MP Formally Protests BBC Hard Left Militant Bias

[Teddy Bear]

The techniques identified in the article, and used here by the BBC to further any cause they deem as part of their agenda, are typical. One can only wonder why the government is so silent on many of the other agendas maintained by the BBC.

Tories order police to halt workfare demos as MP makes formal protest to BBC over bias in favour of hard-Left militants

By Simon Walters and Glen Owen
Last updated at 3:20 PM on 26th February 2012

A police crackdown on anti-capitalist extremists who invade shops to sabotage the Government’s work experience programme has been ordered by Ministers.

Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith has asked the police to act amid growing fears in Whitehall that the protesters’ wrecking tactics are succeeding.

Burger King yesterday became the latest major company to withdraw from the Welfare-to-work scheme after claims that it amounts to ‘slave labour’.

Last week, a Tesco store in Westminster was forced to close after it was targeted by Left-wing activists bearing placards accusing the firm of ‘exploitation’.

Mr Duncan Smith believes retailers are not getting enough protection and, after raising the matter with Home Secretary Theresa May, asked the police to get tough.

He said: ‘We have asked the police to be more pro-active. If they receive intelligence that a shop is to be invaded they should stop it happening. And if a shop has been invaded, retailers need to know that they can call on the police to eject them. It is illegal to prevent people going about their normal business.’

The aim of the scheme is to place young people on Jobseeker’s Allowance in work experience for up to eight weeks to help make them more ‘marketable’ to employers.

It is voluntary and those taking part have a week to pull out of a placement if they feel it is not right for them. However, if they withdraw without good reason after that stage, benefits can be withdrawn.

So far, more than 34,000 jobseekers have volunteered for work experience stints of up to two months, and about half have stopped claiming benefits as a result.

The decision to send in the police came as Tory MP Priti Patel made a formal protest to the BBC, accusing it of being biased in favour of the protest led by the Left-wing Right To Work organisation.

She claimed BBC 2 Newsnight had ‘spent all week putting solitary Government Ministers up against panels made up of the hard Left’.

And fellow Conservative Philip Davies said: ‘Burger King are spineless. They have caved into pressure from a small band of hard-Left militants.’

Critics claim many of the job placements are for ‘worthless’ shelf-stacking roles – but Ministers point out that Burger King was offering youngsters white-collar work experience at its office HQ.

The Right To Work group has close links with the Socialist Workers’ Party and Ministers say it is using ‘sinister’ methods.

They claim agitators were responsible for flooding the website Mumsnet with abusive messages attacking firms involved in the scheme, such as Tesco.

Employment Minister Chris Grayling, who devised the scheme, says he has fresh evidence to back up his claim that ‘fake activity’ by a ‘small number’ of Socialist-linked activists is driving the campaign.
Kirsty James did work experience at a hair salon

He says that hours after he repeated the claim on the BBC last week, he was bombarded with dozens of emails, using almost identical wording, from campaigners. They all ‘protested in the strongest possible terms’ against his claim that the Right to Work campaign was a front for the Socialist Workers’ Party.

The emails all say: ‘I am not, and never have been, associated in any way with the Socialist Workers’ Party – or indeed any other Left-wing political group.’

Sources say David Cameron is ‘determined’ to rescue the scheme and is ‘livid’ at the BBC’s role. On Tuesday’s Newsnight, Tory MP Harriett Baldwin was put up against three critics who had experience of workfare schemes.

Jeremy Paxman asked Baldwin four times: ‘Do you understand why people find the schemes offensive?’

And on Thursday, presenter Kirsty Wark said: ‘It’s just essentially cheap labour.’

On Friday morning’s Today programme, Evan Davis said: ‘The amount you are going to learn stacking shelves is not going to be very great – it’s been over-sold. What do you learn when you go and do work experience in supermarkets?’

Then Friday evening’s Newsnight – following a filmed report which poured scorn on the Government’s claims that the protest campaign was being pushed by social media manipulation – put a Tory MP up against another panel of three critics.

And Paul Callanan, representing Youth Fight for Jobs and Education, was asked whether the campaigners were a front for socialism.

He said: ‘I am a member of the Socialist Party’, adding: ‘The reason socialists are taking up this issue is because it’s a symptom of a capitalist system that is utterly corrupt, rotten to the core.’

The Tories have also questioned the role played by the Left-wing Guardian newspaper.

It has offered blanket, supportive coverage of the Right to Work’s campaigns, with many pieces written by Left-wing activist Shiv Malik.

