A catch-up

He may no longer bat for the BBC, but it's always good to catch up with old friends. Here's that oh-so-nice Gavin Esler again, literally comparing The Brexit Party to the Nazis: 

I’n [sic] just surprised that the Brexit party so shamelessly copied the Nazi party in turning its back in an elected assembly. At least we now know what we are up against.

Not that Gavin himself is up against them in the EU parliament, what with having failed to be elected in May.

In honour of John Cleese...

Today's news about Change UK losing six of its 11 members calls for a Monty Python Life of Gavin sketch:

HEIDI: Listen. If you wanted to join the The Independent Group you'd have to really hate the Brexiteers.
GAVIN: I do!
HEIDI: Oh, yeah? How much?
GAVIN: A lot!
HEIDI: Right. You're in. Listen. The only people we hate more than the Brexiteers are the effing Change UK.
MIKE: Yeah...
ANNA: (Hic) Splitters.
MIKE: Splitters...
SARAH: And Change Now.
MIKE: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Splitters. Splitters...
ANNA: (Hic) And the Tiggers' Front of Change UK.
MIKE.: Yeah. Splitters. Splitters...
HEIDI: What?
CHRIS: The Tiggers' Front of Change UK. Splitters.
HEIDI: We're The Tiggers' Front of Change UK!
LUCIANA: Oh, I thought we were The Independent Group.
HEIDI: The Independent Group! C-huh.
JOAN: Whatever happened to the Chuka Umunna Independent Change UK Now Group?
CHUKA: I'm over here.

Of course, all I really care about here is where ex-BBC face Gavin Esler ends up? I'm guessing in either the Lib Dems or acting as independent peer Jenny Tonge's butler. 

Confession time

I've been blogging about BBC bias, on and off, for nearly ten years now, and I think it might be starting to skew my political priorities. 

This week's European elections may or may not have transformative effects on UK and EU democracy, but none of that matters to me anywhere near as much as the fate of Change UK's lead candidate in London - ex-BBC megastar Gavin Esler - because I really, truly, madly want him to fail. Hopefully very badly. 

I know I should be ashamed of myself, but if my dream comes true and he loses I'll be cracking open my bottle of Jane Garvey 1997 Vintage Champagne overnight on Sunday night/Monday morning. 

I will now say two dozen Hail Marys. 

‘Village’ and other Idiots

Oh good, there’s an interesting conversation below the line on this blog. It’s about whether it’s completely fair to rip sound-bites out of their intended context, take them down and use them against the suspect, later, as evidence in the court of public opinion. 

There are millions of examples, but let’s take the most notorious one. 

“Friends”. No, not them. Jeremy Corbyn and his friends from Hamas and Hezbollah. He definitely called them friends, but at a stretch, he could have meant it in a general sense, or ironically, as one might refer to an infestation of carpet beetles or rodents. You know, our little friends who invade our homes and chew them to bits.

That is arguable but unlikely. We all know that British irony may be Jeremy Corbyn’s special area of expertise, but let’s face it, irony is not something he’s known to have used himself. He’s just not that witty.

So, taking his overall conduct into account, it’s safe to assume that he really does consider Hamas and Hezbollah as friends - not necessarily in a strictly personal capacity, but ideologically and symbiotically “denoting a mutually beneficial relationship between different people or groups”

Next. 

The red bus. Side of.

 “The Leave campaign promised the NHS 350 million quid per week.” No. Not exactly, but there was an implication, and they should have known better than to lay themselves open to such a meme. Look out for the potential open goal - anticipation is nine-tenths of success. (I made that up, but you get the point) Every fule kno that when one says ‘could’ it is automatically assumed one really means “will”.

“Freddie Starr ate my Hamster.”

Apparently, he didn’t.

Now we have: “Gavin Esler called Leave voters village idiots”. Gavin Esler explained on Daily Politics that he used the term ‘village idiot’ during a conversation about Michael Gove’s comment about ‘experts’. Esler claimed he used the term ‘Village Idiots’ merely to serve as an example of ‘the opposite of ‘experts’,  and specifically to illustrate the type of person who doesn’t merit any air-time at all. Only ‘experts’ deserve air time.

But then someone went and spoiled it all by producing the incriminating Tweet, which did show that he does indeed think of Leave voters as village idiots. “The ‘village idiots’ of Brexit” - there it is in black and white. But wait - there are scare quotes around the damning words.  Does that exonerate Esler?

