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Showing posts with label BBC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BBC. Show all posts
BBC 🛢Written by Peter Hoskins et al. Recommended by Simon Smyth.

Shares in US energy companies have jumped as investors bet that the US seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro will open opportunities to tap the country's oil reserves.

Shares in Chevron opened more than 4% higher, after surging more than 7% in pre-market trading, while other firms, including ConocoPhillips and Exxon also gained.

Precious metal prices and shares in defence stocks also rose as the intervention increased investors' concerns about geopolitical risks.

Gold was about 1.9% higher at $4,412 (£3,275) an ounce, while the price of silver was up by 3.6%, as money was moved into so-called "safe-haven" assets.

Prices of precious metals such as gold and silver often rise in times of uncertainty as they are seen as safer assets to hold.

The gold price saw its best annual performance last year since 1979 after rising by more than 60%, reaching an all-time high of $4,549.71 on 26 December.

Those gains were driven by several factors including expectations of more interest rate cuts, major purchases of bullion by central banks and investor concerns about global tensions and economic uncertainty.

Oil prices fluctuated on Monday as investors weighed whether Washington's intervention in Venezuela would affect crude supplies.

Continue @ BBC.

US Oil Companies Gain After Seizure Of Venezuela's Maduro

Labour Heartlands ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs.

“The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.” — George Orwell, 1984

BBC Caught in Its Own Web of Newspeak: When Saying ‘Woman’ Becomes a Thoughtcrime

What does a woman need to know to understand she is a woman? According to the BBC, apparently nothing at all. Because if you know what a woman is, if you dare to say that women are adult human females, you have committed the cardinal sin of our age: you have noticed reality.

When newsreader Martine Croxall changed the phrase “pregnant people” to “women” during a live broadcast, she wasn’t editorialising. She was stating a biological fact so obvious that every civilisation in human history has understood it without needing a committee meeting. Yet the BBC found her guilty of expressing “a controversial view about trans people.” Twenty complaints were upheld. Her crime? A facial expression that suggested she knew what a woman was.

George Orwell warned us about this in 1984: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” The BBC, our publicly funded broadcaster, has become precisely the institution Orwell feared. 

The BBC’s Ministry of Truth 🪶 When Britain’s Public Broadcaster Decided Women Don’t Exist

Labour Heartlands ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs

As the BBC reels from resignations and legal threats, new evidence reveals a culture of bias and ideological capture, from politically edited documentaries to newsroom activism and “forbidden” words like women.

If you’re wondering how the BBC plans to spend your licence fee this year, here’s a clue: it won’t be on impartial journalism.

Donald Trump has threatened to sue the BBC for $1 billion (£760 million) over claims that a Panorama documentary deliberately edited one of his speeches to make it appear as though he was inciting the January 6th Capitol riot.

According to a leaked internal memo, Panorama spliced together two separate parts of Trump’s 2021 speech, misleading viewers into believing he was calling for direct action. The BBC has since admitted it was an “error of judgement”, one that gave the “impression of a direct call for violence.”

That “error,” however, came amid a pile-up of editorial controversies. A Telegraph investigation published last week revealed an internal memo by Michael Prescott, a former external adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Standards Committee. His report accused the corporation of systemic bias, citing one-sided Gaza coverage, anti-Trump and anti-Israel framing, and ideologically skewed transgender reporting.

BBC Faces $1 Billion Trump Lawsuit, But the Real Question Is 🪶 What Are You Paying For?

Anthony McIntyre  ☠ Today's weather is horrible.


It will not deter Drogheda Stands With Palestine later this morning from shivering in solidarity with the besieged of Gaza. Besides, as it is Ireland we are advised not to complain about the weather as it will change in fifteen minutes anyway. This is a country where climate change takes place four times a day.

As wet and windy as it has been, the storm we have possesses nothing of the strength of the hurricane that is currently pounding the BBC whose head of news and director general both resigned this week. Jonathan Cook, if we may borrow the analogy, in a recent weather report, observed that:

The BBC’s now in a death loop: it grows ever more craven to the billionaires, shifting the political centre of gravity further rightwards, even as the billionaire-owned media claim it’s too ‘leftwing’.

