BBC Replaces Footage of Boris at Cenotaph with Ceremony from 2016 to Avoid Embarrassing Him?

Here’s another reason not to trust the BBC’s news coverage. Boris Johnson’s performance at the Cenotaph yesterday, when he formally laid the wreath to commemorate all those, who lost their lives fighting for this country, was shambolic. Our clown Prime Minister was caught looking around during the Two Minutes’ silence. He then walked out to the monument two earlier, and laid the wreath upside down. This was picked up by Royal Central and the Mail Online yesterday, which both commented on it, according to Zelo Street. But you could be fooled into believing that it didn’t happen by the media coverage. There’s no mention of it on the front pages of the papers. Instead, the rags concentrate on trying to claim that our economy is thriving under BoJob’s wise leadership and there is absolutely no mention of it in the Scum, which is just wall to wall Tory propaganda. Zelo Street comments

‘The Bozo Cenotaph shambles encapsulates the sheer venality of our free and fearless press. It is airbrushing of reality that would have made the editors of Pravda and Isvestiya blush. And it demonstrates the challenge for Labour in the upcoming General Election.

We have a press desperate to put an inept, philandering, mendacious, bigoted, uncaring clown into Downing Street. Because he’s one of theirs. I’ll just leave that one there.’

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/11/press-cenotaph-hypocrisy.html

The comparison with the Soviet manipulation of the news is also appropriate when it comes to our state broadcaster. Mike posted up a piece earlier today about how the Beeb had decided to replace the real footage of BoJob laying the wreath with a clip from 2016. This was discovered very quickly by the good folks on Twitter, who were rightly massively unimpressed and wanted to know why the Beeb had done it. The Corporation tried to wriggle out of it by saying that it was a production error, for which they apologised. This, as our parents used to say, is a likely story. The peeps commenting on the switch weren’t convinced, and neither am I. Simon Maginn, who has put in an official complaint about the Jewish Chronicle’s latest smear of Corbyn being in breach of electoral law, spoke for very many when he said

You’re liars and we know you are. You lie about things big and small, but always to Tories’ advantage.
We don’t believe a word you broadcast, because we have no reason to.
You’re corrupt, rotten and dishonest, and everyone knows that now.
Labour will reform you.
Bring it on.

Others, who didn’t believe it either included the author and scriptwriter Stephen Gallagher, and the ex-Beeb/Sky/Reuters/ PA journo Julian Shea. Evolve Politics stated that it was very unlikely that it could have been a genuine mistake, as the Beeb would have had to look through their archives to find footage from that far back. They also pointed out that the 2016 footage had obviously been substituted, because it included appearances from politicos, who have since left government. Like the former Prime Minister, Tweezer.

One viewer, Gayle Letherby, sent a written complaint to the Beeb. This ran

“I cannot accept that this was a ‘production mistake’ not least because it is clear in the 2016 footage that Theresa May and not Boris Johnson was the Prime Minister. Additionally, it surely takes some ‘skill’ to mix up footage from yesterday with footage from three years ago. I, and I know many others, can only conclude that your intention was to present the PM as more statesmanlike, more respectful, than yesterday’s performance showed him to be.

“Bias.”

Mike comments that he hopes everyone sending complaints to the Beeb like this will also post them to Ofcom, which is still investigating whether the Beeb breached its own rules on impartial coverage. He also watched Politics Live to see if they would cover this story and issue an apology. They didn’t, so he sent them this tweet to the editor, Rob Burl.

@RobBurl I was looking for the #PoliticsLive apology for BBC Remembrance Day coverage showing images from 2016 rather than yesterday, which someone clearly had to go and find, to use it instead of the shots of @BorisJohnson showing contempt for our veterans. Where is it please?

So far, he has received no reply, and thus concludes

The BBC has outed itself as a propaganda arm of the Conservative Party. Its election coverage – and other news output – should therefore be avoided on the basis of prejudice, and should be reported to Ofcom.

BBC digs out Remembrance Day clip from 2016 to avoid showing up Boris Johnson. What happened to impartiality?

Both Mike and Zelo Street compare this with the outrage the media tried to work up against Corbyn’s appearance at the Cenotaph, when they falsely accused him of wearing a blue coat to the ceremony.

