BBC Lies, Distortion and fear mongering

A better example of BBC lies and distortion than the '45,000 cows to be culled because of Brexit' I have yet to find. 'Newsnight' put the story out as part of an ongoing and now quite open bias that has seen almost all BBC news output propagating silly 'Project Fear' stories. Even the ex-minister Robert Goodwill in the clip rubbished the story. The first 3 or 4 minutes of this lying rubbish are sufficient.



The simple facts are these. A third of Northern Ireland's milk currently goes to the Republic for processing, largely into cheese. The Republic then exports some 80,000 tonnes of cheddar a year made in part with this milk back into the UK*. After Brexit, there will be a 40% tariff on the milk going south and a 40% tariff on the Cheddar coming into the UK. Of course it won't continue.

The solution of course is very simple - if the EU remain obdurate and refuse to see sense, in no short time some enterprising individual will throw up a cheese factory in the province, making 80,000 tonnes a year of cheddar from UK milk for UK consumption. Result? Jobs, wealth, GDP and taxes for the UK - gainers - and job losses, benefit costs, tax shortfalls and falling GDP for the Republic - losers.

Whilst the new Ulster cheese factories are under construction, the government could buy the milk and give it away to schools, hospitals, food banks, the elderly and so on.

Do the people of Ireland really want us to come to this? Isn't it about time ordinary Irish voters told Varadkar to stop posing and get back to his Kylie fan club posters?

* It takes 10 litres of milk to make 1kg of cheddar, so the 700m - 800m litres of milk exported from North to South each year makes 70,000 - 80,000 tonnes of cheese - almost exactly equivalent to the UK's Cheddar imports from Ireland.

EU enables remote customs clearances - no hard borders - in Austria

You will have missed it - it's slipped right off the main news radar - but the EU is just enabling all customs clearances and taxes for all goods entering and leaving the EU through the Italian port of Trieste to be paid, accounted and administered in the small Austrian town of Fürnitz, some 200km away. Yes, that's right. Trieste customs will now be based in Austria. 

During the pilot phase, the organisers wrote

Trieste has a harbor with a space problem due to the narrow coastal area towards the city. Fürnitz is ideally located at the junction of the Baltic-Adriatic axis (Gdansk-Warsaw-Vienna-Villach-Trieste-Venice-Bologna) and the Tauern axis (Munich-Salzburg-Villach-Ljubljana-Zagreb-Belgrade-Sofia-Istanbul). In order to prevent delays in customs clearance and to reduce the burden on the environment, the Interreg project Smartlogi now wants to work on new forms of intelligent logistics, which should, among other things, enable a cross-border customs corridor.

The port of Trieste has a great interest in passing on goods as quickly as possible, since the area is limited by the nearby city of Trieste. Inevitably, loads are loaded onto trucks and transported across the streets. Numerous administrative and technological challenges currently prevent a so-called "modal shift" (shifting traffic from one mode of transport to the other) from road to rail.

In the Smartlogi project, the LCA in Fürnitz, which is perfectly connected to the various main traffic routes, would like to develop into a close cooperation partner of the Port of Trieste. The project is being funded with a total volume of approx. 1.3 million euros from the Interreg program Austria-Italy. In addition, the equity shares of the Carinthian project partners are being co-financed by the Carinthian Economic Development Fund (KWF).

'Intelligent logistics' and 'customs corridors' mean that borders don't actually have to be located at borders, and that queues of trucks and containers can easily be avoided with advance clearances, computer tracking and so on - so that customs clearances are just an information exchange formality, rather than the physical impounding and holding of objects and vehicles at ports and border crossings. 

ORF reported yesterday

Great opportunity for Fürnitz

This is definitely a great opportunity for Fürnitz, said economic officer Ulrich Zafoschnig (ÖVP). He had received information from the Ministry of Finance that the necessary intergovernmental agreements should be made in September. Theoretically, customs clearance in Fürnitz could start this year, according to Zafoschnig.

If this can be done for Trieste, why not for Ireland? Why can't Ireland's custom clearance point be in Calais, or Hamburg even? Why shouldn't there be a customs corridor from Dublin to Dover?

I rather think this proves that the Irish Border Issue isn't actually an issue. I wonder if anyone's told Mr Robbins that he doesn't have to surrender the UK's sovereignty to Brussels after all?

Cameron's £9.3m tax 'diversion' to Remain campaign to be investigated?

The DCMS Committee has called for the donor of 'Britain's biggest ever campaign donation' to be investigated by the police.

That would be the £9.3m diverted from UK tax funds to the Remain campaign by David Cameron, then. 

REMAIN SPEND: £28,359,066
LEAVE SPEND: £13,436,241

Yet more lies from the False News BBC

Booker details in the Telegraph the heinous falsification of historical fact on Kirsty Wark's Newsnight. The lie propagated in the programme was that the 2m deaths upon partition - Hindu on Muslim, Sikh on Muslim, Muslim on Hindu and Sikh, rape, murder and carnage - were all the fault of the British for partitioning the Indian Empire into India and East and West Pakistan. 

No doubt this is not just BBC fake news but the lies are taught in schools to children of Indian and Pakistani immigrants. 

As Booker points out, it was the Muslim leader Jinnah who refused to accept a single nation and insisted on lines on a map dividing Hindu India from Muslim Pakistan and which led directly to an ocean of blood and 2m slaughtered across the subcontinent. 

Even the BBC cannot get away with telling a lie this big.

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?  

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.