Suella Braverman arrives in Rwanda: charities are being told not to criticise her unworkable deportation scheme by a Charity Commission chairman who has strong Conservative connections.
What do you think of a Charity Commission chairman with strong links to the Conservative Party telling charity bosses to stay out of politics?
Orlando Fraser once stood as a Tory party candidate and is a founding fellow of the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), a right-wing think tank.
If anybody shouldn’t be involved with organisations that are supposed to be politically impartial, wouldn’t that be him?
And look at his reason for telling charity bosses to shut up:
Many launched a scathing attack on the unworkable and inhumane plan to send migrants to Rwanda
So it could be argued that he was silencing them for political reasons himself.
While the comment has been welcomed by Tory politicians, the author of the Left Foot Forward piece highlighting his words has pointed out that Tories have no problem with charities that support their policies, like
the climate sceptic Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), which was chaired by the former Tory Chancellor Nigel Lawson and which has previously been found to have breached rules on impartiality by the Charity Commission
and
the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), another charity, [which] often associated with the right and which was behind many of the ideas contained in Liz Truss’ disastrous mini-budget which caused financial turmoil, has also published climate change denial material and pushed for privatisation.
So the question is this: if right-wing charities are allowed to trumpet whatever they like but left-wing charities aren’t – because the Charity Commission chairman is a Tory…
Isn’t it the Charity Commission that is politically biased and shouldn’t it be purged of this taint?
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“Blatantly Backing Conservatives”: the malady seems to have spread from BBC news and is now affecting all its departments. But can the Corporation bow to public demand and restore its tattered claim to impartiality?
Who would have thought that one little tweet would rock the world’s biggest public service broadcaster to its foundations?
That’s what Gary Lineker seems to have done with this message:
He was referring, of course, to the language used by Suella Braverman when she introduced her silly Illegal Migration Bill to Parliament last week – and he was right.
Subsequently, we learned that the measures in the Bill, and the language around it, would be more appropriately compared to the UK’s own treatment of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s – politicians of that time sent more than half a million back to Europe where an unknown number ended up being killed in extermination camps as part of the Holocaust.
Everybody should think very hard about that – and about the way politicians in both the Conservative Party and Labour condemned Mr Lineker and denied that the current Bill, or the way it was described, bore any resemblance to what happened in the 1930s.
The BBC reacted to Tory pressure the way it usually does – it caved in.
Mr Lineker was removed from his position as host of Match of the Day – and the Corporation lied about the circumstances. First we were told he was “stepping back” voluntarily until he could reach an agreement with the BBC over how he conducts himself on a social media account that is nothing to do with his employment and over which his employers should have no influence at all. Then we found out that he had been forced out.
And then the effluent hit the air conditioner.
Mr Lineker’s co-presenters on MOTD walked out in solidarity with him and everyone asked to be a possible stand-in host refused on principle.
Now, we are learning that sports coverage at the Beeb is suffering even more:
Presenters, pundits, commentators, players and another BBC football shows pulled….am sure no-one at BBC had any idea the decision to take Lineker off air would escalate as quickly or dramatically like this. And when crises do blow up like this, climb-downs become even harder…. https://t.co/BfyD9wHkwG
And the backlash has spread into other parts of the BBC.
Question Time, which actually discussed both the Illegal Migration Bill and Mr Lineker’s tweet about it, has come under fire after host Fiona Bruce played down the significance of Stanley Johnson beating his wife, in a discussion of his son Boris’s nomination of that man for a knighthood.
Here’s what she said (with apologies for the strong language used by the person tweeting it):
The charity Refuge, which supports women and children who are victims of domestic abuse – and for whom Ms Bruce is an ambassador, made its position abundantly clear:
“Domestic abuse is never a ‘one off’, it is a pattern of behaviour that can manifest in a number of ways, including physical abuse. Domestic abuse is never acceptable.”
In a parallel with the BBC’s treatment of Mr Lineker, the charity said it had also been in talks with Ms Bruce: “She is appalled that any of her words have been understood as her minimising domestic violence. We know she is deeply upset that this has been triggering for survivors.
“Like the host of any BBC programme, when serious on-air allegations are made about someone, Fiona is obliged to put forward a right of reply from that person or their representatives, and that was what happened last night. These are not in any way Fiona’s own views about the situation.
