This government lies like Goebbels and the worst excesses of the former official Soviet press agency, TASS, combined. You cannot trust anything they say. Well, actually, I think there is probably a way to get to the truth from an official Tory statement. You do what Private Eye recommended you do for young Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father, William. You read what he says carefully, and then turn it all 180 degrees and then believe the exact opposite. Then you will have the real, exact truth.
Boris and his ministers have been boasting that they’re opening 40 or perhaps 48 new hospitals. They’re not. They’ve ordered the press to report every bit of building work on existing hospitals as the building of a new one. Yes, we’re dealing with ‘Potemkin villages’ here. Or rather, Potemkin hospitals. Potemkin was the Russian prime minister under Catherine the Great. Catherine shared Peter the Great’s determination to modernise and westernise Russia. It was she who opened the country’s first universities and imported western, chiefly German professors to teach there. The result was the growth of a Russian intelligentsia, highly educated, who were acutely aware of how backward their country was. Hence the development of a class of radically alienated, revolutionary intellectuals. Potemkin also claimed he was going to do something about the wretched condition of the Russian peasantry. New, modern villages were going to be built to raise their living standards. In practice, however, this is was impossible. So Potemkin had built a number of show villages, which I understand consisted simply of impressive facades with nothing behind, rather like the fake western towns built as movies sets for the cowboy flicks to display to Catherine. The term ‘Potemkin village’ has thus become proverbial for anything like that which is all done for show but lacks any substance. And this is what Johnson and his crappy crew are doing now.
Boris Johnson, our Potemkin prime minister, destroying the NHS by falsifying construction and improvement. All spouted by a compliant and complicity lying media.
Much mirth was had on Friday night’s edition of Have I Got News For You when host Lee Mack inadvertently accused Jeremy Hunt of money laundering. The current minister in charge of privatising the NHS has bought a whole load of houses in Southampton to the tune of £50 million, but not declared it in the register of members’ interests. This breaks parliamentary rules, as Mike reported on his blog. Mack went a bit further, and frightened the Beeb’s lawyers and producers by inadvertently claiming that Hunt had been accused of money laundering. He hasn’t, as the producers and the lawyers told him through the microphone in his ear and by autocue. He then got frightened over whether it would be the programme or himself that could get sued for libel.
Hislop, however, was perfectly willing to repeat the accusation. He said that the legislation that Hunt had violated had been brought in specifically to deal with money laundering, and so that was what Hunt was doing. ‘Trust me on this. I never lose’. That last must have been said ironically, as Hislop and Private Eye have lost libel cases so often that it was a case for major celebration over a decade ago when he actually won one. Mack hurriedly repeated the statement that Hunt had not been charged with that offence, while Hislop said ‘But that’s what he’s been doing.’ Ah, the fun of watching arguments on panel games, and a host terrified of m’learned friends coming down on him.
But this also raises an interesting point. Amongst their various donors, the Tories have been taking money from Russian oligarchs. These men were very highly placed managers and apparatchiks under the old Soviet system. Hence they were able to buy up their particular industries and state enterprises, often at knockdown prices, when it was all privatised by Yeltsin. And there’s a conflict of interest here. When Putin came to power, he allowed them to retain their ownership on one condition: absolute loyalty to him. It’s been described by Russian dissidents and academics as ‘industrial feudalism’. Alexandra Politovskaya, the murdered Russian democracy activist said that as long as this system continues, there is no freedom, no democracy, just the strong man in the Kremlin.
Exactly true. So although the Tories want some kind of confrontation with Putin, including war, a sizable portion of their rich donors don’t.
But there’s also the possibility of personal danger to Hunt himself. Russia is a very corrupt society, and the Communist era was certainly no exception. The Russian journalist Arkady Vaksberg described just how corrupt Russian officialdom was in his book The Soviet Mafia. Vaksberg was a Jewish Bulgarian, who worked for TASS, the official Soviet news agency. Several times he risked censure and arrest for uncovering massive corruption within the Communist party. And it went all the way to the top, right to Brezhnev himself and his son-in-law. Vaksberg describes talking to exhausted, demoralised Soviet generals, who had spent days trying to arrange emergency transport for food into areas hit by famine. They then found out that all their efforts had been wasted. There was no famine. It all had been a scam by the local party chiefs and apparatchiks to misdirect funds and goods, and enrich themselves.
