Tag Archives: distort

Grossly distorted report by Starmer supporters predictably blames Corbyn for Labour election defeat

The villain of the piece: Keir Starmer set Labour up to fail with a weak Brexit policy – and a new report has blamed that policy on Jeremy Corbyn. How hypocritical.

Why are the media making such a fuss about a right-wing report that blames Labour’s defeat in the last general election on the party’s then – lefty – leader?

It makes the blood boil to read the distortions in this so-called report, put together by a cabal of Starmer-supporting right-wingers with an anti-Corbyn chip on their collective shoulder who have the cheek to brand themselves “Labour Together”!

Labour backstabbers, more like!

It should be no surprise that all the major members of Labour Together now have prominent roles in the shadow cabinet of Keir Starmer: Ed Miliband, Steve Reed, Lisa Nandy and Jim McMahon. Other right-whingers writing the review included Lucy Powell.

The report claims that the biggest issue in the election was Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, which had fallen in popularity. It does not correctly describe the reasons for that fall in popularity.

So for example, the report – falsely, in This Writer’s opinion – claims that the departure of backstabbers including Luciana Berger and Chuka Umunna to form the unpopular and ill-fated Independent Group/Change UK/whatever-they-ended-up-calling-themselves led to a collapse in Corbyn’s approval ratings.

It does not state that this could have been because those now-former Labour MPs immediately went on media junkets trashing his leadership and spreading falsehoods about anti-Semitism.

In fact, after his success in the 2017 election, it is widely accepted that Jeremy Corbyn suffered the longest-running and most unfair hate campaign, possibly of any political leader in UK history – with a complicit media lapping up every lie.

Labour “went into the 2019 election without a clear strategy of which voters we needed to persuade or how”, and failed to settle on a coherent message with the power of 2017’s “For the many, not the few”, the report says.

It states: “It was unclear who was in charge” of the election campaign, and relationships were soured by years of infighting which had created a “toxic culture” and “significant strategic and operational dysfunction”.

And it says: Labour was outgunned by the Tories in the digital war, with messages poorly coordinated and most of them failing to reach beyond the party’s base.

All of these three issues can be related to a single cause: treachery against the party leader. We know this because it was very clearly highlighted in the leaked report on the way the party handled anti-Semitism allegations under Corbyn.

Party officers worked hard to present Corbyn as an anti-Semite, to undermine his leadership and to ensure that Labour could not win a general election with him as leader, that report stated.

Mr Starmer has launched an investigation into that leaked report, apparently with the intention of clearing those accused of treachery (and in many cases racism) and tarring the whistleblowers.

One criticism that rings true is the fact that the Conservatives’ “Get Brexit Done” message was more popular with voters than Labour’s offer of a new referendum on membership of the EU. But the report seems to forget that this particular policy was the brainchild of the current Labour leader, Keir Starmer. I wonder why?

Here’s a more accurate analysis of that part of Labour’s defeat:

Nobody with an ounce of knowledge about politics in the last five years has been fooled by this self-serving pack of distortions from Starmer’s new New Labour elite. See the responses for yourself:

https://twitter.com/JCisAntisemitic/status/1273957714583044096

This Writer was even tempted to respond to some of the usual suspects who have trumpeted this travesty as though it were the Word of God:

But media Toryism of the last 10 years has created a generation of ignorance, with most of the public happy to be spoonfed lies rather than think for themselves about the Age of Hypocrisy into which they have voted themselves.

The hypocrisy is strong in this report. How sad that the same people who lapped up the “Corbyn is a racist/Corbyn is a traitor/Corbyn is the devil” bull will be happy to do the same with this.

Source: Labour: dysfunctional ‘toxic culture’ led to defeat, major report finds | Politics | The Guardian

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/mike-sivier-libel-fight/


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A pathetic last gasp from the editor of More or Less on incapacity deaths

Biased Broadcasting Corporation: It seems the BBC's More or Less programme really is more interested in broadcasting the views of the Conservative Government than in providing a genuinely impartial public service.

Biased Broadcasting Corporation: It seems the BBC’s More or Less programme really is more interested in broadcasting the views of the Conservative Government than in providing a genuinely impartial public service.

I had another email from Richard Vadon, the editor of BBC Radio 4’s More or Less today – and it was absolutely pathetic.

I note that you have published my reply on your website without permission under those circumstances I will be making no further responses.

