Complaint against Nick Robinson on the Today Programme for Negligence

I've just filed a complaint against Nick Robinson for negligence. You can too. Here


On 28/12/2019, at around 0840hr, Nick Robinson on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme interviewed Matt Ridley who was trying to resurrect the debate about the extent of the threat to humanity from man-made climate change.

Nick Robinson did not raise the fact that Matt Ridley was chairman of Northern Rock at the time that the bank experienced a run. Neither did he raise the fact that he owns land that has an open cast coal mine on its surface.

This is nothing but negligence on the part of Nick Robinson, whose researchers could have picked up these facts on the simplest of searches, if indeed he did not know them already.

They are germane to the interview, since the first fact calls Matt Ridley's judgment about risk into question, and the second establishes a conflict of interest, since Ridley's underlying argument is that it is possible to continue to burn coal and other fossil fuels without causing serious problems for present and future generations of human beings and other species.

An intelligent interview would also have challenged Ridley's "lukewarmism" approach to climate change, since it is clear that lukewarmism is simply arguing that seriously damaging climate change may happen a few decades later than the overwhelming body of climate science expects it to happen.

This is a serious failure on the part of the Today programme, and I ask that next week the facts of Ridley's responsibility for the Northern Rock failure and his hosting of a coal mine should be made clear.