Spokesman Alvin Stone tells The Australian that the stranding of their vessel, Akademik Shokalskiy, has been misconstrued.

“One of the misconceptions is that this is a climate-change voyage full of climate scientists, which is actually not true,” he says.

“There are a couple of climate scientists on board, but it is just a scientific expedition and it is quite broad, with biologists, geographers, looking at penguin and seal populations and a whole lot of other things.

Nothing to do with climate change?  Expedition leader Chris ‘The Penguin’ Turney explains the aims of the expedition in August 2013:

We are gong to discover just how much has changed in the last 100 years since the Mawson Expedition…melding science and adventure…a major research programme…looking at islands that are facing the uncertain impact of a warming planet….and trying to understand past climate to inform the present, the Southern Ocean plays a crucial role in global climate and the carbon cycle and the latest research suggests large changes are afoot..we will be collecting precious data on sea temperatures and salinity:

Note he also states that Commonwealth bay is badly clogged with sea ice limiting access over the last three years…he says they will try to reach Mawson’s hut but if unsuccessful will push on to other ice free locations and continue the work.

Good luck with that…oh…too late….didn’t listen to his own advice obviously!

I was going to add this to David’s indepth look at the troubled Antarctic expedition and the BBC’s less than perfect coverage but it grew too big as I linked through so here’s something the BBC aren’t mentioning (ironically from the Expediton’s Online who organised the trip):

Near Record Sea Ice in Antarctica (again)

The sea ice extent in Antarctica attained a near-record high level of 18.7 million square kilometres in mid-August this year, according to studies by the USA National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Normally averaging 18 million square kilometres at the height of winter, the increase is part of a long-term trend and is paradoxically consistent with how scientists believe global warming may affect the southern ocean around Antarctica.

oops….Somebody may have got it wrong:

The Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre says:

Changes in Antarctic sea ice extent are predicted under future climate change scenarios, although models for the 21st century show wide variability with a 25-40% decrease predicted.

Also via WUWT:

Scientists at the British Antarctic Survey say that the melting of the Pine Island Glacier ice shelf in Antarctica has suddenly slowed right down in the last few years, confirming earlier research which suggested that the shelf’s melt does not result from human-driven global warming. Dr Pierre Dutrieux of the BAS states bluntly: “We found ocean melting of the glacier was the lowest ever recorded, and less than half of that observed in 2010. This enormous, and unexpected, variability contradicts the widespread view that a simple and steady ocean warming in the region is eroding the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.”

From ‘The Australian’:

GRAINY film footage from Douglas Mawson’s epic Antarctic survey and expedition provides lasting proof that when the adventurer’s team reached Commonwealth Bay exactly 100 years ago, it was free of sea ice.

The BBC had on writer Sarah Wheeler a few days ago who claimed it was the Mertz Glacier collapsing which produced the ice…to everyone’s complete surprise apparently….as I mentioned earlier

Here is expedition leader, Chris Turney’s explanation:

It has been a sobering week.

The conditions we are experiencing over the Shokalskiy are a result of the frequent and deep low pressure systems that encircle the continent. In combination with a funnelling effect from the ice sheet, these lows are producing strong and pervasive winds from the southeast. The wind is not unusual but what is unexpected is the major reconfiguration of thick multi-year sea ice to the east of the Mertz Glacier. In 2010, a large iceberg known as B09B, calved from the continent and collided spectacularly with the extended tongue of the Mertz Glacier. The knock-on effect has been that Commonwealth Bay has filled with sea ice (termed ‘fast ice’), preventing direct access from the sea to Mawson’s main hut at Cape Denison. Unfortunately for the AAE, it appears the region has just undergone a massive reconfiguration of sea ice, years after the loss of the Mertz Glacier tongue.

So nothing to do with climate change….no melting glacier as implied by Wheeler….a massive iceberg hit the protruding ‘tongue’ of the Mertz Glacier knocking it off in 2010…the bay coast then became clad in ‘fast ice’ which clogged the bay…as already known by Turney before the expedition began.

