Author Archives: Robin Horbury

The extremist mindset of the boys and girls of the BBC is laid bare in an exchange of letters between a few highly-paid BBC “stars” who do not want to strike next week and those who do. Those “stars” – led by the likes of James Naughtie and Jeremy Paxman (paid, of course, massive salaries out of your money) – say that the NUJ strike, aimed at blacking out Dave Cameron’s speech at his party conference, should not go ahead because it will demonstrate political bias. Putting aside for a second the risibility of the idea that the BBC is not biased, the reponse from Ian Pollock, the BBC NUJ branch chairman, illustrates graphically the cloud cuckoo-land nature of the BBC worldview. He says:

“Frankly, I do not take kindly to non-members trying to unpick democratically taken decisions (NB, only a tiny fraction of the 17,000 workforce voted for the strike)…There is a simple fact…the other political conferences would have been targeted too but fell outside our scope because of the long-winded niceties of calling strikes. Not one NUJ member…has suggested targeting the Tories because we don’t like them(!)…They simply happen to be the first in line….If you have better tactical suggestions for conducting strikes…I will be glad to hear them. But I have to tell you that taking Shaun the Sheep cartoons off air will not cut the mustard.”

Many years ago, I was a BBC NUJ father of the chapel. Even by the standards of demented BBC militancy and arrogance, this takes the biscuit.

The greenie news editors at the BBC salivate every time they hear about plans to build a nuclear power station. It’s their chance to create more anti-development propaganda. The subject matter today is Sri Lanka, one of the poorer countries on this earth, with a GDP per head of around £3,500. They desperately need cheap energy to make their lives more comfortable and to generate more wealth.

So when the Sri Lanka government decides to build a nuclear power station to help ameliorate poverty, what is the BBC response? Simples, as they say. Let’s talk to a few greenie agitators and stir up a rumpus. The story is specially risible, even by the corporation’s standards set by Black, Harrabin and co. First, the island is “too small” for a nuclear power plant. That will be an island that is 25,000 square miles (more than a quarter of the size of the UK). Second, there’s enough power available from “renewables”. Cobblers. Here’s the latest report on why the said renewables will never be economically viable, anywhere.

What the BBC really wants is to keep Sri Lanka in a permanent poverty, trapped in the European middle class greenie idyll of “sustainable” and “ecologically sound”. What’s completely missing from this story is – predictably – any mention of the case for providing cheap, affordable energy. But then the BBC is not in the business of providing balanced coverage of such matters.

If there’s a green story, you can rely on the BBC to take the most alarmist line, and then exaggerate further. David Shukman is at it again here; reporting without qualification of the faintest whiff of doubt fears that scientists think that 20% of plant species are “at risk”. His source for the scare is International Union for the Conservation of Nature, a neutral-sounding body that actually is made up of climate change zealots. If you doubt me, look here. The solution, of course, is to ban the burning of fossil fuels, to impose more green taxes and have a world government under Ban-Ki-Moon and his henchmen.

What Mr Shukman carefully doesn’t mention is that there are many scientists who believe that such reports are a load of tosh. Stephen Budiansky’s blog cogently shows why here; the whole biodiversity movement, which Mr Shukman is so stridently publicising, is built on pillars of sand.

One of the relentless goals of the greenies is to hit the poor. They are driving up the cost of energy and green taxes in the lunatic belief that CO2 causes global warming; the consequence is millions are being forced into fuel poverty. They have banned DDT and because of it, millions have died of malaria. Now they have another target – the cooking stoves of 3bn people worlwide, which according to the jackboot administrators of the UN, produce something called “black” carbon, the latest greenie villain of the peace. Note how BBC alarmist-in-chief Roger Harrabin says the effect has not been quantified but nevertheless, the fumes must be scrubbed and capped and contained because nameless, faceless scientists and bureaucrats say so. The next thing that will happen is that schemes will be drawn up – costing billions – to provide useless new stoves, and yet another aid/manufacturing/subsidy scam will be in full scale production.

I’m all for making homes safer, particularly as thousands in the developing world do die in avoidable fires, but the way forward is to provide cheap, reliable electricity – and the greenies are doing everything in their powers to prevent that because they hate fossil fuels.

I’m not an expert on oil spills, and do not feel qualified to decide whether the Deepwater Horizon well leak was a “disaster”. There was loss of life, and some damage to the environment, and a major negative effect on BP’s balance sheet, and therefore it was a serious incident; but all the indications are that the impact has been much less than had been forecast. To the BBCl, of course, it’s still a “disaster”, even when the good news is reported that there is confirmation that the well has finally been capped. That’s because they love Obama and hate oil production, and everything to do with it, and because they are involved in a major eco-camapign to force us to shift to other forms of energy.