The right wing bias of BBC Question Time tonight staggers belief, even for the BBC. One Francoist, two Tories, the still more right wing Chukka Umunna, all “balanced” by Akala, who thankfully has more brains, and certainly more compassion, than the rest put together.
Esther McVey, Tory. Champion of the rape clause, minister implementing benefit cuts and promoting privatised benefits assessments, lobbyist against regulating gambling machines. One of the very nastiest of Tories.
Chloe Westley Another Tory. Here representing the tiny far right fringe group the “Taxpayers Alliance”. Proponent of fierce benefit cuts. Studying the rampantly Islamophobic counter-terrorism course at St Andrews University. Her twitter handle is “LowTaxChloe” which is all you need to know.
Alejandro Agag Another Tory, invited by the BBC as a “businessman”. Former MEP for the Francoist Spanish Popular Party – the current government in Spain which is busy jailing as many political prisoners in Catalonia as they can get their hands on, and is happy sending in paramilitary thugs to club old Catalan ladies waiting to vote.
Chuka Umunna Full time taxpayer-funded right wing campaigner against Jeremy Corbyn.
Akala Very decent guy. Performing this year at our Doune the Rabbit Hole festival for which you should pull your finger out and get buying tickets now.
Why is the BBC permitted, day after day after day, to pump out programming which actively promotes a political programme far to the right of where the British population actually stand? With the continual over-representation of nutty right wing groups like the Taxpayers’ Alliance and the Henry Jackson Society, while left wing groups of much larger membership such as Stop the War are completely ignored. Why low tax campaigners but no invitation ever to groups like Black Triangle who represent claimants interests? Not to mention the routine ignoring of the SNP, parliament’s third largest party.
I strongly urge you not to pay your TV license to fund this barrage of right wing propaganda. I and thousands of others in Scotland have refused to pay since 2014, and other than lots of silly threatening letters nothing has happened. Just stop paying for this nonsense.
I thought Chuka didn’t mix with ‘trash’, yet there he is mixing with his fellow Tories and Dimbleby.
A reminder of the BBC over the years…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wcHq5U_ZdiY
Why stop at the TV Licence? It’s perfectly clear that the UK Government is a terrorist organisation, by any definition. Rendition, torture, false-flag ops, illegal wars and support for illicit and proscribed groups. Supporting terrorist organisations is a criminal offence.
Stop paying your income tax. It only feeds the system.
Unless you are self employed it’s very hard to do unless you can reduce your income to the point where income tax is not deducted
What a sorry piece of rubbish. Mr Murray, perhaps you don’t realise but it’s not the BBC being far to the right of where the British population stand, it’s you being far to the left.
It’s really poor to pick one particular show and criticise the BBC based on that. But the Beeb is often criticised from the right based on exactly the same unfair basis. What would a right-wing Tory have to say after seeing pretty much any episode of HIGNFY?
Demonstrably untrue Jan. https://www.ft.com/content/c932b8ea-e223-314a-9e68-a412e7ac5ac2
And I fear you haven’t watched HIGNFY for a decade if you think its remotely subversive.
I don’t subscribe to the FT, so I don’t have access. Which bit is demonstrably untrue?
(And no, I don’t work for the BBC. I follow this blog and find myself agreeing with Craig’s opinions much of the time, but I know I am to the left of the British average.)
I can only assume that Jacob Rees Mogg now represents the “British average”.
What an idiotic comment from Jan, she must be a BBC employee.
HIGNFY is the most flaccidly bland rubbish. And they’ve had plenty of Tories on over the years. They’ve even had Jacob Rees Mogg – who fitted in perfectly.
..and they were drooling over right-wing Rape-Clause-Enthusiast Ruth Davidson, leader of the Tories in the Scottish Parliament. Of course, when she was on it looked like she had a future.
I view the panel tonight as a sign of increasing Unionist desperation.
The Taxpayers Alliance wants to scrap Inheritance Tax. Fact is there are now a lot of extremely wealthy baby boomers and even more wealthy Thatcherite entrepreneurs. Most people don’t own as much as the £300,000 threshold. So scrapping the tax would only benefit the very rich and very lazy who have not found ways of leaving their wealth to their heirs.