Sea ice research at ACE CRC tells us that:

Sea ice is frozen seawater. It forms when the surface layer of the ocean becomes cold enough to freeze, not to be confused with icebergs, which have their origin in land glaciers.

Here is the Sunday Mail’s latest on the foolishness:

A university researcher has accused a group of scientists of carrying out an expedition to the Antarctic “on the cheap”.

Robert Headland, of Cambridge University’s Scott Polar Research Institute, blamed the team for not investing in a ship suitable to the ‘easily predictable’ sea ice.

Passengers, scientists and journalists were evacuated from the ship via helicopter on January 2, but the Russian crew must wait until the ice thins before heading home.

 Mr Headland said: “The team were in an area where it is common for ice to suddenly build up, and instead of using an icebreaker, they used an ice-strengthened ship, which is totally unsuitable.”

The team were taking the ship, which cannot break ice sheets and can only operate in light ice, around to repeat measurements taken by Douglas Mawson, an Australian explorer, in 1912.

It is thought that the rescue will cost £220,000.

Oh look…another pro man made climate change activist/scientist with a commercial interest in ‘proving’ it is happening:

I [Chris Turney] am an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and Professor of Climate Change at the University of University of New South Wales where my team and I are focussing our efforts on using the past to better understand the changes we are seeing today. To do something positive about climate change, I helped set up a carbon refining company called Carbonscape which has developed technology to fix carbon from the atmosphere and make a host of green bi-products, helping reduce greenhouse gas levels.

So…the expedition is based on climate change research…they knew already that there was huge amounts of sea ice present…and the expedition leader has a vested interest in AGW.

Shame the BBC doesn’t seem to want to look at all this indepth.

The Telegraph tells us this:

Long-time immigrants almost as concerned about immigration as UK-born people, study shows

Whilst the Daily Mail reports this:

British families will ‘lose out’ from influx of cheap labour from Romania and Bulgaria, Miliband admits in call to close low wages loophole

More British workers will ‘lose out’ from the influx of cheap labour from Romania and Bulgaria, Ed Miliband has admitted. The Labour leader insisted it was not ‘prejudiced’ to believe that growing numbers of low-skilled migrants from the European Union would add to the problem of low pay and poor job security.

‘Unless we act to change our economy, low-skill immigration risks making the problems of the cost of living crisis worse for those at the sharp end,’ Mr Miliband added.‘When millions of workers already have low pay and poor job security in Britain and we add high levels of low skilled migration mostly from within the EU, some benefit but some lose out.’ He added: ‘It isn’t prejudiced to believe that.’

All a bit late from Labour 10 years after they betrayed the British working classes.

Labour’s relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to “open up the UK to mass migration” but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear it would alienate its “core working class vote….it wasn’t necessarily a debate they wanted to have in working men’s clubs in Sheffield or Sunderland.”.

The BBC is, as ever, still on the wrong side of the immigration debate….all the more so as it is an organisation legally obliged not to be on any side…and yet it actively campaigns for immigration disregarding, in fact setting out to belittle and discredit the beliefs of the majority on the subject.

As noted in the last post the BBC gave us this:

Recent immigrants to UK ‘make net contribution’

Immigrants to the UK since 2000 have made a “substantial” contribution to public finances, a report says by Prof Christian Dustmann and Dr Tommaso Frattini from UCL’s Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration.

The very same Prof Christian Dustmann who:

‘.. was one of the authors of the notoriously inept Home Office study predicting that only between 5,000 and 13,000 migrants a year would come to the UK.’

Might just have an interest in telling us that mass immigration has benefited us…as the Daily Mail spelt out…

The Daily Mail challenged the BBC’s reporting of that report:

Skewed figures and a BBC agenda: As a new wave of Eastern Europeans arrive, JAMES SLACK reveals how the ‘benefits’ of immigration are endlessly overstated

Yet, as the Mail reported yesterday significant questions are now being asked about the accuracy of the academics’ report, which other experts say contains ‘schoolboy errors’.

In 2003, ahead of Poland and seven other ex-Eastern Bloc countries joining the EU, Professor Dustmann was one of the authors of the notoriously inept Home Office study predicting that only between 5,000 and 13,000 migrants a year would come to the UK. In the end, more than one million arrived – the largest single wave of immigration to this country since 1066.