Personally, I think he really does think of Leave voters as village idiots, on account of umpteen more general indications and clues that that is what he actually thinks. Everything points to it, and if it walks like a duck etc., etc. 

I just think he let it slip accidentally, and tried to row back on it rather ineffectively. That doesn’t mean I approve of the witch-hunt as a means of attack. Not at all. I’m one of your more pedantic observers of what 'words' mean, but I think in most cases the bigger picture rules ok.  Discuss?

Update:
Lo and behold....

A non-sarcastic post

A piece of news tonight...

...and a tweet from former BBC presenter/reporter Gavin Esler...

These two things have jointly spurred me on to totally re-think my world view.

In that spirit I wrote the following earlier this evening:

I see that Turkey's President Erdogan is giving the people of Istanbul a confirmatory vote on their recent municipal election.

That was supposedly 'won' by the opposition CHP (who funds them?) via the so-called ballot box. 

Some might say that Mr. Erdogan is simply re-running the election because he lost and that he's a bad loser and anti-democratic. But, despite all the evidence, that's surely nonsense. He's only re-running the election because he rightly thinks that the people of Istanbul deserve a people's vote and a chance to re-visit their earlier (wrong) decision.

All those anti-Erdogan types claiming that they are the democrats ought to be made to answer this simple question: How can anyone who claims to be a democrat say that re-running an election won by the opposition isn't democratic? What could be more democratic than holding another vote? 

And Turkish TV must stop giving airtime to the 'village idiots' of the CHP - the dubious Gulanist supposed "think tanks" and pseudo-experts among CHP MPs who simply haven't a clue what the implications of not voting for President Erdogan's AK party truly are. (Catastrophe for Turkey).

It would be truly democratic to ban them completely (especially as they are like the Nazis, despite being nothing like the Nazis) so that they can't mislead the public any longer, but excluding them from the airwaves would be a good start, and something a properly impartial media would and should do.

And, pace the BBC's John Simpson regarding the UK's EU referendum, Turkish media should provide "clear guidance about what to do" during public votes, to counter the "lies" of the likes of the CHP. The Turkish media certainly didn't give them clear enough guidance about the lies that were being told by the pro-democracy opposition. I suspect that if people had known the facts and had judged in a more balanced way the outcome would have been a bit different, yes. They let their viewers and listeners down.

*******

So, yes, inspired by former BBC man Gavin Esler, I myself now finally see that democracy means stopping wrong-thinking people from being heard, including 'elected' MPs guilty of bad-thinking.

Like his BBC programme Dateline London in its heyday, a true democracy should carefully control the range of voices allowed and ensure that bad-thinking people are either marginalised or excluded.

Bad-thinking is, by definition, bad. Gavin Esler is a good-thinker and knows what good-thinking is. Therefore, Gavin Esler must know what's right.

And if we disagree and think he's a not as good a thinker as he believes himself to be, well, we should just shut the flip up and simply accept his proposed ban on anyone who thinks too differently from him on the subject dearest to his heart from the BBC's airwaves. Because, obviously, Gavin's a good-thinker.

QED.

I was looking at him speaking at a Change UK rally on my widescreen TV and I gazed up at his enormous face on my screen. Over ten years of blogging it has taken me to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath Gavin's bright-eyed, biased TV persona. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two wine-scented tears are at this very moment trickling down the sides of my nose. But it's all right, everything is all right, the struggle is finished. I've won the victory over myself. I love Gavin Esler.

No more Mr Nice Guy

Gavin 'BBC impartiality' Esler

As regular readers will know, I've spent years on various blogs chronicling in often tedious detail  and, if I may so, proving beyond doubt the chronic left-liberal, pro-EU bias of one particular BBC News Channel programme that barely anyone in the UK actually watches - namely Dateline London. 

For most of those years the programme was hosted by Gavin Esler, whose 'nice' TV persona never entirely disguised the fact that he was a left-liberal, pro-EU presenter heading a left-liberal, pro-EU-biased programme and skewing it towards his own point of view. 

Let's recall again some of Gavin's highlights as a licensed 'impartial' BBC presenter.

And, yes, he also used to brazenly scoff at critics of his 'impartiality' on Twitter during the latter stages of his Dateline days. 

