Last night on BBC Question Time the Lib-Dem MP and party leadership candidate Jo Swinson told a blatant lie claiming that just 4% of kids from Govan in Glasgow end up going to university, blaming "lack of aspiration" and "lack of investment".
The real figure is that 22.8% go on to university or higher education colleges, which is not particularly high compared to more affluent areas, but 570% higher than Swinson's unsourced claim.
The worst thing about this Lib-Dem lie isn't that Swinson used fake statistics, it's the pure classism of making out that kids from poor areas like Govan are less likely to succeed academically because of "lack of aspiration".
The lie also seemed to be motivated by a desire to terrify middle class English voters by raising the awful caricature of the terrifying working-class Govan shit hole (which is a bit like using Moss Side's fearsome reputation to terrify southerners about the whole of northern England).
Then there's the fact that the Lib-Dems actively helped their Tory mates to absolutely trash investment in education between 2010 and 2015 resulting in an unprecedented collapse in per pupil funding.
Furthermore the Lib-Dems helped their Tory chums to significantly lower infrastructure investment in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and the north of England, while massively boosting investment in London and the South East.
This means that that any kids from working class communities who do overcome the odds to succeed out of austerity-ravaged areas will end up being drawn away to London and the South East if they want the best jobs and opportunities. A brain-drain scenario that leaves abandoned northern communities even further behind.
And let's not forget that Swinson and her Lib-Dem pals' broken promise not to hike tuition fees, resulting in English students facing the highest fees in the world to study at public universities (Scotland escaped this grotesque Lib-Dem betrayal thanks to devolution and the SNP government's commitment to education as a right, not a commodity to be traded by the rich).
Even more concerning than Swinson's classism, lies, and white-washing of her own party's track record in government is the way the BBC uncritically amplified what she said.
Of course nobody expects the host Fiona Bruce to know precise higher education attainment statistics for every local area in the UK off the top of her head, but we could at least expect the BBC to check that statistics aren't lies before they tweet a clip of the lie, with an uncritical repetition of the lie written in the actual text of the Tweet!
If the BBC had any intention of actually holding the political class to account, they'd fact check the all of the Question Time clips they're thinking about tweeting to make sure they're not amplifying lies, and then publicly call out people who get caught lying on their show in order to actually hold them to account.
But far from calling this lie out, the BBC actively helped Swinson spread it even further by uncritically retweeting it.
Middle class Brexit-sceptic Lib-Dem types are often the first to complain when the BBC actively helps to amplify Brexiteer lies and false promises, but in order to avoid being total hypocrites they also have to complain when one of the darlings of their pro-austerity, pro-student debt, pro-privatisation, anti-investment, welfare-vandalising Lib-Dems spouts made up statistics. Especially when the made up statistics are intended to push the classist trope about kids in poor working class areas "lacking aspiration", as if it's their own fault for having severely reduced life opportunities, when in reality it was the Lib-Dems and their Tory mates who spent five ruinous years slashing education funding and deliberately rigging the UK economy against kids from Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and the north of England.
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BBC Question Time is a remarkably biased show. Regular viewers will be familiar with the regular appearances of Tory Party plants in the audience, and they'll also be familiar with the way the panel of five guests is always heavily loaded in favour of pro-austerity neoliberals, and the way that left-wing panellists are hectored and interrupted far more than right-wingers.
However the episode on February 7th 2019 was quite extraordinary with the notorious Billy "the bigot" Mitchell making yet another appearance as one of the select few audience members allowed to ask a question.
Billy Mitchell is an orange order supporting former UKIP candidate with a long track record of spouting extremely right-wing British nationalist bile. Wings Over Scotland has more details on the four appearances, and Billy's extraordinary bigoted, sectarian, British nationalist, pro-Trump, anti-EU, pro-Putin, orange order, creationist views.