Mr Malik, 30, has been a controversial figure for more than a decade. Just six days after the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers in 2001, he wrote: ‘The world has gone crazy, 5,000 businessmen and military personnel die and suddenly we are at war. With whom? More people die each day from starvation or bad water as a result of IMF loans.’

In 2008, police raided Mr Malik’s North London home to search for interviews he carried out with Hassan Butt, a former Muslim extremist arrested on suspicion of terrorism offences. Butt was later released without charge.

Mr Malik, who was writing a biography of Butt, won a High Court battle to keep the material confidential. In 2010, Mr Malik was caught up in violent student protests against tuition fees, and described being struck on the head by a police baton. He wrote: ‘I felt a big whacking thud and I heard it reverberating inside my head. There was blood everywhere.’

Mr Malik has posted dozens of messages on Twitter over the past week attacking Welfare-to-work.

Ironically, the Guardian has itself been accused of ‘exploiting’ unpaid work experience students.

The newspaper is currently advertising on its website: ‘A limited number of short work experience opportunities throughout the year to those dedicated to a career in journalism. Placements are unpaid and range in duration from a few days to a maximum of two weeks.’

Mumsnet appears to have been one of the main targets of the campaigners. Its mothers’ internet forum has been bombarded with postings critical of Tesco and the work experience, many aggressively militant in tone and language.

One ‘strand’, which was started on February 16 and now has more than 1,000 posts, is headlined: ‘Tesco should f***ing well PAY THEIR STAFF’ and includes lines such as ‘why the f***ing f*** should Tesco get their staff for free? Why?’ Another, left by someone calling themselves ‘Norman Tebbit’, reads: ‘Tesco are absolute f***ers.’ Mumsnet is run by Justine Roberts – the wife of Ian Katz, the Guardian’s deputy editor. Ms Roberts did not respond to calls. Right to Work started in 2009 as a campaign against public service cuts, with the Socialist Workers’ Party boasting that it had ‘initiated the campaign’.

An early rally in May 2010 was dominated by SWP members. Right to Work is currently led by bus driver Paul Brandon, a representative for the Left-wing Unite union, and its registered address is the home of SWP boss Charlie Kimber.

Right to Work’s spokesman, Mark Dunk, is an unemployed activist whose Facebook page has as its profile picture the slogan: ‘All out! Stay out!’

The BBC said: ‘It is impossible to respond to a complaint before it has been received, however we are comfortable that our coverage of this issue has been fair and impartial.’

Mumsnet co-founder Justine Roberts said: 'Mumsnet is a place where you often get strong debate and differing views.

'To suggest Mumsnet users are anyone's stooge is just nonsense and to suggest that I am merely a mouthpice for my husband is just sexist Many Mumsnet users expressed views against the Workfare scheme but not all.

'Some wanted Mumsnet to withdraw adverts from workfare participants which we have not done as we know the arguments are finely balanced.'

[Teddy Bear]

Melanie Phillips has more to say on the issue, particularly the role of the BBC in this travesty.

Jobs, welfare and how the BBC went into battle for the Socialist Workers

Hands up all those who actually know someone in the Socialist Workers' Party. Hmm, just as I thought.

Now hands up all those who think the Socialist Workers' Party plays a significant role in British public life.

Exactly. The SWP is a marginal, far-left revolutionary grouping of placard-toting obsessives and droning Marxist bores which until very recently had zero public impact except in the context of raucous and occasionally violent demonstrations.

Yet astonishingly, it has all but derailed a key government policy designed to bring jobless youngsters back into the workplace.

This scheme targets 16 to 24-year-olds who have been unemployed for three to nine months, and gives them a work experience placement lasting between two and eight weeks to make them more attractive to employers.

It is an excellent policy. It exploits no one. The placements are so short they do not take away paid jobs from other people.

It does not penalise the unemployed. Nobody is compelled to go on these placements. If the unemployed choose to take part in the scheme, they lose no welfare benefits.

Instead, by giving them lessons in punctuality, what to wear for work and how to speak courteously to customers, such placements provide invaluable assistance to people whose hopes of finding work are often blighted by disadvantage.

So it would seem to be a win-win situation, and accordingly has struck a chord with the public. Heck, even the usually knee-jerk leftie audience on BBC TV's Question Time seemed to support it on last week's show.

Yet in the course of just a few days, high-profile demonstrations and internet campaigns claiming that the scheme amounts to 'workfare' involving 'forced labour' caused one firm after another to pull out.

How absurd. These placements are not forced but entirely voluntary. Nor in fact are they 'workfare' - a system under which benefits are made conditional on the taking up of a permanent job - but merely temporary work experience schemes.

