Climate Headbangers Crawl from the Wreckage of RCP8.5 ‘Implausible’ Finding Spinning Nothing-to-See-Here Claims
It has taken a few days for the climate headbangers to work out the best spin to counter the recent IPCC ruling that the RCP8.5 computer model pathway is “implausible”. Necessary work of course, since the shock ruling from the UN’s main climate science body about a set of impossible assumptions destroyed the validity of almost every mainstream Net Zero-supporting climate scare story published over the last 15 years. First out of the traps was Adam Vaughan of the Times, who said that the most apocalyptic worst-case scenario had been ruled out “thanks to the rapid rise in renewable energy”.
This is the feeble explanation given by the IPCC ‘s own ‘implausible’ authors but, alas, it is not borne out by the facts. In 2011 at the start of the RCP8.5 madness, wind and solar accounted for 0.8% of world energy production. According to the latest fully compiled figures for 2023 from The World in Data, the percentage rose to 4.5%. In other words, the percentage of total global wind and solar energy supply rose from negligible to almost negligible – this despite trillions of dollars being spent on an increasingly expensive source of unreliable and industry-destroying power.
Supporters were quick to run with this seemingly best explanation.
Negligible is a word that also springs to mind given that Vince’s Ecotricity UK onshore wind turbine operation contributes just 0.06 % of current UK electricity generation. Over the last 20 years, he has collected a far from negligible £145 million in subsidy paid by the British consumer. Electricity only accounts for 20% of all UK energy consumption, so Vince’s contribution to the overall total at 0.012% is not so much negligible as practically invisible. Calculations on how much global warming has been saved by all this expensive effort are sadly impossible to calculate.
In passing, Vince also notes a new high scenario figure of 3.5°C, down from 4.5°C. This figure is also mentioned by Adam Vaughan, and it arises from slightly different calculations. The rise of temperature established under RCP8.5 is generally held to be 3.9°C by 2100 from a 1850-1900 baseline. The science writer Roger Pielke Jr., who first drew public attention to the “implausible” finding, calculates that a newly proposed high scenario has an upper temperature rise of 3°C. Still ridiculous, of course, since this is the IPCC, a politically-funded body that gives scientific backing to the belief that almost all global warming in the industrial age is caused by a few trace gases in the atmosphere. Since pre-industrial times, and the lifting of the Little Ice Age, the Earth has warmed around 1°C. All is not lost it seems for clickbait scientists and their willing messengers flaming up bizarre claims in mainstream media. Now the high-end assumptions fed into computer models suggest a possible rise of about 2°C in just 74 years compared with 3°C. Come back Roger Hallam and Extinction Rebellion – all is forgiven.
To digress for a moment. It will be interesting to see if Dale Vince has changed his mind on jailing climate deniers in the light of RCP8.5’s demise. In July 2024, he posted on Twitter, now X, the following in support of five climate vandals who had brought the vital London M25 ring-road to a halt. One of the lunatic disrupters putting emergency services at grave risk was Roger Hallam, who was subsequently imprisoned for five years. The conspiracy was organised by Just Stop Oil, a group given £340,000 by Vince.
The “facing the end of the world” defence has more than a touch of RCP8.5 hysteria about it. Is Vince still in favour of jailing people who have questioned some of the ridiculous stories that have arisen from this now discredited set of assumptions? Are there any other parts of the inquiring scientific process where he thinks jail time is appropriate for those who question the ‘settled’ narrative? I think we should be told.
Alas, Vaughan’s article indicates that the Old Guard has not given up on Hallam-style warnings of the coming apocalypse. IPCC scenario lead author Detlef van Vuuren said that “uncertainties” in how sensitive Earth’s climate is to more greenhouse gases “mean that even under this slightly lower emissions pathway, warming could still end up exceeding 4°C”. Phrases like that of course give the green light to future scaremongering designed to prop up the fading hard-Left Net Zero fantasy. The “uncertainties” noted over carbon dioxide are unlikely to surround the lack of a conclusive temperature link over 600 million years, or a consideration that the Earth has thrived in the past with gas levels many times higher than today’s denuded levels. No chance. When you are deliberately stoking mass climate psychosis for population controlling aims, the uncertainty scare is all about slyly suggesting scenarios that even King Charles, Sir David Attenborough and the Swedish Doom Goblin might think a bit rich.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
The Best Thing for England Might be the End of Britain
By Clive Pinder
The Telegraph splashed last week that Sinn Féin intends to work with the SNP and Plaid Cymru to “break up the UK”. Cue the usual outbreak of pearl-clutching from Westminster, where people who cannot run a railway timetable suddenly speak as if they are Metternich preserving the Congress of Vienna.
But perhaps we should all calm down and ask an awkward question.
What if they’re right? Not morally right. Not romantically right. Not Braveheart right. But economically, culturally and politically right.
