Author Archives: Robin Horbury

There’s an important investigation here by the Mail on Sunday of a grant to BBC environment “analyst” and greenie poster boy Roger Harrabin of £15,000 from the University of East Anglia’s climate centre, the outfit at the centre of Climategate. The cash, it is stated, was used to fund a range of climate change seminars. Mr Harrabin denies, of course, that the money has influenced his reporting…and the BBC itself can see no issues of impartiality. Well that’s OK then.

But I wonder how many who disagree with Mr Harrabin’s brand of eco fervour attended his seminars? And, as I’ve extensively reported before, Mr Harrabin seems happy to tout his services to any greenie cause that will hire him.

The Mail investigation also mentions the Television Trust for the Environment (TVE), which as I reported earlier this week, has been censured by the BBC trustees over conflict of interest and a failure to tell viewers where the programme budget had originated. Reporter David Rose notes that Dr Joe Smith, Mr Harrabin’s partner – and joint recipient of the UEA cash – was chief scientific adviser to TVE programmes, including a couple the BBC trustees have censured. Mr Rose quotes Jenny Richards, the deputy chief executive of TVE, as saying that the company had “made hundreds of programmes” for the BBC and regarded the trustees report as a “slap on the wrist”.

That, to me, is the most telling remark in the whole story. It suggests that she knows that the trustees don’t really give a fig about this whole sorry mess – they are involved in a bit of cosmetic window dressing, and nothing will actually change.

Bishop Hill, who (wrongly) thinks that Robert Lamb is still the chief executive of TVE, says I have been “overheated” in my reporting of this affair. He is entitled to his views, and I respect them – that’s the strength of blogging. But in my book, those at the BBC who are involved in this rather fetid mess of obfuscation and conflict of interest are without doubt eco fascists, and thoroughly deserve that description. Mr Lamb and his ilk have traduced the BBC and reduced it to an organ of WWF propaganda. They want rule by international diktat, to cover the countryside with windfarms, to massively reduce the population, to make heating our homes so expensive that thousands will live in daily fear of how much energy they are consuming, to stop us from flying, to force us out of our cars, and much more. That all adds up to a brand of fascism.

This man, Robert Lamb, appears to be at the heart of the BBC’s environmental programmes scandal. Surprise, surprise, he was trained as a BBC producer in the 1980s and has since become a one man blizzard of greenie programming. Two of the companies he has has set up and run have been named by the BBC trustees as “causing concern” because they accepted funding from external sources in alleged breach of current affairs programme guidelines and were made in such a way that there could have been conflicts of interest. In other words, the production standards and financing stank to high heaven.

So who is Robert Lamb? A partial profile is here. As you see, he ticks almost every greenie activist box – the BBC, the UN, and various right-on pressure groups. His own, self-righteous assessment of his eco-fascist agenda is here. Basically, he set up the Television Trust for the Environment in the 1980s and ran it until around 2005. Over the past few years, he formed and now runs his own outfit called One Planet Pictures. He also helped establish, and is now an executive producer of, Dev TV.

TVE, as I reported yesterday, has mysteriously vanished from the web (on October 24, a B-BBC reader found) and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Under the template created by Mr Lamb, it currently (according to its latest charity commission return – h/t Tony Newbery, Harmless Sky) generates more than £1.4m a year of support from sources that include various greenie tranzis and government departments that have an EU-driven climate change agenda. From the beginning, again under Mr Lamb’s nakedly aggressive political agenda and template, its goal was to disseminate unbridled greenie alarmist propaganda in accordance with the UN agenda. The only surprise really is that it has taken this long for this to be seen as a conflict of interest.

Dev TV and One Planet Pictures – set up, I surmise, on the basis of my own inside information, after Mr Lamb fell out with the TVE trustees – appear to be run on exactly the same lines. I urge you to have a quick look at what they say and how they are structured. Their output is hardcore, unqualified propaganda. And Dev TV’s co-production guidelines here appear to be a recipe for exactly the conflict of interest and undue outside interest that the BBC trustees have now – so belatedly – fingered.

I do hope this signals the end of Mr Lamb’s eco-fascist career. But the BBC both spawned him and has kept him in business for almost 30 years – I suspect that like the hydra, he will keep on going.

I was tied up yesterday when this story about the BBC trustees investigation of dodgy environment programmes broke. This morning, I’ve been digging further, and I suspect we only know a fraction of what’s gone on. I think there’s evidence of a a frantic but very extensive cover-up.

The Television Trust for the Environment (mentioned here in the BBC’s sanisitised version of their investigations) was for years one of the BBC’s biggest suppliers of environment programmes. There are dozens of items like this about its programmes. But – astonishingly – TVE itself has disappeared and its website is now defunct. Here’s proof that it once did exist, but this morning, this is the only type of reference to it that I can find.