On Donald Trump:

Donald Trump really is a fat-shaming, ill-informed, tax-avoiding misogynist who routinely insults people of other races. Why is this election even close? And why could Mr Trump still win?

On Boris Johnson:

...a man with a reputation for being born with a silver foot in his mouth...

On the EU referendum:

But what you might see is, broadly, the centre-left and the centre-right coalescing on a 'yes' vote and others towards the left and towards the far-right will say 'no'...

On the perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo atrocity:

...fringe figures in French society...two orphans (in) dead end jobs...

On the perpetrators of an Islamist atrocity in Brussels:

You could almost have written the script beforehand in a way: that they were people on the fringes of society with very little stake in that society, which they obviously hate.

On the 2015 migrant crisis:

There's been a lot of talk here and elsewhere about 'pull factors' - why people come - but actually the 'push factors' are the ones that seem to be in the case of the horrible case in Austria and those coming from Syria. That's what's moving people. They're being pushed.

On antisemitism and Islamophobia:

That's a very interesting point, Nesrine, because, in fact, there are a lot of parallels between anti-Semitism historically and Islamophobia now. There's absolutely no question of that. And that's the, quote, "perceived threat" of a particular minority.

On Hillary Clinton:

Hillary, who's one of the brightest women around... 

On immigration:

I've conducted some public meetings and ordinary members of the public have said precisely that, our health service could not exist without people who are migrants.

On Tony Blair and the Chilcot Inquiry:

This inquiry, they ask a question, they get an answer, they move onto something else, and that seems a bit feeble. There are all kinds of problems I've suggested here. There are people who watch this, who just want...who already loathe Tony Blair, and who just want to see that he's got fangs, horns and a tail, and all he said was 'this was a decision, it wasn't a conspiracy, I said pretty much public what I said privately'.

On the EU and Eurosceptics:

One way of looking at it is that Sarkozy and Merkel, and maybe Brown and Berlusconi and the others, want it to be - what did the French used to call it? - a 'union des patries', a union of sovereign states, which is what it is. So it's shot the idea that there's some federal superstate in the offing. I rarely hear the federalist superstate argument except for people who say they're opposed to it. You never hear anyone saying they want it.

All of those quotes came from him whilst he was serving as an 'impartial' BBC Dateline London's presenter.

And here he is today, post-BBC, openly being left-liberal and pro-EU and speaking for 'the entire country':

You could say that he's now 'showing his true colours' but, in truth, he showed them over his many years of hosting Dateline London.

And, despite all my endless chronicling, he got away with it. 

And the BBC got away with it too.

Down Memory Lane with Gavin Esler

If you haven't read it already, David Keighley's latest post at The Conservative Woman is especially worth catching up with -  and not just because it mentions me! 

David takes on Gavin Esler's "avalanche of ad hominem bile" at The New European (something we wrote about last weekend) and notes the former BBC man's "wildly risible pantomime division of the world into heroes and villains". Gavin naturally casts himself among the heroes:

Hero 2: Himself! Esler outlines how he has had a brilliant career in journalism and throughout was ‘accurate, fair and balanced’. But now – thanks to the noble work of Collins & co – it has been revealed that those pillars are cracking because of assaults by those who support views he does not like, such as Brexit, taxpayer-value-for-money, and climate change scepticism. So he – an intrepid warrior for Truth – is valiantly stopping the rot by name-calling.

Here, from the ITBB archives, are just a few of "accurate, fair and balanced" Gavin's strictly impartial bon mots from his glory days on the BBC (especially Dateline London):

On Donald Trump:

Donald Trump really is a fat-shaming, ill-informed, tax-avoiding misogynist who routinely insults people of other races. Why is this election even close? And why could Mr Trump still win?

On Boris Johnson:

...a man with a reputation for being born with a silver foot in his mouth...

On the EU referendum:

But what you might see is, broadly, the centre-left and the centre-right coalescing on a 'yes' vote and others towards the left and towards the far-right will say 'no'...

On the perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo atrocity:

...fringe figures in French society...two orphans (in) dead end jobs...

On the perpetrators of an Islamist atrocity in Brussels:

You could almost have written the script beforehand in a way: that they were people on the fringes of society with very little stake in that society, which they obviously hate.

On the 2015 migrant crisis:

There's been a lot of talk here and elsewhere about 'pull factors' - why people come - but actually the 'push factors' are the ones that seem to be in the case of the horrible case in Austria and those coming from Syria. That's what's moving people. They're being pushed.

