Author Archives: Robin Horbury

The BBC Thompson unbiased mindset is made up of a complete set of nanny-state values that is based, in turn, on fantasy views of science and human development. One of the central axioms is that life in nature and the past was idyllic. People grew their own food, didn’t produce any carbon dioixide, didn’t burn nasty fossil fuels and lived in constant orgasmic stasis (or whatever tendy word is in vogue). Anyone who advocates such ideas is instantly elevated to sainthood, or at the very least, front page status on the BBC website. So it is today for this piece of moonshine, carefully crafted by BBC health zealot Jane Elliot. She talks admiringly of a group of behaviour police in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, who are touring schools telling long-suffering youngsters that if they eat like peasants (peasants, note, not the villanous landowners because they crammed themselves with expensive nasties) did in medieval times, they will not get fat and not taint their bodies with vile salt or – shock, horror – food from abroad.

That will be the medieval diet that meant in reality that there was a life expectancy of around 30-35, diseases were rampant and there was a dependence on local food that meant every period of bad weather or low rainfall spelled starvation for our ancestors. Not to mention the back-breaking labour involved. There’s an excellent critique of the food problems of the past here; the writer also brilliantly shows how the greenie obsession with localism and organic food is dangerous, self-indulgent nonsense. For the thought police of Mr Thompson’s unbiased BBC, of course, the brilliant analysis of Mr Budiansky is heresy against the green creed and will never see the light of day.

Marie Stopes, the birth control pioneer, is an icon of BBC lefties, feminists and trendies, as this glowing tribute posted today on the BBC website makes clear. Reporter Howard Falcon-Lang shows his breatheless admiration for what he portrays as a saintly pioneer of Darwinian science (thousands of brownie points in the BBC lexicon)and ensuring that women should be “liberated” through sex manuals (another brownie point subject, especially for contemporary ones that denigrate men and are aimed at five-year-olds).

What Mr Falcon-Lang leaves out of his eulogy is a few other less savoury but rather more important facts about Ms Stopes. Like that her views on evolution led her to become an ardent admirer of Hitler, and that she wrote to him a month before the war broke out in 1939 telling him so. The reason? Well, she was a central figure in Anglo-US eugenics movement (along with leftie friends like George Bernard Shaw) and believed in every element of his views about race and selective breeding. This heroine of the left was as much a believer in racial superiority and getting rid of lesser races as most Nazis.

As with the inconvenient truths about Islam, the fanatics at the BBC airbrush out with wearying predictability the facts that don’t fit with their systematic bending of history.

Update: Paulo states (below) that the version of the Stopes story he saw mentioned Hitler and that I must have only skim-read the story. Not true; that’s never my approach. I’ve double-checked the edition I read when I posted the story and it definitely did not contain the reference to Hitler. Mmm…curious, that. This was the intro on the edition I have:

Marie Stopes (1880-1958) shook the world. She wrote a best-selling sex-manual for women and was a controversial birth control pioneer.

When Stopes set up her first birth control clinic in 1921, all assumed that she had trained in medicine.

Yet, bizarrely, she was an expert on fossil plants and coal.

So how did this young palaeontologist come to transform Western society and become one of the most infamous women in history?

The Oz general election is on a knife edge. There’s no doubt who the BBC is supporting. Here’s the profile of Labour’s Gillard:

* Welsh-born former lawyer
* Taken to Australia as a child in 1966 for the warmer climate
* Known for her pragmatism and sharp tongue
* Seen as intelligent and determined
* Lives with her partner, a hairdresser
* Faced criticism from conservatives for not having children

And of Tony Abbott:

* Nick-named the “mad monk”, relating to his brief training as a priest
* Renowned fitness fanatic and former student boxer
* Socially conservative on issues such as same-sex marriages and abortion
* Known for gaffes and has frequently been caught swearing on camera
* Climate change sceptic

To decode: that nice Ms Gillard is pragmatic, intelligent and determined, is not married but has a nice boyfriend, and has been unfairly attacked for not having children. In other words, a BBC role-model. Horrid Mr Abbott is a nutter, a fanatic, dares to believe in traditional family values, is gaffe-prone, and – boo,hiss, worst of all in the BBC hate stakes – dares to challenge the climate change idiocy of Ms Gillard(who wants to cripple the Oz economy by introducing eye-watering green taxes). So, for the BBC, it’s we love Gillard, that lovely lady from Wales.

