Who's doing the setting up here?

Oh, good grief, I've only just begun listening to today's Broadcasting House and I'm already thinking an early night would have been a much better option.  

The programme began with Paddy O'Connell and BBC correspondent Louise Stewart gloating (sneering and laughing) over Michael Gove's 'spat' with the head of Ofsted, Sir Michael Wilshaw.

Well, OK, 'gloating' is how I heard it. 'Bias by tone' is hard to proof. 

Their loaded language, however, also had a strong whiff of bias to it, suggesting it was a right-wing plot. (Mr Gove seems to be the bogeyman of the Left). Here's how.

Two think tanks are in the frame for being hostile to Sir Michael - Civitas and Policy Exchange. 

Civitas is generally considered mildly centre-right, with tendrils reaching into the Guardian. Both Paddy and Louise chose to label it simply as "right-wing". Hmm.

OK, that's debatable bias. Now comes the serious bit....

Louise then said that Policy Exchange, the other think tank presently in the frame, was "another think tank set up by Michael Gove", thus surely implying (to the unsuspecting listener) that Policy Exchange is his think tank and might well, as result, be doing his bidding against Sir Michael. 

But was Policy Exchange really set up by Michael Gove? I was suspicious because I'd never heard that before. 

Well, no, the BBC's Louise Stewart was wrong. Policy Exchange was mainly Archie Norman's brainchild. He set it up with Francis Maude and Nick Boles. They then hired Michael Gove to be their first chairman. 

It is, therefore, simply false to describe it as "another think tank set up by Michael Gove".

If Louise was simply mistaken, it was simply that - a misleading mistake (albeit a painful one for a BBC political correspondent to make). If she wasn't, then it was a smear, pure and simple. 

Maybe I ought to ask the BBC to clarify which it was. But first...bed. Good night.

Odds and Ends

As it's Sunday night, there are various loose threads that I've left dangling in my head over the past few days and I don't want any passing cats to start playing with them and make a mess on the carpet. Much better to make that mess on a blog. 

Bouquets and brickbats galore for the BBC follow. 

A bouquet first. 

Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time this week looked at the sources modern academics use to study early Chinese history. This was In Our Time at its best. I can't say I was exactly drooling at the subject matter beforehand but I found it absolutely fascinating. It helped having three engaging academics to talk about it, especially Roel Sterckx of Cambridge University. (My goodness, that man is fluent and interesting. Less Linda Colley, more Roel Sterckx please BBC.) 

If you were wondering (and knowing you, of course you were!) the earliest Chinese written records of historiographical value are the 'oracle bone inscriptions' of the Shang dynasty (c1600-1700 B.C.- c1050 B.C.). They date from around 1200 B.C. They are inscriptions written on the shoulder blades of oxen and turtle shells, divination records of the Shang king's consultations with his royal ancestors. On the bones a question was put (such as "Will the king become ill this month?"). A priest then cracked the bone with a hot poker and wrote down the prognostication from the cracks in the bones, seen as the answer from the ancestors. There about about 200,000 fragments of these bones around the world, some 400 in Cambridge University Library alone. They allow academics to work out the movements of the Shang royal family, and mention such things as childbirth and toothache. 

I also like the fact that Melvyn Bragg is unusually conscientious as a Radio 4 blogger. His contributions dominate the Radio 4 blog. Without him the Radio 4 blog would be semi-comatose. (Actually, I think we're a better Radio 4 blog than the Radio 4 blog!)

Now a brickbat, and I'm lobbing it straight at Jeremy Paxman. 

What is it with the likes of Jeremy Paxman and John Humphrys that they only ever seem to have one tone when interviewing a scientist about some matter of general scientific interest - a tone of sustained (if good-natured) bemused scepticism tinged with moments of 'gee whiz!' surprise? It's always the same question too: 'What's the point of this?', with 'Why are we wasting our money on this?' often chucked in as a bonus question. Last Monday's Newsnight saw The Great Paxo interviewing The Sky at Night's excellent Professor Chris Lintott about the comet-chasing Rosetta probe and those are the questions he put and that's the tone he struck. As to the 'waste of money' question, Chris replied:

Well, you have to think where the money's gone. The money doesn't go to the comet. The money's spent here on earth. It goes to people, it goes to technology and it goes to industries in this country and throughout Europe.

And while I'm chucking brickbats at the BBC's science coverage, I've got to say that the larkiness of programmes like Radio 4's Inside Science can be really wearing. Larky, larky, larky. If the larkiness led to laughs it would be OK, but it's almost always a laugh-free kind of larkiness. Yes, Humour and the Higgs-boson can certainly go together, but they certainly didn't during the exchanges on this week's edition. Come on, Inside Science, treat us like adults please, or do I have to send Melvyn Bragg in to sort you out? I will, you know. I will send in Melvyn Bragg to sort you out. 

There were no laughs whatsoever during this week's Four Thought. The previews of Four Thought rarely tempt me to listen, but this week's edition sounded interesting - and most unlike the sort of thing you usually hear on Radio 4. It was a talk by a former British soldier who served in Afghanistan, and made for a genuinely thought-provoking listen. 

Emile Simpson gave an account of how the strategy in Afghanistan evolved over time to become ever more subtle and sophisticated. Concrete examples were given as to how British strategy changed as the early idealistic aims of the war ran into the messy reality of Afghanistan and how growing local knowledge led to nuance and greater success in Britain's military activities. I don't think I've really done full justice to the shrewdness of Emile Simpson's arguments there, so please listen for yourselves.

Time for another brickbat. (This is like a game of bouquet-brickbat table tennis). 

Newsnight's Ethical Man, Justin Rowlatt, was back on the programme this week discussing the tax dodges of China's elite. It was just what I'd have expected from him and Newsnight. It was based on a Guardian report and the work of a left-leaning American investigative journalists' group, and featured the leftist Tax Justice Network's Richard Murphy (described, as ever, merely as a "tax expert"). It inevitably framed the Western banks and accountancy companies and ended with Justin saying, "And let's not forget who's ultimately responsible for that". 

Can you guess who? "Ultimately we should say perhaps we're responsible and we should be looking to clean up this offshore haven", said Justin. 

Yes, elements in China's elite are engaging in tax avoidance but the Chinese aren't the guilty ones, oh no. Yes, we are "ultimately" the guilty party. It says so on Richard Murphy's oracle bone inscriptions. 

Now, if ever I heard the authentic voice of the Guardianista-BBC Left, that's it, in full flow. Thanks again, Newsnight.

We're due another bouquet, I think, after that rant and I'm returning to More or Less. 

