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The end of the working week approaches so time for a new one of these. Got a view on the BBC you would care to share?

This former BBC man, Alex Kirby – whom I have fingered before as being linked indirectly also to the UN and Television Trust for the Environment propaganda machines – is emerging as one of the shadowy stars of the Climategate 2 emails. Mr Kirby, who, as can be seen for example here, is a long-standing strident alarmist, has for 20 years been one of the corporation’s main disseminators of climate change propaganda. This is what he told the PANOS institute:

I have a very short memory span, and every time I have to write something about climate change I have to look up the latest statements from the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) or the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) or whoever it is.

So that’s it, then, objective climate reporting, BBC style.

So what’s new? It emerges loud and clear from the Climategate 2 emails that Mr Kirby was close, very close (as was Roger Harrabin, of course) with Phil Jones and his henchmen at the University of East Anglia. So nice and cosy was the relationship that in 2004, Mr Kirby wrote to Phil Jones (email 4894) in the build up to COP-10:

Yes, glad you stopped this — I was sent it too, and decided to spike it without more ado as pure stream-of-consciousness rubbish. I can well understand your unhappiness at our running the other piece. But we are constantly being savaged by the loonies for not giving them any coverage at all, especially as you say with the COP in the offing, and being the objective impartial (ho ho) BBC that we are, there is an expectation in some quarters that we will every now and then let them say something. I hope though that the weight of our coverage makes it clear that we think they are talking through their hats.

So to the BBC, sceptics were loonies way back then. In 4655, Mr Kirby is again discussed, this time in an email to UEA climate fanatic Mike Hulme. He is recommended as the chairman of a forthcoming conference to warn of the perils of climate change. The same email also notes a discussion with Roger Harrabin about “strategy”, so Mr Kirby and Harrabin were clearly both regarded as safe and trusted pairs of hands involved in peddling the right messages.

Then in 0794, Mr Kirby is in the frame again, this time in an exchange between Mr Jones and Michael “hockey stick” Mann. It’s clear here that Phil Jones regards him so highly that he should be the first point of contact about complaints that the BBC output has not been strident enough about climate change.

This adds up to unambiguous further evidence (if any were needed) that the BBC was firmly in bed with climate hype from the very beginning. Phil Jones & Co clearly regarded Harrabin, Kirby and Black as the attack dogs of propaganda who would easily and unwaveringly do their bidding.

(Note: I haven’t linked directly to the latest Climategate emails, they can be viewed via this link)

It turns out that the Television Trust for the Environment – the BBC greenie programmes supplier whose problems I noted here – derives half its income, more than £500k, from the EU, and effectively gives its programmes away; last year it made less than £50,000 from sales. In effect, therefore, it is a propaganda arm of the EU. Not without coincidence, I suspect, its website was mysteriously taken down on the same day, October 24,that FBC Media – the other company named in the BBC report about conflicts of interest – went into administration. Bishop Hill has done sterling work in digging out the 2010 annual reports for TVE and its commerical arm that makes programmes. These show that the trustees were increasingly worried about income (the vast majority of which is through donations) and fairly drastic measures had been introduced to cut costs. This could explain the sudden departure of the website. The combination of cash problems with a sudden withdrawal of its shop window (the BBC) could have forced the trustees to take terminal fright.

What the figures reveal is the extent of conflict of interest that the funding of TVE created. The BBC relied for a major plank of its environmental programmes from an organisation that effectively was being paid for by the EU (£500K), the UN (£245K) (through a variety of its agencies), along with Oxfam, the Swedish and German governments, a couple of greenie trusts and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists – a total misnomer in that they are actually camapaigning green fanatics. Every element of this financing is from organisations that want unfettered greenie propaganda; TVE and the BBC were dutifully compliant.

Put another way, the EU and the UN have effectively bought airtime on the BBC, but their strident propaganda has been disguised as “independent” film-making. What is astonishing about the BBC’s role in this is that TVE’s funding is not secret, annual reports have been published for years. So why have the BBC trustees not realised this huge clash of interest before now? That’s because they are so much in bed with the climate change lobby, including the UN and the EU, and so much convinced that the science is “settled” that they are blind.

