run away….when he clearly hadn’t and was more than ready too talk….Robinson prepared to talk but a journalist is unwilling to talk and back up his own claim that Robinson is ‘Far Right’…..

This is what happened when a Swansea Muslim confronted a former leader of the far right EDL

Oh the irony….Pitts reports with glee of this ‘confrontation’ but when it comes to himself he clams up and refuses point blank to explain himself.