Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
Energy bills will rise by more than expected from April, following an announcement from the regulator Ofgem.
But Labour pledged in its manifesto: “We will save families hundreds of pounds on their bills, not just in the short term, but for good.” It also promised bills would come down by “up to £300 by 2030”.
Responding to the price cap rise, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said it was due to “our reliance on the fossil fuel markets” and added: “We’re acting to bring down bills for everyone with our mission for clean, home-grown power that we control.”
The government wants to remove nearly all fossil fuels from UK electricity production by 2030.
It recognises that we have some of the highest electricity prices in the world, and then goes on to say:
The largest, and most variable, component of a UK customer’s electricity bill is the “wholesale” price. This is the cost at which suppliers buy it from the companies that generate it.
Other parts of the bill include “network” costs for operating, maintaining and upgrading the power grid, and “policy” costs, which include government levies to help fund environmental projects.
The main reason for the spikes in electricity bills over the past few years has been changes to wholesale costs. This is linked to an increase in international gas prices.
The main reason why electricity prices are currently high is because the cost of gas – which is what sets the electricity price – is also high,” said a spokesperson from the Climate Change Committee, the government’s independent adviser on cutting emissions.
In the long term, renewables “will be bringing down overall energy bills, and specifically electricity bills, for the UK,” argues Dr Iain Staffell of Imperial College London.
There is an oblique reference to high renewable costs in the past:
Strike prices were expensive, but have fallen considerably, apart from a small rise from 2022-24 linked to global supply chain pressures.
But it is phrased in such a way as to fool readers into thinking that we are no longer paying these prices. There is certainly nowhere in the article that refers to just how much of our high electricity prices is still due to subsidising renewables. Instead they refer to wholesale prices as the largest component of bills, and the CCC’s lie about the cost of gas.
The figures as supplied by OFGEM tell a totally different story.
Since 2015, wholesale costs, (excluding CfD and Capacity Market subsidies, which OFGEM include), have increased their component of the cap from £260 to £399 for a typical household, an increase of 53%. But this is virtually all accounted for by a rise of 52% in RPI.
Of course there have been ups and downs in wholesale costs, but overall they have changed little in real terms. In fact, in reality they have fallen, as the costs shown by OFGEM include the effect of carbon pricing, which should really be seen as yet another subsidy for renewables.
When we look at all the other costs lumped into the price cap, mostly subsidies and network costs, we see they have doubled from £325 to £648. Renewable subsidies alone account for £210, and most of the extra grid costs are related to intermittent renewable generation in one way or another.
Sometimes gas prices go up, as they have done in the last few months. And sometimes they go down. But overall wholesale prices have pretty much followed the RPI.
It is not gas prices or wholesale prices which are responsible for the UK’s sky high electricity prices. It is renewable energy.
It is astonishing, if unsurprising, that BBC Verify can devote a whole report on the topic, without once even mentioning the fact, never mind quantifying it.
The two activists, Poynting and Reuben, tie themselves in knots in their attempt to deny the undeniable.
They start, of course, from the false assumption that “renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuels and then wonder why the UK has some of the highest electricity prices in the world.
The two activists, Poynting and Reuben, tie themselves in knots in their attempt to deny the undeniable.
They start, of course, from the false assumption that “renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuels and then wonder why the UK has some of the highest electricity prices in the world.
They waffle about how electricity prices are “funding environmental projects”, but never get to the crux of the problem, which is very easy to understand.
This year, our electricity bills will be £12.9 billion higher than they should have been because of subsidies for those “cheap” renewables. This is an increase of £3 billion since 2023/24, and the cost will keep on rising:
Secondly, even the new renewable energy Miliband wants to see is not cheaper than gas power either.
The offshore wind projects which won contracts last year will be paid £83.01/MWh at current prices. According to OFGEM, the wholesale price of electricity ranged between about £60 and £90/MWh during 2024. At best new offshore wind will be about the same as gas.
There is also no evidence of the “volatility” in gas prices, which BBC Verify claim exists. Take away the Ukraine war spike in 2022, and gas prices show long term stability.
