I’ve never watched ITV in the morning before, but I have seen Piers Morgan on other programmes and I’m aware of his reputation so I sort of know what he’s like. I remember seeing Susanna Reid quite a while ago, hosting one of the BBC’s Sunday Morning shows. They're both assholes in their own way, but controversialist Piers Morgan has his uses and Susanna probably has nice legs, so I can understand why ITV employs them in the dog eat dog scramble for ratings and advertising revenue.
A member of this household alerted me to it. I hope it will be on YouTube soon. In the meantime, the tabloids have picked it up, and so has the Telegraph. Twitter is ablaze. (link temporarily unavailable)
If you have joined “The State’ in hounding Tommy Robinson for inciting violence against the Muslims, you should wash your mouth out with soap immediately.
If anyone says something that’s considered ’wrong’ these days, you can bet that some cloth-eared bully of a media pundit will reinterpret it and encourage the baying mob to ridicule you. Incitement is incitement is incitement.
Tommy Robinson has made several mistakes along the way, but he deserves to be listened to. He certainly wasn’t taken apart by Andrew Neil or Jeremy Paxman and as for Guido’s cobbled together list of ‘similarities between Tommy Robinson and Anjem Choudary’ it’s as wrong-headed as it is dumb.
Both agree on an expansionist, conquering interpretation of the Quran.
Big difference. Choudary is for and Robinson is against.
Both are denounced by the vast, vast majority of British Muslims.
Who isn’t?
Both have been in prison.
But for committing what crime?
Both led extremist organisations.
Cheap and sloppy.
Both love noisy confrontational street demonstrations where violence and arrests were common.
Sloppy and cheap.
Both have been taken apart in BBC interviews by Andrew Neil.
No.
Both, in their time, loved a beer and a fag.
Irrelevant.
Both were based in Luton.
Correct.
Both struggled to keep their language short of incitement to violence laws, treading carefully to avoid official action against them.
Choudary managed to avoid official action for far too long whereas Robinson failed to avoid the patently unwarranted official action that was taken against him.
Both are attention-seeking media manipulators who exploit legitimate grievances.
Craig will tell you that I never did have very much faith in Theresa May. As for Brexit, I like the principle that we can take back control but - ‘That’s all very well’ I’d say, ‘but who is gonna be the ‘we’ that takes it?
It could be Jeremy Corbyn, propelled into P.M-ship by the upcoming post-Brexit dip in the economy. If Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell were the ‘we’, it would be even worse than the dreaded bad-deal, but by the same token if Theresa May made a pig’s ear of the negotiations we could be lumbered with a deal that could be a good deal worse than a bad deal..
Her first cabinet reshuffle was hardly confidence-inspiring, and her disastrous election campaign with its clumsily presented, ill-judged, and if I may say so, arrogant manifesto, together with Jeremy Corbyn’s fairy-godmother manifesto, not to mention those furious rallies and all the bullying by his antisemitic, politically illiterate Momentumists; between them they created a perfect storm.
For want of a better alternative many people were prepared to settle for Theresa May.
But, and it’s a big but (as Jeremy Corbyn probably said to the Shadow Home Secretary) if there’s one thing I certainly don’t think Theresa May should be criticised for, it’s the absence of that public show of emotion that everyone is clamouring for. I don’t want to see Theresa May or any other politician blinking back tears and I’m fed up of listening to anyone prefacing their political opinion with a sad-faced statement concerning their thoughts and prayers. What prayers? Does everyone say prayers now?*
After Grenfell surely Theresa May should have been doing exactly what she says she has been doing. Setting up the public enquiry. Putting emergency funding in place. Doing Prime Minister stuff.
Yet we had a veritable stream of identical-looking women parading through the TV studios (BBC and Sky) reviewing the Sunday papers. They all said the same thing, directly or indirectly, that Theresa May hasn’t shown sufficient emotional incontinence in public.
There’s a theory that economics influences fashion. Something in the current climate - hair straighteners ? - has produced armies of clones with the same infantilising hair-style and the same infantile opinions. They all want everything delivered in the form of a soap opera. To earn their approval Theresa May must be seen in public fanning her red-rimmed eyes and hugging a poor person.
Perhaps Theresa May can take heart from the turnaround within Her Majesty’s opposition.
Jeremy Corbyn outwitted the critics and rebels in his own party whose desire to unseat him evaporated with his electioneering triumph; so if he can ride out the storm, maybe she can too.
All she needs is a good BreakfastBreggsit Brexit.
*****
I was too busy to blog yesterday. Now I’ve got Theresa May’s emotional inadequacy off my chest there's the latest car-ramming incident to respond to. More tear-filled thoughts and prayers.