Inheritance brings out the very worst in families. So why not let the richest families have even more gold to poke eachothers eyes out for?
Spare an old schekel for a lepor?
As I have said previously, I’m getting tired of hearing people complaining about BBC and MSM bias. Maybe those who complain are biased and unwilling to face the grim truth that England — not Scotland and the rest — generally speaking is a rancid right wing, xenophobic/racist, militaristic, society.
In the last 38 years the English have voted only once for a PM that wasn’t a Tory. That man was Tony Blair who will go down on history as a sort of murdering sociopathic confidence-trickster. When their leaders bomb and attack other countries, the English generally cheer and popularity ratings rise. And it’s the same when they attack the poor and disadvantaged.
I don’t say it lightly. England has become a bitter and ugly country in my lifetime. The Question Time panel is typically full of bitter and ugly people which makes it representative.
You comment sir is as ignorant as it is prejudice, how dare you feel you have some kind of right to judge an entire country based on votes that constitute no more than a third of the population.
Bigotry like yours has should have no place in England or Scotland. And I speak as a son of both.
the two thirds allow , encourage the Great and Good to ride roughshod over decency. Hence, an accurate depiction of England today (England, Their England 1933 for some perspective)
Oh shut up. I used the word “generally” and assume you know what that means.
The facts are the facts. England votes for these monsters and Scotland doesn’t, generally speaking. You’d need to go back about 70 years to find a general election that Scottish voters even affected the outcome of, so it really is down to who England votes for.
England loves to think of itself as cultured and sophisticated. The truth is it’s every bit as dysfunctional and diabolical as America. And it has all the same hideous social problems, racism, poverty, shallow materialism, militarism, etc. The only difference is gun law really.
Thankfully England is a much smaller than the US and is more or less an irrelevance in world affairs.
There not facts they’re your bigoted prejudices. You’re an extremely unpleasant person, up there with loony and the mad brexiteers.
Up there with the loony brexiters who were to a large extent motivated by xenophobia and racism… and to a large extent were English.
How about stopping the calling of names, and addressing the points he brought forward?
Hatuey, You are right about what England has become – exactly right – but the important thing is not to judge a Nation by it’s Tabloid MSM – which, in this country, is absolute filth and should not have the dignity of being called ‘newspapers’. It is true what Shatnersrug says though, many of us do not and have not voted conservative, the FPTP system in this regard renders us to be an electoral dictatorship and, until we switch to Proportional Representation, if we ever do, we will never have a representative Government. Meanwhile, we do what we can on websites such as these and through other channels. The MSM has, on behalf of the Tory Party and their own vested interests, in the past few General Elections, conducted malicious, vicious and dishonest and untruthful sustained campaigns against Ed Milliband and Jeremy Corbyn – more so with Jeremy Corbyn – the campaign against who has been truly vicious and malicious. Although he is the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, he is treated like a criminal by them. What I do know though, is that if a Labour Government had presided over the things this Tory Government has done, the Press would have crucified it threefold. So, yes we are rapidly becoming an ignorant, uneducated bunch of sheeple, but not all of us. If we lived in France or any other country, we would be out on the street en masse now to protest against savage benefit cuts, lack of affordable housing, exruciatingly high transport costs and many other issues. We don’t for some reason.
Sorry Jo, my analysis is scientific not based on personal feelings. Everything you say rests on the FPTP electoral system rendering England a dictatorship (your words) but that’s the same system Scotland uses and Tories very rarely poll about around 24% in Scotland.
It’s hard to admit but maybe you should simply accept it; England has a political character that in my opinion is ugly, vicious, and identical in many way to that of the US. It’s basically America without the guns.
Hatuey, I cannot agree with what you say – by the way, I did say an electoral dictatorship. If you look at the recent Council elections here – and the analysis by the Electorral Reform Society – you will see Labour polled a record number of votes and actually won the vote in Wandsworth and made great gains in Westminster. However, the Tories still have the majority of seats. There is something deeply wrong with the system. It’s not necessarily the public – they turned out in the recent elections and turned in the biggest Labour vote since 1970 – so the electorate are voting for Labour – but the FPTP system is skewing the representation. The political character in the UK is largely driven by the MSM and that’s the point – the MSM is ugly and vicious. Murdoch (who owns the majority of the MSM and has a 30% stake in ITV and now going to own SKY News outright, has claimed vociferously in the past that the MSM can make or break Governments and he is proud of that. In the USA, Murdoch again, owns much of the MSM, just take a look and see how vicious and malicious that is – then take a look at Outfox and see just how extremely right wing (bordering on fascist) they are and how be concerned at the level of bias towards the Republicans – to the exclusion of the truth.
