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The BBC’s Dualist Approach To News

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‘ …a sobering and disturbing tale, and a reminder that intelligence and a lifelong devotion to “truth” is no protection whatever against believing that the most brutal, stupid, dangerous and unethical ideology is the greatest achievement of mankind.’  Philosophy’s shameful love

 

 

Three examples of where the BBC reports something in a different way depending on what ‘narrative’ it is trying to push…..

 

Firstly….

The BBC’s Matt McGrath was quick to try an exploit a report from the GWPF and turn it to his advantage….despite, when you read it, there being little in its contents that bare much resemblance to claims made in McGrath’s imaginative report.

McGrath preferring to massage the truth in favour of his own ideological prejudices has by comparison completely ignored another report by the GWPF and Michael Gove’s response.

The Daily Mail does report events:

Heads are breaking the law if they preach eco agenda, warns Gove: Education Secretary’s ‘concern’ at report that accuses ‘activist’ teachers

Plans to curb wind turbines onshore will push up electricity bills

 

 

Secondly:

When energy firms put up their prices they made a claim that the green levy was a major consideration and burden on them…this was of course pooh pooed by those with vested interests in maintaining the momentum of the green agenda by making fossil fuels more expensive, artificially loading them with extra taxes to make renewables seem cheap….but of course they have to hide the amount of subsidy the renewables get to make that possible.

Helpfully the BBC has long ignored or downplayed the enormous subsidies going to windfarms and other green renewable energy generators.  More often than not fossil fuel or nuclear are pictured as vastly more expensive, not to mention dangerous.

How strange then that the BBC, in the shape of Matt McGrath, is now very concerned about the effect that restricting the building of windfarms will have on energy prices….

Plans to restrict wind farms to seas around Britain will need much larger subsidies from consumers, experts say.

So….not interested in the vast costs of directly funding windfarms when they are being built but suddenly is interested when windfarms aren’t being built…then, oddly, not subsidising them is going to cost us more.

 

Harrabin joins in the chorus of propaganda for onshore:

 

Journalism or green lobbying?

 

Roger Harrabin has a theory...and it is only a theory because he offers no proof (who needs proof when you are on a crusade?)…..Pickles has banned windfarms because of the right wing press…..

Communities Secretary Eric Pickles has staged a minor coup over coalition energy policy.

Conservative newspapers have been demanding a cap on onshore wind farms, but the Lib Dems have refused to agree…..the Liberal Democrats, accused him of playing politics….

 

However even McGrath doesn’t come up with that fantasy (and the BBC itself has frequently blamed ‘rightwing Tory backbenchers’ for this policy change)……

Newspaper reports suggest that the Conservative Party will include a pledge to limit onshore turbines in next year’s election manifesto.

Long unpopular among some Conservative MPs from rural constituencies, onshore wind turbines appear to have incurred the wrath of the Prime Minister as well.

 

Which paper does McGrath link to there?…er…the right wing Guardian….

And what does the Guardian say?:

The south-west is home to a large number of onshore windfarms and marginal Tory-Lib Dem seats.

 Asked by the Western Morning News whether plans to curb wind farms would feature in his party’s manifesto, Shapps said: “The wind is moving in a clear direction here.”

 

Ah…so marginal Tory seats….in other words Tory MPs working the maths out for themsleves unaided by a rabid right wing Press….ban windfarms and get more votes.

Presumably the Western Morning News is not an example of that rabid right wing Press…and yet it is asking questions about a ‘cap’.

Just another example of Harrabin confusing his personal prejudice with news and journalism.

 

 

Here Harrabin is more interested in the politics than the facts:

 

 

 

 

A third example of the BBC’s hypocrisy and the tortured manipulation of the facts to fit their agenda….

China has long been held up as the poster child of the green renewables initiative, despite building a coal power station every week.

China is the new Go-Green Model

We have been told that such developing nations must be allowed to generate massive amounts of CO2 in order that they can industrialise…it’s only fair that they be allowed to catch up with the West.