“Fiona is deeply sorry that last night’s programme has distressed survivors of domestic abuse. Refuge stands by her and all survivors today.”
Sadly, the BBC did not see fit to support the charity’s assertion that Ms Bruce was “appalled” and “deeply sorry” for “triggering” and having “distressed” survivors.
Instead, it merely defended what happened on the programme: “When serious allegations are made on air against people or organisations, it is the job of BBC presenters to ensure that the context of those allegations – and any right of reply from the person or organisation – is given to the audience, and this is what Fiona Bruce was doing last night. She was not expressing any personal opinion about the situation.”
Not good enough.
A BBC decision not to broadcast an episode of Sir David Attenborough’s new series Wild Isles for fear that its its themes of the destruction of nature would risk a backlash from Tory politicians and the right wing press has provoked a huge backlash – not just from environmental groups but, again, from within the Corporation itself.
The sixth episode will appear only on BBC iPlayer. All six episodes were narrated by Attenborough, and made by the production company Silverback Films, which was responsible for previous series including Our Planet.
Chris Packham, presenter of Springwatch, told The Guardian: “At this time, in our fight to save the world’s biodiversity, it is irresponsible not to put that at the forefront of wildlife broadcasting.”
Green Party MP Caroline Lucas said: “For the BBC to censor of one of the nation’s most informed and trusted voices on the nature and climate emergencies is nothing short of an unforgivable dereliction of its duty to public service broadcasting. This government has taken a wrecking ball to our environment – putting over 1,700 pieces of environmental legislation at risk, setting an air pollution target which is a decade too late, and neglecting the scandal of our sewage-filled waterways – which cannot go unexamined and unchallenged by the public.”
The Guardian added that “senior sources at the BBC [said] that the decision not to show the sixth episode was made to fend off potential critique from the political right.
Again, the BBC’s response was cowardly. The broadcaster claimed the six-part series was only ever intended to have five episodes: “Wild Isles is – and always was – a five part series and does not shy away from environmental content. We have acquired a separate film for iPlayer from the RSPB and WWF and Silverback Films about people working to preserve and restore the biodiversity of the British Isles.”
If this sixth film is part of a package of such films – a series, if you will – all made by the same organisations and narrated by the same person, and all to be available together on iPlayer, then it seems clear that it is an episode of that series and the BBC is again being economical with the truth.
This behaviour – and the decision over Mr Lineker – drew the following comment from economist Richard Murphy;
So, this afternoon the BBC gives in to fascists over Gary Lineker’s support for asylum seekers and on David Attenborough’s desire to highlight the impact of climate change. Fascism isn’t a threat. It is happening here and now, with the BBC enabling it.
Finally (for now), the BBC has faced a backlash against its continued employment of Lord Sugar on The Apprentice, whose own political tweets – particularly attacking former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn – have gone unquestioned by the Corporation.
Mr Corbyn found an unlikely defender – on a BBC news programme – in Alastair Campbell. And the former New Labour press secretary didn’t pull his punches when referring to any of the scandals mentioned above:
Finally some honesty about the disgusting treatment Jeremy Corbyn received from figures at the BBC. And it’s coming from…Alistair Campbell. pic.twitter.com/sBhNOMFrIL
I’m aware that Campbell himself is a controversial figure but he’s absolutely right here.
The BBC is in serious trouble over these politically-motivated decisions. Its claim of political impartiality lies in tatters.
The only way out is to apologise and reform.
But, as Beth Rigby stated above, when crises blow up like this, climbdowns become very hard to do.
What next?
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Jeremy Corbyn is clearly not an enemy of the Jewish people.
Look at the state of this:
Most progressive people now accept the idea – as regards most forms of racism and discrimination – of the existence of unconscious bias. Apparently not in the case of this form though. https://t.co/RlOAtw7r1C
Baddiel is saying that, although on the surface Jeremy Corbyn is absolutely not anti-Semitic, he has an unconscious bias against Jewish people.
He has cited the case of the Mear One mural featuring bankers playing Monopoly while sitting on the backs of the poor, saying they all bore caricature “Jewish” facial features. Mr Corbyn defended the artist.
People forget that only (if I recall correctly) two of the bankers featured in the mural (they were all based on real people) were Jewish, so they could not all be representations of the anti-Semitic trope of a Jewish capitalist banking conspiracy. They were simply caricature representations of bankers in general and what the artist considered them to do to the poor.