But what makes this very obvious media bias to BoJob and the Tories is the complete lack of care he and they have for the real veterans. The Mirror covered the story of the death of  an 82-year old veteran, who had been evicted from his squat in Manchester along with 12 other ex-squaddies. Mike reports that they were just 13 out of the 13,000 former servicemen and women, who are now living on the streets. Mike points out that almost all of them suffer from PTSD, which often leads to drug and alcohol addiction. They receive no help from the government, which means that the Armed Forces Covenant – that those who serve or have served in the armed forces are treated fairly, which became law in 2011, is a sick joke. He quotes Chris Barwood, of the Salford Armed Forces Veterans Network, who said

 “We are turning our backs on our troops who have taken the Queen’s shilling, sworn the oath of allegiance and offered up their lives to keep us safe and yet in return we do nothing to ensure that they have a roof over their heads and food in their bellies for their remaining years.”

The only help these courageous people receive comes from charities.

Mike concludes

The crowning irony is that most members of the Armed Forces are ardent Conservatives.

I hope they reconsider that position.

Why should they vote for a party that throws them into pointless conflicts, then throws them onto the streets when they get PTSD, and whose leader shows nothing but contempt for those of their comrades who have died defending their country?

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/11/10/boris-johnsons-contempt-for-the-forces-goes-much-further-than-laying-a-wreath-wrongly/

This problem comes round regularly, whenever the Tories get into government. I remember how, nearly 30 years ago, there were reports of homelessness, unemployment and poverty amongst ex-service personnel during John Major’s government following the first Gulf War. The army was being cut, and so thousands of squaddies were turned out onto the streets with no preparation or support for civilian life. Just as Maggie inflicted drastic cuts on the armed forces after the Falklands War. Spitting Image/Private Eye made a very bitter comment on the cynical use of British servicemen and women in their book Thatcha! The Real Maggie Memoirs, which spoofed the former Prime Minister’s own when they were published. This featured a parody of a boy’s war comic, whose hero is a Falklands veteran. Proud of serving his country until he’s shown the door, the strip ends with him gunning down a bus queue in rage and despair. This was also, obviously, a comment on the mass shootings that were just then appearing across the Atlantic and elsewhere.

I don’t know of any shootings like that, which have been done over here by former servicemen and women. I hope there hasn’t and will never be one.

But the Tories’ treatment of men and women, who have served their country with pride, honour and courage is utterly, utterly disgraceful. And Mike is quite right to ask members of the forces to reconsider their allegiance to a party that treats them so cynically. 

 

Sargon on the Gay Rights Civil War between Lesbians and Trans Activists

Sargon of Akkad, real name Carl Benjamin, is a shabby individual. I’ve blogged about him several times before, not least because his recruitment to UKIP along with Mark ‘Nazi Pug’ Meecham and Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars infamy, effectively destroyed whatever electoral credibility that borderline Fascist party had. Sargon is very definitely a member of the extreme right. He’s islamophobic, anti-feminist and has been credibly accused of racism. He claims to represent the moderate left, but also defines himself as a ‘classical liberal’. Which means that he favours the complete privatisation of the economy, and the destruction of the welfare state. He’s notorious for sending a particularly noxious text to the Labour MP Jess Philips telling her ‘I wouldn’t even rape you’ when she was describing the threats of sexual assault and worse she receives.

But this time, surprisingly, he sounds like a reasonable human being.

In this video he comments on a letter sent last month to the Sunday Times, signed by 22 leading gay rights activists, including Simon Fanshawe, the co-founder of the gay rights organisation Stonewall. The letter condemns that that organisation for its support of trans activists and their denial of the biological basis of gender identity, which they feel is a dangerous threat to women’s rights. They are particularly concerned about the way their ideology – that gender identity is a mental construct – threatens to undermine women’s rights and voices in issues like FGM, pregnancy and abortion. Sargon agrees with them, noting that concepts like lesbianism and bisexuality are based on there being only two genders, which the trans activists deny. Sargon and the gays here object to people, who have been born men, claiming to have a right to speak for women on these issues. They also state that it is dangerous for trans activists to go into schools to encourage children to review their gender identity. Sargon also agrees with this, stating that half the time if ask children about what gender they identify with, they’ll answer with fire-engines and dinosaurs.