The BBC already speaks fluent Muslamic. Announcers pronounce “Muslim’ with the double ‘ss’. ‘Moosslim’, and enunciate the term ‘Friday prayers’ with a familiarity that subliminally incorporates Friday Prayers* into standard British culture, which I suppose, these days it just about has been. Mosque-goers are referred to as ‘worshippers’ in a reverential manner I’ve yet to hear applied to any other religion.
Unlike Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn has done the right thing. He’s blubbed. He’s just soo honest.
Most of the Today Programme was devoted to this incident. John Humphrys consulted Brendan Cox to ask if this was an act of hatred or an act of insanity?
BC.
“There is an increasingly strong group of people who are actively inciting hatred against others, and that has certainly been true from bits of the extremist Islamist community in the past and we’e spoken about what we can do to crack down on those hate preachers, but I think it’s also something, in the case of Islamophobia, people, there are extremists again who are driving hatred, who are using language about cleansing Britain of Islam, who are talking about a final solution for Muslims and I think we have to treat this act of terrorism, if that’s what it ends up being, in the same as any other act of terrorism”
“Final solution” now where have I heard that before? Apart from your actual Hitler, wasn't it his modern incarnation, hate preacher and thought criminal Katie Hopkins?
BC.
“Extremist voices feel more emboldened to act on these views and that’s all about the climate. You know, for example when there is the US president talking about Muslims in a disparaging way and failing to break down the difference between extremists and people that just happen to belong to a community, it changes the entire tenet of the debate. The person that did this is the person that has the responsibility. I said that in the context of the Manchester attack and the London attacks and the murder of my wife; the person that did it is the person that’s responsible, but we do have to look at the context in which these events happen and I don’t think we take that seriously enough.
JH.
Is there any evidence at all of any coherent organisation behind this far right extremism?
BC.
You’ll see online, and it’s very clear that there are a series of organisations who are actively inciting hatred, not against extremists, but against Muslims as a whole and I think those people are very organised, they’re well funded they’re well financed, and again I think we have to have a dual approach to this cos it’s partly about those extremist organisations, but I also think we all have to have a look at ourselves and actually more mainstream organisations and organisations who probably don’t tip over into that incitement to violence, but I think sometimes we do blur the distinction and talk in a way where people think that Muslims as a whole are represented by the people that committed the attacks in Manchester or London. They don’t, in the same way that this attack doesn’t represent the vast majority of people.
You know yesterday and over the weekend we had this huge coming together of communities in celebration of the things that unite us across the UK.
That’s what represents our country, but we have to get much better at tackling hatred in whatever community that comes from.”
Who or what is this well organised, well-funded and well financed group? I’d be interested to know.
I didn’t join any of those ‘Get-Together’ celebrations yesterday but I did find time to watch some of the live-streamed footage of the Al Quds march through central London.
People, including Sadiq Khan, who were talking about coming together were probably too busy to notice the bile that was megaphoned over the streets of London to the insistent beating of a drum.
If Brendan Cox doesn’t acknowledge that it’s not just the violence of the few that needs to be dealt with, but the extremism of the many, then all his posturing is hypocritical and hollow.
"we have more in common than that which divides us” while the Al Quds brigade retaliate with “Jews to the gas”?
These sentiments are not mutually exclusive, are they? In fact they may complement each other.
The BBC is aware of the former celebration, but apparently not of the latter. It will be interesting to see how (and if) they report these events, particularly Al Quds, should there be ‘trouble’.
Which event to attend? Jeremy Corbyn must be torn.
It’s (nearly) my official birthday and I’m releasing a statement: ‘It’s difficult to escape a very sombre mood’ in the country.” And would you believe it, on her official birthday The Queen agreed with me.
A very sombre mood
Terrorist attacks, Jeremy Corbyn set to become the next Prime Minister, the Conservative Party imploding just as we’re about to commit Brexit, Al Quds day tomorrow and the BBC whipping up more and more indignation and fury with its wall-to-wall coverage of those increasingly familiar days-of-rage, sparked off (sorry) by the Grenfell Tower inferno. It’s all part and parcel of living in this country don’t you know, and we’ll just have to get used to it.
As if all that wasn’t sombre enough, on top of that the BBC aired a programme last night featuring a whole load of those really annoying people who always, always laugh at nothing. You know them. They’re the ones about whom you’re thinking ‘why are you laughing like that, you moron’.
Where do they get these people? Are they real? Like, actually sitting in the audience, laughing at swearing? Or are they spliced in at a later date?