Mr Corbyn saw that. Baddiel seems to have a blind spot there.
I know it’s just one example, but might it not be more accurate to suggest that it is Baddiel who has the unconscious bias, if he can’t understand that Jeremy Corbyn’s opposition to racism in all its forms is genuine?
Others do:
I’ve know Corbyn for years. I’m Jewish. I’ve suffered antisemitism. My mother lost dozens of her family in the Holocaust. I have degrees in clinical psychology & grew up in an apartheid state. I’d know unconscious AS & racism. Corbyn is no antisemite! https://t.co/9tpQpvREI2https://t.co/6VR1a9CyjI
Mr Corbyn had his faults as a Labour leader, certainly. He didn’t clear the right-wing factionalists out of the party machine to stop them clogging it up, for one thing.
But on anti-Semitism, he acted decisively. He brought in measures that reduced the amount of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party to a lower level than anywhere else in the United Kingdom – even while being hindered by those right-wing factionalists. But this is ignored.
And now his successor, Keir Starmer, is behaving in openly anti-Semitic ways but gets a free pass because (it’s thought) the mainstream media do not see him as the threat to the Establishment that Mr Corbyn was.
So Starmer can kick any number of left-wing Jews out of Labour without being questioned at all:
Jeremy Corbyn would never have threatened to kick a Jewish Holocaust survivor out of the Labour Party.
Keith Starmer has.
Where is the outrage from Margaret Hodge, David Baddiel, the Jewish Labour Movement, the Board of Deputies and the MSM? https://t.co/OC6Lct3TGZ
— Frank Owen's Legendary Paintbrush 🟨🟥🥀🇵🇸🇾🇪 (@WarmongerHodges) January 30, 2023
One has to question, also, why Mr Corbyn and anti-Semitism keep being dragged back into the spotlight. Is this a distraction from the issues facing us now?
So it seems that, rather than there being a hierarchy of racism in Mr Corbyn’s mind, there is a hierarchy of bias instead.
Jeremy Corbyn isn’t biased at all; David Baddiel has an unconscious bias against Corbyn; and the media have a very conscious bias against him. Am I right?
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Slapdown: Emily Maitlis drew criticism from BBC watchdogs for pointing out Tory double-standards during Covid-19 lockdown.
This is a follow-up to the claim by Emily Maitlis that the Conservative government has an inside man on the BBC board, there to ensure that the broadcaster never criticises the Tories.
It seems that, rather than discuss the matter in a serious way, or indeed discuss more important subjects like the effect of the energy price cap increase, the mass media are attacking Maitlis for having told her truth as she saw it.
Watch:
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All white: look at the police faces behind Boris Johnson at this speech he made in 2019 – not one of them is from an ethnic minority.
Remember when the Tory government released a report claiming that the UK is an “exemplar” of racial equality in all its institutions?
Now members of one of those institutions – the police – are having to apologise for “racism, discrimination and bias”. Bit of a contradiction there, don’t you think?
In a new race plan, to be launched next week, the National Police Chiefs Council and College of Policing will state:
“Many people believe policing to still be institutionally racist and have grounds for this view.
“We accept that policing still contains racism, discrimination and bias. We are ashamed of those truths, we apologise for them and we are determined to change them.
“[The] need for change is evident. Policing lags behind almost every part of the public service as an employer of choice for Black people. Confidence levels are much lower, and our powers are disproportionately applied to Black people. In some crimes, victimisation rates are higher.”
The plan avoids admitting institutional racism but declares that police chiefs are “ashamed” about racism remaining in law enforcement.
One chief constable who supports accepting policing is institutionally racist said: “All the figures show it still is.”
There will be a consultation on the plan, so it may change.
I wonder if the Tories will try to remove the admissions of racism from it, to conform with their Big Lie?
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Boris Johnson’s Conservative government put its man Robbie Gibb on the board of the BBC as a non-executive director and he has tried to block the appointment of a news boss on political grounds.
The irony is that non-executive directors are responsible for “upholding and protecting” the BBC’s independence – not to make demands on the behalf of their political leaders.
Gibb used to be Theresa May’s communications director when she was prime minister. Before that, he was a BBC journalist and he started his career as a Tory aide – so it seems likely that his politics has coloured much of his work.