On antisemitism and Islamophobia:

That's a very interesting point, Nesrine, because, in fact, there are a lot of parallels between anti-Semitism historically and Islamophobia now. There's absolutely no question of that. And that's the, quote, "perceived threat" of a particular minority.

On Hillary Clinton:

Hillary, who's one of the brightest women around... 

On immigration:

I've conducted some public meetings and ordinary members of the public have said precisely that, our health service could not exist without people who are migrants.

On Tony Blair and the Chilcot Inquiry:

This inquiry, they ask a question, they get an answer, they move onto something else, and that seems a bit feeble. There are all kinds of problems I've suggested here. There are people who watch this, who just want...who already loathe Tony Blair, and who just want to see that he's got fangs, horns and a tail, and all he said was 'this was a decision, it wasn't a conspiracy, I said pretty much public what I said privately'.

On the EU and Eurosceptics:

One way of looking at it is that Sarkozy and Merkel, and maybe Brown and Berlusconi and the others, want it to be - what did the French used to call it? - a 'union des patries', a union of sovereign states, which is what it is. So it's shot the idea that there's some federal superstate in the offing. I rarely hear the federalist superstate argument except for people who say they're opposed to it. You never hear anyone saying they want it.

Update (h/t Peter): And here's what Gavin has been doing today:

Friends Re-United

Mask of impartiality slipping alert!...

And what is it exactly that Newnight's Emily Maitlis thinks her now-openly anti-Brexit former colleague has "nailed" in his article in the anti-Brexit New European and that pro-Brexit Tim so objects to? 

Well, Gavin's piece is a "blast" against the EU referendum result. He used to accept it, despite being a Remain voter, but now he doesn't. And, more importantly, he now rejects the idea of "supposed balance" and, already aghast at the BBC for allowing Lord Lawson onto their airwaves to be 'sceptical' about climate change,  now wants a re-think. He 'sees' that the referendum result was built on lies and manipulation and must be repudiated. Plus the leading Brexiteers are bad people. And the Tax Payers' Alliance are bad people. And so are the IEA. Brexit will make us poor and 'Project Fantasy' must be stopped. Evidently, he wants broadcasters to say so and put the baddies in their place. The mask couldn't be more 'off' with Gavin. 

It's a funny thing. I used to feel a bit silly and unkind for banging on so often about how biased Gavin Esler was on the BBC News Channel, especially on Dateline London Even other stern BBC critics seemed to pass over the mild-mannered Mr Esler (friend and promoter of Palestinian extremist Abdel Bari Atwan, for many years his programme Dateline London's most regular guest). This New European piece of his, therefore, comes as absolutely no surprise to me though it's tone, should you read it, might still shock you - especially if you still think Gavin Esler is simply a nice, moderate, inoffensive guy. This is not a nice piece. (Check out his bit on Chloe Westley of the TPA if you still doubt that).

Still, that's not what matters. Gavin is gone from the BBC. Like Æthelred the Unready or Qin Shi Huang (China's first emperor), he's history.

What about Emily Maitlis though?

Her Newsnight performances are becoming increasingly James O'Brien-like (and he parted company from Newsnight last year over the very issue of impartiality, with him thinking - like Gavin Esler - that 'correct views' must be expressed and the bad guys exposed). 

How is it in any way compatible with BBC editorial guidelines on impartiality that she should say that Gavin has "nailed something critical here" when pretty much everything Gavin wrote in that New European piece is (openly) impartiality- free and aggressively anti-Brexit? 

What is Emily Maitlis up to by so openly agreeing with her former Newsnight colleague that broadcasters like the BBC have failed to expose "Brexit fantasies" and the wicked ways of the Brexit fantasists?

And what is her much-applauded-by-the-pro-EU-Twitterati newly-hyper-aggressive interviewing of the very people Gavin so objects to all about exactly?

Is she merely following through on the same thoughts Gavin Esler was expressing here and she was endorsing in that tweet?

She is clearly on manoeuvres, for some reason.

Will Newsnight's new editor Esme Wren tolerate this?

End of the (date)line

End of an era on Dateline London today. It was Gavin Esler's final show. He announced that he's leaving the BBC. He was there at the very start of the BBC News Channel (looking a wee bit younger).