Of course a minority of the Scottish public are actually orange order supporting sectarian bigots like Billy, and they should be allowed to express their views (even if they are despicable) but how on earth have the BBC decided that this tiny sectarian demographic in Scotland should be represented by the same man as if he's just a random member of the public rather than someone they've repeatedly selected to represent orange order bigotry on national television?
The odds against being selected to speak on the show more than once are very high, but when someone's been selected as a speaking audience member on at least three occasions the odds are simply too high for it to be a coincidence.
But there's no need to rely on the mathematical improbability of being selected as a speaking member of the audience on so many occasions, because pictures from before the show reveal Billy the bigot getting offscreen access to at least one member of the Question Time panel (something that isn't supposed to happen according to the show's own rules).
There is clearly a very serious problem with the methodology the BBC are using to determine the makeup of Question Time audiences, and to decide which audience members get picked to ask questions of the panel.
And there's obviously a very serious problem with their selective enforcement of their own rules when it comes to certain politically partisan far-right audience members being given off air access to the panel before the show, whilst ordinary members of the public are expected to abide by the rules.
The woman in charge of picking the Question Time audience is Alison Fuller Pedley who has an extraordinary track record of controversy including sharing Britain First content on her (now deleted) Facebook page, colluding with a UKIP councillor to bring Question Time to his home town, inviting the EDL street thuggery group to appear in the Question Time audience, and following the Facebook page of an extreme-right hate mob called the British Patriot Front.
Whether she's a far right fanatic pushing her own personal agenda onto the show, or someone actively working to push extremist far-right ideas into mainstream political discourse it's appalling either way.
But as is the way with big institutions, whenever people complain about her antics, or the obviously partisan audience selections the BBC go into 'circle the wagons' ultra-defensive mode. And whenever people ask about the exact process they use for deciding the balance of audience members on their politics shows, they refuse the Freedom of Information requests.
The BBC has a "closed box" approach to their methodology for picking audience members and which audience members get to speak, the woman who runs this process has a concerning history of far-right activity, and they've just been caught red-handed giving an orange order bigot yet another speaking appearance on the show.But given their long track record of ignoring criticism over their lack of political impartiality (including the extraordinary case where they gave a question to an extreme-right fanatic who was facing jail time for a disgusting string of online abuse and death threats) it's highly unlikely that anything will be done to reverse this Question Time trend of deliberately promoting far-right extremist views into mainstream political discourse.
As far as they're concerned far-right political views make cracking publicity for their show, hence the fact that they decided to actually Tweet Billy the Bigot's question, provoking absolute raptures from across the extreme-right online fringe.
Not only do they think they're doing nothing wrong by rigging their audiences and questions in order to push extremist far-right views into the mainstream, they actually see it as their job to do this.
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The Question Time panel for Thursday September 13th 2018 is a clear demonstration that the BBC claims of political impartiality are absolutely ludicrous.
They've managed to stuff their panel with four right-wing pro-austerity figures, countered only by a single left-wing pro-investment figure (and by far the lest famous of the five to boot).
The four right-wing panellists are the Tory government minister Rory Stewart, the Tory party donor Theo Paphitis, the hard-right Daily Mail polemicist and Brexiteer Julia Hartley-Brewer, and former Labour Shadow Chancellor and one of the chief architects of Labour's disastrously unappealing austerity-lite strategy that lost them the 2015 General Election.
Chris Leslie is such an anti-Corbyn right-winger that he's actually starred in a Tory attack ad, which features one of his trademark economically illiterate rants against Labour's agreed manifesto policy of investment-based growth strategies and in favour of even imposing even more ruinous hard-right Tory austerity dogma!
Putting Chris Leslie on the panel means that any discussion of Labour's fantastic manifesto commitment to actually invest in the economy will be marred by the sight of a rebel right-wing pro-austerity Labour MP dynamiting his own party's economic policies!
The one left-wing panellist is the virtually unknown Faiza Shaheen from the centre-left think tank CLASS.
At the 2017 General Election the UK public was absolutely split down the middle when it came to right-wing austerity dogma with the number of people voting for right-wing pro-austerity parties almost exactly matched by those voting for pro-investment parties.
