A visit to Planet BBC

FOR a snapshot of the BBC’s instinctive soft-Left mindset, consider its treatment of two news stories, barely 12 hours apart.

Example One, broadcast on Tuesday’s Newsnight, was a lengthy analysis of the housing crisis in Peterborough. Somehow the report managed to avoid a single mention of mass immigration – probably the most significant cause of the acute shortage of affordable accommodation in the Cambridgeshire town.

Example Two, yesterday morning, was the Today programme’s spin on the latest, sensational jobs figures. Instead of highlighting the drop in unemployment to its lowest rate for 40 years, Radio 4 focused on the growing gap between chief executives’ pay and that of the wider workforce.

Thus, it presented a great Tory success, transforming thousands of lives, as a bad news story for the Government. Doesn’t it often seem that the BBC inhabits a different universe from its licence-fee payers? TRUE, we cannot know whether a highly-trained terrorist would have penetrated Parliament’s defences more effectively than the loser who injured three cyclists on Tuesday. But what is clear is that the security barriers and prompt police response were more than a match for terror suspect Salih Khater. Indeed, this paper believes it would be a mistake to convert failure into victory for terrorism by closing the roads around the Commons to traffic, at great inconvenience to Londoners. MPs are isolated enough from the real world without surrounding their bubble with steel. AS he threatens to move ‘ tens of billions of pounds’ of business out of the UK, has RBS boss Ross McEwan forgotten that British taxpayers bailed out his bank to the tune of £ 45billion? Yesterday, the competition watchdog ranked RBS worst for customer service. Clearly, it’s top of the league for ingratitude and downright treachery.