Artist’s impression of the launch of the new Corbyn-Sultana party:
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Good luck with that.
That’s the last time Zack Polanski will be on Question Time.
Smear campaign incoming.
Zack Polanski, “I’m Jewish, and the reason why that’s relevant is because I’m one of five Jewish people to lead a political party in the last 100 years”
“So I take antisemitism really seriously”
“In the same way, I take Islamophobia really seriously”
“Because I recognise when they come for one minority group, they come for all of us”
“The only way to be morally consistent is to condemn what happened on Oct 7th and to condemn the genocide in Palestine”
“As a Jewish man I feel the genocide very very deeply”
Zia Yusuf, “I’m a Muslim man and you’re calling me a fascist”
Zack Polanski, “You actually are a fascist, you’re form a far right party”
Zia Yusuf, “Your concern about Muslims extends only as much as they agree with your political views”
Zack Polanski, “Nigel Farage joined forces with the Swedish democrats in the European parliament, this is a far right Nazi group. They want to deport people not from the colour of their skin but from the place sthey come from”
Zia Yusuf looking very uncomfortable
“Nigel Farage also talked about it being the end of democracy because of the way certain ethnic minorities are voting”
“This is racism. It’s fascism. We should call it out”
When a Muslim person immediately resorts to calling some person or process racist without cause they demean the entire argument and soften it in the ears of the easily led (which is most folk really). Similarly when an Israeli person calls something anti-Semitic. All that happens is that slowly they are allowing water to seep into the foundations such as they are of a tolerant and liberal society. It short sighted and selfish and wrong and dangerous.
I’d add that we will vote green in the next election and strangely not because of green environmental policies.
Unfortunately this is likely to be a wasted vote in a constituency which has in recent times been too close to call between lib dem and labour (we usually vote lib dem). Nonetheless, Polanski deserves our votes.
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The Muskovite says sssshhhh
The Russian bribe guy demands tampons made of meat in men’s public toilets.
Sausages perhaps?
THE BIG ISSUES
I’m anti-anti-Semitism campaigner @JohnnyZetor and the UK media will be all over this anti-Semtism just like all the other anti-Semitism from right wing sources they always ignore.
This BBC “scandal” is some load of bullshit. It’s the fascist playbook in action yet again.
The way it works is this:
Right wing headcases install their cronies in an institution of public value in order to deliberately run it down.
These right wing cronies deliberatlely corrupt the institution and drive systematic bias towards right wing headcases.
Then you get pretend “impartial” right wing political operatives to manufacture a fake scandal about the institution and to lie that it is biased in the other direction.
The industrial right wing bullshit machine across media and politics then seizes on this and pumps the fake scandal relentlessly.
A couple of right wing cronies are forced out for not being right wing enough.
The institution is then driven ever more in a right wing headbanger direction.
Meanwhile the glaring right wing bias and corruption that now plagues the institution that has been driven by those very right wing cronies is systematically ignored.
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Appease the paedo-Nazis at all costs
Worth a read - the “truth” about the BBC as reported by the right wing bullshit machine is the literal opposite of the truth.
The BBC has bigger impartiality problems than its coverage of Trump
It is the BBC’s entire governance structure–rather than individual stories–that should cause most concern
November 07, 2025
Image: Philip Yabut
Let’s accept that someone at the BBC made a clumsy error in editing some clips of Donald Trump addressing the crowd on January 6th 2021. And let’s acknowledge that the BBC has known for some time that there have been problems with aspects of its Arabic service. Worst-kept secret in the world: all media organisations occasionally screw up.
That’s true of all Fleet Street newspapers, as well as leading broadcasters. Journalism, as the wise old Washington sage David Broder once wrote, is “a partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we have heard about in the past 24 hours—distorted, despite our best efforts to eliminate gross bias—by the very process of compression that makes it possible for you to lift it from the doorstep and read it in about an hour.”
The veteran Pulitzer prize-winning columnist was writing about newspapers, but the same is true of every digital outlet and television company. The important thing, as Broder went on to add, is that we label the product accurately—and correct and update any errors.