In unison

Dateline London may have had a broader spread of guests today (with a right-winger on the panel in the form of Janet Daley) but the unison chorus of disapproval for Donald Trump and all his works seemed fiercer than ever. 

Surely it's now time (as I may have said before) to find some new guests for the programme (even if just a couple) who actually support Donald Trump. 

This programme goes out to the world and is one of the BBC's flagships (even if few people in the UK might watch it), so it surely needs to take its 'BBC impartiality' responsibilities more seriously?

*******

Gavin Esler wasn't silent, of course. He contributed such thoughts as this (re Trump's supporters):

It's interesting that that same audience is very attached to the Second Amendment of the US Constitution, which is guns, and not very attached, it would appear, to the First Amendment, which is the right to freedom of speech and for people in the media to comment on the executive branch.

Moderate

While watching the BBC News Channel this morning I heard Gavin Esler reading the news about the upcoming Stoke-on-Trent Central by-election and describing its ex-MP Tristram Hunt, without verbal quotation marks, as a Labour "moderate" - an interesting label for the BBC to apply, given that it naturally implies that the Jeremy Corbyn wing of the Labour Party is not moderate - i.e. extreme...

...something it's fine for us to say, but surely not for the BBC to suggest?

Hands

I did have to smile at yesterday's Dateline London when Alex Deane found himself, yet again, outnumbered by hand-waving, talking-over-you opponents of Brexit. Alex is pro-Brexit, of course.

"It's just you. There's a surprise!", quipped Gavin Esler. 

"As usual!" said Alex back. 

Indeed. 

Still it could have been worse. Many's been the episode of Dateline London this year where all the guests have been anti-Brexit. 

Agreements and disagreements

Today's Dateline London was one of those disappointingly consensual affairs for the most part, given that everyone came from within a narrow section of public opinion. 

The first two topics saw everyone taking aim at a rogue's gallery of familiar left-liberal/BBC targets. (I ticked off Trump, Putin, Brexit, social media, the alt-right and Breitbart, Duterte, Boris ("a man with a reputation for being born with a silver foot in his mouth", as Gavin Esler described him) and Mrs May.) 

The main disagreement came over the closing question of Mrs Merkel wanting to ban the burqa in certain cases and related questions of Muslim integration (or the lack of it). French secularist Agnes Poirier challenged the dismissive way Gavin Esler had framed the discussion about the burqa ("Do European governments actually have more important things to worry about?"). Former Cameron speechwriter Ian Birrell, in contrast, stood up for Muslims and denounced Islamophobia and Louise Casey's report ("a pretty terrible document") whilst expressing regret that Mrs Merkel is saying such thing given that she's "the best hope we've got". 

Michael in the lion's den

Today's Dateline London had a new pro-Brexit panellist today - one Michael Gove. 

Against him were ranged three strongly anti-Brexit regulars: Michael Goldfarb, Nesrine Malik and Rashmee Lall. 

I had to laugh at Michael Gove smiling and waiting politely to reply as all three of the latter worked themselves up into a hand-jabbing, head-in-their-hands, hair-tossing frenzy against him. "More, more please!", he said at one point, clearly seeing the funny side of it. 

Regular pro-Brexit Dateline viewers, of course, have (metaphorically-speaking) been precisely where Michael Gove was many, many times over during the past year or so, having faced many an entirely anti-Brexit panel jabbing its collective hand, wagging its collective finger, tossing its collective hair and tutting in their direction, time and time again. 

Still, at least Gavin Esler (for the second week running) did a proper, devil's advocate job and didn't join in the frenzy, instead (quite rightly) putting some counterpoints to the three attackers of Mr Gove. 

After the two Brexit discussions, the final topic today had its starting point in an article in the Guardian (naturally) by one of the guests, Nesrine Malik. Dateline asked, "Has the impending Trump presidency given permission for some to use sexist, misogynistic, antisemitic and racist language?" Nesrine, of course, thinks it has.

Here, for the record, is Michael Gove's take on the 'alt-right' - a term he prefers to avoid:

It covers too many phenomenon. At the one end you have this new generation of hipster Nazis, essentially. These are people who use the internet and who cluster under particular policy institute names - the people who greeted the president's victory with 'Hail Trump! Hail our people!'. They're a tiny group who are given disproportionate attention because they're taking a toxic legacy of the past and repackaging it. Then there are a broader group of people who are raucous, right-wing, who are in some cases vulgar and I think in many cases misogynistic, who are not Nazis. They are people whose speech I deplore but who are not in the same bracket. And then there are also others who are provocateurs, who try to make us think again, and who are in the tradition of 18th Century satirists who sometimes say things that make us shudder but who are trying to hold up a mirror to some of the corruption that they see around. 

