The BBC

Blades Business Crew

Serious sheffield united hooligans

.....................strike me down..............

Ipswich Total Violence

(OK, I made that up and in fact when we supposedly had a "firm" they decided to call themselves The Spanners, why they did is anyone's guess)

BBC blamed for attacks on Poles

wtf @ that guy

Tories, eh?

Sub-Passantino at best

At 6 feet 8½ inches (204 cm), Kawczynski is believed to be the tallest MP ever to sit in the Parliament of the United Kingdom.

But the average height of doors in Westminster is six feet eight and now he wants ministers to take account of an increasingly tall UK population.

"Being officially a giant myself... you want to raise things which pertain to yourself and people like you," he said.

ISSUES4U

Damn those liberal elites...

Britain is the country of choice for many 'feckless' Poles

'Polish Borat' claims groping women is normal in Eastern Europe

IMMIGRANTS TO BLAME FOR SURGE IN CRIME SAYS POLICE CHIEF

Also I'm sure he said all this a couple of months ago somewhere else. Why has it come up again now?

Oh, yes, in the Independent.

He'll be blaming the BBC for attacks on giants next

I'd guess he has a point if he's talking about Tory voters mouthing off on the mid-morning phone-ins on local stations like BBC Radio Shropshire etc.

Conservative Friends of Poland

Like Neville Chamberlain, he means?

Pretty sure it's mostly Channel 4 running the anti-Polish stuff. But it is tricky spotting the difference between Panorama and the Völkischer Beobachter most weeks.

EXCLUSIVE: Max Mosley confirmed as new Panorama presenter.

A step too far, this is causing as much kerfuffle as when the moved women's hour.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2009/06/change_to_international_pages.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jul/14/ben-bradshaw-bbc-management

the bbc does seem amazingly inept at covering its arse. it is kind of a symptom of a wider elite-class self-aggrandizement that the likes of byford and thompson think they deserve mad money, but it's still going to come back to bite them.

beeb has kind of an impossible job in dealing with its critics, since they simultaneously claim the licence fee isn't justified because the bbc isn't populist enough and that it isn't justified because it doesn't provide enough specialised content that the commercial sector won't touch. i can't see that sharing the licence fee does anything to help except spreading it thinner.

agree that bbc bosses don't help the cause though.

is it really going to be dismantled?
― D Aziz (esquire1983), Wednesday, 18 February 2004 00:03 (5 years ago)

Possibly, if - when - the Tories get in.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/oct/19/wed-abolish-bbc-trust-hunt

Has to be a troll:

Pay per view BBC news would allow the lefties to view their own biased news reports while the rest of us could choose ITV news for more impartial reporting.

this business about "damaging commercial competitors" really pisses me off. we should be celebrating the fact that the BBC creates quality products and services for "free", not requiring it to dumb down its offerings so that something inferior and expensive can maintain market share.

Whenever that comment is made, it is usually voiced by someone with vested interests eg. Murdoch. In America, Murdoch goes after Obama but here he goes after impartial news media. This should be a good compass for anyone wishing to locate the centre of power in any given country. Who does Murdoch go after in, say, China?

yeah, you do wonder whether this is the quid for the quo of The Sun's support.

tories don't need any outside encouragement to go after the bbc, tbh.

So is the Mail anti-Beeb purely because of DMGT's regional newspapers? Or is there something else, aside from Jonathan Ross and the telly tax?

it's ideological - the bbc is full of lefties.

not only that, the whole concept of the BBC is lefty.

and yet they've employed Jeremy Clarkson, Carol Thatcher, Michael Burke, Patrick Moore (latter two mentioned just due to sexist comments made in past)...

Patrick Moore is very right-wing on immigration too, unfortunately.

and yet they've employed Jeremy Clarkson, Carol Thatcher, Michael Burke, Patrick Moore (latter two mentioned just due to sexist comments made in past)...

... and Andrew Neil and Michael Portillo and Nick Robinson and Quentin Letts ad nauseum

Michael Buerk is a Conservative?

