Last February, the BBC and others were proclaiming the ban on discarding at sea fish that had been caught but either could not be landed legally, or were of inferior quality to that which sells at the desired price, as a great victory.
Roger Harrabin, the ‘environmental lobby propagandist’ who draws a substantial income from the BBC, in addition to substantial cash from various sideline work for the very eco groups whose every report and argument he then reports about without challenge or question, went so far as to say that it was “something of a victory for citizen power, following organised lobbying of MEPs by ordinary people, as well as by high-profile celebrity chefs and environmentalists”.
The reality, as Richard argued some months ago, would be very different. While everyone was singing the hymns of EU praise back then, North was about the only voice taking time to explain that:
Even then, some discarding at seas is going to be allowed. And, while the reforms are to prevent discarding at sea – what this means is that non-quota fish will be landed, and disposed of on-shore. This is marginally better than dumping at sea, but only marginally so. It will have very little effect on the overall health of the fishery.
In effect, therefore, the much-vaunted “reforms” are a big bag of nothing – a cynical PR exercise of very little consequence.
Fast forward back to today and what do we find? The Guardian with a ‘scoop’ story that reports on the findings of a study by the University of East Anglia and the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture. Guess what one of the lead authors, Professor Alastair Grant, has to say?
The discards ban is not the great victory that the public seem to think.
Well, colour me shocked! Richard expands on this in a valuable post today over at EU Referendum. But rather than focus on that – you can read it for yourselves – I’m minded to ask a question.
Is there a single damned thing that comes out of Roger Harrabin’s mouth, or from his keyboard, that we can rely upon to be accurate?
People in this country are saddled with paying the salary of this activist lackey through the BBC licence fee, for nothing but biased reportage, naked propaganda and inaccurate scare stories hammed up to reinforce the spiteful agenda of his coterie of envirochums. But the BBC love it because it is their agenda too. Forget impartial reporting. Forget balance. Forget question and challenge of assertions made. The BBC is a publicly funded propagandist, abused by its employees to push their worldview on a public they treat with scorn and contempt.
Let’s see if Harrabin corrects his previous claims of victory and present the reality, or if he will leave falsehood to stand as the BBC’s published record of these matters.
Autonomous Mind 
Good catch AM. There is not a single Common Policy that the EU have not made a complete & continued hash of over the last 40 years. Fishing is a particularly sore point as Heath gave it away so readily and consigned numerous ports around our land to unemployment backwaters.
“People in this country are saddled with paying the salary of this activist lackey through the BBC licence fee, for nothing but biased reportage, naked propaganda and inaccurate scare stories hammed up to reinforce the spiteful agenda of his coterie of envirochums. But the BBC love it because it is their agenda too. Forget impartial reporting. Forget balance. Forget question and challenge of assertions made. The BBC is a publicly funded propagandist, abused by its employees to push their worldview on a public they treat with scorn and contempt.”
If you told me you had cut and paste this from the BBCs internal charter I would believe you. But joking aside it could come straight from the Common Purpose Bumper Book of How to Manipulate Governments and Coerce People. The BBC is a perfect example of “leadership beyond authority”.
The people approving this policy would of course be exactly the same people who complain we are wasting too much food?
One way to begin unsaddling ourselves from the BBC is to become legally licence free (LLF) – I have posted about this today. Not as difficult as it sounds unless you’re addicted to TV.
The BBC is very far from independent – its charter is granted by Queen and Parliament – how can it be?
Not infrequently, I hear Harabin on Radio 4’s Today / news bulletins – everything is the fault of global warming, everything. Presenters rarely, if ever, challenge him.
But without campaigners and EU politicians like this we would never have got that extra little cookie button to press on every web page asking if we want to be there or not.
Harrabin had an article – say a couple of months back – which quoted the Marcott paper, and displayed the graph from that paper which has, as per Mann, a ludicrous hockey stick.
What the article did not state was that Marcott himself, when pushed, stated that the hockey stick was “not robust”.
I pointed this out to the BBC. The response? The paper was peer-reviewed.
Why bother?
Harrabin is to fishing discards what Cameron is to the EU budget.