Moreover, far from representing mass public opposition, the campaign against the placements was masterminded by a mere handful of diehard SWP agitators hiding behind a front organisation, cynically named the Right to Work campaign.

Just a dozen people protested in the Tesco Express opposite the Houses of Parliament, causing it to close for barely an hour.

At the head of that protest was a full-time SWP activist who last year led an attempt to storm the London headquarters of Royal Bank of Scotland in protest at bankers' bonuses. Another SWP demonstrator had previously called for a 'global intifada'.

Yet in response to this public nuisance by extremist agitators, Tesco promptly ran for the hills, abandoning its work experience programme which provided placements for 3,000 young people and instead instituting its alternative scheme.

Other companies and organisations such as Waterstones, TK Maxx, Poundland, and Burger King all followed suit and declared that they, too, would no longer take part, with still more companies reviewing their own positions.

So how on earth can the British Government have been pushed off course like this by a few far-left thugs?

The immediate answer is the contemptible absence of spine displayed by these firms in the face of such manipulative and bully-boy tactics. They caved in because they were frightened by SWP threats of a 'wave of protest' that would lead to boycotts of their stores.

The further question posed by that, however, is why they were so spooked by such risibly marginal individuals.

The disturbing answer is that the otherwise negligible impact of this campaign was vastly amplified by a combination of social media and the BBC.

Twitter, Facebook and other digital platforms have immeasurably amplified the potential for rabble-rousing incitement and hate campaigns. So charities involved in the work experience scheme were targeted on websites and received abusive emails.

The parenting website Mumsnet was bombarded with abusive messages attacking firms involved in the scheme. The effective hijacking of this mainstream family message board gave the ugly campaign a spurious centrist veneer.

But what really put rocket fuel behind these extremists was the BBC. Day after day it gave them a platform, sanitising their true nature and unashamedly endorsing their message that the Government scheme was somehow immoral and unacceptable.

Uncritically, it presented the protest as if it really was about the 'Right to Work', rather than what it really was - a campaign of intimidation against work.

It left the public wholly unaware that 'Right to Work' was merely a fig-leaf for far-left troublemakers. Indeed, had it told the truth about them it could hardly have put them on to its TV and radio shows, as it did so assiduously.

So egregious was this partisanship that the Tory MP Priti Patel has made a formal protest about bias to the BBC.

In particular, she points out that BBC2's Newsnight 'spent all week putting solitary Government ministers up against panels made up of the hard left'.

On one of these shows, presenter Jeremy Paxman four times asked the Tory MP Harriet Baldwin: 'Do you understand why people find the schemes offensive?'

Another presenter, Kirsty Wark, opined the following day: 'It's just essentially cheap labour.'

A day after that, Newsnight broadcast a report pouring scorn on the Government's claims that the protest campaign was being pushed by social media manipulation.

And on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Evan Davis said: 'The amount you are going to learn stacking shelves is not going to be very great - it's been over-sold. What do you learn when you go and do work experience in supermarkets?'

Contrast all this hyperactive support for far-left troublemakers with how slow the BBC was to report the huge scandal over A4e, which has taken millions of pounds of public money in contracts to get the unemployed back to work, even after police had launched a fraud inquiry into the company.

And yet with what glee the BBC extensively reported 75-year-old June Hautot berating Health Secretary Andrew Lansley over the NHS reforms, presenting her merely as an irate pensioner - but somehow obscuring the fact that she too was a veteran left-wing agitator.

How very typical. The BBC always seems ready to sign up to the latest wailing and whingeing from the public sector, doubtless because it is itself used to receiving large amounts of public money.

Too often it sounds like the Guardian of the airwaves. And it is the Guardian which surely takes the biscuit for the most shameless and poisonous hypocrisy over the 'Right to Work' campaign.

For it produced piece after piece supporting the campaign's ludicrous claims, and rejoicing at the bloody nose the protesters were giving the work experience scheme.

Yet this is the same Guardian which even now is advertising for its own work experience scheme where people voluntarily work for nothing because they are glad to get the experience.

Does this not just tell you all you need to know about the left? Purporting to care about the poor, they kick away from them the ladder of opportunity they provide for their own young people. Bloated with often inherited wealth themselves, they flay companies that make wealth and opportunity for others.

The Government's work experience scheme is part of a crucial and commendable attempt to rescue lives being ruined by joblessness. The SWP want to destroy that scheme because their aim is to destroy British society.

But the companies who have caved in, along with the BBC and the left-wing press, are far worse - because they have shamefully made themselves complicit in that nihilistic and despicable aim which so cavalierly trashes the poor.