That must be it. I think I know how they do it. Frankie Boyle and clebs from the BBC’s favourite pool of same-olds perform their tedious Theresa May / Donald Trump routines in front of the green background. Then the technical department splices in the laughing audience, which was actually filmed watching people falling down on “You’ve been Framed”. They do this to make Frankie Boyle look amusing.
Unfortunately things turned out more sombre than ever. Is Frankie Boyle Susan’s brother? Can he sing or anything?
Frankie Boyle’s New World Order is the title of the programme. It's an ironic title - so ironic it's not. Wearing an oddly retro suit and waistcoat combo that made him look portly and awkward Mr. Boyle poured his little heart out. What was wrong with him? It seems that he had a bottled-up stream of resentment against Theresa May and Donald Trump he needed to offload, and the BBC generously gave him a safe space to do so. Sara Pascoe and Katherine Ryan made one or two predictable quips and the diversity quota came in the form of the finger-wagging Mona Chalabi and that American who appeared (mysteriously) on Question Time last week.
“It’s amazing to thunk that that’s the best election result that we could’ve hoped fur. The Conservatuves formung a co-ulushuon with the poluticul wung of the auld testimunt” He said. Oh how they laughed.
All the ire was directed at Theresa May / the DUP and Donald Trump. Not even a squeak about Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, Emily Thornberry, Seumas Milne, John McDonnell or Sadiq Khan, let alone the perpetrators of the three recent terrorist attacks, which, one would think would have merited at least a tad of ire.
“Two of the Palestinians attacked police officers with guns and knives while the third stabbed the policewoman, police say.
The three were identified by police as two men aged 18 or 19 and another man, all from the West Bank.”
Since we’re always accusing the BBC of bias against - no, let’s look it it as bias towards - certain issues, it’s helpful when sites like ITBB provide extra substance to to back up such claims. There are some inbuilt biases which we believe fatally compromise its impartiality.
The BBC’s influence on the public, on the matter of domestic politics at least, is tempered by the fact that they’re speaking to an audience that is familiar with the issues. People have grown up with them and are capable of thinking for themselves. The BBC’s ideological affinity with the Labour Party (not so much with the current leadership) is understood by the Right and denied by the Left, but the public consists of all sorts, people with entrenched views who will hardly budge no matter what the BBC puts in from of them; those who waft in the wind; rabid ideologues from the hard left and the far right; the don’t knows and the don’t cares. The Lib Dems, even. And more, I’m sure.
BBC news editors decide what is or isn’t newsworthy, and the BBC’s political pundits and experts still have a certain influence on public opinion, but access to to all stripes of politics is freely available in the press and online. The BBC no longer has the monopoly it once had on “the news”, and, as someone once said: ‘other brands are available’.
However, while the BBC’s views on domestic politics are becoming less relevant, the vast majority of the British public turns to the BBC for information concerning foreign affairs. For some reason the BBC has shown an almost obsessive interest in the Israeli / Palestinian conflict, and the BBC's negative attitude towards Israel coupled with its rose-tinted view of the Palestinian Arabs has had wide ramifications.
As we face the prospect of Sunday’s annual Al Quds march in central London, where Hezbollah flags and “Hitler was right’ banners abound, it would seem apt for ITBB to offer some kind of ‘fightback’ in the form of a ‘back to basics’ review of some relevant posts that show where the BBC is coming from when it reports, or more importantly doesn’t report - matters appertaining to the Middle East.
Our contention is that the BBC is full of Liberal-Left Arabists who report the Israel-Palestinian conflict from a purely anti-Israel perspective, but that the bias is semi-concealed from the public, many of whom are trusting enough to assume that the BBC’s impartiality obligations, as per the charter, are automatically upheld and monitored.
Tagged-on “Israel claims’” passages in the reporting of Jeremy Bowen or Yolande Knell pay lip-service to impartiality. The BBC sticks them there in order to muddy the waters and give their in-house complaints department something to clutch at.
My objections to Paul Adams’s authoritative-seeming piece on the 6-Day War were based on an instinctive hunch. (That he was no impartial authority, but a typical liberal-left Arabist.) I found just enough information online to confirm my hunch, but Daphne Anson has written blogposts with detailed background information, and they’re worth revisiting to get an understanding of the wider picture.
Craig and I have noticed that the amount of time and effort we put into a post inversely affects the response - in the short term, anyway. Our longer pieces tend to slow-burn, and they do get the readership in the end.
For that reason, over the page, I’m going to repost, with her permission, an extract from one of Daphne’s pieces from 2010 and the entire Elder of Ziyon piece from 2015, and link to two of my own posts, which relate to the same subject.
