Author Archives: Robin Horbury

Moore on Marr

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Charles Moore here expertly casts his eye over Andrew Marr’s BBC series The Making of Modern Britain. It pretty much sums up almost all that is wrong with the BBC today. In a nutshell, Marr ludicrously condemns anything to do with the political right and praises unreservedly the forces of “progress” – especially the trade unions. It’s goodies versus baddies and we know who the villains are in Marr’s universe.

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MORE NUTT

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Briefly, for those who believe Professor Nutt is a genuine scientist who was martyred for uttering objective truths about drug use, I recommend this article by Melanie Phillips. Hat tip to Marky.

There isn’t the space on this blog to analyse why he so richly deserved the sack, but from what I’ve seen so far of the BBC’s continued coverage this morning , you won’t see it there. And for the record, though I am not a scientist, I do sit on a body which contains many experts on drugs (working in both academic fields and rehabilitation) who have markedly different views from Professor Nutt and his fellow government cronies. What they have been saying has been a huge matter of concern to my committee for years. But its views are consistently ignored by the BBC.

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NUTT OUT (PART2)

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The BBC is rousing itself today into a highly-predictable frenzy of indignation over the aftermath of Professor David Nutt’s justified sacking as head of the government drugs advisory committee.

As a Biased BBC reader has pointed out, the pro-cocaine culture at the BBC is both illegal and has demonstrable victims. Now the BBC journalists are whipping this story up as if it were entirely a matter of academic freedom, when in reality, Professor Nutt and his associates are wet liberals who are as wrong in their analysis of drug-taking and its impact as our chums at the Met Office are about so-called “climate change”.

The real scandal here is that for years, the corrupt government of Blair and Brown has stacked so-called advisory committees with their own cronies and poodles. When their pigeons come home to roost, they don’t like it. Chances of the BBC investigating that? Zero.

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QUESTION TIME?

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I see that the BBC’s strange version of political ‘balance’ was in evidence again in this week’s edition of R4’s Any Questions? It was time for an appearance by UKIP (Marta Andreason, the former chief accountant of the EU,now an MEP for UKIP), so who is lined up against her? The ridiculous (but fanatic europhile) Charlie Faulkner, Shirley Williams (ditto) and from the Tories, one of the last remaining europhile MPs Kenneth Clark. Not only that, they chose an audience from Cambridge University that, judging from its reactions, was also madly pro-EU. Predictably, the three panellists had a joint love-in about how wonderful the EU was, while Andrea – though giving as good an account of herself as possible in the circumstances – was pushed to the margins. According to my sums, parties with eurosceptic policies amassed almost 60% of the vote at the June elections, not 25%.

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NUTT OUT

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The BBC, of course, loves the idea of liberalising the drug laws, or better still, making hard drugs legal so that the boys and girls at White City can have oodles of their favourite white powder and waccy baccy. So when Alan Johnson – under pressure from dear Gordon – sacks Professor David Nutt for over-stepping his brief and lobbying to have cannabis re-classified (again) as a class ‘C’ drug, there’s no question where their loyalties lie.

The whole row is cast as a matter of freedom of expression and opinion, with batteries of experts wheeled out to say a) that Professor Nutt is a jolly good all-round egg and scientist who should be allowed to say what he wants, and b)the government is being repressive. Naturally, in support of the good professor in the BBC’s coverage are charities such as Drugscope and Release, which for years have been pressing for legalisation of all kinds of drugs, and who believe that methadone is a ‘cure’ for heroin addiction.

But what’s completely missing from the equation is any consideration that Professor Nutt and his colleagues have been a joke for years because the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs – which he chaired – has been hijacked by liberals like him. Also, that – although Alan Johnson has actually done something right for once – the whole of the government’s policy towards illegal drug use is a shambles, and it is they that caused the current climate of ill-judged and highly dangerous liberalism.

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Party Posturing (Part 2)

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Credit where credit is due. Following Today’s attempted ambush of William Hague yesterday over the alleged Nazi sympathies of Michael Kaminski, the leader of Poland’s Law and Justice Party who are the Conservative party’s new European allies, the programme invited on this morning Michael Shudrich, Poland’s chief rabbi, to clarify whether or not – as David Miliband alleged yesterday – he believed Mr Kaminski was anti-semitic. Very cooly and precisely, Mr Shudrich said that, although Mr Kaminski had in his youth belonged to a neo-Nazi party, he had long since moved on and was now strongly pro-Isreal and “anti anti-semitic”in his beliefs. Not only that, again despite what Mr Miliband disgracefully alleged, the Law and Justice Party was not right-extremist (ie racist), but a respectable centre-right party.

