BBC Bias Digest

News-Watch

05:37 am
13 March 2025
News-watch calls for scrapping of ‘biased’ BBC complaints system

News-watch calls for scrapping of ‘biased’ BBC complaints system

BBC Bias, BBC Trust | | by David Keighley

News-watch has told culture minister John Whittingdale’s review of the BBC  that the current BBC complaints system is not fit for purpose.

The 10,000 word submission argues that it should be replaced by scrutiny through a completely independent body.

It provides comprehensive evidence – from News-watch’s own experience of submitting complaints – that the Trustees, who police BBC impartiality and have overall responsibility for complaints, are too much in the sway of BBC management and are not robustly independent.

The introduction to the submission states:

“News-watch  has unique experience over the past 16 years in dealing with the BBC about issues of impartiality relating especially to the coverage of the affairs of the European Union[1].  We have found that the current structure of BBC governance favours too much the interests of the BBC itself, is not properly independent, and, because of multiple operational inadequacies, is not fit for purpose. There is brick-wall negativity in dealing with complaints[2].

The Trustees have obdurately and unreasonably refused to accept extensive evidence that the EU-related output has continuing serious shortcomings of the type first highlighted in the Lord Wilson of Dinton report of 2005.

The findings of News-watch, based on the systematic monitoring of BBC output and analysis using rigorous academic methodology, include: under-representation and poor understanding of the eurosceptic perspective, a continual tendency to view the European Union through the prism of Conservative splits, a failure to discuss properly the case for withdrawal, and severe under-reporting of EU affairs, to the extent that it is ‘bias by omission’.”

Full report here.

 

[1] News-watch has been analysing BBC output on a structured basis, in accordance with academic practice of media monitoring, since 1999.

More than 6,000 hours of news and current affairs programmes have been systematically logged and analysed on a regular basis through longitudinal surveys. It is arguably the largest research project ever undertaken into BBC output.  An archive of this work is here: www.news-watch.co.uk/archive .
[2] In 2014, according to the Trustees’ complaints bulletin, only nine complaints out of 144 considered by the Editorial Standards Committee were upheld.

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BBC PLUMBS NEW DEPTHS OF CLIMATE ALARMISM IN EMMA THOMPSON ‘INTERVIEW’

BBC PLUMBS NEW DEPTHS OF CLIMATE ALARMISM IN EMMA THOMPSON ‘INTERVIEW’

BBC Bias, Newsnight | | by David Keighley

An interview on Newsnight of the actress and Labour-supporter Emma Thompson has taken the BBC’s handling of climate alarmism to new depths of shoddy and biased journalism.

Under the editorship of ex-Guardian man Ian Katz, this type of celebrity interview – in which the subject is given virtual carte blanche to put across highly questionable leftist views – has become a regular feature. Here, for example, it was Russell Brand.

For years, the Corporation’s approach to climate reporting has been deliberately and systematically skewed against those who are sceptical about alarmism.

The grossly biased stance was decided by the BBC Trustees and became official editorial policy back in 2011. Since then, the output in all programmes, from news and current affairs to drama, has been hinged to a massive extent upon the mantra that unless we massively curb carbon dioxide output we are doomed.

The policy is so absolute that one appearance by a ‘sceptic’, such as that by the Daily Mail’s Quentin Letts, when he dared to question elements of the prevailing orthodoxy, is met with an internal inquiry and fits of apoplexy by those – such as the BBC’s former ‘environment’ correspondent , Richard Black, now a prominent eco-campaigner- who claim to know with certainty that we are all going to fry.

Meanwhile, as another indicator of how deeply alarmism is engrained in BBC reporting, the Corporation’s overseas aid charity arm,   Media Action, is engaged in extensive operations throughout the world to spread climate alarm in every way it can, while at the same time encouraging developing countries to resent Britain and the West generally for causing the alleged problem.

The latest example of this BBC worship at the altar of climate alarmism was the appearance last Wednesday by Ms Thompson.

Thompson, it should first be said, has become one of the most prominent media supporters of the law-breaking ‘charity’ Greenpeace, as is evidenced here in the pages of the Guardian. She is also a declared life-long member of the Labour party, supports Action Aid, a development charity that is as strident as Greenpeace in its climate alarmism, and is also strongly pro-Palestinian (and thus anti-Israel).

The peg for her appearance was an event that was scarcely reported elsewhere, the decision by Greenpeace to place a giant polar bear outside the HQ of Shell in London in their bid to try prevent the company from drilling for oil in the Arctic.   She did not deign to come live into the Newsnight studios, and rather, presenter Emily Maitlis treated her throughout the recorded exchange as if she was a highly respected dignitary with immense status.

The full transcript is below.

The first question was if Thompson thought she could negotiate with the ‘oil giant’. The essence of Thompson’s answer was that Shell were liars, there was no point in negotiating and ‘if you look at the science’ their drilling for oil would lead to a 4C rise in temperature by 2030.