Indeed, the research was so disastrous that, ahead of Romanian and Bulgarian citizens getting full rights to work this week, the current government refused to repeat the exercise. Is it unfair to suggest that, having so spectacularly underestimated the number of Eastern Europeans who would arrive in the UK post-2004, Professor Dustmann might feel inclined to ‘spin’ their positive impact?

Prof Dustman runs the Centre for Research and Analysis of Immigration…CReAM for short…. a pressure group for immigration.

So Dustman might have a vested interest in promoting mass immigration apart from his own beliefs…but what about his co author Dr Tommaso Frattini?

An educated man…he’s got a PhD in economics…but who taught him?

PhD in Economics, University College London, 2010
Supervisors: Christian Dustmann and Ian Preston

And Ian Preston?…Ian Preston, Deputy Research Director of CReAM.

Small world eh?    Great minds all think alike.

OK…academics with an axe to grind on their own special subject….what you might expect….but you might also expect the BBC to take a more nuanced look at their claims.

Especially when you consider this about Labour’s Charles Clarke:

Charles Clarke

Charles Clarke is Visiting Professor in Economics and Migration at University College London and a fellow at CReAM since 2012…….As Home Secretary from 2004-06 he had direct responsibility for Migration, including the February 2005 White Paper, “Controlling our Borders: Making Migration Work for Britain”

A very small world indeed.

Only it gets even smaller…look who else pops up:

Prof Dustman also runs the Norface Research Programme on Migration

In 2013 it organised the Migration: Global Development, New Frontiers…Interdisciplinary conference on migration.

Interesting who not only turned up, not to report on it,  but to actively participate in the conference…Harrabin Mk II.

That’s right…as an active speaker at the conference rather than as a reporter, the BBC’s very own Mark Easton made an appearance.

Easton is of course fervently pro-immigration…telling us once that we ‘should just get used to it’…no suggestion that it might be possible or legitimate to control it.

So a pro immigration Professor who worked with the Labour Party to sell us a lie about immigration, whose co-author was taught by him, whose organisation has the very same Labour minister who opened the doors for mass immigration working alongside him, and who has the BBC’s Mark Easton on call to talk about immigration at his conferences.

Nothing to see here guv!

A few days ago we had this from the Daily Mail:

Skewed figures and a BBC agenda: As a new wave of Eastern Europeans arrive, JAMES SLACK reveals how the ‘benefits’ of immigration are endlessly overstated

Numbers of jobs in the coal mining industry

The BBC and the Left frequently portray Thatcher as the destroyer of the coal industry.

Just how true is that?:

In 1900 there were 3,384 coal mines.

In 1975 there were only 241 coal mines…..3,143 coal mines having been closed by then.

In 1979 there were only 219.

In 1995 there were 65 coal mines.

So was Thatcher really responsible for the ‘ruination’ of a once great industry?

Only if history begins in 1979.

Number of working colleries in the UK
1900 – 3384
1920 – 2851
1930 – 2328
1944 – 1634
1947 – 958
1950 – 901
1955 – 850
1960 – 698
1965 – 483
1970 – 292
1975 – 241
1979 – 219
1980 – 213
1981 – 200
1982 – 191
1983 – 170
1984 – 169
1985 – 133
1986 – 110
1987 –   94
1988 –   86
1989 –   73
1990 –  65
1995 –  65
2000 – 28
2004 – 19

Labour’s Harold Wilson closed around 290 mines, Thatcher 160.

The National Union of Miner’s own website says:
Throughout the 1960s, with a Labour Government in office from 1964, the pit closure programme accelerated; it decimated the industry. During this period, nearly 300 more pits were closed, and the total workforce slumped from over 750,000 in the late 1950s down to 320,000 by 1968. In many parts of Britain, miners now became known as industrial gypsies as pit closures forced them to move from coalfield to coalfield in search of secure jobs.

They were victims of madhouse economics.