Because here is the increasingly obvious reality. The United Kingdom no longer behaves like a unified nation-state. It behaves like an exhausted multinational holding company, held together by inertia, nostalgia, transfer payments and the BBC weather map.
Scotland increasingly votes as if it is a Nordic social democracy trapped against its will in Thatcher’s ghost. Wales leans permanently towards public sector socialism. Northern Ireland is basically a theological argument attached to a motorway network. Meanwhile England generates most of the tax revenue and carries most of the economic weight – then gets told by its own governing class that expressing the slightest English self-interest is somehow vulgar and racist.
England now feels like the chap paying alimony to three ex-wives who all say he was useless.
The economic numbers are revealing. England already accounts for roughly 85% of UK GDP. Strip away Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and England would still possess an economy of around $3.5 trillion to $3.7 trillion. That would leave it roughly the size of France and still among the seven or eight largest economies on Earth.
More importantly, England’s GDP per head would remain among the richest major nations in the world. London would still be London. One of the planet’s dominant financial capitals, legal centres and cultural magnets. The Bank of England would remain. The City would remain. Most corporate headquarters would remain. Heathrow would not suddenly drift into the North Sea.
In fact, England’s fiscal position might improve. This is the part we are apparently not supposed to say aloud.
Public spending per head is already significantly higher in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland than in England. England effectively acts as the Union’s economic engine room while simultaneously being lectured about its alleged selfishness by political elites whose budgets depend upon English taxpayers.
The much-discussed Barnett Formula has long functioned as a mechanism by which England subsidises devolved administrations that often define themselves politically in opposition to England itself.
Now those same administrations increasingly wish to leave anyway. Fine. Let them.
The standard counterargument arrives immediately. ‘But Brexit damaged the economy!’
Possibly. The economic breathlessness of Covid not withstanding, economists continue to debate whether Brexit increased frictional trade costs with Europe and reduced investment.
But there is an enormous difference between leaving a continental trading bloc of 450 million people and ending a dysfunctional constitutional arrangement inside one sovereign island where 84% of the UK population live.
England would still trade heavily with Scotland and Wales because geography exists. The Welsh economy is unlikely to declare holy war on English tourism and second-home owners simultaneously. Scotland leaving the Union would not suddenly turn Carlisle into North Korea. A United Ireland will still sell Guiness to us, just as the French still sell wine to Britain despite spending half their national existence despising us.
People trade with nearby prosperous neighbours. Switzerland trades with the EU. Norway trades with the EU. Britain traded with Europe long before Brussels invented itself.
Then comes the emotional argument. ‘But Britain is a great power!’
No. Britain was a great power. That distinction matters.
The political class still talks as though we are somewhere between Churchill and the Falklands Task Force. In reality we are a debt-heavy, ageing ailing state struggling to control borders, maintain infrastructure, police cities or build a runway without a judicial review and three diversity audits.
The UK increasingly resembles one of those stately homes open to the public. Impressive façade. Crumbling plumbing with bats in the belfry.
England, however, remains a potentially formidable country if it actually governed in its own interests.
Imagine an England outside the gravitational pull of perpetual constitutional management. Outside the endless need to subsidise competing nationalist projects. Outside the bizarre modern habit of treating English identity as faintly embarrassing.
Yes, perhaps eventually outside the ECHR as well. There. I said it.
One of the strangest features of modern Britain is that almost every serious conversation about borders, deportation, policing or migration eventually runs headfirst into supranational legal architecture that voters cannot alter.
Meanwhile the political class insists this represents ‘democracy’.
Holyrood has just elected a transgender Green MSP who is simultaneously applying to remain permanently in Britain while helping legislate for it. The same separatist movement demanding Scottish nationhood also champions border policies that render nationhood largely meaningless. You cannot build a serious country while treating borders, citizenship and national identity as optional social constructs. Nationalism without borders is rather like veganism with a side of brisket.
Only in modern Britain could someone arrive on a temporary visa, join a party that believes borders are essentially a colonial hate crime and women can have penises, then end up governing the country before his own long-term immigration status is fully settled.
An independent England could pursue a radically different model. Lower corporate taxes, a work not welfare culture, aggressive deregulation, serious infrastructure investment, controlled immigration weighted towards economic contribution, energy realism, faster planning approval and a legal framework rooted in Parliamentary sovereignty rather than permanent judicial activism.
In other words, an England run more like Singapore than Brussels.
Of course there are risks. Plenty.
The break-up of the Union would create disputes over debt allocation, military assets, Trident submarines and borders. Financial markets dislike uncertainty. Constitutional divorces are rarely tidy.
Yet we must also stop pretending the status quo is stable, any more than a state built increasingly upon managed grievance can produce genuine solidarity and national pride.
The United Kingdom is already fragmenting psychologically. Devolution created four political identities without preserving one shared patriotic identity strong enough to hold them together. Westminster now spends much of its time arbitrating internal resentments while simultaneously importing millions of people from cultures with little historical connection to Britain at all.
