IT IS beyond debate that the BBC’s complaints system is corrupt and not fit for purpose. The fundamental problem is that they mark their own homework, so it is not surprising that so few complaints are upheld by the BBC Executive Complaints Unit (ECU).
The first line of defence is called Stage 1. This is where complaints are initially handled and fobbed off with juvenile replies which never address the substance of the complaint.
Most complainants either cannot be bothered to pursue the matter or are unaware that they can. Anyone who does persist with their complaint usually comes up against the second line of defence – play for time and hope the issue goes away.
Although the BBC say they aim to reply within 20 working days, they almost always take longer, particularly when they know they have not got a leg to stand on. It is only after this second stage that the complaint can be passed up to the ECU.
I currently have three outstanding complaints, all dating back to last year. They are all straightforward and it should be easy enough for the BBC to prove their articles were correct, or correct them and apologise. The first was a Justin Rowlatt report last September, concerning drought in Somalia:
- Climate change is ‘turbo-charging’ Somalia’s problems
The report claimed that ‘in 2022 the country experienced its worst drought for 40 years – an event scientists estimate was made 100 times more likely by human-caused climate change‘.
As my complaint pointed out, the claim about droughts is false and absurd. According to the official World Bank Climate Portal data, the 2022 drought was not unusually severe, and many previous droughts in the 20th century were much worse:
https://climateknowledgeportal.worldbank.org/country/somalia/climate-data-historical
- How is climate change affecting hurricanes?
In a December report, the BBC claimed: ‘But it is “likely” that a higher proportion of tropical cyclones across the globe are reaching category three or above, meaning they reach the highest wind speeds, according to the UN’s climate body, the IPCC.’
This is what the IPCC actually say: ‘There is low confidence in most reported long-term (multi-decadal to centennial) trends in TC frequency- or intensity-based metrics.’
The US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration say: ‘There is no strong evidence of century-scale increasing trends in US landfalling hurricanes or major hurricanes. Similarly for Atlantic basin-wide hurricane frequency (after adjusting for changing observing capabilities over time), there is not strong evidence for an increase since the late 1800s in hurricanes, major hurricanes, or the proportion of hurricanes that reach major hurricane intensity.’
The BBC article includes a disgracefully dishonest chart, purportedly showing a sharp rise in the number of Cat 5 and other major hurricanes in recent years, quoting the US National Hurricane Center. However the latter warn that many hurricanes were never spotted in mid-ocean prior to the satellite era began in the 1980s.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-42251921
- A year of extreme weather that challenged billions
In an end of the year report, clearly designed to push their climate agenda, the BBC claimed: ‘Climate change has brought record-breaking heat this year, and with it extreme weather, from hurricanes to month-long droughts.’
The report went on to list a few random weather events, but failed to provide any evidence that they were anything other than natural events, nor that such events have been getting more frequent or extreme over time.
By this stage, most complainants would have given up or forgotten about it, thus enabling the BBC to avoid having to substantiate their fake claims. I have of course chased, and been told they have a ‘backlog’, partly due apparently to staff working from home!
The BBC’s ECU needs to be shut down, and replaced by a genuinely independent body, (certainly not the complicit Ofcom). Any complaints that are not dealt with on time should automatically be passed on to this new body.
What the BBC did not tell you about Cyclone Alfred
CYCLONE Alfred hit Queensland last weekend, after weakening to a tropical storm. The media coverage was surprisingly muted, given the hysterical reporting usually associated with hurricanes or tropical cyclones as they are called in Australia.
The BBC, for instance, never seem to miss an opportunity to label each as somehow record-breaking, and keep telling us that climate change is making them all much more powerful.
Perhaps it is because cyclones in Australia are much less common and severe than they used to be there!
Australian Bureau of Meteorology
Rampion wind farm given £895million in subsidies
A REPORT by one of the country’s leading experts on the economics of energy policy into the cost of Ed Miliband’s plans to decarbonise the grid by 2030 has been given good coverage by the Telegraph and GB News.
Gordon Hughes is former Professor of Economics at the University of Edinburgh, and senior adviser on energy and environmental policy at the World Bank. His extremely detailed study finds that Miliband’s plans will add at least £15billion a year to energy bills – this is on top of the £12billion we are already lumbered with. Even then the grid will be at risk of widespread blackouts, as it will not be able to cope with the inherent intermittency of wind and solar power.
None of this should come as a surprise to TCW readers. As I wrote at the time, analysis of last November’s report from the National Energy System Operator (NESO) indicated that Miliband’s plans could cost as much as £20billion a year.
Miliband’s Department of Energy Security and Net Zero refused to discuss Hughes’s figures. Instead they tried to bluff it out with this statement: ‘We wholly reject these findings, which are fundamentally incorrect on what has driven higher energy prices. Every family and business has paid the price of rocketing energy bills because previous governments failed to invest at scale over many years in the clean, secure home-grown power our country needed, so we have been left exposed to volatile international fossil fuel markets.’
The claim that bills would be lower now if the Conservatives had built more wind and solar farms has been trotted out by Labour for years. It is however totally untrue. Subsidies for renewable energy have continued to grow year in, year out, as more and more renewable capacity is built. As a case in point, Rampion offshore wind farm, which ruins the view from Brighton beach, has been paid an astonishing £895million in subsidies since it started operations in 2017. By the time its 15-year contract runs out, the cost of subsidies will probably exceed £2billion, all of course added to our energy bills.
Rampion is just one offshore wind farm among many. Just think of how much higher our bills would have been if the previous government had built even more!