The lesbian activist Julie Bindel is also concerned about the violence and threats coming from trans activists. She states that there are no threats of violence coming from the terfs – an acronym standing for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists. But there certainly are threats made by the trans activists. Such as slogans like ‘Punch a Terf’. Sargon also shows a video on the Mail Online page, in which Bindel walks down a road in which trans activists are holding a counter demonstration against a meeting by an anti-trans feminist group. The trans people are chanting ‘Trans rights are human rights’ and kicking at the windows of the building in which the meeting is being held. Bindel states that this being done to intimidate the women inside. She states that women are being threatened, and criticises the police around the building for not doing anything to protect the women inside.

So great is the conflict between gays, bisexuals and lesbians, particularly the latter, with the trans rights activists, that the letter to the Times talks of a split occurring in the LGBTQ group, with the formation of a splinter organisation, LGBQ.

Naturally the video also contains Sargon’s sneers about feminists and gay rights activists. He states that he finds their views ridiculous and laughs at them. In a dig at progressivism in general he replies to Bindels comment about women being intimidated that the police will do nothing against the trans activists, as trans people trump women as being a more oppressed group. Well, there’s that. But the way the cops moved Bindel on when she tried to stop and talk to some of the counterdemonstrators suggested that they were more worried that any action by them would turn it into a violent riot. Sargon does say, however, that although he laughs at the Terfs, they have a right to their views and to express them. And so he opposes their deplatforming and the way some organisations, like the Cooperative Bank, have refused to deal with Terf groups.

It’s a crazy situation when a near Fascist like Sargon actually starts to make sense and defends free speech and democracy. I think he’s right in that most people would see gender identity as based in biology, and it is dangerous for trans activists to try to encourage children to question their gender identity. And he’s right when he says that women faced with issues like FGM cannot escape them by claiming to be a different gender mentally.

There are caveats to his views, however. Some transpeople, like the trans vlogger Rose of Dawn, draws a distinction between the genuine transgendered and the gender radicals. Rose of Dawn is a transwoman herself, and has stated that trans people like her have invested a great deal financially and psychologically in their transition to the opposite gender. The gender radicals, however, consider gender to be simply a mental construct. They make little or no effort to change the physical markers of gender identity or their biological gender itself. They have created any number of different genders, some of which come close to, or are indistinguishable from parody. One of them is a ‘gender that identifies with space, stars and nebulae’. Most dangerously, these people consider that as gender is a mental construct, they wish to overturn the 2004 act that stipulates that diagnoses of gender dysphoria – the medical condition in which one’s mental gender does not match one’s biology – should only be made by medical professionals. Rose of Dawn is, unfortunately, like Sargon in that she is a person of the right. Nevertheless, she makes some excellent and interesting points.

The radical trans activists do seem to be a threat to women’s rights, although I would argue that some, hopefully the majority of transpeople identify so strongly with the gender to which they have transitioned, that they should be treated equally to born members of those genders. I also have a read accounts by trans activists, who have been physically assaulted by radical feminists, so I don’t believe that the violence and threats are all on one side. But there is a genuine issue here, and it’s a sad state when only the right is discussing it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Daily Mail Labeled ‘Fake News’ by Microsoft News Software

Ho ho! Another fascinating story Mike put up today is a piece reporting that Microsoft Newsguard, a piece of plug-in software designed to warn users if the news website they’re looking at is unreliable, has flagged up the Daily Mail’s Mail Online as fake news. If you onto the Daily Mail while using the software, you get a message telling you that

“this website generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability” and “has been forced to pay damages in numerous high-profile cases”.

Mike quotes the Guardian on the software, which says that it is run by veterans of the news industry, who are trying to establish industry-standard benchmarks for judging how trustworthy news sites are. It employs experts to analyse sites to see if they meet certain journalistic standards. It makes all its judgments public and invites news outlets to respond to criticism and improve their standards.

So how bad is the Fail? Well, according to the site Tabloid Corrections, it’s pretty terrible. In fact, it’s worse even than the Scum. It was sanctioned 28 times by the press regulator, IPSO, last year, 2018. The Times was second with 18 sanctions. Behind the Times came the Scum, with 16, the Mirror with 10, the Express and Torygraph with 7, and the Star with 4. Still, the Fail has improved. In 2017 it violated journalistic rules 50 times.