It is difficult to build solidarity in a country that increasingly resembles an airport terminal.
Perhaps the real question is not whether the UK can survive technically. Of course it can.
The real question is whether the Union still possesses enough shared cultural confidence, democratic trust and reciprocal loyalty to justify its continuation.
Increasingly, the answer appears to be no.
If Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland genuinely believe they would flourish independently, England should wish them well.
Cheerfully. Calmly. Amicably.
Then quietly get on with becoming the most economically and culturally dynamic country in Europe.
Clive Pinder is a recovering global executive, former elected ornament and reluctant chronicler of Britain’s cultural and institutional drift. Find him on Substack.
The Forgotten 19th Century Novel that Predicted Angela Rayner
Did you know George Osborne was in Vanity Fair? Okay, Thackeray’s immortal literary ne’er-do-well wasn’t actually the oleaginous former Conservative Chancellor from 2010-2016, but, just like his later namesake, Thackery’s own Boy George was certainly very good at spending other people’s money.
William Makepeace Thackeray was not the only 19th Century novelist to have produced an eerily accurate political anticipation of The Way We Live Now. In 1817, the now long-forgotten satirist Thomas Love Peacock published Melincourt (full text online here), which tells the strange tale of a crooked plot to instal a trained orangutan dressed in human clothing into the House of Commons to act as an MP under the puppet-like control of sinister outside forces – or, in other words, the life-story of Angela Rayner 200 years too early.
Primate Minister
The red-haired and pendulous “Ginger Growler” Rayner really does look like the proverbial orangutan in a dress, and often acts like one too; in the immediate aftermath of the Labour Party’s disastrous local election results, she was pictured working out her frustrations by energetically rampaging through mud and chimping out all over.
Angela is not quite as simian as the hero of Love Peacock’s Melincourt, however, this figure being a literal orangutan, captured in a jungle by a grog-loving British sailor who lends him a taste for drunken dancing, just like Angela. Brought back to England, the orangutan finds himself adopted by an elite moral philosopher named Sylvan Forrester (a parody of loony Lord Monboddo – look him up) who lends him the false name Sir Oran Haut-Ton, kits him out in human dress and gets him elected to Parliament via one of the notorious old pre-Victorian ‘Rotten Boroughs’, before exploiting the fact the beast cannot speak other than via incoherent grunts and burps to give implausibly persuasive speeches through his otherwise mute mouth via ventriloquism.
Forrester’s main aim appears to be a naïve liberal desire to show how very, very tolerant he is by ‘proving’ how everyone in this world is absolutely equal, even up to and including actual disguised orangutans. Thomas Love Peacock’s own aim was simply to prove how corrupt and easily manipulated the British electoral system of his day really was.
Written over a decade before the Great Reform Act of 1832, which finally abolished Rotten Boroughs, Melincourt was by all accounts a biting satire for its day. Today, sadly, it is nigh-on unreadable. Examining it for this article, I confess I didn’t get to the end, so am unsure precisely what finally happens to Sir Oran Haut-Ton, but my natural assumption, narrative-wise, would be that the primitive ape eventually learned to develop a voice, bolted from its owner’s control, and embarked upon a disastrous independent political career of its own, embarrassing and exposing the wrong-headed motives of those who conspired to parachute the beast into Parliament in the first place – after all, that’s basically what has happened with Sir O-H-T’s fellow humanoid orangutan Angela Rayner right now for real, isn’t it?
Chimply appalling
Like all captured orangutans, No-Brainer Rayner was envisaged originally as an exotic pet for her privileged owners. The 21st-century Labour Party, its upper echelons captured by poncy upper-middle-class London-centric Human Rights lawyers like Sir Keir Starmer and Lord Hermer, quite clearly considers its ruling wing to be every bit as evolutionary distant from its traditional working-class voter-base as Homo sapiens is from Australopithecus afarensis.
But, of course, to achieve power they still needed the tedious little apelings’ votes in places like Newcastle and Hull; how better to continue to harvest them than to randomly elevate one of their hairy kind to the House as a highly visible public sop to the zoo-dwellers? The trick had already worked well enough under Tony Blair with the appointment of another Old Labour-friendly primate to the symbolic but powerless post of Deputy PM in the shape of ‘Jurassic’ John Prescott. As a cruel joke, once pushed up towards full cabinet minster level, they even gave Angela responsibility for house-building – an ideal job for Homo erectus.
Following initial success, however, certain inescapable flaws soon began to emerge within this cunning plan. Living in Quislington, blind Labour leaders honestly appear to have thought their chosen cartoon chimp with lipstick on was an actual typical working-class person, whom actual typical working-class people would automatically admire and trust. In reality, the majority of working-class voters are nothing like Angela at all, and many hate and despise her just as much as they do the likes of Starmer, only for slightly different reasons. The most common descriptions of the woman I have heard from people in my own constituency, a working-class town in the North-West of England, are unrepeatable here, and are often followed by an expression of utter despair about the alarmingly plausible prospect the nation may one day “have that thing as our Prime Minister!”