A reader had seen an NHS poster at his local surgery which warned, scarily, that 'Two or more large glasses of wine a day could make you three times more likely to get mouth cancer.' Is that true? Well, More or Less investigated and, to cut a long story short, no, it isn't, and it's wrong in so many ways. Mouth cancer isn't common and, by itself, the stats actually reveal that the increased risk of mouth cancer from drinking two large glasses of wine a day actually carries a 0% risk. The increased risk from tobacco, however, is 22% - and here's where it gets interesting because the increased risk for people who use tobacco and alcohol is 61%. It seems to be the combination of the risk from tobacco and alcohol where the heart of the risk really lies. Please excuse me then while I pour a third large glass of wine then. Hmm, very nice.

Finally, as someone who used to write a classical music blog, I was very interested in Who Killed Classical Music? on Radio 4 the other day. It was written and presented by a young composer named Gabriel Prokofiev. Yes, Prokofiev. He's the grandson of the great Sergei himself. 

Though pleasantly nuanced, it's general thesis was a familiar one to classical music lovers -  that the modernists and avant-gardists of the Twentieth Century (Schoenberg, Pierre Boulez, et al) had alienated Western audiences to a disastrous degree (unlike their traditionalist counterparts in the reactionary Soviet Union, such as that wonderful tunesmith Sergei Prokofiev). The post-war avant-garde in particular felt that the kind of tuneful, romantic classical music that led up to WWII was irredeemably contaminated by Nazism and that mass appeal was a dangerous thing. They denounced traditional, tonal composers and became an authoritarian, dominating presence looming over the classical music scene. Meanwhile, the hated bourgeois audience went back to their tuneful classics, ever shrinking in number as more and more people found that the only contemporary music they liked was popular music (or jazz.)

Gabriel's granddad

Now, as the programme made clear, the influence of the avant-garde has declined sharply in the last couple of decades, and tunes and audience appeal are very much back in vogue. Still, despite that - and despite Classic FM - audiences remains small and knowledge about classical music minimal. Gabriel felt hopeful things are beginning to improve though.

Here's where the BBC comes in. 

If there's one thing reading classical music magazines for 25 years of so has taught me it's that lots and lots of British classical music fans of a traditional bend - those who like tunes and dislike too much dissonance - blame a particular institution above all for that avant-garde dominance of British contemporary music in the decades after the war (especially from the late 1950s onwards). That institution is the BBC. They regarded it as having been a deeply malign influence at that time.

As Gabriel was broadcasting on the BBC at the time, he presumably felt it was impolite to mention that fact. 

The man who usually gets the blame is former Radio 3 controller Sir William Glock. He certainly did have a strong bias towards the avant-garde (among many other biases). Sir William went on to control the Proms and stamped his radical mark on that too. Rumours of a hit list of traditional, conservative contemporary composers - tunesmiths to a man - who Sir William banned in favour of anti-tonal, experimental modern music abound and seem to have some truth. Some defenders of William Glock say that Radio 3 was actually worse under his successors, Robert Ponsonby and Sir John Drummond. 

I'm banging on about all this because you may be unfamiliar with it - and because it interests me (and it's me and Sue's blog!). It's a peculiar area of BBC history, where the BBC seems very clearly to have been strongly intent on guiding and shaping public taste in classical music and conditioning them to admire a particular type of contemporary classical music. 

I'm sure some of you might draw analogies with how the present BBC seeks to guide and shape public opinion on other matters. 

Ukraine, Noah's Ark, the first Anglican woman priest, politics and religion, a radical nun and anti-clergy abuse

This morning's Sunday began by looking at the role being played by the main churches during the current unrest in Ukraine. William Crawley discussed it with the BBC's man there, David Stern. Apparently, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kyivan Patriarchate (formed in 1992 after schism from the Moscow Patriarchate Orthodox Church) is strongly backing the protests. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate (a branch of the Russian Orthodox Church which became autonomous in 1990), on the other hand, is remaining cautious, initially ordering its priests not to back the protests but now relenting somewhat. Finally, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (which follows Orthodox rites but recognises the authority of Rome) is also backing the protesters, but has come under most pressure from the authorities. So now you know. 

Then came a fascinating interview (by Trevor Barnes) with Dr Irving Finkel of the British Museum on the remarkable discovery of an ancient Babylonian cuneiform tablet - a sixty-line passage from their Story of the Flood written around 1750 B.C. What's new in this telling of the story is that the ark built to carry the Babylonian Noah was a round vessel - a sort of huge coracle about two-thirds the size of a football pitch. As it was round, all it could do was float. And that's all it needed to do - just bob about, keeping anything on it safe and sound until the flood waters subsided. Unlike any of the other Babylonian accounts of the Flood, this one also mentions that the animals went in two by two - an interesting echo of the account in Genesis. The main difference between the Babylonian and the Biblical accounts, according to Dr Finkel, is that the Babylonian gods chose to wipe out the human race because they were too noisy whereas the God of the Bible chose to wipe humanity out because of its sinfulness.  

Dr Finkel was asked for his views on the Bible. This was his reply:

My view of the Bible is a very sympathetic view because it was put together out of very disparate sources, I think for a very specific purpose, and it has had a durability of a remarkable length of time. It is worth considering this, that when the Bible was being written down the Judean population, for whom it became their central text, they were surrounded by the religion of the Babylonians and the Egyptians, with their big powerful gods, huge pantheons of gods, and all those gods have gone forever but the God that was central to the Judean tradition is still alive and the Jewish religion is exactly the same thing as it was at that stage. So you have something quite remarkable, that this ramshackle group of people who were taken out of Jerusalem, dispossessed and dumped in Babylon, ended up with a religion that is still alive today. 

Next it was onto a familiar Sunday theme, banks and alternative banks. This focused on a new not-for-profit "community bank", run entirely by volunteers from St. Andrew's Church in Hampton, Kent. The programme's website blurb frames this feature well:

As the world's economic and business elites gather in Davos the first church bank opens in Kent. William talks to the Bishop of Dover, Trevor Wilmott, about the project and what difference it might make.

People can put their savings in it, take out loans, sit and have a coffee, get debt advice and receive counselling. In time, there will be craft activities and games for children. 

Bishop Trevor blessed the bank the other day (above), so he's naturally a warm supporter of it, and we didn't hear any dissenting views. 

It all sounds much like the Big Society in action to me, and good luck to them.  

From one favourite Sunday theme to another - women priests (shading eventually into women bishops), and it was time for William to chat to Thought for the Day (and Sunday) regular Christina Rees, one of the leading campaigners for women bishops. She took the opportunity to bash "patriarchy and male heirarchy" in the Church and called for women bishops. This is much as you expect from Sunday, with its pronounced liberal bias.

