Story submitted by Eric Worrall.
The BBC, the UK Government Broadcaster, has banned former Chancellor of the Exchequer Lord Lawson from appearing on BBC programmes to talk about climate change.
According to a spokesman for the BBC, a series of complaints about an interview in which Lord Lawson expressed climate skepticism, led to a ruling in favour of the complainants by the BBC’s Editorial Complaints Board.
“This ruling found a false balance was created in that the item implied Lord Lawson’s views on climate science were on the same footing as those of Sir Brian Hoskins.”
However, this is not the first time the BBC has gagged unfashionable views.
Sir Winston Churchill, the WW2 leader of Britain, openly expressed the opinion that his views on NAZI Germany were gagged by the BBC, because his concerns about Germany were not what the BBC wanted the British people to hear.
History suggests the tactic will backfire:
According to the article on Churchill’s “gagging” by the BBC;
“There is no written evidence that Churchill asked the BBC for the opportunity to speak out against appeasement. However, he did complain to a young BBC producer who visited him on the day after Chamberlain returned home from Munich. A memo records their meeting. They spent hours discussing the Nazi threat and “Churchill complained that he had been very badly treated… and that he was always muzzled by the BBC”.
The BBC producer who tried to reassure Churchill about BBC bias was Guy Burgess. Burgess was the man who would later become Britain’s most infamous traitor, when he defected to Moscow with fellow spy Donald Maclean.
Story Title: BBC Bans Lord Lawson for Climate Skepticism
One line summary of story: A previous gagging led to disaster
h/t to Jo Nova
Even so, he still would have known where his master’s interests lay.
Not an easy question in 1934, though. The Sovs were willing to cooperate on the Czecho as early as 1935, but London wasn’t buying. As a mole, he would have just gone along with whatever was most likely to keep him under cover. But it is very difficult to know exactly what was going on.
Rhys Jaggar says:
July 10, 2014 at 1:03 am
‘Village Idiot’
It may have escaped your notice but it is indubitably true that the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, the Guardian, the Independent, which represent pretty much every political opinion under the sun are all scrupulously meticulous in censoring anything that doesn’t follow their desired political line.
The BBC is just like all the rest of them.
============================================================
“The BBC is just like all the rest of them.” Really? Then then all those newspapers are funded by tax dollars? Really?
evanmjones says:
July 10, 2014 at 8:55 am
(replying to)
You are not looking at either the historic socialist practice of deep deception and “communist-interest-first-last-and-always”, but also so real world politics involved in strategic socialist/communist planning.
the French and British and German (to some extents, and greatly feared by the 20’s and 30’s Nazi Party!) unions were strongly controlled by communist controllers of the socialist leaders who controlled all of the three types of union members: the pragmatic whats-in-for-me, the idealist socialist members and the easily-cowed don’t-hurt-me-I’ll-keep-working members. As long as Russia and Germany were allied with each other in early WWII, and as long as Russia was getting German tooling and arms and commercial trade (in exchange for Russian oil and ore and wheat) the British, French and Belgium and Italian trade unions were actually opposing the on-going war between their countries and Germany: Between 1938 and extending long periods during the winter 1939-1940 “Sitzkreig” and even for a period after the Belgium/Denmark/French/Norway conquests, the trade unions in many European and British areas opposed the war and contributed to sabotage and strikes that helped Germany (and thus Soviet/Communist interests).
As soon as Germany invaded Russia in 1941, these same unions IMMEDIATELY began sabotaging German equipment and trains and armies and communications and shipments against the Nazi’s. Strikes were begun again to halt production of German arms and equipment and repairs in France, and Germany faced increased internal strife. The unions followed suite in America: Propaganda and strikes and opposition to a “European War” stopped immediately. Longshoreman and pro-socialist strikes ended immediately when the Soviet Union became an enemy of the Nazi’s. Training and “education” followed suite in the union headquarters and socialist newspapers in Chicago, New York City, Hawaii and San Francisco. (I say “immediately” somewhat incorrectly: Stalin had to overcome his manic-depression of the first 4 weeks of the invasion first. THEN, he began ordering the overseas and European unions to begin their actions opposing Germany.)
A socialist mole or director will keep only socialist goals and his or her actual orders and the socialist interests in mind at all times.
evanmjones says:
July 10, 2014 at 7:13 am
I find myself in an interesting position. I have no “official” scientific background at all. Yet currently I am among the leading experts in surface station placement (vis a vis heat sink), as a result of five years’ directed study. One might argue that I am a history student making a very typical historical statistical study of the history of US climate. In fact, it is the almost complete dismissal of station siting effect on trend by the scientific community which has given me this opportunity at playing “Citizen Scientist”.
Yet this would not qualify me for comment insofar as the BBC is concerned.