The BBC’s report of the resignation of Lord Pearson of Rannoch as leader of UKIP makes drearily predictable reading. The stress in commentary by Ross Hawkins is totally on what the BBC perceived he did not do well, most notably that he regarded a question about banks as “minutiae”. But what Mr Hawkins fails to mention is that Lord Pearson was by this time deeply frustrated by the BBC’s systematic avoidance during the election campaign of raising anything that would cut across the desire by the three main parties to avoid the EU as an election issue. Note, too, the choice of the picture of Lord Pearson. Not his best side, as they say. The corporation hate UKIP and everything to do with it, so yet again, this is seen as an open goal to knock the enemy.

The BBC hate the royal family and all that it stands for. Except, of course, when it’s Prince Charles on one of his many loony green missions. Then they choose a very nice smiley picture of him and drone on about greenie nonsense such as that the royal train is running on “sustainable biofuel” and that he’s encouraging that the people of Wales to help the rainforests. Then they become ardent royalists.

Hold the front page! Richard Black has told Anthony Watts that he is correcting a story in which – using all his scientific brilliance – he told the world that rice yields are falling “because of global warming”. The reality is that over the past few decades rice yields have grown hugely thanks mainly to brilliant agricultural scientists who understand the relationship between optimum plant breeding, soils, temperature, irrigation and growth. Mr Black plainly did not read the press release and he got completely the wrong end of the stick, presenting – as usual – warmist twaddle. It will, of course, be interesting to read what Mr Black has to say and I welcome his willingness to acknowledge his error. But, call me a cynic, I am expecting a sting in the tail…especially in view of what Bishop Hill calls Mr Black’s “slack-jawed” acceptance of the alarmist narrative being applied to biodiversity. Is this the BBC’s latest crusade? Mr Black has certainly got form, in this area.

Warmists have been at it for at least a decade: publishing dire predictions that heatwaves are going to kill us by thousand, we’ll all drop like flies as the mercury rises. Here’s CNN in 2000. And here’s the BBC yesterday. Note the similarities, the same strident language, the same ‘we are all doomed’ rhetoric. Like a cracked record.. When I see this statistical hogwash – which comes from the school where if you pay people to find a problem, they will find it – I ask if heat is such a problem, why do Brits flock to Greece and Florida and Spain every year? And why does California continue to grow? Is it so those involved will increase their chance of a heart attack? Er, I don’t think so.

BBC reporter Richard Stott purred with delight when the Cleggerons confirmed that they were going to chuck bucketloads of our money into electric car subsidies, despite the recession. No stone was left unturned in his report in telling us that production is both necessary and what consumers want. Today’s report from Spain about the reality of the virtually non-existent demand for these useless, expensive, greenie toys – just 16 have been sold in a year despite massive publicity and taxpayer cash – is rather more terse and bald. No explanation of the disastrous attempt to fool consumers; just an insane and throroughly misleading quote that implies millions will be sold, because electric cars are the same story as “mobile phones and computers”. Er, both these products have a clear use and fit consumer needs. And they don’t cost the earth. They took off when they became affordable. By contrast, electric cars are – and will remain for the forseeable future, despite the greenie propaganda and massive subsidies – expensive, inferior in range and performance, and be restricted in appeal by the need to recharge for long periods. In other words, they are in almost every respect inferior to petrol cars and are only being produced because they fit the greenie-global warming propaganda narrative. Why can’t the BBC be honest and say that?