The cowardly BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is one of our supposed “national treasures” whose aims are to educate, inform and entertain the public that funds it through the licence fee. Under the motto “Nation shall speak peace unto Nation” the BBC claims to be a pillar of impartiality and a reliable source of independent news at home and abroad. 
That was never the case back in the 1920s when the Corporation was founded. It’s certainly not the case now.
The BBC’s role has always been to serve the ruling class and defend British imperialism. During the Second World War the BBC’s policy of credible reporting easily outshone that of the Nazis. When the war ended the BBC continued to serve the ruling class and defend British imperialism. It totally failed to report a famine in Bengal that resulted in around 10 million deaths and was the result of a deliberate British imperialist policy of deprivation, and defended colonial efforts to maintain the Empire throughout the post-war era. 
During the Cold War the Beeb cashed in on its war-time prestige to churn out sophisticated anti-communist propaganda at home and all around the world in the service of Anglo-American imperialism. It was said that while news from the Voice of America and Radio Moscow were “95 per cent truth and five per cent lies” the BBC had the edge with “ninety-eight per cent truth and only two per cent lies”.
Those days are now long gone. Although the state-owned broadcasting service still promotes some serious dramas, its news and current affairs output is just cheap, dumbed-down, third-rate bourgeois propaganda.
The BBC consistently supported Nato aggression against Serbia, Iraq and Libya, and imperialist efforts for regime-change in Syria and Venezuela, whilst turning a blind eye to Ukrainian fascist war-crimes in the Donbas and routine Zionist atrocities against the Palestinians. Obscure Russian, Chinese and Korean dissidents are treated like latter-day Gandhis while communists and other left leaders in the Global South are vilified or simply ignored. 
This is the BBC that led the pack that demonised Jeremy Corbyn when he was the leader of the Labour Party. This is an international news outlet that crackdowns on their own journalists for sharing posts that include facts about Israeli atrocities in Gaza. This is the broadcaster that totally ignored the massive Palestine solidarity demonstration that rocked London last weekend. Some 600,000 people marched through the heart of the capital in support of the heroic Palestinians who still refuse to budge in the face of Israeli terror. But you wouldn’t know about it if you only relied on the BBC for home news.
Meanwhile this august body, which turned a blind eye to all sorts of degenerates like the late Jimmy Saville, can force out Gary Lineker for daring to publicly denounce the Zionist genocide in the Gaza Strip.
Lineker was a legend on the pitch. A top scorer in the League he made his England debut in 1984, earning 80 caps and scoring 48 goals over an eight-year international career, which made him England's second-highest goal-scorer on his retirement. Now he’s an immensely popular sports broadcaster. It’s the Beeb’s loss and Lineker’s gain. He’ll soon be back amongst the highest echelons of the sports media. As for the BBC no-one will miss it. The sooner it goes the better...