Ever since then the popularity of right-wing austerity dogma has been waning further, with ever more people cottoning on to the fact that austerity was always just a massive Tory wealth transfer con to enrich the mega-rich at the expense of the rest of us.
But the BBC remains absolutely determined to keep the Tory austerity con going by stacking the Question Time panel with as many right-wing pro-austerity figures as they can get away with.
There's little doubt that they'll resort to their usual trick of planting Tory party Councillors/activists in the audience to be given the opportunity to ask ridiculously loaded questions too.
It's absolutely impossible to imagine the BBC ever stacking the Question Time panel 4-1 in favour of left-wing pro-investment figures, but a panel loaded 4-1 in favour of right-wingers is depressingly unexceptional by the BBC's ridiculously biased standards.
The decision to cobble together such a transparently biased Question Time panel makes an absolute mockery of the BBC's claims to political impartiality.
Such transparent political bias at the BBC is unacceptable because they're a public service broadcaster with a duty to impartiality. They're not like the right-wing billionaire-owned propaganda rags like the S*n and the Daily Mail, and they're not like small independent blogs like this one either. They're funded by licence fee payers and they have a public service duty to avoid displays of overt right-wing pro-austerity bias like this.
But the BBC know that the Tory party control their purse strings, and appoint their Board of Directors, so they're going to ignore their obligation to political impartiality, and continue actively promoting hard-right Tory austerity dogma just as hard as the right-wing propaganda rags do.
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When the extreme-right hate-monger Jonathan Jennings was jailed the BBC ran a short piece on their website about his 16 month sentence for multiple offences between March and August 2017, which included extreme anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic abuse and a threat to kill Jeremy Corbyn.
One thing the BBC somehow 'forgot' to mention in their article was that this extreme-right fanatic was selected by BBC Question Time producers as one of the select few to be awarded a question on live TV in November 2017 (after the abusive messages and death threats he was jailed for).
By November 2017 Jennings' online abuse had already been well documented and reported to the police, but the BBC somehow managed to pick him out of an entire crowd as one of the lucky ones to be given a question.
It beggars belief that the BBC somehow managed to pick one of the most vile extreme-right fanatics in the UK to be be given a question. Even the most cursory of background checks would have come across Jennings' White Genocide podcast and articles like this one detailing his extremist views, like "all those who oppose Donald Trump must be killed".
Whichever way you look at it, the BBC's platforming of this vile individual is unforgivable.
Either they knew about the White Genocide podcast and the Twitter abuse and decided to give him a platform because they believed that extreme-right fanatics like him are more deserving of a question than any of the scores of decent ordinary people in the crowd, or they didn't bother to do the slightest check on who they were awarding airtime to.
Anyone who is familiar with the continual stream of Tory party activists who have been handed headline questions on Question Time must surely suspect that Jennings was not given a question on the show despite his vile extreme-right views, but because of them.
Jennings was so delighted at having been awarded the chance to push for a hard-right "no deal" brexit on national television that he uploaded a clip of his Question Time appearance on his extreme-right White Genocide podcast.
It's hardly a surprise that the BBC 'forgot' to mention the fact that they gave this jailed extreme-right fanatic a platform on national television less than a year ago, because had they (or anyone else in the mainstream media) bothered to mention it, surely people would be demanding an investigation into how on earth it happened, and whether the show's producers were aware of his extreme-right activities when they made the decision to put him on air.
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David Dimbleby picked a member of the BBC Question Time audience to speak, and what came out of the young man's mouth sounded suspiciously like a poorly drafted Tory party press release about what a great job Theresa May is doing under difficult circumstances.
The reason this impassioned plea for the country to get behind Theresa May's Brexit plans sounded more like a Tory party statement than the thoughts of a random member of the public is that the guy who was invited to speak was Alexander Maughan, a Tory party councillor from Lincolnshire.