Maitlis then asked whether there was a path for Thompson ‘to the president of the US’. She replied that she could try, but it would be pointless because governments were in the pockets of big oil.

Next was whether it would help the Greenpeace Arctic campaign if she got arrested. Thompson agreed that arrests were useful publicity for Greenpeace. But she was sure it wouldn’t happen because the legions of Shell PR people ‘in their big buildings’ would bust a gut to prevent it.

Ms Thompson didn’t say it, but she clearly believed they had battalions in the wings ready to do anything to avoid the ruinous impact of a ‘Thompson arrest’ pic.

Finally (in questions about climate), Ms Maitlis wondered how she could choose to demonstrate for Greenpeace when the refugee ‘crisis’ was so pressing. Thompson said the two topics were profoundly connected. She asserted that if climate change was allowed to ‘go on as it’s going’, the current refugee crisis would soon look like a tea party because ‘there are going to be entire swathes of the Earth that would become uninhabitable, and where are those people going to go? We are looking at a human disaster of proportions we can’t imagine’.

Even by the BBC standards this was bad journalism:

In summary, the BBC’s self-declared flagship television news and current affairs programme broadcast inaccurate preposterous propaganda from a woman who is a self-declared activist. There was no effort to challenge her views even though they were obviously extreme.

Of course, the BBC has a duty to give voice to all parts of the sides of public debate. The reality in the climate alarmism stakes, however, is that those in favour are given free rein – to the point of absurdity – while those who think differently are simply not invited to take part.

A ruling last year by the BBC complaints department said that Lord Lawson should not be allowed to discuss climate change on an equal footing to ‘experts’ who believed in alarmism because he himself was not a climate scientist. On which grounds was Emma Thompson, an English graduate from Cambridge, allowed on Newsnight to spout utter nonsense?

Because her views chime with those of Ian Katz?

Transcript:

 

EMILY MAITLIS:     Well, one voice unambiguous in her support of this country bringing in more refugees is the actress, Emma Thompson, whose own adopted son was a refugee from Rwanda. She was about 4 o’clock this morning helping bring life to a giant polar bear, Aurora, who she and some 60 other Greenpeace campaigners took to the Shall Centre on London’s South bank to protest against Arctic drilling. I caught up with her earlier and asked whether she believed she could negotiate with the oil giant.

EMMA THOMPSON:            No, because we’ve been negotiating with Shell for years, and there’s been so much obfuscation and so many lies actually, and so much green-wash, they’ve absolutely put lip-service to ‘Yes, yes, we’re interested in renewables, yes, yes, yes’, but they’ve continued without cessation to extract, and they’ve continued their plans to drill in the Arctic. They have plans to drill until 2030, and if they take out of the earth all the oil they wanted to take out, you look at the science, our temperature will rise 4°C by 2030, and that’s not sustainable.

EM:         Is there a path for you straight to the president of the US?

ET:           Well, I could try ringing him . . . I suppose. But I don’t think that that would help, I think that successive governments including his have been too much in the pockets of the big oil companies. I think it’s very difficult for governments to break away from that.

EM:         Would be useful for you, on a matter of the Arctic for example, to get yourself arrested? Does that sound useful?

ET:           It depends I suppose, I mean, today, I would have been, I suppose, a good news story Greenpeace, and arrests are useful to them. I could just hear the sort of distant sound of all the PR people in the shell offices in the big buildings, going ‘Don’t arrest her, do not arrest the big mouth, please don’t (words unclear) don’t do that.’ So they didn’t.

EM:         How do you choose? I mean, there will be people watching this saying there are currently thousands of people drowning in the Mediterranean, what odds timing to go and talk about Arctic and oil, and the environment?

ET:           Hmm.

EM:         As opposed to, you know, what Britain has to do about the refugee crisis.

ET:           No, I’m really glad that you’ve brought that up, because of course it’s profoundly connected. Our refugee crisis which, let me tell you, if we allow climate change to go on as it’s going, the refugee crisis we have at the moment will look like a tea party compared to what’s going to happen in a few years’ time, because if we allow climate change to continue, there are going to be entire swathes of the Earth that will become uninhabitable, and where are those people going to go? Where do we think they’re going to go? We are looking at humanitarian disaster . . . of . . . proportions we simply can’t imagine.

EM:         So, is that still the answer to the refugees drowning in the Mediterranean today, this week?

ET:           Today, this week, the answer to the refugees drowning in the (slight laughter in voice) Mediterranean is that, is not that, no, it’s to do with bringing in, we have to open our doors certainly to more refugees. The idea of 3000 people in Calais you’ve been through unspeakable things, I mean, makes me feel very ashamed.

EM:         So why do you think we’re not doing it, (words unclear, ‘this time round’?) I mean, you’ve got Germany who seems to be opening its doors and you’ve got . . .

ET:           (interrupting) 800,000.

EM:         The UK . . . that isn’t.

