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.
The Government’s state censor, OFCOM, is now actively attempting to clamp down on any debate about climate change that challenges establishment orthodoxy.
The Government’s state censor, OFCOM, is now actively attempting to clamp down on any debate about climate change that challenges establishment orthodoxy.
Two decisions by OFCOM this month have made this crystal clear.
Climate Change is a Hoax – Trump
The first concerns a GB News interview with President Trump, in which he called climate change a “hoax”.
“GB News is facing an investigation over claims it broke broadcasting rules by failing to challenge Donald Trump when he called climate change “a hoax”.
Ofcom said it had launched an investigation into a re-run of a GB News interview with Mr Trump for the midday broadcast of The Weekend
The regulator previously declined to launch an investigation into the original airing of the same interview 12 hours earlier, on GB News’ The Late Show Live, stating the programme had featured “alternative perspectives” as part of a panel discussion.
The new investigation concerns a second screening of the sit-down interview on Nov 15. OFCOM is expected to examine the surrounding content shown alongside the interview.”
I am not quite sure what right OFCOM think they have to challenge anything a foreign leader says. The President is fully entitled to his views and, whether OFCOM like them or not, the public have a right to hear them and make their own judgement.
Interviews with foreign leaders are broadcast on all channels, and they often include incorrect statements and outrageous views – is the BBC, for example, now expected to dispute everything that Putin, Xi or von der Leyen tells them that sounds a bit dodgy?
And it is the BBC, of course, who regularly report propaganda from Hamas or the Iranian regime as if it were factual and without any challenge at all.
Interviews with foreign leaders tend to be deferential, unlike ones with our domestic politicians, who we expect to be grilled. The public want to hear what Trump and the rest have to say, not listen to interviewers’ gotcha questions.
Was what Trump said controversial? Yes.
But the BBC has often broadcast equally controversial claims from the alarmist side of the climate debate.
Take, for instance, one Greta Thunberg!
In 2019, BBC Radio 4’s Today programme aired a pathetically servile interview with the then 16-year old schoolgirl, during which she made several outlandish, factually incorrect claims, including that climate change was an “existential crisis”. No serious scientist believes this to be true.
She also blamed climate change for starving polar bears and causing environmental damage. But at the time of the interview, it was already known that polar bears were thriving, with numbers having risen since hunting was banned in the 1970s. And whatever the cause of environmental destruction, it certainly is not the weather.
Thunberg then went on to incorrectly state that “most emissions are not caused by individuals”, but by corporations and states.
At no stage during the interview was she challenged about any of these claims. Nor did the programme offer the chance for other guests to present different views.
For some reason, OFCOM never investigated the BBC for their egregious failures.
It’s Heresy To Criticise The Met Office
Much more chilling though was OFCOM’s decision last week to uphold a Met Office complaint against Talk TV.
Last October, while still working for Talk TV, Mike Graham interviewed the highly respected energy analyst, Kathryn Porter. Most of the interview concerned high energy costs imposed by Net Zero, but at one point the conversation turned to the poor quality of the Met Office’s weather station network, with Porter commenting:
And the other thing is that some of these weather stations that do exist produce junk data. There’s one I think in Regents Park or St James’s Park, one of the London parks, where the equipment is surrounded by a concrete wall and right next to a diesel generator. So, obviously, there’s a huge amount of heat being both created in that little space and contained by this wall and, obviously, that equipment is going to record higher temperatures than it would on the other side of the wall….you shouldn’t use a weather station that’s in such a compromised position. And then they will say, ‘oh, well, you know, it’s, it’s so much hotter than it was in the past’.
OFCOM outlined the Met Office’s complaint:
Ms Porter suggested that Met Office weather stations produce “junk data”. The complainant said that this was untrue, and that it had a “world-class network of over 350 land-based weather observation sites”. It explained that each station is located in accordance with World Meteorological Organization (a UN Agency) best practice
OFCOM upheld the Met Office’s claim that they had been unfairly treated, but significantly made no judgement about the accuracy of Porter’s claims. If the Met Office is using shoddy scientific practice, it should surely be exposed, whether they like it or not.
So, was Kathryn Porter right about junk temperature data?
In 2024, the Met Office were forced to admit,following a FOI request, that most of their temperature station network was not fit for purpose. Of the 380 sites in their network, 297 were classified as Class 4 or 5, based on the World Meteorological Organisation -(WMO)- classification system:
The WMO classification system has five classes based on siting, with “1” being pristine and “5” worst of all. WMO explain the factors that can cause poor ratings:
They specifically state that class 5 sites should not be used for climatological purposes:
A class 5 site is a site where nearby obstacles create an inappropriate environment
for a meteorological measurement that is intended to be representative of a wide area (at least
tens of km2)
Yet that is exactly what the Met Office does. Those 380 meteorological stations are used to calculate regional and country-wide average temperatures. When you hear claims that last summer was the hottest on record, remember that the temperatures were based largely on data from sites which have been artificially heated by as much as 5 degrees because of poor siting. The Met Office assure us that they know the UK’s average temperature to a hundredth of a degree!
The Met Office’s claim that “each station is located in accordance with World Meteorological Organization best practice” is an outright lie. Best practice is to NOT use junk Class 4 and 5 sites.
According to the WMO, Class 5 sites can have added uncertainty of up to 5C. Class 4s are little better with uncertainty of 2C, and even Class 3s can add 1C to underlying temperatures.
Plenty of examples have been found of just how poorly sited many Met Office stations are – next to roads, car parks and airport runways, in suntraps and even in the middle of heat reflecting fields of solar panels. Some are even located in walled gardens, which were built deliberately to create a warm micro climate!
Kathryn Porter’s comment, “So, obviously, there’s a huge amount of heat being both created in that little space and contained by this wall and, obviously, that equipment is going to record higher temperatures than it would on the other side of the wall” sums the issue up perfectly.
Lying to OFCOM is surely a serious offence and they should immediately reverse their decision, apologise to Talk TV and hold the Met Office to account.
Threat to Free Speech
The implications for free speech, from the Talk TV decision in particular, are chilling.
The statements made on the Mike Graham show were not incorrect in any way. The suggestion that criticisms of the Met Office cannot be broadcast because they might be offended is preposterous and a threat to free speech.
OFCOM’s bias in this case is there for all to see in their findings. Kathryn Porter, they say, is “described as an independent energy analyst”. She is not “described” as one, she is one. OFCOM then proceed to dismiss the Daily Sceptic as a reliable source of information.
At the same time, they clearly regard the Met Office as being beyond criticism, a fountain of truth.
There are similarities here with OFCOM’s attempts to shut down debate during the pandemic; any criticisms back then of lockdowns, facemasks or jabs were quickly suppressed by OFCOM. Now it seems that challenges to the establishment climate and Net Zero orthodoxy are also going to be suppressed.
An exaggeration?
