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Roger Harrabin, like the lackey he is, faithfully reports the House of Commons whitewash about the University of East Anglia leaked emails. Not a whisper of a challenge or alternative view to that the committee involved has laughingly claimed that the science behind climate change is intact – even though it did not have the competence or remit to do so. One day, politicians will wake up with a revolution on their hands because they are so drastically out of touch with public opinion and are treating with malicious contempt their constituents. For genuine opinion about what people think of the House of Commons report, you have to look elsewhere, for example, the comments here. In the meantime, the BBC will be making no efforts to report the true picture on climate change, or anything else that’s outside their liberal-lefty worldview.

Update: for an excellent assessment of why Harrabin’s account is so dishonest and disingenuous see Frank Furedi here at Spiked.

In Mongolia, it’s sadly been so cold this winter that a million animals have died, and many of the nomadic herders and farmers are said to be in desperate need of aid. The Today programme reported this story this morning, but guess what was missing from the equation? Any mention of that dreaded phrase “climate change”. This fits a pattern. Today reporters grind on about AGW every time there is a claim – however tenuous – that temperatures are getting hotter; but never when the reverse applies. Of course, one extremely bad winter does not prove cooling, but on Radio 4’s co-called flagship news programme, the topic is never discussed properly.

Could this be because Ceri Thomas, the editor of Today, is yet another BBC executive who is a climate change activist? Mr Thomas, it transpires, is on the board of a body called the Science Media Centre, another shadowy outfit that has been created, according to its own blurb, to act as:

first and foremost a press office for science when science hits the headlines. We provide journalists with what they need in the form and time-frame they need it when science is in the news – whether this be accurate information, a scientist to interview or a feature article.

An admirable objective, if – but only if – the Centre was properly neutral on matters of scientific controversy. But it it isn’t. It’s yet another collection of warming fanatics. It runs a number of briefings for journalists which show the reverse is true; everything they do on the climate front is geared towards the AGW perspective. So when Copenhagen was looming, who did the centre choose as its speaker to make sure journalists were properly in the picture? Why, none other than Vicky Pope, of the Met Office, who might be described as one of the UK’s warmists-in-chief. Others of these briefings follow exactly the same pattern and format, for example this one on so-called carbon sinks, which assumes as the start point that AGW is happening:

Efforts to control climate change require the stabilization of atmospheric CO2 concentrations, which in turn depends on the balance between our own emissions and natural carbon sinks. The Global Carbon Project has evaluated all the available evidence on carbon sinks and sources, the results of which have been published in Nature Geoscience. Two of the authors of the paper briefed journalists in their findings at the SMC.

I could go on, there’s tons more, but I have made the main point. Mr Thomas deems it acceptable that he is an active member of a body which is grafting away behind the scenes to prejudice the debate about climate science towards the warmist viewpoint.I know from other sources that he also responds to complaints about the programme’s climate change coverage by using sweeping warmist statements such as that there is a “great consensus” about climate change science, therefore there is only the need for him to afford “due impartiality” to sceptics – which means in practice that they rarely, if ever, appear on Today. And, in turn, that the programme is totally biased in its approach to the topic.

I submit that because of his activism, Mr Thomas is not fit to edit Today – or any other BBC programme. He should resign immediately.

On this week’s Now Show Jon Holmes took advantage of Marcus Brigstocke’s absence and actually did a segment mocking climate change alarmism. Hard to believe, I know. A sop to the show’s critics, perhaps?

Another interesting little point. Brigstocke’s replacement for the week was Paul Sinha whose routine was based – with stunning originality – on a Daily Mail article. However, he referred to it only as “a major national newspaper”. Has criticism of lazy right-on comedians using the words “Daily Mail” also hit home?

The story in the Mail was about a naughty word nearly appearing on Channel 4’s Countdown. For Sinha it was an opportunity to use another tiresome comedy cliché, namely the “Have you seen those crazy comments under right-wing newspaper articles?” bit. He riffed off a comment on the Mail’s website from Doreen in Dorset who had written of the near-scandal: “More evidence of how moral standards have fallen in Brown’s Broken Britain.” If you look up the post by “Doreen” you’ll see she also adds: “When will they scrap the awful licence fee TAX?” This is clearly someone taking the piss out of Daily Mail readers. There are other comments like it, such as “Dave” in Maidstone: “Another idiotic waste of taxpayers’ money by Jonathan Ross and the BBC.” One wonders what percentage of comments on the Daily Mail website are actually written by crappy comedians stuck for things to joke about.