Afterthought

A Helen Yaffe fan, reading her book on Guevara

Something I didn't post about yesterday was that I tried to keep up with most of the BBC News Channel's Castro coverage between about 10am to 3pm (using the scrollable 'live' online News Channel feed so that I could quickly skip most of the rest of the channel's output before finding something better to do). 

The reason I felt I couldn't post about was that I'd missed an hour and that might have undermined the truth of the point I would have made (by featuring a strong critic of the late dictator): namely that all the one-on-one interviews done from the BBC studio within that time frame were with far-leftist fans of Castro (albeit all 'experts' - as Michael Gove might say [see above!]. 

One of them (just before Dateline London) was a female academic from the UK (Helen Yaffe of the LSE) who painted the most Panglossian picture of Cuba and Cuban human rights imaginable. Even Gavin Esler seemed taken aback by her refusal to admit any failings on the part of the Castro regime, including over its treatment of gay people. Gavin said that he had actually seen the sanatoriums/prisons where AIDS sufferers were locked up. He didn't go any further than that though and let her blithe reply that Cuba now has low rates of AIDS go unchallenged - along with all the rest of the 'happy clappy' pro-Castro stuff she spouted. (There are some pretty morally dubious academics teaching in our universities.)

All four of them

This week's Dateline London discussed Brexit at length. 

Everyone on the panel (from arch-Europhiles Marc Roche, Eunice Goes and Steve Richards to Brexit-doubting American Greg Katz) gave Brexit a thoroughgoing bashing. 

Impartiality was chucked out of the window yet again today, guest-wise. 

No smelling salts are required for that news it has to be said; however, at least Gavin Esler tried harder to ask devil's advocate questions this week.

Others are noticing too, e.g. Dr Richard Wellings of the Institute of Economic Affairs:

Gavin and Gott

Just for the record, here are Gavin Esler's contribution to that interview with "journalist and author"/KGB-gold-receiving 'agent of influence' Richard Gott on the BBC News Channel this morning:

• Well, for more perspective on this now, I'm pleased to say we're joined by Richard Gott, who's travelled to and written about Cuba on many, many occasions. Richard, good to see you. Let's pick up on the revolutionary. I mean, you see those pictures and to the Left around the world this was the glamour of the revolution - the people who told the Americans to get lost. 

• And because the regime was rotten. I mean, the regime that he replaced. We can get onto the problems that he had later, but the Batista regime was absolutely despicable, wasn't it? 

• And at the start...I mean, the revolution did quite extraordinary things for ordinary people. I mean, in terms of healthcare one of the interesting facts is if you were...unbelievable perhaps to some people...if you were a child born in Cuba, post-Castro Cuba, you had a better chance of living than actually a child, statistically, in the United States because perinatal mortality, they attacked that and did a lot for children. So that was the good bit of the balance sheet. 

• And Richard Gott is still with us. On that point, Richard. I have visited Cuba a few times and was told during the period where Fidel was at the heights of his powers, as one could say, that the most subversive things the Americans could do would be to normalise relations because the people feared that Cuban-Americans would come back home and say, 'Look, this is my house in Miami. This is my car. How are you doing, brother or cousin?' And that does have an effect on Cuba, doesn't it? It did change things?

• When Fidel Castro got older the regime became quite geriatric, didn't it, in some ways? And also very authoritarian. I mean, if you got AIDS you were locked up. It was called a sanatorium but, basically, it was a kind of prison. Dissent was crushed and so on. And that's the aspect of the regime that many people find the most distasteful. In other words it replicated - perhaps not as bad at Batista - what they'd overthrown.

• And in terms of where Cuba is now, however, how do you see the future? Because the Castro era is not over. Raul is still president. But it will be over eventually and there must be a younger generation who want change?

• Let me ask you what may be an impossible question: Was Fidel Castro actually ever a communist? I mean, people have said to me he's more an egotist. In other words, he was - as you say - the Governor General. He was called 'el lider maximo' - you know,  'top leader'. Was he really a communist or that really a convenient thing for him to do to get money from the Soviet Union? 