Just two months ago, OFCOM announced that they are reopening investigations into three Talk TV programmes broadcast last year, which they had already looked into and found no issue with. Since then they have been pressured by Jolyon Maugham’s Good Law Project and as a consequence reopened them.
All three programmes featured guests offering their personal opinions about Net Zero and climate change. Everyone is entitled to their opinion and have the right to express it. But not for much longer, if OFCOM get their way.
Their plan is now clear. If you put enough pressure on the likes of GB News and Talk TV, they will stop inviting these pesky sceptics onto their shows. In other words, censorship by the back door.
It is truly Orwellian. Who is to determine what is correct and what is not correct? OFCOM, BBC Verify, the Government?
We might just as well go the whole hog, and have a Ministry of Truth!
This is frightening. Indeed, it is truly Orwellian:
From the Guardian:
A U-turn by the UK’s broadcasting regulator Ofcom means it will investigate complaints of climate change denial on television and radio for the first time since 2017. The move marks a victory for campaigners who have accused the regulator of allowing some broadcasters “to spout dangerous climate lies” and “flout” rules on accuracy and impartiality.
Complaints about programmes on TalkTV and TalkRadio were assessed by Ofcom, which then decided not to investigate, the same result as more than 1,000 other climate complaints since 2020. However, after a letter from the Good Law Project (GLP) in January, requesting an explanation for the rejections, Ofcom said it had withdrawn its original decision and would “consider afresh” the complaints.
One complaint was about comments from a Talk guest who said in November that climate change “was a deliberate effort to create fake anxiety … out of something that is false”. In the second case, also in November, another guest said the Labour government’s energy policies were “suicidal”, “driven by pseudoscience in many cases” and “a kind of cultish behaviour”.
A reassessment led Ofcom to conclude its approach to “due impartiality” in the broadcasts “required reconsideration”, with the results of the investigations to be published in due course. Ofcom stuck by its decision to not investigate three other climate complaints.
“Rightwing channels have been allowed to spout dangerous climate lies, unchecked, for too long,” said a GLP spokesperson. “We’re glad Ofcom is finally listening and await the conclusion of the investigations. Should it fail to take action against Talk’s misinformation, we will not hesitate to hold them to account.”
An Ofcom spokesperson said: “In re-examining the programmes, we concluded that they raise potentially substantive issues under the broadcasting code which warrant investigation. We have, therefore, opened investigations [on] whether they breached our rules on due impartiality and material misleadingness.” Ofcom said it had also opened another climate-related investigation after a viewer complaint about another TalkTV programme.
A spokesperson for Talk said: “We, as we always would, will cooperate with Ofcom in these matters.”
The first point to make is that there are already rules in place to address factually inaccurate news reporting. But this is not what is at issue here.
OFCOM, it appears, now want to police free speech. Both of these new complaints concern the views of guests, not the journalists or presenters.
Guests on these sort of shows make all sorts of outlandish, and sometimes patently false, comments about all sorts of topics. That is their right. We still have something called freedom of speech in this country.
OFCOM does not get involved in these other cases, so why should they intervene when the topic is climate change?
This decision to intervene in free speech by OFCOM opens a whole new barrel of worms. What will happen in future if somebody challenges the establishment line on, say, hurricanes?
There is a wide variety of scientific opinion on most climate topics. Will OFCOM be the new arbiter of which version is “correct”? Will they ban anybody who dares offer a different opinion, or, heaven forbid, dare to quote some facts?
Maybe OFCOM will also ban all use of fraudulent weather attribution models, but I somehow doubt it!
This is a chilling suppression of free speech. “Truth” is fine, but who decides what is true and what is not? OFCOM? The Government? BBC? UN?
And it won’t stop with climate change. How long before we are not allowed to call Starmer the worst PM ever? Or dare to criticise his Government?
We will end up with George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, where the Government decides what is right and what is wrong.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command”
Complaints about programmes on TalkTV and TalkRadio were assessed by Ofcom, which then decided not to investigate, the same result as more than 1,000 other climate complaints since 2020. However, after a letter from the Good Law Project (GLP) in January, requesting an explanation for the rejections, Ofcom said it had withdrawn its original decision and would “consider afresh” the complaints.
One complaint was about comments from a Talk guest who said in November that climate change “was a deliberate effort to create fake anxiety … out of something that is false”. In the second case, also in November, another guest said the Labour government’s energy policies were “suicidal”, “driven by pseudoscience in many cases” and “a kind of cultish behaviour”.
…
“Rightwing channels have been allowed to spout dangerous climate lies, unchecked, for too long,” said a GLP spokesperson. “We’re glad Ofcom is finally listening and await the conclusion of the investigations. Should it fail to take action against Talk’s misinformation, we will not hesitate to hold them to account.”
An Ofcom spokesperson said: “In re-examining the programmes, we concluded that they raise potentially substantive issues under the broadcasting code which warrant investigation. We have, therefore, opened investigations [on] whether they breached our rules on due impartiality and material misleadingness.” Ofcom said it had also opened another climate-related investigation after a viewer complaint about another TalkTV programme.
Climate skeptic websites for now do not appear to be part of the investigation. OFCOM has the power to investigate websites, and extensions to this power are being considered which might be applied to websites like WUWT.
In an age where British people can be arrested for an unkind Facebook post, the threat of regulatory investigation of statements like climate change “was a deliberate effort to create fake anxiety … out of something that is false” appears to represent a dangerous step towards shutting down freedom to criticise climate claims.
Climate change is not fake, in the sense the world has warmed since the mid 1800s. What is fake is this represents any kind of emergency.
This is a sad day for Britain. Britain can reasonably claim to be the birthplace of modern parliamentary democracy. The history of British parliaments stretches back to AD 1236, when King Henry III summoned the parliamentum generalissimum. Most of that history represents an advance of people’s right to speak, a gradual replacement of absolute tyranny with representative democracy. Threatening or curtailing people’s right to make a claim in public about a scientific point of view, whether you agree with those expressed views or not, is a major step backwards in this tradition of freedom.
Even in Shakespeare’s time, in the late 1500s to early 1600s, the British enjoyed a level of freedom unknown throughout most of the world. Shakespeare wrote plays which were widely seen as criticisms of royal policy or conduct, without being punished for his impudence – though he faced investigation on at least one occasion, for allegedly encouraging insurrection. But even Shakespeare didn’t face harassment for his scientific views.
For hundreds of years the appropriate way to respond to a scientific claim you disagreed with was to publish a counter claim. There is no tradition of having government censors on programmes to immediately dispute or red label everything the government disagrees with.
But now we face a massive retrograde step, an attempted shutdown of free speech, the right to express views about science, which is on a par with the speech regulation of the religious tyrannies of the Middle Ages, when speaking out against religious interpretations of nature and divinity was severely punished.
Is this really the kind of future Britain wants, where disputing claims we are in a climate emergency is treated as blasphemy? Where broadcasters are required to include a representative of government approved views whenever science is discussed? Because this is where Britain is currently headed.