Still, she brought with her an interesting story - the story of the first Anglican woman priest, Rev Dr Florence Li Tim-Oi. She was ordained as a deacon by Bishop Hall of Hong Kong seventy years ago this weekend (25 January 1944), because the Japanese occupation of northern China prevented priests from travelling to perform the eucharist. Bishop Hall informed the then Archishop of Canterbury, William Temple, who replied saying he couldn't condone his action but gave them both his blessing. "A kind reaction", Christina called it. Other Anglican bishops, however, were furious and wanted Bishop Hall's resignation. To forestall that Florence Li Tim-Oi renounced her licence but not her holy orders. She then lived for thirty years in Maoist China where she was banned from her priestly duties, forbidden to express her faith publicly, forced to cut her vestments into shreds with scissors in front of them and then put out to feed the chickens. When things in China eased after Mao's death, she began to minister again and then left to join her family in Canada. Christina credits her visit to England in the 1980s with Archbishop Runcie's decision to support the ordination of women. When he met her he said, "Who am I to say who God can or cannot call?"

Next up was a discussion centred on a new report from the religious think tank Theos (launched November 2006, with Sunday's Edward Stourton presiding) about the political affiliations of faith groups in the UK. One of the report's co-authors, Nick Spencer, was put up against a less-than-wholly-enthusiastic left-wing politics professor from Manchester University, Maria Sobolewska (who, incidentally, doesn't much like 'the Tory cuts'). 

The report itself is interesting. (You can read a short version of it here). It comes with a fair few caveats, foremost of those being that there's no U.S.-style religious bloc vote in the UK and no moral majority issues. Moreover, it makes it clear that there are other overlapping factors - the historical attachment of certain communities to a particular party, regional attachments and ethnicity - which may be more important. Also, regular churchgoers of whatever denomination share a lot in common, such as now-untypical views in favour of high welfare spending and taxes. 

Basically, though, it finds that Anglicans and Jews are more likely to vote Conservative, Catholics and Muslims more likely to vote Labour, and Buddhists more likely to vote Lib Dem. Hindus used to be Labour-inclined but are growing less so, and Sikhs also have a Labour tilt but are more evenly split between the main parties. Among the Muslims, the Bangladeshis are overwhelmingly pro-Labour, the Pakistanis less heavily so (having switched to the Lib Dems recently). The stats are derived from many decades' worth of editions of the British Election Study and around ten years' worth of the British Social Attitudes Survey. 

Next up, it was a real Sunday classic - a report on an American left-wing activist nun from the BBC's biased Matt Wells. Matt almost guarantees Radio 4 listeners a left-leaning perspective on things. (It was he who did that drippingly admiring report about the far-left Catalan nun who so grabbed the BBC's attention last year). Here we heard of elderly nun Megan Rice (above), a pacifist and 'Christian anarchist', who is facing imprisonment for breaking into a nuclear weapons storage facility and defacing it. Matt's report was typically one-sided. Everyone was on Sister Megan's side. (Except, presumably, those who aren't, who we didn't hear from). 

The closing section of this week's Sunday returned to a subject they touched on a couple of weeks ago - violence against the clergy. Then, you may recall, they seemed rather intent on dismissing the calls of a "centre-right think tank" (as they remembered to call it) for such attacks to be branded as religiously-motivated 'hate crimes'. William reminded listeners of that (this time calling it a "right-leaning think tank"). 

This week we heard more worrying testimony from clergy with experience of this kind of thing and Sunday carried out a survey, inviting every diocese of the Church of England to respond, into whether the Anglican hierarchy is providing enough training to its clergy to help them cope with situations of abuse and the threat of violence. It clearly isn't. Only one third of responding dioceses said such training was offered. Some people want compulsory one-day training courses for all clergy, and the programme seemed to enter campaigning mode on behalf of that point of view. BBC favourite Bishop Stephen Lowe (on his way to The Big Questions studio to sit next to Seamus Milne of the Guardian) was then interviewed and was also sympathetic to this way of thinking. 

Bishop Stephen did drop a bit of a bombshell though. As William invited him to dismiss (again) that think tank's suggestion that such attacks were based on religious hate, Bishop Stephen agreed but then added that he had come across some such attacks on clergy (not many, but some). He specified the attackers as Muslims. William didn't explore that point any more.

Such was this week's Sunday - plenty of food for thought and a decent smattering of BBC bias for good measure!

Next week's edition will be a special, hosted by Ed Stourton, on immigration and religion. Gawd 'elp us!

More or Less, or a lot less

You may (or may not) recall that biased Radio 4 immigration debate from the start of this year, Immigration: Good for Whom? 

Well, Radio 4's excellent More or Less [h/t hefyd in the comments] returned to it this week after a listener queried the stats used by two of the contributors - the confident assertion by mass immigration advocate Susie Symes that immigrants contribute £70 billion a year to this country, and the confident but contradictory assertion by the more sceptical David Goodhart that their fiscal contribution was actually either neutral, or slightly negative. The listener said, correctly, that both couldn't be right.

More or Less's Ruth Alexander investigated. 

She began by dismissing Susie Symes's £70 billion claim. Susie had got it wrong by a factor of ten. The correct figure, an extrapolation from an OECD study, should have been £7 billion. Moreover, she'd misunderstood what the report was studying. It was not looking at what immigrants contribute to the economy as a whole. They were looking at the narrower question of whether immigrants contribute more to the public purse than they take out and calculated it by comparing how much they pay in tax and social security contributions to how much they receive by way of benefits and services. They looked at the period from 2007-09 and found, yes, they contributed roughly £7 billion, just under half a percent of GDP. Susie Symes argued this was "a large contribution" but, Ruth said, it's "actually quite a small amount". 

As for David Goodhart, well he was quoting figures from research from UCL, London. They looked at a much longer time period, from 1995-2011. These show that immigration has been "a drain on the public purse to the tune of about £95 billion". (One heck of a drain!) However, they draw a 'positive' result too - that European immigrants have put more into the public purse than they've taken out, especially post-2000 European immigrants. (All those hard-working Poles). BUT, when you look at all immigrants, the overall impact on the public purse is a negative one. It's non-European immigrants who are responsible for that negative impact.

So between 1995 and 2011, on average each European immigrant put about £6,000 more into the public purse than they took out. Non-European immigrants, on the other hand, each took out about £21,000 more than they put in. There's also a lot more non-European immigrants in this country, which means when you look at both groups of immigrants as a whole - so European and non-European - they take out around £14,000 more than they put in.

But what about native Brits? Do we take out more from the public purse than immigrants? Or less?

Answer: Less.

We all know the government is in debt and is running a large deficit. That is it's spending more than it's got and it's spending a large proportion of that money it doesn't have on its own people. And we can see that very clearly when we look at how much native Brits are putting in and taking out of the public purse - on average, each native Briton took out roughly £11,000 more than they put in between 1995 and 2011. So, on average, only the Europeans are putting more in to the UK public purse than they're taking out.

