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The Daily Mail today notes that more than 3m legal immigrants were allowed into the UK under new Labour, with the total swelled by a further 1m illegals. This, it observes, has been the biggest invasion for a thousand years, even though their election manifesto in 1997 vowed to control our borders. (Presumably it means proportionately the largest, because the population of the UK was only around 3m in total 1,000 years ago) Sir Andrew Green, the persistent, well-researched and erudite head of Migration Watch UK, says that a major factor in allowing the influx was the attitude of the BBC. He writes:

Another major factor was the attitude of the BBC and, in particular, its devotion to multiculturalism. For years it avoided discussing immigration if it possibly could.

Although in the autumn of 2005 official statistics for the previous year showed an increase of 50 per cent in net immigration, there was no mention of this on the BBC.

Its own report into impartiality, published in June 2007, concluded that its coverage of immigration amounted to bias by omission.

Last December the corporation’s director-general admitted: ‘There are some areas, immigration, business and Europe, where the BBC has historically been rather weak and rather nervous about letting that entire debate happen.’ Indeed so.

The overall effect was to deter any serious discussion of immigration and to give plenty of space to the Left to accuse anyone who raised the subject of being a covert racist. On this matter the BBC failed to meet its own standards of objectivity.

Back in 2003/4, I did research into the BBC’s coverage of immigration, and it was blatantly clear that all those who opposed Labour’s policy were ignored, the only people interviewed about the topic were fervent multi-culturalists, and people like Sir Andrew Green were cast as bigoted xenophobes. As usual, what I submitted was ridiculed. Not much has changed, even though Mark Thompson has now admitted that there was a problem. The real issue is that no matter what it says, the corporation’s desire for what it sees as multi-culturalism is an integral part of its credo. I can hear their purring agreement with Labour’s verdict on the figures:

This is an unbalanced, misleading and highly political report. Migration levels increased initially because of the strength of the British economy over many years.

The UN wants to rob £800bn every year from the global economy to tip down the chute of eco-worship and send us back to the stone age. The BBC faithfully reports this mania , without a word of dissent or common-sense. In the BBC’s green-creed book, it must be worth reporting because 100 ministers (no less!)along with a clutch of “experts” say so. And in the world of eco-fascism, what ministers and experts say must be obeyed. Actually, I agree with some of what these UN nutters are advocating. For starters, let’s scrap the Common Agricultural Policy, the Common Fisheries Policy, and with them, the whole shooting match of corruption in Brussels. The reality is that none of that will go, all that will happen is more bloated, corrupt globocrats will harry and scour the world finding fantastical ways of frittering our cash. And the BBC will carry on reporting.

Here, Richard Black sets out to mount what he sees as a balanced discussion of the much-mulled-over disagreement between Eric Steig and Ryan O’Donnell about the Antarctic climate record. He fails miserably, first by firmly nailing his colours to the mast of the warmist approach of Mr Steig, and secondly for his sneering, patronising assertion that he – unlike bloggers – bases his observations and reporting on “peer-reviewed” papers. Putting aside the rather major point that the central issue of the Steig-O’Donnell spat was that Mr Steig was a so-called peer reviewer who sought to block the publication of Mr O’Donnell’s paper (thus highlighting yet again what a warmist-rigged snakepit the whole peer-review system is), it also shows that Mr Black’s stance is based at core on smug, holier-than-thou hectoring. He is clearly having a swipe at those he perceives as his hated, inferior, right-wing enemies, such as the redoubtable James Delingpole – who published this searing analysis of the O’Donnell saga. Who would you trust most?

The Daily Mail claims today that culture secretary Jeremy Hunt has recommended that Lord Patten should become the next chairman of the BBC, and that this is now almost certain to happen. It’s a horrific prospect, and it beggars belief that the Tories should appoint this euro-bigot to the role. Any idea that this is in any way a eurosceptic administration – already highly questionable after the handling of the Irish bailout and the daylight-robbery increase in the EU budget of 2.9% – is shot down in flames. Mark Thompson finally begrudgingly accepted (after cacophonies of protest stretching back years) in December that there had been bias in BBC reporting of the EU. With the appointment of Patten, the whole topic is now off the agenda and the euro-bigots who run the BBC will be smirking all the way to their White City eyries.