I have replied as follows:

“You never asked for any of it to be kept in confidence. Why should you wish it to be? You broadcast your programme happily enough but, now that you’re being asked to justify it in public, suddenly you have nothing to say.

“The public can judge you on that.”

I’ll let you know my own judgement right now: Pathetic.

Feel free to offer your own opinions via the BBC More or Less website.

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Is this saga More or Less over? VP blogger puts down BBC editor

This is the last (so far) episode in the More or Less saga: My response to the comments of the programme’s editor, Richard Vadon, regarding the segment on the programme covering the DWP’s release of statistics relating to deaths of claimants of incapacity benefits – published as promised in a previous article.

Thank you for your very fast response to my further complaint. I think you have reacted a little too quickly, in fact, judging from the comments you make.

Firstly, allow me to remind you that I am the person who made the Freedom of Information request to which the DWP’s statistical release is an attempted response and about which all of the media discussion following that release – whether acknowledged or not – is based. I have been dealing with this matter for a little over two years so forgive me if I suggest that I may have a little more authority on the subject than Full Fact, Ben Goldacre or your team. Your opinion of those people is of no interest at all. They have all gone into this from the wrong angle and I am disappointed that you see fit to defend this.

I notice that in your further comments, you are selective about the points I raise and perpetuate certain vague references that were made in the programme. For example: “The figure that the DWP released is only a subset of those who have died…” Why did the DWP only release the figure in that way when the FoI request wanted the full picture? No investigation from your programme and no comment from you. Yet Mr Stephenson says the DWP was asked for information about the irrelevant “within two weeks of being found fit for work” point. Why not do the job properly?

Your comments about people who have been found fit for work are confusing. By virtue of having been refused benefit by the DWP – as I stated before – they are defined by the government as being just as likely (or unlikely) to die as the rest of the non-incapacity-benefit-claiming population. You are making a distinction that is not accepted by the law. Are you saying that the test is wrong to send these people out without benefits, possibly to their deaths? If so, then why not say that on the programme? If not, then what, exactly, are you saying?

I await your response to my other points.

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The More or Less ‘incapacity deaths’ saga: This BBC editor’s comments may infuriate

This is from Richard Vadon, editor of More or Less, in response to my email earlier today, following up on my complaints about the segment on Radio 4’s More or Less covering the DWP’s release of statistics relating to deaths of claimants of incapacity benefits – published as promised in a previous article.

I am the editor of More or Less and my series producer Wes Stephenson has passed me your complaint.

 In your reply to his letter you say that a Full Fact article is discredited, that Ben Goldacre has got the wrong end of the stick and you describe More or Less as making a proper mess of the story. I am full of admiration for the journalism done by Full Fact, Ben Goldacre and for that matter Tim Harford and the More or Less team (although clearly I’m biased in the last case). These are all independent minded and award-winning journalists but your position is that we are all wrong. I’m not sure I can say anything that could change your mind but I will make a few points.

 I’m sorry if the reply has confused things about the 2380 deaths but the programme’s script couldn’t be more definite, “We’re clear: these 2380 people were declared fit for work, and then they died”.

 The reference to deaths after breakfast is making a simple correlation is not causation point. This is a regular theme in the programme and maybe could have explained in a fuller way. I’m sorry if you find the breakfast point in poor taste.

 You say:

 “the figure you provided is only a fraction of the total number of deaths and you have misled the public. It would have been far better for you to have said that the DWP has provided this figure but we don’t know how many have died after its self-imposed time limits. You didn’t.”

 The script does make it clear that the figures released are a subset of those who are died and the true figure is almost certainly higher:

 TIM: But we don’t actually have the data we need to say whether something alarming is happening to people we seeking some kind of disability assistance, but who’ve been declared fit for work.

 WES: No. We don’t. One of the reasons we don’t is that the figure that the DWP released is only a subset of those who have died after being declared ‘fit for work’ it only includes people who’ve been assessed as fit for work and who are still on Employment Support Allowance – so people who are appealing the decision for example. Those people who had been moved to other benefits such as Job Seekers Allowance and had then died wouldn’t be captured in this figure so the figure is almost certainly higher.  So we can’t come up with a proper death rate.

 The claim that “the ‘fit for work group” contains a number of people who have an above average chance of dying” is not really contentious. When someone is found fit for work it does not mean they have been found to be in perfect health or even to be of average health.

 I was for five years the editor of Money Box and Money Box Live. I saw as the years progressed how we got more and more calls from people struggling with the Disability Benefit system. We covered the story many times and my presenter Paul Lewis always held the authorities to account.

