Author Archives: Robin Horbury

Spot what’s missing from this piece of so-called reporting by the BBC.

Predictably, this most disturbing report about the agonising impact of fuel poverty has been processed by BBC business “reporter” Damian Kahya without mentioning at all the key fact – namely, that all this heartbreak has been engineered by green policies which have deliberately jacked up the price of electricity generation in the lunatic quest to shift to so-called renewables.

It reminds me of the story I was told when I started as a cub reporter back in 1974. I was sent to cover an amateur dramatic play. My news editor (a dour Yorkshireman who was a veteran of D-Day) growled as his parting shot as I left: “And remember, lad, we sacked your predecessor. He went to a play, and when I asked him where his copy was a couple of days later, he told me he had not been able to file anything because the lead actor had fallen off the stage and died so the performance didn’t finish”.

Joking aside, as I noted this morning, Richard Black and his eco-fascist BBC chums now actually want to make the problem of fuel poverty hundreds of times worse by introducing a well-head oil tax.

The BBC: reporting only the information that fits with its world view.

Here we go again…Richard Black advocating at full throttle that governments should start taxing oil at the well-head to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Begrudgingly, he concedes that efforts to create a “carbon” market have been a fiasco and a farce, but now he reckons that every barrel of oil should cost more. Words fail me…he is actually advocating – at a time when energy prices are going through the roof because of idiotic, cack-handed government policies – that billions round the world who rely on fossil fuel should be made to suffer hardship. It’s an appalling prospect, akin to the tax on bread (via tithes) in pre-revolutionary France, and shows how reckless about human welfare green zealots are. In their bigoted pursuit of the climate change creed, they want a re-imposition of repressive, regressive state larceny. Those who would be hurt the most are the poor, the old and the young, particularly in developing economies, but no matter Mr Black, you are saving the world here – so they can suffer.

What’s doubly depressing is Mr Black’s report of a BMA conference on Monday attended by a coterie of climate change fanatics who are in, or have held, senior positions within broadly the establishment, including, really worryingly the armed forces. All of them agreed like lemmings that climate change is an immediate threat to security, and of course, Mr Black lapped it all up and reported their lunacy with admiring relish. Meanwhile, in the real world, the debunking of such climate scare buffoonery goes on apace.

I’m bored with writing about the BBC’s bias about climate change. Nothing changes. But I could not let the latest Richard Black homily pass. Here it is – an unbridled, no-praise-too-small homage to the nice, cuddly eco-warrior activists at Greenpeace. Single-handedly, according to Mr Black, these heroes have saved the whales, stopped the pollution of rivers and halted deforestation, though the nasty Indonsesian president is daring to try get in their way.

I actually prefer an alternative view of Greenpeace, which is that they are thuggish, vicious louts who stop at nothing to spread posonous lies. Donna Laframbois – whose magisterial book on the lies of the IPCC is just out – has their measure. In 1994, for example, they published a scare-fest pamphlet called the Climate Time Bomb which suggested that the impacts of global warming were already leading to coral bleaching, species extinction, and widespread urban disease. Not one element of their alarmism stands the test of time. But not content with spreading such lies themselves, Greenpeace have also infiltrated the IPCC to the extent that their press releases (more lies) make it into reports without dilution or check. And – Ka-ching! – not content with that, they bank-roll so-called scientists to fabricate climate change research.

Propaganda comes in many guises. In Mr Black’s case, it’s as subtle as a Glasgow kiss.

Rod Liddle may say BBC bias is not a conspiracy, and John Humphrys on Friday claimed in the BBC’s blunderbuss response on Today to Peter Oborne’s Guilty Men paper that the corporation is not “monolithic”. But it’s hard to avoid such a conclusion when – as part of their vast tapestry of newspeak and bias on major issues – someone, somewhere in the corridors of BH and White City has decided that the terms “AD” and “BC” are to be abolished because “modern practice” now means that everyone uses instead “CE”. In other words, chaps, we have decided to airbrush out – to appease the Muslims, no doubt led by multicultural BBC trustee (and all-round complaints quango queen) Mehmuda Mian, doyenne of the Lokahi Foundation – another major component of our proud heritage. James Delingpole has a brilliant analysis here.