I know the executive director of the organisation, Cheryl Campbell (used to work with her, many years ago), and quite a lot about the charity because I had dealings with it a few years back. It was founded in 1984 by Central Television and had grown to be a huge greenie outfit producing dozens of films a year for the BBC, with funding derived from a range of sources, including the Swedish and Dutch governments and the usual suspect greenie foundations. I wrote about it in previous posts, for example, here where I posed questions about funding and support of the sort now supposedly being investigated by the trustees.

Maybe readers with better internet skills than me can find it, but I’ve been trying every variation of the name and web address and not managed to trace anything but cross-references that go nowhere.

So where has it gone? And why? But it surely can’t be coincidence. And one thing that I am certain about is that, meanwhile, Richard Ayre, the BBC trustee appointed to investigate this rather fetid affair is emphatically not in any sense independent. First, he worked for the BBC for almost 30 years before becoming a trustee, and as a former controller of editorial policy, is unquestionably one of the main architects of the current BBC editorial approach. Second, he has direct greenie form. Mr Ayre was chairman of Article 19, a body that claims to be about journalistic freedom, but is in fact an organisation enforcing the UN rights agenda, including its belief that all the world’s ills are caused by nasty, carbon belching westerners. Put another way, Mr Ayre is an unqualified supporter of the lefty greenie agenda, and not only that, openly boasts about his Article 19 links on the trustee website. So how on earth can he be trusted to investigate venality among greenie activists and programme makers?

I keep saying it: the BBC, rotten to the core.

If Richard Black is to be believed, he has a real world scoop; he’s got his eco zealot little mitts on a draft of the latest IPCC report several days before publication. Now in my journalist manual, that’s a hold the front page scoop if ever I saw one – especially as the BBC has been the main conduit of publicity for the IPCC’s faked exaggerations for more than a decade. But it hasn’t happened. He’s instead got a modest down page lead, and his exclusive – far from being trumpeted – is rather buried in a load of verbiage about the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a grouping of developing world countries who are hollering loudly for buckets of cash because the nasty west has caused flooding, droughts and all the pestilence they have ever known.

So why the reticence? Could it be that, as Benny Peiser deftly points out here, that the IPCC is saying that – far from the Armageddon they’ve been predicting for years – the latest data shows something very different:

“Uncertainty in the sign of projected changes in climate extremes over the coming two to three decades is relatively large because climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variability”.

Shock horror! No doomsday, so Mr Black glosses over the seemingly seismic shift – but blethers on regardless about the various countries’ tiresome complaints like rising sea levels, all of which have been rehearsed a thousand times before and all of which have been debunked. I must say, I smell a huge rat. If the IPCC really does come out with a report that suggests natural variability as the main driver of climate change, it will be astonishing. Of course, they will (almost certainly) also say that their models show that warming will resume later…and that, I predict, will be Mr Black’s focus.

I have long since given up on this government. David Cameron is not a Conservative, he’s a lefty, Euorophile, greenie fascist from exactly the same mould as the vile Edward Heath, the dangerous egomaniac who bounced us into the EU. Proof? Andrew Mitchell, Cameron’s international development secretary, has announced this weekend (reported in the Sunday Times P6, so not linkable)a £90m grant for the BBC World Service Trust (WST). This, as I have written before, is a body whose main purpose is to brainwash the developing world about eco loonery, and already spends millions doing so, with projects like this:

The major objective of Africa Talks Climate is to identify the entry points to engage, inform and empower Africans in local, national and international conversations about climate change. To achieve this, the initiative will collate opinions and then amplify the voices of people at all levels of society. “Climate change is the defining issue of our age,” said Peter Upton, Country Director for the British Council in Nigeria. “Climate in Africa is one of the most important issues that all people and governments will face. Africa will be one of the most affected regions but has done the least to contribute to the problem.

The whopping new grant – at a time when millions in the UK are suffering from fuel poverty because of the government’s renewables policy – will at a stroke make the WST five times bigger and, in effect, convert it into an arm of Mr Mitchell’s government department DFID. Be very afraid. It means oodles more bureaucratic fear-mongering projects, the goal of the greenies involved being to convert the developing world into West-hating, climate change fanatics.

The WST is run by someone with ideal credentials for this eco-zealot role. The boss is Caroline Nursey, a career tranzi parasite with no qualifications in any climate-related field or broadcasting. As an-ex “director level” Oxfam (greenie propagandists-in-chief) executive, she no doubt fits the ideal DFID mould of a disburser down the drain of millions of pounds of our cash. Her head of policy is James Deane, who formely worked for the Panos Institute. another body up to its gills in climate change activism.

I could go on. But the main point here is that this government came to office pledging to rein in the BBC as part of a so-called Conservative agenda. It claimed that it was going to cut back the World Service; instead it has now made it an agency of another government department, one in which normal laws of economics do not apply because the boy David has ring-fenced its budget.

Thus, in the WST a new bueaucratic Frankenstein has been created, one which will spray cash around the world in its lunatic dissemination of climate change propaganda. As I said, this is not Conservatism. And it goes beyond anything NuLabour ever dreamed up. Even Tony Blair is asking only for a few million from DFID!

