Another update

Here's an update on a sad story you may remember from last year... 

In the months following the EU referendum a Polish man in Harlow, Arkadiusz Jozwik, was killed during an altercation with local youths. 

It was a big story at the time and there was frenzied speculation in certain quarters that it was a 'hate crime' provoked by the Brexit vote. 

BBC One's main news bulletins, featuring reporter Daniel Sandford, gave the 'hate crime caused by Brexit' angle a very strong headwind (transcript here), and John Sweeney on Newsnight also vigorously pushed the 'hate crime caused by Brexit' angle (transcript here).

Both DS and JS also vigorously tweeted about it at the time. 

Newsnight's John Sweeney report was framed by Evan Davis saying, "Also tonight: a Polish man beaten to death in Essex, could it be the latest example of hate crime post-Brexit?". 

John Sweeney himself asserted, "This is not an isolated experience. What happened here isn’t only a story of the ugly mood in our country post-Brexit. It’s also a story about antisocial behaviour, of people at night being afraid to walk down a British high street".

So, according to JS, it was a combination of the "ugly mood" post-Brexit and "antisocial behaviour" - a point he ended his point by repeating, saying "the fear is that two poisons have come together to a lethal result".

And those closing comments contained a particularly harsh charge - or, more accurately, a smear - against one particular UK party leader at the time. Here's how the interview ended:

ERIC HIND: (fragment of word, unclear) I don’t know if I can mention names but I mean . . .

JOHN SWEENEY:  Mention names!

ERIC HIND: But I mean, Nigel Farage, I mean, thank you for that, because you are part of this death, and you’ve got blood on your hands, thanks to you, thanks for all your decision, wherever you are, er...yeah, it’s your call.

JOHN SWEENEY: Nigel Farage has always denied this allegation. As the search for clues and answers continues, the fear is that two poisons have come together to a lethal result.

So what happened next? Well, the police, towards the end of last year, charged one youth with manslaughter and decided not to pursue the 'hate crime' charge. 

I spotted at the time that both Daniel Sandford (the BBC reporter who reported for the BBC's main bulletins at the time) and John Sweeney (Newsnight's man) each put out a short, factual tweet about it (minus the 'not a hate crime' bit), neither adding any further comment, and neither in any way repenting of their reporting sins. 

At the end of last month, the trial came to an end and the verdict was given. A boy was convicted of manslaughter and it's now clear that the fracas was a case of people drinking, youths cycling too close, an argument ensuing, a youth getting violent, a tragic death. Nothing to do with Brexit. 

Now, I will admit that I didn't see the BBC online report about it, even though I check the BBC News website closely. But, yes, there was a report about it (albeit a brief one).

I only found it after specifically Googling to find it, after a tip-off from David Keighley at News-watch, and I suspect that the BBC never made it a prominent story last week. 

The BBC online report fails to mention that it was widely - and wrongly - suspected of being a racist, Brexit-provoked hate crime at the time, and there's been no contrition from the BBC. 

Curiously, neither Daniel Sandford nor John Sweeney have tweeted about the outcome of the trial, despite both of them making the initial incident a major story on the BBC.

Nor have they reported the outcome for the BBC.

In fact, they've both been silent on the story. 

In fairness, checking his Twitter feed, Daniel may be on holiday as he's gone completely quiet. 

Not so John Sweeney though. There's no such excuse for him. 

He spent 31 July, the day of the verdict, tweeting away in a total frenzy. His concerns were Trump, Scaramucci, paintings he likes and animal videos, and he banged out scores and scores and scores and scores of tweets about them (as impartially as you'd expect - he says sarcastically) - but nothing, absolutely nothing, about the outcome of the trial for the 'hate crime' incident that he'd gone all sensationalist over for Newsnight last year.

And, as far as I can see, he didn't even notice the verdict. (Some BBC star reporter, eh?)

[Update: I hope she won't mind but I must share Sue's brilliant summation of John Sweeney's behaviour here: "Sweeney's indifference to the outcome of a story he had been so keen to Brexify".]

As for BBC TV - those BBC One news bulletins and Newsnight - which made so much of the story as a possible Brexit-related hate crime at the time - well, I've done thorough search after thorough search on TV Eyes (which picks up pretty much everything) and found nothing. Literally nothing. No follow-up reports on the BBC's News at Six and News at Ten. No follow-up segment on Newsnight. Nothing.

That raises serious questions: Why isn't the BBC setting the record straight here? And: Is it because it doesn't fit their narrative?

Well, I don't know but this is obviously either one of two things: It's either extremely shabby reporting or its extremely biased reporting. (Or both).

It's yet another sign that there's something deeply rotten in the state of the BBC.

News-watch pursued this energetically through the Cretan, Minotaur-filled BBC Complaints system and got lost in the BBC Complaints maze - a maze whose every dead-end features a large sign saying 'Not upheld'. I suspect they'll try again after this latest development.

Another update

John Sweeney

There are times when you absolutely despair of the standards of reporting in this country. 

I certainly felt like that catching up with David Keighley's latest Newswatch posts about the sad death of a Polish man, Arkadiusz Jozwik, in Harlow last year and the BBC's atrocious reporting of it. 

The BBC, despite some brief caveats, strongly pushed the angle that it might be a Brexit-related racist hate crime/murder against a much-liked Polish man. 

A youth was sentenced for Mr Jozwik's manslaughter this week. 

Things, however, weren't as the BBC reported them. The BBC got it wrong.

