Author Archives: Robin Horbury

Sandy Toksvig, presenter of Radio 4’s so-called News Quiz – actually a propaganda fest for the presenter’s and panellists’ liberal prejudices – summarises all that I loathe about the BBC. She’s a lefty, smug, holier-than-thou, no-talent performer who thinks she’s very funny. Despite this, she’s carved out a career at the corporation and she is evidently adored by her bosses.

Miss Toksvig clearly thought it was hilarious in an edition of her show which -in keeping with the rest of the BBC output – mentioned government cuts. She declared: “It’s the Tories who put the ‘n’ into cuts”. Now I am not a prude, but the use of this word is still at the frontier of what is acceptable, and for women I know, is regarded as deeply offensive, especially if used gratuitously. But Ms Toksvig’s BBC boss at Radio 4, Paul Mayhew Archer, didn’t think so. He regarded her little joke as “delightful”, and he authorised the head of complaints to say:

“I want you to know that I thought very hard about whether to allow Sandi’s joke to be broadcast.I knew it might offend some listeners, and if my job was simply not to risk offending any listeners I could have cut it instantly. But that is not my job.My job here was to balance the offence it might cause some listeners against the delight it might give other listeners. I say delight because I thought it was a good joke and I knew that a huge number of fans of the programme would love it.”

And for the Mail on Sunday, which has splashed with the story, a spokesman defended this further. He defined the language only as ‘robust’ and therefore acceptable.

My question for Mr Mayhew Archer and his censor-hating BBC colleagues is this. If a right-wing guest (pretending for a second they exist on the BBC) had in the course of the quiz mentioned the ‘n’ word about blacks, what would his reaction have been? My guess is he would have been insulted for his use of nasty language by everyone from the director general downwards and barred for life from ever appearing on the BBC again.

Irrespective of the broader debate about the ‘c’ word, this episode underlines the blatant, unpleasant hypocrisy of the BBC. They are forever pushing back boundaries of taste – but only when it suits their liberal agenda.

The BBC – in its venomous hatred of fossil fuels – was very quick this week to link attempts to extract shale gas with earthquakes and to emphasise the danger that such efforts would alarmingly cause tap water to ignite because aquifers could become impregnated with methane. Dramatic pictures of these flaming taps (from a US propaganda film, it now transpires, although this was not made clear in the bulletins) dominated news reports, and were obviously included to heighten the alarmist nature of the story. The intent by the BBC was to plant firmly in people’s minds that shale gas was a nasty new excrescence.

Now we learn that the film showing the said flaming taps was deliberately misleading. The director – a greenie activist – knew that the phenomena had existed and had been a puzzle for decades, since long before fracking extraction existed. He chose not to include this fact in his propaganda exercise because he decided it was “not relevant”. How very convenient.

So, too, did the BBC. In its haste to terrify people about fossil fuels, it did not properly check its facts or its sources – par for the course in its greenie crusade.

Update: In the same way, Richard Black this week trumpeted new “research” about clownfish which purported to show that they were at risk from ocean “acidification”. Anthony Watts posted this item overnight which takes apart the claim and shows that the experiment was totally flawed. Chances of a retraction/explanation? Zero.

When, why and how did the rot set in at the BBC? As an ex-employee who joined the corporation in 1978 when there were at least some news and programme editors who did not support left-wing lunacy, I have often pondered this point. But a penny dropped this morning when I read an excellent piece about the inestimable corrosive damage caused to Africa by Live Aid…which also has led inexorably to the current prime minister’s hell-bent destruction of enterprise in developing countries by his insane insistence on boosting so-called aid budgets.

It was, of course, the BBC’s Michael Buerk who broke the Ethopia famine story that led to Live Aid the following year. I was indirectly involved, and in the immediate aftermath, I was proud of the broadcast and the impact in terms of famine relief. But then I watched with horror of a series of behind-the-scenes battles erupted. As the television award season approached, I became aware of a major row between Reuters Television(then Visnews) and the BBC. Reuters claimed it was their stringer camerman, the legendary Mo Amin, who broke the story; the BBC, for its part, wanted to take all the honours. It was an unseemly fight to the death which the BBC, with its superior resources and knee-in-groin approach, won – and the corporation walked off with the major gongs at that year’s Royal Television Society Awards.

I now see that it was probably at that time and in that context that the corporation hitched its wagon irrevocably to supporting “aid” to Africa at whatever price and without regard of the facts. The corporation – and phalanxes of left-liberal recruits who had been drafted into the BBC over the years – became so determined to show it was doing good in the world, in particular in Africa, that it abandoned any pretence of “balance” on such issues.

