And the clapping seal audience clapped on.
It’s never an accident when the bias always goes one way. The BBC is notoriously Left-wing and we shouldn’t be surprised when they use the ”ends justifies the means” mentality in obtaining an audience to a debate their providing.
NOTE: This is the main reason as to why there should never be any state media, there is no such thing as an impartial media, just be honest with the public where your biases lay, and let the reader/listener decide.
MAN ALONE: Ukip leader Nigel Farage after the debated organised by the BBC at Methodist Central Hall in Westminster
Biased BBC audience said ‘La-la-la… We can’t hear you Nigel,’ writes the Ukip Leader
The BBC has had a rough few years, and deserved them. It has been rocked by the Savile affair, the overpayment of talent, and of course at every turn its political bias is rightly called into question. The latter is why I didn’t hesitate, about a third of the way into last week’s televised leaders’ debate, to comment on the make-up of the audience in the room at Methodist Central Hall in Westminster.
Early on in the debate, the subject of housing came up, and I seized the opportunity to challenge the other panel members. Would any of them take up, as even my nine-year-old daughter can, the challenge to admit that mass migration into the UK has worsened the housing crisis? Would any of them say, ‘Yes, Nigel, five million immigrants to Britain since 1998 probably has increased the demand for housing’?
Of course they wouldn’t. And the audience clearly agreed with them – that this was nothing to do with immigration, and it’s just coincidental that a massive population boom in this country has coincided with a housing shortage. Fingers in ears: ‘La-la-la. We can’t hear you, Nigel.’
Well they heard me all right, after I gauged the reactions in the crowd to my own comments, and those of the other leaders on stage. I knew the audience was far from the ‘balanced’ and ‘representative’ sample of people that we had been promised by the event organisers, the BBC.
I was firm, but polite. I said: ‘There seems to be a total lack of comprehension on this panel, and indeed among this audience, which is a remarkable audience even by the Left-wing standard of the BBC. This lot’s pretty Left-wing, believe me.’
IT WAS important, I felt, for the audience at home to realise what was going on in that room.
‘Nigel, it’s never a good idea to attack the audience,’ crowed Miliband, smug as you like. He didn’t get it, and I bet he still doesn’t. Why should he? While he’s no stranger to a rough ride by the media, he’s not under the persistent assault that Ukip is – he doesn’t have to stand up for his party and its members on an almost hourly basis, against one smear or another. But I do, and I’ll continue to. Taking the BBC to task for their biased audience was a legitimate extension of that.
I said: ‘The real audience is at home.’ And it was true. The 200 people in the room were overwhelmingly anti-Ukip. After all, we know the BBC recruited most of them from ‘nearby geographical areas’. Given that the debate was slap-bang in the middle of Westminster, it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that I, as an anti-establishment politician, was not going to be their favourite choice on stage. But I was talking to the millions of people viewing at home.
I was talking to the people who know what it is like to struggle to book a GP appointment, or who have had members of their family in the military, or who struggle to buy a house, or get help from their council to get an appropriate home. I was talking to real people, which the BBC often forgets to do.
Sometimes the Corporation is guilty of basically talking to itself, with news coverage and TV programmes that suit the tastes of its six-figure-salary directors and their mates in Islington.
And Miliband continued to play to the room.
Woe to those who mock UKIP.