I have a copy of the Peter Oborne’s Guilty Men which I picked up at the launch at the CPS last night. Figures such as Michael Howard and even the odd Labour eurosceptic MP were there. ..but conspicuous by their absence were any of this miserable so-called Tory government, who even now are desperately trying to save the euro despite their professed scepticism. That aside, some of what Mr Oborne says about the BBC’s coverage of the first day of the euro on January 1, 2002, deserves spelling out in full to add to the previous post:

It was a moment of celebration for the BBC, whose already fragile sense of perspective collapsed. The BBC forgot its duty of impartiality….And it was nakedly contemptuous of its mass British audience.

Today presenter Jim Naughtie, in France on January 1, spoke of:

“…a sense of occasion, a genuine excitement, a sense of peculiar new notes, a sense of change in the air especially among young people, a sense of breaking away from the past.”

Naughtie lapsed into mystical language, strikingly similar to the words used in St John to describe one of the central mysteries of Christianity: “The arrival of the currency that the fathers of modern Europe dreamed about are symbols now made flesh”.

The BBC Charter with its demand for neutrality and professionalism, was broken again and again in those early days of the euro. Guidelines on balanced reporting were repeatedly ignored. Reasonable doubts about the euro were underplayed. Some reporters failed to distinguish between normal New Year revelries and specifically euro-related celebration…The BBC coverage should be seen as apart of a wider and more significant national pattern as many mainstream British institutions were subverted to serve the aspirations of the pro-euro camp.

I await with interest reaction from the BBC. Mr Oborne bases his analysis of the euro launch on a detailed research paper. My guess is that, as usual, Patten and his henchmen will simply bluster and ignore it. After all, they are always right. They say so.

Update: Mr Oborne appeared with eurofanatic Denis MacShane at the end of Today. I am currently having the sequence transcribed…and will comment when I have looked in detail at exactly what was said. True to form, there was a particularly sneery interruption from the aforementioned Naughtie.

Put out the bunting and crack open the champagne. It’s still early days, but Cuadrilla Resources, a small but highly enterprising UK company that is surveying for shale gas, has announced that it has found a field under the UK with over 200 trillion cubic feet of gas…one of the largest in the world and enough to create 5,600 jobs.

But for the BBC, of course, there’s no celebration. It’s just an excuse for its eco-warrior reporters to marshall a barage of objections and to recycle the same tired propaganda about the dangers of fossil fuels. They are an essential part of the deadly serious greenie camapign to get frakking banned and condemn the UK to escalating fuel poverty. So twisted is their reporting that a demo mounted by a man, a dog and a paint pot outside the Imperial Hotel in Blackpool is given more importance than 5,600 new jobs.

Already, the BBC and its greenie chums have forced Cuadrilla to halt drilling,and they are awaiting for the results of an inquiry to be given the all clear. It defies belief that we are mired in such regulatory miasma – these loonies, if they had been around in the industrial revolution, would have stopped everything from coal mining to iron smelting, and we would all still be pox-ridden yokels with a life expectancy of no more than 30. Cuadrilla’s response? Well, if the UK heeds the poisonous lies like those peddled by the BBC, they will be off to Poland. And who would blame them?

The crooks at EDF – their Gallic gullets already bloated by massive government renewable energy subsidies – are putting up electricity prices in the UK by an eye-watering 8.9%, forcing tens of thousands more Britons into fuel poverty. Their website is crammed full of eco-nonsense like this…they are saving the world dontya know, so who gives a stuff about pensioners and low income families? And meanwhile, the BBC brings us the pathetic squeaks of protest of climate change minister Chris Huhne, who, they faithfully report like lapdogs, is going to fight the increases. If they were doing their job properly they would be telling us instead just how much his rabid climate policies have caused the hike.

But fat chance. The reality is that the BBC is also part of the scam. EU pensioner and apparatchik Lord Patten, chairman of the BBC so-called trustees, tops up his fat earnings by a number of directorships, including as a member of the “stakeholder advisory panel” of a company called…EDF. His companion in the three-monthly pow-wows to tell the Frenchies how to extract more of our cash is – er, another BBC trustee, Diane Coyle, his deputy chairman. Chances of the ranks of BBC eco-warriors – already dragooned by the trustees into suppressing the views of those who disagree with climate change lies – reporting the truth about this gang of Gallic thieves? Zero.