Arthur Scargill, the NUM leader, is now being portrayed as a hero…and yet the voting record shows him to be anything but…going against the wishes of his members and leading them to destruction….never mind his refusal to hold a national ballot on taking strike action…because he’d lost two previous ones:

Pretty clear…..69.2% against strike action in these area ballots.

Scargill and the NUM were being funded by the Soviet Union…..Scargill of course used, exploited, the miners as ‘shock troops’ in his political battle to try and impose a hard Left Union rule over the country regardless of the hardships they faced as he betrayed them.

The BBC here try to make light of that and quietly pooh pooh the connection to the Soviets….
Long-shot wait for miners’ cash
At one stage during the miners’ strike the government hoped it might catch red-handed someone from the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) trying to smuggle a suitcase full of banknotes into Britain.  Cabinet Secretary Sir Robert Armstrong wrote: “If a representative of the NUM could be detected entering this country with a suitcase full of banknotes, it might be possible for him to be stopped and searched at customs.”
“Those concerned” (by which he presumably meant Special Branch and MI5) were “exercising vigilance” and on the look-out for anyone from the union going abroad “for the purpose of collecting consignments of notes”.
This was, he admitted, something of a long shot, “but is the best we can do”.

…but such funding was confidently reported by the leftwing Morning Star as the Telegraph points out in its more serious report:

However, it was the considerable donations to the NUM from sources in the USSR that most alarmed Number 10.
Minsters were alerted by MI5 to the Soviet financial lifeline for the miners in early November 1984.
Later that month a secret Government document noted a report in The Morning Star, the British socialist newspaper, that the union had received more than $1.1 million from “our Soviet comrades”.
Sir Geoffrey Howe, the foreign secretary, viewed this as “a matter of some concern” and demanded that the Soviet Embassy in London give a “clear account” of Moscow’s role in the transfer of aid from Soviet miners to the NUM.
A Foreign Office aide wrote to Charles Powell, the prime minister’s foreign affairs adviser: “Our belief, which we are checking with our embassy in Moscow, is that it would be most unlikely that the Soviet miners’ union could have been given access to convertible roubles without express Soviet official permission… The Soviet Government has, to some extent, been involved.”

And the Guardian, after a 5 year freedom of information battle, already had the damning  information in 2010:

Thatcher’s diplomatic offensive worked: no donation reached the British miners during their year-long strike. Gorbachev had embarked on his effort to reform the sclerotic Soviet state and concluded that the wiser option was to continue cultivating the British prime minister for the sake of relations between the two countries. Sacrificing the interests of the British miners was the price to be paid for not upsetting the so-called Iron Lady.

So why does the BBC try to treat it all as a bit of a joke?  Are they trying to distance the NUM and Scargill from his Marxist brothers and paint him as a victim of rightwing smears?

The conclusion must be, then, that Mr Scargill has organised a strike which has no basis in the democratic procedures of his union, which is probably opposed by a majority of its membership, which is employing mass picketing of a kind that is now illegal, and which involves violence and intimidation on a scale quite alien to British traditions, in an attempt to force a democratically-elected government to abandon some of its policies. Mr Scargill may – ludicrously – be condemned as a collaborationist by leading members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, such as Frank Richards and Mike Freeman, but their vague rhetoric about uniting the working class and ‘taking control’ does not carry the menace that Mr Scargill does.?

Here are some inconvenient points the BBC should be including in any report about the miner’s strike:

1.  There was no national ballot for a strike…it was illegal.

2.  The miners were offered very generous redundancy terms….better, far better, than anything else on offer in the public sector….as well as a pay rise of over 5% for those still employed.

3.  There was huge investment going on in the coal industry at the same time as inefficient pits were closing….claims that the  intention was to destroy the industry were patently untrue.

4.  As mentioned above, the close links to the Soviet Union which was attempting to fund and stir up industrial conflict in the UK.

5.  Whilst the BBC gives voice to the heroic battles and struggles of the miners it fails to point out the massive disruption that a successful strike would have imposed on the country…decimating industry, shutting power stations and turning out the lights in domestic homes.