The top flight departures came in the wake of a Daily Telegraph exposé which revealed the 2021 BBC manipulation of camera footage for the purposes of presenting Donald Trump in a negative light. Seriously, if they had left the man now being ridiculed as Donica Lewinsky to his own devices, he would have generated more negative publicity than a child protection conference for rapist reverends.


That the axe fell their way was not down to the crime of manufactured news but because of the powerful figure it was manufactured against. Again, let Jonathan Cook explain:

The reason heads have rolled at the BBC this time are not because it made a journalistic blunder – it makes them all the time. It is because the corporation foolishly offered an open goal to the billionaire right and its media outlets.
If anyone is falling for the manufactured “furore” over Panorama’s latest journalistic gaffe, there are examples of far graver malpractice by Panorama – especially on issues related to Israel and Palestine. These editorial crimes have barely caused a ripple, even after they were exposed. 
Why? Because the billionaires love Israel and hate its critics. Israel is their vision of the future: the model of a fortress state in which they believe they can protect themselves from the people whose lives they are destroying around the globe.

This brings us into the dark Zionist heart in the BBC that pumps a malign narrative packaged as news around the public's circulatory system.

When, in May this year, Ramita Navi turned up uninvited to a meeting of BBC executives,  they were discombobulated. As explained in the Observer:

They had not invited her because, as it turned out, the point of the meeting was to set her up as the fall guy.

Navi had been one of the executive directors of the documentary Gaza: Doctors Under Attack. It was a forensic investigation into the Israeli destruction of the Gazan health system. By the time she arrived as an uninvited guest at the meeting the documentary had been delayed for the sixth time. In her words:

the BBC was anxious because it had another Gaza film on its hands: one showing that doctors, medics and hospitals were being targeted and killed by Israel, made by a production company working hand in glove with two of its own journalists . . . An executive called and told us that those at the top of BBC News were ‘very jumpy and paranoid about Gaza’

The documentary was important because, again to cite Navi:

The BBC’s coverage was not showing what people could see on their phones: the killing of children, the targeting of hospitals, the erasing of entire families.

Those in leadership at the BBC trusted neither Amnesty International or The United Nations. Israel was its preferred source for information. As one BBC producer put it: “We all fear the phone call from the Israeli embassy.”

The obstacles encountered by Ramita Navi are emblematic of the malaise of structural and ideological bias that permeates the culture of BBC management.

In a damning report by the Centre For Media Monitoring, the BBC found itself taking serious criticism for its pro-Israel bias. The report's authors pointed out that:

Across the BBC’s coverage, a clear dynamic has emerged: the marginalisation of Palestinian suffering and the amplification of Israeli narratives. The data shows that the BBC has consistently failed to report Israel’s war on Gaza with required impartiality.

Of course, the Labour government led by Der Starmer wants no such thing as impartiality or accuracy in reporting the genocide.  Culture Secretary, Lousy Liza Nandy, responding in July to the broadcasting of another documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, whined that:

I have been very clear that people must be held accountable for the decisions that were taken . . .I have asked the question to the board [of the BBC]. Why has nobody been fired?

Hopefully that reference to accountability comes back to haunt her and Der Starmer for their government's role in facilitating and enabling genocide. To conclude with Jonathan Cook:

The BBC has not failed. It has done exactly what it is there to do: help the British government conceal the fact that there is a genocide going on in Gaza, and one that the UK has been knee-deep in assisting.

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

British Bias Corporation

Gearóid Ó Loingsigh ☭ writing in Substack on 29-June-2025.

Photo from Palestine Action https://palestineaction.org

Kneecap’s music is not really my thing. I am perhaps too old, or maybe my musical tastes are more conservative. But I do love their politics and their stance on Palestine. I don’t think much of Hezbollah, but I do think waving their flag is not a criminal offence. The BBC think otherwise as evidenced by their decision to not broadcast Kneecaps’s performance at the Glastonbury festival. The only reason for this was their support for Palestine. There was no other reason. Though, it didn’t work out well for the BBC as Bob Vylan who was broadcast live got the crowd to chant Death to the IDF, one of the noblest of chants ever to be heard at Glastonbury.