ET:           No. It’s not good enough. And also where not even meeting our quotas, that’s really shaming. Erm, so . . . I think it’s got a lot to do with racism. I think if these people were white, Europeans, that were coming from some dictatorship in Bosnia or somewhere where . . . if they were coming, turning up, I think we would feel quite differently about it. And I think that it is the mark of a civilised and . . . a skilful and humane society, and I use the word ‘skilful’ advisedly because we’re so unskilled in our responses to strangers on our shores.

EM:         Who needs to be the powerful voice that says, erm, what’s happening now . . . is not working?

ET:           Well, you know, it’s a very good question, but I mean, I would hope that there were statesmen and women out there with the kind of . . . sense of decency . . . of common humanity out there, who would find it possible and indeed incumbent upon them to stand up and say ‘We need to help these people’, they’re not just . . . coming over here because they want an easy ride, they’ve been through hell. There’s 3000 of them in Calais – that’s nothing. We’ve got plenty of room for them.

EM:         You’re on record as being a Labour supporter, clearly your heart is with a lot of green issues, is this a moment where you feel more pulled towards the Labour Party than the Green Party?

ET:           I’m very torn . . . I mean the Labour Party have been . . . useless actually on green issues, but I think Corbyn’s quite, quite sound on them. We can’t open the mines again, sorry about that, but it’s the dirtiest energy there is, but, but I think he is very sound and that he would be very, erm, intelligent and face . . . he would be willing to face the transition that we are all going to have to face.

EM:         And do you think Labour could get into power with Jeremy Corbyn?

ET:           Erm . . . yeah. I do.

EM:         Emma Thompson, speaking to me earlier.

 

 

NEWS-WATCH SURVEY: MASSIVE BIAS BY OMISSION OF EU ISSUES IN BBC GENERAL ELECTION COVERAGE

NEWS-WATCH SURVEY: MASSIVE BIAS BY OMISSION OF EU ISSUES IN BBC GENERAL ELECTION COVERAGE

2015 General Election, BBC Bias, UKIP | | by David Keighley

Analysis by News-watch of the BBC’s EU-related general election coverage in selected flagship news programmes reveals massive bias by omission.

There was a failure to explain in any depth the EU-related policies of the main parties, despite the fact that the United Kingdom’s future relationship with the EU were a central part of election manifestos.

For example, questioning of David Cameron about the Conservative proposals to re-negotiate the terms of EU membership  amounted to only four minutes over the entire election campaign.

And UKIP’s policy of withdrawal from the EU was the subject of only a handful of questions. Coverage of withdrawal  itself  was swamped by consideration of the potential shortcomings of the main party supporting it.

David Keighley, managing director of News-watch, said:  “The BBC of course has a duty to report the skirmishing of election campaigns. But as the main public service broadcaster it also must ensure that audiences are properly informed of key election issues. It seems that the reverse was the case. Explanation of the EU policies was very limited indeed.”

Below in full is the executive summary of the preliminary findings of the report. You can read the full report here:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

News-watch research indicates that across the four highest-profile BBC news and current affairs programmes, coverage of the EU during the 2015 General Election between March 30 and May 10 was extremely limited and did not sufficiently convey to audiences the issues involved.

Policies and attitudes towards the EU were a central point of difference between the political parties, with their respective approaches potentially having a huge impact on the UK, but this was not reflected in coverage.

Especially, the analysis shows that the issue of possible withdrawal was not explored fairly or deeply enough. The possibility of withdrawal was central in both Ukip and Conservative EU policy. Coverage was heavily distorted, for instance by the substantial business news comment on the Today programme that withdrawal would damage British trade and jobs.

The message of potential damage to the economy was supplemented by the provision of frequent platforms for Labour and Liberal Democrat figures to warn of the same dangers. The spokesmen from these parties were not properly challenged on their views.

On the other hand, the only advocates of withdrawal who made points on that subject – apart from one brief sequence involving the Socialist Labour party and a minor mention by the former leader of the BNP – were from Ukip. But the main editorial focus on the party was whether they were competent or potentially racist and this clouded the treatment of withdrawal as an issue in itself.

In response to the Wilson report , the BBC promised to ensure that coverage of the EU was treated as important, and would include detailed explanation which ensured that audiences were fully abreast of the complex issues involved. But analysis by News-watch, based on the monitoring throughout the campaign of BBC News at Ten, Radio 4’s Today, and World at One and BBC2’s Newsnight, shows that this was not the case.

A major point here is that across the four programmes, coverage of EU-related election material amounted to only to 3.1% of the available programme airtime, a cumulative total of around 4 hours out of 130 hours of total programme time.

The key findings of this preliminary survey are:

Overall, there was only minimal editorial effort to explain to the audience what the respective party policies meant. This is best illustrated by the fact that Labour leader Ed Miliband was not interviewed at all about his EU-related election policies. When Mishal Husain (Today) and Evan Davis (Newsnight) interviewed Nigel Farage, no direct question were put to him about EU withdrawal or policy. David Cameron was interviewed by John Humphrys – but there were only four brief questions about the EU, and this portion of the exchange lasted only four minutes. The only questions put to Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg were whether he agreed that holding a referendum in 2017 would be damaging to the British economy and whether he would join a coalition which supported the holding of a referendum.

