THERE is a huge and troubling paradox in the selection by the Government of Ian Cheshire as preferred candidate to become chair of Ofcom.
He has been presented as a safe pair of hands because he is a former chief executive of Kingfisher, the FTSE 100 retail group behind B&Q; a former chairman of Barclays UK and, until recently, chairman of Channel 4. On paper, he is the embodiment of stability – an experienced figure brought in to oversee a regulator facing rapid expansion and increasing complexity.
Yet there is lesser-known dimension to his background which is of huge significance and was not mentioned in the Government release about his likely appointment. Alongside his corporate career, research by News-watch has revealed that Cheshire has occupied a series of senior positions at the heart of the influential climate and sustainability policy network.
He is chair of the ‘We Mean Business Coalition‘, a major international alliance committed to accelerating the transition to a Net Zero economy and to mobilising investment running into the trillions of dollars towards ‘decarbonisation’. He has also chaired the Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change and led the government-established Ecosystem Markets Task Force. These are senior roles within organisations that operate at the highest level of policy formation and capital allocation, helping to shape both the direction and the sheer scale of Net Zero implementation across business and government. Set against the highly contested nature of climate and Net Zero policy, and economic and social implications extending across entire industries and national economies, that record raises an unavoidable question: how will he approach one of the most sensitive areas of modern public debate when his own professional world has been so closely aligned with a programme of such magnitude?
Unlike his predecessor Lord Michael Grade, Cheshire has no direct experience of editorial judgment or the delicate balance required in adjudicating competing claims in public discourse.
All of this is highly relevant in the evolving role of Ofcom and the way in which ‘due impartiality’ is now interpreted in areas deemed to be governed by ‘settled’ scientific consensus. This is no longer a narrow question of broadcasting standards. Under the Online Safety Act 2023, Ofcom has been transformed into a far more powerful and all-embracing regulator, charged not only with overseeing traditional media but with shaping the behaviour of digital platforms and, increasingly, the informational environment in which citizens form their views on questions of major economic and political consequence.
In that domain, climate change has become a major and highly sensitive issue. As News-watch and others such as Paul Homewood have documented on TCW, the BBC responds to complaints by routinely and bull-headedly invoking ‘scientific consensus’ to justify excluding dissenting voices from the scope of due impartiality. Correspondence from the BBC’s Editorial Complaints Unit has made it clear that those who do not accept the framing of a climate emergency are deemed not to form part of the range of views that must be reflected. This is not balance: it is crude boundary-setting and a restriction of free speech applied in an area where policy choices carry profound economic implications.
Ofcom, for its part, has shown no appetite to challenge this approach. Its adjudications and guidance have consistently reinforced the principle that coverage should reflect the ‘weight of evidence’ as defined by established authorities. The effect is to align regulator and broadcaster within the same conceptual framework, one in which consensus is used as a filter to determine which perspectives qualify for inclusion at all. That tendency has been sharpened by the Ofcom Content Board’s highly unusual decision to reverse an earlier ruling and launch formal investigations into TalkTV and TalkRadio broadcasts accused of excessive climate scepticism. Having initially decided that the programmes did not warrant investigation, the board re-opened the cases.
This regulatory posture is reinforced by Ofcom’s wider role beyond adjudication. Through its Making Sense of Media educational programme, the regulator has partnered organisations including the Guardian Foundation which receives support from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and a wider network of campaign groups to promote media literacy and to counter ‘misinformation’. These initiatives, linked to the broader framework of the Online Safety Act, are now being disseminated in schools, universities and public institutions. The effect is to extend Ofcom’s influence from the regulation of content into the shaping of how information itself is interpreted and evaluated. In practice, the same conceptual framework, centred on authority, consensus and the mitigation of ‘harm’, risks being embedded not only in broadcast output but in the educational and institutional environments through which future audiences are formed. The organisations involved show no sign of support for open debate let alone climate scepticism. Many are full-on advocates of Net Zero.
It is here that Cheshire’s background becomes even more concerning. He is entering this debate not as a neutral arbiter, but from the network of institutions that has promoted and consolidated the Net Zero agenda across government, corporate and regulatory domains. Organisations dedicated to climate action, sustainability and decarbonisation are not marginal pressure groups: they are hugely (often government) resourced and integral to the policy architecture of the modern state and to the mobilisation of capital on a global scale. To be embedded in that world is to share, by default, its questionable assumptions an orthodoxies about urgency, direction and legitimacy.
The risk is that Cheshire will see no need to question them because, from his professional and institutional experience, it scarcely appears as an orthodoxy at all. It is simply the settled framework within which responsible actors operate. In such circumstances, the exclusion of dissent does not register as a problem because it is the natural consequence of adhering to what is understood to be ‘the evidence’.
However, the moment anyone accepts a ‘climate emergency’ and prescriptions such as Net Zero, they are firmly in the realm of policy. Questions of cost, feasibility, economic impact and social consequence, often involving commitments measured in the trillions, are inherently political. To treat them as settled is to foreclose debate in an area that goes to the heart of democratic choice and arguably, according to figures such as Rupert Darwall, to threaten human life on a massive scale.
The consequences of such limitations are not confined to programme output; they are visible in the way the BBC now manages the response of its own audience. A recent article on TCW described how a reader, responding to a BBC report on climate, posted a measured comment suggesting that those concerned about a ‘climate crisis’ might consult the work of a number of dissenting scientists. The comment contained no abuse, no inflammatory language, and no apparent breach of the BBC’s published house rules. Yet it was removed. When the author appealed, the BBC upheld the decision but declined to specify which rule had been broken.
This episode illustrates the huge depth of confirmation bias. The issue was not how the point was made, but that it was made at all. Views that fall outside the accepted framework are filtered out before they can enter into discussion. The BBC thus moves beyond shaping the news agenda into shaping the boundaries of permissible responses to it. What begins as editorial judgment becomes, at the level of audience interaction, a form of blatant exclusion.
Placed alongside the corporation’s formal stance, endorsed by its complaints system, that those who reject the framing of a climate emergency fall outside the scope of due impartiality, the pattern becomes harder to dismiss. The range of acceptable opinion is pre-defined. Once defined, it is enforced not only through editorial selection but through the moderation of public engagement.
Into this structure steps a new Ofcom chairman whose instincts are those of co-ordination, consensus-building and institutional alignment. There is nothing inherently wrong with those qualities in a corporate context. But in a regulatory body tasked with safeguarding the plurality of public debate in areas involving vast economic and social transformation, they carry a hugely different and sinister implication. It suggests a continuation, even an intensification, of the existing tendency towards convergence between regulator, broadcaster and the wider ecosystem of received policy advocacy.
The use of institutional authority to define the limits of legitimate discourse in relation to policies is of immense economic consequence. When those limits are drawn too tightly, and when they are reinforced by a regulatory framework that extends from content regulation into education and public understanding, the space for genuine debate shrinks dramatically.
Two related questions need to be asked: Whose interests is that in and was Cheshire appointed to shore up Net Zero?