So, the stats stack up as:

European immigants = a positive contribution of £6,000 to the public purse 

Native Brits = a negative contribution of £11,000 to the public purse 

Immigrants (as a whole) = a negative contribution of £14,000 to the public purse 

Non-European immigrants = a negative contribution of £21,000 to the public purse 

Interesting, eh? Now what should we do about non-European immigration?

There'll be a second part to this report on next week's programme, and there's a balanced write-up of the whole thing here.

I do like More or Less.

Thirded! (apparently)

Being, as you may know, something of a follower of Radio 4's Sunday, I like to keep an eye on its Twitter feed. 

It usually tells listeners what's coming up or what a guest on the programme has just said. It also occasionally retweets comments sent to it via Twitter. 

Its latest retweet, however, is something it just happened to pick up on Twitter about the findings of a Theos report on UK religious affiliations and voting patterns (which the programme had discussed). It's a rather partisan thing to retweet, isn't it?

 Retweeted by BBC Radio 4 Sunday

Stuart ‏@Stuey_James  58m

RT @DrBattyTowers: @PeterOuld @waltonandy Tory vote is all about self interest, which is not what my faith is all about <-- Seconded!

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Gold

If you blog about bias it's surely inevitable that you'll end up throwing more brickbats than bouquets at the BBC; in fact, it tends to be pretty much brickbats all the way. Here, however, are a couple of bouquets for the BBC. 

One goes to whoever decided to choose Gold: The Race for the World's Most Seductive Metal by Matthew Hart as last week's Radio 4 Book of the Week. Another goes to whoever abridged it (Peter Nichols, that's you!). 

The first episode recounted the author's descent into South Africa's Mponeng mine, the deepest man-made hole on Earth (2.5 miles deep) - an intensely hot, vast, inverted metropolis where a crowded cage plunges hundreds of miners at a time a distance more than five Burj Khalifas in just four minutes to get them down just to the first level and where large numbers of illegal 'ghost miners' live, their skins turning grey, often up to months on end and sometimes with their wives or prostitutes, in the hope of nabbing some of that precious gold. And all for a seam of ore just 30 inches wide. 

The second covered more familiar territory - the tale of how 300 Spaniards captured, conned and killed the Inca Atahualpa in the vicinity of his 200,000-strong army, all in the pursuit of gold - a very unpleasant tale, vividly told. Pizarro's gang got the gold but, in one of those rare occasions when history gratifies our sense of justice by giving its blackest villains their comeuppance, they didn't get to enjoy it, nearly every one of them coming to a nasty end of some kind. Ha, ha. The Peruvian army couldn't do anything to rescue their king because he was a divine being and unless he commanded them to do something - such as rescue him - they couldn't lift a finger. As Atahualpa was in no position to command them (being in captivity), 200,000 Inca soldiers had to stand by helplessly before helping to fill a large room with gold to placate the Spanish. It's a shame we couldn't bring Pizarro and the boys back to life and send them to North Korea. They'd know how to deal with Kim jong-un.

The third episode was the best of all, taking us to modern China and telling an almost completely unfamiliar tale. It told of the Chinese gold rush which began when Deng encouraged private prospecting in the early '80s and the Chinese government's subsequent flip-flopping between clamping down on it and giving it the tacit green light. That early gold rush was on a scale and intensity (a madness, you might say) that seems to eclipse even the famous 19th Century frenzies in the U.S.A. And it's still going on, resulting in severe environmental degradation, large-scale corruption and conflict with the locals - Tibetans, Uighurs and (inner) Mongolian nomads. China is mad on gold. It can't get enough of it. Literally. It imports more gold now than India (the previous top gold importer). Because of that there is now more gold being extracting in three months than in the entirety of previous human history. What happens when China reaches 'peak gold' (that point of no return when most of its own gold reserves begin drying up), perhaps as early as in six years time? The rest of the world's gold producers (legal and illegal) will be licking their lips in anticipation, and prices will rocket accordingly.

The fourth episode told of how President Nixon finally broke the link between gold and currency, engineering the end of the gold standard in 1971. It was as gripping as any of the other stories, and shows again just how remarkable and skillful a president that strange and crooked man could be. 

The final episode brought us up to date - up to and beyond the financial crash of 2008 - and described the arcane process by which a few major banks set the international price of gold twice a day. It used to involve picking up and lowering small union jacks, and something of that tradition lingers on. 

It will start disappearing from the i-Player soon, so if you want to listen, now's your chance. Or you could buy the book. 

Sunday morning reading

A little light reading to accompanying your bacon, eggs and sausages this morning...

A couple of weeks ago, ITV accused the BBC of using licence-payers money to rip off TV programmes from its commercially-funded rivals in an “aggressive” pursuit of higher ratings in a submission to the Commons Culture Media and Sport Committee:

The BBC’s pursuit of audience share regardless of distinctiveness or innovation has been evident where the BBC has rushed to commission or produce almost identical programmes to those by ITV, and then has scheduled them against ITV’s planned transmissions.

Now it's Classic FM's turn to make the identical complaint to the Commons Culture Media and Sport Committee, according to The Sunday Telegraph. The station claims the BBC has copied its most successful innovations and made major programme changes to erode the gap between them and grab audiences:

Given Classic FM’s success in building audiences for classical music radio, twenty years later, the BBC now appears to have decided to ape its commercial competitor, abandoning much of the distinctiveness in peak-time hours in the process. Once again it appears Radio 3 is being encouraged to use its public funding to chase ratings.

For those with a taste for BBC-related scandals though, it's surely The Mail on Sunday that's going to grab your attention this morning. There's certainly no love lost between the MoS and the BBC, as you can see from these headlines:

(1) Another bully at the BBC: MoS reveals senior editor who left his radio star wife for talkshow host bullied staff and faces probe over sexual harassment and expenses 

Mark Sandell editor of World Have Your Say and partner of Radio 5 Live presenter Victoria Derbyshire, also faces claims of sexual harassment against a female employee. He left his wife Fi Glover in 2002 for the radio host. Last night, the BBC also confirmed that his expenses claims were being scrutinised. 

(2) Ranting Rod made my life hell... so sack him: Victim of BBC bully Rod McKenzie speaks out about 'climate of fear and paranoia' created by editor

An anonymous victim of the former BBC Newsbeat editor speaks out in this frank account of working life under Mr McKenzie.

(3) BBC accused of spending £4million on hotels and rail fares to get staff to new base in Salford

New figures obtained under Freedom of Information requests expose dramatic increases in the BBC’s spending since Salford opened in 2011.

'Dateline': Business as usual

Today's Dateline London demonstrated that however much pressure the programme comes under from outside sources - usually bloggers - to be a bit more inclusive and less of a a left-liberal talking shop, it will keep reverting to type. Hence my reluctance to even talk about it any more. 

