A Place to Stand

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything — you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.

     Robert A Heinlein (again)

  The underlined bit shows how little is the difference between a state a full scale police state where the police can just "disappear" you and one where the state controls the media and uses it to prevent free political discussion.

   Admittedly the latter is considerably more comfortable and even safer to live in but it is barely more free.

   It is also where we in Britain live. The state do undeniably have ownership of a legal monopoly (70%) of broadcast news and a de facto control over even the nominally independent bit.

“Death on the Rock” won two major awards as best documentary of 1988, but Thames was to become a victim of a new method of awarding ITV franchises in 1991.  The common wisdom is that there was a connection between the programme and the franchise loss.  There is no doubt that the new system – foolish and deliberately destructive – was vindictively brought in by the Thatcher government to punish ITV for its supposed excesses and errors. 

    For my money the government were quite right to have these IRA scum killed but that killing what was widely accepted as the best broadcaster of the time, to enhance censorship was a far more important crime and one against the entire British people.       There is no dispute now that the BBC state broadcaster censors for political reasons - the BBC itself has boasted of this and paid one of their own £140K to produce an "impartial report" saying why it is a good thing.. Even the BBC do not deny they deliberately lie & censor to promote racist murder on a genocidal scale. Even the BBC do not dispute that the BBC censor in party political matters to prevent free debate.       This obviously has attraction to the parties in whose favour censorship works. here is an old article from Iain Dale, normally a Tory liberal & free marketist (except when it counts), explaining why it was right to censor UKIP during the election.

They are not standing in every seat (unlike the three main parties) - in fact there are 90 seats without a UKIP candidate. At the last Westminster election they scored only 2% ..

To my mind the BBC has bent over backwards in its news bulletins and other political programmes to include minority parties - far more than in any previous election.

I just do not believe that UKIP deserves a fourth podium on Thursday, and I suspect the courts will agree.

   I look forward to him saying that the Tories, who placed 3rd, at the last European elections should get much less coverage than UKIP, who placed 2nd (& may place 1st this time) up until the next EU election (5th to 8th June 2014), since this is the basis of the argument used to censor UKIP.

    He is also lying about the "inclusion of minority parties". This inclusion only applies to the state approved "Greens" who do indeed get massive positive coverage - the BNP with twice their vote receive little coverage & none positive and UKIP, with 4 times their vote get 1/10th the coverage, almost all unsupportive. That is not including minority parties it is promoting ecofascism in a patently fascistic way.

   But if the censorship,of UKIP is not justified in terms used proportionately for all other political debate then we do not live in a free society (such as Russia where even the small parties are guaranteed 21 hours of airtime) and we do not live in a democracy but under fascism which merely retains the trappings of democracy.