Jo, you aren’t listening. You’re making excuses and you shouldn’t. Nobody is blaming you.
Again, it’s the same electoral system that exists in the rest of the UK. It’s the same media system that exists in the rest of the UK. The only thing that’s different is the political character of the people. There is no alternative.
why bother responding to him? on a previous blog i just read this clown was objecting to government spending on public transport, on the grounds he doesn’t use it. yet here he is now affecting maximum offense at english people who elect tories. a sad attention seeker.
That’s true. I have no problem with paying tax for things that are important though. In the case of transport, it’s plain to see that the subsidies are going to private companies and I disagree with that.
I like the free market and think it provides effective mechanisms and dynamics that work perfectly well when unhindered. We are happy to leave miners, web designers, and cleaners to face the free market, why not banks and transport workers?
Of course, there are things the free market shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near. I’m happy to discuss them but I don’t think transport is one of them.
Hatuey expresses a sobering thought, with which one can scarcely disagree (that is, the description of the Murdochised England)
The problem is, of course, that the BBC’s defenders still spout “we’re the public service broadcaster” , heirs to the WW2 heroes etc etc. It’s this blatant deception which infuriates, and some younger people can benefit from the commentary given by Craig Murray.
On the Murdoch factor (short-hand for a wider, deeper malady) I still check out Dennis Potter ‘s interview with Melvyn Bragg in 1994.
Anyone over sixty should , with effort, be able to recall an England which had not sunk so egregiously into the putrid cant of today. One refers, naturally, to the elites, whose twisted views have nevertheless infected some working people (racism, cynicism etc) The young (post-Thatcher generation) have been systematically corrupted by the MSM etc and will find it very difficult to uncover their betrayal and articulate a response, so, in the end, the commentary here is worth making .
David, I have no strong objections to anything you say but I actually think that older generations in England — again, generally speaking — exhibit the most vile traits and views on a range of subjects from racism to foreign policy and history.
Data backs up this contention too, if you look into it. And it’s easily found; most studies of voting behaviour give a lot of weight to age difference.
What’s annoying in England’s case is that the older generations are the most pampered in English history in terms of jobs, rights, pensions, house ownership, etc. Young people in England today get a comparatively terrible deal.
I’d also say that young people in England were more tolerant too but I have no evidence to back that up, it’s just an impression.
@Hatuey
I really have no idea what your experience of England and the English is, but in my exposure to the English, Scottish, Irish and individuals of the myriad of cultures that now inhabit Canada, the English have been, if anything, the least xenophobic and racist of the lot. Perhaps you are channelling your inner anglophobe, but I wonder what evidence you would present to back your contention. The ‘English’ inevitably includes xenophobes and racists, but I would suggest that the proportion is lower than those that you would encounter in almost any other established culture. Rates of racial intermarriage in England would tend to support my view.
Canexpat, my experience of the English and England isn’t important. I’m judging England based on the history of how it votes, survey data (quantative and qualatitive), foreign policy, the newspapers English people buy, and many other variables which I would look at quite uncontroversially if I was assessing any other country.
For some reason we are not to apply the same basic standards of assessment to England that we (and English scholars and politicians) are happy to apply everywhere else. But fear not, my assessment of this rogue state isn’t likely to result in me launching air strikes or sinking any Belgrano.
As for racism in England, that’s a massive subject. England has always denied its racism. You can’t colonise a quarter of mankind without pandering to racist ideas. Your anecdotal tales fly in the face of the facts. Anyone who says England doesn’t have serious racism problems is living in cloud cuckoo land.