Today's castlist was  classic Dateline. It consisted of (a) strongly pro-EU, anti-Anglo-Saxon-model-of-capitalism French left-winger Marc Roche of Le Monde (France's answer to The Guardian); (b) left-wing, environmentalist, Guardian/Observer writer Isabel Hilton of China.dialogue; (c) Abdul Barri Atwan, left-wing Palestinian extremist; and (d) John Fisher Burns of the liberal New York Times - all voices very firmly on the Left politically, except for Mr Fisher Burns ("the dean of American foreign correspondents") whose ideological standpoint is hard to judge, but who doesn't seem to conform to the usual Dateline model. 

On the subject of Britain's apparent economic revival, presenter Gavin Esler's opening question posed Labour's 'standard of living' question before Marc Roche attacked Britain's economy, our standard of living and the inequalities caused by the Anglo-Saxon model. Isabel Hilton also attacked our economy, calling it "extraordinarily fragile", and agreed with Mark about the unsustainable inequalities of our neo-liberal economic model. John Fisher Burns disagreed with Marc Roche and asked 'what's not to like?' about our return to growth, being interrupted repeatedly by both Marc and Isabel for his pains. (He'd listened to them without interrupting them, but they were immediately onto him for disagreeing with them. What is it with people like them that they can't stand being disagreed with and feel the need to instantly gang up on any dissenter?) Atwan then joined his left-wing allies and attacked austerity effects on "the poor people", saying austerity is "not working" and attacking the government over immigration. (No one interrupted him). Marc Roche then expressed his approval of Ed Balls's 50% tax on the grounds of "equity". 

Typical, predictable Dateline. You could have guessed what at least three of them would say in advance. (In fact, you could have scripted Marc Roche and Atwan's contributions for them.) Who can stop the bias?

Saturday afternoon reading

It's raining and blowing a lukewarm gale outside, Morecambe F.C. are being held 1-1 at home by Portsmouth (having blown a penalty opportunity) and I've got a few spare minutes, so what better time to read a fine article about BBC bias from a former BBC producer, Scott Grønmark, at The Salisbury Review? 

(I do like ex-BBC insider pieces).

Scott wonders, "Why does the corporation keep doing things seemingly designed to confirm right-wing conspiracy theories?" 

His suspicion is that it's something to do with "malfunctioning feedback loops".

And what explains those "malfunctioning feedback loops"? 

Well, his first answer is that while he worked (for 12 years) at the BBC he found very few right-wing employees at the corporation:

Of the dozens of news journalists I worked with, I can think of only four who, either openly or secretly, admitted to being conservatives. My instinct at the time was that at least 90 per cent of my colleagues were leftists of one sort or another – possibly 95 per cent. In that sort of overwhelmingly liberal atmosphere, it’s no wonder that conservatives keep their politics secret for fear of damaging their careers. 

And many of those "leftists" - including managers - display open contempt for the Right. (He provides several vivid examples from his own personal experience).

What's his second answer to the question at hand?:

You might imagine that employees would receive feedback about bias direct from right-wingers they meet in the real world – I certainly heard enough complaints from non-media types when I worked there. But urban leftists tend to socialise almost exclusively with their own dirigiste kind. I suspect most BBC news staff assume – despite the evidence of polls suggesting 45 per cent of the electorate lean to the right – that right-wingers are similarly rare in wider society, and that they resemble the cartoonish figures featured in BBC news stories – the truffle pigs of the banking world, the blazered bluff coves of UKIP, the knuckle-draggers of the EDL etc. You and I know that the vast majority of Tory and UKIP supporters are perfectly nice, kindly, unextreme people – but the average BBC producer probably doesn’t. 

His third answer?:

This perception of right-wingers as a tiny minority of greedy racists who enjoy seeing the poor suffer is reinforced by the fact that the most important potential source of feedback – Conservative voters – hardly ever complain to the BBC about bias. A paedophile presenter scandal, an insult to the Queen, or cruel on-air phone calls to a much-loved comedy actor will light up the switchboard. No doubt they also get upset about the make-up of Question Time panels or the way John Humphrys never lets a Tory minister answer a question without interruption. But as they don’t descend on Broadcasting House clasping flaming torches – or even send a complaining email – the BBC assumes Middle England is content.

Fourthly, 

As for criticism from what the BBC invariably calls the right-wing press, well, those papers are all mouthpieces for wicked capitalist robber-barons and – unlike, say, the Guardian – are hopelessly biased and can therefore safely be ignored.

And finally: 

Finally, you might imagine the consciences of senior managers – all honourable men, as I said – would cause them sleepless nights. But as they know they aren’t part of a sinister conspiracy (there really aren’t any secret meetings to plot Labour’s return to power), they feel no guilt. Besides, left-wing views confer on the holder a delicious, unshakeable sense of being on the side of the angels. Even if you suspect that providing a constant diet of anti-Israel stories and US political coverage suggesting the centre of the solar system is located in the vicinity of Barack Obama’s backside might not represent true balance, you can tell yourself you’re helping to create a better, fairer, cuddlier world.

His conclusion?

Unless the Right can think of ways of making the BBC’s feedback loops work effectively, or the BBC spontaneously recognises its responsibilities to license-fee payers who don’t share its equalitarian instincts, Europe’s most significant left-liberal broadcaster will continue – shamelessly – to dress to the left.

Very well worth a read. See if you agree with it.

Saturday morning reading

This morning's interesting BBC-related reading includes: 

Spectator: Ed West - Why do most children’s books have a liberal bias?

...and now only children's books. Ed now believes he's not losing the plot when he detects a liberal bias in today's children's TV. He's found that he's not alone. Contrasting the conservative values enshrined in Thomas the Tank Engine with the liberal messages enshrined in today's Mike the Knight on CBeebies, he suggests that today's children are being instilled with liberal values from a very early age - and that the BBC's in on it.

Spectator (£): Henry Jeffreys - Agitprop for toddlers: the oddly strident politics of CBeebies

This is how Ed knows he's not alone:

I think I might be a bad parent; whenever my wife is out, I plonk our two-year-old daughter in front of the television. The other day we watched a rainbow nation of children marching around the British countryside singing ‘Let’s make sure we recycle every day’, and I realised that something has changed in children’s programming since I was little. These young recyclers are from a show [on CBeebies] called Green Balloon Club, which is ostensibly a wildlife programme, but the song had more in common with one of those Dear Leader dirges you see in North Korea. It wasn’t education, it was propaganda.

Biased BBC: Alan - You’re either in front of Guido, or you’re behind…

A persuasive piece arguing that the BBC has allowed Labour's claims about the 'standards of living crisis' to go largely unchallenged thus allowing the party to dominate the agenda while relentless dissecting all the government's claims. 

