Monthly Archives: January 2010

I’ve previously posted this about how senior BBC personnel such as Peter Thomson, environment editor of The World, influence and peddle the ‘climate change’ alarmist mantra. Today I am focusing on a completely different kind of BBC figure who is working at an international level to force the world to adopt climate change measures. Step forward Michael Hastings, who boasts the title Baron Hastings of Scarisbrick in the County of Lancashire after he was ennobled by Tony Blair in 2005. Our good lord is now head of “corporate citizenship” at the multi-national accountants KPMG. But before that, he was a political lobbyist at the BBC – prepared like many of his cronies to bend the rules if they got in his way – and despite that, or perhaps because of it, he rose to become founder head of corporate social responsibility at the BBC.

In this role, I know that he was extremely influential, responsible for projects such as Comic Relief – with its strident Bob Geldof ‘climate change’ agenda – and also for making sure that the BBC met green targets by reducing its CO2 footprint. Somewhere along the way, it’s clear that he became a greenie fanatic. It is therefore highly likely that he was instrumental in pulling together, if not leading, the steps towards the BBC accepting that climate science is settled (at a seminar held in January 2006), and that the corporation must have a role in ‘educating’ the rest of the world about the need for alarmist measures.

When he was created a life peer, it was decided that being an active politician – albeit ostensibly a crossbench one – would represent a conflict of interest with his BBC job, and he took up his present role at KPMG in June 2006. However, this was partly window-dressing. He remains a board member of the BBC environment committee, the BBC World Service Trust and also a board member of Comic Relief (heavily linked to the BBC, of course), so his ties with the corporation are still strong. In his new role at KPMG – an organisation with 137,000 employees – he travels the world telling people that they must reduce carbon emissions. He is also at the top table of those who buy into the climate change agenda, to the extent that he chaired a session at Copenhagen COP15 in December.

His lordship, of course, projects all this effort as pure philanthropy, because, like all climate alarmists, he believes he’s saving the world. But delving a little deeper shows that the driving force is actually corporate greed. For KPMG also has its own Global Energy Institute, the job of which is to lobby for CO2 taxes, and to make sure its clients (and KPMG) get rich through this seemingly unstoppable gravy train that is worth billions.

Thus, Lord Hastings is working away to ensure that, on the one hand, through his continuing ties with the corporation, the BBC spreads the alarmist message as far and as loudly as possible. On the other, he is pushing fervently that, like KPMG, businesses everywhere must adopt ‘social responsibility’ targets underpinned by leftie greenie zeal.

Some of this is frustratingly circumstantial. It’s impossible to know his precise role in persuading the BBC that climate science was settled (as they fervently believe), because efforts to find out have been thwarted by the fact that the corporation hides behind Freedom of Information Act exemptions granted to journalistic organisations. What is certain, however, is that Baron Hastings is a climate change fanatic; he still has active and extremely influential ties to the BBC; when he was at the BBC, they became formal converts to the greenie ‘climate change’ cause, and his agenda was precisely in this area; he is now part of a major effort spearheaded by KPMG (an in tandem with the BBC) to persuade the world that it must pursue ‘climate change‘ alarmism and to impose CO2 taxes; and he is – palpably – highly adept in the art of persuasion. There, I rest my case.

Baron Hastings of Scarisbrick, I contend, demonstrates both that the tentacles of the ‘climate change’ monster are everywhere, and that the BBC is at the epicentre of the massive international propaganda effort to enforce a battery of new measures to restrict our freedom and squeeze more taxes out of us all in a demented effort to save the world. At the very least, the BBC gave his lordship the platform to peddle his greenie creed; and they are still working with him in its fanatical propagation.