It wasn't just the BBC of course - and Brendan O'Neill rips into the rest of the media at Spiked over this - but the BBC are a licence-fee-funded public broadcaster and their lapses were particularly egregious, especially John Sweeney's absolutely shocking Newsnight report, which, if you recall, ended like this:

ERIC HIND: (fragment of word, unclear) I don’t know if I can mention names but I mean . . .
JOHN SWEENEY:  Mention names!
ERIC HIND: But I mean, Nigel Farage, I mean, thank you for that, because you are part of this death, and you’ve got blood on your hands, thanks to you, thanks for all your decision, wherever you are, er...yeah, it’s your call.
JOHN SWEENEY: Nigel Farage has always denied this allegation. As the search for clues and answers continues, the fear is that two poisons [violence and racism] have come together to a lethal result. 

The BBC asserted on the News at Six that the death of Arkadiusz Jozwik was the result of an "unprovoked attack". The court found otherwise, deciding that Mr Jozwik and his friend (both heavily drunk) had behaved provocatively, shouting racist abuse at a black man and at the English youths. 

The BBC asserted on Newsnight (through the mouth of Evan Davis) that Mr Jozwik was "beaten to death". The court found otherwise, concluding that Mr Jozwik had died from impact with a pavement following a blow from a single youth that was not intended to kill him. 

The BBC's Daniel Sandford on the News at Six asserted it was a "frenzied" attack. The court found otherwise. (See previous paragraph). 

Radio 4 Today reporter Dominic O'Connell asked the Polish deputy prime minister, "And tragically, we had a Polish man attacked and killed in Harlow in Essex on Saturday. Do you fear actually that some Poles might be motivated to return simply because they fear the Brexit vote has stirred some racist feeling against them?" - a linkage the court failed to find.

The whole tenor of the BBC's reporting was that 'people "fear" this was a racist hate crime provoked by the Brexit vote. (Both John Sweeney and Daniel Sandford used that form of words.) The court found otherwise, failing to find any evidence that it was a racist hate crime related to the Brexit vote - rather the reverse in fact.

*******

Nigel Farage is understandably furious at the BBC's behaviour here - especially John Sweeney's - and no one, whatever you think of Mr Farage, could surely feel otherwise. 

John Sweeney and Newsnight owe him an apology for starters. Whether John Sweeney is big enough a man to give Nigel Farage such an apology is something that remains to be seen. It's to be hoped that he is.

(JS seems, however, to have forgotten the story completely, having tweeted nothing about the sentencing this week).

*******

Hopefully the BBC will be held to account over this and will make a full and widely-broadcast apology. 

Such appallingly inaccurate and loaded reporting is hardly what the BBC is supposed to be about.

Did the BBC prevent John Sweeney from profiling Seumas Milne?

"posh, minor aristocrat Stalinist" Seamus 

I didn't know, until Sue informed me yesterday, that the famous John Sweeney now co-hosts a podcast called 'Last Call'. 

He presents it with an American journalist called Michael Weiss, and the pair of them call their double act 'Two Boozy Hacks'. (As far as John Sweeney is concerned, I think we can all guess why!) 

Their latest episode is called 'Labour Pains' and features former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson as a special guest. It last about an hour.

Unexpectedly, I must say that I enjoyed it. They all came across as rather charming.

John was on the pinot grigio, if you're wondering.

(In fairness, I did once write, "Do you know who I'd really like a night-out with? Yes, Panorama/Newsnight star reporter John Sweeney. He sounds great fun. I'd specifically like to be his all-expenses-paid-for guest", and I stand by that.)

The serious bit comes in the last quarter of an hour when they turn to Labour antisemitism. As you'd perhaps expect, having spent 18 years at the BBC, John Sweeney seems to have fully imbibed the general BBC resentment towards the State of Israel, and even has a Jeremy Bowen-like personal grievance against it, but was still distressed at the influx of the antisemites into the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn.

Also interesting was their discussion of Mr Corbyn's director of communications, Seumas Milne. This was John Sweeney's boozy ramble on the subject:

I need to share with our three listeners my class hatred here in that I was brought up...we lived in in Manchester, and then when I was ten we moved down to Hampshire and I went to a grammar school. And Seumas Milne went to Winchester College. And it is comically posh. And its also where...most of the Cambridge spies when to Winchester. And then here's this almost comically absurd Stalinist who went to Winchester College. He is the voice of the Labour Party. And the problem I had when I was a BBC journalist was 'Can I please do a profile of Seumas Milne, in the way that I was allowed when I worked at The Observer, to do profiles for the BBC about Alastair Campbell and his shenanigans with Rupert Murdoch, blah, blah, blah, blah?', and it was impossible to get through. So, although Seumas was a posh, aristocratic Stalinist, people were afraid of him and it was impossible for me at the BBC to do a proper profile of the guy. 

Now that's very interesting, isn't it? The BBC didn't want to let John Sweeney do a proper profile of the avowed Stalinist-communist director of communications for the leader of the Labour Party. Was it just because they were afraid of Seumas Milne (and the Corbynistas)? Or was it also because, for some strange reason, the man's extreme politics didn't particularly worry them?

It's especially rum, isn't it, because the BBC hasn't shown any reluctance to 'properly profile' the Conservatives' director of communications. He was on the end of a full-length, thoroughly one-sided hatchet job earlier this year, fronted by Emily Maitlis. 

(What is it about his public antipathy towards the BBC and his role in winning the EU referendum for Leave and the 2019 general election for Boris Johnson that so excites the BBC's hostility towards Mr Cummings?)

Anyhow, cheers!

John Sweeney's Pick of the (Vox) Pops

Pointing

Fans of John Sweeney will want to know that the great man was on Newsnight last night with a report about immigration. 

Before the transcript, here's an exchange from thread below the THE BBC's OFFICIAL FESTIVE FIFTY BIAS TECHNIQUES 2018 post to give it context: 

Sir_Arthur_Strebe-Grebling, 19 December 2018 at 19:55 

bBBC 'news' website today has a perfect example of 37. Our country is swamped by foreign fruitpickers, coffee-baristas and hotel cleaners, but to illustrate the government's new immigration restrictions, the bBBC displays an image of three NHS workers. 