If BBC Verify was doing its job properly, it would have looked at NESO’s Clean Power 2030 report, which makes clear that grid upgrades, curtailment costs, storage will INCREASE electricity costs by £25/MWh by 2030 – another £8 billion on our energy bills.
Some UK social media users have been pouring milk down their sinks and toilets in protest at the trial of a new feed additive that claims to significantly reduce the emission of methane gas in dairy cows
Some UK social media users have been pouring milk down their sinks and toilets in protest at the trial of a new feed additive that claims to significantly reduce the emission of methane gas in dairy cows.
Arla Foods, a Danish-Swedish company which owns the UK’s biggest dairy cooperative, announced last week that 30 of its farms across the country would test the additive, named Bovaer.
The company says Bovaer – which is added in small quantities to cow feed – could reduce cow methane emissions by between 30-45%.
It has been approved for use by UK regulators, and several major supermarkets will stock milk produced by cattle eating feed with the additive.
Some online users have raised concerns around the use of Bovaer, citing issues around the safety of certain compounds used in it.
However, experts have told the BBC that the additive “does not pose any food safety issues”.
Other consumers have been threatening to boycott products from leading supermarkets in anger over the trial, while multiple farmers have taken to social media to inform consumers that they don’t use Bovaer.
Meanwhile, baseless claims of it being part of a “depopulation” plot have swirled online alongside misinformation about its links to US-billionaire Bill Gates.
The manufacturer, DSM-Firmenich, says “mistruths and misinformation, external” have been spread about its product. It says it is “totally safe” for use, and has been tested over many years in many countries.
What do we know about Bovaer and the new trial?
Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and is helping drive climate change.
Given that methane breaks down in the atmosphere after ten years or so, it is irrelevant as far as climate change is concerned. (This is even before we consider the fact that the wavelengths affected by methane are already nearly fully saturated).
The article goes on to assure us that the additive is perfectly safe. But the real issue is that we simply don’t know. So why even take the risk of using additives which have absolutely no benefit?
Further and better particulars have emerged about the green billionaire-funded course run by the Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN), which has to date attracted over 400 participants from around the world. It recently signed up Marco Silva, the climate ‘disinformation’ specialist employed by BBC Verify.
Further and better particulars have emerged about the green billionaire-funded course run by the Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN), which has to date attracted over 400 participants from around the world. It recently signed up Marco Silva, the climate ‘disinformation’ specialist employed by BBC Verify. To “hit closer to home”, course participants are told to pick a fruit such as a mango and discuss why it wasn’t as tasty as the year before due to the impact of climate change. Noted climate hysteric Saffron O’Neill has been a past speaker and she is on record as speculating on the need for “fines and imprisonment” for expressing scepticism about “well supported” science. There is something very disturbing about a climate activist from a State-reliant broadcaster attending a course funded by narrative-driven billionaires with a speaker who has suggested that sceptical climate scientists and writers be locked up in prison.
As the Daily Sceptic disclosed, the OCJN six-month course is run by the Reuters Institute, which is funded by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Direct funding for the course, which started last year, has been provided by the Laudes Foundation and the European Climate Fund, the latter heavily supported by Extinction Rebellion funder Sir Christopher Hohn. Immersion in the correct political narrative surrounding climate collapse, the so-called ‘settled’ science, and the need for extreme Net Zero measures, whatever the cost, is the order of the day. It would appear that the aim of the OCJN is to insert constant fearmongering messages into media stories, as global elites press ahead with a collectivist Net Zero political agenda.
In a recently published essay, two OCJN organisers give chapter and verse as to how this is being directed on the course. It is designed to allow climate journalists to “move beyond their siloed past” into a strategic position within newsrooms “combining expertise with collaboration”. The “pick your mango” strategy is designed to make climate change “less abstract” and delegates are told to pick a “beloved fruit or activity that everyone in your country or region seems to care about, and seems to capture attention when impacted by climate change”.
“Less abstract” is one way of summing up this pseudoscientific hogwash. ‘Infantile’ might be better. None of it is based on a scintilla of scientific proof. Much the same can be said for a presentation by Dr. Friederike Otto who uses computer models to claim her green billionaire-funded World Weather Attribution (WWA) team can attribute individual bad weather events to human-caused climate change. Following Otto’s presentation, attendees are reported to have shown a “massive jump in self-confidence” when attributing individual weather to the long-term climate change.
