Finally, the BBC says it is guilty... of not being Left-wing enough!

THE point of Left-wing propaganda is to make us feel powerless. Garbage of all kinds is constantly stated as fact on the airwaves. We know it is tripe, but we can do nothing about it. By submitting to it, we are demoralised and weakened. I learned this during years of visiting and living in Communist countries, where ludicrous banners and lying media proclaimed wicked falsehoods and dared you to protest. The tiny few who did ended up being dismissed as officially crazy by shameless toadying psychiatrists, exiled or locked up in camps.

It was only when, gloriously, enough people found the courage to defy this that these regimes came to an end, often very rapidly.

But in our squelchy Leftist State, there seems to be no escape. The BBC increasingly functions as a sort of Thought Police. Even its complaints system has been turned into an arm of conformist repression.

One of the articles of faith of the new despotism is that climate change is caused by human activity. It has to be an article of faith because there is no objective testable proof that this is so, the normal requirement in science.

We are told instead that there is a ‘consensus’ or a ‘vast majority’ in favour of this belief. But scientific questions are not decided by majorities. They are decided by hard experiments, repeatedly verified.

Precisely because it is a faith rather than a fact, a special intolerant fury is turned on any who publicly doubt it.

HERE is an example. Last week, the BBC’s own ‘Executive Complaints Unit’ (ECU), with which I have had many dealings, condemned Radio 4’s Today programme. This is something I have been trying to get it to do for years. I have many times battled my way through the futile outer defences of the Corporation’s complaints system. This was long ago outsourced to an outside contractor, Capita.

I get the strong impression that Capita is there solely to soak up the anger of viewers and listeners. I can get no straight answer from the BBC about whether complaints made to it are even passed directly to the programme-makers involved. You have to persist mightily to get past this to reach the ECU, which most complainants never manage to do because they don’t even know it exists.

Today is an overrated, increasingly dull and badly biased programme which repeatedly gives a free run to propagandists for the decriminalisation of dangerous drugs, a cause mysteriously popular among BBC persons, among whom drug abuse is totally unknown.

Ill-informed presenters listen obediently to this bilge, and recently (for example) allowed a guest to broadcast the street prices for cocaine, which it is a crime to sell or buy, without rebuke or interruption. It gives no matching publicity to opponents of this mad cause, who are lucky if they get on the air at all.

But the ECU somehow cannot see that this is a blatant breach of the BBC Charter and Agreement, which requires impartiality on issues of public controversy.

Contrast this with its righteous response when a listener complained that Lord Lawson, who had expressed doubts about the claims of the climate change lobby, was not properly challenged by the presenter involved. In fact, this claim had some merit. Lord Lawson’s statements about global temperatures were open to challenge. I would not myself have made them.

But while my complaints about presenters’ failure to interrogate the claims of drug legalisers, or to be impartial on the issue, are repeatedly flatly rejected, this complaint was upheld and resulted in a formal apology.

This is straightforwardly unjust. Complaints against the BBC are only upheld when it is not Leftwing enough.

There are only two responses to this. One is fury, and the other is laughter. But is there any escape from the web of incessant lies in which we are now entangled?