Monkey Brains, 19 December 2018 at 23:16 

Yes, that's a classic technique. Immigration is running at something like 600,000 every year. From when I've looked at the numbers, I've concluded the NHS takes something between 20,000 - 30,000 migrants per annum. But the UK MSM, and the BBC in particular focus on the tiny 3% of migrants who come to work in the NHS rather than the 97% who don't.  

Another technique used in Vox Pop bias is to ensure that the people you interview expressing concern about mass immigration should have clearly evident health problems - ideally find someone on a mobility scooter to voice such opinions.  

John Sweeney had the classic mobility scooter interview in his biased report from Peterborough for Newsnight today. It also started with that other classic trope about the fact we like to enjoy a wide ranging cuisine means we also have to love mass immigration. The greatest non-sequitur ever - proved by the fact that countries throughout Asia like western cuisine but don't allow Europeans easy access to their countries and their citizenship. 

 ***********  

Emily Maitlis: So what does the country expect - or rather want to see from this immigration policy? We sent John Sweeney to Peterborough to find out.  

John Sweeney: When it comes to migration, who's in and who's out? Does the Government know what we want? Do we? Take a look at the main square and you'll see just how much we love a bit of foreign. Never mind Henry VIII, look below him. Pizza Express, that's Italian. Another pizza place. Yorkshire Building Society, I'll give you that. Next door, Nando's, Afro-Portuguese. Next door, the HSBC, the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank. Over there, McDonald's, American. Folk in Peterborough are happy that companies from around the world come here. But what about people? All the brouhaha around Brexit may be blinding us to some simple facts. Polling says that people who voted leave are less worried about Europeans than non-Europeans coming to Britain:  

Vox Pop 1

Vox Pop 1: Well, I'd like to see more European workers here than the others on the Indian continent, like.
John Sweeney (to Vox Pop 1): Why is that?
Vox Pop 1: They seem to fit in more with the English way of tradition, sort of thing.   

Vox Pop 2

Vox Pop 2:  There's that many people 'ere now that the systems just can't cope. At the end of the day, I'm not racist one little bit. The only thing that I object to is, like, when I want to go... I've paid into it all me life and I 'ad to pay into it, it's not voluntary, but now I get put back of the queue.   

Vox Pop 3

John Sweeney (to Vox Pop 3): Brexit will mean, you would say, that the number of Poles, Romanians, whatever, would go down. Does that worry you?
Vox Pop 3: Yes, of course it does, because they provide our economy with a very mobile, very efficient and very cheap form of labour and if that form of labour disappears and we substitute it with domestic labour, which is less efficient and more expensive, then that's going to lead to wider inflation and higher prices.
John Sweeney (to Vox Pop 3): Are you a professor of economics by any chance?
Vox Pop 3: I'm a teacher of economics. (LAUGHTER.) 

You might not pick this up on the street, but these are the numbers: In the 12 months to June this year, three-quarters of the increase of the immigrant population was down to non-EU countries. The country sending the largest number of migrants to the UK is China, followed by India. Lots of businesses say they'll struggle without European workers. But not this one. After Newsnight hid the lost Ark in this warehouse, Harrison Ford eat your heart out, we asked this storage business how they are placed: 

Jarred Lester, Operations Manager, Big Web Warehouse: I don't have particular huge concerns about losing a great deal of the Eastern European options. I think really everything is supply and demand and one of the problems that this industry and, say, the fruit picking industry has had is that they've decided that it's low-wage jobs. Now, people saying that British workers won't do it is just rubbish. Really, it's supply and demand and, you know, people will pick fruit for £10 an hour. People may not want to do it for £6 an hour. 

Today, the Government was notably fuzzy on both numbers and salary levels for wannabe migrants. Leave voters may not get quite what they wished for. 

Was Nigel right?

John Sweeney

Last night's Newsnight carried a report from John Sweeney which Evan Davis introduced as a "disturbing" update on a story they'd covered previously.

John Sweeney reported that an 18-year-old man, from one of the Syrian refugee families which the programme followed after the UK government granted them asylum last year and brought them into the country from a camp in Jordan, has been in court, alongside two other men, charged with sexual assault against a 14 year old girl. One of them has also been charged with sexually assaulting a second 14 year old girl, and a fourth man has been charged with assault too (no further details given). All of them, John Sweeney said, are "believed to be Syrian" and all the names read out were Muslim names. All have pleaded 'not guilty'. A fifth man is on bail and a sixth has been released without charge. 

"We will of course follow developments in that case", Evan Davis said at the end of the report.

This is to their credit. They could have ignored the story - as people on 'blogs like this' might have assumed they would - but they didn't. 

And, as John Sweeney's report made clear, the outcome of this trial could have major repercussions for the government's refugee resettlement programme and for the "fraught issue" of immigration (and, unspoken, of Muslim immigration in particular).

I've seen a comment elsewhere about this that I really ought to have let go by without comment but just can't, because it does what people on some 'anti-BBC blogs' have an unfortunate tendency to do (and that's beginning to bother me again)....

Instead of giving any credit to Newsnight for 'breaking the story' to a nationwide audience, they leaped straightaway onto carping about it instead, implying that the programme was 'burying the story' by relegating it to "the last 5 minutes of the programme" (actually it was the second story after the EU referendum and began 22 minutes in, with another story - Muhammad Ali's funeral - to follow) and that "for some reason it wasn’t shown further up the running list".

Why do people do that?

John Sweeney's report was, understandably, very carefully worded. He mentioned that Nigel Farage's comments last week about migrants and sex attacks (in the wake of Cologne) had been "widely condemned" but he left unspoken the obvious point that Mr. F's comments will look a good deal less easy to condemn if this court case finds the accused guilty. 

