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BBC News 24, reporting the government’s apparent intention to at last cut the extortionate, ever-rising BBC licence fee, described culture secretary Jeremy Hunt as being “aggressive” towards the corporation. How dare he suggest that the BBC should be part of cuts was the indignant tone, especially as sacrifices such as the closure of the Asian network were being made. Would that the same language was applied to Palestinian terrorists and other “activists” described in BBC reporting of acts of outrageous (real)aggression in the middle east.

Without a breath of irony, the next item on News 24 was a reverential reference to that Jonathan Ross had presented his last show on BBC1. Why that was considered “news” in a national bulletin defeats me (except in the context of BBC self-worship), but that will be the same Jonathan Ross who has been paid millions by the corporation, despite his intrinsic, gratuitous unpleasantness – and is one of the reasons why the licence fee is so high.

BBC website serial fantasist Mark Kinver spends his time combing the world looking for climate change alarmist tosh. His latest foray into the field is a full-scale scare story aimed – as ever – at terrifying our kids into believing that Red Sea coral reefs will stop growing by 2070 because sea temperatures will by then have risen so much that they will die. There’s just one problem in this scenario, Mark, and it’s rather a big one. The records demonstrate that sea temperatures are not rising, despite intensive efforts by alarmists to suggest otherwise. The whole scare, as so often the case, is based on the false predictions of dodgy models. Why, oh, why, can’t he refer to the debate as a whole?

Jonathan Hoffman and Rabbi Tony Bayfield were asked for their views on an Ipsos Mori poll about whether British Jews were in favour of Motherhood and Apple Pie.

They were.

What was the question Mori asked? Would you prefer Katkins, or this bowl of broken glass?

Nine out of ten cats prefer Katkins.
Evan Davis queried why British Jews who support Israel should be thought of as courageous. With OUR reputation, he winked?

Okay I’ll spell it out. Jews in Britain listen to the BBC, much like everyone else. Horns permitting. They might support Israel, they might have relatives there, and they might go there a lot. But curiously they might rely on Jeremy Bowen to keep them posted on how badly behaved Israelis are.
So, Evan, if they don’t admire Hamas and Hezbollah in quite the way the BBC and the Guardian do, they might need to be plucky.

“A study of more than 4,000 British Jews suggests that although most feel a strong affinity with Israel and strongly support its right to self-defence, a majority believe the country should swap territory for peace, and negotiate with Hamas. Rabbi Jonathan Bayfield and Jonathan Hoffman, vice chairman of the Zionist Federation, debate the importance of British Jews’ sense of identity.”

By the way, Rabbi Bayfield’s name isn’t Jonathan.

Why did the BBC run the story? Are they trying to make it sound as though British Jews want Israel to make yet more unilateral concessions for peace? Talk to Hamas? A missing word is conspicuously absent. Conditional. Good for Jonathan Hoffman for mentioning it.

More than £3.6bn a year now floods in to the grubby palms of the overpaid executives who supposedly manage the BBC. The licence fee has gone up over the past five years by almost 15% to £142.50. But spending on new shows is plummeting, a survey by Ofcom has found. It has dropped from 65% of revenues in 1998 to only 56% now, and over the past three years, the amount of money spent on first-run programming on BBC 1 has fallen by 10% and that on BBC2 by 15%. By contrast, Ofcom found , spending in the same period by commercial television companies on their programmes increased, despite the recession.

No prizes for guessing where the cash has gone: into the bloated pay packets of the propagandists who call themselves journalists and programme-makers.

The BBC has a new-look website. Check it out, it’s quite sharp. No doubt it cost tens of thousands of our cash to engineer. The main purpose remains depressingly the same, however. For example, I checked out the new science and environment page. Every link at the bottom (a new feature, I think) – the Environment Agency, DEFRA, the Royal Institution, the Royal Society, Research Councils UK, NASA, the National Science Foundation – is to bodies which have web areas dedicated to unqualified, loud, unsubtle, lying, climate change drivel. Surprise, surprise.

Richard Black, the esteemed BBC environment reporter, reminds me of Godzilla; no matter what is thrown at him, he rampages on, extolling the perils of global warming.

For days, the blogsphere has been alive with further evidence that seriously undermines the credibility of the IPCC’s AR4 assessment, not least of which was its claim that 40% of the Amazon rainforest was at risk from minor changes in rainfall.

The back ground (for those who don’t know it) is that earlier in the year, in a story that become known as Amazongate, the Sunday Times revealed that this scary claim was based on propaganda from the World Wildlife Fund rather than any scientific investigation. Afterwards, the warmist bullies (as they do) squealed with anger, issued various threats, and shamefully, the Sunday Times backed down,publishing a retraction a couple of weeks back.

But Richard North, over on EU Referendum, who broke the original story, has continued his brilliant sleuthing on this subject – and has established that, despite a miasma of misinformation from WWF and warmists fanatics such as George Monbiot, the whole scare story was based on nothing more than cod science on a dodgy website that was taken down years ago. (I’ve linked to only one story on EU Referendum – there are dozens more.)