What’s odd about that is of course that we are frequently told that we have ‘x’ number of months to save the planet…cut CO2 or we will fry.

100 months to save the world

How does that work….a desperate and dangerous time when belching out CO2 is destroying the planet…..and yet China et al are to be allowed to pump out …CO2.

 

Here’s the latest from the IPCC….

[The IPCC] warns that governments are set to crash through the global CO2 safety threshold by 2030. Humans have tripled CO2 emissions since 1970, it says – and emissions have been accelerating rather than slowing.

 

Sounds apocalyptic doesn’t it?  And yet…China is the Green’s poster boy for renewables…

…why?  Because to justify allowing China to generate all that CO2 the apologists have to find something to excuse that ‘polluting’ of the planet…..and it is polluting apparently….Harrabin is quite firm in that belief:

 

[Harrabin should really stop Tweeting]

 

But back in the UK or the West, the fingers point at, for example, our vehicle use and how polluting that is…….when people suggest China has vastly more vehicles the point is made that that’s OK because when you look at it as cars per head of population China has far fewer cars than Western countries…not more ‘in absolute terms’….so that’s OK.

or is it?

The report, seen by BBC News, warns that transport will become the biggest source of CO2 emissions unless politicians act firmly.

Act firmly…but let China et al have what they want.

 

Contrast the approach when a climate change advocate is trying to extol the virtues and the capacity of wind energy in China….suddenly the relatively tiny wind generated energy shouldn’t be compared ‘per head’ so to speak, but in absolute terms…and then it is permissible to  compare it to Europe’s own generation capacity…which of course is allegedly smaller…so good for China…….

A more fundamental question is the likely contribution of wind power to China’s insatiable demand for energy.

The most recent figures, for 2012, show that wind only generated 2% of the country’s electricity. Coal, the largest contributor, generated 75%.

However, since China’s total generation is more than that of all European Union countries combined, wind’s percentage is large in absolute terms.

 

So…hurray…China is leading the world in green renewable energy…er…in absolute terms…not in comparison to the polluting, dirty, filthy fossil fuel energy it actually produces…but never mind ignore that when convenient.

And then maybe not even in ‘absolute terms’….. in the comments to the BBC report someone begs to differ and suggests China is not as productive as the BBC claims:

84.

Roberto Lacal
9th January 2014 – 20:59

One of the statements of the article is not true: “the European Union countries together have just over 90GW of installed wind capacity”.

The EU had 106 GW of wind installed capacity by 31/12/2012. Source: “Renewable Energy Snapshots 2012”, p. 34.
In addition, China produced 100.2 TWh of wind electricity and the EU around 180 TWh in 2012 (Eurostat official figures only published by July 2014)

 

 

And you may be interested in this from the Telegraph:

 

Global solar dominance in sight as science trumps fossil fuels

Solar power will slowly squeeze the revenues of petro-rentier regimes in Russia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. They will have to find a new business model, or fade into decline

Solar power has won the global argument. Photovoltaic energy is already so cheap that it competes with oil, diesel and liquefied natural gas in much of Asia without subsidies.

Roughly 29pc of electricity capacity added in America last year came from solar, rising to 100pc even in Massachusetts and Vermont. “More solar has been installed in the US in the past 18 months than in 30 years,” says the US Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). California’s subsidy pot is drying up but new solar has hardly missed a beat.

For the world it portends a once-in-a-century upset of the geostrategic order. Sheikh Ahmed-Zaki Yamani, the veteran Saudi oil minister, saw the writing on the wall long ago. “Thirty years from now there will be a huge amount of oil – and no buyers. Oil will be left in the ground. The Stone Age came to an end, not because we had a lack of stones, and the oil age will come to an end not because we have a lack of oil,” he told The Telegraph in 2000. Wise old owl.

Pro-Immigration Fanaticism…Ignoring The Truth

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77% of the British population think that immigration is too high and should be controlled and reduced.

A small liberal, metropolitan elite think otherwise and are intent on importing as many immigrants as possible regardless of the consequences….and they are ready to denounce you as racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic in order to try and silence you and any criticism of them that you may have.

