Author Archives: Robin Horbury

The Daily Mail claims today that culture secretary Jeremy Hunt has recommended that Lord Patten should become the next chairman of the BBC, and that this is now almost certain to happen. It’s a horrific prospect, and it beggars belief that the Tories should appoint this euro-bigot to the role. Any idea that this is in any way a eurosceptic administration – already highly questionable after the handling of the Irish bailout and the daylight-robbery increase in the EU budget of 2.9% – is shot down in flames. Mark Thompson finally begrudgingly accepted (after cacophonies of protest stretching back years) in December that there had been bias in BBC reporting of the EU. With the appointment of Patten, the whole topic is now off the agenda and the euro-bigots who run the BBC will be smirking all the way to their White City eyries.

One of those will be the insufferable Andrew Marr, a europhile-in-chief. It’s been revealed that he is paid £600,000 a year of our money so that he can present BBC shows in which he rams his prejudices down our throats. How much more of this profligacy can be tolerated?

I agree with Mr Littlejohn that it’s time for the chop, though a replacement for Question Time would undoubtedly be much worse. BBC producers are so obsessed by their own lefty agendas that they are no longer capable of understanding, let alone marshalling, balanced debate. Many years ago, when Robin Day ruled the roost and it was broadcast almost every week from the Greenwood Theatre, I used to do the PR for the programme. It had its problems then, of course, but the current gimmicks had not even been thought about…it’s been a slow, painful and garish slide into today’s deliberately-rigged gang-bang confrontation in the name of viewer appeal. What say you?

Mr Littlejohn’s piece has been prompted, of course, by the news that the BBC’s madhouse social engineering – in decanting thousands of staff outside London – means that in future that the production office of QT will be in Glasgow, but production meetings will be held in London because David Dimbleby refuses to travel to Glasgow. This will push the programme’s carbon footprint and hotel bills into the stratosphere. It’s madness on a massive scale that goes against the BBC’s moral zealotry; clear evidence that they never let their so-called principles block their own plans, and are always keen to find new profligate ways of spending the licence fee.

Hold the front page. Richard Black, discussing the preposterous use of models by a group of scientists in Oxford to “prove” that higher levels of flooding in the UK in 2000 were undoubtedly caused by CO2, actually quotes a “sceptic”, who seemingly disagrees with the the analysis. Except that Bjorn Lomborg – though he once wrote a book called the “Skeptical Environmentalist” – is anything but, as a moment’s research reveals. So this is yet another example of dishonest reporting. Mr Lomborg actually firmly believes, just like Mr Black and his cronies, that greenhouse gases are causing global temperatures to rise and also that tens of billions of pounds should be spent on combatting this alleged menace. His only difference of opinion with the green creed is that people should learn to adapt to climate change, not spend their time whinging.

Meanwhile, American Thinker has unearthed some very interesting background material on the roots of the green religion that Mr Black and his BBC chums so fervently support. I reported yesterday about Mr Black’s one-sided enthusiasm for the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution’s call for mass social engineering and population control to combat climate change. Such views are a central tenet of the green movement. It’s increasingly clear that the origin of these thoughts is actually mired firmly in Nazi ideology and they were first articulated and advocated in the post war era by Gunther Schwab, a wartime member of the Nazi party. He and his fellow party members wanted massive social engineering in line with their crude and ruthless beliefs in eugenics and social Darwinism, the twin concepts that underpinned and led directly to the Nazi genocide of Jews, Roma people, Slavs, Negroes, gays, the mentally ill and infant social “imbeciles”. In my book, nothing in what today’s greens who inhabit bodies like the Royal Commission are calling for is different. It’s the callous logic of ruthless centralised control. “Fascist” is a label that in my view is bandied about too often, but here, it is clearly appropriate. Black&co are advocates of eco-fascism.

Update: those who argue that we are doomed because of rising population and that therefore social engineering is vital (and I know because I used to be one of them) seem totally impervious to the facts, as a post below illustrates. They are on a socialist, world-saving mission, but for those who want to read further with an open mind on this topic, I recommend this, or Matt Ridley’s excellent The Rational Optimist. In 1972, the Club of Rome pronounced authoritatively that there would be mass starvation in 2000; ten years on, we are feeding almost 7bn people at a better level than we did when there were 3bn and standards of living are rising almost everywhere. And yet still the anti-liberal, world-government-supporting social engineers out there want to impose more laws of the type that Hitler deployed.

