Saturday, November 01, 2008

More disgust at non-existent BBC standards

There is immense respect for the Queen in Britain but among Leftists, not so much

While fury against the BBC over Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross was at its peak, the corporation brazenly aired a highly offensive remark about the Queen. During the comedy show Mock The Week on Wednesday evening, Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle made a 'disgracefully foul' so-called joke. Asked to think of something the Queen would not say in her Christmas speech, he put on a high voice and said: 'I have had a few medical issues this year - I'm now so old that my p**** is haunted.'

The decision to allow the 'joke' to be aired on the show at 10pm, hours after Brand resigned, has led to renewed anger among viewers. Boyle's 'gag', in a Mock The Week repeat, is just one example of the depths to which the BBC has fallen. The Daily Mail has uncovered further examples of bad language and degrading remarks given airtime by the corporation.

John Beyer, of Mediawatch UK, said of the Mock The Week remark: 'It is very offensive and should not have been broadcast. It is indicative of the sloppy way in which this kind of thing gets on air. 'There is a great deal of respect for the Queen and people do feel very strongly about any kind of disrespectful comments about her. It compounds what is going on at the moment.

'One has to acknowledge that the BBC is in the frontline of producing really excellent material, but when it comes to lapses of judgment like this you really have to look at the way things go on air. 'Clearly, there needs to be an assessment as to whether the chain of command that has been referred to time and again over the Ross and Brand affair is actually functioning.'

David Davies, Tory MP for Monmouth, urged BBC viewers who were offended to hold off from paying their licence fee until the last possible moment in protest. 'If the BBC wishes to continue to take taxpayers' money it is going to have to become accountable to the people it serves,' he said. 'Ordinary, decent people who are struggling to pay their mortgages must wonder why overpaid buffoons are being rewarded for making foul comments about elderly people who have always behaved with the utmost decorum. 'It was a disgracefully foul comment to make about any lady. 'Just because the Queen is the Queen, it doesn't mean she doesn't have feelings, and she should not be subjected to that kind of comment on a national TV programme.'

Source



British planning laws: When a shed is not a shed (but a shedload of confusion)

James Dedman's battle with the planning laws highlights their absurdity

It has taken over a year for James Dedman to resolve his planning dispute with East Hampshire District Council, involving many hours talking with planners, planning inspectors and consultants. Perhaps what he most needed, however, was a team of philosophers to answer the question: has a building ceased to exist when it is temporarily missing three walls during reconstruction?

In August 2006, James gained planning permission to convert a redundant cart shed in the village of Froxfield into holiday accommodation. Given that the building was in a conservation area, he was under no illusions about the sensitivity required. Indeed, the planning application stated: "The external materials to be used shall match, as closely as possible, in type, colour and texture those of the existing building." But this was not a problem: he is a specialist builder in the renovation of old buildings and had worked on such projects many times before.

One thing he has learned over the years is that you cannot always convert an old farm building directly into a modern home and obey all building regulations. Sure enough, when he started working on the cart shed it became clear that the walls and roof were in such a poor condition that they would never get past a building inspector. The walls, built without modern foundations, had to be underpinned, and the rotten roof timbers had to be replaced. "So I carefully took down three of the walls, storing all the materials so that they could be reused, and took the opportunity to clear off some modern cement, which should never have been used on the building," he says.

Before James could rebuild the walls, however, an anonymous villager complained to East Hampshire District Council that the building had been demolished. The council sent out a compliance officer to investigate, and, in August 2007, sent James a letter, stating: "I must advise that as the cart shed has had almost all of the structure apart from one wall either demolished or removed, there is no cart shed left to convert, and therefore the current planning permission cannot now be implemented." The letter went on to say that Mr Dedman was welcome to submit a new application for the construction of a new building - but added that it was highly unlikely permission would be granted because "there is a presumption against any new buildings in the countryside''.