The Daily Telegraph is no more immune to making mistakes than any other news outlet. The difference is that, when their own editorial, ownership and ethical failings come to light, it doesn’t register nine on the Richter scale of public and political outrage. That’s reserved for the BBC.
Fair enough, you might say. We all contribute to the BBC’s journalism through the licence fee, and it enjoys a somewhat protected status within the UK’s media environment. All true. But the venom spat at the BBC on a near-daily basis by its ideological and commercial enemies is out of all proportion to its occasional lapses.
The latest squall has arisen over a “dossier” apparently compiled by one Michael Prescott, a former journalist working for Rupert Murdoch, who had something of a ringside seat at the BBC for three years. He has questioned the editing of a Panorama programme on Donald Trump—which elides separate quotes to make it look like Trump said he would march on the Capitol and “fight like hell” alongside his supporters.
Prescott also has concerns about what he regards as an anti-Israeli bias within the corporation, as well as its coverage of certain trans issues.
Well, all those claims will doubtless be picked over in the coming weeks, with MPs demanding BBC bosses explain themselves. Two of Prescott’s complaints seem particularly questionable. The first is that the Panorama editing was “completely misleading.” Prescott argues that the fact that Trump did not explicitly exhort supporters to fight at the Capitol was one of the reasons he wasn’t prosecuted.
But the Congressional committee which examined the day’s events in detail recommended criminal charges on the basis that the former president did indeed incite the attack on Congress—a verdict backed by the only federal district judge to consider the case. The Senate voted 57-43 to impeach him, with seven republicans backing the motion. So, while the way the film was edited was wrong, it’s not clear that it was “misleading” in the way Prescott argues.
Secondly, Prescott seems to have believed that an “equally aggressive” look at Kamala Harris should have been commissioned. He found it “shocking and alarming” the aberrant behaviour of Trump should be singled out for especial scrutiny. But that suggests a bizarre notion of editorial equivalence. The deputy head of news, Jonathan Munro, was surely right to have dismissed Prescott’s idea of “due impartiality.”
Similarly, with criticisms of the BBC and Israel, there have been plausible and detailed critiques which suggest that the BBC is, contrary to Prescott’s own belief, actually biased in favour of Israel. But such analyses tend to sink without trace. Is this, in itself, a form of bias?
But let’s take a step back and look at the decidedly odd governance arrangements at the BBC, which is still, despite all of the above, one of the greatest news organisations in the world and quite easily the most trusted news providers in the UK.
Prescott is reported to have sent his dossier to BBC Board members. They are a motley bunch, with five of them (including the chair, Samir Shah) appointed by the government of the day. The 13-strong board include several business leaders, lawyers and people with experience in investment banking and private equity. I counted three (not including the director general, Tim Davie) with any substantial record in journalism.
But the key committee looking after editorial standards is an even odder body since it comprises three insiders (Shah, Davie and head of news Deborah Turness) as well as two outsiders, Sir Robbie Gibb and a former BBC COO, Caroline Thomson.
It’s odd, because it’s an uncomfortable mix of the people supposedly enforcing standards and those who are accused of allowing standards to slip. This is the body which, according to Prescott, didn’t take his concerns seriously enough. Prescott was, along with one Caroline Daniel, an editorial advisor to the committee.
Here’s where it all becomes a little murky. Robbie Gibb will be familiar to some as a rather abrasive “proper Thatcherite conservative” (his own description) who led the mystery consortium to buy the Jewish Chronicle on behalf of a secret backer whose identity has never been revealed. His stewardship of that paper saw it mired in a number of its own ethical and editorial failings. Pots and kettles.
Whatever you might say of Gibb, he does not pretend to be impartial on issues related to British politics or Israel. But he was appointed by Boris Johnson and confirmed by Rishi Sunak, so the BBC is stuck with him as a supposedly objective arbiter on such matters.
Prescott is reported by the Financial Times to be a friend of Sir Robbie. There was some controversy over Johnson’s choice of him to help select the chair of OfCom, which regulates the BBC. That process—widely regarded as farcical—resulted in Lord [Michael] Grade, 82, eventually getting the job after Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre was deemed unappointable. It was claimed, and never denied, that Gibb had intervened to try and ensure that a long-standing Conservative back office functionary landed the role instead.
