How the Blair Government Paid for the Subversion of Our State Broadcaster

BBC: Paid bias

BBC newsroom (Photo: BBC)

So now we know yet another reason why the BBC is so biased in its reporting on climate change: because in 2006 the Labour government effectively paid it to be so. It was a £67,000 grant from the Department for International Development (DFID) which paid for the notorious, secret high-level seminar at which the BBC was persuaded to abandon all pretence at neutrality on the global warming issue. I expect the BBC’s environmental analyst Roger Harrabin just can’t wait to get his teeth into this major scandal.

Oh no, wait, I forgot: Harrabin was the seminar’s organiser. (Don’t worry, Rog. I promise not to remind anyone. We Oxbridge English Literature graduates must stick together, eh?)

Anyway, I notice one or two feathers have been ruffled by the Mail On Sunday’s suggestion that many of these revelations are new. Some of us were on to this stuff at least as far back as November 2012 (see eg this Spectator article and this Telegraph blogpost), while, of course, the real credit ought to go to the following:

Maurizio Morabito – who (despite heroic attempts by the BBC to keep it secret) managed to unearth the list of attendees at the seminar, many of them environmental activists.

Roger Tallbloke.

Andrew Orlowski. (Sorry for forgetting to include you earlier, mate. My bad. You were a star team member too and there’s really no excuse given that I used this excellent report you wrote at the time in one of my blogs….)

Christopher Booker, whose report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation – The BBC And Climate Change: A Triple Betrayal – put the scandal in its proper context.

Bishop Hill – who has provided the most thorough account of the affair in his pamphlet the Propaganda Bureau.

and, above all, to Tony Newbery, the heroic North Wales pensioner, whose indefatigable pursuit of the story and protracted struggle with the Information Tribunal brought all this stuff into the open.

I call that a brilliant team effort by 28Gate United and I for one am absolutely delighted by the contribution of our latest signing, top Mail On Sunday striker David Rose. This, after all, is a story which has been quite shamefully ignored by much of our mainstream media. Perhaps this will now change and, if we’re lucky, we might even see one or two heads rolling.