• As a flag of convenience. Because there was a lot of money in it for him, to be crude!

• And just one final point, which is on the romantic Cuba -  you know, Che Guevara, the early years. It was pretty much because he was putting two fingers up to the superpower that made him to some people on the European Left and elsewhere the hero?

Richard Gott said that Fidel Castro was really a "liberal democrat in the Cuban tradition". Gavin didn't laugh.

"It is impossible to keep track"

The Papers

Regardless of what you think about Donald Trump and his fitness to be President of the United States of America, it's surely beyond reasonable doubt that "a full-scale Corporation attack on him is now in full spate" - as News-watch's David Keighley put it the other day.

Yes, that may also be said of most other mainstream media outlets, but the BBC is the only one that people are forced (by law) to pay a compulsory licence fee to watch.

I've not seen much of the BBC News Channel overnight or today, but I did watch three short segments (about half an hour's viewing in total).

There was last night's edition of The Papers with its very cosy consensus between the BBC presenter and her two journalist guests from the Times and the FT on Trump and Brexit-related matters (biased in all the expected ways), with Martine Croxall adopting a special, slightly derisive tone when talking about Nigel Farage.

Then there was BBC Breakfast's paper review where the BBC's Rachel Burden shared a sneer, at Donald Trump's expense, with David Davies (formerly of the FA and the BBC).

Then I switched on (at around 10:10) and witnessed Gavin Esler interviewing an anti-Trump author and cosily reinforcing everything that anti-Trump author was saying in criticism of Mr Trump, with very little (if any) attempt at playing devil's advocate on Gavin's part.

As I say, those are just snapshots, yet all three contained varying degrees of bias - and all in the same direction.

Goodness knows what listening to hours of it would have yielded (other than a blogpost half a mile long)

As David said, "It is impossible to keep track", so why even try? The bias is all across the BBC. It's there for all to see and hear. I shall just resign myself from now on to just dipping in at random every so often and sampling (as above). That's all anyone can do.

Besides....

Though there's always the 'echo chamber' danger of seeing more and more people sharing your view and thinking that amounts to something significant, it really does seem to be the case that many, many more people are becoming seriously angry at BBC bias these days - and especially over the course of this year.

It seems to have gone way beyond 'the usual suspects'. Is it an explosion yet?

Complaints about BBC bias are certainly spreading like wildfire onto the BBC website, as anyone who regularly clicks on BBC Have Your Say threads will know.

Is this gentleman Catholic?

I just clicked on a few minutes ago - on another of their 'Fake News' pieces - and where I might have seen the odd anti-BBC comment at most a few years ago it can now almost be guaranteed now that there will be legions of such comments.

(Of course, it could be that 'the usual suspects' have colonised there too, but I don't think that's the explanation).

On this typical piece all of the top-rated comments are critical of the BBC. Here are the Top 5:

13. IWANTTOBREAKFREE: Dancer you are spot on. BBC has been ranting about this "fake news" issue all week with the inference that it affected the vote in the USA. This is despite it publishing its own "fake news" in the form of a supposed leaked Govt document saying there was no strategy for Brexit which turned out to be nothing to do with the Govt. Sadly BBC news can no longer be considered reliable. Look elsewhere.

11. Raskilnikov: The BBC and their ilk like to imagine that Brexit and Trump won because the people listened to the wrong advice, Murdoch etc as opposed to our moral guardians the BBC, the truth is people aren't stupid, they voted for Trump/Brexit because it was what's best for them, whats best for the BBC isn't what's best for the working class

3. BBCLeftWingBias: Facebook is cobblers, the BBC News publishes biased articles, the sun rises in the morning and water is wet. Move along, nothing to see here.

2. Dancer: So Zuckerberg is now political, BBC when are you going to admit you are politically motivated?

39. NigeM: The BBC is smarting because it failed to stop Brexit and Trump. As a result it is now slinging mud at everybody else because it knows its influence is on the slide. The population is slowly waking up to the antics of the BBC.

The top-rated comment there ought to be particularly painful for the BBC. It is well put.

The world turns upside down on 'Dateline'

This week's Dateline London was surprising on many fronts (and highly enjoyable). 

I expected it to be like every other BBC programme at the moment (slight exaggeration but not much!) and to be a tiresome festival of misery about the US election result with all the usual crowd wailing and gnashing their teeth and agreeing with each other from a shared left-liberal position. Not a bit of it, it turned out. 