A touch simplistic maybe (you tell me). But it is a fact that since then, the BBC has blindly supported the tenets of aid to Africa and all that goes with it. Bob Geldof and the insufferable Bono are their shining knights. The World Service Trust, as I have repeatedly pointed out, is a campaign vehicle for both its aid paradigm and climate change activism. Comic Relief is another conduit involving BBC staff, resources, and endless one-sided journalism. And out of the steadfast support for such approaches flows the uncritical propaganda about climate change and world poverty that I wrote about yesterday.

I thus believe that what happened back in 1984-5 was a watershed. Michael Buerk – however unwittingly – set in train a paradigm of activism that has now become a biased crescendo and underpins the ideology of Cameron and his useless Tories.

Matt Ridley observes in his excellent book The Rational Optimist:

Despite a doubling of the world population, even the raw number of people living in absolute poverty (defined as less than a 1985 dollar a day) has fallen since the 1950s, let alone the percentage living in such absolute poverty. That number is, of course, still all too horribly high, but the trend is hardly a cause for despair. The United Nations estimates that poverty was reduced more in the last 50 years than in the previous 500.

He goes on to explain that population growth has not led to the mass starvation that greenies have been predicting with monotonous regularity since the 1970s. There has been a revolution in food production that has tripled the yield of staple plants and ensured that – while there is still a long way to go – most on our wonderful planet have full bellies and increasing life expectancy.

But that doesn’t stop the BBC from trumpeting this alarmist report about starvation caused by climate change as if it were a certainty. They stick to their unquestioning acceptance of the green creed emblazoned on every BBC door: millions are going to die because of our nasty, selfish, capitalist ways. The subtext makes International Socialists look subtle. The report is from the same Doomsday script as has been rehearsed dozens of times before, based on the same flimsy models. And the reporter quotes without a trace of balance the preposterous opinion that we can limit – as if we had supernatural powers – global temperature rises as easily as switching a thermostat. Jennifer Carpenter is clearly yet another of the army BBC climate-change activists without the remotest comprehension of science or development history.

Once upon a time, Britain was a land of enterprise and development. Our brilliant inventions, our exploration and ability to push back the margins in pursuit of better lives for the many changed the world immeasurably for the better, and gave us full bellies and cheap energy. Now, our civil servants – when they are not doing the bidding of our masters in Brussels – spend their time drawing up useless regulations, and even worse, measuring our “ecosystem assets” in pursuit of greenie moonshine. At a time of supposed austerity, bucketloads of cash have been tipped down the sewers in an effort to map out how much of the UK divides into coast, farmland, forestry and so on. The man responsible for this luncacy, Bob Watson, chief scientific adviser to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and co-chairman of the NEA, pontificates that this is a terribly important exercise that will benefit us all.

But make no mistake, the agenda involved is not to make the world a better place. Richard Black, like a rat up drainpipe, of course loves the report, because it fits in with his political creed. Bob Watson is clearly the new hero of the hour, and he quotes him lovingly:

“Professor Watson said this did not imply an end to development, but that costs and benefits of each proposed development could be assessed more accurately in advance.”

Be afraid, very afraid, because finding news ways of stopping economic development IS the real agenda here. Skilfully woven into Richard’s piece are supporting words from all the usual sources he uses – the government-supported “charity” the RSPB and lefty academics included. All of them make it very clear that they want to find new ways to use this loathsome report to halt economic growth and take us back to that pristine age when we were all greenies and at one with nature.

Richard Black is the willing mouthpiece for this dangerous tripe. He thus continues his political campaign relentlessly. I suppose that’s to be expected – what else has he ever done? – but what’s shocking is that Britain is fast becoming the world centre of anti-enterprise because of the greenie poison he spreads.

Richard Black seems hell bent on telling us that the oceans are turning acid. Two days ago, he posted this, and now, today, he’s added this – he faithfully and uncritically recycles alarmist predictions that clownfish are going to choke to death because of rising CO2. These clown researchers are being paid to find problems like this, and they do so, using their ju-ju models that predict doom on every level.

Other more rational and less politically motivated souls look coolly and calmly at the evidence. First, rising carbon dioxide levels are good for us and good for the planet because the trace gas enhances plant growth. This is a long report, but well worth a read.

Second, the measurement of ocean “acidification” (whatever Mr Black chooses to call this process) does not support the idea of catastrophic change, even on IPCC projections – it only happens in laboratories deliberately set up to pander to alarmist fantasies. And third, even if there is significant change, there is abundant evidence that life on coral reefs adapts to the changed ecology.

Mr Black is clearly impervious to any contrary facts, is determined to maintain an alarmist paradigm and selectively ignores evidence that does not accord with his own extreme political views. My observations about him are repetitious because he is manically repetitious. But I will not let go because it is a disgrace that our money is being used to support him in his deliberately one-sided campaign.