I might as well join the rest of the virtue-signalling community and boast that when me and Craig have nothing to say, we say nothing. Nothing much, anyway.
It didn’t take long for the usuals to start politicising Grenfell Tower, did it?
*****
I see Laura Perrins is on Question Time tonight, as is Emily Thornberry. Might be worth staying awake for. Go Laura! (g’wan g’wan)
*****
I listened to Jeremy Bowen’s puff piece about Yassir Arafat. Another terrible piece. He’s obviously an Arafat admirer , like Barbara Plett - and I do believe Bowen thinks the discredited polonium story is feasible.
*****
Hugo Rifkind(£) thinks the naturally irascible Corbyn has learned not to be too grumpy in front of the cameras.
“When an ITV reporter asked him a year ago whether he wanted there to be a general election, nobody forced him to say, irritably, “I’m being harassed!”, before storming off to hide behind what turned out to be, awkwardly, a glass door. This is who Jeremy Corbyn was. He was tetchy and he was incompetent, and if anybody with any sense was going to vote for him, then everything any of us knew about anything was wrong.”
He learnt to smile and jest specially for the campaign.
“…..a pivotal moment in this election came during Corbyn’s interview with Jeremy Paxman, when Paxman, in full Spanish inquisition mode, asked him why the Labour manifesto included nothing on Corbyn’s long-held ambition of scrapping the monarchy. “There’s nothing in there because we’re not going to do it,” retorted Corbyn, visibly amused. Hidden beneath the audience’s guffaws, this was the sound of a man wryly acknowledging the fundamental impracticality of his own radicalism. All of a sudden, Jeremy Corbyn was a moderate.”
There are signs that he has reverted.
*****
The BBC may be going overboard with its Grenfell Tower coverage. Sky is the same. All the other stuff that was so important before the disaster has evaporated - obviously the distressing, heart-rending human interest element of this terrible fire makes everything else pale into insignificance, but at the same time continuous interviews with people who knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who is missing or killed, is not ‘news’. Dragging it out too long in a mawkish and voyeuristic way diminishes the tragedy, if anything .
You’d think the BBC would be interested, since it concerns a TV film about migrants.
TV film. Migrants. What’s not to like?
But no. This story is not so much about migrants; it’s more about censorship. The BBC knows about that too, but probably isn’t keen on giving this particular censorship-related revelation the oxygen of publicity. You’ve probably seen the story. It was blogged by Not a Sheep, Breitbart, Pamela Geller and The Times of Israel.
COLOGNE — A new documentary on European anti-Semitism was financed with over €170,000 of taxpayer money. So why is it not being shown to the public? Because the TV networks holding the rights refuse to broadcast it.
The 90-minute film, “Chosen and Excluded — Jew Hatred in Europe” by German producers Joachim Schröder and Sophie Hafner, was commissioned by German public TV broadcaster WDR on behalf of its French-German partner channel Arte.
Presenting the various ways in which anti-Semitism is expressed in contemporary Europe, the documentary shows right-wing Neo-Nazis, BDS activists and a demonstrator dressed like a hippie who designates himself a libertarian and praises the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Anti-Semitism among worker’s rights activists in France is featured alongside cases of Muslim Jew-hatred, some of which culminate in the torturing and cold-blooded murder of Jews.
However, once the documentary was submitted — and approved by the editor — the heads of the networks decided that it would not be broadcast because the movie allegedly “fails to meet formal requirements.”
Throughout Europe, the decision has roused much criticism: The French daily Le Monde and German anti-Semitism researcher Monika Schwarz-Friesel, among others, call it a case of censorship.
Paying special attention to the denigration of the state of Israel as one of the most prevalent contemporary forms of Jew-hatred, the documentary highlights the activities of NGOs that engage in anti-Semitic Israel bashing while receiving European tax money. In order to contextualize anti-Semitic libel about the Jewish state by contrasting it with the reality on the ground, the producers included footage from Israel and the Palestinian territories.
That footage, ironically, is what Arte program director Alain Le Diberder, states as the major reason for pulling the plug on the production.
In a press statement Le Diberder claims that the producers failed to comply with the requirement to deliver a documentary about anti-Semitism in Europe, because they included too much footage from Israel and too little from European countries.
“This is ludicrous,” says Serap Güler, a member of both the WDR network’s program council as well as the executive committee of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU-party.
Michaela Engelmeier, a Social-Democratic member of the Bundestag (Germany’s federal parliament), likewise calls Le Diberder’s statement “incomprehensible.”
The comments below the line are rabidly antisemitic, proving a diametrically opposite point to the one intended.
Backlash? Of a sort, maybe; but not against French-German broadcaster channel Arte. Just unadulterated Jew-bashing mayhem.