The distinguished science writer Roger Pielke Jnr. is scathing about weather attribution calling it a new “cottage industry”, adding that the need to feed the climate beast leads to a knock-on effect of creating incentives for researchers to produce studies with links to climate – “no matter how tenuous or trivial”. At the BBC, weather attribution has always been very popular. Writing in a WWA guide for journalists, the former BBC Today editor Sarah Sands says attribution studies have given us “significant insight into the horseman of the climate apocalypse”. Former OCJN attendee, Ben Rich, the BBC’s lead weather presenter, has used the “science” of climate attribution “to help explain to audiences when and how scientists can link extreme weather to climate change”.
None of this ludicrous propaganda can be questioned since the science is deemed to be ‘settled’. Geography lecturer Dr. Saffron O’Neill has taken climate hysteria to a new level with a demand that journalists should not use photos of people enjoying themselves on beaches during summer heat waves. She recently told the Guardian that such images “can hold the same power” as photos of the tanks in Tiananmen Square and smoke billowing from the Twin Towers. After a session with O’Neill, audience members said that “news outlets and photo agencies can and should think ahead of time about how they photograph the risks of hot weather”. And of course if anyone disagrees with O’Neill and her version of the “well supported” science, it is time for fines and prison. The last suggestion was published in Carbon Brief, the activist blog financed by the European Climate Fund. As it happens, Carbon Brief is represented on the OCJN Advisory Board through its editor Leo Hickman.
The OCJN is far from the only billionaire foundation-funded operation trying to spread climate alarm and hysteria throughout the general population. Climate Central targets local media with ready-to-publish stories about significant landmarks disappearing beneath rising sea levels. It recently gulled the Mirror into running a notably silly story about much of London disappearing beneath the waves within 80 years. Covering Climate Now (CC Now) is an off-shoot of the Columbia Journalism Review and is backed by the Guardian. It claims to feed over 500 media operations with pre-written climate stories. Both these operations rely on heavy financial support from a small cluster of green billionaire funds.
The links between these operations spreads far and wide. One of the partners of CC Now is Reuters, the news agency connected to the OCJN through its Reuters Institute. Not everyone is happy with Reuters’ connections to operations such as CC Now that make no secret of a desire to promote a hard-line Net Zero narrative and suppress opposition to it. Neil Winton worked for 32 years at the agency covering science in his time. Politicians and lobbyists are in the process of dismantling our way of life, he notes. If we are going to give up our civilisation, at the very least we ought to have an open debate. “Journalists need to stand up and be counted. The trouble is this requires bravery and energy, and an urge to question conventional wisdom,” he said.
And, he might have added, avoiding the naughty step of Dr. Saffron O’Neill.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
Marco Silva is taking time out from his role as a senior reporter for BBC Verify specialising in ‘climate disinformation’ to enrol on a six-month course at the Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN), a green activist operation funded by billionaire foundations promoting the collectivist Net Zero project.
Marco Silva is taking time out from his role as a senior reporter for BBC Verify specialising in ‘climate disinformation’ to enrol on a six-month course at the Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN), a green activist operation funded by billionaire foundations promoting the collectivist Net Zero project. Past direct funders of this course include the Laudes Foundation and the European Climate Fund, the latter heavily supported by Extinction Rebellion funder Sir Christopher Hohn. Also signed up for the course is Mora Morrison, a BBC World Service producer.
I guess the cat's out of the bag… In January, I'll be joining the Oxford Climate Journalism Network🌍 Super excited about it! https://t.co/yTLNmM00YE
The OCJN runs what is described as an intensive programme for about 100 journalists/activists around the world. Participants can expect to be immersed in the correct political narrative surrounding climate collapse, the so-called ‘settled science’ and the need for extreme Net Zero measures, whatever the economic and societal cost. A flavour of the echo-chamber discussions can be gleaned from past essays produced by ‘alumni’, which include titles such as ‘Journalists should help audiences understand extreme weather – even when they lack climate data’, ‘To report fully on climate change, journalists need to integrate indigenous knowledge into their coverage’, and ‘Newsrooms should develop a mental health strategy to help climate journalists cope’.
