The BBC One News at One bulletin today featured another negative report about Brexit.
The item was introduced as follows:
The fashion industry is big business for the UK, bringing in around £28 billion into the economy. But as London Fashion Week prepares to welcome visitors from 58 countries some industry experts have expressed concern about the impact Brexit could have on the industry's global status. Well, Emma Simpson has been in Soho to see Fashion Week get underway....
According to Emma Simpson, "the real talking point here is what will Brexit mean for British fashion". [Really, Emma?]
After one pro-Remain designer, Anya Hindmarch, admitted that the cheap pound, post-referendum, has boosted trade at the moment, it was then straight onto the negatives (when the vast bulk of Emma Simpson's report lay) - "But this industry is worried about the potential downsides" - and then specifically onto the main concern: the possible stopping of free movement.
Caroline Rush of the British Fashion Council argued that it's vital that talent from abroad can continue to come here, and then Emma introduced us to Roksanda, a very successful designer and led her along a particular path:
Emma: She's Serbian but her fast-growing business is British. She came here to study and never looked back, now dressing some of the world's most famous women.
Roksanda: I came to London from Serbia because I was so inspired with all the incredible imagination that is coming from London. And I think that London is still a little melting pot of ideas. Huge innovations, pushing the boundaries are what fashion needs.
Emma: Would you be where you are today if you hadn't been able to come to London?
Roksanda: Definitely not. And this is a very straightforward answer.
Emma Simpson end her report by saying that the fashion is is "determi best of Brexit" before adding, in a more downbeat tone of voice, "whatever that may bring".
Woe, woe and thrice woe!
Incidentally, as others have spotted, Serbia isn't a member of the EU. Roksanda didn't come here, settle down and build her successful business in this country because of the UK's membership of the EU and EU free movement rules, despite what Emma's viewers doubtless took her to be suggesting here.
In fact, it looks here as if the BBC's Emma Simpson herself simply assumed that Serbia is in the EU and that Roksanda must have come to the UK because of the UK and Serbia's 'joint membership of the EU' - which would be a pretty basic error on a BBC reporter's part.
It could be taken as just another moment of BBC pro-rapid, mass immigration, but the topic was Brexit so the obvious conclusion meant to be drawn is that the Serbian woman was a Britain-in-the-EU success story. They'll deny it, of course.
ReplyDeletePS: Welcome back. Have you seen the execrable BBC News special report, "The Lost Streets of Chicago"?
http://hotair.com/archives/2016/09/13/bbc-video-lost-streets-chicago/
Apparently, America's obsession with guns and out-of-control gun culture has caused gang-ridden areas of Chicago to be suddenly flooded with guns, causing them to have no choice but to kill more of each other over the last decade or so than US soldiers have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Completely out of the black youths' control, it seems.
Even with some of the strictest gun control laws in the country (which the BBC forgot to mention), they're forced to slaughter each other as if they were in the great Chow Yun Fat gangster film, "Killer". The feature gun-toting family man - an Iraq veteran, so he has absolute moral authority on guns and violence - opined that the troubles all started "when they took the gang leaders out". No, the BBC didn't bother to find out what that meant, and I sure as hell don't know. In Chicago, the gang leaders work closely with some of the politicians.
Americans and their stupid guns, eh? Oh, and spot the missing political party which has been running Chicago since 1927, and for the last four years has been run by the first black President's former chief of staff. No, they weren't mentioned either.
This was just an eleven-minute shroud waving. The least investigative or curious special report I've ever seen. It was more like the maudlin, sensationalist ratings-fodder they do on the big three American networks.
That's probably Ian Pannell and cameraman Darren Conway going after their third David Bloom Award for Frontline Reporting.
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