But there is a long history to the BBC and other British media censoring musicians. The BBC in its statement said:

Whilst the BBC doesn’t ban artists, our plans ensure that our programming meets our editorial guidelines.
We don’t always livestream every act from the main stages and look to make an on-demand version of Kneecap’s performance available on our digital platforms, alongside more than 90 other sets.[1]

In other words, the BBC does ban artists. It is not like this is the first time they have banned some of them. Following the Bloody Sunday massacre by the British Army in Derry in 1972, Paul McCartney, penned a song titled Give Ireland Back to the Irish.[2] It was the debut single of Wings. It was instantly banned in Britain by the BBC but managed to get to No. 16 in the British charts nonetheless and got to No. 1 in Ireland. They banned songs that mentioned sex, even Shirley Bassie’s Burn My Candle[3] and they banned songs that were considered more political such as The Sex Pistols, Anarchy in the UK,[4] a song that wasn’t really political at all. And not surprisingly they banned the then relatively unknown Heaven 17’s debut (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang,[5] over concerns it might upset the then recently elected US president Ronald Reagan, a man whose government through the CIA went on to support deaths squads in Latin America and set up cocaine smuggling networks to finance them through his loyal servant Oliver North.[6] Reagan of course is referred to in the song.

Democrats are out of power
Across that great wide ocean
Reagan's president elect
Fascist god in motion

That wasn’t the last of it either. The BBC went on to ban a song by The Police, Invisible Sun[7] because of a possible slight on the British Army contained in the lyrics and of course the official video to the song.

I don't want to spend the rest of my life
Looking at the barrel of an Armalite
I don't want to spend the rest of my days
Keeping out of trouble like the soldiers say

I don't want to spend my time in hell
Looking at the walls of a prison cell
I don't ever want to play the part
Of a statistic on a government chart

The BBC would, during the 1st Gulf War ban a total of 67 songs for the duration of the war, amongst them songs by such establishment figures as Elton John whose song Act of War [8] recorded in 1985 with Millie Jackson was put on the list as was Pat Benatar’s Love is a Battlefield,[9] recorded even earlier in 1983. It takes little to upset the BBC it would seem.

The former Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar criticised Keir Starmer’s call for Kneecap to be not allowed play at Glastonbury stating that:

It’s not great for politicians to get into deciding which artists should be allowed to perform where or not.
To me, that’s illiberalism. Part of the whole point of art and music and literature is to be inappropriate, is to be challenging, is often to be anti-establishment,” he said.
We’ve had a situation now for quite some time in Ireland and in Europe and Britain, where politicians didn’t get into the space of saying who should be allowed to perform, who shouldn’t, what books you should be allowed to read, and I hope we don’t slip back into doing that under the guise of national security and anti-terrorism when it isn’t really about that.[10]

Varadkar tut tuts the BBC and Starmer. Sounds great, except his party and the Irish state in general does not have a great record in the matter. The state broadcaster took an insidious approach to censorship with songs rarely being banned outright. Rather, they were just not simply played on the radio station. Hint hint, nudge nudge. A very Irish way of doing things. The Irish group The Wolfe Tones released many songs over the years about the conflict in the north of Ireland and got little to no airtime. Such was the situation that they even recorded a song about it, called Radio Toor I Li Ay (sometimes called They Don’t Play Our Songs on the Radio) [11]. The lyrics are pertinent to Kneecap and Starmer and sum up exactly what the Establishment are about.

You don't play our songs on radio
You say they're too political!
Who controls the mind, where's the mind's control?
For the music on the airwaves
Follows empty minds, those empty heads
Play songs of sex and drugs instead
Don't tell them how it really is

Won't MI5 look after you, control your thoughts
Feed information to your hearts and minds
To save you all from thinkin', thinkin', thinkin', thinkin'

It is a fact that RTE didn’t give them much airtime and still don’t. So much so that in 2024, Derek Warfield the lead singer with the group said it was time to end the ban on them.[12] It still hasn’t happened, nor will it. In fact, the Irish women’s football team got into trouble for singing one of their songs, Celtic Melody,[13] and were excoriated by British sports journalists, who are not renowned for their knowledge of music, politics, history or much else aside from who ran how fast and where. Not exactly intellectual heavyweights. Nonetheless these idiots led to the Irish women’s team being eventually fined €20,000 for singing the song.[14]

The Irish singer Christy Moore found himself on the wrong end of state repression in Ireland on many occasions and his songs, like those of The Wolfe Tones were not banned per se, but they never received much airplay, except those that were considered to be humorous and non-political, such as Don’t Forget Your Shovel.[15] But other songs of his were censored on the radio without the need for an official ban, such as Ninety Miles From Dublin,[16] which was about the IRA and INLA prisoners on the Blanket and Dirty Protests in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh. Likewise, other songs he recorded about the prisoners and later on about the Hunger Strikers equally received no airplay. There was one brief exception to this.