The pro-immigration lobby, of which the BBC is a prominent and powerful member, is fanatical and reckless in its abandonment of all reason as it presses for completely open borders to allow in unlimited numbers of people who have no loyalty to this country, no idea of its laws, its culture, its norms, and often have no intention of adhering to those anyway.

It is a quite extraordinary example of people who allow their ideology to over-rule common sense and a total and deliberate failure to address the issues that such a policy might result in, ultimately the total breakdown of the society this mass influx of immigrants profess they want to join and, we are told, will ‘improve’.

It was known that the EU was intent on importing millions of Africans into Europe and now with wars in the Middle East the UN is trying to force millions more upon us…

The UN’s special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants has said wealthy countries should agree to accept one million Syrian refugees over the next five years to help end the series of boat disasters.

Not sure millions of Muslims entering Europe would be good for social cohesion and stability.

The Times on Monday told us that 25% of Britons will be from an ethnic minority by 2051, double what the level is now….driven of course by immigration…the population rising to over 77 million.

This will have dramatic effects upon services, infrastructure and of course society itself especially if different groups fail to integrate and continue to segregate based on race or religion.

David Coleman, professor of demography at the the University of Oxford, said:

“Many of the consequences of large scale migration are damaging.  We do not need up to 13 million more people by the mid century.   Almost all that increase will be immigrants and their children.  It will not make the UK a happier or richer place.  Crowding and congestion will have entirely negative effects, increasing pressure on schools, hospitals and particulary housing.”

Simon Ross, director of Population Concern, said it was time people looked at the consequences migration had on quality of life.

“There’s a lot of people with vested interests in immigration, the universities and employers for instance….People talk about the taxes that migrants pay but that is a short term view. Migrants have children and get old and we need to take account of the services they will eventually use.  We should not reduce migration simply to a taxation issue.  We should talk about its effect on British society including the need for more housing which effects the green belt and transport infrastructure.  These are quality of life issues.”

Such thoughts would be ‘ramping up the rhetoric’ and an unacceptable tone for Evan Davis and Co.

Left leaning David Goodhart also had his doubts…..

Too diverse?

Is Britain becoming too diverse to sustain the mutual obligations behind a good society and the welfare state?

The nation state remains irreplaceable as the site for democratic participation and it is hard to imagine how else one can organise welfare states and redistribution except through national tax and public spending. Moreover, since the arrival of immigrant groups from non-liberal or illiberal cultures it has become clear that to remain liberal the state may have to prescribe a clearer hierarchy of values.

Goodhart did conclude something similar in this BBC programme….

The gulf between conservative Islam and secular liberal Britain is larger than with any comparable large group….for those of us who value an open, liberal society it is time to explain why it is superior to the alternatives.

He told us that…

Some claim that if people understood Islam more everything would be fine, they would be more tolerant, I think quite the contrary….the more they understand about it the more alien they would find it…authoritarian, collectivist, patriarchal, misogynist…..all sorts of things that Britain might have been 100 years ago but isn’t now.

 

He also said this in another interview…..

I am pro-immigrant but against mass immigration.

I believe in human equality and the unity of the human race, but I am sceptical about the economic benefits of large-scale immigration for the bottom half of British society, and worry about too much rapid change leading to segregation of communities and a withering of the kind of fellow-feeling needed to sustain welfare states.

There is nothing remarkable about those views and there are now plenty of others on the centre-Left who share them — Jon Cruddas gave my book a favourable review in the New Statesman — though official Labour remains somewhat uncertain of its position on this territory.

Like many metropolitan liberals I had very little direct experience of immigration yet I came to see it as beyond the normal trade-offs and interest calculations of political life. It was simple: good people were in favour of it, and bad, bigoted people were against it.

Alongside this belief was a twitchy ambivalence about my own country, no doubt reflecting a twitchy ambivalence about myself. Left-wing and liberal intellectual scepticism about the national was particularly strong in England because of its dominant imperial past.

I now, of course, believe this disdain for the national was immature and premature as well as loftily dismissive of majority opinion.