Marco Silva should enjoy his time confirming his climate science priors. He has a keen nose for what he calls ‘disinformation’, basing his work on what he deems to be the authority of 99.9% of scientists who say humans are primarily responsible for the current warming of the climate. This is provided as a reason for not hearing from the “other side”. The ongoing scientific process, alas, seems to play little part in the BBC’s Net Zero agitprop. Alas, again, Silva seems unaware that the 99.9% consensus claim that he holds to be true is the creative work of cream pie thrower and green activist Mark Lynas. This work was demolished recently in a paper led by the chemistry and physics professor Yonatan Dubi. He found that massive flaws and biases riddled Lynas’s work, implying the conclusions of the study do not follow from the data. In fact, looking at the data presented by Lynas, Dubi concludes that the actual number of scientists agreeing with human-caused warming may be on the “low side”. A previous 97% consensus claim has also been widely debunked, with former Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) author Professor Richard Tol saying that the climate community still has a long way to go in weeding out bad research and behaviour.
None of these issues need bother the hundreds of journalists now passing through the hands of the OCJN. Started last year, it is part of the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford. The Reuters Institute is backed by the Thomson Reuters Foundation and numerous green billionaire funders including the Laudes Foundation, the European Climate Foundation (backed by Sir Christopher Hohn’s Children’s Investment Fund Foundation) and the Knight Foundation. During 2022-23, funding of “over £1 million” was received from the Google News Initiative and Meta Journalism Project.
At the OCJN, the Advisory Board is dedicated to “improving the quality and impact of climate change journalism worldwide”. Again, careful curation is evident in its goal to “establish connections between the Network and leading organisations and ideas in the world of climate journalism, climate science and climate policy”. Members include OCJN co-founder Wolfgang Blau, who’s also an adviser to the United Nations Climate Change Division and a trustee of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation; Dr Fatima Denton, a co-ordinating author for the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report; Aldine Furio, the Strategic Communications Director, Europe, at the European Climate Foundation; Leo Hickman, the Editor of Carbon Brief, an activist blog funded by the European Climate Foundation; Dr Radhika Khosla, contributing author to the IPCC; and Catrin Thomas, who helps the Laudes Foundation to “catalyse broad impacts through the development of external relations”.
Marco Silva claims that he is investigating and debunking bad information about global warming. “Not everything is what it seems,” he tells us. “Bad actors can be incredibly clever in the way they try to manipulate our knowledge and perception of climate change. Don’t rush, take your time to dig deeper, and dare to ask: why is this narrative being shared? Where does it come from? Who stands to benefit from it?”
Perhaps he might care to put those last three questions to the well-funded organisers of his sabbatical over the next six months.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
So what is driving this decline in trust? Is fake news to blame? Or, paradoxically, could the efforts of the BBC to counter such stories be exposing its own limitations?
In 2017 the BBC announced its intention to assemble a dedicated team “to fact check and debunk deliberately misleading and false stories masquerading as real news”. News chief James Harding proclaimed that the Reality Check team would be “weighing in on the battle over lies, distortions and exaggerations”. Harding continued: “The BBC can’t edit the internet, but we won’t stand aside either.” Harding goes further to say the corporation had been inundated by news in 2016 because the world was “living in an age of instability”.
It appears that the BBC has not coped particularly well with this excess of news and the methods employed by the Reality Check team have not generated the desired outcome. According to data compiled by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, the BBC has experienced a decline in public trust from 75% to just 55%, with other mainstream TV broadcasters and print news suffering a similar decline over the same period, from 2018-2022. Further to this, the most recent global annual report published by the Edelman Trust Barometer placed the U.K. in 26th position, ahead of only South Korea and Japan in terms of public faith in media. The survey clearly tells us that the U.K. remains one of the countries with the lowest faith in media.
So what is driving this decline in trust? Is fake news to blame? Or, paradoxically, could the efforts of the BBC to counter such stories be exposing its own limitations? A typical example of how BBC Reality Check chooses to ‘weigh in’ is illustrated in this 2022 report, ‘Does video show Russian prisoners being shot?‘ The report is unable to provide sufficient evidence to ‘debunk’ the authenticity of the footage, which, the BBC states, “has been claimed to show Ukrainian soldiers shooting Russian prisoners of war”. Instead, it offers the reader a discourse, the content of which is clearly riddled with omission, selection and presentation bias. The report reads like a crude attempt to defend a narrative, rather than an objective attempt to elucidate a news story.
