Roger Harrabin wins the battle

 

When we last met the BBC's (environmental activist) environment analyst Roger Harrabin he'd published 8 separate BBC News website articles about the proposed new coal mine in Cumbria within the space of a month. 

He didn't stop there. He got up to 9 with:

Cumbria coal mine plan 'damaging PM's reputation'

Boris Johnson has been warned by some of his foreign ambassadors that a planned coal mine in Cumbria is damaging his reputation.

And made it 9½ in a piece headlined UK environmental protections 'being flouted'. 

Here's a question: Did his (campaigning) reporting contribute to the Government's U-turn this week by piling on the pressure against the mine? I'm assuming yes.

Whatever, he contented himself with merely providing an inset 'analysis' to the BBC's main report on the story this week:

The government could still decide to approve the mine, but given the amount of anger it's caused that seems unlikely - at least until after the UN climate conference.

Local Conservatives strongly supported the scheme and the employment it would bring.

But the government's climate advisers, along with a crowd of green groups, warned it would increase carbon emissions when the UK's committed to cutting them.

What's more, it would harm Britain's international reputation before the UN conference, they said.

One of the world's leading climate scientists, the American James Hansen, warned Boris Johnson risked humiliation over the mine.

The US climate envoy John Kerry warned against it on Monday. And yesterday Alok Sharma was again rebuked by MPs over the plan.

It was too much pressure.

See more here.  

Another BBC factual error?

The closure today of the UK's last deep coal mine has received considerable coverage from the BBC today. 

I noted down part of BBC reporter Dan Johnson's report for BBC Breakfast that reflected a concern I've written about before here:

Dan Johnson: Kellingley was one of the news 1960s pits offering a bright future:

Contemporary news report: The coal from Kellingley will flow like a black river for the rest of this century and beyond. 

Dan Johnson: But job cuts and closures led to the year-long Miners' Strike. After that came a slow, painful decline.  

That's the kind of thing that risks being taken out of context - and that the BBC often takes out of context, repeatedly implying that the blame for the decline of the coal mining industry lay with the Thatcher government of the 1980s and that its death began with the Miners' Strike on 1984-5, whereas the reality is that the death of coal mining in the UK was already beginning as Kellingley was being born:

Some of the graphics I've seen in other BBC reports today have suggested this, to be fair to them - without exactly spelling it out; however, I can't say I was impressed by the main BBC online report on this story this morning which ended with the following:

The problem with that is that it's simply untrue that "privatisation in the 1980s" led to the Miners' Strike. 

The coal industry wasn't privatised until the 1990s. It was the Major government not the Thatcher government that privatised the coal industry (in 1994).

That's an error that seems to have gone unnoticed all day (so far). 

Or am I missing something?

UK Conspiritorial

The National Archive at Kew has released the official Cabinet papers from 1984 under the thirty-year rule. 

Their website contains a half-hour podcast where two of the archivists at Kew run through the highlights from the latest batch. Both are excellent, engaging speakers and what they have to say is very interesting and pleasingly free of obvious spin. 

Every year at this time Martha Kearney presents UK Confidential, an hour long Radio 4 special devoted to the latest release. This too was very interesting and covered much the same ground as the National Archive podcast - though, being the BBC, it wasn't quite so free of obvious spin. 

Both the National Archive and BBC Radio 4 led with the Cabinet papers' take on the Miners' Strike. The National Archive gave an overview of all the main revelations without making a lot of any particular one. 

Curiously, one they omitted became the lead angle for Martha Kearney's programme - the records of a meeting in which National Coal Board boss Sir Ian MacGregor's suggestion that 75 pits might have to be closed was raised in Margaret Thatcher's presence. The official line, we were told, was that just 20 mines were earmarked for closure. Martha said Arthur Scargill has been alleging from the start that their were secret plans to close 70 pits. This made it seem like Scargill was right all along, that the miners' cause was just and that the Thatcher government had been complicit in a lie. 

Lord Kinnock one of the programme's three guests, pointed out, however, that Scargill kept claiming all manner of different figures for secretly-planned pit closures. Lord Armstrong, another guest, noted that the National Coal Board was closing around 20 pits a year anyhow and the suggestion of 75 pit closures was explicitly over a three year period. 

Without these guests Radio 4 listeners might well have come away with the impression that Arthur Scargill was, indeed, right and the Thatcher government was in the wrong. 

No context was given, merely former BBC reporter Nicholas Jones pushing this BBC narrative with all his customary vigour. 

Here's the missing context, courtesy of the National Coal Museum:

Number of working colleries in the UK 

1920 - 2851
1930 - 2328
1944 - 1634
1947 - 958
1950 - 901
1955 - 850
1960 - 698
1965 - 483
1970 - 292
1975 - 241
1980 - 211
1985 - 133
1990 - 65
1995 - 65
2000 - 28
2004 - 19 

That's the sort of thing you don't get told by the BBC. Literally. 

I tried to find such a list on the BBC website but couldn't find one. All I found was a long list of mine closures since 1984 - which is all very well but, as you can now see, also likely to prove deeply misleading for those unaware of the vastly longer list of mines closed in the decades before the miners' strike. 

Of course, if BBC Radio 4 was making this its main angle on the National Archive 1984 batch you could safely bet that the rest of the BBC will have been doing so too. And so it proved. (Nick Higham's website article is a good example). 

They are highly coordinated in their news reporting, setting the agenda and pushing it for all it's worth. The BBC chose to make this one document its main angle. (Listening to the National Archive podcast proves this, and the archivists at Kew didn't make anything of it.) They then went to town on it.

Typical BBC.