The BBC has often been criticised as the propaganda wing of the Tory Party and this intervention will only strengthen that impression among members of the public. It proves that attempts to rig decisions of organisations like the BBC by stuffing their ruling bodies with Tories can only backfire.
What did he do?
He sent a message to the Corporation’s director of news and current affairs, Fran Unsworth, warning her not to appoint Jess Brammar to a new post of BBC executive news editor, saying it would shatter the relationship between the BBC and the Tory government.
It is clearly a political intervention. Brammar’s career is now being trashed by other Tory propaganda mouthpieces:
In case you were wondering how long it would take the Government explicitly to attack independent media outlets… pic.twitter.com/zldv6Eg5Av
What could this “borderline fake news lefty clickbait website” be? It seems an odd way to describe HuffPost UK, and This Writer looks forward to seeing that organisation’s reaction to the smear.
Previously, Brammar had been deputy editor of Newsnight.
According to the Financial Times, Gibb’s message to Unsworth said she “cannot make this appointment” and the government’s “fragile trust in the BBC will be shattered” if she went ahead. One of his cronies has apparently denied the claim.
The recruitment process has now stalled. Gibb’s message was allegedly sent on June 22 and the post has yet to be filled.
Apparently the Corporation is going through Brammar’s past statements, in public and on the social media. To see if it can find some dirt on her that would invalidate her application?
It’s alleged that Gibb would want her defence of HuffPost journalist Nadine White to count against her – but if so, natural justice would demand that he be disappointed.
White was attacked by Tory minister Kemi Badenoch, who claimed she was “creepy and bizarre” in asking questions about a Covid-19 vaccines video that Badenoch branded unnecessary.
In response, Brammar filed a former complaint to the Cabinet Office, stating that “this characterisation of a journalist asking questions as somehow undermining a public health message or fostering misinformation should alarm anyone working in journalism or anyone who believes its job is to hold power to account.”
Realistically, the vetting process is unlikely to provide any reason to reject Brammar because Gibb’s intervention has forced the BBC’s hand.
Turning her away would indicate that the Corporation is vulnerable to political pressure – the kiss of death for an organisation that has long had to defend itself against such accusations.
And there is another possible reason for Gibb to have intervened now.
Awkward
The BBC is currently negotiating a five-year financial settlement with Boris Johnson’s Tory government.
Still-newly-appointed director general Tim Davie – himself a dyed-in-the-wool Tory – has spent a lot of time, and used up a considerable amount of his own credibility, steadying relations with the government in the midst of aggressive (some would say unreasonable) criticism.
Doesn’t it seem likely that Gibb’s claim about Brammar may be just the excuse Johnson needs to cut BBC funding further than previous Tory governments already have?
Whatever happens, the public response has been a PR disaster for the Tories:
— leftworks #WeAreCorbyn #IStandWithJeremyCorbyn (@leftworks1) July 11, 2021
Appalling. Brammar is a studiously objective journalist who has stood up for her reporters against ministerial pressure. There could be few better recommendations for the job. Gibb is trying to turn the BBC into a government press office. https://t.co/a1ewnp0UhG
If this story as reported is true then Robbie Gibb should resign. It is a cardinal rule that when you join the BBC,whether as a junior reporter or a board member, you leave your politics at the door.// BBC director sought to block senior editorial https://t.co/Xc5WDhefy2
For the BBC to protect its 'alleged' political impartiality Gibb has to go. https://t.co/OTZui7AqDb
— bigrobbutnocape @bigrobnocape (@bigrobbutnocape) July 10, 2021
This is explosive. Very influential Tory and prominent Brexiteer Robbie Gibb trying to stop a senior BBC news appointment that Downing St doesn't like. Huge test of BBC ability to resist political interference. pic.twitter.com/lNfNfMZmMn
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Police at one of the Easter Saturday ‘Kill the Bill’ demonstrations: who do you think is being more violent here?
Dozens of demonstrations against the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill took place across the UK on Saturday (April 3).
I held off reporting on them because I wanted to see how the national media covered the protests first.