How did I come to change my mind about that and about large-scale immigration?

No doubt becoming a more grounded person and mixing with a wider spread of people knocked some of the undergraduate ideological gaucheness out of me as I entered my thirties. But what I like to think really changed my mind was good ideas, or openness to better ideas than I had been carrying around.

It was David Willetts, the leading Tory, who had first drawn my attention to the “progressive dilemma”. Speaking at a Prospect debate on the welfare state in 1998, he noted that if values and lifestyles become too diverse it becomes more difficult to sustain common norms and hence the legitimacy of a risk-pooling welfare state.

“This is America versus Sweden. You can have a Swedish welfare state provided you are a homogeneous society with intensely shared values. In the US you have a very diverse, individualistic society where people feel fewer obligations to fellow citizens. Progressives want diversity but they thereby undermine part of the moral consensus on which a large welfare state rests.”

That is to say, people are readier to share and co-operate with people whom they trust or with whom they believe they have significant attributes, and interests, in common.

Willetts’s dilemma seemed to me a true and powerful idea. I remember thinking when I first heard it: why is this issue not discussed more, particularly on the Left?

Having experienced the tribal irrationality of part of leftist Britain on the issue of diversity I found myself extending my critique to other aspects of the argument: the nature of community, the role of national identities in liberal societies and more.

The other idea that broke through my inchoate left-liberal instincts was even simpler than the progressive dilemma. It is this: embracing the idea of human equality does not mean we owe the same allegiance to everyone.

For most people commitments and allegiances ripple out from friends and family to neighbourhoods, towns and nations. This does not mean we should not care about the global poor. But we have a hierarchy of obligations that means we spend 30 times more every year on the NHS than we do on development aid. Is that wrong?

Immigration, at least on a significant scale, is hard for both incomer and receiver, especially when multi-generational poverty is being imported. People are not blank sheets, societies are not random collections of individuals, and objection to the arrival of a large number of outsiders in a community is not necessarily racist.

When middle-class social scientists like Michael Young in the 1950s and 1960s discovered what a high attachment people in working-class communities had to stability and continuity it was considered something to celebrate by left-wing sociologists. When people objected to that continuity being disrupted by the churn of mass immigration they were denounced.

 

You may want to read this forecast from 2007 of what the future may well bring….and indeed has…

From DCDC strategic trends document: Development Concepts and Doctrine Centre for the uk mod…a source document for uk defence policy: 2007-36

Mass Displacement. Conflict and crises will continue to trigger the displacement of large numbers of people, mainly into proximate regions, which may find themselves at risk of instability or exogenous shock.

Migration will increase in response to environmental pressures, deprivation and the perception of economic opportunities offered in towns and cities, as well as in wealthier regions and countries. Some 175m people, 3% of the world’s population, currently live outside their country of origin. That number is likely to grow to 230m by 2050

 

Identity & Interest – Potential Implications
While citizenship and physical security will remain important, individual loyalty to the state and state institutions will become increasingly conditional, based on personal identity and interest.
Nationhood and ethnicity in certain countries will continue to influence human behaviour and international relations.
Diaspora communities and their networks will be dynamic and unpredictable features of the political, demographic and economic aspects of globalization.
Physical and cultural origin will continue to be significant to identity, but will be employed increasingly selectively, based on their utility in context and in relation to personal interest.
Communities will increasingly form around the pursuit of common interests.

Dynamic Diaspora.
ICT developments and advanced mass-transit systems will facilitate and increase connectivity between ethnic/national diasporae and their communities of origin. This will tend to reduce incentives for integration and assimilation and allow self-contained ‘virtual’ communities to exist across continents in ways not always in step with the interest and aspirations of their host countries. Remittances from members of diasporae will remain an important source of capital transfer and redistribution, especially for developing countries.
Less benignly, diaspora will remain a medium for the international transmission of social risk, including: inter-communal violence, terrorism and transnational crime, especially trafficking and illicit trade.