Patsy O’ Hara (INLA) died on hunger strike on May 21st 1981 after 61 days. His mother Peggy O’Hara was initially adamant that she would not let her son die and that when he lapsed into a coma she would intervene and give the doctors the order to break his strike with an intravenous drip. However, in her last conversation with her son, he said to her that he was sorry they had not won and asked her to let the fight go on, before lapsing back into unconsciousness. Christy Moore wrote a song about that exchange called The Time Has Come.[17] It was well received and got airplay and praise. Then someone informed the ignorant and arrogant mandarins at RTE what the song was about and suddenly it got no more airplay. Listening to the song, it is obvious what it is about.

The gentle clasp that holds my hand
Must loosen and let go
Please help me through the door
Though instinct tells you no

Our vow it is eternal
And will bring you dreadful pain
But if our demands aren't recognized
Don't call me back again

Ironically Christy Moore would record another song that got no airplay. It was called Section 31,[18] a reference to the article of the Broadcasting Authority Act (1960) that gave the minister power to ban interviews with members of Sinn Féin and proscribed organisations such as the IRA, but in effect led to RTE’s scant reporting of or carrying out of few interviews that were critical of state policy on the conflict. The song explained exactly why some issues are censored.

Who are they to decide what we should hear?
Who are they to decide what we should see?
What do they think we can’t comprehend here?
What do they fear that our reaction might be, might be?

It is always about silencing the opposition and preventing a reaction to their repression and in this case genocide.

So back to Kneecap. They stand in a long line of artists who have put their money where their mouths are. They stand side by side with giants from other musical genres such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger who were repressed by the McCarthyite wave in the US in the 1950s. The BBC for its part continues to be the propaganda arm of the British Empire, or what is left of it, covering up, lying about or justifying murder, massacre, torture and plunder from India to Kenya, Ireland and now Palestine.

Woody Guthrie had the words This Machine Kills Fascists carved into his guitar, a slogan that might earn him a jail sentence nowadays. It was meant more in the sense that his music was part of the struggle against fascism, carrying political messages to workers, dustbowl refugees and migrants. It didn’t literally kill anyone, though in his song Ludlow Massacre,[19] Guthrie celebrated the workers taking up arms to kill the scab thugs that came to shoot them. Scabs at the behest of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, owned by the infamous Rockefeller family, murdered 26 people, mainly the wives and children of the striking miners. However, the massacre was just one large incident, the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency had harried and harassed the striking miners, murdering them in ones and twos. The detective agencies celebrated in comics and films were what would later become known in Latin America and elsewhere as death squads. The miners fought back and Guthrie celebrated this in his song. Resistance, including armed resistance was legitimate.

The state soldiers jumped us in a wire fence corners,
They did not know we had these guns,
And the Red-neck Miners mowed down these troopers,
You should have seen those poor boys run.

The press, at the time, described the striking miners as savages. Any similarity to the current media onslaught on Palestine is not a coincidence, it shows the class interests of the media moguls and the western states. Working class people, foreign resistance movements will always be savages to the media. And the use of armed masked thugs by the state is not new either. Before ICE, there were the detective agencies. Most of the dead at Ludlow were migrant workers. The final death toll according to Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the US was sixty six men women and children.

Kneecap have contributed to the fight against fascism and Bob Vylan’s chant Death to the IDF should be on everyone’s lips. There is no reforming the IDF, just like there was no reforming Hitler’s SS. Only the complete destruction of the IDF will bring any change.

Can their music, like Guthrie’s be said to kill fascists? I don’t know, time will tell, but from the reception they got at Glastonbury it is looking good.[20] What I do know is Keir Starmer and Trump finance fascists. Starmer like a fascist wants to ban Palestine Action. The BBC covers up for fascists, praises them and censors those who stand up to fascists. I know who is on the right side of history.

References


[1] The Guardian (28/06/2025) Kneecap’s Glastonbury set Will not be broadcast live, BBC confirms. 