This is far from the first time a serving Tory politician has masqueraded as an ordinary member of the public to spread pro-Tory propaganda on Question Time. There was the Tory Councillor Eric Holfield who spewed anti-Labour scare stories shortly before the General Election in 2017, and just a few episodes ago there was Christian Stevens, a UKIP-turned-Tory councillor from Horley who desperately tried to whitewash the Tories appalling track record of mistreating disabled people.
On none of these occasions did the Tory plant identify themselves as a Conservative politician rather than the random member of the public they were posing as.
Once would be an embarrassment for the BBC, but these deceptions just keep on happening.
Question Time is right-wing biased enough already without this effort to infest the audience with pro-Tory plants. The show almost always consists of four neoliberal pro-austerity panellists lining up against a solitary progressive voice, and to make matters worse the host David Dimbleby has an appalling habit of repeatedly interrupting non-Tories, and allowing right-wing panel members to interrupt too.
The BBC make such a big deal out of their supposed neutrality, but they're completely unwilling to provide a fair balance between purveyors of pro-austerity dogma and pro-investment voices in their political coverage, and that's highly unlikely to change any time soon.
However they really do have to get a grip on the Tory plant problem, and make sure that every audience member who is invited to speak on the show is vetted beforehand to ensure that they're not political plants.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
The new Tory housing minister Dominic Raab is a liar. He appeared on BBC Question Time on January 11th 2018 and told a glaring lie to the British people.
His lie was an absurd claim that the NHS has more beds than ever.
Anyone who has paid the remotest attention to the Tory vandalism of the NHS that has been going on since 2010 will have been aware of the dozens of NHS facilities that have been shut down and downgraded under their so-called cost-cutting measures.
How could there be more beds than ever as Raab claimed when the Tories have been closing and stripping back so many NHS services you may well ask.
The answer is that Dominic Raab was lying through his teeth, and that there are actually 17,000 fewer hospital beds than when the Tories came to power in 2010.
In fact the current collapse in the number of NHS is the second Tory wave of bed closures following their previous funding assault on the NHS between 1979 and 1997. In reality the number of available NHS beds has almost halved in the last 30 years.
So at a time of rising demand for NHS services as a result of our ageing population, the Tory government has overseen a dramatic decline in the number of NHS hospital beds. But rather than apologise for it, Raab decided to reverse reality and lie that there are more hospital beds than ever.
Ever since Raab's (brazen and obvious) lie was exposed, he's been refusing to apologise or offer any attempt to clarify the truth that the number of NHS beds has actually plummeted by 17,000 on his party's watch.
One of the big problems here is the attitude of the mainstream press who repeatedly allow government ministers to get away with endlessly spewing this type of easily disprovable lie.
If government ministers were faced by a barrage of demands that they admit the truth and apologise for lying, they'd pretty soon learn to be more careful about what they say.
But the next time Raab is interviewed or appears on the television you can be almost certain that the interviewer won't remind him of the lie he told to the British people or demand that he apologises for it.
If throwaway lies like this costed politicians and their party more in negative publicity than they could ever gain by using them, they'd soon stop lying of their own volition, or be pressurised into avoiding such brazen lies by their political parties.
The problem of course is that the mainstream media is rammed full of wealthy privileged toffs from the same elitist backgrounds, private fee-paying schools, and Oxbridge colleges as the politicians they pretend to be holding to account.
Mainstream media hacks know that forcing politicians to apologise for their provable lies would make great telly in the short-term, but they also know that they'd get soon blacklisted and denied special access to the Westminster elitists if they behaved like that.
If mainstream media hacks want easy access to politicians, and strategic leaks, and the latest word on rumours in the Westminster village, then they know they have to act with the deference and subservience demanded of them by the political elitists.
The subservience of the mainstream media is one of the main reasons government ministers like Dominic Raab feel so at ease lying to the British public, and the main reason you're highly unlikely to see any mainstream media interviewer forcing him to admit that he lied and suggesting that he apologise for it and set the record straight by admitting the truth.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
The bald man in the BBC Question Time audience demanded answers from the Labour shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry, but he wasn't remotely interested in what she had to say, because he'd already diligently rote learned his political opinions from the right-wing media.