Derek Bateman Broadcaster 1: Derek Bateman -  BBC Bias Update 

Former BBC Radio Scotland presenter (now pro-independence blogger) Derek updates his readers on how their complaints to the BBC about the report evidently showing a marked anti-independence bias at the BBC have been received by the man in charge of the BBC's editorial policy in Scotland. They are telling him that they've received "an automated response", which Derek calls "the BBC corporate equivalent of saying F**k Off."

BBC Watch: Hadar - Bowen on Sharon: what did BBC audiences learn?
Hadar outlines Jeremy Bowen's characteristically skewed reports about the late Ariel Sharon with her customary attention to detail. Is Jeremy Bowen biased? Do bears perform a bowel movement in the woods?

Newsnight: What's the story?

Continuing on the theme of this week's Newsnight, here's a run-down of the stories they chose to cover.

Monday 20/01/2014: (a) the Lib Dems "mess" over Lord Rennard, (b) Syria, (c) the Rosetta comet-chasing probe and (d) a new kind of cafe.

Tuesday 21/01/2014: (a) the Lib Dems "mess" over Lord Rennard, (b) David Baddiel on Nicholas Anelka and the quenelle, (c) UKIP's un-PC pronouncements, (d) 24 hours in A&E and (e) China's tax-evading elites.

Wednesday 22/01/2014: (a) the latest unemployment figures, (b) Syria, (c) sex pests (in the light of the Lord Rennard story), (d) khat

Thursday 23/01/2014: a special from the World Economic Forum in Davos

Friday 24/01/2014: (a) Labour's plans to wipe out the budget deficit, (b) Syria, (c) the protests in Ukraine, (d) how Google positively encourages technological risk-taking 

"a Tory minister who fell from grace"

Moving back in time to the Tuesday 21st January edition of Newsnight, let's turn to the programme's remarkable savaging of UKIP for some of its member's distinctly un-PC comments.

Kirsty Wark's introduction to this feature dripped drooled with unfriendly sarcasm and Emily Maitlis's subsequent report did that thing of showing Emily sitting pretty in some unfamiliar part of the Newsnight studio speaking on the telephone to some poor chap from UKIP who'd committed the unforgivable sin of tweeting something that wasn't to Newsnight's taste - a jokey tweet calling Barack Obama "Islam Obama" (which, if Newsnight types believed in the death penalty, would surely be considered a hanging offence). 

Newsnight's obsession with 'inappropriate' Twitter comments continues.

The savaging only got worse when Kirsty gave a UKIP representative in the studio the full stony-faced, interruption-heavy, curt introduction-and-closing-thank-you, relentless attack kind of interview that Kirsty tends to reserve for those she feels absolutely no sympathy for.

That UKIP representative was the famous Neil Hamilton (of Neil and Christine Hamilton fame).

When complaining that Newsnight had failed to inform its viewers about Alain Soral's far-Right and antisemitic track record, the BBC Complaints department argued (you may recall) that the programme couldn't tell its viewers everything after they chose merely to described him as a "French writer and film-producer"...

...and yet, Kirsty Wark didn't just introduce Neil Hamilton as UKIP's deputy leader. Oh no. She introduced him as: 

Well, Neil Hamilton was a Tory minister who fell from grace. Now he's UKIP's deputy chair.

Was that strictly necessary, except in the context of a hatchet job on UKIP? Well, it certainly set the tone for what followed.

It's funny how Newsnight can provide background on an interviewee during their introductions to an interview...when its suits them.

'Working Street'

Following on from the completely-and-utterly one-sided pro-drug (khat) piece on Wednesday's night's Newsnight, what can we say about the rest of that edition?

Well, it contained three other topics: (a) the latest unemployment figures, (b) Syria and (c) sex pests (in the light of the Lord Rennard story). Let's look at the first of those.

The bias in the khat piece can be excused (at a push) by saying that it was a non-BBC 'personal view'. The 'latest unemployment figures' report, in contrast, was an entirely inhouse report. It came from the BBCs Andy Verity.

It's framing imagery - 'Working Street' - mocked the Left's bogey-programme-of-the-moment, Channel 4's much-talked-about, ratings-grabbing (7 million!) documentary Benefits Street. [People at work really are talking about it. No one is talking about Newsnight.] 

On the day that the Office for National Statistics (see a few posts ago) released its latest stats for employment and unemployment in the UK showing a large rise in total employment (now at a record level), a sharp fall in unemployment, a fall in the number of economically inactive people and a rise in total pay and regular pay, Newsnight chose to report from another street in Birmingham - one where people work rather than being just on benefits. Strikingly, this was presented as being more representative of Britain now - "not too far from the average street," as Andy put it. 

He talked to two such residents - one who complained about being on zero hours contracts and the other who, whilst in work (self-employed), was "classed as being in poverty". Neither, as you can see from the stats in the post slightly lower down the page, are at all 'average' or 'representative'. Both are outliers, statistically-speaking. Why then were they presented as Mr Averages, typifying the present condition of Britain?

Well, this all seemed pretty biased stuff, rather bearing out the complaints of many at, say, Biased BBC that the BBC seems to be accentuating the negative, as usual, about the economy under the coalition. 

Then came what might be seen as the the clincher. 

Andy began talking Labour's talk about the 'cost of living crisis' and, for his expert 'talking head', he featured James Plunkett of the Resolution Foundation, as well as citing statistics from that think tank. Now, the Resolution Foundation is a centre-left think tank with many links to the Labour Party. Labour and the Resolution have worked closely on the 'squeezed middle' agenda. Andy Verity failed to mention any of this. 

"Labour's little helpers"?

Still at least the following interview balanced the Conservatives' David Gauke with Labour's Stephen Timms.


Incidentally, the 'sex pests' feature was a discussion between Kirsty Wark and Labour MP Stella Creasy, Labour peer Baroness Bakewell and well-known Labour supporter Anne 'The Wink' Robinson. Nice.


Update 25/1: That said, Andy Verity was back on last night's Newsnight as the programme plugged previewed a Labour speech intending to reassure voters that Labour will be a safe pair of hands on the economy, and he didn't underplay the problems Labour face with the public over their economic reputation. There were images of cars and dummies depicting the crash that happened on Labour's watch [which they can't have enjoyed watching!] and memories of pledges of economic competence past which smashed into the ground. Victoria Derbyshire's introduction laid out the agenda:

Tonight Labour promise to wipe out the budget deficit by 2020 if they win the next election and to bring in legislation to make sure they actually do it. But can he {Ed Miliband} persuade the voters to forget it's Labour who presided over the financial crisis which created much of the deficit mess. Right and Left are here to point the finger at each other.