Among the writers and bloggers who are nonplussed by the avalanche of antisemitism unleashed by Labour’s popularity is Marc Goldberg. His piece is enigmatically titled “The Irrelevance of Antisemitism.” ( Harry’s Place) Of course he didn’t mean he thinks antisemitism is irrelevant. It means he’s staggered by the number of labour voters and supporters to whom it actually is. They deny that antisemitism exists in the Labour Party because "legitimate criticism of Israel is not antisemitic" and accuse the accusers of perpetuating smears.
Were you aware that Jeremy Corbyn wrote to Theresa May in January because he was “concerned that there was a plot against British democracy” ?
I can’t remember if I knew about it at the time and had forgotten or if it was new to me, but either way it says more about Jeremy Corbyn’s stupidity and spitefulness than it does about hyperbolised theories about Israelis plotting to undermine democracy.
The plot in question was, of course, al Jazeera’s undercover film that caught a junior member of the Israeli Embassy on camera “plotting” to “take down” Alan Duncan, (which sadly came to nothing.)
The openness with which antisemitism is being expressed is one thing. The fact that it is based on so much misinformation is something that the BBC has the means to correct, and if they do not do so soon, they will look just as guilty as the next antisemite.
17 years ago Jeremy Bowen’s driver Abed was killed by ‘trigger-happy’ young Israeli soldiers who had mistaken their car for the sign of a possible terrorist attack; by a quirk of fate Bowen was filming a ‘piece to camera’ some yards away from the unfortunate Abed patiently waiting for him in the the car and our intrepid reporter lived to tell the tale. He has borne a grudge against Israel ever since. His brush with death left him with survivors’ guilt as well as a deep-seated hostility to Israel. Despite the obligatory grafted-on lip-service to “Israel’s side of the story” his feelings seep into his reporting.
This is where the BBC’s judgement in appointing him their chief Middle East editor comes into question. We’re resigned to hearing events described from the Palestinian perspective by Jeremy Bowen and other here-today-gone-tomorrow BBC journalists who report from the Middle East under his supervision. We know there’s nothing to be done about it. The BBC shares Jeremy Bowen’s outlook and that’s that.
This would be fine if the BBC routinely added one of their famous footnotes to their reports; something like “May contain nuts.”
When Alan Johnson was being taken hostage in Gaza, he pleaded to his captors in a panic-induced outburst of honesty: “But I’m telling your story!”
Now Paul Adams is lecturing us about the Six Day War and I have to ask - by what authority?
Why has Paul Adams been commissioned to write an article called “The Six Day War : Six ways the conflict still matters” on the BBC website? Is he a historian? Did he graduate from Oxbridge with first class hons. specialising in Middle East studies? Did he study history?
Not really. I think he’s an pro immigration BBC correspondent with a left-wing attitude, an English degree and an unapologetically Arabist outlook. (I Googled)
BBC Watch is able to deconstruct his piece far more knowledgeably than I, but I can make some observations from the perspective of a blogger with a useless fine art degree and an unapologetically pro-Israel outlook.
The slightly florid language with a whiff of menace in the first paragraph is classic BBC. Think Fergal Keane meets a poor man’s Michael Burek. It could almost have been written by Jeremy Bowen.
“For many Israelis, this was a moment of euphoria. Their young state's military prowess had been amply demonstrated. The whole of Jerusalem, and all of Judaism's holiest places, were back under Jewish control for the first time in 2,000 years. Just 22 years after the Holocaust, the Jewish people's future now seemed secure, in their ancestral homeland. This was heady stuff.”
The cavalier: ’both sides have experienced profound division” seems to me to be a throwaway line that compresses a half-truth into the distortion of a whole truth.
My understanding is that the religious minority that holds some sway over the Israeli government bears no comparison to the religiously fuelled turmoil that permanently rages within much of Palestinian society. Added to which, the fact that Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are continually at loggerheads causes massive disruption to everyday life. Failure to pay Gaza’s electricity bill is one consequence of that. However, both Palestinian factions are ultimately committed to the destruction of Israel, each going about the business at their own pace. Paul Adams has:
“the Palestinians have been deeply split for over a decade, between a PLO-dominated Palestinian Authority, willing to negotiate with Israel, and an Islamist militant movement, Hamas, which still says it wants to liberate "all of Palestine”.
“the PA’s willingness to negotiate with Israel “ is stretching it a bit. It’s no secret that Abbas’s negotiators have continually procrastinated and shown little appetite for negotiating with Israel; instead they've invented a series of spurious preconditions before even entertaining the possibility of coming to the table. They’ve painted themselves into a corner with that one and they’re stranded there.