=========================================================
Yep would that not include Anthony here in that category also? Some of the best informed and leading figures and best informed communicators among the Skeptics have no Doctorate and so by the BBC’s ruling it seems that ALL of those type of people are not worthy of even being allowed to question someone with Dr. before their name on a BBC broadcast. And THAT was the intent it seem of the BBC’s action.
How many other topics are banned from the BBC?
After all, they have an Editorial Board which needs to do something. How big is their accumulated list of past actions?
From this UPI report (linked to at the BBC’s website), http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2014/07/07/BBC-refusing-airtime-to-deniers-of-climate-change-striving-for-gender-balance/7131404769105/ , I don’t see any need for paranoia, and it’s not about ‘banning’: it’s a reasonable (though obviously questionable) revision of the debated concept of balance. Of course, they’re mistaken in relying on the so-called 97% consensus, and their journalists should do some investigation of that!
Since reality is not conforming to the evidence presented by the models, and is adhering to a non-global warming policy, reality will no longer be allowed on the BBC.
This ruling found a false balance was created in that the item implied Lord Lawson’s views on climate science were on the same footing as those of Sir Brian Hoskins.”
BBC something that is true for once. Lord Lawson’s views are correct and Sir Brian Hoskins are not.
Pravda was very good at not telling the truth also, can we change the name of BBC to The Truth Network.
Interesting that Burgess was censoring Churchill. I did not know that. But nothing has changed, the BBC is still full of traitors. You only have to watch their news output for a couple of weeks, to find out that all other cultures and all other political systems are much better than the British equivalents. In the eyes of BBC producers, the sooner Britain is destroyed, the better. **
In addition, the BBC has a track record in Climate censorship. They did exactly the same to David Bellamy, the BBC’s favourite environmentalist, when he expressed doubts about AGW. if they can freeze out Bellamy, then none of us stand a chance against the BBC Climate propaganda bulldozer. The BBC needs to be attacked politically at its Achillie’s Heel – its funding.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2266188/David-Bellamy-The-BBC-froze-I-dont-believe-global-warming.html
Ralph
** A BBC executive said to me that the sooner Britain is destroyed the better, even if that meant the impoverishment or death of his own children. Why? Because he believes in a One World Government, and to achieve that you need to destroy all nation states. I said he was evil, and he was genuinely perplexed by my reaction – which says volumes about the general mindset and conversation within the BBC.
Is this is the same BBC which was found to have been infested with child molesters and teenage sexual predators since the mi- 1960s?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20026910
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/jan/18/jimmy-savile-abused-1000-victims-bbc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Yewtree
Yes, indeed. But the BBC is also an “unbiased” (ha ha) state broadcaster receiving public monies from a mandatory TV license. Over the years many people who do not even watch TV have complained about harassment from agents trying to enforce collection of the TV licence.
Large numbers of people have found themselves in court for not paying the BBC tax.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/10256679/TV-licence-offences-account-for-one-in-ten-UK-court-cases.html
These days some people post videos on youtube giving advice on how to deal with licence-fee harassment. For example:
nb
The BBC also gets revenue from adverts outside the UK (it is forbidden from showing adverts within the UK), but they don’t like to talk about it.
AnonyMoose says: July 10, 2014 at 9:46 am
How many other topics are banned from the BBC?
__________________________________
Oh, there are many prejudices within the Biased Broadcasting Corporation:
All fathers are latent child beaters and murderers.
All traditionalists are pompus little H!tlers.
Terrorists are Freedom Fighters in Syria, but if they dare go to Iraq they are suddenly terrorists.
All religion is contemptable, unless it is !slam.
Israel is a bit of dirt on the producer’s shoe.
Anyone from another country is superior to an Englishman.
If someone belittles a woman they are to be utterly condemned (unless they are !slamic) **
Anyone lacking meleanin is a worthless reactionary.
etc: etc: and etc: There are many more.
**. This one was priceless. The EU’s foreign minister went to Iran, and the Iranian minister refused to shake hands with her, because she was a woman. Suddenly, the BBC, who will condemn misogyny in the stongest of possible terms, refused to mention or condemn the Iranian minister’s actions. When i complained, the BBC said we must respect other views and opinions. Yeah, right. But what if George Bush or Benjamin Netanyahu had refused to touch the female EU foreign minister – there would have been all hell to pay.
There is no bias quite like BBC bias.
Over at Jo Nova is this quote:
Why apologize to an activist whose business depends on climate disruption? Chit Chong is the owner of Dorset Draught Proofing. Here is what they say on their home page.
The same Chit was probably not aware of the promised warmer winters made by the IPCC and other climate scientists. What a nut.
Linked in profile of Chit Chong.
http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/chit-chong/b/267/82a
Michael hart.