[2] See.

[3] See.

[4] See.

[5] See.

[6] Jacobin (12/11/2021) What We Really Know About the CIA and Crack. Daniel Finn. 

[7] See.

[8] See.

[9] See.

[10] The Journal (27/06/2025) Varadkar on Kneecap row: Terrorism is bombs and guns, not music. 

[11] See.

[12] Newstalk (11/09/2024) ‘Systemic ban’ on The Wolfe Tones should be lifted – Warfield. Jack Quann.

[13] See.

[14] Sky News (08/12/2022) Ireland women footballers fined €20,000 for singing song referencing IRA in World Cup celebration. 

[15] See.

[16] See.

[17] See.

[18] See.

[19] See.

[20] See alburujpress.


A post shared by @alburujpress

⏩ Gearóid Ó Loingsigh is a political and human rights activist with extensive experience in Latin America.

BBC, Kneecap And The Long History Of Censorship

Guardian ✒ Former BBC One controller Paul Fox says anti-Catholic prejudice was deeply embedded at the corporation during the Troubles. Written by 
Richard Brooks. Recommended by Marty Flynn.


The British public were not told the truth about the Troubles in the 1960s and 1970s because “the bloody Protestants were running the BBC in Northern Ireland”, the then controller of BBC One has claimed.

This is the damning judgment of one of television’s most distinguished former top executives, Sir Paul Fox, who was editor of Panorama and then controller of BBC One. He firmly believes this meant that British viewers were not told the truth of what was really happening in Northern Ireland and in particular to the Catholics.

Fox, who was editor of Panorama in the 1960s, condemns “the censorship” of the Catholic viewpoint in a new documentary about the corporation’s fights and impartiality. Similar sentiments are expressed by Martin Bell and Irish-born Denis Tuohy, who were then both reporting from Northern Ireland and who agree that the BBC was prevented from telling the British public about discrimination against Catholics in education, work and housing.

Yet the documentary, Shooting the Rapids, was itself nearly “censored”. 

Continue reading @ Guardian.

‘The Bloody Protestants Ran BBC In Northern Ireland’ In 60s And 70s, Says Ex-TV Boss

Caoimhin O’Muraile ☭ BBC Match of the Day Presenter Gary Lineker has spoken out against the British Governments “plans for illegal immigration.”


They plan to ban for life anybody trying to enter Britain, illegally, and sending them back to their country of origin is an option, providing their life is not in danger. Another option as part of a broader plan is to send people landing on British shores to Rwanda! 

Have these ministers ever considered the real possibility that many arriving in Britain, or anywhere else for that matter, may not have the correct papers thus making them possible illegals? Countries where people are fleeing for their lives do not always, if ever, go through the niceties of giving these desperate souls documentation which may give them access to their country of destination? So, what happens if a refugee arrives, in Britain, without the correct identification or other required paperwork because the authorities where they are coming from refused to give them any? Or, the government of the land they are fleeing wanted to kill them? After all, if a regime has the idea to liquidate a person, they are hardly likely to go to a branch of that government asking for the correct paperwork in order to travel! Does this mean they will be refused entry into Britain and thereafter banned from the shores for life? 

The British Government is lunging further and further to the right and is adopting para-fascist methods. How long before we see the mask come off and the real face of fascism exposed in the corridors of Westminster? It was arguably tried once with Thatcher, but the checks and balances prevented her going as far as perhaps she wished. She did try to get the Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, kicked off the Privy Council because he was too left wing! This was Kinnock who failed to support the NUM in the 1984/85 strike!!

All these racist plans and legislation are a direct result of so-called Brexit. The campaign to bring the United Kingdom out of the European Union which was led by an alliance of the parliamentary right-wing, the far-right and the fascist right. This alliance was not dissimilar to the first minority government formed by Hitler in 1933 when the Conservative Right held governmental posts under Chancellor Hitler. Two of the constituent parts of the UK, Scotland and the Six Counties, voted to remain in the EU but have nevertheless been dragged out against their will in favour of the overriding will of England. The racists have been trying for years to legitimately introduce racist legislation and Brexit has provided them with this opportunity. The British plan may also go against International Law and conventions. What next for the British, pull out of the UN perhaps? Or no longer apply international conventions on human rights? This is what Hitler and the Japanese did to the League of Nations: when things did not go their way, they just left. More similarities perhaps?