The other side is more up front with their uncompromising plan to liberate all of Palestine from the river to the sea. The Islamist militant movement Hamas are quite clear and open about the fact that they are hell-bent on eradicating Jews, and when Jeremy Corbyn’s followers chant “from the river to the sea”, make no mistake, that is exactly what they align themselves with.
I digress.
“the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, suffered the same fate as Anwar Sadat: gunned down by a religious zealot” says Adams, using an aberration to draw a false analogy, which is exactly what apologists for lslam do when they wheel out Anders Breivik’s killing spree to deny the specificity of Islamic terrorism the minute someone has the temerity to specify it.
All this would be fine and dandy, if the BBC were honest enough to add one of their special health warnings, for example:
The following sample is BBC Watch's summarising paragraph:
“Like the other recent Six Day War features by Tom Bateman and Jeremy Bowen, this article by Paul Adams is essentially an exercise in advancing a transparent political narrative according to which the modern-day conflict is exclusively rooted in the outcome of those six days in June 1967 – especially the ‘occupation’ and ‘settlements’. And like those other two articles, Adams’ advancement of that narrative does not serve the purpose of enhancing audience understanding of either the root causes of that war, the ones that preceded and followed it or the continued lack of progress in resolving the century-long conflict.”
The BBC are clearly more than willing to stick the stiletto into UKIP, when the opportunity arises.....
Later in the same Newsnight special there was a discussion between two anti-Brexit Labour supporters (the ever-dramatic Simon Schama and Kerry Anne Mendoza of The Canary) and Nigel Farage. And Emily (going after the former UKIP leader far more than anyone else) chose to ask Nigel this 'gem' of a question:
When you look to the future now do you think we've become a softer...I mean, UKIP's share of the vote is now, what, 2%? Does that sound to you like a rejection of Nasty Britain or a Britain that didn't like the language of (indecipherable) intolerance?
And Emily couldn't let it go, as this exchange will show;
Kerry Anne Mendoza: You've got a Labour Party that is reinvigorated, and more importantly a labour movement which is reinvigorated which is actually engaging the young, the old, the gay, the straight, the black, white, and brown, and all the colours in between. Emily Maitlis (to Nigel Farage): All of kind of inclusivitythat UKIP felt uncomfortable with.
That was a gratuitously insulting and deeply biased question from Emily Maitlis, basically saying that UKIP were/are homophobic and racist.
I think we may have found the one significant party in UK politics which appeals to the BBC even less than UKIP...and, no, it's not the obvious choice for many of us, Sinn Fein.
Try this exchange on tonight's Newsnight special between Emily Maitlis and loyal Cameroon, soft-Brexit-backing Baron Barker of Battle (aka Greg Barker):
EM: I'm just hearing from Nick Watt that the DUP may align itself with the Conservative Party in a confidence and supply arrangement. Would that suit you?
GB: I think that would be ideal.
EM: So you would not mind, and there would be many people, Conservative voters and wider voter, who say the DUP represents everything that Theresa May meant when she talked about a Nasty Party.
GB: They are certainly not our allies of choice. Personally I would prefer to do a deal with the Lib Dems. We actually had a strong and stable coalition with the Lib Dems for five years, but that's not on the cards. So I think...what is the alternative? The alternative would be handing the keys to Jeremy Corbyn.
EM: We are looking at the party that is homophobic, that doesn't really believe in climate change, that talks about creationism.
GB: Sure, and I abhor all of those things...
EM: I mean, that could drag the party backwards, couldn't it?
Much more of that and the DUP might make the price of their continued 'confidence and supply' support for the Conservatives the full implementation of their manifesto policy to scrap the BBC licence fee and radically overhaul the BBC!
I won’t bother using the excuse of BBC bias and I won’t try to shoe-horn my opinion into a BBC-related op ed., but I will explore a fraction of the issues that have arisen from both parties’ dire election campaigns and the immediate aftermath, and the boundless ramifications therein.
We knew Labour’s perceived ‘win’ would allow people like Owen Jones to be even more insufferable than usual.
In fact he was being insufferable in the snippet of Dateline I caught this morning; so there you are, an unforced U-turn by me just seconds into the game. I have resorted to the BBC after all, but not necessarily its bias. Owen went into a diatribe about the Conservatives’ coalition with the DUP.
“A Conservative party that has been humiliated and now faces huge division, is now going to be held over the barrel by the most extreme party on the House of Commons, the DUP, which let’s be very clear, when we talk about social conservatism and those sorts of euphemisms, is anti LGBT rights, anti women, they are climate change deniers…”
“Led by a woman” interjected Irishman Brian O’Connell.