A better comedian might have questioned why so many newspapers covered this non-story (Guardian, Telegraph, Sun, Mirror) rather than take the all too familiar – and clearly fake – Daily Mail readers’ comments route.

The following, by BBC presenter Dotun Adebayo, was, according to ‘Damon’, a commenter at the Pickled Politics site, printed in the Voice newspaper in September 2008.

Damon’s view of it : “It seems all kinds of people can feel this ”loss of hegemony”. When it’s articulated by the white working class (in places like East London) it’s usually called racism.“

I’ll let it speak for itself, but I wonder – what would have been the career trajectory of a white BBC presenter writing such a piece, lamenting the loss of an earlier (John Major’s ?) Brixton or White City and complaining that “all the shops are now owned by“? Would they still be at the BBC ?

WAVE BRIXTON GOODBYE.

There used to be a time when everyone knew that Brixton belonged to us.
We fought for it, and made love for it.
Some of us even died in that corner of the landscape that would ever be black.

It didn’t mean that white folks weren’t welcome, all that it meant is that they KNEW it was ours, the same way as when I go to Norfolk or Suffolk, or any of the shires, I know that it’s NOT ours.
I’m on my ‘p’s and ‘q’s when I go up country, because I don’t have the backative to claim it as mine. And all the youts know this, so they’ve got the bottle to shout out ”N*****!” from across the road when they see you walking down one of their village streets or quiet country lanes.

I don’t have a problem with that because I KNOW when I venture out there I’m in a white mans country and the white man makes the rules.
Brixton was different though. Babylon THOUGHT he made the rules until Brixton made a stand against the so-called Operation ‘Swamp 81′. As the late Bernie Grant MP would say, the police got a ”bloody good hiding” that time.

There were of course casualties on both sides. But at least the message was clear all around the country that Brixton belonged to us. And so did Tottenham. And so did Hackney and Stonebridge and Peckham and Handsworth and Moss Side and Cheetham Hill and St Paul’s, so on and so forth.

ROOTS

Where ever you had an inner city, you had a corner of England that would be forever Jamaican or Nigerian or Bajan or St Kittian. We didn’t just put down roots, we put down down-payments on those areas, or at least our parents did. And like the law states, if you own a piece of this green and pleasant land, it’s yours.
Nobody can take it away from you (unless you divert the mortgage payments to buy a Ferrari).
But 27 years on, Brixton no longer belongs to us. I went down there the other day and discovered another country. Oh, we were still evident. It wasn’t like ‘’spot the black man” but we no longer own it.
The bars, the clubs, the resturants and shops no longer belong to us. With the exception of a pattie shop or two, Brixton belongs to everybody but us. It’s the same in Tottenham and Hackney. We spend most of the money, but virtually the only things we own are barbershops and hairdressers.
We’ve got ourselves to blame. Look at the Asian community. They came here at more or less the same time we did. They didn’t just put downpayments on the areas they claimed, they bought them outright.
Often jointly, communally, together as one family. So when you go to Southall, Alperton, Ealing, Whitechapel, and the other London areas they own, it’s all about Indiashire, Londonistan and Bangla-Brick Lane. They own the houses, the businesses AND the councils.
So who do you think makes the rules in those areas? It’s not the Women’s Institute and the Rotary Club and the Freemasons, I can tell you. Forget the local parish church and the sound of Bow Bells, it’s the Hindu temples and the mosques that call the shots, and if the Imam wants to call the belivers to worship at five in the morning, that’s up to him.

Like I said, we’ve got ourselves to blame. We had it all in the palm of our hands and we threw it away. We could have been contenders. We could have controlled entire neighbourhoods, businesswise and otherwise.
We should be in control of our local councils in those areas where we are/were the majority.

VICTORIES

But after the street battles that won us our victories of the past (and not just us, because let’s face it – Asian communities benefited from the blood we shed in the eighties (the two Asian people burned to death in Handsworth Post Office didn’t – LT)) we rested on our laurels. Like ex-slaves, we indulged our new found freedoms far too long and partied until it was 1999. By then of course it was too late.

