The Culture Secretary, Oliver Dowden, is considering appointing a “Free Speech Champion” and introducing fines for universities that “no-platform” speakers. This is excellent news. We can tell it is a move in the right direction because the Guardian ran a comment piece criticising it. No-platforming at universities by students is just the …
Read More »The BBC: the need for change
The BBC has been subject to dramatic changes in its Charter over the past 14 years and this has had a deeply negative effect on the Corporation. The BBC Charters until 2007 placed the BBC under fairly tight government control and used general advisory and national broadcasting councils to monitor fairness and …
Read More »Morality and Politics
The process of democracy evolved to allow those with different ideas of what is moral and right to co-exist in a society. The democratic process involves people freely expressing their opinions and then a vote being taken to decide which group of people should govern for a fixed period. Political …
Read More »The Public Sector is a Disaster
Challenges like COVID test organisations. NHS England shows no sign of appreciating the urgency of the vaccination program. It is asking potential vaccinators to show evidence of “skills” such as diversity awareness before they are hired. How vets, student doctors and nurses, dentists etc. who could be used in the …
Read More »Is the political battle now the Nation vs the Media?
Objective measures show that the UK is very much less racist than either the USA or EU. Yet the UK Media ignored this and elided the US Black Lives Matter protests into UK politics. It is 200 years since the UK abolished slavery but only 100 years since the Jim …
Read More »China: Are we too late to react?
My joy at opening this week’s AAAS magazine “Science” was slightly blunted by the four pages of Chinese Government advertising that were followed by a long editorial article on how the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) should be given NIH funds. The article did not mention that due to the …
Read More »Media madness
I recently heard Jeremy Bowen, the BBC correspondent, claim that the world had failed Syria. The message being that “we” should have been more involved. In fact the world has been involved in Syria, NATO has blown whole towns to pieces and the Russians and Iranians are helping Assad to …
Read More »Immigration, Net Migration in the UK and Points Based System
The Government has just announced a new points based immigration system where 70 points are needed to migrate to the UK (10 points for speaking English, 20 points for having a job offer etc). 10,000 places will be allocated to seasonal workers. Sky News had this neat summary: Sky has …
Read More »The BBC: A threat to all of us?
During the Referendum campaign and the three years that followed many supporters of British Independence cursed the BBC News and found it to be biased. The Remain campaign realised that this was a threat and made counter accusations to provide the BBC with apparent evidence that by offending both sides …
Read More »How can the Tories win the 2024 election?
The Conservatives can take some steps now to win the 2024 election. The most important first step is to demand that BBC News and Current Affairs employs a fairly representative number of journalists from across the political spectrum in the UK. Perhaps it is a result of operating the World …
Read More »Impartial Journalism in a Polarised World
The BBC has recently produced a programme called “Impartial Journalism in a Polarised World”, created by James Harding, which discusses how they are being challenged by alternative sources of news. Organisations like the BBC portray themselves as heroes battling against a tide of disinformation but how far is this the …
Read More »BBC News Suppression
The BBC suppresses any news that favours leaving the EU. Check these links to find out what the BBC should have told the nation: Nothing in the Belfast Agreement requires European Union Membership Imports from Calais Ports of Entry in NI Barnier preferred Canada Plus Racism in the EU Trade …
Read More »Who should pay for the BBC?
The withdrawal of free television licences for over 75s should really be looked at in terms of how the BBC should raise money in the first place. At present there is a universal flat rate tax on televisions with some exemptions. What matters is not so much who is exempted …
Read More »Caster Semenya, Cambridge Slavery and the BBC
Three sports judges at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland have just pronounced that the South African athlete, Caster Semenya will need to take testosterone suppressants if she is to compete in women’s sport. The judges noted that women’s sport was discriminatory but this was “necessary, reasonable and proportionate” for …
Read More »Scruton and the new Corporate Extremism
The debate about the views of Sir Roger Scruton has been framed in terms of “Left” versus “Right”. Stand a little way back from the immediate debate and it is obvious that something else is going on. What is happening is yet another media frenzy which has as its objective …
Read More »Has Question Time been unfairly dominated by Remainers?
On 4th April 2019, Charles Moore accused BBC’s Question Time programme of being biased against Brexiters, quoting research from the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) that Remainers featured on the programme almost twice as much as Brexiters. The host, Fiona Bruce, refused to accept that there was any bias, and …
Read More »Banning No Deal is banning Brexit
If No Deal were banned then the EU could simply sit on its hands and wait for the UK to request to Remain in the EU. Banning No Deal is banning Brexit. Oliver Letwin and Yvette Cooper are attempting to introduce a Bill that would force the Government to extend …
Read More »Chancellor Philip Hammond isolated in predicting Brexit will be bad
We have been warned by the BBC that Philip Hammond thinks Brexit will be bad for the UK economy. What do other sources of economic “wisdom” predict? The IMF Predicts the UK will have some of the strongest growth in European big 5 after Brexit: The World Bank in its Global Economic Prospects Predicts the UK …
Read More »The Eurozone Trojan Horse
The UK has a trade deficit with the Eurozone of about 90 billion euros per annum. The Eurozone has a trade surplus with the world in general of about 200 billion euros pa so the UK supplies almost half of the Eurozone trade surplus. When pundits praise the Eurozone for its trade surplus …
Read More »Let the market decide the BBC’s fate.
The British Broadcasting Corporation, or as I like to call it: the Bias Broadcasting Corporation. For 95 years the BBC has kept itself in business on the backs of ordinary working people, claiming to be “impartial, free and fair”, but have proven to be quite the opposite. For years they’ve …
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