Between the lines of bureaucrat-speak exists a fascinating philosophical question: if you take something apart and put it back together again, is it the same or does it become different? Indeed, are the millions who pay to go to see Stonehenge each year being sold a pup because the structure, as it exists, is largely the work of Victorian reconstruction?

Fascinating as it was to ponder this, James would rather have got on with his building project. "It put me out of business for six months and was a very long and expensive process," he says. "But finally, I have won the case on appeal and rebuilding work will with luck be starting in six months' time."

Asked to comment on losing the case, East Hampshire District Council has replied with an anodyne statement: "Whilst ultimately deciding that the new building was acceptable, the secretary of state has put on the appropriate conditions to safeguard the area from inappropriate development." In fact, the original planning permission already provided this - stating that the original materials must be retained.

The impossible situation in which James found himself - damned if he took the building down, damned if he tried to convert it without taking it down - is far from unique. Anyone with experience of building projects, particularly those which involve old buildings, will know of the often contradictory demands of planning departments, listed building officers and building control teams who fail to speak to each other.

Just because one official tells you it is fine to do something doesn't mean that there won't be another ready to pounce on you, fine you - or even clap you in jail, as Ray Kutscher-Byrne recently found to his cost. The soldier- turned-sculptor came across two pearl mussels while undertaking a 20,000 pound project to shore up the bank of the River Doon next to his Ayrshire cottage. Many builders would have tossed the mussels back in the river but, realising that they were a protected species, he put them in a bucket and reported his find to the fisheries board.

When a survey showed no other mussels present he was allowed to continue. Or at least he thought he was, until a few months later a police officer turned up on his doorstep and charged him with disturbing a protected species, an offence which carries a sentence of up to six months in jail. He was later admonished.

"What you often find is that there are two pieces of legislation side by side that are contradictory and neither of which takes precedence over the other," says Matthew Slocombe of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.

No one wants to see a situation where developers are allowed to bulldoze old buildings at whim. On the other hand, it would help if the various strands of building legislation were coherent - and the officials employed to uphold them would pick up the phone and speak to each other a little more.

Source



Black British police guilty of embarrassing case of mistaken identity

It was a case of mistaken identity which the National Black Police Association will not repeat in a hurry. Delegates attending the opening day of the organisation's national conference were expecting a keynote speech from David Davis, the ex-shadow Home Secretary and champion of civil liberties. Their star attraction duly took to the stage, but turned out to be the wrong Conservative backbench MP. Even more unexpected was the speech he delivered, which provoked widespread outrage, heckling, slow handclapping and a protest walkout.

Instead of David Davis, the event's organisers had somehow invited David Davies, the little-known Tory member for Monmouth who happens to sit on the Commons home affairs select committee. Mass confusion and no little embarrassment in the ranks turned to astonishment when the 38-year-old MP, elected to Westminster in 2005, began to speak.

Mr Davies, already developing a reputation for his hang 'em and flog 'em approach to law and order, had decided to accuse the National Black Police Association (NBPA) of being racist for denying membership to white officers. "To me, it is a shame that full membership of the BPA is open only to those of black, Asian or Middle Eastern origin," he began. "Tackling racism and unfair treatment of ethnic minorities is something which is taken seriously by members of every race in the police force and yet the clear implication is that white people do not share this concern.

"It could be argued that this policy is explicitly racist, in that it bars white people, and implicitly racist in suggesting that white people care less about racism than people of black, Middle Eastern, Asian or African origin." Warming to his theme, Mr Davies suggested that the NBPA's membership policy "would be unacceptable and probably illegal in virtually any other organisation in this country".

The MP, who serves as a special constable in London, proceeded to offer the association some helpful advice on taking alleged cases of racial discrimination to employment tribunals. It would be a good idea, he suggested, to "try to establish the veracity of claims being made by the applicant before taking matters to the courts".

