Demonstrations don't count half as much as votes

Paul Mason reprises a Remoanian whine in the Guardian today; they may have lost the vote, our Article 50 letter is good to go, our negotiating teams are primed but still he clutches at the most feeble of straws. Demonstrations matter, he says, because they lay the ground for future electoral victories. Thus NHS and pro-EU protesters will see no easy victory now, but will score unexpected wins in the future.

To a point, Lord Copper. Was the Brexit vote then a delayed effect of the Countryside march, the first I ever attended? It was as much a protest about the disregard of the elite Metropolis for the rurality as about hunting, and until the Iraq march was the biggest ever seen in London, dwarfing the recent piddling little NHS and pro-EU huddles. And what of the anti-Blair march, the second of my lifetime (and probably the last)? Did the size and scale of this presage the overwhelming destruction of the Labour Party, it's utter unelectability for all time? 

Yes, the pendulum will swing back again. It always does. But not because of enfeebled radicals such as Mason calling fewer and fewer ageing followers onto the streets. Generational change will drive a future political rebalance. Demonstrations are really no more influential than a successful pop song or blockbuster TV series. It's universal suffrage and the secret ballot that really bring change - both of them striking fear into the hearts of the Illiberals. 

Let me fix that strapline for you, Paul ..

More lies from the Fake News Guardian

Yep, that mendacious rag the Guardian has been at it again. This time it's a Fake News story that vast numbers of EU nurses are fleeing the NHS for fear of Brexit. The story is so risibly crooked, biased and laden with falsity that Guardian subs have not even dared allow comments.

Firstly - All context is absent from the story. No mention is made of the latest official Parliament report on NHS staffing, particularly that only 5% of NHS staff are from other EU countries, and of those some 48% work in London and the South East. No context is given to the bald claim that 2,700 EU nurses leaving the NHS in 2016 is unusual. No mention is made of normal staff 'churn' - usually 10% a year. Of 21,000 EU NHS nurses, we should expect that 2,100 leave each year; that gives us 600 EU nurses a year over the norm that are quitting. That's 0.05% of all NHS staff. Worth a headline?

Secondly - Little or no fact checking seems to have been done, certainly not using the Parliamentary report on NHS staffing, which states that far from falling, the number of NHS staff from EU states has been rising - "Of staff who joined the NHS in 2015/16, 10.8% were from other EU countries. This has risen from 6.8% in 2012/13" - though still only 5% of the total. 

Thirdly - The most risibly unevidenced claim, that floods of EU staff were leaving because of fear of Brexit, is nothing more than made-up agitprop that has no place in any newspaper. No survey, no voxpops, no reporter interviewing significant numbers. It's just a lie.

In fact, EU workers in all sectors including agriculture and horticulture have fallen since mid 2016. In all cases where evidence is available, this is primarily because of the weak pound; getting €1.15 for each NHS £1 is simply not as attractive as the old €1.35 rate. Particularly for staff in London and the South-east faced with high housing costs. But of course, not a single mention of this. 

In the face of such blatant omission, distortion and misrepresentation, such outrageous Fake News, is it any wonder that this foul little rag is going broke?  

Banks - More Fake News from the Guardian

The Guardian has started 2017 as it ended 2016 - with Fake News, distortion, omission and misrepresentation. The paper's decline from the 1970s and 80s when it represented fearless journalism to the sad little agitprop rag it has become today is precipitous. Now just a platform for waspish spite and crude post-truth corporatist Federast propaganda, Paul Foot will be spinning in his grave. Still fighting the Brexit battle with Fear and Smear, today's risible guff is a story that banks are preparing to leave Britain. 