Update: The Mail on Sunday article by David Rose yesterday in which he detailed TVE’s activities, and revealed how Roger Harrabin had apparently received grants from the UEA, has been mysteriously pulled. Is he (or any other parties involved) taking legal action? I wait with bated breath! In the meantime, if you haven’t already done so, take a look at this contribution from Harmless Sky. Masterful.

***This has appeared at the end of the wiki TVE entry over the past couple of days – it was definitely not there Friday:

tve’s website is currently under reconstruction. Two tve programmes were included in a BBC Trust report into “sponsored programming”[6], and were found to be editorially impartial, complying with BBC Production Guidelines. One programme on eradicating the killer global cattle disease rinderpest was deemed to have a conflict of interest with the sponsor. The second programme was only found to have inadequately clear credits.

There’s an important investigation here by the Mail on Sunday of a grant to BBC environment “analyst” and greenie poster boy Roger Harrabin of £15,000 from the University of East Anglia’s climate centre, the outfit at the centre of Climategate. The cash, it is stated, was used to fund a range of climate change seminars. Mr Harrabin denies, of course, that the money has influenced his reporting…and the BBC itself can see no issues of impartiality. Well that’s OK then.

But I wonder how many who disagree with Mr Harrabin’s brand of eco fervour attended his seminars? And, as I’ve extensively reported before, Mr Harrabin seems happy to tout his services to any greenie cause that will hire him.

The Mail investigation also mentions the Television Trust for the Environment (TVE), which as I reported earlier this week, has been censured by the BBC trustees over conflict of interest and a failure to tell viewers where the programme budget had originated. Reporter David Rose notes that Dr Joe Smith, Mr Harrabin’s partner – and joint recipient of the UEA cash – was chief scientific adviser to TVE programmes, including a couple the BBC trustees have censured. Mr Rose quotes Jenny Richards, the deputy chief executive of TVE, as saying that the company had “made hundreds of programmes” for the BBC and regarded the trustees report as a “slap on the wrist”.

That, to me, is the most telling remark in the whole story. It suggests that she knows that the trustees don’t really give a fig about this whole sorry mess – they are involved in a bit of cosmetic window dressing, and nothing will actually change.

Bishop Hill, who (wrongly) thinks that Robert Lamb is still the chief executive of TVE, says I have been “overheated” in my reporting of this affair. He is entitled to his views, and I respect them – that’s the strength of blogging. But in my book, those at the BBC who are involved in this rather fetid mess of obfuscation and conflict of interest are without doubt eco fascists, and thoroughly deserve that description. Mr Lamb and his ilk have traduced the BBC and reduced it to an organ of WWF propaganda. They want rule by international diktat, to cover the countryside with windfarms, to massively reduce the population, to make heating our homes so expensive that thousands will live in daily fear of how much energy they are consuming, to stop us from flying, to force us out of our cars, and much more. That all adds up to a brand of fascism.

This man, Robert Lamb, appears to be at the heart of the BBC’s environmental programmes scandal. Surprise, surprise, he was trained as a BBC producer in the 1980s and has since become a one man blizzard of greenie programming. Two of the companies he has has set up and run have been named by the BBC trustees as “causing concern” because they accepted funding from external sources in alleged breach of current affairs programme guidelines and were made in such a way that there could have been conflicts of interest. In other words, the production standards and financing stank to high heaven.

So who is Robert Lamb? A partial profile is here. As you see, he ticks almost every greenie activist box – the BBC, the UN, and various right-on pressure groups. His own, self-righteous assessment of his eco-fascist agenda is here. Basically, he set up the Television Trust for the Environment in the 1980s and ran it until around 2005. Over the past few years, he formed and now runs his own outfit called One Planet Pictures. He also helped establish, and is now an executive producer of, Dev TV.

TVE, as I reported yesterday, has mysteriously vanished from the web (on October 24, a B-BBC reader found) and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Under the template created by Mr Lamb, it currently (according to its latest charity commission return – h/t Tony Newbery, Harmless Sky) generates more than £1.4m a year of support from sources that include various greenie tranzis and government departments that have an EU-driven climate change agenda. From the beginning, again under Mr Lamb’s nakedly aggressive political agenda and template, its goal was to disseminate unbridled greenie alarmist propaganda in accordance with the UN agenda. The only surprise really is that it has taken this long for this to be seen as a conflict of interest.