The Conservative party’s core policy was renegotiation of the relationship with the EU, followed by an in/out referendum. These bare facts were conveyed to audiences, but there was little of substance beyond that. David Cameron and George Osborne were asked a few questions which included whether uncertainty about the EU would lead to a loss of trade, and whether their policies were actually an attempt to placate anti-EU backbenchers. But there was no attempt to ask them to explain their decision to a hold a referendum, or what the poll would mean for voters and the United Kingdom .

Labour policy on the EU was that there should be a more enthusiastic engagement, a referendum should be denied unless there was treaty change, and that the Conservative approach was a major risk to jobs and investment. Their basic stance to the EU was explored briefly, but there was no attempt to ask what such enthusiastic adherence to the EU actually entailed. More Labour figures than Conservatives appeared on EU themes, and a handful of adversarial questions – such as why the public should not be trusted to vote on EU membership and why Ed Miliband had not talked more about foreign policy – posed to them, but the interrogation was superficial and limited. Labour figures had frequent brief platforms from which to attack Conservative policies and were not challenged in their views.

The Liberal Democrats were asked only whether they agreed with holding a referendum in 2017, and later in the campaign, whether they would join a Conservative coalition which included a referendum promise. As with Labour, there were frequent soundbites from party spokesmen who attacked Conservative and Ukip policies towards the EU.

Most of the questioning of Ukip did not relate to the party’s core policy of withdrawal from the EU, but was about their competence or attitudes towards race and immigration. Party spokesmen had the opportunity to make a handful of key points about the EU – such as that the UK could leave the EU and subsequently have a trading relationship with it. But editorial effort was minimal, and on the day of the launch of the Ukip manifesto, more focus was on telling audiences that Mr Farage had called the 2010 manifesto ‘drivel’ than conveying what was in the 2015 version.

A further major issue was business coverage. Throughout the campaign, there was a focus on interviewing business and political figures who believed that leaving the EU would be damaging to business in the UK. For instance, the Today programme interviewed only four guests who spoke in favour of the Conservative referendum policy, or who more broadly supported EU reform, and 18 speakers who saw the proposed referendum as a threat or a worry to business. There was not a single contribution from any speaker who believed that withdrawal from the EU would benefit British business. This frequent one-sided reporting amplified the suggestion that there was strong opposition to both the referendum and withdrawal. Put bluntly, it was an extra and sustained strand of bias against the policies of both the Conservative and Ukip parties, and against withdrawal as an issue in its own right.

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BBC Reform? Don’t Hold Your Breath

BBC Reform? Don’t Hold Your Breath

2015 General Election, BBC Bias, BBC Trust | | by David Keighley

Is the government planning radical reform the BBC? Don’t hold your breath.

Despite a bit of high-profile sabre-rattling, and intensifying speculation in the press based on ‘government leaks’ that this is on the cards, the answer is probably a huge resounding ‘no’.

Figures close to new culture secretary John Wittingdale have clearly been the source of the recent rumours about reform. It has now emerged that a green paper on the subject is due within the next few weeks.

Sounds good, but dig deeper and all that is on the agenda, it seems, is a bit of tinkering: minor reform of and continued pegging (not abolition) of the licence fee, together with privatisation of BBC Worldwide and of some production facilities.

Also mooted is the scrapping after only eight years of the useless BBC Trustees. Even Sir Michael Lyons, the Labour- supporting former BBC chairman, now wants shot of them.

The end result of this limited fudge? The BBC will soldier on a bit bruised – and maybe slightly slimmer and smaller – but essentially the same: an arrogant, corpulent and reactionary presence at the heart of a media landscape that is otherwise fizzing with ideas that could energise our culture and our democracy.

If this really is the scale of the Conservative vision for the reform of public service broadcasting, it’s deeply depressing.

Point One: Nothing short of complete abolition of the current fee and a change to subscription funding will alter the outlook of the Corporation and cease the flow of propaganda. They need to be subject to the disciplines of the market-place.

Point two: Abolishing the BBC Trustees and handing regulation to Ofcom – the route apparently also favoured by George Osborne, who declared his support back in March – won’t change a thing. Key figures on the Ofcom board, the chairman (Dame Patricia Hodgson, who spent thirty years at the BBC before being forced to jump ship by Greg Dyke in 2000) and the man in charge of content regulation (Tim Gardam) are both BBC veterans who spent decades at the Corporation before acquiring their current cushy posts. They will staunchly defend the lefty propaganda emanating from the BBC in exactly the same way the Trustees do because they are wilfully blind to it.

What is needed instead is genuinely independent, robust regulation that forces the BBC to be properly independent in its outlook, and to make sure that every penny of spending is properly focused on generating creativity and content that is in tune with British culture, audience tastes and interests.