Bear of Very Little Brain

I’ve been wondering lately, what is all this blogging for? It’s time-consuming, and the effectiveness is disproportionate to the effort expended. However, someone's got to do it, and it might as well be us. 

Firstly, how many of us force ourselves to stay awake for Newsnight these days? It hasn’t been worth the sleep deprivation for quite a while, has it?

I started preparing a couple of half-hearted pieces about Newsnight recently, but they didn’t get very far.

One was about a Newsnight scoop about David Cameron and Paul Dacre, which roughly amounted to the BBC acknowledging, disapprovingly, that the press has a considerable influence on events. However it hadn’t occurred to Emily Maitlis as she strolled along the Embankment delivering her piece-to-camera in a mini skirt and fetching military style pea-coat that the BBC too has considerable influence on opinions (and therefore events.)

Another embryonic article, which I aborted and abandoned was about Evan Davis’s chairmanship of a discussion between an extremely belligerent Stella Creasy and Oliver Letwin. (whom Evan certainly didn’t  ‘let win’.) 

I wrote: “Evan’s wispy beard makes him look more unkempt and spectral than ever. If I’m not mistaken I’ve seen him sitting on the pavement with a dog, a sleeping bag and a few empty cans.”

Not very nice of me, was it, but I can understand why he succeeded Paxo. However, LBC’s James O’Brien’s appointment is a different kettle of fish altogether. 

The mystery is, did Ian Katz pluck O’Brien from relative obscurity to the harsh glare of ’national T.V.’ simply to be as objectionable on Newsnight as he is on LBC?  What does he have going for him? He is argumentative - maybe that’s it? He’s also partisan, potato-faced and petulant. His LBC interview with Haneen Zoabi made me think of David Brent surreptitiously scuttling off into his office to quickly Google “Israel and the Palestinians” .

Much more unprofessional than any of the above was / were the now infamous John Sweeney interview(s) with Geert Wilders. The BBC and Sweeney himself must have known how bad this looked because the BBC virtually gave him the right-of-reply-by-stealth, with that creepy FOOC. 

Bear of very little brain

“We sent our bear in a duffle coat John Sweeney in hot pursuit.” was how Emily Maitlis introduced the item when it went out on Newsnight.

The bear in a duffle-coat looked absurdly inappropriate riding a bike in pursuit of typical Dutchmen to use as selective ‘vox-pops’ before confronting “the great man” with that mischievous “Some say you’re a bit of a fascist”. 

He opened with the Mishal Husain manoeuvre, adapted to fit. Not quite “How many Israelis have been killed by those homemade contraptions?” but “What’s the biggest cause, by terror, of the loss of Dutch lives?” 

Same trap, different location.

With this approach, Sweeney is inferring that you can’t justify opposing the Islamisation of Holland until sufficient Dutch lives have been lost. 

All this was the lead-up to a massive ‘whataboutery’ -  the allegedly Russian-inspired downing of a passenger aircraft which killed hundreds of Dutch nationals, and Sweeney's accusation that “Myopic concentration on one thing (Islam) blinds you (Wilders) to ‘another’.  

To add insult to injury, in his subsequent FOOC, he falsely claimed that Wilders hastily “changed the subject’ when this was put to him.  In fact it was Sweeney who ignored, (rather than changed the subject) Wilders’s patient explanation as to why all religions and cultures do not merit moral equivalence.  

Sweeney and his fellow defenders of Islam face a huge conundrum. How to condemn Islamic terrorism without condemning Islam? The favoured  get-out strategy is to assert that ‘good’ Islam has nothing to do with ‘bad” (perverted) Islam. The same contortion is used to avoid appearing antisemitic. ‘Good’ Jews  - some of my best friends - have nothing to do with ‘bad’ (Zionist) Jews. 

Hugh Sykes squirmed to avoid being seen to be Islamophobic as Craig showed earlier .

The most offensive argument being used to denigrate opponents and critics of Islam like Geert Wilders who've been conveniently labelled 'far-right' and who seek to defend their country’s values, (democracy, liberalism, freedom of expression etc etc) against Islamisation is that they are Nationalists or white supremacists, and are behaving like Nazis. If Muslims are their victims then Muslims are the new Jews and the ‘nationalists’ and the Zionists are the new Nazis.

John Sweeney firmly elevated this twisted non sequitur into the headlights when one of his interviewees  elaborated on his opposition to Wilders, ending with a cryptic “I’ve been to Auschwitz….”  So the implication is that Geert Wilders’s political fulfilment will culminate in mass  government sponsored extermination of the world’s Muslims, will it? All 1.6 billion of them? 

Sweeney’s loaded postscript confirmed what we already know. The world has been turned upside down. 

And finally, Sweeney’s closing op ed demonstrates a staggering moral inversion : 

“Many Dutch find his views not just repellant but dangerous. So will Geert Wilders take power? This man is changing what was once the most liberal country in Europe into something different. “

No, it’s not ‘this man’ who’s changing liberal countries into something different. It’s Islam, stupid.

Not that John Sweeney will read this unless he spends his life Googling himself. We bloggers are renowned for preaching to the converted. Sad but true.

The BBC, the L.S.E., North Korea, Paddy O'Connell and Peter O'Hanraha-hanrahan

Well, the BBC can certainly give itself a right good whacking at times. If you want to hear a BBC reporter getting violently slapped around (figuratively-speaking) by a BBC interviewer then please give this morning's Broadcasting House a try. The interviewer displaying a surprising amount of rudeness was Paddy O'Connell and the BBC reporter on the receiving end - though he fought back a bit - was John Sweeney, presenter of tomorrow night's Panorama, North Korea Undercover. 

