As a Biased BBC reader for at least five years, I know that its essence is variety. My second post as a new contributor, therefore, was going to be about something other than the wretched BBC obsession with climate change. However, that was before I heard the unspeakable John Prescott lecturing me on R4’s World at One this lunchtime. He, a jumped-up, thuggish shop steward with no scientific training whatsoever, told me that he knew beyond doubt that the science of global warming is settled. His rant – as a bonus – also included a major attack on the US, the nasty industrialists of which he regards as the villains responsible for impending global catastrophe.
Martha Kearney, his so-called interrogator, rolled over like an admiring puppy dog in the face of his onslaught, and was concerned only to ask him how bad the situation really was.
It goes without saying that Prescott was never much known for his intellect; this item showed exactly why. This was a former (or maybe current) trade unionist arguing for steps that will progressively de-industralise and impoverish not just Britain, but also much of the Western world; at the same time, his measures, on the government’s own admission, would lead to increases in the cost of heating that will put millions of pensioners and our least well-off into fuel poverty.
On these topics, Kearney was strangely – eerily – silent.
As a lesson in pig-ignorant biased propaganda it was not bad (Goebbels would have approved – the science of racial superiority is ‘settled’ don’t you know?), as an exercise in balanced journalism, it was simply appalling.