The range of views on Donald Trump was pleasingly diverse, with lots of positive things as well as negative things being said about his election and what it means. It was far from the usual Dateline consensus. Unusually, the range of views on Hillary Clinton was less diverse but in a most 'un-BBC' way, the general feeling being that she got what was coming to her. 

More surprising too is that, for the first time in seven years of continuously monitoring this programme, the panel had a majority of right-wingers. (It's had majorities of left-wingers literally hundreds of time - and I do mean 'literally' in the literal sense there!). 

There was a woman making an anti-feminist point and even a climate sceptic who denounced 'climate change' as a scam. Such things don't usually happen on Dateline (if ever).

The only unsurprising thing was Gavin Esler, who couldn't quite manage to shake off the BBC mindset (or mood) in some of his comments but, in fairness, he hardly got a word in edgeways for much of the programme.

Well worth a watch if you've a spare half an hour. You're unlikely to see or hear anything quite like it elsewhere on the BBC at the moment.

Another post about 'Dateline London'

I

This week's Brexit discussion on Dateline London was like most previous ones where a single pro-Brexit guest is allowed onto the panel (though, often recently, there's not even been one such guest, so this counts as 'good' by Dateline standards).

It's usually been Alexander Deane of late but this week it was the turn of Alexander Nekrassov.

Different Alexander, same result: All the three other anti-Brexit guests and Gavin Esler piling in against him, often all at the same time (a hubbub duly resulting).

Both Alexanders can more than hold their own though, and the result was worth watching.

II

Regular readers might recall examples of Gavin Esler's previous demonstrations of apparent derision for Boris Johnson. Two more apparent examples popped up on today's Dateline. 

Gavin (to Ned Temko): And where is Britain in this? I mean, Boris Johnson calling for demonstrations outside the embassy of a country with whom we're not actually in conflict was a very odd thing to happen, wasn't it?......Ned (to Gavin Esler): How surprising that Boris should say something odd!.....(Laughter).

Gavin (to Alexander Nekrassov, after AN called for a 'million man march' for Brexit): Well Boris Johnson's called for one demonstration and you're calling for another! I think he got one protester. Let's see if you can get more!

III

Here's how Gavin Esler phrased his introductory Brexit-related question on today's Dateline London:

Has Brexit become what one MP this week described as 'a dog's Brexit' - a hugely costly mess - because those who most strongly advocate it haven't actually figured out how to make it work?

Yet another negative take on Brexit from the BBC.

IV 

And here are Gavin's other Brexit-related contributions today. Taken as a whole, they fall almost entirely on the anti-Brexit side of the argument (as you will see). Does that make him biased?: 

(Secondary introduction): The advertising for a British favourite spread called Marmite says 'You either love it or hate it'. The same could be said for Brexit, which this week is being blamed for the rising cost of...Marmite. And for Parliament being refused a real say in the most important political decision of our lifetime. Is Brexit being botched?

(to anti-Brexit Ned Temko): I talked to Herman van Rompuy this week, the former EU president of the council, and he said that 'You have to understand that this is not a top priority for the French government, the German government', and he went through the governments. 'It may be your big deal but it's not ours, and it will be terrible'. He suggested it will be really, really difficult. Now, that was a view, but an important view.

(to anti-Brexit Abdul Bari Atwan): But what's really struck me about this week was Parliament attempting to reassert itself. I mean, we are governed by the Queen in Parliament. It's very, very clear what that's supposed to mean...except we've also got the will of the British people absolutely clear we want to get out of the EU....what's not clear is what that would look like and is there a mandate, for example, for leaving the Single Market. That is the question that MPs have been....

(to pro-Brexit Alexander Nekrassov): Well Boris Johnson's called for one demonstration and you're calling for another! I think he got one protester. Let's see if we can get more!

 

(interrupting Alexander Nekrassov): It's the detail, that's the point, It's the detail. Let me bring Suzanne in.

(interrupting Alexander Nekrassov): It's an advisory referendum.

(to Ned Temko): But also on the specific point of Parliament. You know, it's very difficult to overturn several hundred years of British history in which Parliament effectively scrutinises the executive...well, we will see, won't we?

(interrupting Alexander Nekrassov): Well, there are a lot of cars that are made in Germany, I can tell you that!

(to Alexander Nekrassov): Well, we don't buy Chinese wine, that's all I can say!