Point three: Privatising BBC facilities won’t dilute the massive stultifying influence the Corporation exerts over the UK’s media scene. What is needed is genuine competition so that creativity can flourish. A lion’s share of the money that the public have for television entertainment goes directly and automatically to the BBC coffers; until this changes, innovation from independent players in the business is stifled. For its part, the BBC remains a massive feudal-style dispenser of cash and patronage.

The only conclusion to draw from this half-hearted menu is that in reality, the government does not want real reform. The renewal of the BBC’s Royal Charter due in 2017 is a once-in a-decade opportunity, but what’s apparently so far on the drawing board is only a pathetic fudge that will, in effect, maintain the status quo for yet another ten years.

Why? Well David Cameron and George Osborne desperately want a ‘yes’ vote in the forthcoming referendum. So why would they plan to hobble the best propaganda channel they have?

Research by News-watch indicates that their relentless deluge of pre-EU sentiment – and patronising denigration of anyone who puts an alternative view – continued unabated during the General Election. With Cameron’s attempts at renegotiation hitting the buffers this week, he will be praying for all the help he can get – especially from the experts, the BBC.

 

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Kathy Gyngell: How would the BBC cope if it didn’t have Hezza to fuel Tory Europe splits?

Kathy Gyngell: How would the BBC cope if it didn’t have Hezza to fuel Tory Europe splits?

BBC Bias, Conservative Party, EU Referendum | | by Kathy Gyngell

The BBC’s approach to EU coverage is pretty much on the lines of a word association game.

EU – Conservative Party – split – europhiles – Michael Heseltine – Ken Clarke – reasonable – superior –  prime time. 

Eurosceptics – extreme – xenophobic – inferior – marginalise – diss – interrupt.

Labour  – unified – no story – splits –  never – Tony Benn – past – irrelevant.

That is how it was in 1999 when I started on a BBC/ EU coverage monitoring and transcribing project with David Keighley for Global Britain.  And that is how it still is today.

Yesterday, in fact, on Sunday morning, it was back to the future with Andrew Marr (about 20 minutes in to the programme for anyone who can be bothered to watch):

“When it comes to the great Conservative Party debate over Europe,” Marr assured us, “there is nobody who knows the territory better than Lord Heseltine.”

For those of you too young to have been wearied by the tedious and pompous pontifications of this particular peer on the BBC over the years, Lord Heseltine was Deputy Prime Minister under John Major in the 1990s. He retired from his seat and has not been active in politics since 2001. Not that that has diluted his incestuous relationship with the BBC.

They love him because he is an unreconstructed Europhile.

Despite the old boy looking a shadow of his former self, Mr Andrew Deference Marr did his best to big him up:

“He confronted Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s; he stood at John Major’s side in the 1990s and he’s continued vigorously to make the case for Britain to be at the heart of the EU.”

This latter point was, of course, being entirely thanks to the BBC for the permanent platform they’ve offered him for the last 14 years – not mentioned I might add.

Marr then encouraged the old dinosaur to witter on for 6 minutes until he produced the line he was looking for – for the end of programme news headline:

‘Lord Heseltine told this programme that David Cameron was right to tackle the issue of immigration (Is he tackling it? Ed) but he had a warning for the Conservatives: “It is very complex … he (Mr Cameron) is more likely to be successful if the people he’s negotiating with feel he has he backing of the party that he leads.”

The only conceivable reason for having him on – since he is not active in politics any more – is when he can be used to highlight ‘Tory splits’.

One thing those canny BBC news producers can rely on is that he will diss whatever the Eurosceptics are currently doing.

No surprise then that nothing that former Cabinet Minister Owen Paterson – who appeared later in the programme – could say was going to make the headlines – however strong his critique of Britain’s current relationship with the EU. Not even his revelation that Britain, still a great global trading nation, is now represented in world trade councils via the EU by a female former psychiatric nurse from Sweden – no doubt a great expert on trade – demonstrating just how much power over our own affairs we have ceded.

It gets worse. Not content with digging Lord H out of the woodwork the BBC ignored Kate Hoey’s incendiary article in the Mail on Sunday – incendiary for the Labour Party that is – on her Brexit advocacy and on her searing critique of the Labour leadership candidates’ failure to understand why the party lost votes to Ukip.

Was she on Andrew Marr’s sofa? Of course not. Just an obscure SNP MP John Nicholson and Marr’s favourite liberal leftie, self-regarding Shami Chakrabarti.

But then, according to the BBC, the Labour Party is never split on Europe. How convenient since that means it cannot be newsworthy that Kate has criticised Labour for being so pro-EU that its sceptical members aren’t taken seriously.

Yet Kate is one of about 20-30 Labour MPs who want to exit the EU, along with prominent Labour donor John Mills. Yet another prominent Labour eurosceptic the BBC chose to ignore is Kelvin Hopkins, MP for Luton and former Nalgo official, who was on the EU Scrutiny Committee.