And money laundering was one of the many tricks the corrupt Communist chiefs were into. In one of the these scams, the embezzled money was laundered through the Soviet hotel chains on the Black Sea coast, run by a powerful Georgian lady nicknamed ‘Iron Bella’. Again, millions of roubles were involved. After this was busted wide open, and those responsible were sacked and led off to the gulags, Iron Bella mysteriously disappeared.
But everybody knew where she went. As they said in the Godfather, she sleeps with the fishes. The joke at the time went, ‘Nobody knows what happened to all those roubles, but everyone knows Iron Bella’s at the bottom of the Black Sea’. Quite.
If Hunt has been doing a bit of money laundering, an offence for which he has not been charged, and it comes from Russian oligarchs, then it might be advisable for him to avoid any coastal holidays for the time being.
The Republicans are up to their tricks again, trying to stop American audiences from taking their news from alternative sources and so getting a clearer, different picture from that the corporate media wishes to impose. In this report by Samira Khan from RTUK, Republican Senator John McCaine and one of his colleagues are trying to pass a bill, which would allow American network providers to avoid having to carry RT – Russia Today – in the US. The ostensible reason is that Russia is using the broadcaster, which is owned by the Russian state, to influence American politics. There’s a clip in the programme of various Republicans in Congress debating and complaining that too many Americans are getting their views from RT.
The programme notes that there are three other state-owned foreign broadcasters in the US. These are France 24, Al-Jazeera, which is owned by Qatar, and, of course, the Beeb. None of these will be subject to the McCaine’s and Graham’s bill.
I’m very much aware that RT is owned by Russia, which since the Second World War has been America’s ideological and geopolitical opponent. And, despite the Fall of Communism and the introduction of capitalism, Russia still is in geopolitical opposition to America. But the claims that Russia is interfering in US politics is pure rubbish.
This twaddle ultimately comes from Hillary Clinton and her attempts to blame everyone else for her failure and corruption at the elections. She claimed that the leaked emails from the Democratic National Convention, which showed how corrupt she was in her dealings with corporate backers, and how she and Debbie Wasserman Schultz unfairly manipulated the internal electoral process within the party to stop Bernie Sanders coming to power, came from the Russians. They weren’t. They came from disgruntled members of her own party.
As for the accusation that Russia was influencing US politics, there’s no evidence that they were doing so unduly, or at least, no more than they had been. And as William S. Blum has pointed out on his Anti-Empire Report, that’s a lot less than America has interfered in other countries. He has a whole list of the countries, in which America has interfered in their politics and elections, not counting those, which the US has actively invaded or organized or backed coups to overthrow liberal and left-wing, but not necessarily Marxist or even Socialist governments. And there are pages and pages on this in Blum’s book.
This is just another attempt by the political establishment to try and shut down alternative media, and stop the American people from finding out what their country is really doing. Not just around the world, but also to them. Thanks to both the establishment Democrats and the Republicans’ promotion of corporate interests, as Pat Mills observed in one of his talks on politics and comics, there are pockets of America which are like the Third World. And this is White America, never mind Blacks, who still remain much poorer.
The corporate establishment is panicking, both in America and over here in Blighty, because people are no longer buying the right-wing propaganda churned out by Fox News and MSNBC, or by a supine BBC over here, which has turned its news into a kind of British TASS for Conservatives. (TASS was the Soviet state news agency before the collapse of Communism). They’re taking their news from alternative sources, like the Real News Network, RT, Democracy Now!, The Young Turks, Secular Talk, the David Pakman Show, Sam Seder’s Majority Report in the US, RTUK over here, media commentators like Chunky Mark the Artist Taxi Driver, and a whole plethora of bloggers and vloggers. And they’re getting worried.