Hold on to your hats. Richard Black has now decided to move into overt political analysis, the logical extension, I suppose, of his eco-warrior brief. His worst nightmare is in prospect: that a red meat Republican climate denier might succeed the sainted Obama. Clearly, “red meat” has special abusive value in this context, because he points out with pride it was devised by his chum, the cannabis smuggler, Jonny Dymond. En route, he sings loud praises to the Environmental Protection Agency, the body that single-handedly is doing more damage to the US economy than a phalanx of Bin Ladens. And, using a quote from one of favourite organisations, the so-called Friends of the Earth, he produces his trump card to show how plain stupid the red meaters are, because he EPA, he tells us with glee, was actually set up by one of their own, none other than that (boo, hiss) ultimate nasty Republican, Richard Milhous Nixon.

Mr Black saves the best until last. He writes gloomily:

But the rest of the world has to recognise that whatever transpires, the US is unlikely to be pushing a radical green line any time soon. Then again, it has been this way since the hanging chads of Florida carried Mr Bush to the White House in 2001.

Quelle horreur! It’s all that lying, cheating, double-dealing Dubya’s fault. What an outro! Can’t you just hear the rest of the BBC newsroom cheering him on for being so smart…and getting so much anti-Republican venom in one story?

Tony Newbery, of Harmless Sky, who is quietly doing brilliant work about BBC bias, tipped me off last night about an item on Today’s business news yesterday morning. It is a gem. First, the Guardian had already led on the story (one BBC box firmly ticked!); second, it involved a dodgy capitalist (who as a bonus was daring to exploit fossil fuel); and third it allowed the use of an “expert” who actually is a militant greenie anti-capitalist.

The story was that Tony Hayward, former chief executive of BP, has formed a company called Valleras and has secured £1.3bn of backing from a range of sources including the Rothschilds. It has very enterprisingly launched a reverse take-over of a Turkish company called Genel which has the rights to extract oil in Kurdistan, estimated to be the world’s sixth largest (and hitherto unexploited) oil field.

My instinct is to say…fantastic! Thank goodness someone in Britain has not thrown in the towel under the deluge of EU regulation and is showing a flash of the spirit that built an empire. But not, of course, the BBC. You could hear the disdain in presenter Adam Shaw’s voice that the new company might soon join the FTSE 100, especially as it was run by an executive who – as was rammed home with relish – had been associated with the gulf oil spill.

But the most questionable part of the whole exercise was that the woman chosen by the programme to react to the news – and introduced on air as only a “San Francisco based oil industry analyst” was Antonia Juhasz, who in fact is a hellcat hell-bent on destroying the oil industry. That’s not difficult to prove, because Exhibit A is her book called The Tyranny of Oil: the World’s Most Powerful Industry and What We Must Do To Stop It. With such neutral credentials, Mr Shaw asked the said Ms Juhasz several times what she thought of Mr Hayward’s return to frontline oil exploration. It doesn’t take much imgination to work out what was expected of her, and she duly delivered; essentially it boiled down to that Mr Hayward was a nasty, vicious crook who should not be allowed near an oil well and must be held to account for the “catastrophe” and “disaster” of the gulf oil spill. Mr Shaw uttered not one peep of disagreement.

Of course, the BBC and Mr Shaw got exactly what they wanted. But a very serious point of journalistic conduct is raised here, in that without a shadow of a doubt, the deliberate omission of Ms Juhasz’s highly partisan standpoint was blatantly dishonest, even by the BBC’s gutter standards.

What did we do to deserve the Cameron government? Autonomous Mind explains the supine sell-out over the EU here. And now the so-called culture minister tells us that the BBC is the “best broadcaster in the world” in response to some genuinely probing questions from a backbencher who is at least partly aware. On which planet does Ed Vaizey live? He seemed reassured, too, that Lord Patten is to hold “impartiality” seminars. With his fat EU pension and his rabid views on climate change, that’s a bit like Ribbentrop promising to get Hitler to educate the Reich on the pros and cons of the Jewish question. I await the results of the latest phase of indoctrination with bated breath. Or perhaps not.