Mike comments that this probably won’t affect the Daily Mail, as most people regard it more as a comic. They only read it to laugh at the nonsense inside. And, sadly, some probably read it only to ogle the scantily clad women in the very sexist newsroll on the right of its webpage. I’m not so sure about this. Years ago a friend of mine said that he thought the Mail was more dangerous than the Scum, because while the people who read the Scum treated it as a joke, those who read the Heil take it seriously. I think he’s partly right, but even this is far too optimistic. Yes, the Scum and the Mail are viewed with contempt by very many people, with more sophisticated tastes and attitudes to the news and journalism, at the same time I’m sure that their readers do take them absolutely seriously.

Mike also states that the Beeb’s Politics Live has also been discussing fake news, but hasn’t mentioned the Mail, concentrating instead on a piece about the UK parliament but which confuses it with the American political system.

Mike concludes

The issue is one that This Site has highlighted recently – that anyone claiming to quote facts about political issues must provide proof, usually in the form of references to their sources. Then readers can check those sources.

If there aren’t any references then you assume the claim isn’t true – and draw your own conclusions about the person or organisation making it.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/01/23/daily-mail-website-flagged-as-fake-news-by-microsoft-mobile-web-browser/

Mike’s piece is interesting not just because of what it says about the Heil, but about the rest of the UK media. The Heil is Britain’s worse paper for misreporting, but the second and third worse are the Murdoch papers the Times and the Scum. The Scum will be no surprise to anyone. But the Times prides itself on being Britain’s paper of record. This shows how vacuous and spurious that claim is. And I don’t regard its sister paper, the Sunday Times, as any better. Not after the repeated way it has libeled Labour party leaders and members, like Michael Foot and Mike himself. It’s not up there on the list, but it still slanders and smears decent people simply for the benefit of the Tories, big business, and in Mike’s case, for New Labour and the Israel lobby.

It will also be interesting to see if Private Eye reports this in their ‘Street of Shame’ column. It’s always reported the findings of press regulators, particularly when one of the most notorious rags has been claiming that it is the paragon of journalistic standards and has never made anything up or libeled anyone ever. And Private Eye is now casting its critical gaze over the alternative news sites. Last issue, for the 11-24 January 2019, it carried the article ‘Skwawk-boxed’, reporting that ‘Britain’s sole state-approved press regulator’, Impress, had made its eighth ruling against the Skwawkbox because it misrepresents or distorts the facts, and confuses fact with comment. It claims the regulator oversees 111 titles, but over the past two years has been called in to deal with 15 complaints. More than half of these have been against the same publication, and at least five have been upheld. This is against the Skwawkbox, which it describes as

‘the ultra-partisan Corbynite website run by Labour activist Steve Walker, which specializes in paranoid conspiracy theorizing and simultaneous attacks on the “MSM” for fake news.’

I dare say that this piece is correct, as far as it goes, and its criticism of the failure of journalistic standards in the Skwawkbox is probably correct. But I trust the Skwawkbox far more than I trust mainstream news. The MSM does present appallingly slanted news, including the Beeb, which it hypocritically maintains is objective, trustworthy fact. The massively biased coverage of Corbyn and the Labour party is a case in point. The media has smeared him and his supporters as Trotskyites, misogynists and anti-Semites, when the opposite is true. And there are organisations with very hidden agendas manipulating both the news and government policy. These are the various intelligence agencies, right-wing thinktanks, and industry groups trying to manipulate official policy to promote the neoliberal agenda of privatization, poor wages, destruction of the welfare state and workers’ rights and the invasion and exploitation of the Middle East under the pretense of combating terrorism. You can read about this over at Lobster, Counterpunch, and in the books of and website of Greg Palast and the now sadly departed William Blum and his Anti-Empire Report. Walker might have to tighten up his journalistic performance, but I don’t doubt that there’s more truth in what he writes than in the Fail or the rest of the mainstream media.

And he and the other left-wing news sites supporting Corbyn and genuine socialism in the Labour party clearly are frightening Private Eye along with the rest of the old media. Otherwise the Eye wouldn’t have published this, and another story attacking the excellent the Canary. The genuine left-wing news sites are catching up on the old media very quickly. It’ll be interesting to see if next fortnight’s Eye includes this story, as it did the piece on the Skwawkbox.