One of the key points of the BBC’s agenda about climate change (as David skilfully also points out in his post below) is the enthusiastic backing of the political, liberal elite/ruling class in their determined efforts to foist unwanted energy taxes on those who can’t afford them and in the steps towards world government. The tiresomely self-righteous actress Cate Blanchett, who can afford solar panels on her Sydney mansion (no doubt partly because of extensive government subsidies that benefit the rich) and who has forced Sydney Theatre Company “to go green”, is part of that noisome elite. And so BBC Australia correspondent Nick Bryant – who regularly recycles greenie claptrap with relish – here sees a big story in darling Cate’s fascist call for Australians to commit economic suicide by adopting Gillard’s hated carbon tax. The rest of the world may be seeing a glimmer of sense by finally rejecting renewal of the Kyoto protocol, but not Ms Blanchett. Mr Bryant, it is true, gives prominence to opponents of darling Cate’s elitist stance. But I think that veils his main purpose, which is contained in the carefully chosen words to explain why some Australians are resisting the tax:

The attacks on Cate Blanchett also reveal an instinctive suspicion of people in Australia perceived to be part of a cultural or educational elite – especially by the populist right.

That’s right, it’s those nasty “populist” right-wingers again. How dare they?

Whether you prefer the term “ocean acidification” or the less compelling but more accurate “ocean de-alkalisation”, there’s little doubt that the addition of carbon dioxide to the seas threatens to change them fundamentally over the course of the century.

With his customary brilliant scientific insight and knowledge, Richard Black thus begins his latest blog and greenie sermon, which culminates in a cloud-cuckoo land plea that Micronesia climate nuts can force the abandonment of highly-sensible Czech plans to build coal-fired power stations in order to save shellfish from a preceived threat from the said acidification. You could not make it up; he’s hoping that political activism will stop all development of schemes that involve the use of fossil fuels.

Richard, in reaching these Mickey Mouse conclusions, claims that the science involved is “documented” (I think he means actually settled beyond further discussion) because the UN and the Royal Society have decreed it. This is his usual nicely-phrased but vicious two-fingered put-down of hated sceptics and deniers. As usual, too, he pays not one iota of attention to evidence that suggests a) that the science of so-called acidification is not settled and b) that inter-agency panels on climate change issues are invariably stuffed with eco-nuts whose sole aim is to reinforce their own prejudices and speed the manic drive towards world government.

There’s oodles of evidence that “acidification” or “de-alkalisation” is nothing more than yet another eco-nut fantasy, but Mr Black, as usual, prevents it as proven, undisputable fact.

The people of Wales don’t want windfarms and the associated forests of pylons. The economics of windfarms are those of the madhouse. But we now have a ruling class that – in greedy pursuit of their own self interest, energy taxes and subsidies, and driven by eco-potty ideology – are hell-bent on ruining the countryside of Wales. The people protest, the Welsh Assembly, aided an abetted by the Cleggerons, sticks two big fingers up at them. The BBC, as usual, busts a gut to make the protestors seem like unreasonable Luddites. Note the acres given to the government position – basically, that Welsh people have to put up with whatever is decreed in the mad pursuit of “renewables” – and the total absence of the arguments against these monstrosities. Such protests in Wales may not seem mainstream, but the drive to green energy is tyranny at its worst, and the BBC is totally complicit in the erosion of our fundamental rights.

Is the BBC news operation now simply the formal mouthpiece of a number of environmental activists? The WWF – probably the world’s wealthiest group of eco-fascists, swimming in billions of dollars of cash – is bellyaching that strawberry growing in Spain is a scandal. Don’t get me wrong; I am all in favour of sensible preservation of wetlands, and illegal water extraction can be a a menace. But this is more than that, it’s fervent, idealistic hate-the-farmer grandstanding. Never mind the 50,000 souls who depend on soft fruit growing; WWF has decreed they are wicked and it’s trying to stop them making a living. In fact, strawberry growing, it seems, is a greenie hornet’s nest of soul-searching about carbon footprints; here, a pair of intrepid investigative reporters at the Guardian have calaculated to the nearest ounce the respective “carbon footprints” of strawberries from Spain or Scotland. Golly gosh, how wonderful it is that they have so much time to pursue such vital public-interest stories.

The BBC, of course, is up to its neck in this activism and backs it to the hilt. Back in 2007, it was faithfully reporting the WWF eco-fascist efforts in Spain and printed virtually line-for-line its call for a boycott on buying strawberries. Yesterday, it re-visited the story, presenting exactly the same facts, in the same strident, one-sided way. Clearly, the original propaganda burst did not do the trick – and those pesky, selfish farmers are still trying to make a living.