Ofcom has confirmed it is referring 4chan to a final enforcement decision under the Online Safety Act. The target is a Delaware company that runs an entirely anonymous imageboard from the United States, with no offices, staff, servers or assets in Britain. The demand: install age-verification systems and content filters so that British children cannot access the site or face daily fines levied from London on an American platform. This case is not an outlier. It is the clearest real-world demonstration of what the new generation of “online safety” laws requires: private companies must build automated filters that decide, in advance, which legal speech is too harmful for minors to see. The question the regulators never quite answer is simple: what exactly does the filter catch?
Ofcom has confirmed it is referring 4chan to a final enforcement decision under the Online Safety Act. The target is a Delaware company that runs an entirely anonymous imageboard from the United States, with no offices, staff, servers or assets in Britain. The demand: install age-verification systems and content filters so that British children cannot access the site or face daily fines levied from London on an American platform. This case is not an outlier. It is the clearest real-world demonstration of what the new generation of “online safety” laws requires: private companies must build automated filters that decide, in advance, which legal speech is too harmful for minors to see. The question the regulators never quite answer is simple: what exactly does the filter catch?
In the early 2020s, a political consensus formed on both sides of the Atlantic: social media is harming children and something must be done. The result in Washington was the Kids’ Online Safety Act (KOSA); in Westminster, the Online Safety Act (OSA), which received Royal Assent in October 2023 and began enforcement in 2025. The political appeal of both measures is genuine. Adolescent mental health deteriorated in the 2010s, parents are alarmed and platforms have appeared indifferent. But good intentions do not make good law, and the form these interventions took is constitutionally and morally indefensible. Both KOSA and the OSA rest on a duty-of-care model: platforms must take “reasonable measures” or implement “proportionate systems” to prevent minors from encountering content associated with depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-harm and suicide. This is not a regulation of conduct. It is a mandate to suppress speech based on its topic and its predicted emotional effect on a reader: the very definition of content-based regulation.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) stated the constitutional problem plainly in its July 2023 letter opposing KOSA: the bill “is a content-based regulation of constitutionally protected speech” that “will silence important conversations, limit minors’ access to potentially vital resources and violate the First Amendment”. Under Reed v. Town of Gilbert, a law is content-based if it “applies to particular speech because of the topic discussed or the idea or message expressed”. Content-based regulations are “presumptively unconstitutional”.
The ACLU identified three specific constitutional failures. First, the speech targeted is protected. The Supreme Court has never permitted government to suppress legal speech simply because a legislature finds it unsuitable for children. In Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, the Court was unambiguous: “Speech that is neither obscene as to youths nor subject to some other legitimate proscription cannot be suppressed solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them.” Creating a “wholly new category of content-based regulation” permissible only for speech directed at children would be “unprecedented and mistaken”. Second, these regimes fail strict scrutiny because they are not premised on demonstrated causation. As the ACLU wrote, KOSA “is not premised on a direct causal link, but instead is based on correlation, not evidence of causation”. This is a decisive legal and moral point. In Brown, the Court struck down California’s video game restriction on exactly the same grounds: the state had produced only correlative data. A law that restricts the speech of millions of people must show that the restriction will actually prevent the harm it identifies. Neither KOSA nor the OSA can clear that bar. Third, these regimes are both under- and over-inclusive. They leave news media, books, music and magazines entirely unregulated while targeting social media platforms. And they will, inevitably, sweep up beneficial speech alongside harmful speech: 92% of parental control apps have been found to incorrectly block LGBTQ+ content and suicide-prevention resources alongside material that is genuinely harmful. Congress, the ACLU concluded, may not rely on unproven future technology to save the statute.
The empirical premise of both regimes is that social media causes mental illness in adolescents. This claim is contested by a substantial body of peer-reviewed research. In a widely noted book review in Nature, Candice L. Odgers, a psychologist specialising in adolescent mental health at UC Irvine, wrote that the graphs produced by Jonathan Haidt in his work The Anxious Generation, which align the rise in teen mental illness with smartphone adoption, “will be useful in teaching my students the fundamentals of causal inference, and how to avoid making up stories by simply looking at trend lines”. Hundreds of researchers, Odgers wrote, “have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative.” The direction of causality may run the other way: distressed and isolated adolescents gravitate toward online community; social media does not necessarily create the distress.
The practical implication is stark. Existing criminal law already covers the most serious harms comprehensively: child sexual abuse material (CSAM), terrorist content, incitement to violence and harassment are all criminal in both jurisdictions and all designated “priority illegal content” under the OSA’s Schedules 5-7. The genuinely novel element of both regimes is the duty to suppress legal speech about mental health, gender identity and emotional distress. That element is what fails both the First Amendment and basic proportionality analysis.
The most immediate and documented casualty of the OSA’s implementation has been LGBTQ+ communities. This is not an implementation error. It is structural: the content filters platforms deploy to comply with age-assurance obligations cannot distinguish between content that causes harm to LGBTQ+ youth and content that protects them. Following the July 2025 enforcement rollout, Reddit moved significant LGBTQ+ community content behind age-verification barriers on the logic that queer content is “adult content” and therefore, under the Act, presumptively harmful to children. As OpenDemocracy documented, content creators who are “queer, trans or racialised”, or whose content focuses on these communities, have been “disproportionately targeted, with anything ‘queer’ indiscriminately labelled as ‘adult’”. For trans people, the harm is compounded by the identity documentation problem. Age verification requires users to produce government-issued identity matching their legal name and sex. In 2018, fewer than 5,000 trans people in the UK held a Gender Recognition Certificate, out of an estimated 200,000-500,000. For those without legal gender recognition, age verification is not a minor inconvenience, it forces them to out themselves to a commercial third party as a condition of internet access, creating a permanent record linking their legal identity to spaces they may be using precisely to explore their identity in safety. The moral stakes here are not abstract. For LGBTQ+ young people who cannot be open at home or school, online community is not a convenience but a lifeline. Stonewall has warned that anonymity-reduction measures create a “chilling effect” that puts LGBTQ+ people in genuine danger, particularly in the 12 countries where being LGBTQ+ carries the death penalty. As Stonewall’s Director of External Affairs wrote: “The UK’s Online Safety Bill could become the playbook for countries looking to use digital surveillance to identify and persecute their LGBTQ+ citizens.” The US State Department’s 2024 Human Rights Practices Report criticised the OSA for pressuring US social media platforms to “censor speech deemed misinformation or hate speech”.