Gary Lineker has spoken out against this and has compared the language used by the British Government with that of the Nazis in Germany during the 30s. His analysis and comparison is about right. British Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, has said Lineker is being “unhelpful” with his comments. She said his comparison with the language used in “Germany during the 30s” is unfair. Other right wingers have said it is “preposterous” to make such comparisons and called such comparisons “unfair and dangerous”. They appear to be suggesting Lineker is likening the governments language to those who died in the German camps via the Gas Chambers, and that such a comparison is unfair and an exaggeration. Gary Lineker never mentioned the Gas Chambers or the so-called “Final Solution” which came about in the early 1940s not the 30s. What the former Leicester City, Everton, Barcelona and Tottenham Hotspur player was doing, by comparing the “language” used by Ms Braverman and her cohorts with that of the Nazi Government in 1930s Germany and where it led to! The language used by Hitler took several years to gain traction amongst the German population but eventually he got his sick message through. The next step was eradication, after Jew baiting, physical assault and separation. Camps like the notorious Treblinka were set up across Germany and the countries the German armed forces (the Wehrmacht) had conquered.

Was Lineker correct in drawing comparisons with the language used by members of the British Government with that of the Third Reich? Yes, he was, very much so. If we look at Hitlers early ideas to transport Jewish people to the island of Madagascar it does sound frighteningly similar to the British Governments plans to send refugees to Rwanda! This was one of Hitlers early ideas to get the “Jews out of Germany”, later more dramatic less humane methods were adopted. But it was much of this early language during the 30s which ensured the public would not say too much against these ideas a few years later. 

Once an idea is planted it just needs cultivating which is what happened in Nazi Germany, before it blossoms which it did. Could the same happen in Britain? Yes, of course it could, once language like “ban for life” and “deportation of all illegal immigrants” without defining what an “illegal immigrant” is. Once language like this gains an audience, people who are prepared to listen, the narrative becomes the norm. Making deals and agreements with other countries acts as a smokescreen if things go wrong, is another ploy. More police on the ground could be a move towards the arbitrary arrest of any citizen on the grounds of national security. The latest language to come out of the British parliament is “the patience of the British people will run out if we do not act” when referring to refugees. This is akin to the German propaganda office and Minister for Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, when he addressed a monster rally claiming “the Jews had better shut their filthy mouths, our patience will one day run out.” See the similarities?

It is this language Lineker is talking about, and what such talk and narratives led to. He did not mention the Gas Chambers, or mass murder in the 40s of Jewish people and any other group, trade unionists, socialists, communists and Gypsies, in his condemnation as Braverman implies. It is the language and where it could lead which is his bone of contention, as it should be to any sane person. This kind of crap is expected from the far-right groups like “Britain First” the “British National Party” and other neo-Nazi organisations. The similarities between what the Sunak Government are using and that of Hitler's Nazi party are stark. Of course, these ministers when questioned about this comparison run immediately for the fact their grandparents were immigrants fleeing oppression, or had escaped the Nazis in Germany during the period Lineker alludes to. Well, if this is the case then they should know better than to use the same language their forebearers fled from.

Gary Lineker has since been reinstated as presenter of MOTD subject to a review of BBC policy on presenters making “political comments”. The BBC policy is not the issue here. What is the issue is the language used by the British Government in this regard! Are the BBC shit scared of this right-wing Conservative Government in Britain? Is Britain witnessing the planting of the seeds of constitutional fascism? In England, more so than Scotland and Wales, there are those who will agree wholeheartedly with the government’s plans for “illegal immigrants” perhaps, in most cases, not knowing or thinking where it could all lead! Unfortunately, there are those, a minority so far, who know full well the possible end result!

In London’s East End, once a hotbed of socialist activity back in the pre-war Second World War years of the twentieth-century, the fascists now have traction. The National Front (NF) and later the British National Party (BNP) have, in the very recent past, made headway in local council elections. They have been assisted in their quest for power by centre left and far left councils knocking down English working-class temples of culture like, for example, the Public House, traditional meeting places for the workers after a hard day’s work, and replacing them with Mosques. Nobody was objecting to Mosques but not at the expense of the cultural places for recreation already present. There could and should be room for both to cater for all. This causes discontent which the fascists immediately jump on. If such activity continues the fascist gains made at local level could, one day, be transformed into national government. Could the Conservatives be trying to emulate the fascists by enacting many of their would-be laws? Perhaps the people of Britain should wise up, and fast.