This is beginning to look like let’s get Richard Black, but he (and the BBC idiots who employ him) deserve it. There is a delicious irony in this story. Mr Black has come out all guns blaring in support of his old chums Greenpeace against a nasty nuclear energy company, EDF. Greenpeace, like Mr Black, want the UK energy supply industry to go back to the dark ages, so the fact that EDF have -in a very French way – looked after their own interests is an occasion for Mr Black to give them a very good (one-sided) kicking, and to remind us how nasty the French government was to the sainted zealots of Greenpeace in the past in helping to sink one of their boats.

But I wonder what the BBC chairman thinks of all this? My guess is that he’s choking over his cornflakes this morning. Or I certainly hope he is. Euromaniac Lord Patten is an ardent greenie, ready to flaunt his eco-fascist credentials to anyone who asks him. To that end, I’m sure he thought he was on a brilliant wicket when he decided (with the inducement, no doubt, of a nice, fat fee) to join the advisory board of a company boasting about its greenie policies and strategy. But I’m afraid all that glitters is not gold – that company just happens to be…EDF Energy. As I’ve noted before, he and his lefty deputy Diane Coyle both sit on the EDF advisory board – so what price their green credentials now? And I’d love to hear them justify how they will continue to serve on a company, which it has been found, is happy to break the law in pursuit of its goals.

This shows, yet again, that the BBC is rotten to the core. Its trustees are nakedly partisan on the subject of climate change, and have sanctioned deliberate misreporting of the whole debate. But at least two of them can’t resist – like so many public servants – the lure of fat consultancy fees… and this morning, they are shown up as venal hypocrites.

BBC bias flows from the top of the corporation. Lord Patten, the chairman of the trustees – that body that supposedly polices and enforces impartiality- is a foaming-at-the-mouth Europhile, as this interview shows. And now it has been revealed that Diane Coyle, his deputy – a fatcat quangocrat and former Indy financial journalist cosily married to BBC reporter Rory Cellan Jones – has accepted a role as advisor to the shadow business secretary and climate change zealot Chuka Umunna. According to the reports, this is despite being told by trust director Nicholas Kroll that such work would be a “conflict of interest”.

The real scandal goes much deeper. It defies belief that Ms Coyle was appointed to her role at all…because in her case a leopard does not change its spots. Without doubt, Ms Coyle shares Lord Patten’s unmoderated enthusiasm for the EU. She wrote in the Independent in 1999:

The defenders of sterling are, in the main, a group of elderly men with more stake in their past than in our future. They clothe their gut anti-Europeanism and Little Englandism in the language of rational economic argument (quoted in Peter Oborne’s Centre for Policy Studies booklet The Guilty Men)

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Also according to Mr Oborne, the following year, Ms Coyle was equally vehement in her dismissal of the idea that an inflationary boom in Ireland was caused by the euro. She maintained that it was Eurosceptics who supported such views .

Ms Coyle also supports the EU in its lunatic climate change-related policies. This is evident in a book she wrote in 2011, The Economics of Enough. This is an interview she gave about her work:

Diane Coyle, author of The Economics of Enough, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the future and the ideas in her book. Coyle argues that the financial crisis, the entitlement crisis, and climate change all reflect a failure to deal with the future appropriately. The conversation ranges across a wide range of issues including debt, the financial sector, and the demographic challenges of an aging population that is promised generous retirement and health benefits. Coyle argues for better measurement of the government budget and suggests ways that the political process might be made more effective

Ms Coyle shares with Lord Patten yet another cosy – and no doubt highly lucrative – climate change, love-the-EU role. She sits with him as an advisor to EDF Energy. And EDF is one of greedy, grasping power companies that tells monstrous porkies about climate change in order get as many subsidies into its fat maw as it possibly can.

The issue here is beyond parody. Ms Coyle is an EU-loving, Labour luvvie who has spent her life nakedly pushing her political views. That she is a trustee at all is a disgrace – and confirms yet again that the corporation is rotten to the core.

What these 200 companies actually mean when they say they demand “more action on climate change” is that they are after more subsidies from the money that government is taking off us in taxes, and they want more green taxes on the public so that the government will be able to give them more subsidies. This story proves beyond doubt the grim reality that every single one of our major companies has now been infected by the the corporate responsibility disease and has high priests of green nuttiness at board level advising strategy.

And these parasites have realised that if they hold out their begging bowls marked “green” and chant the phrase “action on climate change” loudly (turning in circles as they do so), they will be lavishly filled with Chris Huhne’s largesse.

Jo Nova points out eloquently here what these green measures entail: the Canadian government has just committed to introduce measures to reduce temeperatures at the equivalent of $84 trillion per degree (at least it’s centigrade, not Fahrenheit). What’s terrifying is that the same is being requested here.

Richard Black , as usual, recycles the views of these grasping eco-nutters with grim self-smug satisfaction. Not for one second does he doubt that they are right, and nor does he have the self-awareness to realise he’s nothing but a pawn in their greedy, eco-fascist games.