It’s why establishment journos in the press and on the Beeb are whining about how the decline of their sector of news gathering and publication means that there will no longer be a consensus view that broadly unites people of all shades of political opinion. What this actually translates into is a panic that they won’t be able to shape public opinion like they could. They argue this means that opinions are becoming increasingly polarized and oppositional. It also means that they’re afraid that they can’t shape public opinion for the benefit of their corporate proprietors like they used to, and without influence and declining sales they could see all that lucrative advertising money that keeps so many of them going, drying up.
And the giants of the internet are also panicking. It’s why Google is so keen to demonetize ‘controversial’ material on YouTube. The excuse is that they’re doing so to stop racist, Alt Right, Nazi and Islamist propaganda appearing on the platform. But as so much of what is demonetized extends to left-wing news outlets, like David Pakman, Sam Seder and Democracy Now!, this excuse is very spurious and flimsy indeed. Google has said it wants to prioritise corporate content. It’s therefore just another big corporation trying to silence the critics of the corporate capitalism that’s destroying the planet and impoverishing everyone in the world except the super-rich 1 per cent.
It’s also why Facebook has also changed its policy, so that bloggers like Mike over at Vox Political also find it hard to reach their audience.
People the world over aren’t buying the corporate, establishment propaganda. They are turning to alternative media, which includes Russia Today, to find out about what’s really going on. And the corporate media is terrified. Hence this wretched bill. And I’ve no doubt that if this gets through Congress, the Tories will try something similar over here. After all, RT is also over here, as is the Iranian state broadcaster, PressTV, and they also tell the British public facts and information that they really don’t want people to see. Like George Galloway talking about the oppression of the Palestinians in Israel, and western militarism and imperialism in eastern Europe and the Middle East.
Yesterday, I put up a piece commenting on a report in the I newspaper that the BBC had decided to set up a special team, Reality Check, to rebut fake news on the internet. James Harding, the head of BBC News, said that this wouldn’t be about policing the internet, and it wouldn’t attack the mainstream press.
This all rings very hollow, as at least in America, faith in the mainstream news outlets is at an all-time low. More people are turning to alternative news sources on the internet as a reaction to the bias and misreporting of the established news outlets and broadcasters. And the Beeb certainly has plenty of form when it comes to bias. Like editing the footage of the battle between the strikers and the police at Orgreave colliery during the Miners’ Strike, so that it appeared to show the miners attacking the police. The reality was the complete opposite. Barry and Savile Kushner in their book, Who Needs the Cuts, point out that the Beeb rarely allows a dissenting voice to be heard against austerity. When one is heard, they are interrupted or shouted down by the presenter, keen to maintain the government, establishment view at all costs. And Nick Robinson himself did a piece of deliberate misreporting worthy of TASS or Goebbels during the Scots referendum. He asked a question Scottish independence might have on the financial sector north of the border. Salmond answered it fully. This was then gradually edited down over successive news programmes, until it vanished altogether, with Robinson claiming that Salmond hadn’t answered the question.
So there’s plenty of very good reasons why you can’t trust the Beeb.
Now there is a considerable amount of fake news on the Net. The American elections have thrown up any amount of pure rubbish. In addition to the usual weirdness from the Ufolks, which claimed that Putin had told the Russian armed forces to prepare to defend the motherland against extraterrestrial invasion, there were the tin foil hatted claims of Alex Jones. Jones, the head of the conspiracy news site, Infowars, had come out with some truly barking, and very dangerous comments about Hillary Clinton. He claimed that she was part of some Satanic cult, which was abusing children from a pizza parlour in Philadelphia. She was also supposed to be demonically possessed, like Barack Obama, and may have been an alien or robot, at least in part. It’s entirely bogus, along with the reports others put up claiming that she suffers from a neurological illness contracting from eating children’s brains.