This Richard Black outpouring has it all. First the agency involved, The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, is an innocent, raped, victim of government spending cuts. Those nasty Tories again. Second the said body is clearly a collection of eco-nutters preaching that we are doomed unless we stop reproducing, move around to where resources are (whatever that means), stop drinking water (and consuming generally), stop producing waste, and fervently conform to the torrent of how-to-live diktats from global and national rulers. Mr Black, as usual, purveys this fanaticism without a jot of understanding; if our Victorian forefathers had followed this sort of insane ideology, no ship would ever have left a British port, and no entrepreneur would have ever invented anything or introduced any new industrial process. All round the world, except in the green-obsessed regressive west (and for complex, non-related reasons, Africa), human beings are relishing the challenges of expansion and in general making the business of being human a happier, longer-lived and wealthier experience. The greenie philiosophy which Mr Black reports with such one-sided relish wants to introduce the economics of suicide. and negativity. Evidence of the misery wrought by his greenie chums is not hard to find – try, for example, here. The most vulnerable are actually seriously suffering because they can’t afford inflated fuel bills that have been jacked up to subsidise windfarms that are a central componenent and totem of the eco-creed. But such contradictions are lost on Mr Black (and Marcus Brigstocke!); they have their greenie worldview and they are sticking to it.

Here, I thought naively, is a harmless topic on the BBC science and environment website; how Britain became an island as a result of a tsunami caused by melting ice. No mention of climate change (for once, ahtough that’s clearly the undercurrent)….but this is the BBC, and of course there’s a sting in the tail. With carefully chosen selective quotes from historian David Starkey it becomes yet another glib pro-BBC-values homily…this time about how, under the tutelage of that wicked tyrant Henry VIII, we became an island of nasty, anti-Europe xenophobes, and how our coastline – which once made us pro-immigrant pussycats – changed us into acquisitive, paranoid imperialistic robbers.

The Holy Grail of the warmists is to find proof that the Antarctic ice is going to melt. Most of the world’s ice covers the continent, and yet temperatures remain stubbornly locked at levels that suggest that any change will take millennia rather than the decades that are the currency of alarmists. The latest round in the gut-busting efforts by the warmists to concoct evidence that supports their views is chronicled here in Ryan O’Donnell’s forensic taking apart of the Eric Steig’s contention that the Antarctic penninsula is warming at unprecedented levels; this illustrates that global warming supporters will go to any absurd lengths to twist the evidence about temperatures in this part of the world.

The BBC has also entered the fray as part of its renewed front of climate zealotry that I think has been opened up over the past couple of weeks. Richard Black is in overdrive, Roger Harrabin is sharpening his pencil in Oslo with Fiona Fox. The website is currently crammed full of alarmist nonsense, with multiple new entries daily. There’s so much that it is impossible to keep track. But this entry stands out as utter garbage. The theory we are introduced to in this travesty of reporting is that the Antarctic was ultra-warm in the past because of the “extreme greenhouse effect” and a swing is happening again. Our guide to this la-la land is Mr Howard Falcoln-Lang, who pontificates triumphantly:

However, the geological record provides irrefutable evidence that dramatic climate fluctuations have occurred throughout our planet’s history. Indeed, over the past 50 years, the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed by an alarming 2.8C, faster than any other part of the world. So, if this warming were to continue unabated, could an emerald Antarctica be reborn?

Of course, Antarctica has been warm in the past, and may be so again. And indeed, it supported lush life forms, as Mr Falcon-Lang testifies, so what’s the problem? But to suggest that such warming may happen imminently and catastrophically – as is clearly the intention here – is tommyrot. It ignores that Mr O’Donnell has provided in the past few days utterly convincing evidence that the warming statistics for the Antarctic peninsula has been rigged. Mr Falcon-Lang ignores too, that all the evidence points to that the Antarctic ice mass is pretty much constant, rather than receding. This is a BBC man preaching an alarmist sermon and nothing else counts.

The fragrant (flagrant?) Ms Fiona Fox has had her say about Peter Sissons; time for a new thread to express your views about matters of BBC bias. Have fun!

Bishop Hill has blogged on the BBC’s response to concerns about the Horizon programme which shamefully stitched up James Delingpole. I will leave you to draw your own conclusions. All I would add is that it shows yet again, the utter dishonesty and bankruptcy of the BBC approach to climate change.

The content of Fiona Fox article on the BBC College of Journalism site has been ably and rightfully savaged in the comments that have been posted. There’s nothing I can add, except that it was shooting ducks in a barrel. My point about this latest exercise in smug, we-know-we-are-right agitprop is to ask who at the BBC thought Ms Fox was qualified in the first place to write such a piece?