So the programme definitely went out of its way – by tracking Mr Shudrich down to be interviewed – to demonstrate that David Miliband’s claims were preposterous.

However, and there is always a big ‘however’ when the BBC finds something that supports a view to the right of centre, Nick Robinson came in on the act at the end to say that – despite the clarification over Poland -problems still were in store over the new Conservative grouping in the European Parliament, because there were big (unspecified) questions about the Latvians, another member of the new group. The menacing innuendo in his claims was so strong that he virtually nullified all that had been said by the chief rabbi.

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HOBNOBGATE

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There’s a good analysis here of ‘Hobnobgate’ – the ridiculous BBC hypocrisy over Andrew Neil’s lighthearted (and even affectionate) remark on the BBC1 programme This Week that panellist MP Diane Abbott was like a “chocolate hobnob”, while her companion Michael Portillo was more like a “custard cream”. As Christopher Hart eloquently points out, the PC police at the BBC go into flatspin panic the minute 10 Guardian readers complain about alleged racism, while they do virtually nothing at all when an oaf like Jonathan Ross mounts a nasty, vicious, spiteful attack on the gentle Andrew Sachs. And what steps are our revered senior managers at the BBC taking to rid us of genuinely offensive parts of their output, such as using the f-word at every opportunity, or getting Andrew Marr to present an analysis of British history (as he did last night)? His programme was so full of crass class-hatred judgments that the best comparison is with 1066 And All That (although not nearly as funny).

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HUDD "SACKED TO MAKE WAY FOR ROSS"

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The News Huddlines (Radio 2) was one of the BBC’s last old-style comedy shows, with fine roots that could be traced back back to the great days of shows like ITMA and Beyond the Fringe. Despite being hugely popular with its audience, it was axed unceremoniously at the end of 2001. Roy Hudd, its presenter, has just revealed why. He was taken to lunch by an (unnamed) BBC senior executive and told bluntly: “We’d like you to be more like Jonathan Ross”. The executive, says Hudd, then explained that Wossy’s flashy blend of “smut and smugness”, was what was now wanted of Radio 2 performers – “cool, edgy, relevant”.

Now I’m all for making change when change is due and maybe after 26 years, the News Huddlines was a tad tired. But it had a loyal older audience, and it surely speaks volumes about today’s BBC that its senior executives prefer the obscene, in-your-face Ross to steely veteran professionals like Roy Hudd. And instead of the deceptively gentle, genuinely humorous satire of Hudd and his crew (which included brilliant performers such as Alison Steadman) we now have, disguised as BBC ‘comedy’, the blatant left-wing cant of idiots like Marcus Brigstocke.

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HUMPHRYS IN FART SCARE

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Lord Stern, a self-appointed expert on ‘climate change’ who in reality is nothing but a jumped-up economist wrote, back in 2006, a deeply flawed report that contained a tissue of extremist political untruths – dressed up as scientific ‘truth’ – about what he claimed were the threats facing mankind. His work was comprehensively debunked at the time by the doughty economist Ruth Lea, who rightly observed that like all the outpourings of greenies, this was in reality yet another call for higher taxes and more central government oppression.

For the BBC, though, his lordship is still a figure of worship. So when he makes the loony suggestion that we all become vegetarians because farm animals fart too much ‘dangerous’ methane, he’s invited on the Today programme and treated with fawning reverence by John Humphrys. To be fair, Mr Humphrys did acknowledge there were “deniers” out there who disbelieved his scare-mongering, and also suggested that his climate change beliefs were only based on computer models, but when Lord Stern persisted that the science was proven, simple and definitely settled, the supposed Torquemada of the BBC rolled over and purred in agreement. Not only that, Mr Humphrys just sat back and listened as Lord Stern spouted nonsense about moves to “zero carbon electricity”. And he concluded by suggesting that Lord Stern was not being tough enough in pursuing his loony agenda.

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PUSHOVER FOR MILIBAND

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The boy David Miliband has been revealing the real post-Lisbon EU agenda today; that he and the rest of his rotten party want Tony Blair to become president of Europe, and the UK itself to be a vassal state in the pursuit of EU goals. As usual, the BBC gives him acres of space to push his federalist views, both on the website and on most major news programmes such as World at One.

And what’s almost completely missing from this fawning coverage? Any idea – as was clearly expressed on June 3 in the European elections – that the whole vast EU edifice stinks, that Britain hates Tony Blair and that what the EU is doing is against the wishes of the British people.

The only opposition that WATO could muster to the Miliband’s mad dash to crown Tony Blair was French foreign affairs spokesman Bernard Kouchner, whose only objections were that Blair had not joined the euro and that us Brits did not like the EU enough.

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