Here are some typical public responses to a 2025 Daily Mail poll asking if Rayner would make a good future PM:
As was observed on this website recently by Clive Pinder, those elements of the Labour Party commentariat presently pushing Rayner to be PM under the delusional impression that ordinary plebs who eat whippets for breakfast absolutely love the woman, are operating under the shallow assumption that her biography is somehow a more important ‘qualification’ for holding high office than her actual abilities to do so, which in truth are zero.
It shows how patronising Labour’s governing classes really are nowadays when they honestly imagine that ordinary working-class people think it is an actively good and admirable thing that Rayner left school pregnant at 16 without any GCSEs, and that is exactly the kind of thing they want to see in a future Prime Minister. Just because she speaks with a regional accent and grew up on a council estate, it doesn’t automatically mean ordinary people will vote for her; otherwise, Kerry Katona would be PM.
Ape escape
Unfortunately for her initial party-handlers, meanwhile, the ape has now got out of control. Thinking, like Sylvan Forrester, they could safely script her every word, following the Government’s disastrous May local election results her original patrons have now been overthrown. Rayner has gone all Queen Kong and started demanding the right to dictate national policy, saying the party must take a sudden Leftwards swing on the political rope-tyre – or else. Specifically, she insists upon way more free peanuts to throw to what she conceives of as being her fellow hungry chimps and chimpettes:
The Labour Party must now live up to our name: we must be the party of working people. We’ve heard the same on the doorstep as we’ve seen in the polls – the cost of living is the top issue for voters of all parties. People have turned to populists and nationalists because we have not done enough to fix it. … Decisions like cutting winter fuel allowance just weren’t what people expected from a Labour Government. … We must double down on renters’ reform and show leaseholders our action on tackling ground rents and charges was just a first step. … Boosting community ownership and stopping the sell-off of local assets from pubs to playgrounds will put power back in local hands. … We should be unafraid to promote new forms of public, community and cooperative ownership across the board. Buses and trains being brought back into public hands can now operate for the public good, at prices passengers can afford.
In the recent past, Gorilla-Girl has also called for tax rises on actual wealth-creators as an alternative to cutting welfare benefits for those who do not work. Is this what all working-class voters really want, though, or what non-working-class voters of the benefits scroungers variety really want? A far better class of smoking monkey, Nigel Farage, came out the clear winner from the local elections, something he attributed to two main factors.
The first was the profound sense of unfairness amongst voters that welfare state Ponzi-schemers like Labour keep on remorselessly increasing their taxes and doling out free bananas not only to the genuinely disabled, but also to lazy malingerers who simply cannot be bothered to work, i.e., the very unfairness that Rayner is now advocating more of. Secondly, there is Nigel’s promise to stop the boats and send many of the boat-people and the wider Boriswavers back home so they can stop leeching and artificially pushing down the natives’ wages. It is notable Angela nowhere mentions this second factor listed by Nigel in her speech. Why not?
Eeh, tha daft apeth!
In a disingenuous attempt to win back mass monkey-votes from Farage, Labour’s Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is currently proposing to increase the number of years it takes for Boriswave migrants to qualify for permanent residence here – which sounds tough, until you think about it for five minutes. At the end of these periods, they will still be entitled to stay here forever. And where will they be residing beforehand? Also here. So, Mahmood’s measures are pure verbal theatre. But still arrogant Angela demands they be stopped – and Mahmood be sacked. Why? Because, Rayner says, these proposals are inherently “un-British”. How precisely is it “British” to flood the country with migrants instead, though?
Ironically, the one-time pet Labour Party ape is now beholden to a further set of pet Labour Party dupes too, in terms of her own Muslim constituents. One of the main reasons Labour has been so keen on shipping in people from lands like Pakistan and Bangladesh over recent decades is because they considered them to be compliant, whose only necessary qualification for citizenship was obediently placing a cross next to Labour candidates’ names in the correct box on their postal vote forms. But, now, just like Angela Rayner herself, these imagined perpetual client-slaves have also broken out of their cages, are increasingly voting either Green, Galloway or ‘Gaza Independent’, which is a problem for the higher-order monkeys like Rayner who were meant to be their unquestioned troop-leaders.
Rayner’s urban jungle constituency is Ashton-under-Lyne near Manchester where, as of the 2021 census, around 11% of the population, or 10,500 people, were Muslim; post-Boriswave, it will surely now be larger. As Rayner’s majority is 6,791, she needs those votes badly – and the whole monkey-house knows it. Therefore, the foreign orangutans have begun to openly control their own organ-grinder. In 2024, an infamous video emerged (and here’s another) of a dhimmified Rayner addressing male Muslim voters and promising to do their bidding by promising that, if they voted for her, then “If Labour get into power we will recognise Palestine”, which the Party later did. She also promised Labour would commit UK taxpayer aid towards rebuilding Gaza – by which she meant commit stolen working white British people’s money, as that’s where most of it comes from.
