And we generalise: one commentator objected that MMGW must be bollocks because it rained a lot on the Isle of Wight last week. Climate models cannot be used to predict local conditions, but that is short sentence precising a long, complex argument, easily countered by the argument that scientists are all ‘in on it.’ There is a familiarity to this tactic by the right which people active in other areas will recognise: use minority dissenting experts to support your position, quote mine from mainstream experts and exaggerate, resort argument from incredulity, posit a conspiracy. How 18 Doughty Street behaves is up to it: whether its audience believes a former paper editor with no scientific training is up to them. At a lecture last week a scientist said that the climate was now changing at the fastest rate in 40 million years. I know who I believe.

I’m not sure that writing for a write wing paper precludes you from being left wing. There’s plenty of old Trots on the Times.

As for moral relativism, it has been an ever more powerful force in leftwing thinking. Many left wing academics have claimed that brutal practices such as female genital mutilation are cultural norms that neo-colonialist Westerners have no business criticising.

Hell, Noam Chomsky defended Pol Pot!!

You are right that this is not “liberal”, but it is very typical of “the left”.

Colin: I don’t accept that the BBC bias is ‘left and liberal’. You give the game away by equating the two (suggesting you don’t know what either of them actually are). It is certainly middle class and patrician, but you only have to glance at the number of BBC journalists who write for rightwing papers to realise that the bias isn’t leftwing.

In terms of Graham Brady, I’m reading his resignation letter (published in the Daily Mail) and he states: “Like all Members of Parliament who have grammar schools in their constituencies, I must now help to provide the evidence that those schools need to defend themselves. That is why I have felt duty bound to continue my practice of obtaining and publishing facts which demonstrate that selective local education authorities perform better than comprehensive ones.” I could go on, but it is quite transparent that he resigned over disagreement with Cameron on Grammar Schools. How has the BBC distorted this fact?

Conversely, yesterday I was listening to Caroline Quinn on the Today Programme suggesting to Peter Tatchell that gay rights were ‘Western values’ and that he should expect to get beaten up defending them if he will insist on protesting in Russia. How is suggesting that universal human rights such as the right to protest and free assembly, let alone sticking up for gay rights leftwing, or liberal?

Of course, 18DS is a Tory propaganda station, so perhaps what I really want is a genuine politicos (internet) TV channel that does the above.

I agree with your point about Greenpeace. (All of them, but especially…) I used to think that one should encourage widely differing opinions to share a platform, but I’ve been to a few debates over the last couple of years that were simply pointless, becuase experts were arguing about such fundamentals of the evidence that the lay audiance was left with little option but to stick to their pre-conceptions.

Perhaps the solution is to abandon the air of neutrality and adopt the Newspaper system: be openly ideological and allow the viewers to choose. This would necessitate privatising or dismantling the BBC, of course, as it could hardly be both biased and publically owned. But some sacrifices are worth making!!