“they oppose a woman’s right to choose and they are backed by loyalist terrorists. They are now gonna be the most - you know, have huge influence over…” continued the boy.
“You say backed by them - they have no formal link..” interrupted Shaun Ley “We need to be clear about that”
“They were enthusiastically supported by loyalists that’s just an objective fact and you can see the loyalist murals all over Belfast….” […]
Janet Daley to Owen:
“From your point of view as a Corbyn supporter I wouldn’t go on too much about links with terrorists, and I also wouldn’t go on too much about prejudice, social prejudices. The people who write - who refer to me as the Zionist Jew Janet Daley online whenever I attack Corbyn are not a particularly attractive picture either, so I would be very careful about - I mean there is left wing bigotry and there is right wing bigotry…”
In the spilt second before he turned his head away sharply as if to escape, Owen’s face was a little picture.
As for the youth vote, if that was really responsible for the ‘win’ that wasn’t, you have to wonder at the gullibility of the dupes who were so easily bribed with all those undeliverable promises while the memory of the Lib Dems' undelivered and undeliverable free tuition fees pledge is still so fresh, as is the near terminal effect it has had on the Lib Dems.
The Conservatives - perhaps in an effort to distance themselves from the Cameron era - forgot to use the economy at all in their campaign. A catastrophic error, both positively (with regard to potentially Brexit related unrestricted trading) and negatively (in respect of the Labour Party’s Venezuela-Type economic model) not to mention their un-costed manifesto. Now that Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill have fallen on their swords, we get a chance to see where they think they went wrong.
I regret the decision not to include in the manifesto a ceiling as well as a floor
Not a very convincing debriefing if you ask me. I’ve lifted some comments that I think illustrate a fraction of the mountain of problems this country is currently having to deal with.
The first is from Conservative Home, and the rest are from my favourite btl location, Harry’s Place.
“The manifesto and campaign was a car crash: you used the manifesto to attack your own free market wing, had no retail policies, assumed hitting pensioners would win votes of the young, said nothing about how you would positively use powers repatriated from Brexit for good of country, brought back old Conservative stereotypes with nonsense like the fox hunting vote, and then spent the campaign ignoring growth economics. Add to that the u-turns, the refusal to debate etc, and the slogan "strong and stable" looked so divorced from reality to be laughable. That the Cons still got such a high vote share merely serves to show how much the fundamentals were in your favor.”
*******
“It is seriously worrying how many people either don't know or don't care about Corbyn's support for the IRA, Hamas, and Hezbollah, his association with anti-Semites, his work for Iranian TV, his support for the Castro regime, and his Stalinist advisors.”
Still, we can hope that people who voted to punish Mrs May's hubris -because Corbyn couldn't possibly get in!- will think twice next time.
*******
“The worse election campaign I have ever witnessed. A conservative manifesto without costings allowing the stupid left to call it uncosted compared to their fantasy figures. To rake over old coals like fox hunting. To conjure up images of the nasty party by abandoning free shool meals allowing the weasel to sell his for the many not the few rubbish. To target the main demographic that will back you. She had the white working class vote. Then she decided to target their homes if they have home help is unbelievable. Then she backtracked making her strong and stable theme look pathetic.
The old saved us again but the demographics are moving towards the left and fantasy economics.
*******
The causes of this result are a lot deeper than (if I may so) old-fashioned arguments about good or bad election campaigns.
To my mind, the occupants-in-waiting of No 10 and No 11 both having been apologists for terrorism for decades, and having been disowned by 80% of their own parliamentary party, is enough to rule their party out of contention, full stop. There was absolutely nothing Theresa May could have done in her manifesto or in her TV appearances that, to me, was worse than that.
Yet 12.8 million people either don't care or are prepared to dismiss it all as smears and "Project Fear".
The Scottish independence referendum, Brexit, Trump, and this - something is fundamentally changing and it's not just the effects of a bad manifesto.
— LEAVE.EU 🇬🇧 (@LeaveEUOfficial) June 9, 2017
There are two counter-points that can be made to this though - and I'll get them in before the BBC does!
Firstly, when you watch the video closely and look at who's doing the wild clapping and cheering it doesn't seem to me to be the majority of the audience, merely heavily-clustered clumps of the audience. (50/50 maybe?)
And secondly, David Dimbleby didn't exactly look very happy at this eruption of loud partisanship, quickly (and defensively) saying, "We have a balanced audience here" and then inviting the 'other side of the audience' to give voice to their reaction too. ("Let's hear from those who think that's an error", he said).