Hatuey, there is racism in most countries – i think there is better legal protection here than other countries – for people who have been seriously discriminated against. I don’t think there is a blatant racist problem in the UK as such although it obviously does exist as it does in many countries around the world – Look to Hungary, Poland and other Eastern European countries – you will see what blatant and overt racism actually looks like. In Hungary, the Government is just passing legislation that anyone who helps immigrants will face a jail sentence. Both Countries have refused to take refugees under their EU obligations because they don’t want ethnic minorities in their countries. I think your statements tend to be over generalised and rather badly thought out at times.
“Three out of five of Nottingham’s Muslims have been victims of hate crime, new figures have revealed.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/muslims-nottingham-hate-crime-survey-islamophobia-racism-citizens-uk-a8341751.html
I’ve contributed to more than one scholarly work on the subject of racism. Let me assure you, it’s something I can discuss forensically in the case of British history.
Here’s a thought and question for you; show me one example of racism anywhere in the last 500 years that didn’t have some sort of economic motive or underpinning. There are arguably a few but you’d struggle to find them.
Those of us who have taken the time to study racism and the role it plays in societies know that it more or less always goes hand in hand with forms of economic exploitation. In the UK some of the most vicious early examples of that revolved around Ireland, believe it or not.
Today most racism in the UK is of the anti-Islamic flavour but don’t be fooled; it’s not coincidental that your government needs some sort of basis for attacking and brutalising people who are unfortunate enough to live in oil rich countries.
And it would be potentially inconvenient if ordinary British people were allowed to relate to those who their government drops fire on as human beings much like themselves. Easier if they are regarded as uncivilised, violent, fundamentalists, different, inferior, etc., etc.
Racism does exist almost everywhere, though, I agree. Hardly an argument for putting up with it or taking part…
Interesting comments. Thanks.
Well said. I am disturbed by the anglophobia shown here.
Last night’s QT panel was unusual. I would suggest http://www.biasedbbc.org for more insight into how the BBC rolls.
I have never paid for a BBC licence.
“I am disturbed by the anglophobia shown here.”
Anglophobia has real, rational, often deadly, causes.
“In the last 38 years the English have voted only once for a PM that wasn’t a Tory.”
We’ve had directly-elected PMs for the last 38 years? Why did no-one tell me? I would have voted if I’d known about them.
So one Red Tory, two Blue Tories including a motormouth, a Spanish ‘businessman’ of Algerian-Belgian extraction and a rapper/poet/political activist.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejandro_Agag
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akala_(rapper). I have heard of his sister, Ms Dynamite.
Makes a change from Farage and Ree-Smog.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/nigel-farage-set-record-question-time-appearances-century-155615416.html?
Incredibly Wikipedia has lists right up to today.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Question_Time_episodes#Highest_appearance_makers
‘… a Spanish ‘businessman’ of Algerian-Belgian extraction ..’
This constant obsession with people’s national or religious origins!!
I’m glad I’m in New Zealand at the moment so have no chance of stumbling across this whilst channel surfing.
Life in a self confident small independent country with a vibrant multiparty democracy and a decent economy is pretty good. Sure there are problems but they have been identified and are in process of being fixed instead of ignored.
You’ve got to be kidding me? NZ has just had years of a National govt that has increased child poverty. The country of 20 years ago is now barely recognisable. And a ‘decent’ economy based on milk powder… How’s Winston going?
Did the NZ government increase ‘child poverty’ or poverty, full stop? Child poverty is a right wing term that implies poor adults are at fault for their own poverty while children in poverty are victims of their feckless adult guardians.
That the term has become normalized even in left wing circles shows how far to the right the spectrum has shifted and how insidious these ideological weasel phrases are.
One third of children in New Zealand live in poverty.
Get yourself down to West Auckland rather than the European enclaves.
There would be a very high price to pay for losing the BBC though.
I don’t disagree with you that their political coverage is dangerously unbalanced (and yes, getting them to invite people from other lobbying groups would definitely be a good start); everything else they do is of vital importance though, from keeping local radio alive at all to supporting a huge range of diverse talent elsewhere in the system. It’s perilously easy to forget that primetime BBC1 is not remotely representative of the BBC.
(For me, this is dangerously similar to the extremist Brexit argument about the EU – cherry pick an unpleasant example and then extrapolate that to the rest of the system. It makes it difficult to argue against, whatever your actual position might be.)