 I am currently the editor of a Point of View on Radio 4 and agreed to broadcast this piece on disability benefit just before this year’s election:

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05ns9mt

 I mention my previous history as an editor because I want you to understand that I believe the Government’s changes are an important issue. But I remain convinced by the final thought of the More or Less item that although it should be possible to come up with a much better figure, it’s hard to see how this sort of broad demographic information will ever tell us much about the question at issue – which is whether the test is fair.

I wrote a very quick response which I shall publish shortly. In brief, I thought this was an arrogant response from somebody who considered it beneath him to have to defend his decisions to a member of the public.

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Second complaint to BBC re: More or Less segment on incapacity claimant deaths

This is my reply to Wesley Stephenson (senior producer, BBC Current Affairs) following up on his response to This Writer’s complaint about the segment on Radio 4’s More or Less covering the DWP’s release of statistics relating to deaths of claimants of incapacity benefits – published as promised in a previous article.

Dear Mr Stephenson,

Thank you for your email of September 14 in which you have attempted to defend your programme against my complaints about it. Please accept my apologies for the slight delay in responding – I had to take a step back and calm down a little after reading your comments, and also had to attend to other matters.

On consideration, the most striking element in your response is the claim that your piece “was about the way the press and particularly The Guardian had reported it”. In case you hadn’t noticed, the Guardian piece refers quite clearly to the fact that the DWP released its information in response to Freedom of Information requests. Any reporter worth the name, investigating the veracity of such a report, would naturally look into the nature of those requests, in order to determine the value of the response from the DWP – and only then would they turn to the media reports in order to decide whether they were accurate or not.

What you have done is engage in an extremely offensive game of ‘Chinese whispers’. “The Guardian said this about the DWP figures but we’ve looked at them and they say that.” Of course, none of what you’re saying matters one jot if the DWP’s figures haven’t properly answered the original Freedom of Information request – and they haven’t. The Information Commissioner’s Office is currently investigating why the DWP deliberately failed to follow the terms of the Decision Notice that was issued at the end of April.

What you are telling me is that, rather than investigate the substantive issue, you have chosen to reinforce a distortion that supports the Conservative Government’s line. That is very clear from your reference to the discredited Full Fact article. But even that article mitigates against you, now that the DWP’s own comments have been added in.

They begin: “Once found FFW [Fit For Work] an ESA [Employment and Support Allowance] claim ends” so anybody who died within two weeks of their claim ending, after being declared “Fit For Work” would also die within two weeks of that finding – or as near to that period as makes no difference. In any case, your comment that “We don’t know whether the 2,380 claimants died after being declared “fit for work” is nonsense because the Freedom of Information request – which you didn’t bother to check – specifically wanted “the number of IB and ESA claimants who have died since November 2011 [up to the date of the request, May 28, 2014]. Please break that figure down into the following categories:… b) Those that were found fit for work”. The fact that they died after being declared “fit for work” is the only reason they are mentioned at all.

Your claim that “The ESA claims of 2,380 people with a ‘fit for work’ decision didn’t necessarily end because they were declared ‘fit for work’ but they will have also have ended because they died” is nonsense. The DWP itself stated quite clearly that the claim of anybody with a ‘fit for work’ decision ends immediately that decision is recorded.

You mention that “people will have still been counted as receiving ESA if they had received a FFW decision and had then appealed”, which is a further indication that you really should have read my Freedom of Information request, the Information Commissioner’s decision notice and the DWP’s response. My request goes on to call for figures relating to “those who have had an appeal completed after a Fit for Work decision”. The DWP provides a figure of 1,340 individuals in this category. What we don’t know – because the DWP was, again, deliberately vague about it (and we can say this is deliberate because there was nothing to stop the DWP from clarifying, as it is now being forced to do) – is whether those who appealed are included in the 2,380 or whether they should be added to that number, so those of us who have been checking the figures properly are saying that 2,380 is the minimum number of ESA claimants to have died after being found fit for work, while the maximum is 3,720.

Add in the number of IB/SDA claimants and that figure rises to a maximum of 4,010 incapacity benefits claimants (ask Nick Dilworth about that – I’m on very good terms with him) – but there is a question mark hanging over whether even that may be done, because adding the total number of deaths of people on IB/SDA together with those on ESA produces a greater number of deaths, in the relevant years, than the DWP’s own combined death figure. It seems that, according to the DWP, you can die twice. Would you like to investigate that, perhaps?