As you may be aware, this is the subject of a heated and headline-grabbing row between the BBC and the London School of Economics. Three BBC reporters - including Mr Sweeney - posed as students during a group tour of North Korea in order to carry out undercover investigation inside the world's most secretive  (and terrifying) state. That's a brave thing to do of course. The charge from the L.S.E. is that is that it also put its students at risk. Had the North Korean authorities discovered that three BBC reporters were entering their country under false pretences it's highly unlikely that only the reporters would have got into trouble (imprisonment or a heavy fine). The innocent students being used as cover by the BBC team would, in all likelihood, have been taken into custody too. The L.S.E. contends that the students weren't properly informed and that the university itself wasn't informed at all. Mr Sweeney denies this and counters that there was no need for the university to have been told, as it wasn't an L.S.E. trip. The L.S.E. wants the BBC to pull the edition of Panorama while the BBC insists it will go ahead. Mr Sweeney says that it's ironic that the university is trying to censor a programme which is informing the world about a country that practises the most extreme censorship in the world.  

There are many, differing accounts of who knew what and who told what to whom and who didn't tell what to whom and who didn't know what. Other details are disputed too. It's hard for the reader/listener to know what happened, therefore, and who to believe. You too can try and work your own way to the truth through clicking on a variety of newspaper websites. They are all eagerly reporting it. I'm personally uncomfortable with the thought that a BBC reporter might have put students in danger, but I don't really know what actually happened.

John Sweeney has also written an account of his undercover investigation for the Mail on Sunday:

Inside North Korea: No ads, no planes, no internet, no mobiles, no 21st Century... A rare dispatch from deep within the lunatic rogue state enslaved by Zombie and Sons

• John Sweeney enters the secretive state to see 'the true North Korea'
• Travelled undercover as journalists are barred from entering it

Mr Sweeney certainly doesn't mince his words in this brilliantly-written article which, presumably, is a close anticipation of tomorrow's Panorama. Having read all manner of pieces about North Korea over the years, the word 'sensationalist' popped into my head while reading it. North Korea is a famously extreme and bizarre country, so that is probably deeply unfair to Mr Sweeney. Maybe all accurate articles about North Korea will come across as sensationalist.

One passage particularly intrigued me though:

Many people think of North Korea as Communist. One year ago Marx and Lenin still had pride of place in a big square in town. But on our trip, they’re gone.

If North Korea is not Stalinist, what is it? Former British ambassador to the country John Everard was blunt: ‘There are sad parallels between North Korea and Nazi Germany and although some people describe  North Korea as a Stalinist state, it’s actually much more accurate to describe it as neo-Nazi. It is deeply racially biased.

‘Kim Jong Il [Kim The Second] was an unabashed admirer of Hitler and copied the Nuremberg marches that are staged in Pyongyang to this day.’

John Sweeney described North Korea as "neo-Nazi" or "Nazi" several times on Broadcasting House (displeasing Paddy O'Connell for so doing). 

I find this puzzling and will make a rare excursion into general matters to share the reasons for my puzzlement with you (so please forgive me this lapse!)... 

From all that I've read about it, North Korea most certainly is a Communist state - i.e. Stalinist, with a tinge of Maoism chucked in for 'good' measure. Being Stalinist doesn't rule out the nationalist element (re "Socialism in one country" in the Soviet Union, "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" in China, Juche in North Korea). Autonomy is not ruled out by Communist regimes either. Likewise the personality cults surrounding the living leader and the extreme reverence for dead leaders in North Korea is only an amplification of similar cults found in the Soviet Union and China. The growth of apart-from-the-people elites has been common to many Communist regimes (and was most famously satirised by Orwell), several of which have kept the highest reaches of power within a tiny circle or even a single family (as in Cuba!).

Moreover, North Korea retains complete control over its economy and over property. Privatization and globalisation are out. The language of socialism, anti-imperialism and 'class consciousness' still pours out of North Korea, just as it used to do out of Communist Russia and China. The extreme denial of individual human rights in the Land of the Kims in favour of collective obedience was shared by Stalin and Mao's dictatorships. If Kim Jong-il admired Hitler and staged Nuremberg-style marches, then so did Stalin. (Stalin's admiration for Hitler is hardly a secret known only to specialist historians and the admiration was mutual). I still remember being shocked at just how Nuremberg-rally-like Mao's mass gatherings during the Cultural Revolution actually were. (We see too few documentaries about Maoist China). 

And as for the "deeply racially based" character of the regime necessarily making it Nazi rather than Communist, well that's to underplay the deep strains of racialism in many manifestations of Communism - the genocide perpetrated by the Maoist Khmer Rouge strongly targeted ethnic minorities and is only the most blatant example. A streak of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union is also impossible to deny.

The fact that many of these features were also shared by Nazi Germany doesn't detract from the point, as Nazi Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China had plenty in common beyond the mere fact of their shared totalitarianism. 

(Well, that's one blogger's opinion anyhow!) 

The L.S.E.-BBC story looks as if it's got some distance to run yet. Where it will end up is anyone's guess. It would be wise for bloggers to watch and wait.

Incidentally, for those who thought the exchange between Paddy and John Sweeney on Broadcasting House this morning was a bit brutal, well, it could have been even worse for the reporter:

UPDATE - Shaun lays one on Ceri Thomas:

Something similar (albeit rather less rude) happened on The World This Weekend this lunchtime. Presenter Shaun Ley probed the L.S.E.'s Deputy Director, Professor George Gaskell, and then turned to the BBC manager with responsibility for Panorama, Ceri Thomas (former Today editor). Shaun rather blew the whistle on Mr Thomas of the BBC here:

"You're sitting next to him [Prof Gaskell]. You're both in the studio. You could respond to his points directly. We were told you wouldn't discuss with the professor. It seems a bit odd. I presume you didn't like that when you were editor of the Today programme - interviewees not wanting to engage in discussion?"