Though the response from 'the other side of the audience' was considerably weaker, I'm putting that down to Corbyn supporters being much more vocal and the Right being much less given to manic whooping and hollowing than the Left.
So, yes, I'm giving the BBC the benefit of the doubt on this one. As Gaunty would say, are you with me or are you agin me?
*******
"Alas poor Mr Winnick!" (victim of the Newsnight curse)
It made me laugh out loud when the Walsall North result was declared on Friday morning - especially given that it went against the trend of results coming in from England.
I was laughing at Newsnight.
Regular readers will know that Newsnight presented us with a voter panel from Walsall North earlier this very week where not one of the eight selected voters (chosen by IPSOS Mori) said they would be voting Conservative and the two declared former Conservative voters said they were either undecided or going for Labour. It was so dramatic that I wrote:
So, if this panel is representative then Labour veteran David Winnick should have absolutely no fears on election day. His 1,937 majority in 2015 looks set to be massively increased as the Tory vote collapses.
David Winnick was one of the very small number of Labour MPs in England who actually lost their seat this week (which he'd held since 1979). The Conservative vote went up by 16% there, unseating him.
Theresa May should have asked Newsnight to run voter panel editions in every constituency. She might have got her elusive landslide after all!
It's all very informative but it isn't very impartial.
You can tell that, for starters, because of the choice of social media reactions the piece chooses to spotlight - just two: Jon Snow and a Guardian writer, both slagging off the DUP as an extreme party.
Now, it's fine (of course) for a Guardian writer to tweet insults like "climate deniers" but for the BBC reporter responsible for writing this article to use the same term too is surely not alright:
That whole phrase, "a devout climate change denier", absolutely reeks of bias to me.
Quite a bit of the article reads like one of those pieces on UKIP which the BBC kept on writing until fairly recently, listing every 'loon' and 'fruitcake' in the party they could find and trying to make them - and their party - sound as 'loony' and 'fruitcakey' as humanly possible.
It's an attempted hatchet job in my view.
Just imagine if a BBC journalist had written such a piece about Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party highlighting every damning thing they could find - every piece of grotesquerie from Mr Corbyn, John McDonnell, Emily Thornberry, Diane Abbott, etc - and laid them all out as a 'guide' to the Labour Party, just imagine the storm that would have raised. All hell would have broken loose, with people on Newswatch or Feedback accusing the BBC of acting 'like the Daily Mail'.
Well, the BBC has certainly acted 'like the Daily Mail' here. It even tries at one point to insinuate that the DUP has links to terrorists:
Just imagine if that hypothetical BBC 'primer' about the Labour Party had included something like that about Jeremy Corbyn! His "historical links" to republic paramilitaries are at least as questionable. BBC editors would be apologising on Newswatch and Feedback faster than you can say "friends from Hamas".
Now, the DUP hold views on certain things with which I very strongly disagree with and others that I warmly agree with. From reading this BBC report, however, I suspect that the BBC journalist responsible dislikes pretty much everything that the DUP stands for.
I can’t get LBC. Well, I could, but I never bother to tune in. You wouldn’t hear this on the BBC, but if you want to hear 9 entertaining minutes of pure joy click here. (And, “you know what?” for once I even don’t mind those.)
“I have to say to Jeremy Corbyn, absolute Mazel Tov to Jeremy Corbyn - he’s done an amazing job. You lied your backside off beyond belief.
“You promised sweets for everybody, you promised sweets for the doctors, you promised sweets for the policemen, you promised sweets for the railway workers, you promised sweets for the nurses - you promised sweets for the whole world.”
He went on: “I knew it was all spin, they even stuck a rose on Jeremy Corbyn’s lapel in the past few days to make it look like New Labour.
“They kept Momentum quiet, which is a militant organisation, I always voted for New Labour, I always voted for Tony Blair, I couldn’t vote for Jeremy Corbyn.
“I knew it was spin - but what did Theresa May do? I tell you what she done, she said to the electorate: ‘I’ve got such a lead, I can say what I want and I can do what I want’.
“And what did she do? The silly woman went after the old age pensioners for no reason whatsoever… she didn’t need to put that in their manifesto.”
Martin continued: “That lady treated the entire working class of this nation with utter contempt.
“She thought we’d like Jeremy Corbyn so much that she would sweep to power and she’s made the biggest political error in my lifetime.”
According to The Daily Express, the BBC's Europe editor Katya Adler is guilty of "APPALLING" BBC bias after she "GLOATS" that UK election result "could WRECK Brexit":
Now, the Express are certainly making a bit of a meal of it here but, nonetheless, this surely issymptomatic of what BBC editors do these days: They use sarcasm and they editorialise.