The BBC rarely, if ever, talks to Labour Eurosceptics – in the past or currently. News-watch, who have conducted consistent monitoring of the BBC’s Today output for the last 15 years, told the EU Scrutiny Committee recently that across all the programmes they had surveyed only one in 1,400 speakers on EU affairs was a Labour withdrawalist.

Over the May general election, the only speaker on Today representing  a leftist/socialist  withdrawal position was one Ken Capstick from the Socialist Labour Party (the rump of Arthur Scargill’s operation). The exchange with him lasted an entire 15 seconds

Of course the 20-30 Labour ‘dissenters’ does not compare with the 100+ in the Conservative party, but this does not justify the BBC treating the Labour Party as if it is in complete unison when it is not.

Kate Hoey’s article was significant by any standards because it’s the first time she has gone so prominently on the front foot. Nor will you get any enlightenment on this from BBC website.  On Sunday, there was (of course) a story on Labour going strongly pro-EU on the referendum, but nothing about Kate Hoey.

Plus ca change….

 

This article first appeared on The Conservative Woman

Photo by JULIAN MASON

Trade and Investment – Motion to Take Note

House of Lords Questions | | by Andrew

Trade and Investment
Motion to Take Note
3.06 pm
Moved by Lord Maude of Horsham

To move that this House takes note of Her Majesty’s Government’s support for trade and investment and the contribution such support makes to economic growth.

Lord Pearson of Rannoch: My Lords, it is an honour for me to speak in this debate because it was opened by the noble Lord, Lord Maude, with his maiden speech. I have had a nodding acquaintance with the noble Lord for many years, which from my side has always been respectful, although I suspect that the noble Lord may have sometimes regarded my views on the EU as coming from a rather unruly lower boy at the bottom of the lower fourth. So it is a privilege to be allowed to join the grown-ups today and I promise to be on best behaviour in his honour. Even so, I must pick on one central tenet of the Government’s position on trade and investment in this country, and that is the Government’s support for the

idea that our free trade with the EU and the rest of the world is best secured from within the single market and that that trade and the jobs which depend upon it would be in danger if we left the EU. I suspect that this question—what I call the “3 million jobs” question—will be one of the key battlegrounds in the forthcoming national debate about our EU membership. I have wearied your Lordships several times over many years as to why, given political will, jobs will be created if we leave the EU, if we get rid of the unnecessary EU regulation in our domestic market which comes with that membership, if we keep our trade with the single market and if we expand it in the growing markets of the future. So I will not repeat all the facts and arguments of us “come-outers” as to why we would indeed be better off out of the EU; I suspect that there will be time for that in our coming debates on the referendum and other matters.

However, I would like to take this opportunity to refer the Minister to the briefing notes on the globalbritain.co.uk website. I have recommended these to your Lordships before but I am not sure that Ministers or their officials in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills have yet concentrated on them with the enthusiasm which they deserve. They have the advantage of being very brief, as they are designed for businesspeople, who do not have time for lengthy papers and, using official statistics, they constitute most of the economic case for the UK to leave the EU.

To make the noble Lord’s task easier, I shall pick out just a few of those briefing notes now. For instance, there is No. 82, entitled “Post-withdrawal, agreement on free UK-EU trade is inevitable”. This deals with the central fallacy of those who wish to stay in the EU because they fear that jobs might be lost if we left. These Europhiles, if I may refer to them as such, often give our car industry as a key example of one in which we would face new tariff barriers and so on, and thus lose trade and jobs.

If the Minister reads only one Global Britain briefing note, I recommend that he reads No. 96, entitled, “Post-Brexit, tariff-free UK-EU trade in cars will continue”. It is only one page long, well-spaced out, and most of the print is quite large. Its facts speak for themselves. We import twice as many cars from the EU as we export to it—1.4 million cars are imported and 0.6 million are exported. Of the 1.7 million cars imported into the UK in 2011, 83% were from the EU. EU manufacturers own 53% of the domestic UK car market, the Germans having 32%, with Volkswagen alone having 19%. The Renault Nissan Sunderland plant is the UK’s biggest car exporter, with 37% of all UK car exports. Our case—us Eurosceptics—is that these EU manufacturers will ensure that EU-UK free trade in cars will continue tariff-free in both directions, whatever politicians now pretend.

The EU is of course a customs union, not a free trade area. Briefing note No. 101 shows how customs unions have become an expensive and redundant relic from the 1950s, which is why there are now no significant customs unions left anywhere else in the world. The Minister and his officials might care to absorb, together with briefing note No. 101, briefing note No. 98, which reveals “The Hidden Cost of Exporting to the EU Single Market”—costs borne by an EU member state, such as ourselves, but not by countries outside the EU, such as the USA, China, Japan, South Korea and many others. This note sums up the 10 more respectable cost-benefit analyses over recent years, including one from the French Government’s leading think tank, one from the Swiss Government and even one from our own Treasury in 2005, which between them all put the costs of our EU membership at anything between 4% and 10% of GDP.