The regulatory pressure on US platforms is not confined to Ofcom. On February 24th 2026, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK’s independent data protection regulator, issued Reddit, Inc. a £14.47 million fine for unlawfully processing children’s personal information: the largest penalty the ICO has ever imposed for breaches of children’s privacy. The ICO found that Reddit, despite prohibiting users under 13 by its terms of service, applied no robust age assurance mechanism from May 2018 until July 2025, and therefore had no lawful basis for processing the personal data of under-13s under the UK General Data Protection Regulation. Reddit’s omission to carry out a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) focused on the risks to children before January 2025 separately breached Articles 5, 6, 8 and 35 of the UK GDPR. Reddit has announced its intention to appeal, calling the ICO’s requirement to collect identity information from users “counterintuitive and at odds with our strong belief in our users’ online privacy and safety”. The ICO acted under its Age Appropriate Design Code (the ‘Children’s Code’) rather than the OSA, but the two regimes are coordinated: the ICO has openly admitted that it works in partnership with Ofcom, as the ICO stated in its December 2025 children’s privacy progress update, “to ensure efforts are coordinated”. The fine is legally distinct from OSA enforcement but functionally complementary to it: where Ofcom targets platforms’ content-governance duties, the ICO targets their data-governance failures, and the same underlying conduct of allowing age-unverified users to access content triggers liability under both regimes simultaneously. The ICO is now conducting a broader review of at least 17 platforms popular with children in the UK, including Discord, Pinterest and X. Reddit’s objection also surfaces another contradiction the ICO has not resolved: the age verification it effectively mandates creates a permanent record linking users’ legal identities to their platform activity, held by third-party age verification processors entirely outside the platforms’ own systems, and the data practices of those processors are, as the ICO’s own enforcement demonstrates, largely beyond the regulator’s concern.
The contrast between the ICO’s vigour against American social media platforms and its passivity toward British police forces is, on its face, a study in selective enforcement. The same week that John Edwards announced the £14.47 million Reddit fine and spoke at the IAPP UK Intensive, the story of Alvi Choudhury was making national television. Choudhury, a 26 year-old British Bangladeshi software engineer, had been arrested at his home in Southampton in January 2026 by Thames Valley Police, who suspected him of committing a £3,000 burglary in Milton Keynes: a city he has never visited, 100 miles away. The arrest was triggered by a retrospective facial recognition match against Cognitec software that runs 25,000 searches per month against approximately 19 million custody photographs held on the Police National Database. Choudhury was held in custody for nearly 10 hours before officers examined the alibi evidence he had been offering since his arrest. When he eventually saw the CCTV footage that had identified him, he told the Guardian the suspect looked approximately 10 years younger, with lighter skin, a bigger nose, no facial hair and different eyes and lips. His own mugshot had been on the police system in the first place only because he was wrongly arrested in 2021 after being the victim of an assault; his DNA was subsequently deleted, but his custody photograph was not. Thames Valley Police’s response was, on its own account, revealing. The force acknowledged the arrest “may have been the result of bias within facial recognition technology”, but an officer told Choudhury that “as the use of facial recognition is already subject to review at a strategic level”, he did not feel the need to raise the matter for wider organisational learning. The force’s public statement went further, reframing the failure entirely: the arrest, it said, was based on the investigating officer’s own visual assessment after the algorithmic match, and therefore “was not influenced by racial profiling”. The position that a human officer confirming a racially biased algorithmic result absolves the institution of responsibility for racial bias merits no extended comment. This is not an isolated incident. In January 2026, another force paid damages to a black man wrongly arrested using the same technology. Home Office research, suppressed until December 2025 when it was published deep within a consultation document by Liberty Investigates, found that the algorithm generates false positive matches at a rate of 5.5% for Black faces and 4.0% for Asian faces, compared with 0.04% for white faces: a disparity of more than 100 to one.
When Edwards took the stage, he explained the ICO’s enforcement philosophy: the regulator must “very deliberately choose our focus”, concentrating on “AI and biometrics, children’s privacy and online tracking”. Police facial recognition involves all three. But the ICO has conducted audits, expressed concern through its Deputy Commissioner, and asked the Home Office for “urgent clarity” and stopped there. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has been more forthright: it was granted permission in August 2025 to intervene in a judicial review of the Metropolitan Police’s live facial recognition programme, arguing the deployments are unlawful for want of a clear legal basis. A comment made at the time about the ICO’s posture proved apt: the regulator had “stressed the need for FRT deployment with appropriate safeguards” while sitting “on the fence” as others sought judicial determination of whether current use is “strictly necessary”. The juxtaposition is instructive. The regulator charged with protecting personal data finds £14 million worth of urgency in Reddit’s failure to age-verify its users, and no comparable urgency in a biometric surveillance system that its own deputy has called “disappointing”, that the government’s own research shows discriminates against minorities by a factor exceeding 100, and that has produced wrongful arrests of racial minorities on the basis of a technology the operating force itself concedes may be racially biased. The filter, as always, catches what the filter is not intentionally designed to catch.
All of this would be a domestic British problem if the OSA’s reach were confined to British soil. It is not. Section 3 of the OSA applies to any service with “links with the United Kingdom”, which Ofcom has interpreted to include any platform with a significant UK user base regardless of where it is domiciled, incorporated or operated. In March 2025, Ofcom wrote to 4chan Community Support LLC, a Delaware LLC with no offices, staff or assets outside the United States, to inform it that it was a regulated service because approximately 7% of its traffic came from UK IP addresses and must therefore provide information regarding its illegal content risk assessment and its qualifying worldwide revenue. 4chan refused to respond to either request. In October, Ofcom issued escalating demands, investigations and a £20,000 fine plus a penalty of £100 per day for up to 60 days for non-compliance with information requests, all served by email to US addresses. 4chan again refused to pay. In August 2025, 4chan and Kiwi Farms (Lolcow LLC) filed a federal lawsuit against Ofcom in the District of Columbia, alleging violations of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments, pre-emption by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and conflict with the SPEECH Act. Ofcom responded by asserting sovereign immunity under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, claiming both the right to issue binding censorship orders to Americans on American soil and immunity from any American legal response.
Ofcom’s enforcement action against 4chan did not end with the October 2025 information-gathering fine. On February 12th 2026, Ofcom issued a second Provisional Decision against 4chan, proposing both a single penalty and a daily rate penalty for contraventions of sections 9, 10, and 12 of the OSA: its substantive duties to conduct a suitable illegal content risk assessment, to set out adequate user protections in its terms of service, and to implement age verification to prevent children from encountering explicit content. Counsel for 4chan, Preston Byrne, replied the same day: “Increasing the size of a censorship fine does not cure its legal invalidity in the United States.” The deadline for representations having passed without compliance, Ofcom confirmed on February 27th that it was referring the matter to a final decision maker under its Online Safety Enforcement Guidelines. The progression is systematic: from information requests under section 100, to a confirmation decision imposing penalties, to a second provisional decision targeting the Act’s substantive content-safety and age-verification duties. Each escalatory step expands the scope of demanded compliance and raises the potential penalty exposure. For an anonymous platform operating exclusively in the United States, age verification for an anonymous imageboard is not a technical requirement: it is an existential one.