Changing Values. Secularism and materialism are likely to grow in significance in an increasingly competitive, inter-connected world, reflecting trends that are
already well established in the more developed regions. Meanwhile, cultural mixing, the pace of change and a rapid confluence of modern ideas and traditional
values are likely to increase the trend towards moral relativism and increasingly pragmatic values. These developments will trigger responses from complex,
traditionally defined communities, as well as among significant minorities, which will seek the sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious
orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism.

States and Communities will be progressively challenged by the range and complexity of the national and transnational risks that are beginning to dominate the 21st century – and some will not cope.

The expansion of global media and Information Communications Technology (ICT) will
heighten the sense of grievance and marginalization between ‘haves and have-nots’,
nationally and internationally. This is likely to lead to populism, human crises and
confrontations, typified by inter-communal and inter-ethnic conflicts at local level, but,
when related to access to strategic resources necessary to sustain developed or
developing economies, may increase the incidence and risk of international confrontation.
Communicable disease will continue to be a feature of human life; while familiar diseases
will be eradicated or mitigated through prophylaxis or cure, others will emerge, of varying
intensity and impact, alongside the constant risk of low incidence, but potentially high
impact, pandemics.

 

Cosmic Relief

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Plenty of coverage for this BBC report:

Sue Lloyd Roberts hears how a religious sect that believes in Aliens and the pursuit of pleasure is trying to help victims of female genital mutilation in Burkina Faso

FGM, Clitoraid and The Pleasure Hospital

 

 

 

I heard the report on FOOC, it’s been on Newsnight and it’s in the Independent (as above) as well.

 

On FOOC we heard that FGM was a practise carried out by Asian, African and Middle Eastern people….wonder which ones exactly.

 

This though made me laugh, the presenter’s description of the ‘Raëlians‘ as a ‘bizarre religious sect’…

The initiative for Clitoraid and the Pleasure Hospital comes from the Raëlians, a bizarre religious sect who believe in UFOs, and that the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure.

 

And Christianity or Islam aren’t bizarre religious sects?

Is not the concept of an unseen God controlling everything not bizarre in itself never mind the details…creating the Earth in 6 days, women made from a rib, feeding the 5000 with one hamburger, burning/talking bushes, virgin births, coming back to life…flying to Heaven on a winged horse?

Would the BBC admit Islam is ‘bizarre’?  They might certainly go that far in speaking about Christianity if given the chance.

 

Why do the Raëlians get singled out as ‘bizarre’?

Raëlians are individualists who believe in sexual self-determination.[4] As advocates of the universal ethic and world peace, they believe the world would be better if geniuses had an exclusive right to govern in what Rael terms Geniocracy.

 

Sounds a lot like the BBC.

 

The ‘pursuit of pleasure’.…an appalling way to lead a life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

ONLY THE MAD…

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Biased BBC’s Alan reveals a bit of a killer blow for Richard Black here…..

Below is an article from ‘Nature’ science magazine that proves that  the pro CO2 abolition groups are advancing a leftwing ideology and not science….it is cultural and political…

and what’s even better is that…..

Richard Black is caught out with his long held beliefs demolished, discredited and shot so full of holes that it wouldn’t hold a large lump of melting iceberg never mind water…..

RB: I’m not surprised at the level of UK scepticism as the main impacts of CC are decades away and in other places. The problem is poor science awareness. We need to improve science education so people properly understand climate science.

DA: A short-term disaster is needed to guarantee coverage as people aren’t good at processing information about there being no ice at the poles in 30 years. Or get David Attenborough as the front man because everyone trusts him.
RB: I agree that a short term disaster would be effective in persuading people.

(These are notes taken from a discussion meeting at Oxford University on 26th February 2010
Question and answer format featuring environmental correspondents Richard Black (BBC), Fiona Harvey (FT), David Adam (Guardian) and Ben Jackson (Sun) and chaired by Fiona Fox, director of the Science Media Centre.)

DA: I used to think sceptics were bad and mad but now the bad people (lobbyists for fossil fuel industries) had gone, leaving only the mad.

Black may, will have to reconsider his unfounded views after reading this report from the pro climate change ‘Nature’ magazine.