During the eighties and nineties more drugs were pumped into the black communities of Britain than ever before. I lived in and worked in Brixton at the time. Previously it had been all about the good sensi (or collie or lamb’s bread, as it used to be known). After the riots of 1981 and 1985, we began to see the emergence of hard drugs – heroin, speed, then cocaine, and then, of course, crack.

The drugs did their job, They subdued our people into submission. Those very same crack addicts that you see in ‘black’ neighbourhoods are the same guys who used to live on the frontline ready to protest at the injustices we suffered. Those injustices are still here, but if you ask the warriors of old to come out and demonstrate, they’ll fall prostrate, begging for one more hit.

You see, in winning the streets we really didn’t win anything. The streets belong to everybody, whatever your local gang might think. Real power and real wealth is all about who controls the means of production, the judiciary and executive.

The Nigerians of Peckham know this. They are the new Jamaicans. It remains to be seen whether they will be seduced into not buying the freehold of that corner of south east London that will forever be ‘Lagos’.

Unbelievable. And no byline. Hat tip Pounce.

Via Tim Blair, a reminder of stark warnings from BBC Radio 4’s Costing the Earth in 2007:

The Australian of the year 2007, environmentalist Tim Flannery, once predicted that Perth in Western Australia could become the world’s first ghost metropolis, its population forced to abandon the city due to lack of water.

While some critics scoffed at this idea, there is no doubt that it has forced the city to wake up to the fact its water is running out and that it can no longer rely on its natural supply.

Perth this week:

You’ve got to hand it to the BBC. They won’t give up one some things – and especially their relentless advocacy of AGW. No matter what the facts, they will twist them. Take this item, on wind power on Orkney. It’s one long commercial for the joys of “renewables”, an ode to the importance of us all buckling down and accepting these bird-chopping, landscape-defacing monstrosities. Notice that the one thing missing from the article is the “s” word, the elephant in the room: subsidy. The author recounts how the community will benefit by £200,000 a year from their new toy, but he fails to spell out that without the government’s huge subsidies for wind power, wind turbines would be prohibitively expensive. Notice, too, that there is no mention of another vital issue – that the wind is so unreliable as a source of power that no matter how much propaganda is spread about the benefits,it will never, ever, be able to provide anything but a small fraction of our overall power needs. But eh,ho, it’s a nice patronising story about country folk doing nice greenie things. And that’s all that matters to the BBC.

Matt Frei:

Funny, I assumed from decades of BBC coverage that the Republicans were already America’s nasty party. Judging by Frei’s warning it would appear that there’s room to crank up the anti-Republican rhetoric even higher.

Oxfam, one of the BBC’s favourite political organisations – spreading dissension and hate in the name of climate change – has spent megabucks of donor cash (no doubt given in the mistaken belief that it would help the poor)in a project to try and understand how the blogsphere supports sceptical thought about the causes of warming. In so doing, it’s drawn up this diagram (with the heading “how to combat sceptics”) showing the “pro” and “anti” sides. Guess which organisation is at the centre of the “pro” side? There’s dear old auntie, right next to the Guardian, the New York Times and the World Bank. I suppose this only confirms what we already know – but now it’s official. The greenie fanatics know exactly what they are doing and they know that the BBC is a an ultra-safe pair of hands and friend, ready to do their bidding and puff any alarmist press release that’s spewed their way.

Put together a potty, unneccessary EU directive abour air quality, an EU-fanatical greenie nutter like Tim Yeo, and the BBC, and what do you get? A well-tried formula of alarmism warning us that unless we stop keeping ourselves warm with nasty power stations, refrain from using petrol, and wind down our industrial base completely, we’re all gonna die. One thing missing from the equation? Recent peer-reviewed research that shows that all the scare stories about air-borne pollutants should be taken with a huge pinch of salt, and that claims of massive death tolls from the type of matter involved in the EU directive are abject nonsense. But that, of course, can’t be mentioned because it would spoilt the political agenda; the boys and girls at the BBC want to send us all back to the greenie idyll of the stone age.

Oh, and build thousands of wind farms to replace the pollutant-belching fossil-fuel power stations. Ignoring completely the fact that they are hugely expensive, subsidy-guzzling monstrosities that don’t work.

Update: apologies, but this last link didn’t work when the blog was first posted, but it should do now.