But the mainstream media has also produced bogus news. And one of the worst offenders is Fox News. Someone analysed how many of the stories Fox reported were actually true, and came out with the statistics that about three-quarters of the time they were rubbish. Put simply, if you watch Fox, you will be less informed that someone who doesn’t. There’s a reason why the network’s earned the nickname of ‘Faux News’. It’s very much like the old clip sometimes added to pieces on the internet, in which a man upbraids another for making an answer so stupid, that it’s lowered the IQ of everyone in the room, and the other needs to apologise. Well, that’s Fox writ large.
Fox News is also on the internet, along with many other newspapers and channels. So you can watch Bill O’Reilly tell lies about his career there. O’Reilly’s one of the channel’s veteran anchors. He was caught out claiming that he was actually in the Falklands or nearby parts of Argentina reporting during the Falklands War. He also witnessed a sectarian riot in Northern Ireland, and was present outside the house of one of the witnesses of the JFK assassination when he committed suicide. In fact, this was all shown to be bilge. In the Falkland’s conflict, for example, he was safely several thousand miles away in Buenos Aires.
Will the Beeb try and rebut some of the barking stories reported by Fox? No, of course they won’t. Fox is a mainstream news source, and is part owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns the Times and the Scum over here. The Scum is notorious for its bias and mendacity, but somehow the Times and its sister paper, the Sunday Times, has managed to avoid this. Sometimes you wonder why, as the Sunday Times has also carried bogus stories.
Like the time it claimed Michael Foot was a KGB agent called Comrade Boot, for which the former Labour leader successfully sued for libel. And then there were the ‘Clinton Crazies’. These were a group of journos around the Sunday Times and the American Spectator, who believed that Bill Clinton was a violent mobster. The former governor and US president was supposed to be importing cocaine from South America through an airfield in his state. He was also responsible for ordering the deaths of 20 + aids and other figures, who had displeased him. One of the journos responsible for this nonsense was so paranoid, that during an interview with another journalist he kept the curtains closed, and anxiously peered out into the street at various intervals, in case ‘they’ were watching him from a parked car. One of the hacks, who produced this tripe later saw reason, and appeared on one of Adam Curtis’ documentaries stating very clearly it was all crazy nonsense. But the Sunday Times published it.
But the Beeb very definitely isn’t going to tackle Murdoch’s rubbish, because Murdoch is the favourite of the various parties that have occupied No.10 in recent years, both the Tories and New Labour. In exchange for favourable publicity for the Murdoch press, they’ve been very happy to concede greater advantages to the media mogul, despite numerous conflicts of interest and the construction of a near monopoly in private broadcasting.
Murdoch hates the Beeb with a passion. He’s been demanding its break up since the 1980s, publishing stories attacking the Beeb at every opportunity in his papers, including the Times. And so with the threat of privatisation now made extremely clear by the Tories, the BBC will very definitely not want to show how mendacious Fox is.
So you can expect the Beeb to crack down on the alternative news outlets on the Net, under the pretext that it’s fighting the rubbish put out by Jones and co., while doing nothing about the fake news churned out by the establishment. Like the Murdoch press, and the Beeb itself.
Mike over at his blog has frequently discussed the repeated misreporting and, indeed, deliberate censorship of left-wing demonstrations against the government by the BBC and the other mainstream broadcasters. Apart from the usual tactic of deliberately giving the number of protestors as smaller than there were in reality, the BBC has also totally omitted several major demonstrations against the government from its television news. Instead, some minimal coverage was grudgingly given to them on the radio and on-line. Several of Mike’s readers and commenters, including Mike himself, have complained about this. They’ve been brushed off with a standard reply about the limited amount of space available, and the necessity of skipping or omitting some items in favour of more important news. The Beeb has then smugly declared that it’s duly investigated the case, and found that everything was done properly and appropriately.
So that’s alright then, as Private Eye says when an organisation or authority guilty of misconduct similarly exonerates itself by giving the exact same reply.
