As Durban fizzles out – much to Richard Black’s chagrin– and the wheels spectacularly fall off the renewables frenzy, Christopher Booker has summed up brilliantly the saga of how the corporation has abandoned its impartiality. There’s no hiding place from his searchlight; what has happened has been a deliberate, sustained climate alarmist campaign sanctioned from the highest levels and pursued with a vigour that would have impressed even Goebbels and Speer. The stench is now firmly at the door of the trustees, those “independent” citizens who are supposed to be the watchdogs of the BBC’s £3.5bn budget and its journalistic integrity.
This morning, to me, Tony Newbery of Harmless Sky – whose impressive work Christopher Booker’s paper is based upon – has posed the most interesting question about their behaviour in this massive breach of the Royal Charter. For years the trustees claimed they had commissioned the Jones report into their science coverage only because it was part of a regular cycle of such reviews – it was not linked at all to mounting evidence of bias in their output and deliberate sidelining of sceptics. But Mr Newbery has spotted that Roger Harrabin, in his defence of his seedy links with the UEA Tyndall Centre, has let the cat out of the bag and given lie to their posturing. He said in a recent interview:
Climate sceptics seeking more space on the BBC helped provoke the Trust’s investigation into science impartiality but the Trust said we were already giving them too much space – not too little.
This means that without a shadow of a doubt, the trustees have known all along that they are engaged in a window dressing exercise and cynically commissioned the Jones nonsense both to cover their backs and to ram home even further that they did not give a stuff about sceptic opinion.
Could that be because at least three of them – Lord Patten, Diana Coyle and Anthony Fry – have direct pecuniary interests in the climate change scam? And I note that the latest trustee appointment (on December 1), Lord Williams of Baglan (who worked for the BBC World Service and then became a UN envoy) is also a climate change fanatic. The fact that he worked for the UN is enough to damn him, but he also lists among his financial interests membership of the international advisory board of CITPAX, a body that claims it supports peace, but in reality is engaged in climate change propaganda at the core of his activities.
To me, the BBC trustees are nothing more than a cosy club of climate change activists. Richard Black and his chums are scurrying around doing their bidding.