Looking back at the DWP’s comments on the Full Fact page brings us to your error in claiming that “people will have still been counted as receiving ESA if they had received a FFW decision and had then appealed”. The DWP states: “anyone who died during a mandatory reconsideration period would not be classed as being in receipt of ESA at the time of death and should therefore not be included in the figures.” THERE IS NOTHING IN MY FOI REQUEST THAT PERMITS THE DWP TO REMOVE THESE CLAIMANTS FROM THE FIGURES. The request calls for the number of claimants who have died between November 2011 and May 2014, including all those who were found fit for work. Don’t you wish you had checked that? Mandatory Reconsideration was introduced in October 2013 to ensure that claimants who had been found fit for work would have been cut off from ESA while the reconsideration was taking place and would have had no other form of income. How would they have survived? The fact that they were removed from the figures is extremely suspicious. You could have reported this. You didn’t.

“If the claimant goes on to appeal the MR [Mandatory Reconsideration] decision then the ESA claim is reopened,” the DWP continues. This is correct. But we all know that Mandatory Reconsideration was designed to cut down the number of appeals (the question being whether it does so by ensuring the deaths of the claimants) and in any case, as I have already mentioned, there is a further category in my FoI request to cover claimants who have made appeals.

The DWP continues: “Therefore anyone who died during an appeal period (whichever stage of the appeal process they are in) would be classed as being in receipt of ESA at the time of death and would be included in the table 2.3 figures.” If you had asked me, I would have been able to tell you that the relevant part of the original FOI request was for “those who have an appeal pending”. For some reason the DWP did not want to separate this group out from the rest, and asked me to change it to “those who have had an appeal completed after a FFW decision”. You could have asked why the DWP did that. You didn’t.

Let’s have some more of the DWP’s Full Fact reply, as it is relevant to yours: “Yes it is possible that someone may not have appealed the FFW decision and due to time required to update the system they were still in receipt of ESA when they died.” This would, of course, have been within the two-week ‘scan’ period the DWP mentioned but in any case is irrelevant to the terms of the FoI request, which merely required that claimants had died after a FFW decision.

Back to the DWP: “It should also be noted that, as detailed in the publication, the data in tables 2.3 to 2.6 (and table 1) should be viewed with some level of caution as the figures are derived from unpublished information and have not been quality assured to National Statistics or Official Statistics publication standard.” Quality-assured or not, the information has been published – by the DWP, after a delay of between 15 months and three years and nine months. It is not unreasonable to expect the DWP to have managed some kind of quality assurance during that time – especially as the DWP has spent at least two years assuring members of the public that the figures would be published. Considering the period of time we’re discussing, they could even have provided ASMRs – the ONS provides a very handy methodology for doing just that which means it could have been done overnight and checked within a week. You could have asked about that. You didn’t.

DWP again: “I can confirm that the figures to which you refer include people who died up to 2 weeks after their ESA claim ended i.e. those where death is believed to be the reason for the claim ending, as specified in the publication. The FFW decision may have occurred at any point in the preceding period.” It is interesting that the DWP admits it only published information on “those where death is believed to be the reason for the claim ending”, which was not any part of the terms of my FoI request – or anybody else’s. The DWP was instructed (by the Information Commissioner) to provide information on all claimants who died from the beginning of December 2011 to the end of May 2014, after a FFW decision. The end of the claim – as I keep having to point out – is utterly immaterial.

You can see, therefore, that the Full Fact article is also utterly immaterial to the issues at hand. In fact, considering the fact that it has been quoted by Conservative MPs including the Prime Minister, it is hard to believe any claim that it was not written to support the claims of the Conservative Government and therefore your own reliance on it is also suspicious.

Let’s look at your claim that “at no point did we mention you or make any suggestions about what you were trying to achieve the the FoI request”. In the piece, Mr Harford goes into what he describes as a “subtext” that the claim is unfair – “that the people who are being tested and then pronounced fit to work are either so ill that they promptly die or perhaps the strain of being forced into work has hastened their deaths”. It’s sloppy reporting to say people were being forced into work because – as you should know – the jobs simply aren’t there for them; they were being forced to seek work that, the evidence indicates, they weren’t fit enough to carry out. But that’s a side-issue. The fact that Mr Harford suggests a subtext implies that this was behind the initial request that forced the DWP to publish the figures – whether you mentioned it or not. As I said in my complaint, there was nothing in my request to suggest such a thing; in essence Mr Harford and the More or Less team made it up.