When he said "I'd like to hear an example of a country where Corbyn and McDonnell's ideas have worked" you might have imagined that he was interested in listening to the answer, but when Thornberry replied "most of central Europe" and when pressed to name specific countries she said "Germany" and "Sweden" he sneered derisively as if she was the delusional one.
Thornberry's response elicited cackling and sneering from the Tory tribailists in the BBC audience, but that just goes to show how these people have been led like sheep into believing that Jeremy Corbyn is some kind of terrifying left-wing extremist, rather than a centre-left democratic socialist who is proposing economic policies that are perfectly normal across Europe and the rest of the developed world.
Of course there is no country on Earth where a government has come to power and enacted absolutely everything in the Labour Party manifesto, but significant elements of Labour's economic policies are absolutely commonplace across the developed world.
One of Jeremy Corbyn's most prominent headline policies is the abolition of tuition fees (which should more accurately be described as Aspiration Taxes) and making university education free. University education is free (or very low cost) across most of Europe, including Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and let's not forget Scotland either. If Germany and Scotland can afford to offer free university education, why can't England?
Jeremy Corbyn wants to reverse the extreme Tory cuts to Corporation Tax that have been going on since 2010. He plans to increase the rate for major corporations to 26%, while setting a lower rate of 21% for small corporations. 26% would still be the lowest rate in the G7 advanced economies, which means Corbyn's tax policies are so far from being extreme-left that they're actually more pro-corporate than the USA, France, Germany, Japan, Italy and Canada!
One of Corbyn and McDonnell's most interesting ideas is the establishment of a National Investment Bank in order to fund future infrastructure projects. Other countries that have National Investment Banks/Sovereign Wealth Funds include Norway, Singapore, South Korea, Australia, and the Chinese economic powerhouse actually has several.
The Labour Party Manifesto pledged to renationalise the National Grid. Some might see this as radical leftist extremism, but they'd have to be utterly clueless to have been bamboozled into such a position by the right-wing dominated media, because the United States actually has a network of not-for-profit publicly accountable electricity distribution grids.
Perhaps if you're so rabidly right-wing that you think Texas is an extreme-left state awash with commies and Marxists you might believe that Corbyn's energy policies are extreme-left, or maybe you've got some semblance of a grip on political reality?
Corbyn and McDonnell also want to renationalise the railways. There are several countries in the developed world with national rail companies including France, Norway, Singapore, Hong Kong and Italy. The really interesting thing is that under the Tories' shambolic privatisation agenda these foreign state rail companies are actually running 74% of the franchises on the UK rail network, and the only country that is banned from bidding to run UK rail franchises is the UK itself.
Perhaps a more pertinent question when it comes to national rail networks wouldn't be where else do they have publicly owned railways, but where else have they managed to make such a godawful, inefficient, and ideologically-incoherent mess of their rail network?
Another Labour Manifesto pledge was to bring the Royal Mail back under public ownership. Other countries with national mail systems include Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, and Finland.
Then there's the policy of reversing the Tory strategy of carving up the NHS and distributing the pieces to profiteering corporations (including corporations run by major Tory party donors). You don't have to look very far for an example of a successful not-for-profit public health system. The NHS itself was doing brilliantly before the Tories set about vandalising it. The NHS was ranked as the most efficient health service in the world, and had the highest approval ratings ever, then the Tories imposed huge austerity cuts and imposed a massive top down reorganisation called the 2012 Health and Social Care Act. Since then waiting times have skyrocketed, huge numbers of A&E units, maternity wards and walk in centres have been axed (often against furious local opposition), NHS staff are overworked, underpaid and demoralised and huge numbers of people are dying as a consequence.
The truth is that we don't have to look abroad for evidence that Labour's policies work, we just have to look at the devastating ideological vandalism the Tories are inflicting on the NHS, and recognise that Labour have pledged to stop the vandalism and set about reversing the damage.