One of those will be the insufferable Andrew Marr, a europhile-in-chief. It’s been revealed that he is paid £600,000 a year of our money so that he can present BBC shows in which he rams his prejudices down our throats. How much more of this profligacy can be tolerated?

I agree with Mr Littlejohn that it’s time for the chop, though a replacement for Question Time would undoubtedly be much worse. BBC producers are so obsessed by their own lefty agendas that they are no longer capable of understanding, let alone marshalling, balanced debate. Many years ago, when Robin Day ruled the roost and it was broadcast almost every week from the Greenwood Theatre, I used to do the PR for the programme. It had its problems then, of course, but the current gimmicks had not even been thought about…it’s been a slow, painful and garish slide into today’s deliberately-rigged gang-bang confrontation in the name of viewer appeal. What say you?

Mr Littlejohn’s piece has been prompted, of course, by the news that the BBC’s madhouse social engineering – in decanting thousands of staff outside London – means that in future that the production office of QT will be in Glasgow, but production meetings will be held in London because David Dimbleby refuses to travel to Glasgow. This will push the programme’s carbon footprint and hotel bills into the stratosphere. It’s madness on a massive scale that goes against the BBC’s moral zealotry; clear evidence that they never let their so-called principles block their own plans, and are always keen to find new profligate ways of spending the licence fee.

Hold the front page. Richard Black, discussing the preposterous use of models by a group of scientists in Oxford to “prove” that higher levels of flooding in the UK in 2000 were undoubtedly caused by CO2, actually quotes a “sceptic”, who seemingly disagrees with the the analysis. Except that Bjorn Lomborg – though he once wrote a book called the “Skeptical Environmentalist” – is anything but, as a moment’s research reveals. So this is yet another example of dishonest reporting. Mr Lomborg actually firmly believes, just like Mr Black and his cronies, that greenhouse gases are causing global temperatures to rise and also that tens of billions of pounds should be spent on combatting this alleged menace. His only difference of opinion with the green creed is that people should learn to adapt to climate change, not spend their time whinging.

Meanwhile, American Thinker has unearthed some very interesting background material on the roots of the green religion that Mr Black and his BBC chums so fervently support. I reported yesterday about Mr Black’s one-sided enthusiasm for the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution’s call for mass social engineering and population control to combat climate change. Such views are a central tenet of the green movement. It’s increasingly clear that the origin of these thoughts is actually mired firmly in Nazi ideology and they were first articulated and advocated in the post war era by Gunther Schwab, a wartime member of the Nazi party. He and his fellow party members wanted massive social engineering in line with their crude and ruthless beliefs in eugenics and social Darwinism, the twin concepts that underpinned and led directly to the Nazi genocide of Jews, Roma people, Slavs, Negroes, gays, the mentally ill and infant social “imbeciles”. In my book, nothing in what today’s greens who inhabit bodies like the Royal Commission are calling for is different. It’s the callous logic of ruthless centralised control. “Fascist” is a label that in my view is bandied about too often, but here, it is clearly appropriate. Black&co are advocates of eco-fascism.

Update: those who argue that we are doomed because of rising population and that therefore social engineering is vital (and I know because I used to be one of them) seem totally impervious to the facts, as a post below illustrates. They are on a socialist, world-saving mission, but for those who want to read further with an open mind on this topic, I recommend this, or Matt Ridley’s excellent The Rational Optimist. In 1972, the Club of Rome pronounced authoritatively that there would be mass starvation in 2000; ten years on, we are feeding almost 7bn people at a better level than we did when there were 3bn and standards of living are rising almost everywhere. And yet still the anti-liberal, world-government-supporting social engineers out there want to impose more laws of the type that Hitler deployed.