On whether the number of deaths was “bigger than we would expect”, you say “it was fair to give the figure for the number of people receiving ESA who had died, to give a sense of the size of the number that had been reported” – but this figure is not accurate. The request was for the full number of deaths after being found ‘fit for work’ – didn’t I already mention Mark Wood, who died of starvation, months after his own FFW decision? Where does he fit into these DWP statistics? He doesn’t, does he? How many other people like Mr Wood are there, who have been omitted from the figures because their deaths happened after the end of the DWP’s self-imposed claim end date period? Remember, the DWP was asked to include ALL deaths; this shows that the Department chose to omit – how many? I don’t know. I wanted to. The DWP refused to provide that figure in what I understand is “contumelious disregard” of the Information Commissioner’s decision. So the figure you provided is only a fraction of the total number of deaths and you have misled the public. It would have been far better for you to have said that the DWP has provided this figure but we don’t know how many have died after its self-imposed time limits. You didn’t.

Your claim that “the ‘fit for work group’ contains a number of people who have an above average chance of dying” is contentious, to say the least. By definition, people who receive a FFW decision have been told that they are no more likely to die than the average – because they are now to be included among the general population and not among people whose conditions mean they should receive incapacity benefits. Your line, “Just because people are deemed fit for work doesn’t mean they should only have an average chance of death” is unintentionally hilarious. Didn’t you stop to think that ALL the people you mentioned – men, people with lower qualifications and older people – are all included in the wider working-age population who have never claimed incapacity benefits and are therefore among those with an “average” chance of death? I’m a man, and fairly close to the older age range mentioned, but in the nearly-two-weeks since your programme aired, it seems I’ve managed to avoid death. That’s not a miracle.

You mention the Ben Goldacre article, but he got the wrong end of the stick too. DWP didn’t give “the right answer to the wrong question” – it gave the wrong answer to the question it was given.

Now, to return to the second paragraph of your letter, given the number of inaccuracies I have identified above, can you see that the comment that “thousands of people die after breakfast”, in context, was in extremely poor taste? Yes, the piece said that “we know nothing about how or why they died” but stating that “thousands of people die before breakfast” implies – before anything else is even said – that the controversy over these figures is a storm in a teacup. It isn’t.

I think it might be useful to tell you a little about possible future developments. As the DWP’s response to my FoI request was so poor, I have written to the Information Commissioner, requesting enforcement of the terms of the request. The Commissioner is investigating why the DWP has only provided information up to February 2014, rather than May, and also why the DWP – after giving an undertaking to provide the full figures for people who died after being found fit for work, has failed to do so. My suspicion is that the Department will say it did not provide numbers for people who died after its ‘scan’ period because it does not hold them. In that case, why offer them in the first place? The DWP never made any objection to any of the wording of the FoI request, other than that which I’ve already mentioned about appeals pending/concluded.

Finally, you may wish to consider the following, alarming, evidence I received yesterday from the Information Commissioner’s solicitor, who writes: “The Act is only concerned with recorded information and not whether the information which is recorded is accurate, logical or consistent with other information.”

This means, of course, that all of the information provided by the DWP may be complete and utter nonsense – moonshine, intended to confuse and diorientate the public in order to keep us further from the facts. That would explain the discrepancy between the number of deaths recorded for all incapacity claimants and those for IB/SDA and ESA when added together. If you had investigated this matter properly, you might have been able to ask some searching questions about this, too. But you didn’t.

I await your response to this with, I have to admit, diminishing hope. You’ve made a proper mess of it so far.

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BBC More or Less response to first complaint about ‘incapacity deaths’ programme

This is the email from Wesley Stephenson (senior producer, BBC Current Affairs) to This Writer’s complaint about the segment on Radio 4’s More or Less covering the DWP’s release of statistics relating to deaths of claimants of incapacity benefits – published as promised in a previous article.

Thank you for getting in touch about our piece on ‘Fit for Work deaths’ I have read your complaint and feel that there are some misunderstandings about the programme.

1.       Your objection to the comment that ‘thousands of people die after breakfast’ I believe is misguided. This points out the error that can be made with the deaths figure that correlation somehow infers causation. We did not suggest that there is no link just that we don’t know if there is a link and caution should be taken at interpreting the figures otherwise. This was made clear in the piece when I said “We know nothing how or why they died. It could have nothing to do with the fit for work decision; they could be accidents or unrelated illnesses. Or they could be directly related. There is no way of knowing just by looking at the 2,380 deaths figure.”