When she swings down from her tree again today and haughtily tells Keir Starmer to listen to what ordinary working people want, maybe she should listen to what we want: no more mass-imported people stealing our own rations for themselves, at our expense, just to keep you in your own gilded electoral cage for as long as you can possibly arrange it. Recall also how Rayner was placed in initial charge of creating the new de facto blasphemy laws protecting Islam from criticism. What other ancient freedoms of her own people is Yeti-Lady willing to sacrifice to keep her own mega-peanut-paying job?
Through sheer hubris, corruption and greed, the Labour Party has effectively succeeded in recreating the modern-day equivalent of Rotten Boroughs like Ashton-under-Lyne all across the whole country, where sectarian voting, morally corrupt religious pandering and ethnic voter fraud are rampant. Cheeringly, come the next election this whole tottering demographic balancing act may at last come to an end, at least for Angela herself: current forecasts show she could easily lose her seat, caught up in a twin rebellion of the angry Muslims on the one side and the angry native whites on the other.
The dramatic irony of this whole scenario is, one must admit, quite delicious; someone should write a novel about it all, after the fashion of a latter-day Thomas Love Peacock. What could it be called? Plan of the Apes, maybe? Or possibly just Angela’s Ashes.
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books.
Ed Miliband’s Wind Turbines and Solar Farms Are Bad for Environment, Government Admits
The Government has privately admitted that Ed Miliband’s wind turbines and solar farms are bad for the environment – but is pushing ahead with Net Zero plans anyway. The Mail has the story.
Bureaucrats admit the plans may destroy “nationally recognised sites, landscapes and historic environments” as well as damaging “biodiversity and water resources”.
Officials also confess his schemes may increase “air emissions, greenhouse gas emissions, noise and vibrations, light pollution, dust and soils”.
They also say these negative effects could “occur repeatedly” and “have impacts over the short, medium to long term”, as well as during construction.
The internal dossier, revealed in Freedom of Information requests seen by the Mail on Sunday, raises serious questions about Britain’s food security.
It says their changes will “remove some restrictions on green belt land… This could include agricultural land”.
The revelation will infuriate farmers, who are still reeling from Labour’s inheritance tax changes.
It comes as ‘Red Ed’ Miliband rams through mega solar farms across the country, to the fury of residents who live near these enormous projects.
Mr Miliband, the Doncaster North MP, celebrated his 25th “large scale” green energy project last month. Ministers are expecting fierce opposition after they approved 157 more solar farms to be built by 2030.
Worth reading in full.
NHS Pays Psychotic Killers to Give Health Advice
A Telegraph investigation has found that several psychiatric offenders have been paid by the NHS to advise on patient care. Here’s an excerpt:
On a number of occasions psychiatric offenders held up as “patient experts” by trusts have either killed after being discharged from hospital or have advised on patient care despite having killed.
Their appointment is part of NHS England’s “recovery approach”, whereby previously violent psychiatric offenders can be considered “experts by experience” and can be engaged to advise trusts on patient care as “equal partners” with doctors.
NHS trusts enlist experts by experience to advise on improving mental health services, to recruit and train staff and to take part in research projects.
However, doctors and campaigners have raised concerns that some offenders with a history of mental illness who have been employed as experts are being discharged too quickly, posing a potential risk to the public and denying justice to their victims.
One former NHS psychiatrist warned that some patients taking part in such schemes “could be seen as [making] progress”, helping them to be fast-tracked out of detention facilities before it may be safe to do so.
The former head of an NHS mental health trust described the findings of the Telegraph’s investigation as “very worrying”.
“Hearing the user experience is one thing. But getting someone who has killed someone to advise you on how to care for people who are seriously ill is another,” he said.
In one example, the Royal College of Psychiatry enlisted Martin Saberi – a repeat offender who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2008 and was released on licence in 2016 after serving 16 years of a life sentence for armed robbery – to deliver a workshop on substance misuse to doctors at its annual forum in July 2018.
Patients who take part in the Royal College scheme can earn up to £140 a day and must be a “role model” for the organisation’s values and behaviours, according to a 2024 candidate information pack.
In January 2019, Saberi, who still has a LinkedIn account linked to his name that describes him a “service user expert at Royal College of Psychiatrists”, murdered Amy Griffiths, a transgender woman [sic] Saberi met on a dating site.
The killer, whose criminal convictions date back to 1989, bludgeoned Griffiths with a baseball bat before strangling [him] and slitting [his] throat. In 2021, he was given a life sentence for murder and for stabbing a woman in the neck several days before.
An NHS England report into the killing states that the day before the attack, Saberi, whose name is anonymised, “engaged in his work as a lived experience consultant and no concerns were noted”.