Remember my article on how the media try to turn the public against ordinary people by slanting their stories, from a few weeks ago? Here’s a reminder:
First the press [respond] … by reporting it in ‘passive voice’. Reports stated ‘clashes occurred…’ or ‘clashes between protesters and police’. Words carefully chosen to not indicate who had started the clashes (the police) and who had been on the receiving end of the majority of the violence (those attending…)
They will report on any police injuries ‘six police received medical attention due to the protest’ they might say… It is very rare that figures are collected for how many protesters were injured, and the assumption may be that this means that number is zero, and the police were thus on the receiving end of more violence than they dished out.
Many news outlets chose to term everyone present as ‘protesters’.
Politicians… chime in condemning the ‘violence’ caused by ‘protesters’.
Now let’s have a look at some reports from the police and the mainstream media.
At least one officer has been injured after clashes between police and demonstrators at a "Kill the Bill" protest in central London.
Today’s policing operation is still ongoing and arrest numbers may rise, but at this time, 26 people have been arrested for a variety of offences. Ten police officers received injuries during the operation; none of these are believed to be serious.
— Metropolitan Police Events (@MetPoliceEvents) April 3, 2021
Two police officers were sent to hospital in Bristol after a protest against the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. https://t.co/k2XBJix758
— Twitter Moments UK & Ireland (@UKMoments) March 22, 2021
How many members of the public were injured?
Manchester Kill the Bill march ends in disorder as fight breaks out amongst crowd and police swarm on protesters sat on tram trackshttps://t.co/OGsFMdegHz
Agents provocateurs? Police plants? We’ve seen evidence of those in recent demonstrations.
Members of the public saw matters from a different angle – such as the following, showing a policeman very clearly kneeling on the neck of a member of the public. Shades of George Floyd?
A slightly clearer angle of this incident, sent to me by someone else, that appears to show a police officer with his knee on the neck of a #KillTheBill protester in Parliament Square. pic.twitter.com/wCeCSMj4gU
The best that could be suggested is that the Met’s spokespeople may have been accidentally looking at a different incident in which somebody was indeed kneeling on a person’s back. Of course, this would imply that they make a habit of attacking members of the public in this way. Not a good look!
And their images of protests around the UK were similarly divergent from the impression being pushed by the police and the press:
— The Churchill Project (@WinstonCProject) April 3, 2021
The ‘Kill the Bill’ protests (which are about terminating the Police Bill, not the ‘Old Bill’ which is a colloquial name for the police themselves) have been supported by opposition MPs like Jeremy Corbyn…
Mr Corbyn said the bill would prevent protest without police approval.
Speaking in Parliament Square in central London, Mr Corbyn invoked figures such as the suffragettes and Nelson Mandela as he urged the crowd to oppose the bill.
“Stand up for the right to protest, stand up for the right to have your voice heard,” he said.
“I want a society where it is safe to walk the streets, where you can speak out, you can demonstrate and you don’t have to seek the permission from the police or the home secretary to do so,” he said.
… and Zarah Sultana:
Our rights were won through protest, from the right to vote to anti-discrimination laws.
The Tories know there’s power on the streets. That’s why they’re attacking the right to protest.
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It’s hard to tell which was the worst disgrace – the way the Bristol protest against an unjust piece of legislation was perverted into a riot or the way the media manipulated the story to blame the protesters.
I touched on this in my article about those events, much of which was based on what I saw on the social media. But it seems I was at least mostly right.
This means it is possible to reverse-engineer the ‘toolkit’ used by the mass media to convince us that these events were the opposite of what we have seen.
I’m grateful that I don’t even have to do much work on it – somebody has already done it.
(By the way, the author of the article is an anarchist. This means he’s someone who believes we should all take control of our own political lives and not hand that control over to members of political parties who are likely to be corrupt – and not someone who wants to reduce the nation to lawlessness, as certain media elements would like you to think. See how this works?)
So how do the media gaslight you into believing the police are the victims of a riot they have instigated? Let’s see…
First the press [respond] to the attack … by reporting it in ‘passive voice’. Reports stated ‘clashes occurred…’ or ‘clashes between protesters and police’. Words carefully chosen to not indicate who had started the clashes (the police) and who had been on the receiving end of the majority of the violence (those attending…) Whilst not technically a lie, the intention here is to avoid blaming the police, or to imply that the protesters were at fault. Of course had the protesters actually instigated the violence, the early reports would say exactly that, ‘crowds attack police’.