The BBC up to their usual tricks….trying their hardest to malign Thatcher….and have dragged in ex-BBC journo, Nick Jones, to help out…..Jones being very pro the miners who went out on strike and anti-Tory….but of course the BBC doesn’t mention his ‘leanings.’

The BBC has published this farcical ‘report’ based on material released by the National Archives on the Miner’s Strike and Nick Jones’ interpretation of it and past events:

Cabinet papers reveal ‘secret coal pits closure plan’

The BBC reporter, Nick Higham,  gets Jones to give him what every good BBC journo wants…the ‘dirt’ on Thatcher:

“If this document had ever emerged during the strike it would have been devastating for the credibility of Margaret Thatcher” because Mrs Thatcher and Mr MacGregor always maintained there were plans for the closure of only 20 pits, said Mr Jones.

Needless to say the truth about what was ‘revealed’ by Jones and the BBC is somewhat different to their interpretation….but as I say that’s for another post.

What is odd is that the reporter didn’t ask Jones about the extraordinary ‘bombshell’ claim made about the BBC helping the government to crush the strike…Jones mentions them in his own blog...but goes on to say he doesn’t think any such thing happened…however it is interesting to note whose side he is on now…the same side he was on during the strike it seems……

Fresh claims have been made about government manipulation of the BBC’scoverage of the 1984-5 miners’ strike.  It is now alleged that specific instructions were issued from the “highest level of government” to ensure that the BBC’s camera crews focused on the miners’ violence and not on “the police smashing heads”.  The allegation has been made by the former Daily Mirror industrial editor Geoffrey Goodman, chairman of the editorial board of British Journalism Review, who insisted he has an “impeccable source”.

Frankly I don’t believe it: I don’t think there were any such instructions.  But I do accept that a mistake were made, that the editing of the pictures was probably at fault.   I have frequently been under great pressure in a edit suites, often on location, and as the pictures are pasted in – the film was actually cut in those days – it is very easy to get confused, to put pictures in the wrong order.
But the much more likely explanation about what happened at Orgreave – and this is perhaps what’s led to Geoffrey Goodman’s assertion – is that the BBC’s crews were predominantly positioned behind the police lines.  The BBC’s crews weren’t welcome among the pickets; they did get a hostile reaction in the mining villages; sometimes they had to hang back, behind the police, for their own protection.  So yes if one looked at it overall, the footage was perhaps biased in favour of the police and against the miners.

Shafted: The Media, the Miners’ Strike and the Aftermath (published by the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom), the Yorkshire Evening Post reporter Peter Lazenby says the BBC has admitted that it changed the sequence of events.  In reviewing Shafted for the British Journalism Review, Geoffrey Goodman, the former industrial editor of the Daily Mirror, goes much further.  He says he was told by an “impeccable source” that there were “specific instructions from the highest level of government to the BBC to ensure that television camera crews filming the conflict between the miners and the police focused their shots on miners’ violence, but not on the police smashing heads”. So Goodman is quite categorical: he claims there was blatant state interference in the BBC’s coverage.  Personally I had not heard of that claim before being made by Geoffrey Goodman.   I wasn’t at Orgreave that day, nor was I there during the violence of the preceding weeks.  At that time I wasn’t even a television reporter.  My job was with BBC Radio.  I was a labour and industrial correspondent and it was my job to keep pace with the wider industrial repercussions of the strike and the ins and outs of the tortuous on-off negotiations between the NUM and the NCB.  So I can’t offer an eyewitness account of what happened at Orgreave during the struggles between the police and the pickets.  But I can give an insider’s view of events as they were perceived from within the BBC.
To begin with, what I think is more important is that I should reflect on those areas where I might personally have been at fault. The military analogy with which I opened my remarks is pertinent to what I want to say.  The miners’ strike was seen — at least through the eyes of the news media — as a fight to the finish between Arthur Scargill and Margaret Thatcher.  The forces of the state were mobilised against the shock troops of organised labour.  Reporters rarely indulge in public soul searching but it was the most momentous assignment during my fifty years as a journalist. I freely admit that it has been the story which has troubled me most of all when I look back, when I remember the way the miners’ struggle was reported and the subsequent minimal editorial scrutiny of the subsequent ruination by the Conservatives of a once great industry.    

