INDEX	April 5, 2024
China breaks in humorous radio programme
Bharat Express News large numbers of Chinese alleged spooks were being investigated or charged in America, but in Britain there were none at all	The news department of the BBC, like all major UK media, is extremely reluctant to publish anything negative about the intelligence services and if it has to (because the story has already gained a lot of traction) it always puts a positive spin on the item. This is not necessarily because of bias (though the BBC used to have its own in house spook who put pictures of Christmas trees on the files of anyone suspected of being a leftie). Rather it is because the spooks take care to feed the security correspondents with juicy titbits and assignments (like embedding with the troops in wartime). You don't bite the hand that feeds you. As Humbert Wolfe observed: You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God! the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there's no occasion to. So the news story that the spooks (MI5 in this case) made a tremendous fuss about the threat of the Chinese yet actually completely failed to find any real cases, or indeed any evidence that anything was happening at all, is not going to get on the news pages. That doesn't mean it won't surface in any way shape or form. There has to be a safety valve. In the case of the Chinese absurdity it was the Bharat Express News, pointing out that large numbers of Chinese alleged spooks were being investigated or charged in America, while in Britain there were none at all. And now the BBC has finally given voice to the story on the humorous radio show Loose Ends. If only there were some process, say a Parliament where members had guaranteed free speech and could raise issues like this without fear or favour. Meanwhile the spooks are spending a great deal of your money and the body given the task of keeping a watching eye over them is complaining it is being kept out of the picture.
INDEX Jonathan Brind			April 5, 2024