The article notes that reports use emotive language to describe members of the crowd, no matter what the event may be. So attendees at the vigil for Sarah Everard on Clapham Common were “protesters”:
People attending a vigil don’t sound very threatening or unlawful. Vigil invokes images of flowers, grief stricken speeches, candles, sadness. An accurate description of what had taken place on Clapham Common, but not the most useful if you want to paint the police positively. So many news outlets chose to term everyone present as ‘protesters’. Politicians, such as home secretary Priti Patel were quick to chime in condemning the ‘violence’ caused by ‘protesters’ at an ‘unlawful gathering’, and the press dutifully repeated these claims, often uncritically.
You’ve seen it; you know it’s what they do.
Next are the comments:
First they will report on any police injuries ‘six police received medical attention due to the protest’ they might say.
In the case of the Bristol protest, it was 20. I even commented on it in a tweet:
It's been reported that 20 police were injured, and there were seven arrests. How many protesters were injured by the police? It's alleged that they charged out of the Bridewell and used their truncheons to attack people who were SITTING DOWN. #PoliticsLive
Were they knocked out by an enraged protester with a bat… or did they feel faint from dehydration, trip over and crack a rib on a shield, catch their hand in a car door or break a finger bashing someone over the head?
Two more elements to take from the tweet: we were told that there had been arrests, and this immediately implies crime – or at the very least, the suspicion of crime.
And then there’s the fact that we never get statistics showing injuries among the crowd:
It is very rare that figures are collected for how many protesters were injured, and the assumption may be that this means that number is zero, and the police were thus on the receiving end of more violence than they dished out.
Another element is the othering of the crowd:
They’ll agree most of the thousands of people present were peaceful, support the cause, and shouldn’t have been attacked by the police. Then they will, in hushed tones, point out that there were a minority of THOSE PEOPLE present.
THOSE PEOPLE are, of course, the bogeypeople of the day: Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, ‘hardcore feminists’.
Labelling these people means they are othered – they aren’t us, they’re them – and this means they can be demonised:
They weren’t people like you and me, people rightly concerned about violence against women, and about police over reach. They were…
… well, they were whoever the media (and their political masters) want us to believe is “the enemy” of the day.
You will also see attempts to blame the victims of police violence:
They will talk about how the protesters stared shouting when police marched in.
Clapham Common and Bristol.
How there were swear words on placards.
“ACAB” – meaning “All Cops Are Bastards”. So, not even swear words on placards – just an acronym of which a swear word is a part. Politicians attacked protesters who used these at Westminster (protesting against what happened on Clapham Common) and Bristol.
“#KillTheBill” could be seen as brutally provocative – suggesting that we should murder police officers, perhaps?
How the event was an ‘unlawful gathering’.
Clapham Common and Bristol, again.
They will under no circumstances admit that the police may have escalated a calm situation or otherwise acted to make things worse.
After that, the article states, we get the opinion pieces that throw away the ambiguous language and push the narrative on us wholeheartedly. I’m waiting for the headline Feminazis hijacked protest to castrate cops.
(That is one of the claims about Bristol, by the way:)
Dogs were repeatedly [deployed] throughout the night [despite] how dangerous that is for the protesters, for the dogs, and even for the police, at least one of whom very nearly got castrated by his charge.
Of course, it’s all very well for me (or a member of the Anarchist Federation) to say this happens. Can we see actual evidence of it?
Yes. Yes, we can:
'Kill the bill' protest in Bristol condemned as 'thuggery and disorder' https://t.co/m6EjKeT2vT
The headline is Demonstrators against policing bill class with officers in Bristol. Almost exactly “clashes between protesters and police”, wouldn’t you say?
The BBC report on which I based my previous article is riddled with examples of the techniques listed above. Passive voice:
Protesters clashed with officers
Arrests and police injuries:
Eight people have already been arrested after 21 officers were injured.
(Clearly the report has been updated with an extra arrest.)
Othering:
Home Secretary Priti Patel accused some protesters of “thuggery”
Avon and Somerset Police Chief Constable Andy Marsh said the protest had been “hijacked by extremists”
Victim-blaming:
demonstrators scaled the station, threw fireworks into the crowd and daubed graffiti on the walls.
At times there were as few as 50 police officers, facing 100 or more violent protesters.
Denial that the police escalated an otherwise calm situation:
Horses and dogs were used to great effect, but their numbers have been cut in the last decade.