I have plucked out the most relevant and easily digested bits that still gives the full narrative. It is worthwhile reading the whole thing, though written with scientific terms it is perfectly understandable….I did need a dictionary to look up ‘Heuristic’!

My only disagreement is with its categorization of ‘rightwingers’ as people who are only self interested without the welfare of the community as a whole being their concern. Closing down industry and commerce means no money…..no jobs, no welfare, no schools, no housing, no food, no NHS…no nothing. I would say keeping the lights on and the machine ticking over was a community concern of great importance.

Also Sceptics may actually disagree with the ‘science’ on an evidence based principle….no scientist has yet proved ‘warming’ is caused by a rise in CO2 levels…the evidence so far is that CO2 levels rise only after the temperature rises….as admitted by UEA’s Phil Jones.

What does ‘Nature’ say:

Seeming public apathy over climate change is often attributed to a deficit in comprehension. The public knows too little science, it is claimed, to understand the evidence or avoid being misled.
We conducted a study to test this account and found no support for it.

Members of the public with the highest degrees of science literacy and technical reasoning capacity were not the most concerned about climate change. Rather, they were the ones among whom cultural polarization was greatest. This result suggests that public divisions over climate change stem not from the public’s incomprehension of science but from a distinctive conflict of interest: between the personal interest individuals have in forming beliefs in line with those held by others with whom they share close ties and the collective one they all share in making use of the best available science to promote common welfare.

[The normal explanation for scepticism is…..]
As members of the public do not know what scientists know, or think the way scientists think, they predictably fail to take climate change as seriously as scientists believe they should.
The alternative explanation can be referred to as the cultural cognition thesis (CCT). CCT posits that individuals, as a result of a complex of psychological mechanisms, tend to form perceptions of societal risks that cohere with values characteristic of groups with which they identify
People who subscribe to a hierarchical, individualistic world-view—one that ties authority to conspicuous social rankings and eschews collective interference with the decisions of individuals possessing such authority—tend to be sceptical of environmental risks. Such people intuitively perceive that widespread acceptance of such risks would license restrictions on commerce and industry, forms of behaviour that hierarchical individualists value. In contrast, people who hold an egalitarian, communitarian world-view—one favouring less regimented forms of social organization and greater collective attention to individual needs—tend to be morally suspicious of commerce and industry, to which they attribute social inequity. They therefore find it congenial to believe those forms of behaviour are dangerous and worthy of restriction.
These findings were consistent, too, with previous ones showing that climate change has become highly politicized.
As the contribution that culture makes to disagreement grows as science literacy and numeracy increase, it is not plausible to view cultural cognition as a heuristic substitute for the knowledge or capacities that SCT views the public as lacking.
　
Our findings could be viewed as evidence of how remarkably well-equipped ordinary individuals are to discern which stances towards scientific information secure their personal interests.
For the ordinary individual, the most consequential effect of his beliefs about climate change is likely to be on his relations with his peers.
Given how much the ordinary individual depends on peers for support—material and emotional—and how little impact his beliefs have on the physical environment, he would probably be best off if he formed risk perceptions that minimized any danger of estrangement from his community.’

The below though is the possibly sinister and scary conclusion that ‘Nature’ comes to…..never mind trying to educate the public use friendly , trusted, respected members of the ‘community’ to advance the propaganda…..remember this:
‘Get David Attenborough as the front man because everyone trusts him.’

‘One aim of science communication, we submit, should be to dispel this tragedy of the risk-perception commons. A communication strategy that focuses only on transmission of sound scientific information, our results suggest, is unlikely to do that. As worthwhile as it would be, simply improving the clarity of scientific information will not dispel public conflict so long as the climate-change debate continues to feature cultural meanings that divide citizens of opposing world-views.
It does not follow, however, that nothing can be done to promote constructive and informed public deliberations. As citizens understandably tend to conform their beliefs about societal risk to beliefs that predominate among their peers, communicators should endeavor to create a deliberative climate in which accepting the best available science does not threaten any group’s values. Effective strategies include use of culturally diverse communicators, whose affinity with different communities enhances their credibility, and information-framing techniques that invest policy solutions with resonances congenial to diverse groups. Perfecting such techniques through a new science of science communication is a public good of singular importance.’

