Tag: Jonathan Dimbleby

Free Speech Is Ddead in Britain. I Learned This on a BBC Programme Called Free Speech

November 20, 2014

Is it just my imagination or was there a widely publicised report a few weeks ago by a professor called Alexis Jay describing in clinical detail how at least 1400 mostly underage girls were groomed, drugged and raped over a period of years in the northern town of Rotherham by gangs of men from predominately Kashmiri-Pakistani Muslim backgrounds?

The reason I ask is that earlier this week, I was publicly called a liar, an Islamophobe and a racist for mentioning this fact on a BBC TV debate programme called – laughably – Free Speech. “Boo! Hiss!” went the studio audience. “Not true” went the silly girl panelist sitting to my left. “List one contemporary problem facing Britain that’s NOT the fault of Muslims? Are there any in your mind?” said someone on Twitter with evidently strong and somewhat unnerving radical Islamist sympathies.

It’s normally at this point in the proceedings that the moderator comes to your rescue. I know Jonathan or David Dimbleby would have done. Grumble though I do on occasion about the leftist bias of their respective programmes Any Questions and Question Time, the fact remains that the Dimblebys are bright, scrupulous, supremely well-informed professionals. No way would they allow it to go unchallenged if one of their panelists said something that was perfectly true only to have the rest of the panel and (almost) the entire audience to shout him down as a racist, Islamophobic liar.

But the same, unfortunately, could not be said for the moderators on this particular programme, which was evidently designed as a kind of looser, more youthful version of Question Time, aimed at the 16 to 34-year old demographic. They pointed the mics willy nilly at panelists and members of the audience with little regard to the sense – or nonsense – of what was being said.

Certainly, there was no evidence of any presiding intelligence shaping the show or the direction and balance of the debate. For all the difference the Blue-Peter-level moderation made, we could have been talking about Miley Cyrus’s twerking moves or Kim Kardashian’s bum, rather than about highly contentious, very serious and potentially dangerous issues like so-called “rape culture” and the radicalisation of young British Muslims.

Afterwards various viewers who had been appalled as I was by this car crash of debate asked why I’d volunteered for it. “Why go on James? It’s like stepping into the cretins’ den,” said one. Other comments from sympathisers included: “I had to turn it off,”; “You must have the patience of a saint after last night’s “Free Speech”,” It’s not a debate, more a left-wing hate-session against anyone daring not to conform”; “Have watched you on the BBC last night. I have to say that even growing up in communist Poland I have rarely seen such a shameless set up and left wing propaganda show. I admire your courage really.”

And the answer is: definitely not for the money. (£150 in case you wondered). No, the reason you do these things is partly in the naive hope that this time it will be different – that for once you’ll find a BBC debate programme where your function isn’t to play the token right-wing nutcase for the torture-porn delight of an audience of rabid lefties. And also because someone has to put the alternative viewpoint across, otherwise all you’re going to get is a bunch of people spouting the usually right-on, progressive cant and just agreeing with one another. If no one does this, then the enemy will have won.

So that’s why I did it but, God, I almost wish I hadn’t….

Read the rest at Breitbart London

Related posts:

  1. Freedom of speech is dead in Australia
  2. Why isn’t Lord Lawson dead yet?
  3. Radio Free Delingpole XVI: buying Britain’s gold back
  4. A speech, a radio interview, and the strongest cannabis I’ve had for 15 years

 

The BBC: Al Gore’s UK Propaganda Mouthpiece

I wasn’t planning on bringing up my hideous encounter with Old Etonian climate-fear promoter Jonathan Porritt on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions again. It feels like picking at an old scab. But, if you’ve ever nurtured suspicions about the BBC’s persistent left-liberal-AGW bias, here’s a blog you absolutely have to read.

In it blogger TonyN gives the programme a thorough Fisking and demonstrates, pretty comprehensively I think, just how far presenter Jonathan Dimbleby allowed his instinctive sympathies towards Anthropogenic Global Warming alarmism to hijack what should have been a balanced debate. (Hat Tip: world’s greatest living Kiwi Josie Jackson)

He notes, for example, the decided mismatch in the way Porritt and I were introduced: Porritt as a respected elder-statesman type; me as a comedy right-wing caricature.

Jonathan Porritt: Doyen of the green party, founder of Forum for the Future, and until a few weeks ago, chairman of the Sustainable Development Commission, and the government’s chief environmental adviser, to which post he was appointed by Tony Blair a decade ago.

James Delingpole: comes from a rather different tradition, author and Spectator columnist, he reviles what he calls the deceit and lies of the anthropogenic global warming industry … He’s also scathing about left liberals who he is prone to see in his words as ‘stupid’.

I remember baulking at the intro even at the time. I don’t think left-liberals are necessarily stupid, just misguided, self-deluded and wrong (which aren’t the same thing at all). Problem is, if you try picking the presenter up on something he says about you right at the beginning it makes you look either pompous and self-regarding or it raises the possibility he’ll pick on you later on. Not that I should have worried about the second option: as TonyN suggests, Dimbleby did that anyway.

The question about climate change came from a Mr Gent, who asked, ‘Is the answer to an 80% reduction in carbon emissions blowing in the wind?’

On this programme the panel genuinely do not know what the questions will be, although they may be able to guess what is likely to be come up and do some home work. The chairman [Dimbleby] immediately slipped the poisoned pill to Delingpole, although he must have realised that pitting a journalist with no specialised knowledge of this subject against a specialist like Porritt could make for an uneven contest. And addressing the question first is always a disadvantage; there is nothing to react to and no thinking time.