The debates over Scottish independence, leading up to the referendum last Thursday, threw the BBC’s pro-government bias into sharp relief. The Corporation’s reporter, Nick Robinson, selectively edited and then completely falsified his report on a question he asked Scotland’s then First Minister about the possible damage independence might have to the nation’s finances. This was then edited by the Beeb to claim that the First Minister had attacked the treasury. Robinson stated that several of the banks and insurance companies, like the Royal Bank of Scotland, had stated that in the event of Scotland gaining its independence, they would move their headquarters from Edinburgh to London. This would, suggested Robinson, lead to a massive loss of corporation tax for the Scottish government.
Salmond disagreed. He gave the opinion of other leading financiers north of the border that there would be no significant loss of tax revenue, as corporation tax was paid in the country where there a corporation had most of its economic activity, not where it had its headquarters. The banks and other financial institutions may move south to London, but they would still end up paying the same amount of corporation tax. I noticed that the I newspaper made a similar claim. I also wondered how the Royal Bank of Scotland could possibly continue under its name, if it very unpatriotically pulled out of its home country.
This, however, was not the answer Robinson wanted. When Salmond moved on to answer questions from the other reporters present, Robinson heckled and continued to demand an answer from Salmond. Salmond returned to the point, gave a full answer, and pointedly stated that he knew the BBC would report it in its scrupulously unbiased reporting. He then tried to move on to questions from the foreign press. This wasn’t good enough for Robinson, who asked the same question, and got the same answer.
When the BBC reported Robinson’s question and Salmond’s reply, they selectively edited the footage so that it looked like Salmond was attacking the British treasury, and praising the BBC. In fact, as the original footage makes clear, Salmond had been making a veiled criticism of the quality of the BBC’s reporting. Later still, on Newsnight, Robinson claimed that Salmond had not answered his question at all: a bare-faced lie.
As you might expect, Scottish Nationalists are massively unimpressed with this blatant falsification by the BBC, and there are several videos about it on Youtube. Here are two I found that make the case particularly well.
This video, The BBC Is Killing Democracy, gives footage of what really happened when Robinson asked his question. It then gives Robinson’s own highly selective report, pointing out how it has been altered and edited to present the answer Robinson wanted, rather than the one he got. It then moves on to Robinson’s final report, where he lies and states that Salmond didn’t answer the question. It then concludes with a brief resume of Robinson’s and Salmond’s careers, pointing out that Robinson was first head of the Young Conservatives in Macclesfield, and then national head of the organisation.
This video, Dodgy reporting from BBC News Editor – Nick Robinson 11/09/2014 goes further, and gives the relevant passages in the BBC’s charter that demand impartiality, and which the BBC’s reporting of Robinson’s question to Salmond broke.
.
There were protests against the BBC’s biased reporting of the independence campaign outside the BBC’s headquarters in Scotland on the 1st and 29th June 2014. This video below, Protest Against BBC Scotland Referendum Bias shows pro-independence Scots discussing the Beeb’s bias, and their disillusionment with the Corporation.
.
One of the women speaking is actually an English person living in Scotland. She states that she is voting for independence for Scotland because she is worried about the Westminster establishment’s destruction of the NHS and tuition fees. She states her daughter will not be able to afford to go to uni, and the only people that will, will be the elite.
Robinson’s deliberate falsification of Salmond’s answer is important far beyond the immediate debate about Scots independence. Regardless of one’s personal opinion of that particular issue, it should concern everyone worried about the Beeb’s pro-establishment bias. It’s clear and undeniable evidence that the Corporation has blatantly lied in order to serve the interests of the Tory Westminster elite. It also shows how Tricky Nick Robinson really is little more than a Corporation apparatchik spouting propaganda, and that the BBC is now well and truly the establishment’s equivalent of Pravda and TASS, the state news agency in the Soviet Union or the various state-controlled newspapers and broadcasters in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
I’ve reblogged Mike’s and David Hencke’s pieces about the threat to journalistic freedom posed by recent government legislation that would force journalists to reveal their sources to the police. If they do not, then the police may seize their records, including their computers.