The BBC also gets revenue from adverts outside the UK (it is forbidden from showing adverts within the UK), but they don’t like to talk about it.
_________________________________
The BBC also gets income from selling its output across the world. Programms like Top Gear earn tens of millions a year. And also from the sale of its many magazines, which upsets other magazine producers (because they do not get any subsidy).
If the BBC is so popular and successful, it should be privatised. Lets see how long it would last in the real (non-subsidised) world.
Ralph
As some readers of WUWT may be aware, Rangers FC is a football club which plays at Ibrox Stadium in Glasgow, Scotland. The club was created a few years ago when its predecessor of much the same name went bankrupt. Its average home attendance in season 2013/14 was 43,000. It draws its support predominantly from people of a Protestant (or claimed Protestant) background. Among its strongest supporters are Protestants with links to Northern Ireland. For many years its official policy was not to employ any Catholic players. (Nice club I hear you say.) In 2013 a BBC reporter made a comment which annoyed several hundred Rangers supporters. They complained to the BBC. The result: the BBC made a grovelling apology:
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/bbc-says-sorry-over-spences-rangers-comments.22092189
In the same year a BBC presenter made the statement that the words ‘priest’ and ‘paedophile’ were almost synonymous. When I complained I was told that the comment was ‘fair and accurate’. When I complained again, I was told by someone high up in the BBC complaints system that the only question he had to ask was whether or not the statement would have misled the average listener to the programme. (He held that they would not.) Nothing to do with whether or not the statement was ‘fair or accurate’. I detect a certain amount of inconsistency, to put it mildly, between the BBC’s response to the comment about Rangers and the comment about priests. (For readers who might be woefully misinformed and wish to support the BBC presenter’s view on priests may I just point out that my complaint is to do with the criteria the BBC uses in dealing with complaints. My point is that if you have people highly-placed in the BBC who are associated with a particular organisation or viewpoint you are more likely to have your complaint upheld. Hence the success of Mr Chong – and my failure.)
Perhaps the following explains the BBC’s actions. Tip: their pensions are heavily invested in carbon schemes. They are a member of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, having invested plenty pension funds there.
Now, the funny thing is that the BBC Pension fund has also invested in BIG OIL, natural gas and tobacco companies too. You have to wonder how concerned they really are about climate change. It looks like they just want to make a buck, no matter where their money goes. I thought we had a planetary emergency.
BBC Pension – Top equity Investments at 31 March 2013
Altria Group [Tobacco]
Drax Group [Electricity generation]
BHP Billiton [Oil & mining]
British American Tobacco
BG Group [Oil & natural gas]
BP [Oil & natural gas]
Royal Dutch Shell [Oil & natural gas]
Imperial Tobacco
Centrica [Natural gas & electricity]
Reynolds American [Tobacco]
Petrofac [Oilfield services]
Occidental Petroleum [Oil & natural gas]
The above list “Does not include any assets held in pooled funds.”
There may be more in the “pooled funds”.
Here is an example of the BBC seeking to use opinion polls at taxpayer cost in place of observation to allegedly combat climate change. They could start with their own carbon footprint and benefit us all on many levels.
“The BBC has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money asking 33,000 people in Asian countries how climate change is affecting them.
The £519,000 campaigning survey by little-known BBC Media Action is designed to persuade the world to adopt more hard-line policies to combat global warming.
It was immediately condemned yesterday as a flagrant abuse of the Corporation’s rules on impartiality and ‘a spectacular waste of money’ by a top academic expert.
Every year, BBC Media Action gets £22.2 million from the taxpayer via the Foreign Office and Department for International Development.
BBC Media Action has a £40 million annual budget, and the proportion not funded by the taxpayer is paid by the European Union, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the US government.
Richard Tol, professor of economics at Sussex University and a leading authority on climate change impacts, said the BBC ‘would have been better advised to invest this money in proper research’.
He said the survey’s assertions are often contradicted by more reliable sources. He said: ‘Objective data do not corroborate the survey’s reported impacts on health, droughts, predictability of rainfall, and crop yields. Attribution of any of these effects to climate change is by and large beyond the current level of scientific knowledge.'”
More at:
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2014/06/30/bbc-bias-spends-519k-on-campaigning-climate-survey-while-gagging-sceptical-voices/
One has to wonder if there are undiscovered “burgesses” stealthily influencing the organization. They couldn’t, or didn’t want to, discover Savilles behavior, a nasty self-evident sexual pervert, so likely little chance of them detecting a burgess in their ranks.
So they apologized for having him on? Do you know where the BBC has stuffed large amounts of its pension money? You need to read “From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel – BBC”. You also need to read about the “secret 28”. It has been a long time in the making.