Dev TV and One Planet Pictures – set up, I surmise, on the basis of my own inside information, after Mr Lamb fell out with the TVE trustees – appear to be run on exactly the same lines. I urge you to have a quick look at what they say and how they are structured. Their output is hardcore, unqualified propaganda. And Dev TV’s co-production guidelines here appear to be a recipe for exactly the conflict of interest and undue outside interest that the BBC trustees have now – so belatedly – fingered.

I do hope this signals the end of Mr Lamb’s eco-fascist career. But the BBC both spawned him and has kept him in business for almost 30 years – I suspect that like the hydra, he will keep on going.

I was tied up yesterday when this story about the BBC trustees investigation of dodgy environment programmes broke. This morning, I’ve been digging further, and I suspect we only know a fraction of what’s gone on. I think there’s evidence of a a frantic but very extensive cover-up.

The Television Trust for the Environment (mentioned here in the BBC’s sanisitised version of their investigations) was for years one of the BBC’s biggest suppliers of environment programmes. There are dozens of items like this about its programmes. But – astonishingly – TVE itself has disappeared and its website is now defunct. Here’s proof that it once did exist, but this morning, this is the only type of reference to it that I can find.

I know the executive director of the organisation, Cheryl Campbell (used to work with her, many years ago), and quite a lot about the charity because I had dealings with it a few years back. It was founded in 1984 by Central Television and had grown to be a huge greenie outfit producing dozens of films a year for the BBC, with funding derived from a range of sources, including the Swedish and Dutch governments and the usual suspect greenie foundations. I wrote about it in previous posts, for example, here where I posed questions about funding and support of the sort now supposedly being investigated by the trustees.

Maybe readers with better internet skills than me can find it, but I’ve been trying every variation of the name and web address and not managed to trace anything but cross-references that go nowhere.

So where has it gone? And why? But it surely can’t be coincidence. And one thing that I am certain about is that, meanwhile, Richard Ayre, the BBC trustee appointed to investigate this rather fetid affair is emphatically not in any sense independent. First, he worked for the BBC for almost 30 years before becoming a trustee, and as a former controller of editorial policy, is unquestionably one of the main architects of the current BBC editorial approach. Second, he has direct greenie form. Mr Ayre was chairman of Article 19, a body that claims to be about journalistic freedom, but is in fact an organisation enforcing the UN rights agenda, including its belief that all the world’s ills are caused by nasty, carbon belching westerners. Put another way, Mr Ayre is an unqualified supporter of the lefty greenie agenda, and not only that, openly boasts about his Article 19 links on the trustee website. So how on earth can he be trusted to investigate venality among greenie activists and programme makers?

I keep saying it: the BBC, rotten to the core.

If Richard Black is to be believed, he has a real world scoop; he’s got his eco zealot little mitts on a draft of the latest IPCC report several days before publication. Now in my journalist manual, that’s a hold the front page scoop if ever I saw one – especially as the BBC has been the main conduit of publicity for the IPCC’s faked exaggerations for more than a decade. But it hasn’t happened. He’s instead got a modest down page lead, and his exclusive – far from being trumpeted – is rather buried in a load of verbiage about the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a grouping of developing world countries who are hollering loudly for buckets of cash because the nasty west has caused flooding, droughts and all the pestilence they have ever known.

So why the reticence? Could it be that, as Benny Peiser deftly points out here, that the IPCC is saying that – far from the Armageddon they’ve been predicting for years – the latest data shows something very different:

“Uncertainty in the sign of projected changes in climate extremes over the coming two to three decades is relatively large because climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variability”.

Shock horror! No doomsday, so Mr Black glosses over the seemingly seismic shift – but blethers on regardless about the various countries’ tiresome complaints like rising sea levels, all of which have been rehearsed a thousand times before and all of which have been debunked. I must say, I smell a huge rat. If the IPCC really does come out with a report that suggests natural variability as the main driver of climate change, it will be astonishing. Of course, they will (almost certainly) also say that their models show that warming will resume later…and that, I predict, will be Mr Black’s focus.