It also found that the work “may have led to some considerable pressure for [him] to maintain a coping façade and mask difficulties that he was experiencing”. …
The concept of experts by experience became embedded in NHS practice in the early 2010s as part of a broader push towards so-called “co-production”, which states that people with “lived experience” are “often best placed to advise” on the care they require. …
A Nottingham policy document seen by the Telegraph commits to treating “experts by experience as equal partners” to doctors.
The trust hosted workshops from 2019 onwards in which patients made recommendations including asking to be let out to “take positive risks and learn from our mistakes”. …
The Royal College came under fire in 2020 following reports that it had failed to carry out DBS checks on 374 representatives, including patients.
According to the Health Service journal, some of those people were “current or former mental health patients it pays to form policy and visit providers”.
Worth reading in full.
Ex-BBC News Boss Driven Out of Job by Trans Activists
A former BBC News boss says trans activist colleagues drove her out of her job. The Mail has more.
Fran Unsworth who was the Corporation’s Director of News and Current Affairs from 2018 to 2022 said the news division became “increasingly unmanageable” during her tenure because of a pressure to adopt what she called a “mono-perspective” on trans issues.
She said: “I would actually say it drove me out, just dealing with the progressive editorial issues and the bullying around them all. It was incredibly difficult.”
The former BBC executive delivered her criticisms in an interview with her former colleague Rob Burley which was published by the website UnHerd yesterday (Saturday).
Her comments will compound the worst fears of viewers who believe that the BBC has embraced a radical gender ideology which is out of step with mainstream public opinion.
Ms Unsworth, 68, said that BBC managers had to accept responsibility for an environment at the Corporation where radical views on trans and identity issues were normalised.
BBC news staff felt obliged to adopt a “kind” approach to the trans issues and trans people even at the expense of their own journalistic integrity.
She said: “There was a sea in which we all swam… an atmosphere. We need to be kind to transitioning people. It’s a social phenomenon. And I think this ‘be kind’ thing was at the heart of it.”
Asked if she thought that atmosphere had been a problem journalistically, she said: “I do, yes. I do.”
Ms Unsworth said news staff who sought to challenge this prevailing consensus came under an “awful lot of pressure” from colleagues in news, entertainment and drama who had embraced the “mono perspective” on trans issues. …
She said the BBC’s problems at the time had reflected the “progressive madness” engulfing other institutions.
She said: “This wasn’t something that just affected the BBC…The world went mad, and the BBC, because it is part of the world, went a bit mad with it. This was going on in every institution in society; there was a kind of national bullying going on.”
Worth reading in full – and if you can get behind the paywall, the original piece by Rob Burley in UnHerd, which the Mail story is based on, is well worth a read.
Christian Pastor Cleared After Arrest for Peaceful Street Preaching
By Julian Mann
It is disturbingly clear that Avon and Somerset Police would love to prosecute Christian street preacher Pastor Dia Moodley for criticising Islam and transgender ideology.
The police decided in April to drop their five-month investigation into the 58 year-old evangelist. He was arrested last November for “inciting religious hatred” after giving a street sermon in Bristol criticising Islam and transgender ideology.
Footage of the sermon appeared to show a bystander reaching for the wire of Pastor Moodley’s speaker and him pushing her away. She then called the police.
He was then arrested by two officers under the Public Order Act 1986 and held at a police station for eight hours.
On May 16th, the Telegraph reported a spokesman for Avon and Somerset Police saying there was insufficient evidence to pursue a criminal investigation.
But in a comment dripping with sour grapes he added:
Should more information or footage be received, then we can review that material and consider whether any further inquiries are necessary.
Having caught the attention of the White House, Pastor Moodley was among the activists who met US State Department officials sent to the UK last March amid growing concern in Washington that free speech in Britain is under threat, the Telegraph reported.
He is a provocative preacher and arguably more verbally aggressive than it would be wise for Christian communicators to be.
But, while apparently lacking the necessary humorous touches, his street preaching is biblically orthodox and in line with the Church of England’s official teaching which, according to Article 18 of its 39 Articles of Religion, states that non-Christian religions do not bring eternal salvation.
In his sermons Pastor Moodley says Islam is “lies” and “darkness” while Christianity is “light”. He also says the Bible is “truth” while the Koran is “not true”.
In the months after his arrest, he refrained from preaching in Bristol until the day before Easter (April 4th). He reported that during his Easter sermon a Muslim bystander had threatened him after he compared Jesus to Mohammed, stating that only Jesus rose from the dead.
Footage of the incident appeared to show a man saying, “If you do that again, bro, we’ll have to send the boys round.”
According to the Telegraph:
Mr Moodley reported the man to Avon and Somerset Police, but officers allegedly refused to investigate, claiming there was “insufficient evidence” and that the comments “whilst unpleasant… do not constitute an offence”.
