The Daily Mail picked up from The Commentator and UKIPIAN the case of Amy Rutland, the Labour Party official who fulminated against Eastleigh UKIP candidate Diane James on last week’s BBC Question Time (James, you might recall, very nearly snatched victory from the Liberal Democrats)

The question was about the impact that UKIP might have on the Tories future electoral hopes.

the camera swung to Amy Rutland, who launched a personal attack on the UKIP panellist, the Eastleigh candidate Diane James, calling her ‘disgusting’.
Miss Rutland, a politics graduate, claimed UKIP preyed on vulnerable people by ‘scaremongering’ about the number of Romanians and Bulgarians expected to come to Britain.

fortunately Diane James remained unhassled and dealt with her in a calm and effective manner – and there it would have ended if some salient facts about Amy Rutland had not emerged over the next few days.

Rutland is South-East Policy Co-ordinator for the Labour Party

Although identified by Stephen Twigg, the Labour MP on the QT panel, merely as “a questioner from the audience” she had been with him at a meeting earlier in the day
Now in itself there is no reason why a political activist should not be present in the QT audience. But there is considerable suspicion that the BBC was aware of her presence and that the chairman, the millionaire David Dimbleby, not only picked her out but then kept her in the spotlight by highlighting her remarks and pressuring Diane James to react rather than answer the original question

I suspect that Dimbleby and the producers choreographed the whole scene hoping to unsettle UKIP’s Diane James (who had impressed the media at Eastleigh) and to undermine UKIP’s policy stance on immigration.

Unfortunately it has backfired on them. Rutland has gone underground and the Beeb is backpedalling furiously.

But never mind – it was all paid for out of our pockets via the BBC Poll Tax (and it’s likely that £450,000 goes each year to David Dimbleby)

Yes folks, aren’t you glad that the money taken out of your pocket via the BBC Poll Tax, enabled so many of the BBC elite to travel back and forth over the Atlantic?

The BBC spent more than £1 million on flights to America in the space of seven months this year, according to figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act,
Executives including former director-general Mark Thompson clocked up the massive bill flying both business and economy class for meetings and to make programmes.

Yes, forget about the excessive use of fossil fuel and annoying the citizens who live under your flight path – is it absolutely essential to be physically present at those meetings? After all the BBC is television company…can’t they organise “virtual” conferences via skype?
Then what about making programmes – the BBC schedules are full of rubbish anyway so is it necessary to spend hundreds of thousands on sending “Top Gear” or Stephen Fry to the USA as a change of background from the usual crap?

Of course, the costs of these visits are even greater when you consider the hotel bills (doubt whether they stay in Motel 6) and cabs, hire cars, restaurants etc

Note that Mark Thompson travelled to the US a lot – did that include visits to his new employer, the New York Times? I think we should be told…
But do you know what, for me, is the most gut wrenching fact of all?

As the BBC is not legally obliged to reveal full details of how it spends the £3.7 billion it is given each year through the licence fee, it is not possible to name every staff member who flew to the U.S. between April and October.

Not good enough – it is this kind of “broad brush accounting” that helps to cover a multitude of sins. It’s time we were allowed to see these detailed accounts because, after all, IT IS OUR MONEY, YOU BBC FREELOADERS

Good news – we pay out over £2m every year so that over 500 big cheeses at the BBC can have private health care while at the same time telling us all about our NHS being the envy of the world. Oh and you know those BBC liberal/left presenters so eager to pour scorn on millionaires, bankers and global corporations for reducing their tax obligations with the help of clever accountants? Well they have clever accountants as well…..

It’s the stench of hypocrisy from these fat cats who wax wealthy out of the BBC poll tax that really grates……

We now know that during Saddam Hussein’s murderous rule in Iraq CNN acted as a mouthpiece of the regime in order to maintain its presence. No doubt the BBC did the same. All foreign reporters had “minders” who directed them to “news stories” that the regime wished to be disseminated. They were thus essentially broadcasting the government’s propaganda. The advantage for the Iraqis, of course, was the BBC/CNN tag which gave these reports an air of respectability.