Only when it comes to the BBC employing women, I think... women who get jobs he wants, that is

sexist, conservative, racist - all the same

Regardless of how many sexist conservative racist rightwingers are employed there, the very existence of the BBC as a huge part of the media landscape is a slap in the face to Tory free market ideals, so obviously they want to pare it back. I don't think it's all about Murdoch.

In my own experience, sexism is not limited to conservative men!

LOL, far from it!

Yep, easy to envision an alternative where the UK made peace and the outcome was a world where fascism became normaliz oh never mind

Fizzles: would you make the same case about the US civil war?

i don’t know enough about it to answer i’m afraid pinefox. real blind spot for me that i intend to rectify this year. what’s your view? (and do you agree about the WW2view?)

Churchill was ringing the numbers in red pencil of Jews getting "special treatment" from intercepted wires de-scrambled by Enigma from the camps and these were stadium sized big numbers, but it had no discernible influence on war strategy. If anything Churchill would have been more concerned in not saying a damn thing about it to prevent Hitler from having the domestic propaganda victory of portraying the British as fighting a war against them on behalf of the Jews.

right ok. it sounds like it was something they were interested in understanding it though? do you know why? i was reasonably sweeping in my view that nazi jewish policy didn’t factor into pre and early war decision making but it’s a while since i’ve read anything detailed about it, certainly not recent history.

SO MUCH STUFF TO READ

i guess to bring it back to thread, it would be interesting to know how much anti jewish policy and violence in germany and beyond featured in pre and early war news reports in the UK and US (and indeed elsewhere).

I think it's also notable that britain's first major immigration control legislation was specifically motivated by antisemitism (there was a disgusting piece in the jewish chronicle recently denying this, presumably to justify its legacy of subsequent border controls). and that britain deported so many people to their deaths (like we still do today) during the holocaust

these facts seem to me to reveal a lot about the british contribution to fascism and antisemitism, to be extremely relevant our current situation and debates we have about borders and immigration, as well having been quite thoroughly expunged from UK pop history, to the extent that using then to contextualise now (or vice versa) is seen as irrelevant at best or offensive at worst

I was alerted to how good When The Boat Comes In is by a twitter poster and all 3 seasons are on Youtube. It's very binge-worthy as they say these days.

Love it, like if Peaky Blinders was good

the politics in it are quite complex and interesting, some great writing, great performances albeit with some wayward regional accents - it would be 100% more of the latter these days from the bbc! But it is so good.

"We'll get wet rot through this house while you're philosophising about socialism"

i have always felt if it weren’t for geopolitics/balance of power stuff that no one would have given one fuck about the death camps. ofc as tooze and edgerton have shown the economics of lebensraum and the death camps are inextricable but even so feel it’s useful to separate the drivers of war from the post war moral horror. moral is not perjorative there i hope it should be needless to say, it was horrifying and people were rightly horrified. but that moral quality was absent in the drivers to war and did not make it in anyone’s minds a “morally good” war afaict.

Yeah, no doubt. This is apparent not just from govt actions but even the writings of non-jewish anti-nazi writers of the time, the moral horror only came in later. And of course it took a few decades for the holocaust to become fully something the general public had knowledge of (or wanted to face). I've mentioned this many times but the current Life In The UK test has a whole section about WWII and there's no mention of the holocaust or even anti-semitism; I assume this is because it must have been pulled from older history books.

I had definitely watched When The Boat Comes In at some point before in the last decade but had completely forgotten it for aging brain reasons, would deffo recommend chasing it up on YT - it's so good and as NV said it pisses all over Pally Blanders

When the Boat comes from an age where script and human drama did the heavy lifting, not "lol let's do Scarface in Brummagem"

nb I will never watch PB

Fizzles: I think there is a widespread convenient popular history that 'WWII was fighting evil Nazis and their Holocaust', and also 'Civil War was fighting evil slavery'.

I think we can agree that reality was more complex than that.

That might mean that these moral factors (all too easy to agree on now) were in reality less important than Realpolitik (this would be unsurprising by definition), self-interest, or than economic factors.

(It seems accurate enough to say that Britain defending *itself* from Nazi invasion and rule was a good cause, let alone any other moral cause. So that seems an instance of self-interest and morality coinciding.)

