Author Archives: Ed Thomas

Hot air for U2

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The BBC and U2, eh? Hand in glove, they go. I can’t say I was surprised to find a pretty meaningless article on the BBC frontpage all day which described how the frontman of Talking Heads had bitched a little about U2’s lavishly funded world tour. The article can’t decide if it’s the obscene costs of the tour, or its obscene carbon footprint that’s the problem. But it gives the Edge the chance to say “We’re spending the money on our fans”. Awww. The biscuit, however, is taken by the video that accompanies the article. Though cynical, I was expecting it to show some interview of a sort regarding the criticisms. Not a bit of it; it was instead a more or less promotional music video.

They say that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. In this case, even the title emphasised Bono’s boys as victims rather than culprits: “U2 brand green criticism ‘unfair'”. I’m tempted to call it free publicity on our national broadcaster, but I rather think that it’s a question of backscratching after U2’s “impromtu” concert at BBC headquarters earlier this year. In any case, most irritating.

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Open thread

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It seems that this is the time for a new reposted open thread to cater for your latest observations and thoughts on the BBC and its content.

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Dirigism rules, ok!

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Well, maybe not that exactly, but something close to the BBC’s heart- the idea that Government should intervene as much as possible in the economy. In this article the BBC gives us a tale of two factories, one in Wales, one in England. One helped by the Welsh Assembly, one not helped by Westminster, you see where this is going?

It would be a neat little comparison were they not comparing a dishwasher assembly plant with LDV van manufacturers. It’s surely apples and pears. Subsidies of the sort offered in Wales may work for light industrial jobs, but probably not for complex manufacturers like LDV. Yet the BBC give vent to their conviction that Government should be helping, and there is no balancing voice.

A second dimension to the article is the free publicity and praise it offers to the devolved Welsh Assembly, which is made without reference to the Barnett formula by which the Welsh get a thousand squid more per head than the English from the central kitty- thereby potentially more than funding the scheme the BBC is set on praising, the so-called “ProAct”.

Naturally I sympathise with the workers who are struggling, and I also resent the Government’s preference for their corporate socialist big banking buddies, but the BBC is trying desperately to pretend that from the crisis there are good socialist lessons to be learnt. There aren’t. But even if there were some, there are other sides which should be considered alongside- such as the question of the long term sustainability of certain businesses (eg. especially automobile) in changing times, and the need for a low tax environment to help swell investment.

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Serious season

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I notice that the BBC is running a headline story about a Government move to stop so-called queue jumping for organ donation.

A couple of points come to mind. One is that Parliament is not sitting, so the Government is spinning. The BBC is playing along with this. Another is that it is a wonderful piece of spin: fears of rich foreigners plundering our virgin NHS system, only to be sent packing by St. State. According to the chosen quangocrat: “Confidence in the transplant system should increase once money is removed from the equation”.

Well of course; it’s not as if the NHS costs money, after all.

Quangocrats, the Labour Government and the BBC in blissful unintermediated union. Ah, those summer trysts- if only the whole year could be summer.

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Sunhats off

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Yes, sunhats off to Tyler at Burning our Money who draws something to my attention: the reason the BBC are biased on the “climate change” issue is because they decided to be two years ago. This decision may be rather more controversial now than then, as sceptics are more organised and data more negative for the AGW hypothesis. DV mentioned a related study last week.

I can’t have been reading the excellent Mr Tyler’s blog back then, or if I did I missed it; certainly Jeremy Paxman seemed to have missed it when he said that “People who know a lot more than I do may be right when they claim that [global warming] is the consequence of our own behaviour. I assume that this is why the BBC’s coverage of the issue abandoned the pretence of impartiality long ago” (as chronicled in our sidebar). He assumed correctly (in a sense), but he needn’t have assumed. [in fact I think Paxman may have been having a dig here: a long time ago being well before it became official BBC policy]

Tyler reported in ’07 (and I missed) that the BBC in their report called, ahem, “safeguarding impartiality”, said that “The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus.”

So that was that: by fiat the BBC decided the narrative had changed; what numerous people from scientific and non-scientific backgrounds either refused to be convinced by or actively disbelieved had actually to be promulgated.

This is excellent evidence that the “impartiality” meme on which the BBC base their public service justification is unworkable, at least if they are also to “educate and inform”. To do these they need to know “the truth” about newsworthy issues, which is oxymoronic really- they wouldn’t be news if they were as predicable as “truth” (for want of a better word) needs to be. Apple falls from tree- shock, disbelief!

Anyway, yesterday Roger Harrabin started criticising the Met Officefor failed forecasts- the same Met Office which has been teaching the Beeb all about global warming. Is this preparatory for what could be known as the BBC’s Great Climate Trackback?

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An inconvenient vote

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Graham Dines of East Anglia Times weighs in on on the BBC’s (lack of) coverage of UKIP in the Norwich North by-election.

Out of fairness to the BBC, I can see how they are straining to accommodate the unpalatable rise of the Conservative opposition. They need some solace and we can’t expect them to reflect the full range of sentiment opposed to theirs, can we? Can we?


“Just why the BBC decided that the Greens were more meritworthy than UKIP is not difficult to discern. It’s all down to the unpalatable policy of quitting the EU. UKIP goes against the authorised version of Britain’s relationship with Europe and therefore should be ridiculed.”

UKIP are still pressing the BBC over their denial of UKIP’s evident electoral appeal (which many commenters here noted independently, as well). It seems to me utterly unsurprising that the Beeb would violate due impartiality during an election- the very time when they ought to be able to hold themselves together. They fail in every other so-called ideal which farcically underpins their public remit.

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