Make no mistake, once this passes into law, these powers will be used. There have been a number of cases already where British journalists have had their computers, notes and records seized by the police after they have released information that the authorities would rather have kept under wraps. The EU can be just as bad. One German journalist working in Belgium had his computer and documents seized by the police after he started revealing just how corrupt the European Union was. He was lucky. One of the female officials inside the EU itself, who started raising awkward questions about the amount of corruption, ended up falling from the top floor of a Brussels multi-storey car park in highly suspicious circumstances. The EU is, of course, one of the bête noirs of the Tory Right, but this hasn’t stopped the Tories from emulating them in this attempt to suppress free speech.
David Hencke’s piece about it reports that some journalists’ organisations are protesting about the legislation. The Angry Yorkshireman over at Another Angry Voice wondered how the Right-wing press will react when they’re at the sharp end of this piece of legislation. I have to say I doubt they will make much fuss at all, except if this is done by a Labour government. Then it will be seen as another example of their Marxist perfidy. The parapolitical magazine Lobster has several times stated that a number of right-wing newspapers, like the Sunday Times under Andrew Neil, were used as conduits for disinformation by the British secret state. And there are certainly a number of journalists all too ready to collaborate with the harassment and intimidation of their fellow journalists, who are not prepared to betray their sources to the authorities.
About a decade ago Private Eye ran a story about a female journalist on one of the broadsheets, who had been working on a story about the activities of the terrorist organisations in Ulster. This attracted the attention of one of her male colleagues, who made much about his supposed links to British intelligence. He approached her several times saying that his masters ‘wanted a word’, and demanded to know, who her sources were. When she made it very plain that she was not going to end her career as a journalist by betraying them, he threatened her with the words, ‘Well, we can do this the nice way, or the nasty’.
Now I’ve made my disgust at terrorism of any variety very plain on this blog. However, it goes without saying that to get a story, and give the public a clearer picture of what’s really going on, good journalists sometimes have to talk to some ‘bloody nasty people’, to use a phrase describing certain members of the British Far Right. A lot of intelligence work, supposedly, simply involves going through the papers every morning. It’s hard to see how a piece of legislation that allows the police ample powers to force journalists to reveal their sources can serve the interests of national security, as it would have a chilling effect on journalists investigating anything that remotely touches on terrorism, or organised crime or anything else that would remotely excite the interest of Inspector Knacker. The press would be simply reduced to reporting safe subject, and repeating the statements passed on by their governmental superiors.
Pretty much like Tass did during the days of the former Soviet Union.
Hmmm… now I know what the business model for the new, Coalition-friendly BBC is. Possibly German radio under the Nazis would be a closer analogy. I wonder if Oliver Letwin is going to change his job title to ‘Minister for Public Enlightenment?
Either way, the Coalition has taken another step towards totalitarianism with this latest assault on free speech and free journalism. Ceaucescu, the Communist president of Romania, was so paranoid that his secret police, the Securitate, held copies of the typescript from all the typewriters in the country, just in case someone, somewhere, was writing all that nasty samizdat stuff that got authors like Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak published in the USSR. It’s only a short step to that from the government’s desire to allow the police to force journalists to reveal their sources without the current judicial checks and balances. Ceaucescu also caused massive starvation within his own country by exporting most of their agricultural products to get hard currency, leaving his own people poor with little food on sale in the state shops. Obviously this is not at all like the glorious, Thatcherite administration of David Cameron, where there is plenty of food in the shops, affordable to all, except the unemployed, who have to rely on foodbanks and skips, in hardship and famine created by his welfare policies. But then, which apparatchik in any of the totalitarian parties had much time for the ‘narod’, the people, the lower orders?
It took centuries for Britain to develop a genuinely free press. It’s now under sustained attack. If this succeeds, then we will be back in the 18th and 19th century, when journalists were regularly sued and put out of business for publishing ‘subversive libel’ when they attacked government policy or its ministers. And this would suit David Cameron, Osborne, and the rest of the pukka-Etonian establishment now in power just fine. After all, you can’t have the proles rocking the boat, can you?
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 