Ouch!!

As I say, the BBC certainly knows how to beat itself up on occasions. (Ask George Entwhistle and John Humphrys!).

Balloons

John Sweeney (r), just about to begin roaring

A comment on the latest Open Thread...

...necessitates a transcription of the offending piece:

Kirsty Wark: "We're not asking for a second referendum". That is Jeremy Corbyn's stated position on Brexit, but there is evidence of support amongst Labour voters for just that. In the latest poll by YouGov published today a majority of Labour supporters are in favour of A People's Vote. There are also senior figures in the parliamentary party who disagree with Jeremy Corbyn - Chukka Umuna for one, a leading supporter of People's Vote UK, and the Shadow Brexit secretary Kier Starmer is not ruling out a second vote on the final deal either. There are also reports that hundreds of constituency Labour parties are planning to pressurise the leadership at the party conference next month to back another referendum. John Sweeney has spent the day in Bristol - the location tomorrow for the first in a new series of second referendum rallies. 

John Sweeney: Where better to unpick Labour's stance on a second Brexit vote than a hot-air balloon festival? Welcome to Hollywood. Sorry, Bristol. So, in the south-west, as in the rest of the country, people's views are shifting in favour of a second vote on Brexit - what the La-Di-Da Gunner Graham types called 'the People's Vote' - and that spells trouble for Jeremy Corbyn and his vision of a workers' Brexit. Time to take to the skies for a bird's eye view of Bristol's take on 'Wither Brexit?'. 

Balloonist: We got a tangle. So we'll have to pull it down, put the parachute back in,  start again. 

It's kind of like Brexit, isn't it? So things aren't working out quite as smoothly as we had hoped. That is not any of these people's fault. That is something called the British weather, which is being annoying. So this is a cracking metaphor for Brexit, because, frankly, it hasn't worked thus far. Now, had I been able to go up in the balloon, I would have said the following: That the issue for Jeremy Corbyn and his management of Brexit vis-à-vis the Labour Party is not that there has been too much hot air, but none at all, thus starving the debate of oxygen. Where do the balloonists and their fans stand on the great debate? 

Balloonist Fan 1 with silly hat: No, the decision's been made.
Lady Balloonist Fan 1 with silly hat: I agree with 'im. It's been made.
Balloonist Fan 1 with silly hat: Yeah. You make a decision once, you know. And for that reason and no other reason.
Balloonist Fan 2: I'm in favour.
Lady Balloonist Fan 2: I'm in favour.
Balloonist Fan 3:  I think we made our choice, and we almost need to...We made our bed. Let's sleep in it. Let's see how it goes. It can't be any worse than what we've got now.
John Sweeney (to Lady Balloonist Fan 3):  Do you agree with your toy boy?
(Lady Balloonist Fan 3 laughs) Balloonist Fan 3: I'm not a Tory boy.
John Sweeney: A toy boy! Toy boy! Toy boy!
(Balloonist Fan 3 & Lady Balloonist Fan 3 laugh)

That's our unscientific take from the public. But what about Labour? A poll out today found 63% of Labour supporters back a second vote, compared to 18% who oppose it. The don't knows, 19%. Ed Miliband's former spin doctor is leading the second vote campaign:

Tom Baldwin, People's Vote UK: We are detecting signs in the Labour Party, from the leadership,  from MPs, right across the party, from trade unions, that they are moving towards a people's vote, because that's the way out for the Labour Party. It's in a wrong place with its voter. It's out of kilter. That's the biggest dysfunction of British politics today. 

One reason a second vote might not happen is that 60% of Labour MPs represent constituencies that voted Lave. Here in Bristol, the People's Vote will be holding a rally tomorrow to push for a second referendum. Will Bristol East's MP Kerry McCarthy be joining them here in Colton Hall {sic}?

Kerry McCarthy MP: Well, I wasn't invited to tomorrow's event. There's been a lot of debates in Bristol recently that have all been sold out, huge numbers of people coming, so there is clearly a lot of interest. I'm slightly worried that everyone is putting their eggs into the People's Vote basket, and I think we have a long way to go before we are in a position where we decide that that is the option to go for. We are very worried about what Brexit would mean, and I can see why they would be pinning their hopes to a people's vote, but it's quite a high-risk strategy. There is always a danger that they wouldn't get the result they wanted. 

But Team Corbyn's coolness on a second vote doesn't cut the ice with these two Labour loyalists:

Eileen Means, Bristol for Europe: We want the Labour Party, we Bristol for Europe are saying now, and Britain for Europe, that we would like the Labour Party to start behaving like Her Majesty's loyal opposition should and depose the complete disaster, the complete mess up that this government are in.
Seb Thirway, Bristol for Europe: I'm very supportive of Jeremy Corbyn while still being utterly critical of his Brexit policy. 

On a second Brexit vote, Jeremy Corbyn may well win in the end. But he might find his balloon gets popped along the way. 

"These are not the views of the BBC"

So what's John Sweeney up to these days, now that (like John Humphrys) he's free of the BBC? 

Well, THIS:

Tommy Robinson makes out that he's a Great British patriot. But look at what he said in Bavaria. 

Here's a one minute film entitled "Tommy Robinson and the Adolf Hitler Appreciation Society".

Watch it. https://t.co/il1UbEAvTL pic.twitter.com/qtxc44THzM
— John Sweeney (@johnsweeneyroar) October 5, 2019

In the video, "Tommy Robinson and the Adolf Hitler Appreciation Society", John Sweeney calls Tommy Robinson a "Nazi c**t" and shows him speaking to an audience in Bavaria, clipping him saying "German people have for too long lived in the guilt of Adolf Hitler" and setting that alongside chants of 'Oh, Tommy, Tommy!' and scenes of TR being violent.

