"We need a mass migration management within the EU"

My goodness, today's Dateline London was fun, for those of us who like such things! (All seven of us probably.)

It was a rather intense battle between the soft-left and the hard-left over the Calais crisis, Jeremy Corbyn and Cecil the Lion. 

In the left-liberal corner stood Michael Goldfarb of Politics Europe and in the hard-left corner stood Owen Jones of The Guardian. Marc Roche of Le Point sided with Owen Jones. The two BBC attendees, Gavin Esler and BBC Turkish correspondent Safak Timur, split - with Gavin going (as ever) with Michael Goldfarb and Safak going with Owen Jones and Marc Roche. 

(Of course, no right-wingers were present at this BBC-organised party.)

It was such a bizarrely-skewed panel that I found myself having to agree with Michael Goldfarb and Gavin Esler. 

Michael Goldfarb took on Owen Jones when young Owen began moaning about David Cameron's use of 'swarm', saying that the Left should stop behaving like children over such things. Owen promptly shouted him down. Gavin Esler later forced Owen to make an abrupt side-swerve by saying that calling Blairites a "virus" (as one pro-Jeremy Corbyn union leader had done) was no different to calling those migrants a "swarm".

As a blogger about BBC bias, however, my interest mainly lies with the BBC contributors' contributions.

Gavin, as I say, went with Michael Goldfarb's easy-going, left-leaning flow, but it was the contributions of Safak Timur of the BBC's Turkish Service today (during the non-lion-related bits) that struck me as particularly interesting [indeed, on the effects of mass immigration on Turkey, very interesting]).

However, some of Safak's contributions were very BBC in spirit. On Jeremy Corbyn, her only contribution was to cite a 14-year-old girl she'd read about in The Guardian [yep!] saying that the sainted Jeremy spoke to her generation. On the Calais situation, she backed Marc Roche and Owen Jones in calling for an EU-wide fair-sharing of the migration load [which, from their conversation, entails all of us in the UK taking our 'fair share' above all]:

I'm kind of really with Marc on that point. We need a mass migration management within the EU, so EU countries should help others to solve the problem.

Ah, BBC reporters and their opinions! 

On Cecil the Lion, Gavin got Owen Jones to wring his hands about it by baiting him with a bit of class war. Young Owen at first felt that the media attention on poor Cecil was out of proportion and that we should be focusing much more on the human suffering of those migrants trying to enter Britain. Gavin, however, got him to worry that rich people are doing wicked things. 

And then everyone laughed at Putin's topless poses.

Ah, happy days!


P.S. For lovers of silly Twitter complaints about #bbcbias, here's another gem (from one of that hashtag's more regular contributors):