Vox Political on the Unreported Bullying by the Blairites

Mike yesterday also published an excellent piece supporting an article by Rachel Heeds in the Huffington Post. Heeds had writing an article about the bullying of Corbynistas by the Blairites. She talks about how, far from seeing violent racist thugs at Momentum rallies, she has just seen normal people talking and discussing. Occasionally the discussion gets heated, but she’s never seen anyone storm the stage or hurl abuse. As for Momentum supporters, many of them are ladies of a certain age more likely to bake cakes for events in support of Corbyn than anything remotely violent or abusive.

But the Blairites have resorted to abuse and bullying in order to shout down their opponents. Mike states he’s suffered from it in the last few days. I know other people, who’ve also commented on the sheer venom and scatological abuse directed at Corbyn and his supporters on social media. But Tom Watson has done nothing. Indeed, he and the other Blairites in the Parliamentary Labour Party have taken the lead in hurling this abuse, through the hysterical accusations of Trotskyite infiltration. Heeds has also talked to Corbyn supporters, who have been left seriously distressed by some of these allegations, including those in the Mirror about ‘Gulags’, and Mark Foster’s splenetic denunciation in the Mail Online last Sunday about Momentum as a gang of Nazi stormtroopers.

One of those left distressed and upset by that article is Rachel Nesbitt, the other of the Facebook page, Jeremy Corbyn’s Terrible Thugs – #Thuginistas. Nesbitt is Jewish, and part of the distinguished Horvitz family, a group which played a leading role in European Judaism for centuries. Like very many British Jews, she also lost family members during the Holocaust. Now she finds herself smeared as the very people, who murdered her family, by Foster. You don’t need much imagination to sympathise with her deep outrage at this vile smear.

And all this is done to shut down debate, by people who are accusing Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters of doing so.

See Mike’s article http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/08/19/labour-party-bullies-like-tom-watson-and-michael-foster-must-not-be-allowed-to-win/ and following the links to Heed’s piece in the Huffington Post.

One of the worst hypocrites in this bullying is Angela Eagle, who stood up and stated that ‘we need a kinder, gentler style of politics’ while spouting the lie about Corbyn supporters shoving a brick through her constituency office window. There’s also more than element of hypocrisy in Foster’s vile smear about Momentum supporters being Nazis. There’s the obvious fact that Momentum supporters aren’t anti-Semites, and Corbyn’s supporters include many Jews and people of Jewish heritage. Mike also covered a piece by the Skwawkbox, which did a point-for-point rebuttal of Foster’s allegations, starting with the fact that he had walked calmly through a Momentum demonstration for quite a long time before anything happened. If they Momentum really was a hard-right organisation of Jew Haters, quite simply he wouldn’t have been able to do this. The real Fascist organisations are violent thugs, many of whom have committed murder. They have absolutely no qualms about attacking and savagely beating trade unionists, Jews, Blacks, Asians and Leftists when- or wherever they find them. If Momentum were like them, Foster wouldn’t be able to walk around them for five minutes before the abuse, threats and violence started.

But there’s another issue surrounding Foster’s slur. Foster has accused other Jews of being Nazis, which is exactly the same accusation that was leveled at Red Ken. Leninspart was accused a few years ago, if you remember, of anti-Semitism because he had allegedly compared a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard. I’ve read accounts of the incident by others outside the Right-wing media, which recited this allegation. I’ve forgotten the details, but it’s not quite like they portrayed. Livingstone isn’t an anti-Semite. I’ve made this point again and again. You only have to read his condemnation of racism, and the British state’s active recruitment of Nazis, including those actively involved in the Holocaust and pogroms, in his 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour, to see that. And the same accusation has been made against Jews and people of Jewish heritage like Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker and now Rachel Nesbitt, either personally or simply because of their membership of Momentum.

But Foster has not been accused of anti-Semitism for his allegations like Livingstone, or the Jewish people he smeared. This shows very clearly the hypocrisy and double standards of the Blairites and right-wing media. It’s disgusting, and shows once again why these papers and broadcasters can’t be trusted.