Scratch the surface of the BBC, and connections with vested climate change alarmist interests seem to lurk everywhere. Not only has the Corporation become an alarmist propaganda machine, but also its personnel seem to be working on a massive scale behind the scenes to spread the message even further.
As I revealed on TCW, acting chairman of the Trustees Diana Coyle is a paid advisor to energy company EDF – as was former chairman Lord Patten. And fellow trustee Richard Ayre is a former chairman of Article 19, whose goals include climate change rights advocacy throughout the world.
Deputy director of news, Fran Unsworth, can now be added to this list. As well as being one of the BBC’s most senior female executives, she is also a board member of a major EU initiative that includes systematic ‘education’ about climate alarmism. This is called the Erasmus Mundus programme – of which, more later.
First, though, it seems that Ms Unsworth has taken personal charge of the BBC’s response to the row over the Corporation’s coverage of climate change centred on Lord Lawson.
True to form, her views are totally certain, totally set in stone: a consensus exists in favour of alarmism and, by golly, she and her 8,000-strong news division are going to follow it.
She declares in a letter to The Spectator that Lord Lawson, contrary to some reports, is not banned from BBC coverage. Instead, editors must make it clear that his views don’t carry equal weight to those of alarmists because he is not an expert.
Ms Unsworth’s lofty pronouncement would also seem to mean that Owen Paterson, the sacked environment minister, who has described the alarmist lobby as ‘The Green Blob’, will not be afforded ‘equal weight’ in future coverage of environmental issues.
Who else will join this list of ‘non experts’?
This will presumably be down to individual programme editors, who as a result of the BBC’s unbending partisanship on this most complex of subjects, are now in a position of deciding who is properly qualified to comment and who is not. On what basis?
An interesting parallel, I would suggest, comes in the history of eugenics, which I am currently studying. From the 1890s onwards, overwhelming numbers of scientists and liberal‘reformers’ (Marie Stopes and George Bernard Shaw among them) came to believe – on the basis of Darwin’s theories, as well as a torrent of books –that selective breeding and enforced sterilisation were essential to eliminate mental and physical disease and to improve mankind’s genetic strength.They wanted to help natural selection on its way.
As a result, of course, we got Nazi Germany, but before that (less well-known but perhaps just as chilling, but now almost forgotten) more than 30 US states introduced enforced sterilisation laws and Britain came within an ace of following suit in 1913. Sweden passed laws, too, and they were not repealed until the 1970s. A ‘consensus’ of leading scientists, industrialists and politicians (who included Winston Churchill) believed stridently in this social Darwinism and thought the only way forward was selective breeding.
Would the BBC have then been its cheerleader? On Ms Unsworth’s logic, and with her certainty, it most probably would.
And what of Ms Unsworth herself, what equips her to make such clear adjudications on complex matters of science? Not, I would submit, her education…in fact her degree, according to the BBC, was in drama. Very apt for a BBC journalist, perhaps, but not in the understanding of the finer points of meteorology.
May be she is emboldened by the seminar which the BBC held back in 2006, at which, the Corporation claimed, a consensus of ‘scientists’ advised them that the science was settled. But Anthony Montford, of the Bishop Hill website, has shown conclusively that the whole meeting was a farcical charade – the scientists were in fact, mostly political activists, the ‘Green Blob’ that Owen Paterson has identified.
But no matter how flimsy these foundations, Ms Unsworth must be jolly sure of her facts about climate change, as her other connections also testify. The BBC Register of Interests shows she is also an advisory board member of the EU Erasmus Mundus programme. This, on the surface, is presented as an exchange scheme for students, and it clearly attracts lavish funding. But hang on – there’s a catch.
This paper shows it has extensive climate change alarmist objectives. It is doling out our money to create whole new generations of climate change warriors though a massive programme of international seminars and ‘education’.
No doubt listening only to Ms Unsworth’s approved ‘experts’ and properly constituted BBC reporting as they learn.