So, is this Tommy Robinson praising Hitler at the Adolf Hitler Appreciation Society? 

Well, digging around, things aren't quite what the ex-BBC man is implying they are. 

(I know! Who'd have thought it?)

It turns out that Tommy Robinson isn't talking to the Adolf Hitler Appreciation Society (gosh!) but to a audience at last October's Grenzschutzkonferenz (Border Protection Conference) in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where senior figures from various right-populist parties from across Europe gathered. 

And even from the clipped bit, it's not hard to work out that TR is probably about to go on to tell Germans to move beyond the guilt of Adolf Hitler, be proud of themselves and their culture again and look to the future.

(And, come to think of it, talking of Hitler's guilt doesn't sound very 'appreciative' of him, does it?)

So, John may unstandably be deeply bitter about Tommy Robinson...(though he evidently prefers wine to bitter)...but will his reputation - or what's left of it - survive too many more stunts like this?

Update: Pugnazious at B-BBC has much more on this bit of Sweenian fake news, citing a very interesting blogpost elsewhere from a left-wing blogger. That blogger ends his piece by writing:

On Twitter, the video has been lauded as a defiant gesture against Robinson, but I can’t say I’m impressed by the lazy buffoonery, which comes across as compensatory for Sweeney’s self-evident failure. The video gives the impression that Sweeney has unearthed the clip, when he’s done nothing of the kind, and many Twitter users have taken his “Adolf Hitler Appreciation Society” designation at face value – meaning that Sweeney, whatever his intentions, has effectively dumped misinformation onto social media that Robinson and his supporters will in all likelihood capitalise on. 

In short, Sweeney’s latest antics are actually a hindrance to subjecting Robinson and his associates to proper critical scrutiny.

More on John Sweeney

Those of you who have been following the John Sweeney story might be interested in a new development, courtesy of Buzzfeed.

NEW: Investigative journalist John Sweeney is claiming to be a “reluctant whistleblower” against the BBC. According to four sources, Sweeney left the BBC after a young journalist filed an official complaint over an incident at Emily Maitlis’ book launch.https://t.co/AusvFEtZPV

— Mark Di Stefano 🤙🏻 (@MarkDiStef) December 5, 2019

The report says:

BuzzFeed News can reveal Sweeney parted ways with the BBC after two incidents earlier this year. The first related to the botched BBC Panorama investigation into Tommy Robinson which saw him secretly filmed by the far-right activist while trying to cultivate a source. 

The second incident took place at the book launch of BBC Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis in April. According to multiple sources, Sweeney made an offensive comment to a BBC journalist at the London launch of Maitlis’s memoir Airhead. 

One BBC source said the journalist was “deeply offended” by Sweeney’s remark and filed an HR complaint with management. 

It’s understood both incidents were considered by BBC management and played a part in his departure.

'Phwoar!

Fans of Panorama/Newsnight star reporter John Sweeney will doubtless already have seen this. But,  for those who haven't, here's the freelance BBC man being ultra-non-PC. 

And, even better, he's being ultra-non-PC about an ultra-non-PC piece of behaviour by himself - yes himself! - many years ago in deepest, darkest Iran.

The context? 

Well, in the new video John Sweeney is obviously as inebriated as a heavily-tanked-up great crested newt and is busy trying to impress a lady who he's evidently taken out on the lash (via the BBC licence fee payer of course) evidently in order to help him and Panorama trash the famous Tommy Robinson. Unfortunately for John, the lady in question appears to have been a Yaxleyite double agent who was duly recording all of John's drunken gushings for posterity. 

So what happened? Well, our freelance BBC regular, driving in Iran back in 1992, spots some burqa-wearing lady walking down the street and notices a bit of ankle and what he sees as an "erotic" ankle bracelet. And out of the press van window he shouts 'Phwoar!' at her.

Now, that's not very polite, is it? And the lady in question might have already been feeling oppressed at having to wear that body-shaming garb without also having some BBC journalist mocking her from a passing van. (He'd have been braver shouting 'Phwoar!' at the first Shia cleric he saw after that).

And, as MB put it on the Open Thread, "If we applied the BBC's PC rules to John Sweeney we would have to conclude he is being Islamophobic and culturally insensitive here - mocking modest dress in Islamic societies".

Still, I'm rather warming to John Sweeney. Maybe he could change his Twitter handle from:

to:

Bottoms up!

Do you know who I'd really like a night-out with?

Yes, Panorama/Newsnight star reporter John Sweeney.

He sounds great fun.

I'd specifically like to be his all-expenses-paid-for guest. Especially given that I'm a tightfisted white Northern working class bloke who literally likes to eat BBC journalists for breakfast.

Yes, yes, I know it's wrong to live it up at BBC licence-fee payers' expense, but as most people hereabouts say that they don't pay the licence fee I'm sure that they (you?) will forgive me if ever Big Freelance John Sweeney of the BBC invites me to share some champagne, double gin, lots of bottles of red wine, brandy, a few lemoncellos [or is that lemoncelli?], a glass or two of Creme de Cassis, and oodles and oodles of Kir royale - particularly if it's at the expense of those daft BBC-licence-fee-paying suckers.

The following video (if it doesn't get deleted) is an absolute delight. 

Yes, its voyeuristic, and I must admit that I'm not wholly adverse to seeing BBC star reporter John Sweeney getting tipsy and slurring his words as he spreads his peacock's tail to impress a woman.

There but for the grace of God, etc...

But seriously, this must be excruciatingly embarrassing for him.

And just as much for the BBC.

For yes:

Shamelessly, and knowingly, flaunting a sense of wild f***-it abandon regarding BBC expenses by going massively OTT on buying lots of pricey alcoholic drinks at licence-fee payers' expense probably isn't a good look.