You forgot to give an indication of the price.
Think about it….if the BBC is destroyed it is gone for good even when/if the spectrum shifts to the left. Don’t flush the baby with the bath water.
Dry yer eyes son. The BBC your thinking about has already been destroyed. It’s just a taxpayer funded branch of the Murdoch machine. The worse part is that they claim to be impartial, which makes them more effective/ dangerous as they ‘manufacture consent’ for the endless cycle of oil wars and conflict capitalism.
Craig is right, do us all a favour and cancel your license fee.
Scurra you are right. It is the only channel still producing quality drama, brilliant wildlife documentaries and alternative humour. I don’t actually watch television that much I listen to the radio 80% of the time which I find to be excellent – Radio 3 (Free Thinking, The Essay, late Junction), Radio 4 (Women’s Hour, book at bedtime, the Film Programme and many more) and Radio 4 Xtra – which is my staple really. Brilliantly produced and delivered drama and comedy. However, like many people on this blog, I am deeply concerned about the extreme right wing/Tory bias in its current affairs reportage and programming. Craig is right, there should be many other groups invited. Personally, and I am an avid Corbyn /Labour supporter, i wouldn’t watch anything with Chukka Unuma in it.
What an appallingly biased line up. The BBC just gets worse and worse The Andrew Neil This Week show that follows question time is the same. It generally has Andrew Neil and Michael Portillo for the Tories and then one picked from Chuka/Liz Kendal/Alan Johnson supposedly as the representative of the Labour Party. I think Liz Kendals 4% in the leadership election shows how unrepresentative she is of Labour, and indeed the show even uses that as her nickname/hashtag for the programme showing they are aware of how unrepresentative she is.
Jan
What are you doing on this blog? Didn’t the panel of QT sufficiently articulate your grasping Tory instincts, that you felt the need to articulate them yourself here? I don’t have a TV so I don’t know if there is such a thing as Any Answers for QT. but I’d have thought the bulling heifers of the Tory right wing like Aaronovitch and Freedland, desperately trying to hijack the British public into post-neo-failed-born-again-Thatcherism were sufficient dross for recreational right-wing escapism, without being force-fed the utterings of mad-cow-disease think-tanks like The Taxpayers Alliance. Let them eat cake, the last words of a political class that has never smelt , let alone eaten, grass.
BBC Daily Politics is just as bad.
Worth checking out Jo Coburn of Daily Politics; suddenly her position on so many events becomes clearer; can’t imagine her having a balanced view of events on the Golan Heights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Coburn
How does it look when you take a larger sample of episodes?
Asking for a friend.
Remind readers of any QT panel that was dominated by leftwing politicians and lobby groups.
Probably worth checking out Alison Fuller Pedley, the woman responsible for selecting the panel.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourbeeb/tim-holmes/is-question-time-s-audience-producer-really-fascist
Ah, yes! ‘BBC’ Question Time … which isn’t actually made by *the BBC* anymore…
ttps://markdoran.wordpress.com/2017/11/04/tory-tory-tory-7/
M.
OK, l”m off up the pub, have a nice night, try not to fight.
Said one Israeli to a semite
I stopped paying the BBC TV fee two or three years ago. They send me threatening letters every month, and on one occasion I confronted one of their ‘investigators’ on the door. I very rarely open the door to unknown callers.
Anyhow, I’m now 75 but I have not told them that; let them continue to waste tax-payers money sending out threatening letters saying something like ‘!00,001 home calls are made each day’ (what a load of twaddle!).
The number is really down to the exact ‘1’, and it never varies.
Anyhow, I gave the poor guy who I opened the door to a piece of my mind, re BBC gross war-mongering propaganda, high payment and protection to Paedos like Saville, and monumental ‘golden handshakes’ for retirees.
The guy smiled, and metaphorically shrugged his shoulders (quite a trick, that!).
After two years of the same cycle of pseudo-threatening letters arriving regularly once a month, they’ve now given up. Shame, I was looking forward to an inspector having to trek out to the wilds of West Wales.