TonyN goes on to quote in full what I was allowed to say on the subject, and what Porritt (Prince Charles’s chief climate-fear guru) was able to say on the subject. He is in little doubt as to who was given the more leeway.

When guests on Any Questions get abusive, Dimbleby usually cuts them off pretty quickly and tries to restore some semblance of propriety to the discussion. In this case he let Porritt continue, in spite of his repeatedly having suggested that a fellow guest was a liar.

As I’ve said before, I believe that Dimbleby is a decent, well-intentioned, likeable man who does his best to stay neutral. But he is also a paid-up member of the Green Alliance and is about to install a wind turbine at his Devon, much to the upset of some of his neighbours. This, I would suggest, makes him a somewhat parti-pris moderator for a debate on Global Warming.

But please, do be sure to read the blog at www.harmlesssky.org in full. Then make up your own minds and let me know what you think.

Related posts:

  1. Any Questions
  2. What is it that greens like Jonathan Porritt so LOATHE about nature?
  3. David Dimbleby interview: celebrating 30 years of ‘Question Time’
  4. Prof Brian Cox: prettier than Brigstocke but just as wrong

What is it that greens like Jonathan Porritt so LOATHE about nature? | James Delingpole

August 22, 2009

What is it that greens like Jonathan Porritt so LOATHE about nature?

For some time now, I have been struck by a strange paradox about the more radical members of the green movement: if they love nature so much, how come they expend so much energy trying to destroy it?

I’m thinking, for example, of their championing of biofuels – a disastrous idea which not only helped starve the poor by causing a massive hike in global food prices but which has also led to still further devastation of their beloved rainforests. And also of the windfarms with which they plan to carpet the British landscape, in theory to save it from an apocalyptic future envisioned by their highly suspect computer models, in practice to render it ugly and unnatural and damaged almost beyond rescue.

The Hon. Sir Jonathon Espie Porritt, 2nd Baronet – he proposes a two-children limit on families

Or listen to Any Questions and hear it for yourself in the visceral hatred, contempt and shrill self-righteousness in the voice of ecology campaigner Sir Jonathan Porritt (Bart.) as he pours scorn on my suggestion that the Severn Barrage project will cause massive environmental damage to the bird-rich mud flats of the Severn Estuary (not to mention killing off one of Britain’s quirkier national phenomena, the mini-tidal-wave-like Severn Bore).

The £20 billion project, if it ever happens, will produce the same amount of energy as one nuclear power station – but at about eight times the cost. Porritt, naturally, is a huge fan – and seems to have little regard for the unfortunate environmental side-effects.

“Wonderful that James is such an ardent defender of the mud flats. At last he’s found a cause worth defending,” sneers Porritt doing his bravura impersonation of Alan Rickman’s oleaginously evil Professor Snape in the Harry Potter movies.

Elsewhere in the programme, Porritt calls me a “flat earther” and shrieks “Lies. All lies” when I make several perfectly truthful and valid statements questioning the so-called scientific “consensus” regarding Anthropogenic Global Warming. Needless to say, he makes no attempt to answer when I put to him that if, as Al Gore claims in An Inconvenient Truth global warming increases inexorably with higher CO2 emissions then how come, when CO2 emissions have continued to rise in the last 12 years global temperatures have actually fallen. Displaying the grandeur and pomposity you might imagine an-Old-Etonian-baronet turned eco-freak progressive would have striven a little harder to mask, Porritt carries on as if anyone who disagrees with him is scum quite beneath his contempt.

I’d never met Porritt before. I found his zealotry genuinely frightening, not least because – except when the mask slips, as I think it did on occasion during the programme, enabling listeners to make up their own minds as to what a piece of work this man is – he speaks his apocalyptic (and often scientifically dubious) views in a voice of such persuasive, modulated reasonableness. Worse still, he has the ear of our future King.

I didn’t mention this during the programme, because I thought things were already getting pretty mucky, but I do think there’s something a bit scary about a man who publicly advocates, in all seriousness, that couples should limit themselves to having two children only in order to save Mother Gaia from the deleterious influence of loathsome mankind. I come from a large happy family. I  love my little bro and my two little sisters. If we followed Porritt’s fascistic strictures, they wouldn’t now exist.

Was the programme quite as biased towards the liberal-left as I predicted in yesterday’s blog? Well to be fair to Jonathan Dimbleby I believe he tries as hard as he possibly can to be neutral. (As neutral as a man can be when he’s such a believer in AGW that he’s erecting a wind turbine in his Devon garden, much to the fury of some of his neighbours). The audience at beautiful Middle Wallop’s magnificent Museum Of Army Flying (highly recommended, especially for its Arnhem dioramas with Horsa gliders, and Gallipoli, a six-pounder that was actually used in the battle) were generous and pleasant. But I can’t pretend it wasn’t an uphill struggle being the only libertarian right-wing “AGW denier” against a panel of three liberal-lefties.

Even my nice neighbour, novelist Kate Mosse, who was supposed to be at best neutral came out on the deep green leftie side with possibly the most ludicrously stupid remark of the evening. If we put up with electric pylons, she said, we should put up with wind turbines too. And actually, she thought, the windfarms in South West France where she has her second home look rather pretty.

Yes Kate, and I’d bet they’d look even prettier with a makeover by Cath Kidston. Why on earth didn’t we think of this before?

Related posts:

  1. The BBC: Al Gore’s UK propaganda mouthpiece
  2. Greens sacrifice babies to Satan, sell grandmothers into slavery, etc
  3. Any Questions
  4. Only a nutter like Gordon Brown would think it’s a good idea to scrap Trident