This Richard Black outpouring has it all. First the agency involved, The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, is an innocent, raped, victim of government spending cuts. Those nasty Tories again. Second the said body is clearly a collection of eco-nutters preaching that we are doomed unless we stop reproducing, move around to where resources are (whatever that means), stop drinking water (and consuming generally), stop producing waste, and fervently conform to the torrent of how-to-live diktats from global and national rulers. Mr Black, as usual, purveys this fanaticism without a jot of understanding; if our Victorian forefathers had followed this sort of insane ideology, no ship would ever have left a British port, and no entrepreneur would have ever invented anything or introduced any new industrial process. All round the world, except in the green-obsessed regressive west (and for complex, non-related reasons, Africa), human beings are relishing the challenges of expansion and in general making the business of being human a happier, longer-lived and wealthier experience. The greenie philiosophy which Mr Black reports with such one-sided relish wants to introduce the economics of suicide. and negativity. Evidence of the misery wrought by his greenie chums is not hard to find – try, for example, here. The most vulnerable are actually seriously suffering because they can’t afford inflated fuel bills that have been jacked up to subsidise windfarms that are a central componenent and totem of the eco-creed. But such contradictions are lost on Mr Black (and Marcus Brigstocke!); they have their greenie worldview and they are sticking to it.

Here, I thought naively, is a harmless topic on the BBC science and environment website; how Britain became an island as a result of a tsunami caused by melting ice. No mention of climate change (for once, ahtough that’s clearly the undercurrent)….but this is the BBC, and of course there’s a sting in the tail. With carefully chosen selective quotes from historian David Starkey it becomes yet another glib pro-BBC-values homily…this time about how, under the tutelage of that wicked tyrant Henry VIII, we became an island of nasty, anti-Europe xenophobes, and how our coastline – which once made us pro-immigrant pussycats – changed us into acquisitive, paranoid imperialistic robbers.

The Holy Grail of the warmists is to find proof that the Antarctic ice is going to melt. Most of the world’s ice covers the continent, and yet temperatures remain stubbornly locked at levels that suggest that any change will take millennia rather than the decades that are the currency of alarmists. The latest round in the gut-busting efforts by the warmists to concoct evidence that supports their views is chronicled here in Ryan O’Donnell’s forensic taking apart of the Eric Steig’s contention that the Antarctic penninsula is warming at unprecedented levels; this illustrates that global warming supporters will go to any absurd lengths to twist the evidence about temperatures in this part of the world.

The BBC has also entered the fray as part of its renewed front of climate zealotry that I think has been opened up over the past couple of weeks. Richard Black is in overdrive, Roger Harrabin is sharpening his pencil in Oslo with Fiona Fox. The website is currently crammed full of alarmist nonsense, with multiple new entries daily. There’s so much that it is impossible to keep track. But this entry stands out as utter garbage. The theory we are introduced to in this travesty of reporting is that the Antarctic was ultra-warm in the past because of the “extreme greenhouse effect” and a swing is happening again. Our guide to this la-la land is Mr Howard Falcoln-Lang, who pontificates triumphantly:

However, the geological record provides irrefutable evidence that dramatic climate fluctuations have occurred throughout our planet’s history. Indeed, over the past 50 years, the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed by an alarming 2.8C, faster than any other part of the world. So, if this warming were to continue unabated, could an emerald Antarctica be reborn?

Of course, Antarctica has been warm in the past, and may be so again. And indeed, it supported lush life forms, as Mr Falcon-Lang testifies, so what’s the problem? But to suggest that such warming may happen imminently and catastrophically – as is clearly the intention here – is tommyrot. It ignores that Mr O’Donnell has provided in the past few days utterly convincing evidence that the warming statistics for the Antarctic peninsula has been rigged. Mr Falcon-Lang ignores too, that all the evidence points to that the Antarctic ice mass is pretty much constant, rather than receding. This is a BBC man preaching an alarmist sermon and nothing else counts.

The fragrant (flagrant?) Ms Fiona Fox has had her say about Peter Sissons; time for a new thread to express your views about matters of BBC bias. Have fun!