If you follow the argument that 'actually it was about self-interest, economics, etc' ('it's the economy, stupid!'), then I am broadly prepared to assume that this is quite likely to be correct.

But:

1: A complex and accurate view can probably afford to be overdetermined, ie: including multiple factors and not having to choose entirely between one and another. (Many *were* appalled by Nazism during the 1930s.)

2: What's odder is that the same people don't seem to apply the same principles to the two wars. I have recently seen socialists argue *against* the idea that the Civil War was a matter of economics and Realpolitik. It seems as though, in *that* particular case, the conservative arguments are economistic and the progressives are the ones who say 'No, it was a moral war against slavery!'.

I find this discrepancy slightly confusing.

You (Fizzles, or perhaps anyone) can see why I raised the comparison.

Without commenting on the political realities, you have to account for the fact that post-Civil War a huge economic and cultural force sprung up whose only mission was to cast the South as having been totally in the right. Suggesting the war wasn't about slavery but TAXES (the greatest evil yer average joe can think of) obviously a great strategy for that.

Fans of the Third Reich less succesful with this line of argument because of course they would add the prefix Jewish to "it was about money".

Britain defending *itself* from Nazi aggression would be some value of a good or at least understandable cause. Britain refusing to make peace with Nazi Germany because Churchill did not want to lose any part of the Empire (and not out of abstract concerns for human rights, protecting the Jewish victims of Nazism or belief in the inviolable sovereignty of none British states) seems like a different measure of "good" to me even tho sure the actual causes of war were probably more tangled.

Don't try telling Ian Austin that Channel Islands Jews got handed over to the Nazis by British police to be deported straight to Auschwitz. Even the great Michael Rosen was struggling to explain that fact to the deluded moron.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/mar/17/bbc-to-move-many-top-news-jobs-to-leeds-sources-say

as usual, spoilers for tomorrow's internal meeting in the guardian the day before.

as it says in the article, ch4 did this recently too, and half of them took redundancy rather than move.

You know what it's like these days, you're not allowed to joke about anything.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/bbc-breakfast-union-jack-flag-b925080.html

He stares at one while he's wanking into the other. https://t.co/PM2ojbp5se

— Sirius Münleit (@LittlShyningMan) March 19, 2021

Just little baby footsteps toward fascism, or liberty and freedom as it's soon to be known

Why stop at baby steps?

Of course if people are not proud to be British, or of our flag or Queen, they don’t have to live in the U.K. Perhaps they should move to another country they prefer?

— Lia Nici (@lia_nici) March 18, 2021

MP for Grimsby.

The Union Flag is a symbol of liberty and freedom? Not even Robert Jenrick believes that.

I saw someone complaining yesterday about the continuing Barnettification of Woman's Hour and was saying she doesn't want to hear mostly interviews with men on the topic of male violence.

Something genuinely frightening is happening and the BBC needs to be challenged at every step not to kowtow to the wrong side

Telegraph writers now demanding patriotic loyalty test as condition of BBC employment (and dismantling of BBC if this is not done). Totalitarianism, anyone?https://t.co/zeZxQSV0WR

— Chris Bertram (@crookedfootball) March 20, 2021

The Torygraph will be pleased to notice that bbc bosses won't tolerate their staff gently mocking the current flag-shagging mania of Tory ministers and the opposition. Nor will they tolerate dangerous lefty subversive extremists like Huw Edwards!

Having a giggle about Tory ministers who have been told to rustle up a flag from somewhere whenever there's a camera pointed at them is despising your own country? LOL.

There have now been 5 straight days and nights of Loyalist violence in Northern Ireland, so why isn't this leading the news agenda in Britain? (There's obviously been some coverage, including this by the BBC's @EmmaVardyTV) pic.twitter.com/JPINFOgTNf

— Ian Fraser (@Ian_Fraser) April 6, 2021

I haven't seen nor heard that much coverage of this on the bbc news at all tbh

but apparently even the little bit of bbc coverage is shit

I've seen a bit but it does put the coverage of the anti-policing bill into perspective - a bit too much fucking perspective, to paraphrase Nigel Tufnell. Anyway, the British media have been doing their utmost to avoid reporting on Northern Ireland for 50-odd years, why change now?