The domestic British appeals framework for these decisions is itself still being constructed. On February 26th 2026, the Tribunal Procedure Committee (TPC) opened a consultation on amending the Upper Tribunal Procedure Rules to accommodate the new rights of appeal created by the OSA. Under section 168 of the Act, any person with a sufficient interest may challenge Ofcom’s confirmation decisions, penalty notices and technology notices before the Upper Tribunal. The TPC provisionally proposes a three-month window for permission-to-appeal applications by interested persons who are not the direct recipients of an Ofcom notice, departing from Ofcom’s own preference for one month. On costs, the TPC agrees with Ofcom’s proposal to displace the usual no-costs rule, recognising that the tribunal should have broader discretion to award costs in OSA cases given the likely complexity and evidence-heavy nature of such appeals, and that the existing rule would leave Ofcom unable to recover costs even where it successfully defends a decision. Ofcom is a regulator with the power to fine companies hundreds of millions of pounds, funded by fees levied on the very industry it regulates, and it is now asking for the right to make anyone who challenges it in court pay Ofcom’s legal bills if they lose. The consultation closes May 21st 2026.
This structural asymmetry is what the GRANITE Act directly addresses. Conceptualised by Byrne and introduced in the Wyoming Legislature as HB 70, the ‘Guaranteeing Rights Against Novel International Tyranny and Extortion Act’ passed the Wyoming House of Representatives 46-12 on February 23rd 2026. It strips foreign sovereigns of immunity in US state courts when they attempt to enforce censorship orders against US persons and creates a private right of action with minimum statutory damages of $1 million per violation, or 10% of the defendant’s annual US-related revenue, whichever is greater. It also prevents Wyoming courts from recognising any foreign judgment that infringes constitutionally protected speech, extending the model of the SPEECH Act (28 U.S.C. §§ 4101-4105) from defamation to the full range of First Amendment-protected expression. If censoring an American exposes a foreign regulator to a sufficiently significant civil judgment, the cost-benefit calculation changes dramatically.
A separate American legal theory operates through the Sherman Act and does not depend on overcoming FSIA immunity at all. Ofcom’s sovereign immunity defence may insulate the regulator itself from direct suit, but it extends no protection to the private actors who shaped the OSA’s regulatory design. The OSA imposes identical nominal obligations on all regulated services, but its fixed compliance costs fall proportionally far harder on smaller platforms than on large incumbents with existing legal, technical and compliance teams that can simply be redirected to satisfy new requirements: a pattern antitrust economists describe as raising rivals’ costs. For example, where well-resourced incumbents privately coordinated with regulators to embed compliance standards they could more easily satisfy than their rivals, the resulting framework may reflect competitive preferences rather than independent regulatory judgement. Under Continental Ore Co. v. Union Carbide & Carbon Corp., routing an anticompetitive scheme through a foreign governmental apparatus does not immunise the private actors who designed it. The Noerr-Pennington doctrine, which ordinarily protects petitioning activity, rests on First Amendment foundations that protect the right to petition American government; the stronger legal argument is that it does not extend to petitioning of foreign regulators. Where the factual record supports coordination beyond ordinary advocacy, Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act remain available tools even where the regulatory mechanism is British.
If you care about children’s mental health and safety online, there are three new bills in Congress that are worth knowing about: the SAFE Act, the ECCHO Act and the Stop Sextortion Act (collectively known as the James T. Woods Act). Together they address real, documented harm in ways that KOSA and the UK’s Online Safety Act, simply do not. The package addresses three documented gaps in federal law. The SAFE Act repeals outdated CSAM sentencing provisions and directs the US Sentencing Commission to develop updated guidelines reflecting modern patterns of dangerous conduct. Right now, federal sentencing rules are outdated and largely ignored: fewer than one in three cases are sentenced within the existing guidelines. This bill would clear the way for the US Sentencing Commission to write new, updated rules that reflect how online abuse works today. The ECCHO Act creates a new federal crime targeting networks, most notoriously Network 764, that use online group chats to coerce emotionally vulnerable children into self-harm, suicide and violence, with penalties up to life imprisonment where a victim dies or attempts suicide. The Stop Sextortion Act explicitly criminalises sextortion for the first time under federal law, responding to a 33% rise in financially motivated cases in 2024 and more than 40 child deaths linked to these schemes. Unlike KOSA or OSA, the James T. Woods Act does not try to police what people say online. They target what predators do: coercion, blackmail and the deliberate manipulation of children into harm. That is a meaningful distinction, and it is why this package has earned support from more than two dozen organizations across the political spectrum, including the FBI Agents Association, RAINN, the National District Attorneys Association, the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children and Thorn.
The moral case against both the OSA and KOSA is not that children’s wellbeing is unimportant. It is that suppressing protected speech is both the wrong instrument and a dangerous one. The wrong instrument because the science does not establish that social media causes the harms these laws address, and because the content filters that implement these regimes cannot distinguish beneficial from harmful speech. A dangerous one because the same mechanism that blocks, for example, pro-anorexia posts will also block access to eating disorder recovery communities; the same filter that catches self-harm instructions will catch trans youth support forums; and the same regulator empowered to define ‘harmful’ content today may be led by someone with very different ideas about what speech is harmful tomorrow. Above all, it is dangerous because the machinery of protection, once built, does not confine itself to its original target: Japanese Americans were interned after Pearl Harbour; Muslims were surveilled, infiltrated and placed on no-fly lists after September 11th, some rendered to CIA black sites abroad and others tortured at Guantanamo Bay without charge or trial; McCarthyite loyalty boards destroyed careers on the basis that association predicted subversion; and the FBI’s COINTELPRO program turned the apparatus of domestic security against the civil rights movement, monitoring Martin Luther King Jr. as a threat to national security on the pretext of alleged communist infiltration. In each case, the instrument was constructed in good faith to address a genuine fear; in each case the stated rationale was correlation dressed as causation; and in each case the same institutional machinery, once normalised, was available for use against the next group a future administration found threatening.
Ofcom’s attempt to extend this regime to American soil raises the stakes further. It asserts, in effect, that British regulators may determine what Americans are permitted to say on the American internet and that American law has no recourse. That is not a tenable position under the First Amendment, under any established principles of international jurisdiction or under any defensible conception of democratic self-governance. The GRANITE Act is the beginning of the American legal system’s answer.
A brief postscript. I recently sent a prior version of this article to a member of the House of Lords who had asked to read it. Parliament’s email filter blocked it. Repeatedly. The peer could not open the attachment because the system flagged it as suspicious. The article, with working title ‘What the Filter Catches’, was itself caught by a filter. I could not have asked for a better illustration of the argument. Sometimes the world just does the work for you.
Note: The author has submitted Freedom of Information requests to the US Department of State, the Department of Justice, the National Security Council, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Trade Commission, the UK ICO as well as Ofcom itself seeking documents relating to Ofcom’s extraterritorial enforcement strategy. Those requests remain pending.