2.       You suggest we do know that people died within two weeks of the decision to declare them fit for work. I believe this is a misreading of the figures that stems from the way the DWP chose to present them. We don’t know whether the 2380 claimants died after being declared ‘fit for work’. The figures do not tell us this information. The ESA claims of 2380 people with a ‘fit for work’ decision didn’t necessarily end because they were declared ‘fit for work’ but they will have also have ended because they died. People will have still been counted as receiving ESA if they had received a FFW decision and had then appealed. We checked this before transmission and you can see a similar clarification close to the bottom of this piece from Fullfact.org.  https://fullfact.org/factcheck/economy/fit_for_work_deaths_ESA-47588

3.       You say in your complaint that “While the point that we don’t know how these people died is correct – this is because the DWP deliberately fails to record causes of death, which is a contentious matter in its own right – this seems to be making a false claim about my Freedom of Information request. There was nothing in it to suggest that I thought the figure that the DWP provided would prove its responsibility for any deaths that took place. Why was Mr Harford suggesting that there was?” At no point did we mention you or make any suggestions about what you were trying to achieve with the FOI request. The piece was about the way the press and particularly the Guardian had reported it.

4.       The question of whether these deaths is ‘bigger than we would expect’ – we made clear here that we didn’t have the ASMRs for this particular set of people and therefore couldn’t make a proper comparison but it was fair to give the figure for the number of people receiving ESA who had died to give a sense of the size of the number that had been reported.

5.       Your assertion that it’s false to say that those declared ‘fit for work’ may be more likely to die than the general population is not borne out in the figures. The death rate for the working age population is an average. The ‘fit for work group’ contains a number of people who have an above average chance of dying. Men are more likely to die than the average, people with lower qualifications are more likely to die than average, older people are more likely to die that average these groups are all over-represented in the people who are deemed fit for work. Just because people are deemed fit for work doesn’t mean they should only have an average chance of death.

6.       As you say in your complaint you say that these deaths are ‘likely to be the tip of a very large proverbial iceberg’. This is possible although we can’t say that this will be the case however the programme did point out that 2380 certainly wasn’t the total number of people who had died after being declared fit for work as it only took in a subset of those people declared fit for work.

As Ben Goldacre pointed out in his piece (https://storify.com/bengoldacre/how-dwp-has-confused-everyone-by-releasing-the-rig) no matter where we look we haven’t got enough information to know and until the DWP release the ASMR for those people declared fit for work we cannot reach any meaningful conclusions.  Also Nick Dilworth (who I spoke to before writing the piece) says that DWP figures are not meaningful  http://ilegal.org.uk/thread/9144/death-statistics-idss-obfuscation-answer.

I will publish my response shortly.

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Chinese whispers from BBC’s More or Less over benefit claimant deaths

Chinese Whispers: The message might be clear at the start, but by the time YOU get to hear it, it has been hopelessly mangled [Art: Daina Mattis].

Chinese Whispers: The message might be clear at the start, but by the time YOU get to hear it, it has been hopelessly mangled [Art: Daina Mattis].

Remember the BBC’s hopeless mangling of the issues over the DWP’s incapacity benefit claimant death statistics on the radio show More or Less? Here’s a reminder if you’ve forgotten.

It turns out that the segment in question was created, not to examine the DWP’s vague, confusing and altogether opaque choices regarding what information to provide, but to respond to reports about the issue in other media, such as The Guardian.

Instead of proper reporting, we were given a game of Chinese whispers! The Guardian said this about the DWP figures but we’ve looked at them and they say that.” Of course, none of what either the newspaper or the radio show are saying matters one jot if the DWP’s figures haven’t properly answered the original Freedom of Information request – and they haven’t.

This Blog can report on the mess because Yr Obdt Srvt wrote a strongly-worded complaint, as promised at the end of the earlier article, and received a reply on September 14. It has taken until now for me to recover my temper enough to provide a rational commentary on what it said.

I had not realised that More or Less had chosen to avoid the substantive issue in order to belittle The Guardian. Did any of you, who listened to the programme, understand this to be the case? I had to find out in the response to my complaint by Wesley Stephenson who, in addition to being the so-called expert to whom presenter Tim Harford referred in the piece, is also a senior producer at BBC Radio’s Current Affairs department.