Let’s just remind ourselves of what happened, from eyewitness accounts:
Police had a choice, line up defensively by their station perhaps, even pull back a little, or escalate and create a dangerous and increasingly violent situation. They chose the latter, and sent in the dogs, literally in the case of the canine units who would soon deploy, and metaphorically in the case of the human officers who baton charged the crowd, striking at the heads of those standing, kicking folks on the floor, and even hitting a young woman sat on the floor hands raised telling them this was a peaceful protest. [Afed article]
During the chaos someone let off a few fireworks in the crowd. Potentially dangerous, but less dangerous than those police dogs who did get taken away at this point, spooked by the loud noises (its unclear if this was deliberate). [Afed again]
They horse charged people who were sitting down peacefully and then there was a w***er with a baton randomly hitting people and things escalated from there. I was watching the live feed for most of the event. [Annabella, Vox Political commenter]
You see how it works?
Well, now you know how it works, and you’ll be able to identify it when they do it again.
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She thinks it’s all great fun: but whoever put the horns on this image of Priti Patel knew the truth of the matter.
We know the Home Secretary is a full-on, flat-out racist – she deports foreigners, she would deport UK citizens if the Windrush scandal had not happened, and now she has been caught stirring up racial hatred against travellers.
It’s very odd behaviour for a person whose own parents were immigrants into the UK
But here it is: she has been caught fabricating details of a police officer’s death in order to make travellers seem inherently criminal, as an ethnic group.
And she did it in a Zoom meeting with Jewish leaders – hosted by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which is itself notorious for its zealousness in defending their own ethnic group from claims that it has any inherently unsavoury traits.
Good morning John. I wonder if you’ve been following the comments around @pritipatel ‘s words about Travellers. She spoke on Sept 15 at an online meeting hosted by the @BoardofDeputies Will you be commenting on this? @LordJohnMann
determined to stamp out the “criminality that takes place and that has happened through Traveller communities and unauthorised encampments”.
More than 80 leading academics, race equality organisations, and politicians have signed a letter to Patel, urging her to retract her “hate speech”.
One has to ask how she would describe herself – the daughter of refugees who came to the UK after facing persecution in Uganda.
Ah, but that would probably be too close to home.
She seems a perfect candidate for “unconscious bias” training.
Except, of course, she’s probably one of the 40 Conservative MPs who have refused it out of hand. It seems she – and they – have some kind of bias against it…
She is the secretary of state for the Home Department.
She is a racist, to our certain knowledge.
She may also be prejudiced against any number of other traits.
So the question you have to ask yourself, in a country where the Home Secretary is lining people up to be her targets, is:
When will she send people for me?
POSTSCRIPT: Mrs Mike was disgusted to hear about Patel’s behaviour, and asked a very reasonable question: why do we put up with this unacceptable behaviour, these unacceptable viewpoints, from people who are supposed to be our political leaders?
Mrs Mike thinks Priti Patel should be pulled out of Parliament by the ear and slung onto the street.
She cannot understand why nobody has actually used legally-enforcible means to do this.
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Tim Davie: will this new broom sweep the BBC clean?
New BBC Director General Tim Davie is set to tell staff it is now a condition of their employment to be politically impartial.
It seems he has realised the Corporation’s credibility has suffered after years of kowtowing to the Tory administrations of the last 10 years.
And there’s academic information showing an “Establishment” bias during Labour administrations that made it hard for that party to get a fair hearing on the UK’s most-used TV and radio news outlet.
Fine words.
But will they cut any ice with entrenched right-wingers like Laura Kuenssberg and Andrew Neil, or the Tory-riddent BBC newsroom?
We’ll know soon enough.
Here’s the gist of the story:
The incoming director general of the BBC is expected to tell journalists that those who cannot leave their politics at the door are no longer welcome in a drive to repair the broadcaster’s reputation for impartiality, it has been reported.
Tim Davie will set out his plans for the corporation from its Glasgow offices on Thursday having taken on the role from Lord Hall, who stepped down from the top job last week to serve chair of the board for the National Gallery.
And the new director general is expected to make combatting accusations of partisan bias a focus of his tenure, The Sunday Times reported, by using his opening address to staff to tell those who cannot leave their politics at the door that they have no place at one of the world’s most trusted news brands.
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