Over here in the 26 counties we too should not get complacent. Recently, Sunday 5th March, on RTEs A Week in Politics presented by Aine Lawlor the question was asked, by her, of Sinn Fein and People Before Profit, “if a left-wing government were to be elected in Ireland there could be a backlash by the rich using the army and police could there not?” Now, what this was suggesting, and it does not mean Aine believes this should happen or will happen, is just how shallow this liberal democracy really is. If the electorate vote the wrong way this was almost an acknowledgement by RTE that forces are available to the wealthy, the Irish bourgeoisie, to remove the elected government not to their liking by force! As we know the far-right are active on the streets all over Ireland with, it appears, very little left resistance and now are they being given credibility by RTE? Politically these are potentially dangerous times and not only on these islands. Anti-fascists must not get caught napping!

Finally, let us all face facts, none of us in any country can say they are not descended from people who came from somewhere else. In other words we are all, either directly or indirectly, refugees.

🖼 Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent Socialist Republican and Marxist.

Lineker Is Right

Anthony McIntyre ☠ Events as Harold McMillan once said. They can disrupt or upend everything.


For years people have complained about the volume of Tory ideology running through the veins of the BBC without much success in being able to push back or ignite public concern. 

In the end the political hot potato was brought to the boil not by the legions of BBC political correspondents or expert analysts but by a sports presenter expressing his personal view on his own Twitter page. It resulted in an eruption of public anger that made the BBC look like the PR agency for the Bullingdon Club. The artificial tide of impartiality has gone out, leaving the politically partisan shill house without a vestige of cover.

It was less what Lineker said that caused the stir but the decision by the Tories at the BBC to suspend him from presenting Match Of The Day, to which he will now return, leaving the British Bullingdon Cartel to lick both its wounds and the egg splattered all over its face. The huge outcry combined with the solidarity of his fellow presenters had the effect of a stun grenade lobbed into the middle of the highbrow low life.

British Home Secretary Suella Braverman, forever eager to grease the pole that helped her climb so that no one else could avail of it, announced her plan to stop migrants crossing the English Channel. Lineker’s terse observation on Twitter was “Good heavens, this is beyond awful’

Somebody joined in to criticise him, accusing him of being “out of order . . . easy to pontificate when it doesn’t affect you”.

Lineker pushed back:

There is no huge influx. We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries. This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s, and I’m out of order?

And for that he was forced off the air.

The sheer bias in the decision to make him walk the plank was identified by Sky Sports' Kaveh Solhekol:

But a lot of people are looking at this and saying, how come Andrew Neal, one of the most high profile political journalists and interviewers on the BBC for many, many years, how come he is allowed to be the chairman of a right wing magazine, The Spectator?
How come he is allowed to express political opinions on Twitter as much as he wants?
How come the Chairman of the BBC, Richard Sharp, the Chairman is somebody who donated £400,000 to the Conservative Party, someone who has helped arrange an £800,000 loan for the former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson.
How come Robbie Gibb, or as we have to call him, Sir Robbie Gibb, who used to be the Communications Director for the former Prime Minister, Theresa May, how come he’s on the BBC board at the moment?
Why is Alan Sugar allowed to say what he wants on Twitter about political matters? What about Jeremy Clarkson? He’s got a column in The Sun, he’s got a column in the Sunday Times. He was on the BBC. He frequently expressed political opinions, which many people think are extreme on social media.
And why is the Director General of the BBC, Tim Davy? The Director General? He used to be the Deputy Chairman of the Hammersmith and Fulham Conservative Party. He’s a man who’s stood as a candidate in local elections for the Conservative Party.
So why is all this allowed? Yet Gary Lineker is not allowed to make a fairly innocuous comment, which many, many people would agree with about a policy that has been condemned by the United Nations and also by many human rights groups. And this is the same Gary Lineker who’s been allowed on the BBC to criticise the human rights record of Qatar.
Why is he not allowed to criticise the human rights record of the country he lives in?

 

As clean a knock out punch in the political ring as we are likely to see from any sports commentator for years to come.

⏩ Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

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