I had written: “While the point that we don’t know how these people died is correct – this is because the DWP deliberately fails to record causes of death, which is a contentious matter in its own right – this seems to be making a false claim about my Freedom of Information request. There was nothing in it to suggest that I thought the figure that the DWP provided would prove its responsibility for any deaths that took place. Why was Mr Harford suggesting that there was?”

In response, I got: “At no point did we mention you or make any suggestions about what you were trying to achieve with the FOI request. The piece was about the way the press and particularly The Guardian had reported it.”

Chinese whispers. The public wasn’t going to get the facts about the FoI – just some interpretations of what the DWP had chosen to provide, whether it related to the FoI or not.

Any reporter worth the name, investigating the veracity of such a report, would naturally look into the nature of those requests, in order to determine the value of the response from the DWP – and only then would they turn to the media reports in order to decide whether they were accurate or not.

What Mr Stephenson told me is that, rather than investigate the substantive issue, he had chosen to reinforce a distortion that supports the Conservative Government’s line. A reference in his email to the discredited Full Fact article on the subject, which was quoted by David Cameron in Parliament, supports this conclusion.

So the nit-picking subject of the More or Less piece, as with the Full Fact piece, is not the number of people who died at any time between December 2011 and May 2015 after being found “fit for work” by the DWP (as my FoI request demanded). Instead it is about whether they died within two weeks of being found fit for work – a question which is entirely immaterial to the issue at hand.

No doubt Messrs Stephenson and Harford, along with those responsible for the Full Fact farrago and anyone else who has chosen to misreport the issue, are lining up to receive honours for their services to the Conservative Party.

What a shame they ignored their duty to serve the public and betrayed us instead.

I’ll be publishing the full text of the More or Less email to me, along with my reply, so you can read the whole saga and see where they went wrong for yourselves.

ADDITIONAL: The editor of More or Less, Richard Vadon, has now written to defend his programme. You can read his email here – see if your conclusions match mine. I will also be publishing my reply.

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BBC manipulation of the Scotland debate continues – have they no shame?

Following on from yesterday’s article on Nick Robinson and the heads of BBC News, take a look at this; it appeared on Twitter earlier today:

scotlandtweet

You can complain to the BBC in several ways:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/complain-online/

Phone: 03700 100 222 *
03700 100 212 * (textphone)
*24 hours, charged as 01/02 geographic numbers

Post:BBC Complaints
PO Box 1922
Darlington
DL3 0UR

Ofcom is the TV regulator. Its website says you should make complaints about bias to the BBC Trust – which seems odd. Why would a biased BBC Trust do anything about such complaints? So here’s the link to Ofcom’s complaint form: https://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/tell-us/specific-programme-epg

Complaints to the BBC Trust merely go through the ordinary BBC complaints addresses/numbers.

You should also write to your MP. All things considered – apart from holding mass demonstrations outside BBC offices, it might be the only way to get your complaint heard.

Additional: VP has been contacted by a commenter, pointing out that the Big Debate took place last Thursday (September 11) – the same day Robinson manipulated his report. While it is true that there was no date on the tweet or the meme that appeared with it today, so it was impossible for Yr Obdt Srvt to have known this, it makes no material difference to the article as it is still an example of the BBC’s shameless manipulation of the debate.

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If BBC News was a barrel of apples, would Nick Robinson really be the rotten one that spoiled the whole bushel?

How the Daily Record reported the 4,000-strong demonstration outside the BBC's Glasgow headquarters, after the social media revealed that Nick Robinson had misrepresented Alex Salmond in a report.

How the Daily Record reported the 4,000-strong demonstration outside the BBC’s Glasgow headquarters, after the social media revealed that Nick Robinson had misrepresented Alex Salmond in a report.

When TV licence-fee payers take to the streets in protest against BBC news coverage, you know there’s something rotten in New Broadcasting House.

The Corporation’s political editor, Nick Robinson, is apparently responsible for kicking up the stink – by broadcasting a misleading report about SNP leader Alex Salmond. Robinson claimed Salmond failed to answer a question during a news conference but footage has emerged on the Internet providing no less than seven minutes of proof to the contrary.

Did you notice the word “apparently” in the immediately preceding paragraph? It is there for a very good reason.

There is no doubt that Robinson knowingly misled the viewing public by making a false claim about Alex Salmond. The SNP leader definitely answered his question as this Pride’s Purge article makes clear. It is surprising that, after multiple debunkings of the mainstream media by their social media counterparts, organisations like the BBC still think they can get away with this kind of behaviour.