First, Miss Fox is not a scientist. According to her own CV, she is a press officer who happens to have been appointed to a post that provides information to journalists about science. Most of her career has been actually been spent in political activism. Her current role is no different, as the Centre’s consistent, one-sided support for the political objectives of the warmist creed illustrates. Everything she does is underpinned by warmist zealotry; she is not objective, and is thus in no position to be able to reliably rebut Mr Sissons’ arguments – especially as she herself spends much time berating those who dare to challenge “the science” of global warming.

Second, she is an extremist who has demonstrated a lack of sound judgment. For example, she has written for Living Marxism, a publication in which she seemingly sought to blur the lines of responsibility for the Rwanda genocide and to gloss over the massacre by machete of thousands of children. Even the Guardian attacked her for the extremism of her stance. This was admittedly some time ago, but nothing she has done at the Science Media Centre indicates that she has changed her politics or worldview.

Thirdly, and most importantly, Miss Fox says she is a journalist, but I am afraid her qualifications and work experience are very limited. She obtained a trendy two-a penny media degree from Thames Polytechnic, then went straight into agitprop press office work with a succession of agencies which are hardly at the centre of national life.

Peter Sissons, by contrast, the man she tells us does not know what he is talking about on the subject of bias, went straight from Oxford university to the bear pit of ITN newsroom, and he rose under the great Sir Geoffrey Cox to become one of their leading foreign correspondents. He was shot covering the Biafra war, and, re-invented himself as an industrial correspondent and then presenter. He rose to the upper echelons of ITN under Sir David Nicholas and when Channel 4 News was launched in 1981, he was the natural choice as presenter. In that pioneering role he won numerous accolades and awards. When he was at the height of his powers, the BBC decided to do what the BBC does and throw more than the equivalent of a million pounds in his direction to poach him.

I dwell on this because, in my book, though Miss Fox is entitled to her opinions (as we all are), she is emphatically not in a position to be able to judge properly or objectively whether Mr Sissons has got it wrong when he says the BBC’s climate reporting is propaganda. Nothing she so piously says undermines his observations, and the way it is said demonstrates instead that she is not fit to lick his boots. She is a jumped-up press officer of limited vision and intellect with no experience of working in a newsroom, he is a giant of British journalism who won his spurs at the coalface of newsgathering time and time again. That the BBC College of Journalism – their self declared “centre of excellence” – should choose her to rubbish Mr Sissons in this way is a disgrace, and an indication of how low BBC journalism has sunk.

One of the areas I have reported on recently is the extent to which established concerns (blue chip corporations, professional bodies and so on) are tied up in the climate change scam. Their senior executives are engaged in multi-dimensional strategies to work out how to the scare the public and the government into coughing up ever-greater amounts in subsidies and into developing crackpot schemes to deal with “climate change impacts” that the climate models ludicrously predict will happen. Thus big industry funds the alarmist Science Media Centre; there are consultancy companies who specialise in forcing the government’s hand; senior personnel of blue chip companies meet on a regular basis to work out how to scam yet more money; and, of course, senior former BBC executives have become “advisors” in the whole rotten, stinking enterprise.

I have said before that when I trained as a journalist, both at the BBC and on the now defunct excellent regional newspaper scheme, it was drummed into us relentlessly to be sceptical and cynical; and especially, where money was involved, to find out who benefitted and why before rushing into print. In those days, that led, for example, to the unearthing of the massive Poulson local authority corruption, and the demise, eventually, of ex-Tory Chancellor Reggie Maudling for his part in the fetid mess. I had a modest part in this.

Spool forward to today. All this seems to be forgotten. Richard Black instead acts as an unquestioning mouthpiece for a bunch of engineers who ought to be ashamed of themselves . Their logic beggars belief; first they accept unquestioningly Met Office model forecasts that temperatures are definitely going to rise by several degrees (disregarding evidence like this), then they say, that as that happens, new investors are going to be more likely to stump up cash in countries where there is a “secure infrastructure”. This is la-la land, the logic of the madhouse, though of course, it is a framework for getting out their begging bowls in the queue for subsidies to slay these imaginary dragons. Not so for Richard Black. As usual – while his colleague Roger Harrabin is with other eco-nutters in Oslo – he accepts the whole fantasy as gospel truth – and goes to town in his toadying scaremongering. It’s a travesty of journalism and the tragedy is that quite patently, he is not remotely aware of it.