Though, of course, he may have had a biased political ulterior motive behind that spreading of his boozy, pricey peacock's tail to that particular lady.

(Hmm, what could that possibly be for his 'Tommy Takedown' programme? Scratches head, like Nigel Bruce's Dr Watson? Where's Sherlock Holmes when you need him? Holmes? Holmes?)

But if everyone's a raving alcoholic like me, the nation will forgive John and keep on paying the licence fee. We alcoholics will forgive anything.

Anyhow, here's the video (and it features some another bloke as well. You may have heard of him):

********

And, just in case the video does get sent down the memory hole, here's a transcript of what John Sweeney said:

...which is the Champagne and the double gin. And then we're going to have some red wine - but we can panic about that at the appropriate moment!

Here I am on expenses in the boozer, with a dog and a fire... 

I think we should have one more bottle of wine. 

F*ck it. No expense spared! Two brandies, two lemoncellos. 

Urm. this is Creme de Cassis. Er, urm, the Kir royale. Even better is another version which is, urm, er, blackberry. Blackberrent (sic, hic) liqueur and Champagne. Kir royale. How you got any flaming Sambuca? And then two Kir royale. And then the bill. 

Lovely, thank you. Er, thank you very much. 

Er, I think we gotta do a runner. 

Er, it's a joke. It's fine. I don't care. Not only, I really don't care. 

Erm, is service included? So make it £220.   

Other reading

The BBC's Trump coverage this week reached an absolute crescendo of bias and other related blogs have posted such fine, details, excoriating critiques of this astonishing outpouring of overwhelmingly one-sided bile.

Not a John Sweeney fan

Over at The Conservative Woman David Keighley wrote that last Monday's Panorama -Trump: The Kremlin Candidate? marked the final "descent to the pits" of that once-proud BBC flapship, reducing it to scaremongering and further disseminating fake news:

So bad was this malicious offering that it does not deserve to be even remotely classed as journalism. It was a party political broadcast on behalf of the discredit-Trump-at-any-price party.

This week's Newswatch included another criticism of the programme, from viewer Ian Shaw, which also deserves quoting:

John Sweeney does an excellent job of irritating people, and does very little reporting whatsoever, managing to have two of his interviewees leave the set and refuse to continue in anger. It was genuinely uncomfortable to watch him ask questions in an undeniably accusatory way. Moreover, when they do leave or argue back, the show cuts to John Sweeney explaining that these people don't take criticism. Well, this is childish, absolutely galling. 

Then there was Harry Phibbs at Heat Street on why the BBC's Trump coverage in general has been a "disgrace". 

To summarise: Before the election the BBC were confident Trump would lose and Hillary win. They assumed Trump's support was largely confined to angry, white, older men. They didn't dwell on the danger for Hillary of calling such people "a basket of deplorables"; nor spend any great amount of time on examining why Hillary was unpopular. Too many BBC reporters were "fans" of Hillary. 

Used in John Sweeney's Panorama

Why did Trump get 29% of the Latino vote? Why did he get 42% of the female vote? Why did more African-Americans vote for him than Mitt Romney? The BBC was at a loss to explain any of those. Why have they ignored the fact that 43% of college graduates voted for Trump? 

Any false claims by Trump will be given great attention – even a typo in one of his tweets. Yet when he is the victim of fake news, the BBC is desperate to give the claims as much credence as possible. It aches to believe them, notably, of course, with regards to the dossier claiming that Russian intelligence operatives have compromising information on him which fell to pieces when the details were examined. 

There will also by a willingness by the pundits to predict disaster – some of the claims from election night have already proved wrong. For instance that the Republican Party would fall apart, or that news of his election would spark a crash in the Dow Jones Index. 

Even the BBC World Service – which traditionally took great care to be balanced – has been unrestrained in its message of contempt for the President-elect.

Alan at Biased BBC also gave the BBC's coverage a thorough going-over, noting the sheer range and extent of the BBC's Trump bashing in the days leading up to the inauguration, for 5Live to the BBC website, from Radio 4 to BBC TV. Alan calls it a "torrent of abuse, contemptuous mockery and sanctimonious lies".

I agree with them all.

Taking on Putin

Well, I must say that I found John Sweeney's Panorama: Taking on Putin a gripping watch. It was almost like a Cold War spy drama at times. 

It build a strong case that Russia is a sham democracy and  a police state - something we already knew, of course, but it was eye-opening to see just how thuggish and ruthless it actually is. 

It was a distinctly Orwellian moment when the BBC crew (including JS) got arrested for vandalising a memorial to murdered opposition leader Boris Nemtsov when we viewers knew (and can be sure that the Russian authorities also knew) that a pro-Putin group had carried it out and that the BBC had merely been there filming them. 

And then came the local media's cringingly inept attempts to 'doorstep' John Sweeney, and the far-less-amusing pro-Kremlin TV news reports smearing John Sweeney.

As he himself writes in the Times:

While helping police with their inquiries, a story about me popped up on REN TV, a network that is said to be close to the FSB. The website said that I may be charged with vandalism for the attack on the Nemtsov shrine. I had once met Nemtsov, a brave and very funny critic of Putin. I dedicated my novel about modern Russia, Cold, to him. The idea that I would vandalise a Nemtsov shrine is nonsense.

(Sarcasm klaxon! - If there's one thing you can say for BBC reporters such John Sweeney is that they'd never leap to unjustified conclusions and smear people they disapprove of - and I'm sure Nigel Farage would back me up on that one).

Still, this Panorama could be taken as a warning to all democracies - sham or otherwise: A true democracy doesn't harass journalists. It doesn't follow them, or smear them, or arrest them on jumped-up charges...or, for that matter, refuse them entry into the country because they hold 'the wrong views', or detain them because they intend to interview someone of whom the authorities disapprove. 

P.S.