What the paper knows but omits from printing is that:-

• All banks are tackling how to split their retail from their investment operations by 2019 - a post 2008 crash requirement and nothing to do with Brexit
• That there is NO risk whatsoever that retail banks will move offshore
• That banks have a duty to examine options for the future location of investment bank operations - which require separate HR, legal and risk back-office support rather than shared as at present
• That London will retain global #1 ranking for financial ops, that Frankfurt, currently at #19 in the world ranking, is a dreary little provincial town to which bankers will not move
• That it is almost inevitable that the options appraisals will demonstrate that London remains the best option for bank investment ops - better staff pool quality, advantageous employment law, preferred law and court structure, best legal pool quality, best transport and time links - but just in case Juncker's bent chums in Lux suddenly offer banks a 5% tax rate, alternatives must be considered

Of course, if the Guardian had printed the truth, there would be no story. So they go with lies, omissions, distortions and misrepresentation of which Goebbels would be proud. Sad, nasty little rag.

How the Guardian tells lies

As one of the UK's post-truth behemoths, the Guardian still trades on a reputation established in more honest times, before the paper carried fake news as a matter of course. Jonathan Freedland today condemns what he terms the lies of others - but ignores his paper's own record of journalistic dishonesty. 

In the paper's news content you don't have to look far to find prime examples of those heinous journalistic sins Omission, Distortion and Misrepresentation. It took me just a few minutes today to find the following in this morning's report in the paper of the protests outside the Polish parliament; 'Police use tear gas to clear parliament blockade' reads the headline, but in the piece itself the gassing is hardly mentioned - "Opposition party MP Jerzy Meysztowicz told the television network that police used tear gas to disperse the protesters who tried to prevent the cars from leaving." In other words, the paper has no evidence for the use of tear gas, no independent corroboration, just a hearsay anecdote from one of the protesters.

Nor it seems did the paper's 'journalists' seek to confirm the story with the Polish police - or perhaps they DID check with the Polish police as to whether tear gas had been used. And didn't like the answer, and so lied about it. RT also carries the protest story -  and reports "Warsaw police spokesman Mariusz Mrozek subsequently denied reports that police had deployed tear gas against protesters, claiming that what might have looked like tear gas in fact was smoke from fireworks thrown by demonstrators".  

And so the truth emerges. Protesters trying to prevent the convoy of official cars from leaving threw 'fireworks' - in probability marine signal flares - the smoke from which was interpreted by an inexperienced protester in a heightened state of excitement as tear gas, and the Guardian reported this as a fact.

So the Guardian's strap line is simply lousy, unacceptable, fake-news journalism, based on the single uncorroborated hearsay of a single demonstrator and officially denied by the police. It's either omission or distortion, take your pick. And in Freedland's own words, it's a lie.

Post-credulous audience hears evidence of fake news broadcast by post-truth BBC

The video link provided by a commentor in the post below is a scorcher. At a UN press conference, independent Canadian journo Eva Bartlett demolishes the credibility of the fake news from Aleppo promulgated by, amongst others, the Guardian and the BBC.

"..what you hear in the corporate media, and I will name them – BBC, Guardian, the New York Times etc. – on Aleppo is also the opposite of reality"

In a devastating surgical dissection, Bartlett dismisses the BBC's main source of news in Aleppo - one man in Coventry, with an agenda, who calls himself 'Syrian Observatory for Human Rights'. She points out that there are NO international humanitarian organisations in rebel-held Aleppo and NO credible independent sources of news from there. The White Helmets are exposed as an armed partisan force funded by $100m from the US / EU / UK who fake news footage (documented) and are, I strongly suspect, a thin cover for arms shipments to the rebels and for western intelligence organisations.

There is NO evidence, she points out, that the White Helmets have ever been in rebel-held areas of Aleppo at all. Such news is fake.

Bartlett appeared before fellow international journalists, all of whom had full opportunity to question her and require evidence. She comes out as honest, sane and very credible - and the post-truth BBC and Guardian come out as shabby liars and charlatans.

"So they [the White Helmets] are not credible. The SOHR are not credible. 'Unnamed activists' are not credible. Once or twice maybe, but every time? Not credible. So your sources on the ground – you don't have them. You ask why we aren't seeing this. This relates to the other gentleman's question about why most of the corporate media are telling lies about Syria. It's because this is the agenda; if they had told the truth about Syria from the beginning, we wouldn't be here now. We wouldn't have seen so many people killed."

I commend this video. Make a coffee, take a break and play.