It is incredible, in a way, that these are in part protests against the effects of ... wait for it ... Brexit.

Imagine the FBPE people using petrol bombs on Piccadilly!

their blue face-paint tinted passion for the EU was the flame and their oh so twee and humorous pro-EU banner slogans were the bombs!

The hardcore Unionists were the people in NI who voted Brexit!

The fact is this particular community in Ireland (and Scotland) invented 'pwning the libs' - or just pwning in general - and have been doing it for hundreds of years.

The community representatives openly mocked and rejected the all-Ireland working group’s attempts to meet and work together cordially on this.

even while Boris was still reliant on the DUP to prop up the tories it was still pretty clear that he was going to fuck them over on border issues. lol! Enjoy your Festival of Brexit in 2022 lads.

And it should have been clear to them to, and I'm sure it was, God knows they've been fucked over by British politicians often enough, but trying to understand the mindset of that lot is a thankless task.

Northern Ireland First Minister Arlene Foster has criticised the Irish government's all-island forum on Brexit.

Mrs Foster described it as a "grandstanding exercise" and said she had better things to do than be a "lone voice among remoaners".
She has already declined an invite to attend next week's "civic dialogue" event in Dublin.

The forum was established in the wake of the EU referendum result.
"It's a complete grandstanding exercise," said Mrs Foster.
"It will be full of people who quite frankly haven't accepted the referendum result going down to talk about how dreadful it is and how awful it is.
"Mark my words that's exactly what will happen at the grandstanding forum that will come about.
"I'm not going to be a part of that. I am in this to do real business and to have outcomes, not to sit around talking about how dreadful it is."
Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny has said the event will facilitate an all-Ireland conversation among the business community, wider civic society and politicians.

Asked if it would be valuable to put the argument in favour of Brexit to forum delegates, Mrs Foster replied: "To be a lone voice amongst a whole lot of remoaners?
"No thank you - I have better things to do with my time."

The scenes in Northern Ireland have been entirely predictable—and predicted—since 2019. At the heart of the matter is a reality few want to admit: the protocol is imbalanced, implementing, in effect, the nationalist solution to the Brexit border trilemma. https://t.co/ZpEpsj8q6Y

— Tom McTague (@TomMcTague) April 6, 2021

Like seriously, fucking revisionism, I know we all remember that December 2017 clusterfuck.

Nobody listened to Loyalists?

How did that notion get traction?

Loyalists voted DUP. The British PM listened to the representatives of Loyalists - so much so that the British PM was pulled put of a meeting by the DUP - and forced to drop her plans to avoid the Irish sea border. pic.twitter.com/9yv8PMG1AW

— Colm Ó Dóghair (@ColmDore) April 6, 2021

On BBC radio on Wednesday morning, Foster said Sinn Féin was responsible for the unrest. Opposition parties say the tension resulted from Foster’s DUP’s support for the Northern Ireland Protocol in the Brexit deal..

she's even worse than Boris at owning the results of her own appalling leadership choices.

Is that A. Foster statement from now?

She's saying that at the same time that Unionist are protesting (by burning police cars, etc) against the effects of Brexit?

it's from this morning's Today on R4

I'm also frankly surprised to be reminded that Enda Kenny is Taoiseach again (or still). I can't keep up with these rotating characters. Sinn Féin won an national election about a year ago, didn't they, but have been completely shut out of power ever since?

Maybe she should "put the argument in favour of Brexit" to her own "community"? Preferably by going out to address them in the middle of a riot.

Almost expecting to see Van Morrison popping up chucking a molotov at a police van.

Kenny is not Taoiseach, pinefox. That quote is from 2016

We have a fella called Micheál Martin in the job now, although he's not entirely convinced of the fact himself

I'm also frankly surprised to be reminded that Enda Kenny is Taoiseach again (or still). I can't keep up with these rotating characters. Sinn Féin won an national election about a year ago, didn't they, but have been completely shut out of power ever since?

Thanks Number None, I'd heard of Martin, and was confused about Kenny as you can see, and the idea that Foster's statement was from today. I can remember some daft things Kenny said in the past.