Via BBC Watch and Archbishop Cranmer:

It seems the BBC has been giving a platform to an organisation, greenbelt, that hosts an anti-Israel manifesto, its main motivation seems to be centred around Israel/Palestine.

It has a strange notion of what exactly Christianity teaches:

Our history is firmly rooted within a Christian tradition which is world-affirming, politically and culturally engaged…….. inclusive and accepting of all, regardless of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, background or belief.

Hmmm…OK…I guess God loves a sinner.….’Archbishop urges Christians to ‘repent’ over ‘wicked’ attitude to homosexuality’

As you can see Israel is a major pre-occupation with greenbelt:

This is what Greenbelt attempts to do: to make links with people in situations around the world struggling for justice and peace and to bring them to Greenbelt and give them a stage. We view this as part of our mission.

In addition, in terms of our programming on and highlighting issues around Israel/Palestine, Greenbelt also aligns itself with resolutions of international law, drawn up by the United Nations, that deem:

• The continued Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories as illegal
• The separation wall being built since 2002 as illegal
• The continued building of Israeli settlements in the West Bank as illegal

Read BBC Watch and Cranmer….and you can see just how ‘non-inclusive’ and anti-Israeli this group is.

Any surprise that the BBC is giving such a significant boost  to greenbelt’s credentials and therefore to its, unmentioned by the BBC, main political narrative?….and it is essentially a political organisation with tamboreens. 

And just out of interest that bastion of BBC righton-edness, Richard Curtis, is friends with Jim Wallis, guest on the show, and another prolific anti-Israel campaigner.

Jim lives in Washington DC, with his wife Joy Carroll, one of the first women ordained in the Church of England, and who was advisor, inspiration and role model for Richard Curtis for his comedy series “The Vicar of Dibley”.

 Small world.

Isn’t it great that the BBC is in essence a private club for the likes of Curtis who can take license payers money and use it make programmes that are blatant propaganda for one of his many pet causes…whether poverty, anti-Tory or pro-climate change lobbying.  

Remember Leveson and all that when so much was made of the dominance of one media giant…..no, not the BBC.

Seems that all that foot stamping and those pious demands for media plurality was just so much hot air.

Apparently Cameron has taken them at their word and gone forth and spread the word, literally, amongst the highest and the lowest in the land.

Cameron has been talking to regional journalists and broadcasters and the Big Boys don’t like it.

Downing Street hogs the remote control: The PM’s use of tame media is annoying the big guns at Sky, ITN and the BBC

Of course as the BBC is by far the most dominant of the news providers with the lion’s share of the audience for news it is the BBC that should be losing out…its stranglehold on the national narrative perhaps being loosened…no bad thing if true.

Cameron talking to local concerns is a good ploy, back to the soapbox almost…but he still needs the national media, so the BBC still has a significant role to play no doubt.

Jim Al-Khalili has shamelessly, shamefully, set aside his scientific principles and those of his newfound career in Journalism to bring us half an hour of climate change propaganda….not science at all…just pure, outright hard sell and ‘facts’ that would not look out of place on Press TV.

 In The Life Scientific he interviews (and I say that advisedly as it is more a scripted ‘one-two’) Joanna Haigh who pushes the IPCC’s case and ‘explains how she deals with Deniers.’

Haigh is somewhat of a fanatic and one who refuses to countenance any doubts about her science…..she says she objects to calling people who have reservations about the causes of cliamte change ‘sceptics’…she prefers to label them ‘deniers’ because they apparently deny climate change is happening.

  As far as I can see most ‘Deniers‘ in fact say climate change does occur….it always changes…the question they ask is ‘What causes that change?’.

Haigh tells us that the IPCC’s science is reviewed rigorously…the IPCC is not a consensus body of green lobbyists…and consensus is very hard to achieve.

She also tells us that the computer climate models are in fact very accurate and reliable…..input a few equations into a computer and there you go…..the climate predicted for the next one hundred years…’Amazing!’…it gives us faith in the future, allegedly.  Simple really, how could anyone have ever doubted her and her kind.

She tells us that long range forecasts are more accurate than short term….I suppose that’s why the Met. Office stopped publishing its long term ones as they were continuously embarrassed by them.

Of course that is somewhat hard to prove…..a forecast for 100 years from now is more about that ‘faith’ she was spouting earlier than reality.

And of course it is difficult for the Public to know what to believe because of all those ‘Deniers’ blogging away distorting the science.

As for the 15 year or so standstill…well you know there are always going to be errors and a range of predictions….and the climate always varies but….the trend is upwards, ever upwards…no really.

All the signs are that we must do something radical.

Now that the last BBC review into its climate change coverage has been and gone it seems normal service has resumed….not a sceptic, sorry, denier, in sight or sound of a BBC studio as far as I can see.

The BBC know full well Alastair Crooke’s ‘pedigree’ and who holds the leash for this particular lapdog.

Just a couple of months ago BBC Watch commented on the BBC’s use of Crooke:

If readers are now beginning to suspect that the BBC simply saved itself a phone call to the Syrian Ministry of Propaganda by inviting Alastair Crooke to this programme, they might not be far wrong.

It looks though that the BBC just don’t care that Crooke is somewhat compromised as a commentator on events in the Middle East as he pops up again today on  World at One (13:14:30) where we were told merely that he ‘fostered contact between Islamic political groups and the West’

The BBC knowingly led him onto the point they wanted to make….Israel, and Saudi Arabia are ‘providing the intelligence’ about these gas attacks…..and we are to infer…the  intelligence is therefore highly dubious….because of its source.

