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Guess which distinguished BBC correspondent has made these carefully neutral predictions for people to watch in 2011?

Sarah Palin: The momentum is there to nominate her, so how will the world react to the possibility of a Moose-huntin’ right-wing mom as president?

Ed Balls: The Labour Party’s prince across the water (or the corridor) will have a hard time biting his lip if the new party leadership does not improve.

Julian Assange: He ain’t done yet!

The answer is here (clue – he works for Newsnight and he doesn’t vote Tory!).

Back in December 2006,when there was no snow in Red Square, no ice on the Moskva river (for the first time in decades), and some European ski resorts were without snow, the BBC were very keen to report matters. Like a rat up a drainpipe, James Cove was also avid to tell us that many blamed AGW for the so-called problem, and that the OECD (brimming no doubt with climatological expertise) was warning that the ski-ing industry faced a future of sharply diminishing returns.

Over the past few days , it’s been reported almost everywhere on the blogsphere that December 2010 has been the coldest in 120 years, record snowfalls have been falling in everywhere from the Arizona desert to Mongolia, and that Moscow airport has faced a revolt from passengers because it could not cope with the volumes of snow. Not only that, the record cold has cost billions in bills for inadequate infrastructure and repairs to frozen gas-fired boilers that John Prescott ordained were best for dealing with climate change. Ski resorts? They are on a roll, according to latest figures from last winter. On the BBC, there’s so far an eerie silence on all these topics. Nothing. Yadda. Zilch. I wonder why?

Further digging into Common Purpose to follow up yesterday’s post. I accept fully Lloyd’s observation (in the comments) that £150,000 spent by the BBC on Common Purpose over seven years is small beer, when you consider that BBC income was around £17bn in the same period. But John Anderson also made an important point. The BBC should surely not be sending anyone on courses that are not directly related to broadcasting. The fact that senior management is authorising such expenditure on a significant scale suggests endorsement (even if only tacit) at the highest levels of the corporation. And there is further evidence that very senior management do endorse CP – Richard Sambrook (whom I know well), the former head of news, and a pivotal figure in BBC senior management over the past two decades, has attended the course.

Such endorsement does not, of course, mean that the BBC is being run on CP principles. A staff of 20,000 cannot be herded like sheep. However, as anyone who has been involved in political organisation will attest, a 100-or-so dedicated individuals (the figure that have attended CP courses) – if they have support, or are not opposed, in the right quarters – can have a disproportionate and highly effective influence. It looks to me, from the fact that Mr Sambrook and Robert Peston have so publicly supported CP, that the highest levels of the BBC are very definitely not opposed to its agenda and aims.

And although Lloyd drew a blank in his search for further BBC connections, I am not so sure. I looked for example, at Futerra, an ultra-greenie PR outfit which I have noted in the past the BBC has also used for “training” purposes. This is run by Solitaire Townsend,who fully endorses the type of greenie-lefty agenda being pushed by CP. She also sits on the board of an outfit called Tomorrow’s Company, which – like Futerra – is up to its gills in sustainable development, UN goals and everything that the BBC holds so dearly. Also on the board of this outfit is a chap called Grahame Broadbent. He happens to be – wait for it – operations director of Common Purpose, and former managing director of think tank Demos, founded by Julia Middleton (and beloved by the BBC), the founder of CP, and the vehicle through which she has carved political influence.

This, of course, still looks tenuous and is circumstantial. But isn’t this how these organisations operate? And I say it again. Wherever there is vigorous prosecution of liberal-left greenie goals, the BBC also seems to be there. By contrast, has anyone yet found a significant BBC UKIP or Adam Smith Institute connection?

Update: I am happy to accept (see posting below) that Richard Sambrook has spoken at, but not actually undergone CP training. I am also delighted that he has posted here – the highest level (in his case ex-, because he now works in PR) BBC input I can ever recall to B-BBC, though of course, I was also threatened with libel proceedings some time ago by Richard Black.

What Richard doesn’t say speaks volumes. Why did the corporation spend £150,000 on sending dozens of staff on these courses when quite patently they have liberal-left, greenie, EU-supporting, take-over-the-world approach? Why do the BBC send staff on training courses to organisations like Futerra? He says he has spoken at many other groups – but why do anything at all that can be interpreted as endorsement of such a cause? When I worked at the BBC, back in the 1980s, I am pretty sure such actions would not have been sanctioned.

Incidentally, Richard, I do know you well (albeit from a long time ago), even if you do not recognise my name.

I have begun to dig into BBC connections with a shadowy organisation called Common Purpose. This, according to some, is a sinister conspiratorial group – run by a scary woman called Julia Middleton – that is seeking to create an alternative government in the UK under the guise of a leadership programme. Opponents of CP have built interesting evidence that it has already managed to infiltrate many senior posts in organisations such as the police, and is busy consolidating that hold through more than 100 regional operations in the UK and many more abroad.