Daniel was kicked out of Warwick Business School after proposing a civil rights organisation as a business project. He is a member of the ACLU and the Free Speech Union.
The lawfare operation Good Law Project has demanded the UK broadcast regulator Ofcom stop the Murdoch-owned Talk station broadcasting “climate misinformation”. In campaign literature it claims that “toxic channel” Talk, “regularly spouts misinformation about the climate crisis”, using a headline claim that a guest recently said climate science “doesn’t add up to a row of beans”. Alas, this is wholly incorrect.
The lawfare operation Good Law Project has demanded the UK broadcast regulator Ofcom stop the Murdoch-owned Talk station broadcasting “climate misinformation”. In campaign literature it claims that “toxic channel” Talk, “regularly spouts misinformation about the climate crisis”, using a headline claim that a guest recently said climate science “doesn’t add up to a row of beans”. Alas, this is wholly incorrect. Your correspondent should know, I am supposed to have said it. What in fact I observed last November to presenter Ian Collins (here, at one hour 15 minutes) was that Net Zero promoters “were backing it up with science that doesn’t add up to a row of beans”.
As an independent journalist covering climate and Net Zero for a number of years, I would never dismiss the entirety of climate science in this childish way. A check via Grok confirms this statement. There is some good science around climate and there is a great deal of bad, at times fraudulent, work. Misrepresenting my words could be considered highly damaging, libellous even, although on this occasion I am inclined to discount malevolence in favour of incompetence. I could demand a correction, but on the other hand, who gives a toss.
The Good Law Project is an activist operation promoting what are described as progressive causes. It receives funding from individual donations, but also collects cash from foundations such as Joseph Rowntree, the hard-Left money tree. Also listed as a donor is Dale Vince, owner of the state-subsidy dependent Ecotricity. This latest attack on science and political free speech also involves an outfit called Stop Funding Heat (SFH). This is a small band of activists that recently persuaded Damian Carrington of the Guardian to take up its cause. He quoted campaigners who claimed Ofcom was allowing GB News and others to “flout” accuracy rules and broadcast “climate change denial”. Just two broadcast media in the UK offer any critical perspective on climate change. The rest hide behind the preposterous notion that the science is ‘settled’ and use this convenient bias to promote the Net Zero fantasy.
In a letter dated January 26th on behalf of SFH to Ofcom, the Good Law Project says its client has submitted 71 complaints since April 2024 about “climate misinformation and bias broadcasting” by GB News and Talk. Except for two still under review, all are noted to have been dismissed. It further states that information from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and the Guardian reveals 1,221 complaints about the alleged misinformation were submitted to Ofcom over the last five years. Each of these complaints was rejected.
Five specific Talk broadcasts are singled out for attack. Many of the comments complained about are simply political opinions protected, one might still hope, under freedom of expression laws. For instance, on November 27th last year, presenter Mark Dolan said that “if we didn’t have this insane, self-destructive, zealous approach to Net Zero, the crazy, unsustainable target – then many of those tax rises, if not all of them yesterday would simply not have been necessary”. Here we have robust commentary on a Labour Government driving the country’s finances off a cliff – last time anyone looked, it was allowed. On the same broadcast, Daily Sceptic contributor Ben Pile commented that electric vehicles were” an attempt to make people obedient, not an attempt to offer a climate solution”. Those who know Ben are aware that he is perfectly capable of making an intellectual argument that forcing people to buy EVs is making them obey a political command.
In addition to the “row of beans” quote, I was also accused of stating that people had been “crying wolf” about climate change. Forty years of constant climate scares that never occur is the unanswerable proof that backs up this claim. I am also said to have “misrepresented facts” and cited false claims. Needless to say, I am obliged for the lecture on misrepresentation from this particular source.
The political writer Brendan O’Neill offered the opinion that Labour’s energy policies were “suicidal”, “driven by pseudoscience in many cases” and “a kind of cultish behaviour”. For Exhibit A in consideration of unfalsifiable pseudoscience, we need look no further than the media and lawfare friendly field of weather attribution. Author Rupert Darwall referred to claims of climate breakdown and said it was “absolutely outrageous that they are scaring children about something that is not going to happen”. Exhibit B might be the numerous reports of children and young adults needing therapy for so-called climate anxiety.
Green activists and lawfare merchants are encouraged to tittle tattle to Ofcom because the state regulator still holds that the scientific principles behind what it falsely claims is a ‘theory’ of anthropogenic global warming are broadly settled. The legal case is advanced that alternative explanations and opinions must be inaccurate and are therefore in breach of Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code. But as Eric Worrall recently pointed out, the problem with enforced agreement on the facts is that in science, “there is no such thing as a fact which cannot be challenged”. Perhaps these wise words could influence any ‘sod off’ reply that Ofcom makes to the complaining letter.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
No green activist operation makes clearer why they need to ban free speech and cancel scientific debate to achieve Net Zero hegemony than the Guardian newspaper. Last Saturday, we learnt from its Environment Editor Damian Carrington that campaigners had said the UK’s TV and radio regulator Ofcom was allowing GB News and others to ‘flout” accuracy rules and broadcast “climate change denial”, whatever that last phrase means. C
No green activist operation makes clearer why they need to ban free speech and cancel scientific debate to achieve Net Zero hegemony than the Guardian newspaper. Last Saturday, we learnt from its Environment Editor Damian Carrington that campaigners had said the UK’s TV and radio regulator Ofcom was allowing GB News and others to ‘flout” accuracy rules and broadcast “climate change denial”, whatever that last phrase means. Carrington noted in response to frequent suggestions of inaccuracy in UN climate models going back to 1979, that, “in fact, UN climate models have been remarkably accurate”. How Carrington, one of three journalists of the year in 2023 at the Green Blob-funded Covering Climate Now, can write this with a straight face is anyone’s guess.
Net Zero is dead in the United States and there has been a welcome revival of the scientific process that has killed off the ridiculous notion that a science opinion can somehow be ‘settled’. The recent official climate report from the US Department of Energy noted that climate models are the primary tool used to project future change in response to higher levels of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. “Of great concern is the fact that after several decades of the climate modelling enterprise… the range of future warming they produce in response to a hypothetical doubling of CO2 extends over a factor three.” This range of disagreement has not decreased for decades, the five eminent science authors add.
Tittle-tattling Reliable Media is behind the GB News campaign and, egged on by Guardian Central, the anti-science desperation is clear. One GB News contributor described climate change as “rubbish’. Another described it as a “scam”, an opinion recently expressed at the United Nation’s General Assembly by the elected President of the US Government. It might be thought that the scientific process can withstand a few harsh words, but Reliable Media is outraged. It charges that Ofcom has “effectively suspended its accuracy rules on this life-and-death issue”.
