Category Archives: Uncategorized

This is beginning to look like let’s get Richard Black, but he (and the BBC idiots who employ him) deserve it. There is a delicious irony in this story. Mr Black has come out all guns blaring in support of his old chums Greenpeace against a nasty nuclear energy company, EDF. Greenpeace, like Mr Black, want the UK energy supply industry to go back to the dark ages, so the fact that EDF have -in a very French way – looked after their own interests is an occasion for Mr Black to give them a very good (one-sided) kicking, and to remind us how nasty the French government was to the sainted zealots of Greenpeace in the past in helping to sink one of their boats.

But I wonder what the BBC chairman thinks of all this? My guess is that he’s choking over his cornflakes this morning. Or I certainly hope he is. Euromaniac Lord Patten is an ardent greenie, ready to flaunt his eco-fascist credentials to anyone who asks him. To that end, I’m sure he thought he was on a brilliant wicket when he decided (with the inducement, no doubt, of a nice, fat fee) to join the advisory board of a company boasting about its greenie policies and strategy. But I’m afraid all that glitters is not gold – that company just happens to be…EDF Energy. As I’ve noted before, he and his lefty deputy Diane Coyle both sit on the EDF advisory board – so what price their green credentials now? And I’d love to hear them justify how they will continue to serve on a company, which it has been found, is happy to break the law in pursuit of its goals.

This shows, yet again, that the BBC is rotten to the core. Its trustees are nakedly partisan on the subject of climate change, and have sanctioned deliberate misreporting of the whole debate. But at least two of them can’t resist – like so many public servants – the lure of fat consultancy fees… and this morning, they are shown up as venal hypocrites.

The open mic blunder has been reported variously as:

“I cannot stand him. He’s a liar,” Sarkozy told Obama. The US president responded by saying: “You’re fed up with him? I have to deal with him every day.” (Guardian)
****
“I cannot bear Netanyahu, he’s a liar,” Sarkozy told Obama (Haaretz)
****
“I can’t stand him any more, he’s a liar,” Mr Sarkozy said in French.
“You may be sick of him, but me, I have to deal with him every day,” Mr Obama replied.” (BBC)
( It doesn’t state the language in which Obama’s retort was uttered)
****
Whether it’s ‘can’t stand’, or ‘can’t bear’, or whether the conversation began with:
“Mr Obama was taking Mr Sarkozy to task for voting in favour of the Palestinian bid….” (BBC)
or:
“for not warning the US that France would vote in favour of the Palestinians’” (Guardian)
is fairly immaterial, as is the extraneous “but me,” in the BBC’s report, (they probably stuck it in there just in case readers were too stupid to grasp Obama’s ironic self pity) it’s the exposure of the childish and trivial nature of these gossipy disrespectful playground-level remarks by supposedly two of the most important intellectual pigmies in the world that’s so painful.

Memories of Daniel Bernard, the French Ambassador’s infamous remark made in 2001:“All the current troubles in the world are because of that shitty little country Israel.”

The BBC will be feeling a warm glow of satisfaction that Obama agrees with them about Netanyahu, something that also implicitly confirms their assumption that Obama’s apparent support of Israel can be purely put down to electioneering.
Now they can get on with picking away at the scab of Iran’s nuclear threat, and hoping Israel will act alone so that after heaving a surreptitious sigh of relief (which I hope hope some mics inadvertently catch) the rest of the world can blame Israel for unnecessary aggression and for not waiting patiently for some non-existent diplomatic effort by the West to take effect

Not to mention the uncharacteristic but short-lived restraint by reporters.

Wondering if any of you have had the chance to look at the report from St. Pauls Institute that has come out today? I am on BBC 5 Live later this evening on the Tony Livesey show. Any feedback is appreciated. The bit of the report that entertained me was that some 41% of those interviewed believed on God. So, more than in the COE! Comments/points?

