A matter of security

January 3, 2010 — admin

It seems that there were a few hacks back at the BBC yesterday and today as someone has had time to stitch together a toadying news story about Gordon Brown, giving him carte blanche to attack everyone else based on a tepid interview he gave to Andrew Marr. He’s also led the bulletins throughout Sunday by announcing the new full body scanners at airports – steering us gently back onto a massive over-reaction to a very specific and concentrated terrorist danger.

I had to laugh at the headline – not “Full body scanners on the way” or “Airports to get full body scanners” but “Gordon Brown promises full body scanners” as if the PM and the PM alone has the power to do this as opposed to the companies that operate our UK airports. It goes to show the subtle yet insidious bias that remains within the corporation’s coverage of UK politics.

The fact is that people have been getting on board aircraft and hijacking them for years. They have been planting bombs on them and evading airport security for even longer. If the UK government had been serious about this issue it would have acted far more strongly after Lockerbie to ensure that aircraft departing from this country are subject to far stricter and no less time-consuming security specifications. The Lockerbie bomb – if you accept it was such – could have been contained within bomb-strengthened luggage containers that are readily available but not commercially preferable to airlines.

The PM has had 12 years to bring forward these full-body scanning measures and although the technology in this field is advancing all the time, why has he waited to an election year rather than 2001 and 9/11 or 2005 and 7/7 to announced this? We’ve already had the case of Richard Reid when nothing was done. The sudden focus on tightened security is just a get-tough measure that Brown hopes to use to propel himself back into No 10.

What you won’t find on the BBC website is two things. Firstly that among the 

“Experts [who] have questioned the scanners’ effectiveness at detecting the type of bomb allegedly used on Christmas Day in an attempted plane attack over Detroit.”

is a Conservative MP who has advised companies on the design of such things and who no doubt knows a great deal more about the subject than Gordon Brown.

You also won’t find reference to the fact that the PM claimed he had spoken to President Obama about the “new” Yemeni dimension to the terrorist threat, something that turned out to be totally untrue. Funnily enough, there’s no story on this – apparently body scanners are more important than a PM who’s a liar – but you can unpick the angle from the interview transcript.

So we’ve got Yemen, the closed embassies, the airport scanners and top-level US co-operation. It sounds to me very much as though the Labour Party is spinning madly on the security line for a political hit to get the year off to a decent start. We can expect more bogeymen and women hiding in the shagpile – from Yemeni extremists to Conservative MPs – as this government enters into its final throw of the dice; a general election of fear.

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Luvvies, Labour's Lost

September 27, 2009 — simonashall
Flawed but not floored - can he turn it around

Flawed but not floored - can he turn it around

It’s a bit early to define a narrative from the Labour Conference in Brighton just yet but so far the most interesting thing coming out of the proceedings there is the attitude of the BBC.

First, we have a surprisingly combative interview from the normally obliging Andrew Marr, who went so far as to raise with the PM the issue of his alleged medication. Predictably, Brown dodged the question and instead went for the sympathy vote over his eyesight, something that David Blunkett – a far more robust and substantial man – would never have done. Whatever the answer, it caught me (and quite a few of the Tory Twitterati that I follow) out – one wonders whether this is the last Marr/Brown interview.

It obviously irked Marr to ask the question as much as it did Brown to have to answer it. The BBC man’s pleading that it was a “fair” question was followed up by some serious feigned interest in Brown’s sob story. Obviously I’m sorry he has a sight impairment – but it was noticeable how much detail he was prepared to give up on this in contrast with the actual question about prescription drugs.

Then we had this from Laura Kuenssberg (@BBCLauraK) – she really is a gem on top of a compost heap. Not only was she prepared to tell viewers the actual mood of the conference on Brown’s arrival (ie pretty dreadful) but also to lob some real questions at him about his law-breaking ministers and then reflect that the party activists (the BBC usual calls them crowds as if to ignore their handpicked pedigree) were making so much noise that he couldn’t hear her. And she hinted, quite correctly, that this was probably deliberate.

But look at the story headline – “Labour ‘should expose the Tories’”. Clearly the online staff have gone seriously off message – or on message with PM. It doesn’t reflect the downbeat message from LauraK and about Labour – or indeed much about Labour at all. It’s just a pop at the Conservatives.

Previous to this, of course, was this beauty – again courtesy of online staff – suggesting that Brown and Barack Obama are, after all, the closest of chums and that Obama doesn’t see Brown as a washed-up political liability or “depressing to be around“, as one of his staff leaked to the press. According to the BBC, this official line “quelled rumours” of an Obama snub. No it didn’t – and who are they to report that as fact? Any moderately sensible person watching the polls will realise that the last thing Obama needs with his problems at home is to become embroiled in some tawdry scheme by a foreign political party to prop up their ailing government with lent popularity.

Obama isn’t my cup of tea but he’s certainly not a fool. And only a fool would consider anything other than refusing any more public airtime with Gordon than was absolutely necessary. Any suggestion to the contrary is completely counter-inituitive and total propaganda, which the Beeb is only too happy to repeat.

Going back to the polls, not even Obama could have found a way to spin a poll that suggests you are heading out of office positively. I can’t now find the link on the BBC website – maybe they’ve seen sense and pulled it – but this poll, which states 41% of people think Brown is almost certainly going to lose is bad, bad news. Instead, the BBC concentrated on the 48% of people who though Labour still had a “slim chance” of winning in 2010, along with the 11% who think he will win.

It’s a silly question – you can’t ever rule out that a party has a “slim chance” of winning. I’m not surprised so many people ticked that box rather than commit themselves but it doesn’t reflect reality. The BBC is supposed to be here to present facts not spin to us that 59% of people think Gordon is still in with a chance next year – of course he is, he’s taking part in the election. They are more aware than ever that politics is self-fulfilling and by buying into this silly poll (I though they didn’t report routine polls anyway) they are just playing PM and the PM’s game for them. At our expense.

I don’t expect the BBC to give DC a free ride. I don’t expect them to push through government PR work. But there is a bipolarity within the corporation at the moment between the political pragmatists that realise the New Labour years are 95% drawing to a close and the politically-motivated staff who desperately want to play a hand in upsetting the odds with sly journalism. It’s got no place in the BBC and they have no place on the public payroll.

The BBC is a service, not a political tool. I’m afraid quite a number of its staff work there for the wrong reasons – they should stand for election instead.

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