Carrington finds room for reporting the fine of £17,000 levied recently by the French equivalent state broadcast regulator Arcom on the centre-Right TV channel CNews. In this case a contributor had dared to air the opinion that climate change was “a lie, a scam”.
The French complaint was made by the activist Eva Morel from QuotaClimat. She stated that:
When the media blur the line between facts and opinions, it doesn’t lead people to trust in alternative truths; it leads them to trust in nothing at all. Sowing doubt about climate science serves to obstruct climate action and it endangers lives.
In an excellent article in Watts Up With That?, Eric Worrall pointed out that the problem with enforced agreement on the ‘facts’ is that in science, “there is no such thing as a fact which cannot be challenged”.
Ofcom rules specifically note that an example of an issue which it considers to be broadly settled is the “scientific principles behind the theory of anthropogenic global warming”. This is plainly anti-science. For a start, the scale of human-caused global warming is a scientific hypothesis (opinion), not a validated theory. Ofcom’s claim is a political notion concocted by state bureaucrats who obviously have little understanding of the language of science and the way it actually works. In fact, Ofcom seems vaguely aware of the stupidity that lies behind its fashionable claim. Carrington reports that it has received 1,221 complaints related to the ‘climate crisis’ since January 2020 and none had resulted in a ruling that the broadcasting code had been breached.
Worrall is withering in his concluding assessment of the shenanigans of activists seeking to quash dissenting scientific voices in public spaces.
My point is, to declare some facts are beyond challenges, especially ‘facts’ produced by artefacts as flimsy as climate models, is to strike at the foundations of freedom of expression and scientific inquiry. Forcing broadcasters to embrace a uniform, government-approved version of unassailable facts, then claiming they somehow have freedom of expression, is utter nonsense.
Reliable Media is a grubby little hard-Left operation. Few details of its finances and funding are available since it was formed as a limited-by-guarantee company to take forward the ‘Just Stop Hate’ and ‘Just Stop Heat’ campaigns. It claims that it is making “climate change denial unprofitable”, and it does this by seeking to destroy the ability of free speech media operations such as the increasingly successful GB News to attract advertisers. If this is its aim, it presumably has good legal advice, although its latest filed accounts to June 2024 suggest money might be tight. A sum of £107,940 is said to be held as cash at bank, but an identical sum is set aside for creditors due within one year. Whatever its financial position, its activities resemble those of the class sneak, running off to teacher to blub about the bigger boys, those who are more confident and entrepreneurial, better at sports and more successful with the girls. As the brilliant comedy song writer Dominic Frisby sang, maybe jokingly, in his composition about ways to stop freaks like Ed Miliband: “We need to bring back school bullying.” Science, he adds, is only discovering the value of it now.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
Ofcom has received 1,221 complaints related to the climate crisis since January 2020, when its searchable database began. None resulted in a ruling that the broadcasting code had been breached. In fact, only two such breaches have been found since 2007.
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In contrast, the French regulator Arcom has found four broadcasting code breaches related to the climate crisis in the last two years. In one, the rightwing channel CNews was fined €20,000 (£17,000) for a segment in which a speaker said climate change was “a lie, a scam”.
Ofcom’s broadcasting code requires that factual programmes “must not materially mislead the audience” and that “news, in whatever form, must be reported with due accuracy and presented with due impartiality”. The code further requires that “alternative viewpoints must be adequately represented” when programme presenters express their own views on matters of political controversy or public policy. Guidance notes for the code add that: “An example of an issue which Ofcom considered to be broadly settled is the scientific principles behind the theory of anthropogenic global warming.”
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Eva Morel, at QuotaClimat, the French campaign group that filed the climate complaints to Arcom, said: “It is perfectly OK to have different opinions on climate change. What becomes problematic is when a society can no longer agree on facts, because facts are the foundation of trust, which in turn underpins law, and ultimately, democracy.”
She added: “When the media blur the line between facts and opinions, it doesn’t lead people to trust in alternative truths; it leads them to trust in nothing at all. Sowing doubt about climate science serves to obstruct climate action and it endangers lives.”
Is Britain planning forced Veganism? I believe it is reasonable to think so. In 2024 the government backed Climate Change Committee claimed in a letter to the government that Britons must switch to a more plant based diet. There is plenty of talk about the need to reduce agricultural emissions by reducing meat consumption. Whether that forced veganism is achieved by simply pricing meat out of ordinary people’s reach, or an actual law which bans meat consumption, the result is the same.
What about climate activist Eva Morel’s demand that we all agree a common set of facts?
The problem with the kind of enforced agreement on the “facts” climate activist Eva Morel demands is in science, there is no such thing as a fact which cannot be challenged.
Nobel Prize winner Barry Marshall overturned decades of consensus that peptic ulcers are a metabolic imbalance, by proving peptic ulcers are actually an infection caused by a difficult to culture bacteria, Helicobacter pylori.
Albert Einstein overturned centuries of consensus that space and time are absolute and unchanging, by proving the only way to explain unexplained phenomena such as a the fact the speed of light stays the same, regardless of the velocity of the source, is if different observers can disagree about the flow of time and measured distances.
But Einstein himself came under challenge – he spent decades trying to challenge the fundamental weirdness of Quantum Physics, or as Einstein disparagingly described it, “spooky action at a distance” – and failed. The computer I’m using to write this article, the billions of transistors contained in its integrated circuits, were all designed using principles of that Quantum Physics which Einstein struggled to accept.
Yet we know there is something wrong with Quantum Physics – because even though Quantum Physics grew directly out of Einstein’s research, Quantum Physics and Einstein’s General Relativity fundamentally contradict each other. Both theories appear to pass every test which has been thrown at them – but they can’t both be right. Some of the more terrifying experiments with large particle accelerators are conducted by scientists who want to create a small black hole, so they can observe the nexus between Quantum Physics and Relativity up close. Let’s hope if they ever succeed, the Quantum Physics prediction the black hole will immediately evaporate in a shower of exotic particles prevails over the General Relativity prediction that the black hole will grow exponentially and consume the entire Earth.
What about really fundamental facts about the universe, like the “fact” that we live in a universe with three spatial dimensions and one time dimension? Even this everyday understanding of the nature of reality is constantly being challenged on a number of fronts, ranging from proponents of the Holographic Principle, who point out that the universe in important and fundamental ways behaves as if there are only two spatial dimensions, that our three dimensional experience may be an illusion which masks a deeper reality, to higher dimensional string theory proponents, some of whom think the universe might have as many as 26 spatial dimensions. It might seem crazy to challenge something as tangible as the number of spatial dimensions in our reality, but the scientists exploring these ideas have serious reasons for doing so. The universe may be a much stranger place than our everyday experience leads us to believe.
Do climate models produce “facts” which are beyond challenge?
The following are the words of the late great Freeman Dyson giving his views on climate models;
… My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests.
They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models. …
Was Dyson right about climate models struggling to describe the real world? We have some corroboration for Dyson’s criticism, from the climate modelling community. Some climate scientists admit their inability to model clouds is a problem.