But that doesn’t bother our Richard. In true Godzilla fashion, here he is today, raving on:

Meanwhile, the Sunday Times was recently forced to apologise for claiming that IPCC projections on die-back of the Amazon rainforest were unsubstantiated.

Unsubstantiated? What would it take for Mr Black to acknowledge that he is wrong? Or to accept that the real facts of these matters are being established not by the so-called scientists (who are cynically being paid by governments to prove that AGW warming exists so that they can raise taxes), but by the blogsphere – by honourable people who have no axe to grind but to establish the truth.

For the BBC, it’s simple. It’s about a constant stream of newthink and newspeak, telling us that we should accept immigration, that any form of patriotism is evil, and that fear of danger from minorities – especially from Muslims – is idiocy.

Thus, this story about the Great Fire of London becomes an exercise in Goebbels-style propaganda. The facts are that back in 1666, Britain was in the middle of a major war with the Dutch; it was a battle for markets, against trade protectionism and much more; those who lived here at the time thought it was a vital cause and a just cause. Arguably, the actions of the brave men and women back then secured Britain’s place in the world and our future prosperity.

National security, unsurprisingly during war time, was a major issue – soon after the Great Fire, the Dutch mounted a major blockade of the Thames which led to the Battle of the Medway, a vicious action in which they attacked the fleet at its moorings. So when the Great Fire broke out in September 1666, it was hardly surprising that one theory about the causes of its outbreak was the Dutch.

But heck, for the BBC, any thought that Londoners should have been worried is just nonsense; it’s purely xenophobia at its worse that carries lessons for today. In this major re-writing and distortion of our past, I quote from the Meriel Jeater, the “expert” chosen by the BBC to play the Goebbels role. She says:

The dark side was that the fire burst on to the surface religious tension and paranoia about national security…It’s a tale with echoes today, says Ms Jeater. “When I was curating the exhibition, it wasn’t long after the 7/7 bombings and when I was reading about the reactions against Catholics and the Dutch, it struck me that there were a lot of similarities with the backlash against Muslim people after the bombing. A lot of suspicion about people living in London”.

So that’s it then. We should all ignore that many Muslims are busy trying to undermine us, just as back in 1666, we should have rolled over, forgotten about national interests and patriotism, and let the Dutch invade. And of course, our ancestors were nasty, xenophobic, insentient morons. In the US, they revere their founding fathers; here; the BBC leads the charge in denigrating and insulting them.

Sadly, I haven’t time to dissect properly last night’s Panorama stitch-up about climate change, but it should not go without mention. James Delingpole does a wonderful job here. Suffice it to say that Panorama reporter Tom Heap – laughingly believing he was being objective – deliberately distorted the statements from the “sceptics” he spoke to. In other words, par for the course.

Oz PM Kevin Rudd has been ousted, largely because his popularity had plummeted because he was pursuing insane greenie policies. The centrepiece was a ludicrously high tax on the mining industry, despite the fact that minerals extraction is the current main reason for Australia’s prosperity. He can be seen as one of the first major politicians to have been ousted by his greenie arrogance and lunacy. Every element of his eco-wackery was increasingly unpopular with the electorate. For the BBC, though, the reason for his demise is simple; he bottled out on introducing new CO2 emissions targets. And the mining tax? Well, according to the BBC report, it is only a “super tax on the super rich” (code in BBC terms for being a highly desirable, necessary measure); not a breath of a mention that Australian voters were desperately concerned that Mr Rudd was the architect of a whole suite of legislation the sole purpose of which was to lower living standards in the name of eco-worship.

I note that we have had a contribution from Dr David Gregory, who works for the BBC in Birmingham, and who is both a science graduate and reports on the environment. B-BBC readers might also be interested to know that he comes from that same self-smug lefty mindset that treats anyone who dissents from BBC orthodoxy with complete disdain – and responds to anyone who disagrees with that orthdoxy with sarcastic ad hominem attacks and menacing claims that the science proves his stance. Familiar? The background is that Melanie Phillips noted in her blog that David Bellamy (he who has been barred from the BBC since it became plain that he disagreed with their line on global warming) had marshalled evidence to show why warmist claims were wrong in at least some of their detail. None of what he said was based on personality. This is how the esteemed Dr Gregory responded:

…I’m a BBC Environment Correspondent and I have a PhD in Physics. But of course as Ms Phillips points out, qualifications mean nothing in the face of her certainty on this issue. I’ve had a brief correspondence with Ms Phillips before about her interesting approach to climate change science. I look forward to continuing that on her blog. Perhaps it’s worth repeating. I am not told what to report by the BBC and I am not forbidden from reporting certain things. I simply report the science. That’s my job. That’s what I do. What Ms Phillips posts here is illuminating. I mean what is her actual argument? It seems to be based around appeals to “common sense” and what Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness”. Not the truth as such but rather simple facts that are based on a deep seated feeling about what is right. Following your gut feeling rather than your head. I think at worst this is intellectually lazy (after all, what is common sense but the label we give our own prejudice?) but it’s certainly not science. Which is after all, all we have to explain the world around us.

Relax chaps. We can all tell that science reporting is in safe, unbiased, hands at the BBC.