I’d like to ensure that as and from this post going up, fellow writers do their best to use that they use the “below the fold” facility to keep as many posts as possible up on the main entry page to the site. I think this helps our reader contribute as fully as possible to the many excellent posts. Thanks for your help and for your continued support.

The English-language news station France 24 with its youthful, well-informed presenters makes BBC News 24 seem parochial.
France 24’s extensive coverage of Gilad Shalit’s homecoming was, from what I’ve heard, broadly similar to the BBC’s. It was the main topic for the best part of two days. The French are conscious that the Shalit family are French-Israeli, but nevertheless their coverage of the released Palestinian prisoners and their families, and the jubilant celebrations by massed Palestinians and their leadership appeared more than even handed. Did I detect that the implication of moral equivalence was more muted chez France 24? I’m not sure.

We saw snippets from Gilad’s notorious interview with Egyptian TV, the off camera Hamas minder was as invisible in France as he was here, and the translation as selective. Shalit was quoted as expressing hopes for peace, whereas the Palestinians were said to be calling for “more Gilads”.
Gilad’s haunted, gaunt appearance spoke volumes, whereas one particular Palestinian returnee hero, his countenance brimming with glee and good health was filmed uttering: “They [the Israelis] treated us like dogs!” (He must’ve meant like the British treat dogs. With his shiny coat and waggy tail he certainly looked full of Pedigree Chum)

The biggest difference between the BBC and French television’s news coverage, apart from endless analyses of the ‘Euro crisis’ was the amount of time devoted to foreign affairs, and in particular Tunisia. Well, they would be interested, wouldn’t they.
There were televised debates, discussions and speculation by ‘experts’ before, during and after the election, and although there was a palpable undercurrent of disquiet about the so-called moderate Islamist party that eventually won the expected majority, they seemed, as we do, disturbingly ready willing and able to sweep their concerns under the carpet..
One memorable debate was chaired by a youthful attractive well-informed France 24 presenter with smiley dimples.
The all-Tunisian panel consisted of a headscarved member of the Ennahda party, an Islamic scholar, a young female blogger and a secular journalist/political commentator. The gist was that the moderate Islamist party has promised to listen, be inclusive etc., that there would be continuing democracy, and not a once in a lifetime Hamas style election. There appeared to be a willingness to accept this at face value, with reservations, in an ‘only time will tell’ kind of way.
I heard the exact same thing on the Sunday programme this morning, where Jane Little chatted to speed-dial experts Prof. Paul ‘Peace Studies’ Rogers of Bradford University and our old friend Professor Fawaz Gerges from the LSE. They were happy about Tunisia, if a little uneasy about Libya and Egypt, but that’s another story.
Rachid Ghannouchi’s record of making extreme fundamentalist public utterances are being ignored, forgotten and subsumed by a tsunami of wishful thinking.
His pledge not to jeopardise Tunisia’s economic future (tourism) by ‘permitting’ the immodest sunbathing and wine-drinking that we debauched tourists require for our hols seems, for the time being, to have appeased all the pessimistic doubting Thomases out there.
He has provided enough reassurance to allay the misgivings of we sceptics who weren’t wholly seduced by the Disneyland happy ever after of the glorious Arab Spring. We are all free to believe what we want to believe, but if his pragmatic promises turn out to be worth little or nothing don’t say I didn’t warn ye.
Oh for a well-informed, attractive, rounded, unbiased BBC with a healthy interest in foreign affairs and some respect for the audience’s intelligence.

BBC bias flows from the top of the corporation. Lord Patten, the chairman of the trustees – that body that supposedly polices and enforces impartiality- is a foaming-at-the-mouth Europhile, as this interview shows. And now it has been revealed that Diane Coyle, his deputy – a fatcat quangocrat and former Indy financial journalist cosily married to BBC reporter Rory Cellan Jones – has accepted a role as advisor to the shadow business secretary and climate change zealot Chuka Umunna. According to the reports, this is despite being told by trust director Nicholas Kroll that such work would be a “conflict of interest”.