For those noble Lords who want to go more deeply into the subject, there is briefing note No. 92, which deals with global supply chains, through which much of modern international trade now passes, which take time to set up between suppliers and clients all over the world and which cannot be replicated overnight. We say that existing world trade arrangements will continue under the World Trade Organization, whatever we do about our EU membership. It is in the EU’s interest to continue existing arrangements with us because we are its largest client.

A number of your Lordships have suggested that we benefit from the weight of the EU’s account when it makes free-trade agreements on our behalf. We Eurorealists reply that, as the world’s fifth or sixth-largest economy, we would do better on our own in this area. We mention in passing that Singapore has had free-trade agreements with Japan, Russia and India for over 10 years, which we, as EU members do not enjoy. We point out that Switzerland has an FTA with China, which we do not, as indeed does Iceland—not exactly a vast economy.

In conclusion, I would be most grateful for some assurance from the Minister that he will look at the Global Britain briefing note No. 96—the one-pager—and encourage his officials to look at those that I have mentioned and the others on the Global Britain website. Their author, Mr Ian Milne, and I will be happy to meet the Minister or, if we are not grand enough for him, perhaps his officials, for any elucidation that they may require. I trust that we could thus inform the forthcoming national debate in this vital area.

In the meantime, I wish the noble Lord well in his new appointment.

HL Deb, 15 June 2015, c1035

Lord Pearson on European Union Select Committees

House of Lords Questions | | by Andrew

Lord Pearson of Rannoch: Noble Lords appear to be aware that in recent years I have regularly raised the balance, effectiveness and number of our European Union Select Committees before we agreed their appointment. For students of this important but perhaps refined subject, I last raised it on 16 May 2013 at col. 544 and on 12 June 2014 at col. 528.

As to balance, this proposed new committee appears to be just as Europhile as its predecessors. I do not pretend to know all their views, but of its 16 members I can detect only three who I would describe as mildly Eurosceptic and six who are among the most ardent Europhiles in your Lordships’ House. This is more important than usual in a year when we are approaching an EU referendum. Your Lordships’ other Select Committee reports are widely respected, and if our EU reports suffer from a Europhile slant, that will not be helpful to any fair outcome. I want to put the public on alert now, and I hope that I do not have to come back to this point too often in future.

I admit that the second part of my amendment, that our committees should be balanced between those who want to leave the EU and those who want to stay in, will not be easy to achieve. I put it down to underline what a Europhile place your Lordships’ House is when compared to public sentiment on this matter. In fact I can think of only perhaps a dozen of your Lordships who would be prepared to say publicly that we should leave the European Union whatever the outcome of the current negotiations. However, we should at least try to make our committees as balanced as we can, and at the moment we do not.

Our committees are there to hold the Government to account on the legislation that emerges from Brussels—that is what I am constantly told by noble Lords who favour the present arrangements. However, the trouble remains that that is all that these committees can do: they can only scrutinise, and the Government regularly ignore their findings.

I remind your Lordships of the scrutiny reserve, whereby successive Governments have promised not to sign up to any piece of legislation in Brussels if it is still being scrutinised by the Select Committee of either House of Parliament. Yet since July 2010, the Government have broken that promise 303 times in the Commons and 266 times in your Lordships’ House. Some 238 of those overrides were on measures being considered by both Houses. Each override means that a new EU law is being forced upon us without the consent of Parliament, because the EU juggernaut rolls on regardless. I hope the respected chairman of our EU Select Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, will not mind if I remind your Lordships of his disappointed interventions on that subject on 4 December 2014 at col. 1400 and on 17 December 2014 at col. 95. I do not know if he can reassure us now that, as a result, the scrutiny reserve is no longer broken.  I fear that our EU Select Committees do not and cannot hold the Government to account in Brussels. Since 1996, up to last year, the Government themselves have objected to and forced to a vote in the Council of Ministers 55 new measures, and they lost the vote on every single one of them. I add that the situation is just as depressing in that democratic fig-leaf, the European Parliament. Of its 1,936 most-recent Motions, a majority of all UK MEPs voted against 576 of them, but 485 still passed—a failure rate of some 84%. So it does not seem that our Select Committee reports carry much weight there either. None of that should surprise us. The big idea behind the EU has always been that member states should be diminished in favour of the unelected bureaucracy, under the pretence that that would maintain peace in Europe, which was of course, in fact, always sustained by NATO, not Brussels—but that is still at the root of our powerlessness in the EU.

