They Are Not Perks, They Are Rights

Having heard the BBC News refer to BA cabin crew's "travel perks" once too often, I have submitted the following complaint to the BBC ...

I object to the repeated use by BBC News of the term "perks" to describe British Airways cabin crew's travel concessions. The term "perks" is highly subjective - it suggests something unearned, undeserved and which a person could easily do without.

In fact, the travel concessions are essential for many staff to remain in work, and are a well-earned part of their wages and rights.

As this issue is now the main sticking point of a very high-profile, highly-charged industrial dispute, the BBC should take more care and use a less loaded, more objective term, such as "travel concessions".

The Sun Sets on New Labour

Tony Woodley rips up the tabloid at the rostrum, a delegate complains that Murdoch's mouthpiece didn't give our Prime Minister a fair hearing, and Gordon Brown rightly points out that voters not newspapers decide elections.

All of which misses the point that No self-respecting Labour Party would want the support of The Sun to start with.

In fact, The Sun's support over the last twelve years is proof if proof were needed that New Labour was doing something very very wrong.

New Labour has walked into a trap of its own making. In the run-up to the 1997 General Election, Tony Blair and his coterie pulled out all the stops to secure Murdoch's support, following him round the world like desperate puppies, promising whatever he asked, even changing policies to meet his demands. And all this despite the fact that Labour could easily have won that General Election with or without the backing of the Sun.

If New Labour lackeys now complain of the excess power of the press over public opinion, they might reflect on the fact that their government has had twelve years to do something about that. It could have legislated stricter controls over media ownership, it could have resourced greater access to publishing for working-class people and progressive organisations.

Instead, it chose to adapt its policies to the baying tabloids and now does not even get their support. Perhaps it thought that wars would impress the warmongering Sun, but today The Sun is lining up bereaved military families against the goverment. Perhaps it thought that promising to corrall feckless teenage mothers into Big Brother houses would win over the redtops, but no - not impressed.

New Labour used to be anti-working-class and popular. Now it is anti-working class and unpopular, so The Sun has jumped ship. But had Labour done the right thing, supporting rather than attacking the working class, implementing socialist policies rather than Tory ones, The Sun would also have jumped ship. And good thing too.

BNP members interviewed on the Newsbeat website

The F-Word have blogged about an interview of two BNP members on the Newsbeat website and they comment:

While the BNP members don’t come across as the most intelligent human beings and the interviewer does get a couple of gentle digs in towards the end, the BBC’s decision to run this interview without at least giving a bit of context about the party’s violent, racist and sexist history and policies on a website designed for young people who are assumed to have little political awareness is hugely irresponsible.

I know people are divided on the ‘no platform’ policy - personally, I think Griffin’s appearance on Question Time won’t necessarily be a bad thing providing he faces suitable scrutiny and condemnation from the other participants and audience members - but providing an uncritical platform for BNP members to spout their racist views (couched in pseudo-logic and reason, as ever) to generally apolitical young people is dangerous and completely unnecessary.



The F-Word also gives some background on one of the interviewees :

UPDATE: One of the interviewees is Mark Collett, who was exposed in this Channel 4 documentary, in which he proclaimed that 1930s Germany was a better place to live than Britain today. “Hitler will live on forever and maybe I will too”, said Collett. He said that he considered AIDS a “friendly disease because blacks, drug users and gays have it.” He also made this sexist little speech which I blogged last year.

The Newsbeat website makes no mention of this and it is, as stated , a pretty uncritical platform for the BNP.

If you want to complain, here is the link.

Fact or Opinion?

Decent news reporting is supposed to report facts, and include opinions clearly flagged as such. And we're probably entitled to expect this more from a public service broadcaster than from, say, a tabloid newspaper.

I'm not naive anough to believe that this principle is rigorously upheld, but two bits of BBC reporting have got up my nose this week.

Firstly, the repeated mantra that "Everyone now accepts that there must be cuts in public spending." Excuse me, but I don't. If you mean "Every leader of a mainstream political party, plus a great chunk of rent-a-quote bourgeois hacks and economists now agree that there must be cuts in public spending", then say so.

Secondly, the constant reference to "Britain's nuclear deterrent" in reports about Gordon Brown announcing a reduction in nuclear-armed submarines from four to three. Whether Britain's nuclear weapons are in fact a deterrent is a matter of opinion not of fact. The appropriate noun in this context is "missiles", "weapons" or perhaps "arsenal".

I'm happy to confess to being a pedantic nerd about matters of words, but this is not just semantics but politics.

'Immigrant Crime Wave' Revealed As Lie

This week, a police report showed that immigrants are, in fact, not the bunch of criminals that some right-wing rags and ignorant bigots would have you believe. It seems that even in the few crimes where a disproportionate number of perpetrators are foreign, the same disproportion of victims are also foreign. It’s bad news for the BNP, but hey, the truth sometimes hurts. Bad news for the Daily Mail too, but here’s betting it won’t stop them reporting immigrant crime as though it is some sort of rampaging foreign disease threatening to overwhelm us Brits.

I’m old enough to remember that until about the 1980s, newspapers regularly used to refer to a criminal’s race, but only if they were non-white. So you would read that ‘a black man mugged an old lady’, but if a white man mugged an old lady, he would just be ‘a man’. But by twenty or so years ago, a steadily increasing howl of protest had put a stop to this particular brand of racist reporting.

These days, though, I regularly read in the rags that ‘an immigrant’ or ‘a failed asylum seeker’ has been apprehended for drink-driving, or burglary, or assault, or whatever. I never read that ‘a native Brit’ has committed an offence. So the form of reporting that became unacceptable about race and colour in the 1980s is still acceptable about immigration status.

Not only does this fuel presumptions about an immigrant crime wave that this week’s report proved to be false, it also shows that racists who can no longer parade their prejudices about blacks can still direct them against immigrants. And the fact that they prey on people’s genuine fear of crime may get them an audience but is actually sickening.