But there is a more serious oddity here. Eight years ago, Gibb decided he was done with journalism and embarked on a life of public relations—first in Downing Street for Theresa May, and then with a “Global strategic Communications firm”, Kekst CNC.
Prescott’s career took a similar path. Twenty-four years ago, he bailed out of journalism—again preferring to join the ranks of PR professionals. For eight and a half years, he worked for Weber Shandwick. There followed nearly 16 years spinning on behalf of BT. For the last nine years he has worked for Hanover Communications, a PR company with links to the Conservative party.
And Ms Daniel? By remarkable coincidence she, too, decided that journalism was no longer for her. Nine years ago, she quit her job at the FT and joined Brunswick, where she provides “strategic communications advice.” That leaves Caroline Thomson, who had a solid track record in journalism up to 2000 before looking after the corporation’s operations and, subsequently, a portfolio life with various public sector bodies.
If I were a BBC journalist, under such intensive scrutiny and fire, I’m not sure I would be terribly comforted by these governance arrangements, beginning with a Director General with no substantive journalistic record and a Board with negligible experience of what it is to be a journalist in the 21st century.
On top of that, I’d wonder why such close editorial scrutiny should have been entrusted to three key people who themselves rejected journalism in order to enjoy lucrative careers in corporate and political communications. Who, bluntly, would you trust more to be impartial on the Middle East—Robbie Gibb, Michael Prescott or Lyse Doucet? Why should the PR professionals who turned their own backs on journalism sit in judgment on the latter?
By all means, let’s have a debate about Prescott’s “dossier”, preferably unfiltered by the Daily Telegraph. But let’s keep a sense of proportion about it all. And let’s find a governance structure for the BBC that equips it to handle complex editorial decisions robustly and expertly. The BBC is in a mess—but not necessarily the mess you think.
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This Michael Prescott fella is a “whistleblower” of the Chay Bowes variety.
Who is Michael Prescott, the man who led the rightwing attack on the
using the
as a useful organ? I suspect most people have never heard of him before this BBC event so I thought I’d look into him a bit though there’s not a lot of information about him available online. After graduating from St Catherine’s College, Oxford with a degree in PPE (yes, another one of those), Prescott: - Went to work for Murdoch as Political editor at the Sunday Times. - In October 2001, Prescott changed direction and was employed by Weber Shandwick as Managing Director - – Corporate Communications and Public Affairs. Mrs sister worked for this mob in her mid 20s for five years and judging by her experience, it is (or was then) a thoroughly unpleasant company. - In February 2010, Prescott was appointed Director of Corporate Affairs for the BT group, a position he still holds - In February 2017, Michael ‘two-jobs’ Prescott was appointed Managing Director of Corporate and Political Strategy at Hanover Communications which he still holds. Hanover Communications was founded by John Major’s former director of communications and is regularly used as a recruiting ground for Conservative special advisers. Prescott is no stranger to controversy. In November 2021 he was unveiled as the senior external interviewer who would work with Sue Gray to decide which candidates for the post of director of OFCOM would be approved. His appointment as interviewer was seen by right-wingers as a mechanism by which the already rejected Paul Dacre might reapply for the post at OFCOM. Now the appointment in which we are really interested regarding the BBC is that of External Adviser to the BBC Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee. Alhough this happened in March 2023 under Sunak’s administration, senior BBC figures point to an effort to shift the corporation politically, dating back to Boris Johnson’s time in government. Prescott was w=had been heavily pushed for the role by BBC board member Robbie Gibb, Theresa May’s former communications chief who helped set up the rightwing broadcaster #GoebbelsNews (GB News). Prescott left the role in June 2025. Prescott says he has never been a member of a political party. That may or may not be true but it is clear that rightwing politics have been at the centre of his life since he left university.
You’ve nailed this one.
Sure who cares about reality when most of the “press” is a gigantic right wing bullshit machine and we have a million fascist bots clogging up comment sections and websites everywhere.
Shots fired
This was fascinating viewing over the weekend.
What exactly is the deal for the UK here? I am a bit puzzled
https://www.rte.ie/news/uk/2025/1201/1546742-us-uk-pharma-deal/