Consider this shocking statistic: only two of every 10 people in the U.K. feel that the news media is “independent from undue political or Government influence most of the time”. This ranks us 16th among the 24 nations surveyed, on a par with Romania.
I do not mention this to slight other nations, but to illustrate the point that our much vaunted media landscape is not the envy of the world as we are often led to believe.
Against this background, with such a prolonged and substantial decline in trust, what action is our national broadcaster taking to rebuild it? One might expect the BBC to reflect on its output, a period of introspection perhaps, an honest assessment of mistakes that have been made, a promise to learn from them and do better in the future. But no – the BBC has concluded that the problem is you: your inability to separate fact from fiction and your inability to appreciate the hard work that goes into getting the truth to your television.
So in order to help us, the BBC has a launched a new initiative, BBC Verify, “a new brand within our brand” aiming to “pull back the curtain on our journalists’ investigative work and introduce radical transparency”.
Deborah Turness, the Chief Executive of BBC News and Current Affairs, writes:
The exponential growth of manipulated and distorted video means that seeing is no longer believing. Consumers tell us they can no longer trust that the video in their news feeds is real. Which is why we at the BBC must urgently begin to show and share the work we do behind the scenes to check and verify information and video content before it appears on our platforms. All day, every day, the BBC’s news teams are using ever more sophisticated tools, techniques and technology to check and verify videos like the Kremlin drone footage, as well as images and information… but, until now, that work has largely gone on in the background, unseen by audiences.
The implication being presented here is that the BBC’s output is not at fault, but it is our perception of its output that is defective and BBC Verify is designed to correct our misconceptions. It is with circular, or perhaps spurious, reasoning that the BBC chooses not to report on its own decline in trust and then circumvents any discussion of this fact by creating a unit to verify the trustworthiness of content available on other platforms.
Turness kindly provides us with a link to “give people a taste of what Verify will be doing, day in, day out”. The video, presented by BBC Verify editor Ros Atkins, analyses footage of the apparent attack on the Kremlin and one can assume that this is the best current example of the BBC’s forensic capabilities. I would urge readers to view this report and, like the roof of the Kremlin, prepare not to be blown away!
We are informed that BBC Verify will foster the investigative skills and open source intelligence capabilities of around 60 journalists and experts including the specialist ‘disinformation correspondent’ Marianna Spring.
Marianna helps us in the fight for identifying the perpetrators of misinformation online by listing the “seven types of people who start and spread falsehoods”.
Interestingly, Marianna lists politicians, jokers, scammers, conspiracy theorists, insiders, celebrities and even your relatives as people to be wary of, but fails to acknowledge the role of journalists in the dissemination of ‘fake news’. This is despite contemporary research informing us that British people have among the lowest level of trust in journalists, with only 37% of those surveyed saying that they trusted them, versus a global average of 47%. The report states: “That might indicate that developed countries either have people who are more prone to trusting conspiracy theories or they are experienced enough to know when journalists might be lying.”
The BBC offers no evidence that the former theory rather than the latter is more probable, but it is nonetheless working hard to push the former. A demonstration of this push is apparent in the publicity material for Marianna Spring’s podcast series Marianna in Conspiracyland.
The press release for episode six (airs June 19th Radio 4) states: “Marianna is uniquely equipped to navigate Conspiracyland, having found herself on the frontlines of the battle of online disinformation and hate since those early days of the pandemic. She herself has become a frequent target of this movement.”
Does the movement in question include the eminent doctorsandscientists whose voices have been censored and ignored by the mainstream?
Will Marianna act impartially, exercise objectivity and engage with these experts? Will she discuss the substantial body of research that counters the mainstream pandemic and vaccine narrative? Will she detail how our Government delayed the release of statistics revealing that “for healthy 40-49 year-olds almost one million booster shots were required to prevent one ‘severe’ hospital admission”? Or the freedom of information releases from Japan and Australia revealing that vaccine trial data indicated widespread multi-organ bio-distribution of vaccine lipid nano-particles? This was known to authorities but not revealed and it runs counter to assurances given to the public at the time.
