Author Archives: Robin Horbury

As I have suspected would happen, now that there are more and more problems in the climate change crusade, the BBC is increasingly shifting its emphasis on the intensifying push to introduce world government to ensure biodiversity. The UN convention that is frantically studying this topic in order to extract as much political cpaital as possible is meeting in Japan, and Richard Black is of course there at our expense. This is what he concludes:

Many experts believe it is necessary if scientific evidence on the importance of biodiversity loss is to be transmitted effectively to governments, in the same way that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assembles evidence that governments can use when deciding whether to tackle climate change.

What he doesn’t say, of course, is that many competent (but less political) experts maintain the opposite: that his carefully chosen glass half empty phrases, such as “deforestation”, and “species extinction”, are a load of alarmist cobblers. I have referred before to this Extinction Fiction paper by Donna Laframboise which puts the whole pile of pessimist agitsprop into perspective. Mr Black, as usual, ignores material like this and is only concerned to present the negative, world-will-end, must-tax-us-more synthesis; it’s not balanced reporting, just propaganda.

One of the new causes that the BBC is fervently supporting is the mantra that prisons don’t work. During the Labour years, the corporation was virtually silent on this issue, mainly because Blair, Straw, Brown and their lackeys clearly diasagreed.

But now that the Cleggerons seem hell bent on reducing the prison population sharply, our nice BBC reporter friends are on a full-scale hunt for every snippet that will support their case. Today it’s a platform for those perennial do-gooders the Howard league for penal reform to trumpet that only 6% of prison governors believe that short prison sentences work in helping to rehabilitate prisoners. Well hang on. Short prison sentences are not, and have never been intended to rehabilitate as a primary purpose. They’re there to send the message that in a civilised society, certain anti-social, irresponsible behaviour leads to a loss of liberty and all the inconveniences that go with it. It’s also a way of protecting the public and of spreading the reassuring message that if you do bad things, bad things happen to you.

The survey question was as inane as asking whether hanging would help in rehabiliating someone. I note that in the article that there is not a peep from anyone who supports jail as a deterrent or from those (like me) who are deeply uneasy about further ill-considered liberal experimentation in this complex area. Of course, we would all like more effective ways of rehabilitating people, but there is no sign that anything like this is being offered; the alternative to jail seems to be to not jail them – because it saves money – and/or give offenders community sentences (which are so circumscribed by human rights restrictions as to be a useless joke). Note also the careful selection of a quote from a supposed university expert saying that we should “address the needs of offenders”. Right on. Exactly the BBC mentality. But what about the victims of crime? And public safety?

Neil Midgley reports optimistically in the Daily Telegraph today that the BBC’s new editorial guidelines will force our greenie friends at the corporation to start including more so-called sceptics in their climate alarmist reporting, because for the first time, science is included in rules about impartiality.

My advice is not to hold your breath. I have a letter from Ceri Thomas, editor of Today, saying that because there is a ‘consensus’ about global warming, reporting of the subject only needs to give “due impartiality” to sceptics. In other words, sceptics are wrong, the consensus is right, and programmes should only pay minimal lip-service to them.

Nothing that I can see in the new guidlines changes this. Mr Thomas is pretty much representative of the entire BBC management class, and he sits on the board of a warmist organisation that camapaigns to give the warmist cause more prominence, and excludes sceptics.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of pounds of our money are being wasted in distributing 12,500 of these useless new guideline documents to BBC staff in Britain “and round the world”. What wonderful self-love!

The BBC’s news editors probably danced in glee when they decided to run with this story: a bunch of MEPs demanding more action on biodiversity. Two of their favourite causes – worship of the EU and eco-nuttery – combined in one! The ludicrousness of the EU’s latest demand for yet more power to combat yet another imaginary set of problems, is, of course, totally lost on them. Breathlessly, the feature reports that these over-paid, mainly useless MEPs include in their aims:

…eliminating subsidies harmful to biodiversity; zero net deforestation; the end of destructive fishing practices; and preventing the extinction of known threatened species.

That will be the EU that (for starters) is forcing the spending of trillions of our cash on needless climate change measures, a fraction of which – if used instead to promote sustainable business enterprise – could end help poverty in Africa; the same EU that is so incompetent and corrupt in handling money that its own accounts have not been signed off by accountants for 15 years; it will be the same EU that, throught the madness that is the CAP, forces the adoption of monocultural and rigid farming practices that are the enemy of wildlife; and the same EU that like common gangsters have bought up and plundered fishing rights off the coast of Africa with zero regard for the needs of Africans.

Of course, the BBC would not dream of discussing issues like this. Instead, the story is an exercise in admiration for both the EU and its puffed-up politicians. It’s by a veteran BBC greenie camapigner Mark Kinver, whose love of the EU is second only to his save-the-world zealotry.

One of the elements of the BBC’s bias is the deliberate, constant re-writing of history to fit its own narrative, and the drip-drip of its own propaganda messages. The impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil blow-out was far less than the panic-reporting by the BBC predicted, but the corporation hates anything to do with fossil-fuel as part of its greenie obsession, so that’s not what it wants to believe. To them, according to this report this morning, Deepwater remains “one of the worst disasters in US history”. What pig-ignorant cobblers. The reality is that 11 people died and a few miles of coastland has suffered from oil-related pollution. The rest of the damage was inflicted by government ineptitude, vindictiveness to BP (and British interests) and over-reaction. How can that be even remotely compared to 9/11, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 or the 1900 Galveston Hurricane?

What makes such vapid nonsense so damaging is that it diverts attention away from the main substance of the news piece, that the Obama administration had not got the faintest idea how to deal with events, other than to blame the Brits. Shameful reporting.