Perhaps that explains the BBC’s pathological hatred of Thatcher……they are making up for their alleged treachery by denouncing and demonising Thatcher every chance they get.

It is interesting how Jones thinks the miners were wrongly portrayed as the aggressors….and yet he admits the media had to have police protection.

Here you go and as requested – a new PJ Harvey approved Open Thread for you to detail the bias!

In the space of a few minutes on the Today programme this morning, we had two egregious instances of BBC climate change hype. First, it was claimed that 2013 was the official warmest year ever in Australia. As it happens, I was in Australia last year for a few weeks, it wasn’t that warm but the BBC managed to add that such extreme heat “fitted into the global pattern”. Really? Then two minutes later, we were treated to all the flood warnings that have accompanied the approach of a low pressure system. Again, the term “extreme” weather was causally deployed. This is not accidental, it is the BBC trying its best to inculcate the notion that global warming is still with us. They are apostles for AGW despite the facts, truly remarkable. The only “extreme” I see is their bias.

None, really. Yesterday, on Today, John Pilger was allowed to come on and claim that “more than a million” people have been killed in Iraq since 2003. Now talking fiction is the order of the day from Comrade John but the BBC must have felt slightly embarrassed about this so this morning, around 6.50am, they wheeled on the latest UN special representative to Iraq. He was quizzed to provide a number but refused. He did point out that 2013 was one of the VERY worst years in Iraq and that 7000 had died. There was mention of 120,000 deaths in total from another source but incredibly the BBC seemed to suggesting that whether it was 120,000 or in Pilger-talk, 1,000,000 this was more of a detail.

HOWEVER, the interview didn’t end there! Oh no. The UN representative was a BULGARIAN and he was asked to comment on the anxieties in Britain concerning the likely deluge of his fellow citizens coming here to the UK. He said this was “right wing media” playing to the galleries and that Bulgarians would be here to make essential contribution to the economy.

Pilger let off the hook, Mass immigration from european peasantry sanitised. Five minutes on the BBC.

Jeremy Bowen retweeted this comment on the 26th of December:

#Hezbollah is pressing hard to be granted similar powers in security & foreign policy matters that Syria exercised in Lebanon for 15 yrs.

— Mohamad B Chatah (@mohamad_chatah) December 27, 2013

Mohammad Chatah was then assassinated the next day.

Bowen’s only comment was this:

Mohamad Chatah was always informative and frank when I spoke to him. Stood up for his beliefs but was the kind of man divided Lebanon needs

— Jeremy Bowen (@BowenBBC) December 27, 2013

Bowen doesn’t even mention his death…..nor then speculate about a link between Chatah essentially denouncing Hezbollah and his being assassinated?  Chatah is a Sunni, Hezbollah Shia…Iranian mercenaries in essence.

Not as if others in the BBC don’t report the possibility:

Saad Hariri indirectly accused Syria and Hezbollah of being behind the killing.

“Those who assassinated Mohamad Chatah are the ones who assassinated Rafik Hariri; they are the ones who want to assassinate Lebanon,” he said.

Guess the BBC’s Middle East Editor is too busy being cynical about Christmas:

Christmas is over. Time for the next commercial festival. Happy New Year. pic.twitter.com/ncIRNUy07f

— Jeremy Bowen (@BowenBBC) January 2, 2014

And gets told off by Fox News:

@BowenBBC Christmas still has three days to run. Its only commercial if you chose to ignore central purpose.

— Mark Fox (@MarkFoxNews) January 2, 2014

Ha ha…or is that Ho Ho Ho?….must have gone down well with the rather priggish Bowen!

I think it was obvious that the BBC giving Miliband a prime time slot on Desert Island Discs was intended to improve his desultory image with the Public….they now seem to have admitted this was the case…..

Desert Island

This was also the year that Ed Miliband appeared on Desert Island Discs and Deborah Mattinson believes that, in general, the Labour leader’s image among the public is improving, albeit from a relatively low base.