"It is human nature that if we are denied a promotion, we find it easier to convince ourselves and others that our race, religion, sex or sexual orientation is to blame, rather than our abilities." The most senior Muslim police officer in England, Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur, is currently pursuing a race discrimination case against the force over, among other issues, its failure to promote him. He had been due to attend yesterday's conference but was unavoidably detained elsewhere. Mr Ghaffur was thus denied Mr Davies's tip that "an organisation which brings forward unfounded or vexatious claims risks its own reputation and its ability to help people who genuinely need it".

However, Ali Dizaei, the Met Commander - currently suspended over misconduct allegations - who is also the BNPA president, was present in the conference hall at York Racecourse to hear Mr Davies's final words of wisdom. They focused on the Metropolitan Black Police Association's recent decision, in response to Mr Dizaei's suspension, to demand that all potential ethnic minority recruits should boycott the force. "As a result... the BPA has become the only publicly-funded organisation to say that the police should be for whites only."

Choosing his words carefully, an NBPA spokesman later described Mr Davies's contribution as "thought-provoking". Association members were, he said, "mature enough to listen to opinions that aren't shared by us".

Some delegates were less sanguine. When Mr Davies faced a question and answer session during the afternoon, he was slow handclapped and half a dozen NBPA members walked out of the hall in protest. Dave Macfarlane, general secretary of the NBPA's London branch, stood up to accuse the MP of being "like the BNP in the 1980s". "I'm sick and tired of white people coming here to insult us," he said.

Another delegate, Vinny Tomlinson, from Merseyside, suggested that Mr Davies had displayed an astonishing "ignorance and immaturity in his lack of understanding of racial issues".

"You invited me to come here. If you wanted someone just to turn up and give the same old speech, you should have picked somebody else," was the MP's response. Next year, they will.

Source



Political Predictions and Nationalism

An excerpt from George Orwell -- writing in the Partisan Review, Winter, 1945

So far as I can see, all political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome. For example, right up to May of this year the more disaffected English intellectuals refused to believe that a Second Front would be opened. They went on refusing while, bang in front of their faces, the endless convoys of guns and landing-craft rumbled through London on their way to the coast. One could point to countless other instances of people hugging quite manifest delusions because the truth would be wounding to their pride. Hence the absence of reliable political prediction.

To name just one easily isolated example: who foresaw the Russo-German pact of 1939? A few pessimistic Conservatives foretold an agreement between Germany and Russia, but the wrong kind of agreement, and for the wrong reasons. So far as I am aware, no intellectual of the Left, whether russophile or russophobe, foresaw anything of the kind.

For that matter, the Left as a whole failed to foresee the rise of Fascism and failed to grasp that the Nazis were dangerous even when they were on the verge of seizing power. To appreciate the danger of Fascism the Left would have had to admit its own shortcomings, which was too painful; so the whole phenomenon was ignored or misinterpreted, with disastrous results.

The most one can say is that people can be fairly good prophets when their wishes are realizable. But a truly objective approach is almost impossible, because in one form or another almost everyone is a nationalist... The most intelligent people seem capable of holding schizophrenic beliefs, or disregarding plain facts, of evading serious questions with debating-society repartees, or swallowing baseless rumours and of looking on indifferently while history is falsified. All these mental vices spring ultimately from the nationalistic habit of mind, which is itself, I suppose, the product of fear and of the ghastly emptiness of machine civilization....

I believe that it is possible to be more objective than most of us are, but that it involves a moral effort.

[note* once you accept the immoral act as moral, you no longer have the morality to tell anymore. So once you accept that it's a moral goodness to steal from some by force for the crime of working harder and doing better, you no longer have a working moral compass to find any other moral direction. All morals then can be twisted to say what you WANT rather than what you need to know. if your compass doesn't point true north anymore, then you cant use it to get home]

One cannot get away from one's own subjective feelings, but at least one can know what they are and make allowance for them.

Source

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, OBAMA WATCH (2), EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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