Expanding Horizons

The BBC is set to spend £25m of taxpayers’ money every year on funding the creation of a new Arabic television station which it claims will provide news ‘without fear or favour’. Yeah right.

If the BBC’s own domestic coverage is anything to go by, the new Middle East station will not be impartial, independent or authoritative. Instead it will be instilled with the BBC’s usual anti-Israeli, anti-Western sentiments.

Only the BBC and those that support its liberal-left, politically correct worldview desperately continue to claim that the corporation is without bias. Surely if the BBC were so impartial they would have had no reason to spent £200,000 of license fee money last year in an attempt to suppress an internal report on bias against Israel?

At the time as the BBC attempted to deny public access to the report through the courts, Labour MP Louise Ellman commented:

There has been a bias and lack of context with the BBC reporting of Israel. Problems are related to citing individual acts of Israeli aggression by failing to put them into context or explaining the reasons. It makes them look like unprovoked acts, when in fact they were reaction to a terrorist act. I would certainly like to see what’s in the report.

Much like the BBC’s coverage of the European Union, this is an example of what Lord Pearson of Rannoch recently referred to as ‘bias by omission’. Does the Middle East really need yet another news network when it already has so many other commercial broadcasters? Should the Foreign Office really be funding this undertaking? Of course not, but this Middle Eastern adventure will still go ahead nonetheless.

Under Dreaming Spires

Last night’s much publicised Oxford Union debate on the freedom of speech involving BNP leader Nick Griffin and historian David Irving was delayed after protesters broke into the debating theatre.

Perhaps this outcome was in the end not all too much of a surprise since there will always be individuals willing to prevent others engaging in democratic and free debate with whose views they do not agree?

Many Universities in Britain currently hold a ‘no-platform’ policy for groups such as the BNP and the likes of David Irving. Only last year the University of Bath’s Student Union voted to bar Nick Griffin from speaking at a private event hosted in one of its auditoriums. Therefore it actually came as a pleasant surprise to discover that the Oxford Union had actively voted to allow Mr Griffin to be challenged in an open debate.

Regardless of whether you agree with Nick Griffin or David Irving (and I for the most part do not) then it should be generally accepted that if their views are so wrong, then they should be challenged through debate and their arguments shown to be incoherent – not instead to try and force Mr Griffin and Irving into silence, which benefits no-one and in the end often has the undesirable effect of providing them with public sympathy.

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The Educational Social Experiment

The BBC reported a little while back that, according to an annual report from Ofsted, ‘the social divide in schools in England shows little sign of closing’.

You may have thought that our educational system was meant to be a place for actually educating children; instilling in them fact and intellectual rigour rather than a method of profound and radical social engineering.

Well, if you thought that modern schooling was about learning and teaching then sadly you’re mistaken. Successive British Governments have slowly shaped the educational establishment around the equality agenda and the desire to force everyone down one set path.

In real terms this has meant the gradual decline of standards over the past few decades. This has been exemplified by changes in the examination system, with exams having been purposefully made easier to such an extent that seemingly nobody can actually fail one. Furthermore, through the destruction of Grammar schools and the selective system, the brightest and best children have been thoroughly failed by being held back to further the creation of a more ‘equal’ generation of children.

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Ming Pensioned Off

Well, it looks as though the backstabbing, backwater Lib Dems have finally pensioned Ming Campbell off to the twilight home for incompetent party leaders. Not much of a surprise I suppose after a string of consistently bad poll ratings.

The media, obsessed as they are with their cult of youth, never really took to the elderly Sir Menzies, despite his left-wing liberal credentials – and I suspect this lack of media coverage, endorsement and appraisal played a significant role in his eventual downfall.

So, who will rise up to clasp the soiled Lib Dem leadership crown in their grubby hands in any forthcoming leadership elections? In many respects, does it really matter, and frankly who cares? Whoever takes over will be as useless as those that preceded them – just a little more youthful, which in today’s image rather policy driven media age will probably make all the difference.

With that in mind, I suspect the early running will be made by Chris Huhne and Nick Clegg, who, laughably, Jon Snow on Channel Four news just a while ago referred to as the most ‘right wing’ of the candidates likely to throw their hat into the ring. I assume that means the extremely socially liberal, and economically socialist Mr Clegg is left-wing rather than very left-wing then?

As for Ming, it very much appears that he was surplus to requirement and obsolete technology in the party that supposedly prides itself on being in no way discriminatory.