What are its goals? Broadly – as a perusal of the opponents’ website quickly shows – liberal-left elitist, pro-EU and strongly in favour of “sustainability”, a word used by greenies as shorthand for a left-wing agenda to destroy the capitalist system and the West.

Unsurprisingly for such a group, BBC connections are not hard to find. Bees to a honeypot. The corporation has spent more than £150,000 on sending dozens of its senior staff on CP “courses”, and business editor Robert Peston and International Development correspondent David Loyn are not only acolytes but serve on the board of what seems to be a CP subsidiary called the Media Standards Trust (alongside figures such as Amelia Fawcett, chairman of the Guardian Media Group and Baroness Helena Kennedy QC) which ostensibly aims to improve standards of journalism; in practice this means reporting in line with CP goals and policies.

Scratch the surface of the CP website and it quickly becomes apparent that one of its main goals is to ensure that we are all indoctrinated about the evils of climate change, through projects with names such as CHANGEit(sic). It works towards doing this with Deutsche Bank, an organisation that is so besotted by AGW that it publishes pamphlets on how to spot and root out sceptics.

CP was brought to my attention the other night by a journalist friend; I had never heard of it, but within seconds of digging was struck by the huge neon-lit signposts leading to the BBC. Is there nothing the corporation is not doing to foster its political agenda?

If B-BBC readers know anything first-hand about CP, or better still, have been on one of its courses (or knows someone who has), I’d love to hear from you: robinhorbury@gmail.com. I am not normally one for conspiracy theories, but this one is intriguing. Common Purpose may be completely harmless, but somehow, I doubt it.

On the BBC website, there’s still not a shred of attempted analysis of why this winter has so far been so cold not just here but now in the US – and why their beloved Met Office has got it so wrong. Odd, perhaps, in the context of the BBC’s warming fervour? Elsewhere on the web, there’s acres of discussion, and the warmists themselves have gone into overdrive trying to tell us that this is not climate, it’s weather, and in any case, the severe cooling is actually warming because we might be cold but Greenland isn’t. What will it take, I wonder, for Richard Black or Roger Harrabin to spring into action?

Meanwhile, as the boys and girls of the BBC polish their silence in their nice warm offices, even the BBC’s leading cricket commentator, Jonathan Agnew, has filed this from Melbourne:

It seems a bit odd saying this but for summer it is very cold here. Temperatures have been down at around 13 degrees with a biting wind. It is not much fun sitting in a big ground like that with virtually no sunshine, freezing to death.

A whole army of Neros (back at base) fiddling while Rome burns?

Here for your seasonal delectation is a nice BBC picture of AGW in action – the River Wharfe at Bolton Abbey near Skipton (one of my favourite childhood haunts)covered in that warming icing for the first time in a generation. Paul Hudson – perhaps the one BBC employee who is prepared to occasionally look outside the warming frame – also notes that the River Humber and Whitby Harbour are both freezing over (last recorded in 1962/3), and even the Nidd at Knaresborough is solid. Meanwhile, the rest of the BBC remains eerily silent about the causes. Rabbits caught in the headlights? A merry Christmas to everyone!

Leverhulme is a £50m charitable trust which supposedly fosters academic work. But like so many such bodies, it long since decided that AGW was a certainty, and in 2008 held a symposium on the theme. The blurb declared:

The anthropogenic forcing of climate will be one of the major issues faced by Human society over the rest of this century.

And last year, according to its annual report, one of its main grants went to a no-doubt delighted Dr Ings, who is researching the impact of hot winters (like this year?) on bumble bees in deepest Somerset:

The buzz of foraging bumblebees is a quintessential sound of summer, yet since the 1990s the familiar buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) has been observed visiting garden flowersin the depths of winter!

Well golly gosh. Almost poetic, and hold the front page; no doubt his work will fit in neatly (so that he can keep that grant money coming) with the latest warmist contortionist back-somersault pronouncements from the Postdam Climate Institute about cold winters, that they are definitively caused by global warming. Warming, it has now been established by these gurus, causes extreme cooling, and warming, and cooler warmer winters. All, of course, at the same time in our headlong, unstoppable rush to climate change doom.

So what’s the relevance of this to the BBC? Well, this morning, the website has a prominent story (front page when I looked) about a grant being awarded by the Trust to investigate the log books of discovery and whaling voyages to the Arctic in past centuries. The purpose, of course, in line with the blinkered science which the trust pursues, is already decided, namely “to see if they shed light on climate change”. Dr Wheeler, the very happy and newly enriched research director says:

“The Arctic environmentally is a hugely important area, but we need to know how it’s behaved in the past in order that we can assess how it’s going to behave in the future. You can’t look forward without looking back. This is no longer just a scientific issue – climate change is of global, political concern.”