Look what the khat dragged in!

As someone who (for my sins) has been deeply immersed in the world of blogs about BBC bias for many years now, I think I can safely say that there's a perception about that the BBC advances a liberal position on drugs - from the many, many, many blogposts of Home Editor Mark Easton which report (uncritically) the statements of some pro-liberalisation group or bigwig through to Andrew Hussey's Heroin on Radio 4. 

Wednesday night's Newsnight tackled a drugs story. At issue was the UK government's decision to ban khat - a drug popular with Somali immigrants. 

I suppose you might have expected Newsnight to ask, "Is that a good idea or a bad idea?", but they chose not to. Instead, they asked Alex Miller of VICE to do a report for them. 

Alex's report was a sustained argument against the UK government's intended ban. 

I could tell where his report was going from its opening words:

Khat is a mild stimulant that grows on trees in East Africa. To most drinkers and drug-takers in the UK the effects of khat are so minor that they barely register. 

What followed used a distancing tone of voice, including sarcasm, to dismiss the complaints of khat's critics in a few brief sentences.

Here's one such sentence - its first part delivered in a normal tone of voice, its second (a straw man caricature) rushed like the punchline of a joke:

But people who grew khat insist it should be thought of more like coffee and less like the end of the world.

Khat dealer Mahamud Ahmed Mohammed was told (by Alex) that the ban would "presumably be bad for your business." MAM (if I may call him that) agreed.

But, as we may not feel too much sympathy for him, Alex then presented us with a string of poor Kenyans whose lives would be ruined by the British government's ban. Whole regions of Kenya are economically reliant on it, he told us. "When the UK ban actually kicks in, the region's gonna go from being one of the richest in Kenya to being broke". Alex kept on reinforcing this message, tugging at our heart-strings. 

The locals Alex talked to dismissed the suggestion from Western government that money from khat helps funds the terrorists of al-Shabab (the murderous bastards behind the Westgate shopping centre massacre in Nairobi). Alex gave every impression that he completely believed the locals rather than the Western governments, and kept getting them to re-assert that 'fact'. He referred to the link between terrorism and the khat trade as a "supposed" one, emphasizing that word strongly, and then dismissed it editorially, before proceeding to advance the argument that the ban would actually force more Kenyans into the arms of al-Shabab. The argument?: No money from khat will translate into support for vicious Islamic terrorism. The insane illogic behind this was not explored, for whatever reason. 

Alex's next argument was that the ban will lead to illegal trading, to smugglers becoming rich, and that such smuggling is easy.  

We then heard from some British Somalis (or should that be 'British Somalis'?) attacking the government for intruding on their personal freedoms and making khat sound worse than it was. 

A short - yes, short - clip of the UK's leading anti-khat campaigner, Kala Soo Xiriir Barnaamijkan, talking with Alex was then shown.

He "claims" to have struggled with khat addiction, said Alex, and "preaches" on a weekly TV show about it - plenty of loaded language there to dispose us against him. Alex disagreed with him and he disagreed with Alex. It was all over in a flash.

Then it was straight back to Kenya and its khat cafes. 

More loaded language followed immediately, as Alex said khat's detractors were "fixated" by them. The locals in the cafe think they're great, and Alex described them as being great too - places where people just hang out and have fun. "It's just friendly and chilled out. It's a good vibe, right?", he said.  

Now, the BBC will probably defend this one-sided polemic by saying that it's one isolated report, a 'personal view' (even though they didn't exactly emphasize that fact), and that it will be balanced out over time. 

Except that - and I will state this with confidence - it won't be balanced out over time. There...will...be...no...counterbalancing...anti-khat, pro-ban...polemic...on...Newsnight,...not now, not ever.

It's that BBC bias thing again, isn't it? 

For a slightly more balanced report, why not try that by Channel 4 News? Unlike Alex's BBC piece, where he asserts that the vast majority of Somali Brits (or 'Somali Brits') oppose the UK government's ban, Channel 4 says [with my emphases - obviously):

By making such decisions, Theresa May defied government scientists and some of her fellow MPs. But she became an unlikely hero of the Somali community.

Khat is used by an estimated 90,000 people in the UK, mainly Somalis. A mild stimulant, it's blamed by many for family breakdown, unemployment and mental illness.

BBC technology boss John Linwood sacked

Google News is invaluable in letting you track how a new story spreads around the media. 

I can't quite tell whether it was Broadcast or the Guardian which broke it first, but the Guardian certainly published the story at 16.19 this afternoon:

Broadcast's version states:

BBC technology boss John Linwood sacked

The BBC has revealed that John Linwood, the technology boss that oversaw the £100m Digital Media Initiative fiasco, was formally relieved of his duties in July last year.

The Guardian's version says:

BBC boss in charge of scrapped DMI project left without a payoff

John Linwood, the chief technology officer, exited six months ago after failure which cost licence fee payers nearly £100m

It was only at 17.18 (an hour later) that the BBC got round to publishing the story. 

BBC abandons £100m digital project

The BBC's former technology chief John Linwood was sacked in July over the failed £100m Digital Media Initiative (DMI) the corporation has confirmed.

You would have hoped that the BBC would have chosen to 'break' that news themselves, in the interests of appearing transparent.

Will this story be on tonight's Newsnight?

Employment Stats UK

In preparing this week's forthcoming Newsnight reports I found myself having a read of the latest Office for National Statistics report on UK employment. It's not something I usually do (no, honestly!) but I might well be doing so again as they are very interesting - as I hope you'll agree. 

So here are the nation's latest stats:.

• The number of people in employment in the UK is 30.07 million,
• The number of UK born people in employment in the UK is 25.68 million.
• The number of non-UK born people in employment in the UK is 4.38 million.

• The number of men working full-time is 13.99 million.
• The number of men working part-time is 2.17 million.
• The number of women working full-time is 8.06 million.
• The number of women working part-time is 5.94 million.

• 5.67 million people are employed in the public sector.
• 24.42 million people are employed in the private sector.
• 81.2% of people in employment worked in the private sector and the remaining 18.8% worked in the public sector.

• The number of self-employed people is 4.36 million.

• 1.56 million people are employed in the National Health Service.
• 1.08 million people are employed in public administration.
• 1.49 million people are employed in education.
• 432,000 people are employed in HM Forces and the police.

• Total hours worked per week were 969.3 million for September to November 2013.
• Average weekly hours worked for September to November 2013 were 32.2.

• Average total pay (including bonuses) for employees in Great Britain is £475 per week.

• Average regular pay (excluding bonuses) for employees in Great Britain is £447 per week.

• There are 2.32 million unemployed people, down 167,000 from June to August 2013.

• There are 1.31 million unemployed men.

• There are 1.01 million unemployed women.

• 1.09 million people have been unemployed for up to six months.