From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/our_work/editorial_standards/impartiality/safeguarding_impartiality.html
BBC Pension investment in co2 scheme
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mypension/aboutthescheme/responsible.html
Secret 28 (The BBC based their bias on mostly comedy producers and Church of England workers)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/11/12/breaking-the-secret-list-of-the-bbc-28-is-now-public/
You are not looking at either the historic socialist practice of deep deception and “communist-interest-first-last-and-always”, but also so real world politics involved in strategic socialist/communist planning.
I have no illusions — whatever — regarding same. But, generally speaking, a mole is inactive until activated. His public persona might be stridently anti-soviet even after activation; it’s good cover. (Not blowing cover is absolutely essential to communist interest.) Double games have their own esoteric logic.
A few points which need correcting in this thread:
1. The BBC is not a left wing organisation. At the recent European Elections, it received record numbers of complaints over the amount of coverage it gave UKIP (right wing climate sceptic party). The UKIP Leader Nigel Farage has been on the BBC’s flagship political debate programme Question Time more than any other politician in recent years.
2. It is very rare for the BBC to accept a complaint or for it to be ruled against on a formal complaint. Almost all complaints result in no action at all. Chit Chong’s complaint was one of many about the Lawson interview.
3. Chit Chong is not a “nut”. Anyone was says that obviously does not know him.
4. The Green Party has consistently had disproportionately low coverage from the BBC in its political and news coverage. This has gone on for years and resulted post the recent elections in a petition of 50,000 people calling for fairer coverage. For the European elections in May, OfCom ruled that UKIP should be treated as a major party, which the BBC complied with enthusiastically. The Greens, who have significant and growing status in the UK and actually a wider range of elected representatives (though not numbers) than UKIP, were largely sidelined by the BBC.
5. References to Stalin, Churchill, Nazis, etc are completely irrelevant.
6. Lord Lawson’s GWPF is overtly anti-Green, one-sided climate sceptic, pro-fossil fuels and vehemently against forms of energy that are anything other than fossil fuel based. It notably promotes gas and coal. It has recently been asked by the UK Charity Commissioners (following over a year of investigation work which I contributed to) to cease using its status as a registered “educational charity” to propagate its lobbying activities and has itself announced that (expected soon) it will carry those activities from a separate non-charity body. Clearly there is nothing wrong with being a lobby organisation for a particular type of energy – its just that you cannot do it as an “educational charity”.
7. The GWPF has on many occasions (I have researched this for 2 years) changed the titles of sourced articles to suit its lobbying stance and has on many occasions (I have contacted sources) done this without the consent of the original authors or publishers. So articles that circulate around websites all over the world under typical GWPF banners such as “Green Madness … ” usually were not written with that title.
“The BBC is not a left wing organisation”
Oh yes they are.
‘James Abbott says:
July 10, 2014 at 4:23 pm
A few points which need correcting in this thread:’
~yawn~
The BBC, like many public services, local and central government and many NGO activist groups employ many people who have been through Common Purpose leadership training or who they themselves have sent to be trained by it. The ‘graduates’ of CP even include the Prime Minister (who visited one of its projects in India on a recent visit there).
Their aim, amongst others, is to develop ‘global leadership’ at all levels to ‘lead beyond authority’ – their own motto. Their agenda is essentially to promote a utopian communitarian ‘solution’ to the world’s problems, essentially from a globalist Marxist standpoint, in which their ‘global leaders’, supported by the useful idiots they have trained up as well, should run things. They are a left-wing version of the Freemasons but more like the masons of the 18th century in that they advance their aim in secret, through networks of ‘graduates’ whose loyalties are to the aims of CP, especially in the media and politics. They are being trained for ‘post-democratic’ leadership when Britain is dissolved inside the EU and national governments are history in Europe (and don’t think that can’t happen). One view is that they are the left’s equivalent of the right’s old boy network but there’s more to it than that.
Tin foil hat stuff? No, they exist, here’s their website.
http://www.commonpurpose.org.uk/about
This below is from an investigative website here:
http://www.tpuc.org/692/
‘Although it has 80,000 trainees in 36 cities, 18,000 graduate members and enormous power, Common Purpose is largely unknown to the general public. It recruits and trains “leaders” to be loyal to the directives of Common Purpose and the EU, instead of to their own departments, which they then undermine or subvert, the NHS being an example.
Common Purpose is identifying leaders in all levels of our government to assume power when our nation is replaced by the European Union, in what they call “the post democratic society.” They are learning to rule without regard to democracy, and will bring the EU police state home to every one of us. ‘
You should also consider that the UKIP is a fringe political party that is making gains at the expense of the traditional “right wing” (whatever that means) i.e. the conservatives and has taken the opposite views to the mainstream political parties on “climate change”. Denying the UKIP another platform to attack the government is more likely to be a higher ranking consideration of the BBC governors than simply banning sceptics.