Pastor Moodley’s lawyer, Jeremiah Igunnubole, legal counsel for faith-based international organisation the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), said after the police announced their decision to drop the investigation:
The war of attrition against free speech in the UK, demonstrated in Pastor Dia’s case, must end. Censorial laws need to be repealed urgently, and strong free speech protections, including a free speech bill, are needed to reverse the growing culture of censorship in law enforcement. We remain fully committed to standing with Pastor Dia as he considers legal action against the police for these violations of his rights and their failure to protect him from serious crime.
The ADF is surely going to need to be “fully committed” to standing with Pastor Moodley because it is quite clear that the woke police desperately want to go after him.
Julian Mann, a former Church of England vicar, is an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire, UK.
News Round-Up
- “Andy Burnham is the runaway favourite to replace Sir Keir Starmer” – A Find Out Now survey has put the Manchester Mayor neck-and-neck with the PM when Labour members are asked to name their preferred leader, reveals the Mail.
- “Nandy complains about Burnham speculation after helping election bid” – Lisa Nandy dismisses claims that big-hitters are gearing up to depose the Prime Minister as “froth and nonsense”, despite helping Andy Burnham’s election bid, according to the Mail.
- “Tories should stand aside for Reform in Makerfield, says Rees-Mogg” – Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg is among several leading Conservatives calling for a by-election pact with Reform to stop Andy Burnham reaching Westminster and launching a Labour leadership bid, reports the Telegraph.
- “Andy Burnham in retreat over Brexit betrayal” – The Greater Manchester Mayor has distanced himself from calls to rejoin the EU following a backlash that threatens to derail his by-election campaign, says the Telegraph.
- “Labour will trigger ‘years of chaos’ if it tries to undo Brexit” – Kemi Badenoch has hit out at Labour as the party tears itself apart over whether to overturn the result of the 2016 referendum, reports the Mail.
- “Burnham ‘failed to grasp the nettle’ on grooming gang inquiry” – A whistleblower claims Andy Burnham showed neither “leadership nor courage” in failing to order a proper inquiry into grooming gangs in Greater Manchester, according to the Telegraph.
- “Fund manager sells off ‘fragile’ UK bonds in warning sign for Burnham” – One of Britain’s biggest fund managers has dumped Government bonds over concerns of an Andy Burnham premiership, says the Telegraph.
- “As Labour lurches further Left, the markets are calling time” – All Labour leadership rivals in the frame would crank up borrowing and spending even further, warns Liam Halligan in the Telegraph – hence the bond market jitters.
- “Starmer’s challengers are merely rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic” – Labour needs to wake up to how markets and incentives work – and how much the Government itself has helped create the current economic mess, says Roger Bootle in the Telegraph.
- “Middle England’s wallet is in the firing line of a Labour succession war” – Whether Andy Burnham, Angela Rayner, Wes Streeting or Ed Miliband replaces Sir Keir, the squeezed middle is set to pay the price, warns Michael Mosbacher in the Telegraph.
- “Angela Rayner should have faced stamp duty penalty” – According to a Government expert in the department that investigated her, Angela Rayner should not have escaped a fine for underpaying stamp duty on her seaside home in Hove, reports the Mail.
- “Whitehall could sabotage Farage with strikes if he wins election” – Whitehall officials are plotting to paralyse the government with a sustained campaign of strikes if Nigel Farage wins the next election, according to the Mail.
- “UK tourism industry could collapse under new ‘holiday levy’” – Letting agents are warning Britain’s tourism industry is being “taxed out of existence” and could buckle under the Government’s proposed holiday levy, says the Mail.
- “Eurovision proves the British public rejects the crazed Israelophobia” – The Eurovision Song Contest has allowed people to support an unjustly maligned country defending itself from permanent attack, writes Gareth Roberts in the Telegraph.
- “Why are pro-Gaza activists silent on the plight of Afghans, Iranians and Sudanese?” – It is right that we care about the suffering of Palestinians, but the obsessive focus on Israel as the font of all evil must end, says Danny Cohen the Telegraph.
- “Trans Indian MSP wants Scots to pay reparations to Palestine” – A trans Indian student elected to Holyrood wants Scottish taxpayers to fund reparations to Palestinians because of their “complicity” in the “occupation” of the territory, reports the Telegraph.
- “Hamas’s sexual terrorism is laid bare and still the world looks away” – A new 300-page Civil Commission report – backed by 10,000 photographs, 1,800 hours of footage and 430 testimonies – documents Hamas’s systematic sexual atrocities on October 7th, yet the mainstream media and international institutions continue to look away, writes Camilla Long in the Sunday Times.
- “Stab victim fighting for his life after attack by ‘Eastern European’” – A man in his 60s attacked by an “Eastern European” knifeman in Stafford is still fighting for his life in hospital, reports the Mail.
- “Britain may be turning into the Ottoman Empire at breaking point” – We need leadership which engenders renewed faith in the collective mission of our nation, says Alec Marsh in the Telegraph.
- “British engineer sanctioned over Iranian shadow banking network” – A British engineer has been sanctioned along with four other family members for running a “shadow banking network” that laundered billions of pounds for the Iranian regime, reveals the Mail.