So that’s it then: what we have is an overtly political exercise paid for by a warmist trust to confirm warmist objectives. All very cosy. And why do the BBC publicise it? Why is it remotely a news story? Dozens of research grants are awarded every day and this is a tiddler in comparison to many of them. Well, could it be that Sir Michael Perry, the chairman of the Leverhulme Trust, has worked for the BBC World Service (already a full advocate of the warmist cause), and also because anything to do with global warming is pushed as hard as possible by the BBC? Even when it’s a non-story.

Everywhere you look on the topic of AGW reveals deeper and deeper links between the BBC and the warmist cause.

It seems from the Daily Mail today that Mark Thompson – perhaps stung by Jeremy Hunt’s comments earlier in the week – is accepting that the BBC may have been a tad biased in its past coverage of the EU and immigration. Of course, everything is perfect now, and he even has the temerity to claim that the corporation has played a role in making immigration policy tougher.

Over the six years that Mr Thompson has been director general of the BBC, I have been indirectly involved in a succession of very detailed reports that have chronicled in depth a sustained BBC bias in the coverage of (among other things)immigration and EU affairs. So I know a little bit about the background of his latest utterances. Each of these reports examined on a systematic, academic basis the ouput of hundreds of BBC news programmes (focusing esepcially on Today and other main news titles)and they have shown that:

***With the EU, there has been deliberate under-representation of those who oppose the EU project (so-called sceptics and withdrawalists)and an equally systematic ridiculing of those “sceptics” as being the equivalent of flat-earthers or BNP supporters. At the same time, there has been a massive under-reporting of the negative side of the EU, for example its budgetary waste and corruption, it’s manic drive to create new laws in every spehere of our lives, and its ecoloonery.

***With immigration, those who opposed unlimited immigration in line with new Labour zeal were regularly portrayed as BNP, foaming-in-the-mouth, right-wing nutcases. Their reasoned arguments for control of numbers were seriously under-reported, distorted or ignored. Dozens of detailed examples of this were provided.

Over the years, the BBC’s reponse to almost every one of these reports has been to stick its collective fingers in its ears, blow a massive raspberry and ignore the findings. Those who compiled the reports were called (usually behind their backs, but sometimes to their faces) right-wing zealots, incompetent bigots, anal retentive idiots, and on one occasion, one was the subject of an outright slanderous lie told in the Houses of Parliament by a senior BBC editorial figure. In short, the BBC mostly ignored the findings.

On one occasion, this did not happen. Michael Grade, when he was chairman of the BBC, got riled about the sustained criticism about EU coverage and he ordered a full inquiry. This was carried out by Lord Wilson of Dinton, the former cabinet secretary, and it was damning. It found systematic bias by ommission and warned that the corporation must ensure that all sides in the EU debate must be properly aired and treated with due respect. The response was predictable window-dressing; Mark Mardell was appointed EU editor (and promptly went native), but nothing changed. Exactly the same EU bias has remained to the present day.

Mr Thompson’s remarks yesterday therefore, have to be taken with a massive pinch of salt. Pressure is clearly being exerted from some quarter or another (Hunt’s lot?), and the director general is leading with his chin (to a very small extent) with the aim of batting the real issues involved well and truly into the long grass. Any idea that the BBC has any conception of the rotten, stinking morrass of bias in which it is mired, is easily dispelled by deputy DG Mark Byford’s latest interview with Ray Snoddy this morning on the ludicrously-mistitled Newswatch. Mr Byford tells us (with a very straight face)that every one of his BBC news staff works to his or her utmost in pursuit of “impartiality”. What utter tommyrot.

As Richard North eloquently points out this global warming morning, the role of government is to ensure that the basic infrastructure of society runs as smoothly as possible. Upwards of 2m people in the UK depend on heating oil for their essential needs, but this government is so obsesssed in driving up the cost of power and fuel – as Chris Huhne the ecoloon announced yesterday – because of its greenie obsession that it doesn’t give a fig about actual energy needs. The Cleggerons are allowing a third world energy crisis to develop right under their noses while Mr Huhne pontificates about reducing carbon. For Sky News (and bloggers such as Richard North), this failure to make sure basic supplies are available is a major political scandal as it should be. For the BBC, it’s little more than an incidental footnote; Tracey of Lanark may be desperate, but who in the alarmist corporation cares? It’s far more important for their hotshot news staff to focus on renewable energy pipe dreams(but tell that to Tracey!. (I’m writing this early in the news day, and coverage may develop.)

Time for a new open thread…