The real scandal goes much deeper. It defies belief that Ms Coyle was appointed to her role at all…because in her case a leopard does not change its spots. Without doubt, Ms Coyle shares Lord Patten’s unmoderated enthusiasm for the EU. She wrote in the Independent in 1999:

The defenders of sterling are, in the main, a group of elderly men with more stake in their past than in our future. They clothe their gut anti-Europeanism and Little Englandism in the language of rational economic argument (quoted in Peter Oborne’s Centre for Policy Studies booklet The Guilty Men)

.
Also according to Mr Oborne, the following year, Ms Coyle was equally vehement in her dismissal of the idea that an inflationary boom in Ireland was caused by the euro. She maintained that it was Eurosceptics who supported such views .

Ms Coyle also supports the EU in its lunatic climate change-related policies. This is evident in a book she wrote in 2011, The Economics of Enough. This is an interview she gave about her work:

Diane Coyle, author of The Economics of Enough, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the future and the ideas in her book. Coyle argues that the financial crisis, the entitlement crisis, and climate change all reflect a failure to deal with the future appropriately. The conversation ranges across a wide range of issues including debt, the financial sector, and the demographic challenges of an aging population that is promised generous retirement and health benefits. Coyle argues for better measurement of the government budget and suggests ways that the political process might be made more effective

Ms Coyle shares with Lord Patten yet another cosy – and no doubt highly lucrative – climate change, love-the-EU role. She sits with him as an advisor to EDF Energy. And EDF is one of greedy, grasping power companies that tells monstrous porkies about climate change in order get as many subsidies into its fat maw as it possibly can.

The issue here is beyond parody. Ms Coyle is an EU-loving, Labour luvvie who has spent her life nakedly pushing her political views. That she is a trustee at all is a disgrace – and confirms yet again that the corporation is rotten to the core.

What these 200 companies actually mean when they say they demand “more action on climate change” is that they are after more subsidies from the money that government is taking off us in taxes, and they want more green taxes on the public so that the government will be able to give them more subsidies. This story proves beyond doubt the grim reality that every single one of our major companies has now been infected by the the corporate responsibility disease and has high priests of green nuttiness at board level advising strategy.

And these parasites have realised that if they hold out their begging bowls marked “green” and chant the phrase “action on climate change” loudly (turning in circles as they do so), they will be lavishly filled with Chris Huhne’s largesse.

Jo Nova points out eloquently here what these green measures entail: the Canadian government has just committed to introduce measures to reduce temeperatures at the equivalent of $84 trillion per degree (at least it’s centigrade, not Fahrenheit). What’s terrifying is that the same is being requested here.

Richard Black , as usual, recycles the views of these grasping eco-nutters with grim self-smug satisfaction. Not for one second does he doubt that they are right, and nor does he have the self-awareness to realise he’s nothing but a pawn in their greedy, eco-fascist games.

Spot what’s missing from this piece of so-called reporting by the BBC.

Predictably, this most disturbing report about the agonising impact of fuel poverty has been processed by BBC business “reporter” Damian Kahya without mentioning at all the key fact – namely, that all this heartbreak has been engineered by green policies which have deliberately jacked up the price of electricity generation in the lunatic quest to shift to so-called renewables.

It reminds me of the story I was told when I started as a cub reporter back in 1974. I was sent to cover an amateur dramatic play. My news editor (a dour Yorkshireman who was a veteran of D-Day) growled as his parting shot as I left: “And remember, lad, we sacked your predecessor. He went to a play, and when I asked him where his copy was a couple of days later, he told me he had not been able to file anything because the lead actor had fallen off the stage and died so the performance didn’t finish”.

Joking aside, as I noted this morning, Richard Black and his eco-fascist BBC chums now actually want to make the problem of fuel poverty hundreds of times worse by introducing a well-head oil tax.

The BBC: reporting only the information that fits with its world view.