- “Son of British couple jailed in Iran ‘for spying’ blames Keir Starmer” – The son of a British couple who have spent 500 days in an Iranian jail “for spying” blames Sir Keir Starmer for abandoning his parents, reports the Mail.
- “Iranians describe horrific abuse at the hands of regime guards” – Detainees in Iran’s prisons are being subjected to beatings, rape and psychological abuse, according to testimonies that lay bare the lengths the Islamic Republic will go to crush dissent, says the Mail.
- “There won’t be anything left of Iran if it refuses peace deal” – Donald Trump has warned Iran that there will be “nothing left” of the country if its leaders do not agree to a peace deal with the US, reports the Telegraph.
- “US forces kill top ISIS leader in daring 1am gunfight” – Donald Trump has celebrated the killing of ISIS mastermind Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, accused of orchestrating the massacre and kidnapping of hundreds of Christians in Nigeria, according to the Mail.
- “The French nursery staff sexually abusing children and staying on” – Parents of alleged victims are speaking out about a French school system “infiltrated by paedophile networks”, writes Henry Samuel in the Telegraph.
- “The Beijing Motor Show is proof that the future of cars is Chinese” – Rapid-reacting Chinese manufacturers are leading the transition to electric vehicles and building the future, claims Andrew English in the Telegraph.
- “Ebola outbreak declared health emergency ‘of international concern’” – The WHO has declared an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo a “public health emergency of international concern”, reports the BBC.
- “Machiavellian spy firm or NHS saviour? The US giant love-bombing Britain” – US tech giant Palantir is promising to transform UK healthcare, but its critics fear it threatens our privacy, writes Andrew Orlowski in the Telegraph.
- “Wine merchant Tanners threatens to pull out of Wales over recycling tax” – A historic family-owned wine merchant has threatened to pull out of Wales because of plans to add a recycling levy to the cost of each bottle sold, reports the Telegraph.
- “How batteries can help Britain beat a £300 surge in energy bills” – Ed Miliband’s pledge to decarbonise the grid risks piling £100 billion on to household bills. But batteries and smart ‘flexibility’ could cut costs up to £800 a year, reveals Jonathan Leake in the Telegraph.
- “Drill baby drill to drive growth and improve productivity” – On Substack, David Turver argues that oil and gas extraction is one of our highest productivity industries – so it makes sense to start drilling again.
- “South West oyster farmer quits after royal landowner’s pressure” – Oyster farmer Tim Edwards is set to shut his River Avon site after the Duchy of Cornwall refused to renew his lease over the harvesting of Pacific oysters which it calls ‘invasive’, but which he says has no impact on the environment, according to Jonathan Morris for the BBC.
- “Ex-climate activist speaks out – Lucy Biggers” – Former climate activist turned sceptic Lucy Biggers tells the hosts of Triggernometry how she came to question the movement she once devoted herself to – and what she found when she started looking at the science more carefully.
- “Climate pseudoscience debunked: livestock methane fears are baseless” – Killing every one of the world’s 1.6 billion cattle would reduce temperatures by just 0.04°C, making the entire global campaign against live stock methane one of the most costly and pointless exercises in history, says Gregory Wrightstone for CO2 Coalition.
- “Junk science: loneliness caused by climate change kills people” – In Watts Up With That?, Anthony Watts debunks claims that climate change kills people through heatwaves keeping people indoors.
- “Great expectations” – In Climate Scepticism, Mark Hodgson reacts to the WHO’s ‘independent’ Pan-European Commission on Climate and Health calling for a global public health emergency to be declared over climate change.
- “NHS faces more discrimination claims over trans use of women’s toilets” – The NHS could become flooded with thousands of discrimination claims from female staff after a tribunal found it has wrongly been allowing trans women to use women’s toilets, reports the Mail.
- “Met Police apologises to Graham Linehan over Heathrow arrest” – The Met Police has apologised to Father Ted creator Graham Linehan for arresting him at Heathrow over gender-critical social media posts, says the Telegraph.
- “Daughter of Garraway’s new love interest wows with anti-trans speech” – The daughter of Kate Garraway’s new love interest, Liam Halligan, has bcome an internet sensation after her Cambridge Union speech in defence of women’s rights has gone viral, reports the Mail.
- “Schoolchildren taught black people cannot be racist to white people” – Teenage pupils are being told that black people can be prejudiced towards white people, but this doesn’t constitute racism, says the Telegraph.
- “Crowds rampage shopping centres over limited-edition watch” – Shoppers who queued overnight for a £350 Swatch–Blancpain watch stormed retail outlets across Europe and Asia in chaotic scenes that left staff shaken and shelves bare within minutes, reports the Sun.
- “The PM was right to describe the UK as ‘an island of strangers’” – The FSU’s Ben Jones appeared on Free Speech Nation last night to discuss his new book Island of Strangers: Diversity, Decline and Free Speech in Crisis.
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