Jun
30
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For several years it has been obvious that the BBC’s uncritical reporting of EU stories must be dominated by the entrenched left-wing views in the Corporation itself. It has also become clear in recent times that the EU has effectively “bought� the BBC’s support. Via the shadowy European Investment Bank, itself an institution of the EU, the BBC has been provided with several substantial loans.
The nature and terms of those loans are “commercial� or “soft�, depending which party you talk to. The EIB and BBC can’t even spin the same version of events.
The following letter has just gone to Philippe Maystadt, president of the European Investment Bank.
It has been copied to EU Commissioner Joaquin Almunia, responsible for economic and monetary affairs, and to all members of the European Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee.
Sir
The EIB and the BBC
Unfortunately I am unable to attend the meeting of the European Parliament’s Economics and Monetary Affairs Committee at the end of June, owing to prior commitments elsewhere. May I therefore put a number of issues and questions to you via this letter.
You will no doubt have seen the written question I put to the European Commission on the relationship between the EIB and the BBC. You may also have had a hand in drafting the somewhat unsatisfactory answer.
At long last it is becoming better known that the EIB is larger than the World Bank and the IMF, and has distributed some 200 billion euros backed by the taxpayers of EU nation states over the last five years or so. The opaque nature of the EU has extended to include the EIB for far too long, which is why there is concern in the UK about EIB funding of BBC projects in recent years.
It is simply not credible to claim that there is no connection between these loans and the BBC’s editorial policy towards the EU. Legally, perhaps not. In reality, it is obvious.
To make the point even clearer, let me put it the other way around. Would the EIB loan large amounts of taxpayer-backed public funds to an organisation that spent its time vigorously attacking it? Of course not.
So telling me, as Mr Almunia did in his written answer, that EIB policy was for the recipients to disclose the terms of any loan is tantamount to admitting that there has been collusion between the two parties and that the terms were not strictly commercial. Indeed the BBC’s top representative in Brussels has confirmed that to be the fact, specifically and in writing. Your own website referred to these loans as being made “under the most favourable of terms…financing capital projects according to the objectives of the Union.”
No wonder, when I tried to raise this issue at the European Parliament’s Budget Control Committee some months ago the two EIB representatives scuttled off without giving a full and considered response.
Indeed, the EIB’s own terms of reference include the proposition that it be supportive of EU objectives, which must inevitably include support for the EU’s own supporters – a self-serving spiral of mutual involvement. We are also asked to believe the EIB is a not-for-profit organisation. This further underlines the nature of the uncommercial nature of some of its loans, despite the claims to the contrary in Mr Almunia’s written answer.
Of course the EIB is not the sole source of funds from the EU. The BBC also receives additional finance from various EU resources, which, of course, come originally from taxpayers.
You probably already know that I have deposited papers with New Scotland Yard in London concerning the prima facie case against the BBC that they are in breach of their Royal Charter, specifically concerning the legal requirement for objective and balanced reporting of news and current affairs. The case is based, at least in part, on the BBC’s receipt of substantial soft loans from the EIB, an institution of the EU primarily concerned with financing projects and enterprises supportive of EU objectives. My case is supported by a large quantity of independent analysis of broadcasting time devoted to pro- and anti-EU views, commissioned over many years by Lord Pearson of Rannoch.
At present the matter is in the hands of the UK’s police. Specifically at present it is going through the complaints procedure.
Let me cite a few examples of the pro-EU bias which breaches the BBC’s Royal Charter.
1. Listeners were invited to nominate the one piece of legislation they would most like to be repealed. The European Communities Act 1972, which took the UK in to what was then the European Community, was far ahead of all other nominations. The result of the poll was never broadcast.
2. The BBC’s director general Mark Thompson admitted to the Daily Mail a lack of objective coverage and “serious flaws” in BBC coverage of EU matters. Nothing noticeable has since been done to improve the situation.
3. The BBC Trust tells me in writing it has nothing to do with the EU, later publishes an annual report entitled “Forging the Union” directly contradicting the fact, and has only last month been quoted on the BBC itself as “representing licence-payers”! Opaque, if not downright deceitful.
4. Within days of the first EIB loan the BBC’s then Economics Editor broadcast a series of interviews and news items from around the EU about the prospects for the euro. Balanced and objective they were not. They were so embarrassingly deferential that any news editor worthy of the name would have binned them without a second thought.
5. During the signing of the Nice Treaty, within the hearing of many potential interviewees from the UK, the BBC producer on site instructed his crew not to record or report the significant demonstrations against the treaty going on all around them. Opposition was quite literally whitewashed from the screens of British viewers, whose money funds the EU and your bank in the first place.
6. Jonathon Chapman, described at the time as a senior BBC World News Reporter, told the Malta Press Club in March 2004 that “The BBC’s job is to reflect the European perspective…and make the news less sceptical. That is why the BBC has such a large bureau in Brussels”.
I do not expect you to argue with the contents of this letter, nor even to defend your institution’s actions. Facts are facts. But I do wish you to know that the British public is becoming increasingly concerned with this and many other aspects of British membership of the EU.
The EIB’s activities have merely helped to reinforce the view that the sooner the UK leaves the EU to those who like this way of conducting public affairs the better.
We shall take our 2.5 million pounds an hour club subscription with us, and save British commerce some 65 billion pounds a year in compliance costs.
Quite where that will leave the BBC I leave for you and the governors to ponder.
Ashley Mote MEP
Independent, South-East England
Now there’s a Co-incidence…
BBC Wins Two Awards at European Parliament’s Inaugural Prizes for Journalism
The European Parliament Prize for Journalism was launched in March 2008. Two of the first four category winners are BBC programmes. Surprise, surprise!
In the TV category, the winner was BBC Record Europe. This half-hour weekly programme is broadcast on the BBC News Channel (formerly News 24) and on BBC World. Both the presenter and the producer are based in the BBC’s Brussels bureau.
The UK judging panel nominated Record Europe for its authoritative, but accessible way of presenting a wide range of major issues at EU level. Over the year to May 2008 the programme dealt with issues as diverse as the Lisbon Treaty, aviation emissions, gay rights and CIA rendition flights.
The judges claimed the programme “also ensures a balanced presentation of the arguments and interviews experts from the UK and beyond. Its programme from 16 March 2008, for example, featured in-depth interviews with UK, Dutch, German, Danish and Swedish MEPs on the EU accounts, on MEP allowances and assistants, and on the issue of Turkey’s application to join the EU. It also ran in-brief news items on the Galileo satellite-navigation system, organ donations, visa-free travel to the USA and the European Ombudsman.â€?
BBC Radio 4’s Crossing Continents programme won the radio prize. Its ‘Pills for Profit’ programme dealt with the parallel drugs trade in the EU. It included an interview with a spokesman for the European Commission, and was praised for its clarity.
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