There is a serious hypothesis, Lindzen’s Iris Effect, which suggests changes in cloudiness and precipitation may largely counteract anthropogenic warming.
Understanding precipitation is vitally important to understanding the future of climate change, because big storms especially in principle have the capacity to completely counteract all anthropogenic global warming. Storms push vast amounts of heat up to the edge of space, acting as a natural air conditioner, punching a hole straight through most of the Earth’s greenhouse blanket. But the reality is nobody knows how clouds, precipitation and storms will behave as CO2 levels rise, or even if CO2 levels will continue to rise. Today’s climate models just aren’t good enough to capture this kind of effect.
My point is, to declare some facts are beyond challenge, especially “facts” produced by artefacts as flimsy as climate models, is to strike at the foundations of freedom of expression and scientific inquiry. Forcing broadcasters to embrace a uniform, government approved version of unassailable facts, then claiming they still somehow have freedom of expression, is utter nonsense.
The BBC’s director general will be taking on personal responsibility for the overseeing of the company’s complaints unit, the broadcaster has announced.
It is abundantly clear that the establishment will do all it can to shut down anybody who challenges its control of the media narrative, as OFCOM’s continual vendetta against GB News shows:
If OFCOM are finding GBN guilt of breaching impartiality rules, why have they failed to take any action against the BBC over the years, who often breach the same rules.
Take, for instance, Roger Harrabin’s campaign against the Cumbria coalmine a couple of years ago.
When the controversy over the mine was at its height in early 2021, Harrabin wrote four articles over the space of a month, all grossly biased against the proposed mine. Below is an excerpt of my complaint to the BBC at the time:
6th Jan – Whitehaven coal mine: Govt refuses to call in plans
Harrabin provides his analysis, which is wholly anti mine.
14th Jan – Govt defends Cumbria coal mine green light
This quotes at length Greenpeace and CPRE, both heavily critical of the mine. The only pro mine comment is one solitary unattributed sentence at the end.
23rd Jan – Six questions about the Cumbria coal controversy
Virtually all of this article is devoted to anti mine comments by Islands at Risk, the Fiji ambassador, Oxfam, Greenpeace, the Labour, Lib Dems and Green parties and the Committee on Climate Change.
The only pro mine comment comes from the local MP
30th Jan – Minister rapped for allowing Cumbria coal mine
This article is wholly anti mine, quoting at length Lord Deben and Greenpeace . There is not one pro mine comment.
Throughout this series, I can find no mention by Harrabin at all of the economic benefits of the mine, eg number of jobs created, boost to the local /national economy, increased government revenue, balance of payments, or by how much emissions will be reduced by avoiding imported coke.
Nor have there been any comments at all by the local council (who approved the mine unanimously), the mining company, the local community, steel companies or economists.
This is a gross dereliction of the BBC’s Charter, which requires impartial news coverage and the need to provide audiences with the full facts.
This series of propaganda pieces culminated with this article devoted to a letter to the government from the US climate activist James Hansen – note the prejudicial headline:
The leading climate scientist James Hansen has warned Boris Johnson that he risks “humiliation“ over plans for a new coal mine in Cumbria.
The UK government, which hosts a climate summit this year, has allowed the mine at Whitehaven to go ahead.
Dr Hansen, formerly Nasa’s leading global warming researcher, urged the PM to halt production – or be “vilified”.
In his letter, Dr Hansen – whose testimony before the US Senate helped raise wider awareness of global warming back in 1988 – writes: “In leading the [climate conference], you have a chance to change the course of our climate trajectory, earning the UK and yourself historic accolades.
“Or you can stick with business-almost-as-usual and be vilified around the world.
“It would be easy to achieve this latter ignominy and humiliation – just continue with the plan to open a new coal mine in Cumbria in contemptuous disregard of the future of young people and nature.
“The contrary path is not so easy, but, with your leadership, it is realistic.”
The letter continues: “Prime Minister Johnson, young people are fed up – and for good reason. They demand that political leaders follow the science and take the actions needed to preserve and restore a healthy climate.
If this [conference] is like the prior ones – with soothing words and worthless ambitions – they will be justifiably outraged.”
There was no attempt by Harrabin to challenge Hansen’s views. Nor were any alternative views offered. In other words, everything GBN was guilty of applied equally to Harrabin.
Naturally the BBC’s in house Executive Complaints Unit rejected my complaint. And OFCOM did not even respond when I referred it to them.
This was just one complaint. You could write a book about all the other instances of BBC bias.
Sky News are bound by the same rules of impartiality that GB News are, who Sky were keen to gloat about a few months ago.
So why is that Sky can get away with flagrant and blatant bias on climate change? Two articles just this week could not exemplify this bias any better:
The first attacks Rishi Sunak’s slight watering down of Net Zero demands:
It gives column inches to a letter to the government from the Committee on Climate Change, which contains outright lies and mistruths, eg:
“that renters will have to pay more for energy in less efficient homes, while drivers who move to electric cars later rather than sooner will face higher costs through their vehicle’s lifetime.”
Sky fail to challenge this obvious nonsense or seek alternative views, as they have a duty to do.
For a start, renters will be much worse off once rent increases to pay for insulation are factored in, And if rents are frozen, landlords are likely simply to sell up. One of the reason for rising rents is the shortage of rental homes.
The claim about EVs is even more absurd. If drivers really are better off buying an EV, they would but one anyway. They refuse to because EVs are much more expensive.
The article then goes to publish anti-Sunak comments from:
The UK Energy Research Centre
Ford Motor Company (ignoring the motor manufacturers who agree with the delayed ban)
The UK Director of Transport and Environment, a lobby group for “clean transport”
The Conservative Environment Network, the extremist green fringe group of the Conservative Party
There is not a single comment supporting Sunak’s policy, never mind critical of any of these Net Zero policies. Nor is there any attempt by Sky to actually back up the CCC’s mendacious claims with actual data.
The next day, Sky published another ridiculous “we’re all going to drown” report:
The article includes a long debunked photo of a polar bear:
It headlines the threat of 1.5m homes flooded out by rising seas, something which belongs in a fairy tale.
It claims:
“Arctic temperatures are rising four times as quickly compared to the global average, unleashing chaos on wildlife and the people who depend on the rapidly melting ice to survive.”
But fails to mention that Arctic temperatures plummeted at a similar rate between 1960 and 1990, that polar bears and other Arctic animals are thriving, and that the inhabitants of the Arctic are doing fine as well.
It says that “Dwindling ice could destabilise a North Atlantic current known as the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) “, another claim that has been thoroughly debunked by scientists as well.
The article ends with a plea for more funds by the Chair of the Polar Research sub-committee, whatever that is. Apparently giving scientists more money and an ice-breaker will solve all of our problems!
Of course, we know that OFCOM will never investigate bias at Sky News, because they both share the same set of political values.
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