Surely, this knowledge is essential to obtain informed consent, especially from those at less risk from infection.
Legitimate concerns of deficiencies within the vaccine trials, regulatory failures and widespread data misrepresentation have been either censored or forced to the periphery of debate. It seems improbable that Marianna will take part in any substantive discussion on these issues, as she has already announced her intention, namely to construct a tenable narrative that links the “growing U.K. conspiracy movement and alternative media” to foreign, far-Right groups and ‘hate’.
Welcome to BBC Verify! I chatted to BBC Breakfast about it.
Everything from interrogating social media feeds using undercover accounts and investigating real-world impact of mistruths, hate and conspiracy movements to piecing together what’s happening with satellite imagery. pic.twitter.com/4OoaiCd4ah
To appreciate the ultimate purpose of this podcast and the underlying intention of BBC Verify, we must refer back to James Harding’s comment in 2016 when he intimated that the BBC was unable to fulfil its desire to “edit the internet”. Since then, much has changed; mechanisms that curtail the exchange of information between law-abiding citizens are now well established via the Trusted News initiative (TNI).
The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) is a partnership founded by the BBC in 2019. According to the press release:
TNI members work together to build audience trust and to find solutions to tackle challenges of disinformation. By including media organisations and social media platforms, it is the only forum in the world of its kind designed to take on disinformation in real time.
The public interest argument presented is that the TNI is essential “to protect audiences and users from disinformation, particularly around moments of jeopardy”.
A very basic question regarding this initiative by the BBC remains undetermined, namely: by what authority does the BBC exercise the power to create the TNI? The BBC Charter clearly states: “The BBC must be independent in all matters concerning the fulfilment of its Mission and the promotion of the Public Purposes, particularly as regards to editorial and creative decisions… and in the management of its affairs.”
The charter makes no exception to this rule. One cannot be “independent in all matters” whilst also engaging in discussions about media content with a vast network of international news providers and social media platforms. Currently the partners are listed as: AP, AFP, CBC/Radio-Canada, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Facebook, Financial Times, First Draft, Google/YouTube, the Hindu, Microsoft, Reuters and Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Twitter and the Washington Post.
When our national broadcaster creates an international media partnership whose collective perspective is formed through the lens of official guidance then it becomes less able to fulfil its democratic function: to hold officialdom to account. This partnership makes a mockery of the notion of media plurality and the damage to our democratic values is confounded by its inconspicuous nature.
The editorial independence of the BBC also comes into question when it defines health disinformation as any view that runs counter to official guidance. By taking this stance it becomes unable or unwilling to act as an arbiter of truth in its own right. If the BBC only defines truth via the diktats of Government agencies then its role becomes that of an intermediary, like an arm of Government, acting in a similar fashion to a state broadcaster.
For a damning example of how the TNI creates bias within our media, listen to the story of Mr. John Watt outlined in this video.
His experience of severe vaccine injury is purged from the internet by multiple platforms. Consequently, his voice and access to communications via the internet are restricted. Of equal importance, a challenge to the unscientific mantra of ‘safe and effective’ is removed from the discourse. John’s story is not disinformation and this type of censorship acts in opposition to Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 19 is clear: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
The question of whether media platforms have the right to censor speech and ban people from communicating will become highly irrelevant once the Online Safety Bill and the EU Digital Services Act become law. Once this happens, Article 19 of the Declaration of Human Rights looks set to be of limited help.
The BBC should not be coordinating a publicity campaign that falsely implies the only speech these laws will affect are those of far-Right groups, purveyors of ‘hate’ and ‘conspiracy theorists’.
The public deserve a more thorough analysis of how the proposed limits to their communication will remove an essential balance within our society. When diverse voices are supressed, truth and transparency are often the first victims. It is this suppression of ‘unapproved’ viewpoints that has fuelled the rise in alternative media. If the BBC is to regain trust, it should set a path to a return to impartiality.
Shiraz Akram is a member of the Thinking Coalition, a pro-liberty group, highlighting and questioning Government overreach.
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