I have long since given up on this government. David Cameron is not a Conservative, he’s a lefty, Euorophile, greenie fascist from exactly the same mould as the vile Edward Heath, the dangerous egomaniac who bounced us into the EU. Proof? Andrew Mitchell, Cameron’s international development secretary, has announced this weekend (reported in the Sunday Times P6, so not linkable)a £90m grant for the BBC World Service Trust (WST). This, as I have written before, is a body whose main purpose is to brainwash the developing world about eco loonery, and already spends millions doing so, with projects like this:

The major objective of Africa Talks Climate is to identify the entry points to engage, inform and empower Africans in local, national and international conversations about climate change. To achieve this, the initiative will collate opinions and then amplify the voices of people at all levels of society. “Climate change is the defining issue of our age,” said Peter Upton, Country Director for the British Council in Nigeria. “Climate in Africa is one of the most important issues that all people and governments will face. Africa will be one of the most affected regions but has done the least to contribute to the problem.

The whopping new grant – at a time when millions in the UK are suffering from fuel poverty because of the government’s renewables policy – will at a stroke make the WST five times bigger and, in effect, convert it into an arm of Mr Mitchell’s government department DFID. Be very afraid. It means oodles more bureaucratic fear-mongering projects, the goal of the greenies involved being to convert the developing world into West-hating, climate change fanatics.

The WST is run by someone with ideal credentials for this eco-zealot role. The boss is Caroline Nursey, a career tranzi parasite with no qualifications in any climate-related field or broadcasting. As an-ex “director level” Oxfam (greenie propagandists-in-chief) executive, she no doubt fits the ideal DFID mould of a disburser down the drain of millions of pounds of our cash. Her head of policy is James Deane, who formely worked for the Panos Institute. another body up to its gills in climate change activism.

I could go on. But the main point here is that this government came to office pledging to rein in the BBC as part of a so-called Conservative agenda. It claimed that it was going to cut back the World Service; instead it has now made it an agency of another government department, one in which normal laws of economics do not apply because the boy David has ring-fenced its budget.

Thus, in the WST a new bueaucratic Frankenstein has been created, one which will spray cash around the world in its lunatic dissemination of climate change propaganda. As I said, this is not Conservatism. And it goes beyond anything NuLabour ever dreamed up. Even Tony Blair is asking only for a few million from DFID!

I just did something unusual. I listened to Feedback on BBC radio 4, whereupon I heard a strange item.
Roger Bolton summoned Alison Hastings,chair of the Trust’s Editorial Standards Committee, to talk about the BBC Trust’s upcoming review of the impartiality of the BBC’s coverage of the Arab Spring.
Oh Roger! You challenged Alison about the wisdom of appointing Edward Mortimer to conduct it, in view of his close friendship with Chris Patten! “No problem” said Alison, “We commissioned Mortimer to do the review without Patten’s knowledge.”
Not verbatim, but I think that was the gist. So that’s okay. Then Roger sharpened his probe to a steely edge, and with a rapier-like lunge inquired if Alison knew what impartiality actually was. Oooh! You cheeky monkey! As it happens, she gave a pretty good explanation of impartiality, to the effect that it all depends on who says what about what to whom, and when.
In the Observer Peter Preston said that the BBC could save a lot of money by not bothering with this – in his opinion, pointless review. I mean, will they have to spend squillions in legal fees to protect the outcome’s secrecy?
“You might as well commission a Jeremy Bowen report on Mortimer’s impartiality.” he adds, drolly.

I agree. I mean, you might as well get Kevin Connolly to examine the fashion trends of the Arab Spring. Oh.

Anyway, I do hope they enjoy themselves re-living all that breathless footage of Tahrir Square in which they managed to overlook all the signs of the rebels’ antisemitism right up until the storming of Cairo’s Israeli Embassy, an occurrence that no-one including the BBC could honourably ignore.
Edward Mortimer is a fan of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and a rabid antisemite himself, so I can guess what sort of impartiality he’ll be looking out for. “We got it about right,” he might say, ”file it in the cupboard, next to the Balen report.”