Monthly Archives: March 2011

The Cleggeron transport minister Phillip Hammond has caused hoots of derision with his ludicrous claims – made on the BBC Daily Politics Show last Wednesday – that wind turbines do not attract subsidy. They do, and they also benefit from an electricity tariff that forces us, the suffering public, to pay ludicrously high charges for this so-called “renewable” energy.

Andrew Neil, the host of the show, has decided to check out the veracity of Mr Hammond’s claims and he has blogged about his efforts. Good on him, but what he has written shows that when anyone, absolutely anyone, at the BBC writes about climate change, they get it wrong. Mr Neil claims that the only “subsidy” that windfarms receive is through the the higher electricity charges. He ignores/misses/doesn’t know the full facts, namely that these monstrosities do receive direct subsidies through a variety of routes, including help with so-called infrastructure development. The truth may be deliberately buried under screeds of bureaucracy and regulation, but the subsidy gravy train is definitely in motion. And of course, Cleggeron climate change nutter-in-chief Chris Huhne sings their praises at every opportunity, as well as preventing any possibility of the UK adopting sensible energy policies.

Oh, and Mr Neil, windfarms also wreak huge environmental damage by killing wildife, destroying the countryside, bringing misery to rural communities and by gobbling up huge quantities of rare earth metals in their maunufacture.

Autonomous Mind waspishly but brilliantly explains here why David Cameron’s claims today that he will get rid of bureaucracy and stimulate enterprise are a load of hot air. The BBC, of course, uses the speech mainly as yet another pretext to pursue the corporation’s anti-cuts we-want-Labour-back agenda; there’s not a whisper in their Cameron coverage about the real enemy to growth and enterpise, which is the EU.

Meanwhile, without any sense of irony, Roger Harrabin reports about one of the most chilling documents I have ever seen. It was slipped out last week by DEFRA and is called Mainstreaming Sustainable Development. What it means in practice is that the incompetents at DEFRA (who have already wrecked huge parts of British agriculture, slavishly follow EU diktats, and masterminded such debacles as the response to foot-and-mouth) henceforward have a mandate to meddle in every sphere of British life to ensure that eco-loon measures are adopted at almost all and any cost. This really is eco-fascism in action and will ensure that taxes are jacked up in the effort to reduce CO2; all efforts to start new businesses in the UK are swamped by eco-regulations (on top of the thousands of pages already enacted by the EU); and waste management – already a total sick joke – will become even more complex.

For Harrabin and his cronies, of course, even this is not enough. His entire article is taken up by the usual eco-loons like Jonathan Porritt who are bellyaching and moaning that much stricter measures must be introduced and jackboot government must enforce them. Already we have been warned that electricity is going to become an intermittent commodity, and Britain’s energy policy is simply dangerously complacent. Mr Harrabin will not stop his one-sided ranting until we are back in the stone age.

If you examine the 2005 report by Lord Wilson of Dinton into the BBC’s coverage of EU-related matters, what leaps out is bias by omission, the crude but systematic ignoring by BBC journalists of important EU issues. Six years on, nothing has changed. Transcripts of relevant items on yesterday’s main news programmes on BBC radio and television show that there was scarcely any discussion of UKIP’s remarkable second-place result in the Barnsley by-election. There was a 20-seconds soundbite from Nigel Farage on Today, but that was virtually it; UKIP was airbrushed out and the only angle that was covered was that the Lib Dems got a good kicking – giving BBC journalists another excuse to continue with their cacophony of anti-cuts stories. This fits in with their long-term agenda to both brand UKIP as loonies and otherwise ignore the party. The idea that UKIP reflects a major and fast-growing anti-EU swell of opinion is repugant to all BBC journalists.

In fact, the EU only ever comes under criticism from the BBC when there is worry that Brussels is not doing enough about climate change. Here, Richard Black sets out at length and without balance the views of those who think that an already suicidal 20% cut in C02 emissions should be increased to a lunatic 25% or more. To enliven his argument, he highlights a quote from a group of his eco-zealot chums called Sandbag, the jolly members of which are pictured above. They say, no doubt exactly in line with Mr Black’s own views:

“The scaremongering tactics of a handful of industrial lobbyists have successfully castrated Europe’s climate ambitions”

As I have noted before, there’s a clear link between Sandbag and the Futerra PR camapigning group which trains BBC personnel in propaganda techniques. That aside, as far as I can see, the only qualifications that this loathsome self-important, eco-fascist group have to lecture us are that they have spent years on fat salaries working for groups such as Oxfam and WWF. For Mr Black, of course, they are demi-gods.