Finally, my amendment would reduce our EU committees from seven to three, freeing up four committees for other work. It is those other committees that are so widely and rightly respected by the public, which we as a House are uniquely qualified to deliver, and yet we are only being allowed three new ad hoc committees and have turned down requests from noble Lords for no fewer than 42. I refer your Lordships to HL Paper 127 from our Liaison Committee, which details all those 42 committees which we will now not have. I understand that we may be making progress on a committee on foreign affairs, which would be a step forward. However, noble Lords’ suggestions from within 21 other areas of our national life are not being adhered to—the House will not be given those committees and the British public will not have your Lordships’ wisdom upon them. I therefore propose that we have four fewer, somewhat pointless EU committees, and four more to draw on the vast array of your Lordships’ knowledge and experience. I beg to move.

HL Deb, 8 June 2015, c640

Harding’s defence of BBC election coverage ‘does not stand up to scrutiny’

Harding’s defence of BBC election coverage ‘does not stand up to scrutiny’

2015 General Election, BBC Bias | | by David Keighley

In characteristic take-no-hostages style, BBC News chief James Harding has defended in the Corporation’s General Election coverage.

His message – delivered in his trademark pugilistic style without a scrap of supportive evidence to BBC-loving chums at a media conference – was exactly in line with that from senior BBC figures on such occasions: ‘Move along there, nothing to see. We did brilliantly. We got complaints from everyone and that proves we were unbiased’.

Harding claims to believe that his dismissal of the criticism is not based on simple metrics, but nothing in his speech suggests that more subtle techniques of analysis were used.

You can read his full speech here on the News-watch website. The key underpinnings are flawed logic and bombast. And while claiming the Corporation welcomes ‘criticism’, he dismisses out of hand all complaints from politicians because they were based on blatant and risible self-interest.

Harding says that, though astonished by the ferocity of complaints, he looked at each on its merit. Every word of his speech suggests otherwise.

Ukip, he claims, were worried that they were being ‘shut out by the establishment’. Pardon? That’s an exercise in smoke and mirrors.

The main problem about BBC’s coverage of Ukip was not that they were ‘shut out’, but rather that almost every interview, such as this by Mishal Husain on Today, was ‘painting by numbers’. The main intent was to portray the party as basically as racist, air-headed thugs, exactly in line with what BBC interviewers have been doing for years.

Another major issue was that when Nigel Farage appeared on the BBC-staged challengers’ debate, the audience was packed with people whose main objective was hurl abuse at him. The panel itself was allowed to shout him down by force of numbers. Further, no question was asked of the candidates about the EU, the primary issue that distinguished Ukip from all the other parties represented.

A third – linked to the challengers’ debate -was gross bias by omission. Coverage of the EU as an election theme disappeared almost to vanishing point. The main parties might not want to have talked about the subject, but it was the BBC’s job to be proactive on this front and they were not.

Harding’s main argument, however, raises even more concerns. He suggests that the British people voted for a Conservative government, and therefore, any idea that any element of BBC output was skewed to the left can be dismissed.

Here, there is so much wrong with his logic and assumptions that it is almost impossible to know where to start unpicking them.

Point one: How could he possibly know what persuaded the voters who actually voted ‘Conservative’ to do so?   It seems, however, that he thinks the BBC’s coverage had some role in the party’s success. He provides no evidence for his argument, so it would be interesting to know on what this is based.

If Harding believes this, it surely also means that the BBC had some role in dissuading people to plump for other parties?

Point two: His logic does not actually stand up to scrutiny. He has set up a false Aunt Sally. The speech provides no hard evidence that the BBC was not biased against the Conservative party. So it is equally possible to argue that the biased coverage may have led to a reduction in the Conservative (and Ukip) vote. In contrast to Harding, abundant evidence has been provided on TCW and News-watch that indeed it did.

Point three: Harding makes several admissions in his speech that there were mistakes in coverage, for example a disproportionate focus on a hung result and the need for a coalition. Yet he immediately claims – again without providing a shred of evidence – that this has not affected impartiality.

The question here is, how does he know? It looks to be another default assumption that what the BBC does is right, even when it gets things wrong. The reality is that unpicking issues of bias is often a slow and painstaking operation of sifting through the transcripts of what was actually said. If he has got that evidence, he should declare it and let others decide. Instead – as usual – the Corporation is its own judge and jury.

There are other massive holes in his polemic but there is not the space here to go into all of them. Suffice it to say that the main substance of his defence evaporates as soon as it is scrutinised.

Photo by David Holt London

Lord Pearson’s Question on News-watch Website

House of Lords Questions | | by Andrew

Lord Pearson of Rannoch: My Lords, I am most grateful. Have the Government examined the News-watch.co.uk website, which shows how the BBC has so far failed to allow fair debate between the two sides in the forthcoming EU referendum and thus to respect its present charter? Might it be good to involve the public in the next charter by allowing the licence fee-payers to elect the BBC’s trustees and, through them, the chairman and the director-general?

Baroness Neville-Rolfe: My Lords, I have not seen the News-watch website that was referred to, but I will obviously take the opportunity to look at it as part of my induction into this vital area. All aspects of the kind that the noble Lord describes will be looked at in the review. As I said, I think that the comments from this House will be very helpful to us in coming to the right conclusions.

HL Deb, 4 June 2015, c514