The cowardly, craven BBC

Hundreds of film, TV, and media professionals, have condemned censorship and racism after the BBC removed a documentary about the children of Gaza. In a letter to BBC executives, they criticised the decision as “racist” and “dehumanising”, blaming pressure from pro-Israel groups. Billed as “following the lives of four young people trying to survive the Israel-Hamas war as they hope for a ceasefire - a vivid and unflinching view of life in a warzone” the documentary has now been pulled by the BBC.
Gary Lineker and Miriam Margolyes are among more than 800 media figures who have condemned the BBC's decision to pull a documentary about children's lives in Gaza. 
The BBC says it removed Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone from iPlayer while it carried out "further due diligence" after discovering that the young narrator was the son of a Hamas official. Zionists, including the Israeli ambassador Tzipi Hotovely, had written to the BBC asking how a child with alleged family ties to Hamas was allowed to be the focus of a documentary about the lives of ordinary Palestinians.   
The open protest letter published by Artists for Palestine UK criticised what the signatories said was a "racist" and "dehumanising" campaign targeting the documentary. It called on the BBC to reject efforts to have the film permanently removed or “subjected to undue disavowals” saying that surrendering to efforts to stop its return to iPlayer would indicate “racialised smears against Palestinians outweigh journalistic ethics and public interest”.
The signatories also warned against intrusive scrutiny of Abdullah Al-Yazouri, a 14-year-old  child who narrated Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone. His father, Dr Ayman Al-Yazouri, served as Gaza’s deputy agriculture minister – a civil service role concerned with food production.
“​​Almost half of Gaza’s population are children. What they have experienced over the past 17 months is something no child deserves to ever go through” said Liam O’Hare, an award-winning documentary producer/director who signed the letter. “As journalists and filmmakers we have a duty to help tell their story and that’s what this film did so brilliantly. The BBC cannot allow a politicised campaign to succeed in silencing the children of Gaza.”
Artists for Palestine UK (APUK) is a growing network of artists and cultural workers standing together in support of Palestinian liberation and for a just resolution for all in Israel/Palestine, including Palestinian refugees. 
The campaign that was launched in 2015 believes that those who work in the arts have a responsibility to consider the impact of their work when engaging in a situation of radical inequality.
APUK says that the arts are of particular significance where a people’s history, cultural heritage and future are under constant threat of erasure and it believes that the arts have an important role to play in connecting audiences with Palestinian experience. It opposes all forms of racism, including anti-Arab racism, Islamophobia and antisemitism.
“The UK film and TV industry will no longer be intimidated by those whose sole mission it is to censor the voices of the many who are defending the rights of children, the marginalised and those in desperate need. All stories have the right to be told and journalistic scrutiny should not be at the whim of those who deem certain lives unequal,” said letter signatory Nada Issa, an award-winning producer/director and journalist who is part Palestinian and Lebanese. We whole-heartedly agree.

The language they understand

Budget Day is never good news for workers – least of all when it’s under a Tory government. But whilst the Chancellor droned on in Parliament workers were walking out in a new wave of strikes against the austerity regime. Tube workers and train drivers, junior doctors, teachers and civil servants were all taking industrial action over pay.
    Down the ages the employers’ mantra has always been “Management’s right to manage”. In its purest form, it is expressed in the Master and Servant laws of the Victorian era when unions were barely legal, and the ‘corporate’ laws of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. In post-war Western ‘democracies’ the corporate class do their best to marginalise unions and limit the right to strike.
    The bosses claim that they have their workers’ best interests at heart and that strikes are pointless and useless. But no-one believes them.
    If it wasn’t for the unions, kids would still be climbing up chimneys whilst their parents slaved away in factories and mines six days a week for just enough to keep them going.
    The five-day week, paid holidays, pensions, free health care and education, all the trappings of what we used to call the Welfare State – were won by the labour movement. Genuine reforms by Labour governments brought in the health and safety legislation and recognition laws that empowered the unions in the 1970s.
    Those days may be forgotten but what workers still know is that free collective bargaining is meaningless without the ability to withdraw one’s labour. And at the end of the day, the only thing Management understands is industrial action.
    

One–Nil to Lineker

Gary Lineker has been reinstated as presenter of Match of the Day following an apology from the BBC. The BBC has wisely backed down over the Lineker saga whilst the Government tries to distance itself from a row that was clearly of its own making.
    The Government clearly wanted to silence Lineker who had Tweeted his objections to the Government’s new asylum seekers’ plan – a widely-publicised but clearly personal opinion made in his own time and on his own Twitter account.
    Many believe that the Government wanted the BBC to make an example of the sporting guru. The Government clearly believed that packing cross-Channel asylum seekers off to Rwanda was a vote winner that would shore up Tory support in the so-called “Red Belt” of northern seats taken from Labour at the last general election. But they were much mistaken.
    Millions of people supported the football guru who was suspended for comparing the language used by the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, to introduce the new Tory ‘Illegal Immigration Bill’ to that used in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Millions more defended the former England player’s right to free speech – a right supported by Lineker’s colleagues who walked out in sympathy. Even the supine Labour leader was moved by the furore over the sports presenter to call on Rishi Sunak to “stand up to his snowflake MPs waging war on free speech” following the Gary Lineker row.
    What Lineker said was quite right. The Tory plans are indeed “beyond awful”. As he said: “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.”