Look on the bright side. Programmes such as this are so transparently obviously tainted that few viewers will be swayed to the left or right by what they hear. The bias satisfies one constituency in the bliss of ignorance, and whatever gets said changes nothing for them. The Alf Garnetts of this world will never think any further than the end of their noses, and you Craig would go blue in the face trying to convince them otherwise. The comedic bias horrifies the rest of the population who can be bothered to watch, and only reassures them in their own contrary views and opinions.
The programme represents a zero sum overall, and only exists as a cynically driven production to satisfy the Conservative Party grandees that the BBC is not rocking the boat, thereby not endangering its licence fee.
I used to watch it for self-punishing entertainment and horror laid bare, but I cannot be bothered any more. Few under-35’s will be watching, and if only they could be relied upon consistently to vote, our government and country would be the better for it. When the under-35’s don’t vote we end up with the Alf Garnett government we have now, and that should be a lesson to the young when they see the mess the Alfs have got us into: starting with Brexit, subservience to Washington clowns and hawks in their foolhardy adventures in the Middle East and Asia, and in desperation trying to blame Putin for everything which is not quite right anywhere.
It is cheap tv for an audience of Daily Mail readers. Nothing more, nothing less.
Chuka’s cosying up to so much of what the Conservative rebels are getting upset about is a misjudgement in my opinion. The Tory rebels should be left to fracture their own party as they are doing, as they have before. Chuka is no fool, but his ambition to undermine Jeremy Corbyn represents effectively a bitter disloyalty to the Labour Party of which he is an important member, and it comes over as jealousy. We need to see the back of this government and Chuka is not helping at all.
The bias may be obvious to you but it exerts influence nonetheless and subtly helps shape developing minds, among others. Most people do not pay attention to print or television adverts either yet they are still influenced by them.
Chuka is a diseased man, utterly possessed by corporate evil
Saw a documentary the other day about the Great War at sea. The German High Seas Fleet was at Scapa Flow in 1919 waiting for the outcome of the Paris Peace Talks. The German Admiral decided to order the fleet to be scuttled. That much I knew. What was shocking was that after the scuttling of the ships and the German crews were in their boats, officers and ratings of the Royal Navy fired on the unarmed Germans with rifles and small arms killing quite a number. For scuttling ships. All this seven months after the end of the war. The notion of a British/English sense of fair play has always been myth.
The types who fired on the defenceless Germans are the same types who today demand hard brexit, deport the Windrush generation and sneer at Scotland’s and Wales’ democratic rights.
We are out of this fake union.
@ reel guid May 10, 2018 at 23:21
Firing on lifeboats is an acknowledged war crime (though that was obviously before the Nuremberg Trials – it may not have been so in 1919,, but should have been obvious). The Israelis did the same in the attack on the USS Liberty in 1967 (though there were no occupants in them) which reinforces Peter Hounam’s contention that the Israeli’s had been coaxed into attacking the USS Liberty and to sink it and leave no survivors by LBJ, who planned to nuke Egypt Egypt in ‘retaliation’ (nuclear armed palnse were on the way to nuke Egypt from the US Sixth Fleet and from a US base in North Africa, and were recalled three minutes from targets because the Liberty crew managed to get out an SOS) (Peter Hounam – ‘Operation Cyanide’).
The whole thing was heavily ‘hushed up’ by LBJ and his Administration.
Not seeking an argument, but what is your source for that? My understanding was that only 6 Germans died when the fleet was scuttled. Genuinely interested if that is not the case.
No shortage of Internet information on the Germans who died as the result of the scuttling of the German fleet in Scapa Flow, their 13 graves can be viewed at Lyness Royal Navy Cemetery: https://www.tracesofwar.com/sights/18887/German-War-Graves-Lyness-Royal-Navy-Cemetery.htm and there’s: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-33152438
I visit the war cemetery at Lynsey’s at least once a year and the German graves are not all connected with the scuttling of the high fleet. The internet information you refer to is not a primary source and I am just interested in Reel Guid’s assertion that ‘quite a few’ Germans died as a result of being fired upon whilst in lifeboats. The small number who died during the scuttle were not murdered but were caught up in the sinkings. I am genuinely asking what his sources are as I do not recognise his version of events.