Hmmm…well the ‘fact’ of  the gas attack was not provided by the Israelis to the world…..and the UN are  presently at work on the ground trying to establish what did happen, and by whom.

Crooke went on to tell us it definitely wasn’t the Syrian regime that used chemical weapons…because the Russians said so…oh, and Iran said, 100%, that it wasn’t Assad.

I’ll leave the last word to BBC Watch:

Providing Alastair Crooke with the opportunity to spout the spin of a terrorist organization and a murderous dictatorship to millions of listeners unchallenged is obviously bad enough. But when that is done without due disclosure of the political connections of the man and his very dubious organization, then the BBC is displaying wanton disregard for its own obligation to impartiality and once again putting its own political colours – and agenda – in full view. 

Another one…let ’em have it!

Paul Mason, soon to have his steel toecapped suede booties under a Channel 4 desk, seems to have cast off the shackles of BBC groupthink and ventured out into the world of thinking for himself…..well, tentatively:

The economic recovery may be patchy, but the left is wrong to ignore it

It’s not the same across the country, but there are signs of growth. The challenge for Labour is how to make the most of the new reality

Still hedging his bets, and acting as unpaid, I hope, adviser to the Labour Party, but he ventures that austerity may have worked…so much so that it may be possible to reduce it to some extent.

Of course he rounds it all off with a brickbat…

The real problem may not be the weakness or fragility of recovery, but the fact that large parts of the population are locked out of it.

……but I guess old habits are hard to change.

You may have noticed on your travels that any wind turbines that you come across have a rather unusual operational approach.

On windy days they can be seen to be completely motionless, whilst on almost windless days they are ticking round quite nicely.

I often thought that some clever chap who works for one of the turbine producers has come up with a cunning plan…..when there’s no wind put the turbines in reverse, that is, draw power from the electricity grid to turn the turbine to encourage the public to think ‘Turbines are turning…great….it’s working…government must buy more!’…..a little promotional stunt for the wind turbine industry…keeps the blades turning and keep the money coming in (though you couldn’t come up with a better stunt than getting paid to actually turn off your turbine!).

All nonsense of course?….apart from being paid to turn off the turbines….that’s all too real.

However the Telegraph has looked into wind turbines and just how effective they are in a snapshot:

According to RWE’s own data, three wind farms on Thursday afternoon appeared to be taking electricity from the National Grid rather than supplying it.

The eight turbines at Knabs Ridge, which is close to Harrogate in Yorkshire, used up 86KW of electricity while Lambrigg wind farm’s five turbines in Cumbria took 10KW from the grid.

Llyn Alaw wind farm, which is in Anglesey, and consists of 34 turbines also produced a negative output, according to RWE’s own data, of minus 80KW.

Somewhat indirectly connected to BBC bias….but it helps inform the debate and provides some background with which to judge BBC coverage of climate change and measures taken to supposedly combat it.

Andrew Marr hasn’t changed…he’s still Red Andy and pushing the Left’s agenda…this time a few thoughts from the IPPR, left leaning think tank:

Who runs Britain? An Army of unregarded, unpaid carers. Now it’s time we cared for them says Andrew Marr and his wife who nursed him after stroke

 As a report today from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) points out, thousands of women in their 50s are being hit by a ‘triple whammy’ of work, childcare and caring for elderly parents.

Good that the BBC allows him to have other interests outside of work….hard to tell the difference to be honest between his work and play.

Guess the answer to ‘Who Runs Britain?’ is that the BBC runs Britain…or tries its best to.

BBC officer class enrages people, chief admits 

Executive salaries at the BBC have created an “officer class” which is causing “resentment and anger” among lower-paid workers, Lord Hall, the director-general of the corporation, has admitted.

Liz MacKean, a former BBC Newsnight journalist, said: “The whole issue about severance payments gets to the heart of something that has gone badly wrong with the BBC over the last decade and more, which is the creation of an officer class that seems to fly in the face of the principles of public service broadcasting.”

Alan Yentob, who earns £183,000 as the BBC’s creative director, joined Lord Hall on stage and rejected a call for more transparency over salaries. He said: “The BBC is not a local authority, OK? We need to invest, we need to get people to come in. Who wants to come to an organisation where their privacy is [affected]?”

Talking of privacy maybe Yentob should listen to this:

Mariella Frostrup asks:

Is Privacy Over Rated?

And talking of officer elites Evan Davis asks:

What’s the Point of an Elite?

Both programmes very BBC…both jam packed with worthy, highly educated middle class ‘elites’….you can hear Davis has the decency to be embarrassed about the makeup of his panel.

But…Evan Davis admits that he wouldn’t have wanted to go to a school like Eton…because he would have a been a small fish in a big pond, whereas at a state school, where he was headboy, he was a big fish in a small pond….a small pond intellectually and academically he means.

Charmed I’m sure to know how the BBC’s finest look down upon their fellow state school inmates…..intellectually wanting but that’s good as it makes Evan look better.

Listening to both programmes, and well, any such programme from the BBC, and you keep hearing ‘The Poor’ being mentioned, concern for the ‘lower orders’, but where are their voices?

How is it that concern for the ’Poor’ and ‘Disadvantaged’ is the sole preserve it seems of middle class intellectuals? Do ‘The Poor’ not have any thoughtful comments about ‘elites’ or ‘privacy’?

We’re told that ‘The Poor’ are shut out more than ever from the higher reaches of society and that privacy is the domain of the rich….so how come they have no voice on these BBC programmes, a seat at the table rather than picking up the crumbs thrown to them by their ‘betters’?