In other words PR, spin, propaganda, call it what you will but they are advocating altering people’s beliefs by manipulation and ‘faith’ in the person or mechanism used to deliver the message alone…never mind the Truth.”

GAS CHAMBERS, GULAGS AND GLOSSING OVER THE TRUTH..

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Biased BBC’s Alan brings a curiously non-judgemental piece on a Labour MP here:

‘A Labour MP has branded a fellow train passenger a “lager drinking oaf” and suggested he should “have been killed before he could breed”.’

If that had been said by a Tory imagine the outcry….in fact wasn’t some one hounded just for using the word ‘breed’ a while back?

‘Howard Flight (millionaire banker, euro sceptic and Peer)criticised Chancellor George Osborne’s plan to strip child benefit from higher earners as an attack on wealthier families. “We’re going to have a system where the middle classes are discouraged from breeding because it’s jolly expensive, but for those on benefit there is every incentive,” he said.’

‘Labour branded Mr Flight’s comments “shameful” and said they showed the Tories were out of touch with people…. “These shameful but revealing comments cast serious doubt over David Cameron’s judgement in personally appointing Howard Flight to the House of Lords only a few days ago.’

The BBC take? ‘…..critics have said Mr Flight’s remarks smack of “eugenics”.

And eugenics is a bad thing in the popular mind, at least in part due to its association with the Nazis. But there’s more to the story than that.

If you had given a speech about eugenics in the latter part of the 19th Century, it would have been a fairly unremarkable position to take. Well of course they would say that……..because….the Left have record on this sort of thing……and never forget Hitler was a socialist…..

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/leftwatch/2010/11/eugenics-is-the-dirty-little-secret-of-the-british-left.html
‘Freedland concludes his piece as follows –
One other doctrine was crucial – profound elitism. It strikes the 1990s ear oddly, but these leading lights of British socialism had no patience for equality.
“For years, leftists, historians and everyone else have drawn a veil over Adolf Hitler’s naming of his creed National Socialism. It has been dismissed as a perverse PR trick of the Fuhrer’s, as if Nazism and socialism represented opposite faiths. The same view has infused the left’s understanding of the genocides committed in the name of communism, whether by Stalin or Pol Pot, as if those men were merely betraying the otherwise noble theory whose cause they proclaimed.”
“But the early history of British socialism tells a different story. It suggests that socialism – with its unshakeable faith in science, central planning and the cool wisdom of the rational elite – contained the seeds of the atrocities that were to come later. Eventually, in the shadow of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor, the British left gave up its flirtation with eugenics. They saw where it had led. But, just like the governments of Scandinavia, their past was buried too quickly and forgotten. The names of Russell, Webb and Shaw still retain their lustre despite their association with the foulest idea of the 20th century. They escaped the reckoning. Perhaps now, posthumously, it’s time to see them, and much of socialism itself, as they truly were.”
According to Freedland –
…George Bernard Shaw wrote: “The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man.”
…Bertrand Russell suggested that the state issue colour-coded procreation tickets.
…H. G. Wells hailed eugenics as the first step toward the removal of “detrimental types and characteristics”.
…Keynes endorsed legalised birth control because the working class was too “drunken and ignorant” to be trusted to keep its own numbers down.
…Marie Stopes and Mary Stocks “were not motivated by a kind of proto-feminism, but rather by the urge to reduce the numbers of the burgeoning lumpenproletariat”.
…Beatrice Webb was sure her genetic material was worth preserving, describing herself as ‘the cleverest member of one of the cleverest families in the cleverest class of the cleverest nation of the world”.
The New Statesman declared in 1931: “The legitimate claims of eugenics are not inherently incompatible with the outlook of the collectivist movement. On the contrary, they would be expected to find their most intransigent opponents amongst those who cling to the individualistic views of parenthood and family economics.”