The operative question is, why did Robinson ignore what Salmond said? Was it not what he wanted to hear? Was the reference to information that should not have been divulged to the BBC too sensitive for the Corporation to allow onto our screens? Or was there a more deep-seated political agenda?

Frequent Vox Political commenter Jeffrey Davies reckons that Robinson’s report is a breach of the Trades Descriptions Act 1968.

In his comment, he says he bought his licence in the belief that the BBC would follow its Charter and Agreement (Section 3: Accuracy, Principles) commits it to fair, unbiased coverage:

“The BBC must not knowingly and materially mislead its audiences. We should not distort known facts, present invented material as fact or otherwise undermine our audiences’ trust in our content.”

Regarding the Salmond incident, he said it breaches Article 44 of the BBC Trust Charter Agreement, which states: “(1) The BBC must do all it can to ensure that controversial subjects are treated with due accuracy and impartiality in all relevant output.”

He is right, and it is right that Robinson should pay for what he has tried to do.

But what about Fran Unsworth, deputy director of BBC news and current affairs; Mary Hockaday, head of newsroom; and Gavin Allen, news editor, BBC News? According to Private Eye (issue 1369, 27 June – 10 July 2014, p12), “all vie for control of the [New Broadcasting House] newsroom and the historic task of ‘driving the news agenda’.” If that is correct, which of them carries the responsibility for this cock-up?

Come to that, what about Keith Blackmore, managing editor of news and current affairs; Jonathan Munro, head of newsgathering; and their boss James Harding, the director of news? Did they have a hand in this balls-up?

Or did the rot emanate from the new chair of the BBC Trust, Rona Fairhead – who only took up her position last Tuesday (September 9)? What’s her involvement in this cock-and-ball story?

Why mention these directorial types when a news report is the responsibility of the person making it? Simple.

Most – if not all – of these distinguished personnel are also distinguished Conservatives, and it is known that the Conservative Party supports the ‘No’ camp in the referendum campaign.

Robinson is also a dyed-in-the-wool Conservative, as the following (again from Pride’s Purge) makes clear:

NickRobinsonConservative

Therefore we must ask whether any or all of them agreed to ‘slant’ BBC reporting in favour of the ‘No’ camp in an effort to influence voters on behalf of their Tory masters.

We should demand their suspension while an impartial investigation takes place – followed by their resignation if they are found to have any responsibility in this matter.

Do you think that is overstating the matter?

Then perhaps some other matters should also be taken into consideration, including the privatisation of the National Health Service, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, and the abuse of sick and disabled people by the Department for Work and Pensions – all of which are considered to have enjoyed either biased reporting or have been ignored altogether by lovable, licence-fee-funded Auntie.

38Degrees has launched a petition calling for an independent inquiry into BBC bias regarding the Scottish referendum campaign. To sign, visit this site.

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“Hello, my name is The Daily Mail, and I twist your words”

Inforrm’s Blog provides this informative insight into how the Daily Mail reports stories about the NHS:

Read the excesses of parts of the British Press for long enough and one gets quite hardened to distortions, misreporting and twisting of the truth.

But every now and again something so horribly ugly and mean comes along that it stops you in your tracks.

So it is with one case involving Dr Kate Granger. She is the heroic woman medical registrar battling an incurable cancer who started the “Hello my name is…” campaign.

At the last count her campaign to improve patient experiences in the NHS had recorded 26 million Twitter impressions.

Dr Granger has become an international phenomenon. She decided to stop her own treatment when, as she put it “the costs started to outweigh the benefits” and went back to work in Wakefield looking after elderly patients while continuing to campaign for more person-centred care.

Her husband, Chris Pointon, has just extracted a sort of apology from The Daily Mail through a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) for an appalling distortion of her speech to the NHS Confederation conference in June.

Under the headline “How NHS dehumanises patients, by doctor 32, who is dying of a rare form of cancer,” The Daily Mail ran a 750-word hatchet job that vilifies the NHS and grossly misrepresents what she said. It strings accurate but out-of-context snippets of the speech and uses them as ammunition to bash the health service.

The really odd thing about the report is that it completely misses out any mention of her campaign or that she is completely dedicated to the NHS.

To twist what somebody has to say that much is bad enough under any circumstances; but to do so when she has only weeks left to live and has dedicated her life to improving the NHS is almost unspeakable.

There’s more – so visit the article on Inforrm’s Blog to read it.

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