Jonathan Ross is back from suspesion and already the BBC are in trouble. Again.

Back in 1963 many of the main British Non-Governmental aid agencies like the Red Cross, Oxfam, CAFOD and a few others you've mysteriously never heard of decided to set up an umbrella group called The Disaster Emergency Committee (DEC). The idea of this was to allow them to pool their resources, take advantage of tax breaks and better co-ordinate their responses to humanitarian disasters like the Asian Tsunami, the Burmese Cyclone and a myriad of civil wars like the ones going on in Somalia and Sudan. People in the UK will be most familiar with the DEC because of the fundraising appeals they show on all five terrestrial TV stations, normally just after the evening news. The most recent of these came in November 2008, as the British Government was being hammered by the Baby P murder case, with the purpose of raising money for refugees created by fighting between government troops and Rwandan rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This appeal was of course completely altruistic and had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact a senior Rwandan politician had just been arrested by German security services on a warrant issued by the French security services reopening the old question of whether French intelligence were responsible for the plane crash that triggered the Rwandan genocide.


In response to the long running humanitarian disaster in Gaza which has recently been much worse by the Israeli decision to bomb the place for three weeks the DEC has launched an appeal to help the some 10,000 Palestinians who have been made homeless and the 750,000 who are with no access to clean drinking water. This appeal has hit a little bit of a snag though because the BBC have refused to carry a fundraising broadcast on the grounds that;


"it will affect their impartiality in reporting an ongoing news story."


DEC appeals can only be shown on any TV station if it is broadcast on all TV channels following a consensus between all the broadcasters so by taking this step the BBC have managed to block the Gaza fundraising appeal going out on any British TV channel.

With all the fuss this has caused I think it is worth pointing out that following extensive "negotiations" with the police the Stop The War Coalition decided that there was no longer any point holding noisy and expensive demonstrations outside the Israeli Embassy. Instead they've decided to hold all future demonstrations on the issue outside the BBC offices in London on the wafer-thin pretext that the BBC's news coverage of the Israel/Gaza war has been unusually biased in favour of the Israelis. The decision to block the DEC appeal will of course raise questions in diplomatic circles about the BBC's coverage of the war and pour fuel on the flames of the STWC marchers anger ahead of Saturday's demo outside the BBC. This makes me think that MI5 have yet to gather as much information as it would like on young Muslim men and needs to invent another reason to gather them in one place so they can hand over their names and addresses and have their photographs taken for the database.


Anyway donations to the DEC's Gaza appeal can be made here at their website.