• 395,000 people have been unemployed for between six and twelve months.

• 839,000 people have been unemployed for over one year.

• 449,000 people have been unemployed for over two years.

• There are 2.28 million economically inactive students.

• There are 2.29 million people looking after the family or home.

• There are 2.00 million people who are economically inactive due to long-term sickness.

• There are 1.34 million economically inactive people who have retired before reaching the age of 65.

The latest stooshie

That report, which I mentioned a few posts ago, from the University of the West of Scotland which claims to have found empirical, statistical evidence that the BBC is biased against Scottish independence is now available to read online, and is pleasingly compact. 

Whatever your views on Scottish independence, the ensuing stooshie [noun (Scotland): the disruption caused by a disagreement or misunderstanding] has been interesting. 

The BBC is not happy.

According to (pro-independence) former BBC Scotland host Derek Bateman, the BBC is doing what it always does when presented with empirical, statistical evidence of the kind of bias it doesn't want to be accused of: (a) trying to hide it from licence-fee payers by not reporting it, (b) contacting the university concerned to object, and copying in the university's principal ("a classic piece of low cunning to intimidate an academic by referring it to his boss"), (c) merely asserting their own doubts about the factual accuracy of the report and (d) playing the man rather than his argument:

There is little doubt that John Robertson’s illuminating report has found out the questionable management of news at Pacific Quay when [Ian] Small [BBC head of public policy there] says the report is  “highly subjective and questionable analysis of our news output.” Those are, in my view, spiteful and insulting accusations against a Scottish academic for which Small has no evidence whatsoever. Are you getting the impression of an arrogant, out-of-touch, superior organization resentful of criticism and unable to defend itself without resorting to personal vilification?

Sounds familiar.

Stayin alive

There’s a story that makes me think of a sketch in a long-forgotten show, where the character dismisses a bunch of random topics as ‘rubbish’.

Can you guess which story it is? It’s not the quenelle. That story was given the BBC’s default Politically Correct treatment for a while, then after evidence too overwhelming to ignore, the quenelle gesture gradually became accepted as being unquestionably, indisputably antisemitic. Now the issue seems to have segued seamlessly  into ‘racism in footie’ and the whole matter has been muddied with the slightly counter-productive question of “yid”.

So even though I thought the Today programme did a reasonable item on the topic yesterday, (and made a bit of a pig’s ear of it on Newsnight last night,) I think it’s now widely understood that the quenelle gesture is considered to be a justifiably offensive act, and the story currently appears upon our screens nearly as ubiquitously as Benedict Cumberbach.

That brings me to the story in question, which at the time of writing hasn’t been covered by the BBC at all. 

Huffpo, Harry’s Place, Homo Economicus, to name a couple or three, yes. It’s been covered extensively, mainly because it’s so ridiculous.

Everything about this story is ludicrous. Every single one of the ingredients.

Lib Dems

George Galloway

Maajid Nawaz

Twitter

Islam

Cartoons

Jesus and Mo 

So it seems that Maajid Nawaz, who, despite campaigning for the modernisation of his religion, is still a religious Muslim, which for me gets a down-ding, but that’s my problem I suppose - anyhow, for some reason he wants to be a Liberal Democrat so much that he’s an actual Liberal Democrat candidate.

Why would anyone want to be a Lib Dem these days? I mean that would entail being tainted with David Ward!

The Lib Dems’ association with large Muslim constituencies, think Sarah Teather, and Cleggie’s tardiness in dumping Jenny Tonge; think the Lib Dems’ propensity to take CAABU sponsored trips to the Middle East to be fed raw pro-Palestinian propaganda. All this bruises my pro-Israel sensibilities. I might even take offence at it all, which is my prerogative.

Anyway, Nawaz does want to be a Lib Dem M.P., but the persistent high-profile media presence he has cultivated led him to rashly appear on The Big Questions, during which some fellow-panellists (for want of a better word) wore their Jesus and Mo T shirts, which in turn had been the catalyst for a freedom of speech issue at their university. (they’d been banned, then unbanned)   if I remember correctly.

The BBC, pandering to a misunderstanding of Islamic regulations, or a misunderstanding of Maajid’s Islamic sensitivities, or for some other unspecified reason, thought they’d better not let these T shirts be shown Live On National TV, so later Maajid chose to show, on Twitter, that he was such a liberal Muslim that he didn’t mind the T shirts, and he Tweeted the very T shirt image in question to prove it.

Then I hear all hell broke loose. I mean - fatwas all round.

 What is the objection, exactly? What is the actual offence? Is it: 

a) Mocking Islam?

b) Mocking Christianity? (I don’t think so) 

c)  Showing an image of the prophet Mohammad PBUH which is only a very badly drawn cartoon that obviously makes no serious attempt to be a likeness?

So Maajid’s Twitter feed with the image of the Jesus and Mo cartoon that was on the T shirt caused offence.  People from far and wide have clubbed together to campaign for Maajid’s deselection. Can you Adam’n’Eve it? And all this amidst an existential crisis for the Clegg party!

Enter George Galloway. He Tweets:

“No Muslim will ever vote for the Liberal democrats anywhere ever unless they ditch the provocateur Maajid Nawaz, cuckold of the EDL” 

Apart from being a completely bonkers statement, one might wonder why the hell should he care? He’s not a Lib Dem now, is he? Surely not... 

Even the cuddliest Muslims that the BBC are so fond of calling upon for their opinions on this that and the other have weighed in with varying degrees of condemnation.

 Mohammad Shafiq, himself no stranger to The Big Questions,  says it was despicable behaviour.

What, tweeting a cartoon on a T shirt?

despicable behaviour

Then with all the hooha about Twitter and vicious, racist and threatening Tweets therein, think whassername that got the feminist image on the fiver,(or was it the tenner) and the footballer who’s been racially abused,  some Islamist or shall we say misinterpreter of Islam has tweeted a threat. He’s going to cut  his neck off. (Maajid’s, not his own) It would be hard to do that without causing a very serious life changing injury - I don’t imagine he had in mind a simple neckectomy, you know, attaching the head directly onto the shoulders. No. He means he’s going to kill him.

Just imagine.

Everyone has weighed in with their own opinion, even me. Mine is that the whole thing and everything about it is utterly ridiculous.

The Lib Dems are ridiculous.

Maajid Nawas is ridiculous.

Fatwas are ridiculous.

The campaigns for deselection and antideselection are ridiculous.

The Big Questions is ridiculous.

George Galloway is ridiculous.

Mohammad Shafiq is ridiculous.

Twitter is ridiculous.

The LSE is ridiculous.

Me writing this is ridiculous

The only things that are supposed to be ridiculous, i.e. the Jesus and Mo cartoons, aren’t ridiculous.