Vapid epiphanies and confected contrition

The BBC has been caught producing Verified bullshit. It may well even be reformulating its position on climate change. But the state broadcaster's excesses are not all its own work.

The BBC has announced that its director-general Tim Davie and CEO of BBC News are to step down. This comes in response to the leaked memo that alleged BBC News and current affairs producers were wilfully doctoring footage to fabricate a false narrative being brought to the attention of senior executives, and those executives’ indifference to the allegation. In further news, the Telegraph reports also that “The BBC is preparing to launch an investigation to assess bias in its climate change coverage, amid a growing crisis at the corporation.” It sounds like much is changing, everywhere. But is it? Are institutions merely adapting to their immediate crisis, and is that enough? Or should we require more? What will the BBC be? What do we want it to be? Should it be anything at all?

I have, in recent weeks and months, been writing here and elsewhere about the inadequacies of the climate ‘epiphany’, as for example demonstrated by the Conservative Party’s row back from Net Zero. Though we are all relieved that the party of government of 14 of the previous 15 years is now somewhat cognisant of its earlier failures, this has been in my view inadequate. Here’s why, in a nutshell:

• There is no clear indication of what a post-Net Zero policy will be. Will it just be Net Zero 2060, 70, 80, 90?

• How will the extremely strong green tendency within the party, with its investments in green ideology, be prevented from undoing the rollback?

• Without a full account of how, when and why the errors were made — the receipts, the meeting minutes, the organisations involved — Britain’s economic torpor and, deindustrialisation are unexplained.

• Without an exposition of green ideology’s influence, it remains festering within Britain’s institutions of all kinds, rather than being confronted.