Why people have not grasped that everything coming out of Gaza today from CNN, BBC, Reuters etc is equally managed and directed by the Hamas regime is something that astonishes me. When the BBC interviews someone in Gaza they have been handpicked by their media minders. Street scenes, hospital footage – it’s all carefully stage managed and filtered in order to buttress the image of Hamas.

Ask yourself this. Has the BBC ever interviewed somebody in Gaza who is critical of Hamas policy? Have they ever filmed an anti Hamas demonstration in Gaza? No, of course not.

Then riddle me this….has the BBC ever interviewed an Israeli who is critical of his/her government’s policy – or filmed a demonstration denouncing Israel’s policy towards Gaza? Yes, many times….

Until we can have confirmation that the Hamas regime will allow the BBC to interview its political opponents and to film some form of public disaffection in Gaza then I will simply refuse to take any report from within Gaza as anything more than a tissue of lies or half truths.

Every western media report coming out of Gaza should be accompanied by a loud and explicit caveat that it was compiled under very strict conditions of censorship and highly resticted access – and needs to be taken with a very large pinch of salt…..

Strange, isn’t it, that the BBC and its clones amongst the left leaning punditry consistently beat a negative drum over Britain’s involvement in the Falklands and the first Gulf War while our military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan has created a mini industry of reports. exposures and dramatic reconstructions that serve to underline the “futility” and social costs of these campaigns. But, with Syria you get the feeling that the mood music is quite different. Months of BBC reporting, highlighting the activities and sufferings of the anti Assad rebels has built up the pressure for that most seductive of all messages – “something must be done”….

And now it appears that David Cameron is taking up the challenge

Last week, the Prime Minister visited a UN-run compound on the border with Jordan and saw the conditions being endured by tens of thousands of fleeing Syrians.
He said he was determined to do “more” and would be working with newly re-elected US president Barack Obama to up the pressure on Bashar Assad’s regime.

Doing more almost certainly means some form of military intervention – no fly zones, providing the rebels with weapons, sending troops to the Syrian borders to give humanitarian assistance

Wonderful words, Mr Cameron – and it’s true that the Assad regime is brutal, bloodthirsty and autocratic and some of the rebels want to replace it with a liberal democracy. However many of the others have a different agenda – and we all know what happened in Egypt.

However General Sir David Richards, Chief of Defence Staff has a dash of cold water for Cameron’s dream.

Our political masters are quite happy to reduce the size of the Armed Forces, but their appetite to exercise influence on the world stage is, quite understandably, the same as it has always been.
“Often politicians say to me, ‘Can you go and do this?’ I say to them, ‘With what?’

Exactly – we have been “intervening” for over a decade and at considerable cost for uncertain effect. It’s time to retrench and regroup and resist the temptation to grandstand on the world’s stage merely to satisfy David Cameron’s need to feel warm inside.

Let’s give Syria a miss and concentrate on sorting out our own problems…..

“Now we need to learn the lessons and move on. It’s going to be tough but we can do it.” says Alan Yentob, “Creative Director” of the BBC (£183,300 pa )

Meanwhile, in the real world, a comment here has a rather different take on this BBC farce..

All these overpaid troughers, whether Quango CEO’s, Council Chiefs, MP’s or BBC really do think they deserve shedfuls of money from us, the poor sods who have to pay for them.
It has to end, and end now. I am sick of hearing “we must learn from this” and “we must move on” endlessly.
These overpaid incompetent people must be thrown off the public payroll without huge sums of cash as a reward for their incompetence.

Nail…..meet head….

George Entwhistle, the Director General of the BBC, who has resigned over issues of “shoddy Journalism” was paid £450,000 per year and leaves with a £450,000 lump sum on top of his £877,000 pension pot,

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An SAS soldier has been jailed for possessing a “war trophy” pistol presented to him by the Iraqi Army for outstanding service.

Tags: BBC, SAS