Lyness- apologies
This source gives the figure as 9:
http://nerdalicious.com.au/history/scapa-flow-june-21st-1919-the-last-killings-of-world-war-i/
Friedrich Ruge in “Scapa Flow 1919” gives the figure as 8 and 21 wounded.
Of course, by the standards of ww1, these were trivial casualties. And yet to someone who had always been brought up with the idea that British servicemen would never do anything like firing on unarmed men abandoning their ships, it made unpleasant reading far out of proportion to the actual numbers involved.
So far as I know, no one was ever held accountable for these killings.
“The German Admiral decided to order the fleet to be scuttled.”
AFAIK, from my grandfather who served in the Navy in WWI, this decision was taken after “encouragement” from the British government to do just that. That was why these ships were still manned and manned by Germans.
I should add, to be fair, that the BBC has not always been so blatantly biased and ‘anti-truth’.
They put out a three-part series documentary on Gladio back in the early 1990’s:
‘Operation Gladio – Full 1992 documentary BBC’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGHXjO8wHsA ,and on the USS Liberty:
“USS Liberty: Dead In The Water” (BBC Documentary 2002)’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjOH1XMAwZA
For anyone who hasn’t seen them, I heartily suggest they do so – they are really excellent.
And they have put out other good documentaries in the past. But that is the operative word: ‘past’.
The BBC no longer pass the ‘smell test’.
Craig I stupidly fell for the bbc threatening letter after three months overdue NEVER AGAIN
thirty-odd years ago the late E.P.Thompson remarked that there was more productive, honest discussion on Gardener’s Question Time than on the Dimbleby version. Since its inception, the BBC has been a mainstay of the Establishment , its role in brainwashing probably growing as technology develops and as the whole concept of “public service” collapses. Further, as Chomsky has neatly pointed out, the journalists etc who promote , basically, an uncritical acceptance of the Establishment “narrative” are -again, probably increasingly- themselves so indoctrinated that they are rarely aware of their subservience. The construction of alternative reporting and commentary is one of the most urgent of the tasks facing those who refuse to accept the “mainstream” condoning of war and of the destruction of “society” (remember Maggie !)
Found this trying to find out who the hell Chloe westerly is. Absolutely spot on.
Yes me too Chris and its (mostly) a soothing read after allowing myself to get wound up by QT yet again (will I never learn?).
Thanks for watching – so we don’t have to.
I agree, Craig. And chaired by the awful, smug, reactionary David Dimbleby. HE and his idiot brother Jonathan, shoe-horned into the BBC, not on merit but because they are the offspring of Richard Dimbleby.
And then to cap it all, on newsnight, the revolting Mark Regev was allowed to present, without any serious challenge, Israel’s fascistic policy in bombing Syria.
They’re not getting my license fee.
I believe QT is also funded from the BBC Scotland budget. It will have BBC Scotland on the credits at the end. I don’t pay for this travesty of a broadcasting outfit. But other people do and it amounted to £320m last year. Of that, approx 1/3 is spent in Scotland, from which this programme and Homes Under the Hammer and other such irrelevances are funded.
Embarrassing that such dross is attributed to us.
I fully agree. I stopped paying mine in 2017. I have complained bitterly about blatant bias but received stock answers each time
A thorough disgrace
‘Chuka’ has a suitable name; he ought to be ‘Chuka’d’ outta da JC Labour Party ‘sooner rather than later’.
I’m sure the Tories will offer him a safe seat, so he can keep his snout in the trough.
Auf wiedersein, let’s not meet again, good riddance, etc.
BBC? ‘Blatantly Biased Cnuts’ seems to fit the bill.
The more people who just stop paying their license the better… A few million non-payers would hit them for a few bob.
I haven’t had a TV for 20 years as a mark of respect for my mind…. Too many good books to read and music to listen to.
The Yes Movent paid bbC Scotland a wee visit demanding Nick Robinson’s sacking, after his lies –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sodlIuiZ15c
I was at another protest outside bbc Scotland, over Israel / Palestine Bias. –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKSb4aAtUDE&t=29s
An excellent analysis of the Toryfication and demise of impartiality at the BBC.
https://kittysjones.wordpress.com/2018/05/09/bbcs-churnalism-and-the-governments-pr-and-strategic-communications-crib-sheet/