The problem of course is that vast numbers of people are so shockingly gullible that they simply believe what the mainstream media tell them about Jeremy Corbyn being some kind of terrifying leftist bogeyman with bonkers extreme-left policies. They're unwilling to even consider the fact that most of Corbyn's headline economic policies are commonplace across the developed world, and in fact it's radically right-wing Tory policies like handing control of state schools to private sector pseudo-charities, privatising police services, and vandalising the health system that are desperately unpopular, and pretty bloody rare in successful developed economies.
So the big question has to be how do we reach out to people who are so damned gullible that they uncritically rote learn the mainstream media propaganda about Jeremy Corbyn being an extreme-left bogeyman, and sneer derisively when anyone points out the fact that Corbyn's policies are absolutely commonplace across the developed world while the Tories are the ideological extremists?
How do we reach out to people who prefer to believe in mainstream media lies than in observable reality?
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
If you watched BBC Question Time on Thursday November 9th 2017 you will have seen a Tory plant in the audience bridling with faux outrage at the accusation that the Tory government is responsible for the mistreatment of disabled people. Here's a clip of the encounter.
The audience member in question is the Tory councillor for Horley Central in Surrey, although he used to be a Ukipper until he saw the political tide turning and opportunistically jumped ship to join the Tories.
The Ukipper-turned-Tory (blue-kip) councillor furiously condemned Aditya Chakrabortty as "the Donald Trump of the left" for daring to highlight the Tory track record of mistreating disabled people.
Given that the Tory plant in the audience was basically trying to deny the appalling Tory track record of mistreating sick and disabled people as "inflammatory rubbish", it's obvious that he's actually the one using reality-denying Trump-style rhetoric to render uncomfortable truths as "fake news". But by now we should all be well aware that accusing your opponents of what you're guilty of yourself has always been one of the classic right-wing propaganda tactics.
Here's a list of issues that the Blue-kip plant in the BBC audience was trying to publicly deny.
- Appeals against botched WCA rulings have been costing £50 million a year. The Tory government have ensured that this cost is paid for by the taxpayer, not the profiteering corporations that made the botched assessments in the first place.
- A United Nations investigation into the treatment of disabled people in the UK found that the UK government was committing "grave and systematic violations" of disabled people's rights.
- The Tory party claimed to be scrapping the Disability Living Allowance (DLA) and replacing it with Personal Independence Payments (PIP) in order to make sure the money went to the right people, but in April 2017 they slashed PIP payments by 33% using the perverse excuse that this would incentivise them to find work (despite there being no evidence whatever to back up this claim).
- Since 2010 the Tories have had seven different disability ministers in seven years, with most of them using the position as nothing more than a stepping stone to higher positions in government, rather than doing anything to actually help disabled people. The latest Tory disability minister Sarah Newton has a shocking track record of voting against the interests of disabled people.
The mainstream media has given this disgusting Tory track record only a tiny fraction of the attention it deserves, so people can be forgiven for not knowing all of it. However, you would have to have spent the last seven years living in a lead box to not be aware of any of this stuff.
The fact is that when it comes to election time, Conservative voters are aware that the most vulnerable people in society suffer under Tory rule, but in the grim amoral calculus they perform in their minds, the suffering, destitution and actual deaths of disabled people are somehow a price worth paying for whatever (probably imaginary) benefit they think they'd be getting by electing a Tory government.
Of course the majority of the blame is shouldered by the Tory politicians who voted in favour of these horrifying policies, and cynically used the role of Disability Minister as a temporary stepping stone to other things instead of trying to actually help disabled people, but Tory voters are not exempt from blame because by endorsing the Tory party, they're complicit in allowing this disgraceful systematic abuse of disabled people to continue.
It doesn't matter how much blustering faux outrage and denials of reality people like Chris Stevens utter, the fact is simple: People who vote Tory are guilty of voting in favour of more suffering for sick and disabled people.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
