Thought for the Day

Thought for the Day is a five minute slot on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, during which banal platitudes are recited by a cleric. The BBC uses it as an opportunity to "celebrate diversity", by inviting Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs to hold forth; always provided that they don't stray from the moral certitudes of the BBC.

The programme serves a very useful function for me: when the dread words "and now it's time for Thought for the Day" issue from the alarm radio, instantly roused from my torpor, I scramble to hit the off button and head for the shower. Without it, I would be late for work habitually.

But on Friday, I was too late. The speaker was John L. Bell, a minister of the Church of Scotland and BBC regular (despite having been caught lying on air about an alleged Muslim conscript in the Israeli army, allegedly jailed for allegedly refusing an order to shoot Palestinian children).

The talk, on the subject of men being more evil than women, was enlightening for me personally. In the eyes of Rev. Bell, my evil can be bracketed with that of Bashar al-Assad, Adolf Hitler, members of paedophile gangs and organisers of slave labour. All because I don't believe there is persuasive evidence that mankind is causing catastrophic climate change, and have the temerity to say so. Truly, I am damned. I may as well take up murder, rape and genocide.

Here is the talk:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00sc633

Biased BBC, Part 3716

The Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, has edited an anthology of 60 poems to celebrate Her Majesty's diamond jubilee; one for each year of her reign. BBC Radio 4 Today, its flagship current affairs programme, has decided to broadcast three of them. On Tuesday, it broadcast the poem for 1985, Another Country by the acclaimed left-wing poet and professional northerner Sean O'Brien. You can listen to it here, at 1:19:50. You will notice that it passes without comment (unless you can call the reverential silence at the conclusion a comment).

The subject was the year long miners' strike, and anyone old enough to have been aware of current affairs at that time would affirm that it was the defining political event of that year, or any other in decades, closing one era in British political, social and economic history (wherein trades union leaders were as wearily familiar as premiership footballers, and much more important) and opening another (wherein Britain ceased to plummet down economic league tables).

Predictably, the poem depicts southerners, and by implication anyone who supported the government of the day, as selfish, callous and wicked. There is, of course, no mention of, nor allusion to, the facts that:

• the mines were heavily subsidised to produce coal that was surplus to requirements
• the National Union of Mineworkers had shown no compunction in allowing the lights and everything else to go out during two strikes in the 1970s (compelling the government, which fell as a result, to restrict industry to a 3-day working week)
• the NUM leadership refused to hold a nationwide ballot of its members to approve strike action, as its own constitution demanded
• large numbers of miners refused to strike from the beginning (for example 20,000 out of 27,000  miners in Nottinghamshire voted against strike action in their own ballot)
• the Trades Union Congress (TUC) refused to sanction the strike
• the NUM organised phalanxes of 'flying pickets' to intimidate workers at plants using coal into not working.

Now O'Brien can write whatever poems he likes, and it's all the same to me. But in picking this poem, in 3 out of 60, and allowing it to pass without comment, the BBC has failed in its duty of impartiality to the public who are supposed to own it, preferring to build relentlessly on Guardianista mythology. Nobody under about 40 relying on the BBC would know any different. That's wrong, and it's scary.

Toast of Surrey

Excellent time at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre (patron: Consult Hyperion) last night!

The BBC manufactures news

Here is the BBC Radio 4's "The World This Weekend" from last Sunday.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01cj83k/The_World_This_Weekend_26_02_2012/

For those who don't know, it's BBC Radio's flagship current affairs programme, broadcast on Sunday lunchtime. It consists of a five minute news bulletin, followed by 25 minutes of discussion, interviews and analysis.

The second item on the news was that an ex-head of the National Health Service (appointed by the previous government), Nigel Crisp, "has told this programme" that the government's NHS reforms are a mess that will set the service back (etc, etc). And, sure enough, he said those things (amidst quite a lot that was considerably more emollient) in a segment after the news. His ex-boss, Labour's John Hutton, was also a part of the discussion and the tenor of his remarks was actually quite supportive of the coalition government's stance. I'd regard that as slightly more newsworthy: ex-Labour minister agrees with the Tories. Which seems to suggest that the BBC is more interested in highlighting anti-government views than pro-government views.

But that is incidental to my main point: short of John Humphrys running amok with a pump-action shotgun, what happens inside a BBC studio is not the news. On any proposition, it must be trivially easy to get somebody who used to be important to vent on the radio, for or against. There is an ex-senior civil servant who disagrees with a government policy. Big deal. If doctors plan to strike because of the reforms, that is news. If some clause of the government's bill gets voted down in parliament, that is news. Something has happened in the outside world, and it affects the public at large.

Of course, none of this would bother me if I weren't forced to pay for the BBC's inflated sense of importance and its tendentious news presentation.

From the sublime to the ridiculous

Great science story in the Telegraph today: a 'new' oldest group of organisms on earth has been found: they're somewhere between 12,000 and 200,000 years old (most likely around 100,000 years). Each spans 10 miles and weigh more than 6,000 tons! They're sea grasses in the Mediterranean, as here:

Great work by Professor Carlos Duarte of the University of Western Australia. Then he goes and spoils it all by claiming "If climate change continues, the outlook for this species is very bad". What? At 200,000 years, the things have lived through the better part of two full-blown ice ages! If they're over about 130,000 years old, they lived through the last interglacial, which was nearly 3ºC or about 5ºF warmer than today. See this temperature reconstruction from the Vostok (Antarctica) ice core:

Even at 12,000 years old, they'd have seen some of the last full-blown ice age. And they'd have lived through the Holocene climate optimum (around 8,000 and 7,000 years before the present) and the Minoan, Roman and Medieval warm periods: all warmer than at present, as shown by this Greenland ice core:

 

You don't get beyond your 12,000th (or 100,000th or 200,000th) birthday without being just a little bit adaptable [rolls eyes heavenwards].

Words that make me gag

Is it just me, or has the phrase "policy maker" (even worse, sometimes the word "policymaker") gone from 0 to 100 uses per day on the BBC, and like media, in the last five years or so?

The most frequent use, it seems to me, is by self-righteous, self-styled "campaigners", lobbed softball questions on the Today programme, demanding that policy makers do this, that or the other thing, of which BBC-types would generally approve.

The very words make me retch. The implication is of a group of people, a class apart, possessed of preternatural ability, in dialogue with journalists and lobbyists, dreaming up things that are supposedly good for the hoi polloi. The only policy makers should be the self-same hoi polloi. The apparatchiks of political parties might offer up draft policies, for the consideration of the masses at election time or in referenda. But only the people should make policy.

My google searches on "policy maker" yield most mentions for members of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee and their counterparts at the US Federal Reserve. I'm not sure that much can be derived from google searches anymore, since they seem highly personalised, but certainly those people fit my definition very well, as people with executive authority who seem beyond democratic accountability. Their counterparts are now openly the unelected leaders of Greece and Italy, as nominated by Berlin, Paris and Brussels.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.