Activists hold a banner as they blockade the entrance
MORE than 50 activists disrupted Drax’s annual investor meeting in London today, bringing proceedings to a halt for an hour.
The firm operates a wood-burning power plant in Yorkshire, which has received some £6 billion in green subsidies, while operating as Britain’s largest carbon emitter.
Despite a BBC investigation finding that it has burned wood from rare forests in Canada, the firm is set to continue to receive taxpayer money until at least 2031.
Activists blocked the entrance to the venue, preventing shareholders from entering, and dropped a large banner reading “Drax Kills.”
Inside, activists physically disrupted proceedings, rushing to the stage shouting “Drax kills,” before the meeting was forced to close.
Axe Drax spokesperson Sam Johnson said: “We’ve seen over the last year repeated desperate attempts from Drax to silence dissent — from spending millions working with the police to shut down peaceful protest, to silencing whistleblowers. “
The BBC has stopped Evan Davis, one of its senior presenters, from hosting a personal podcast informing the public about heat pumps, a flagship clean heating solution.
Speaking on the final episode of the show, launched in January, Davis said that the BBC had become “concerned” that the podcast was “somehow treading on areas of public controversy”.
He added: “I take their shilling; they dictate the rules. They know they have to try and keep their presenters out of areas of public controversy and they have decided heat pumps can be controversial so they’ve asked me not to be involved.”
Heat pumps, powered by electricity, are currently set to play a key role in decarbonising heating and replacing gas boilers, which heat around 85 percent of Britain’s homes and account for 15 percent of greenhouse gas emissions nationwide. The government has set a target of 600,000 heat pump installations every year by 2028, up from just 55,000 in 2022.
The Happy Heat Pump podcast co-hosted by Davis attempted to educate listeners about how to use a heat pump, how much they cost, and which properties are best suited to a heat pump.
Heat pumps can be more expensive to install than alternatives, though experts have blamed the government for not matching the incentives offered by its European counterparts. Heat pump uptake in the UK is among the lowest in Europe, with more than 500,000 heat pumps sold in France last year, and more than 400,000 in both Italy and Germany.
However, gas industry lobbyists and sections of the right-wing media have attempted to stoke a “culture war” around the uptake of heat pumps in the UK. DeSmog revealed in July 2023 that a barrage of negative press about heat pumps had been funded by a gas lobby group.
Davis’s podcast co-host, Bean Beanland, criticised the BBC’s decision. Beanland, the director for growth and external affairs for the Heat Pump Federation, said the corporation’s judgement was “extraordinary”.
“It does seem to me that somehow the technologies we espouse have fallen victim to some sort of culture war,” he added.
Davis said that he believes the BBC’s decision was “more about net zero than this particular form of heating”. The legally-binding target of reaching net zero emissions by 2050 has also been weaponised by campaigners and conservative media outlets, despite a broad public consensus for reducing emissions and building new green infrastructure.
“Cars are controversial, they kill and maim thousands every year, but that hasn’t stopped the BBC glamorising car use in its decades broadcasting hundreds of episodes of Top Gear,” said Andrew Simms, co-director of the New Weather Institute.
“Heat pumps, on the other hand, don’t kill or maim, they just cheaply and safely warm homes. It’s been estimated that swapping all 23 million gas boilers in the UK to heat pumps could save roughly £11 billion in wholesale gas costs.
“The technology is already hugely successful in some of the coldest countries in Europe. In those with the longest, harshest winters like Norway, Finland and Sweden, heat pumps dominate. Already by 2022 around 41 percent of Finnish households had a heat pump installed, with two-thirds in Norway and nearly half in Sweden. Try telling them that their heating systems are controversial.”
A number of commentators have expressed their dismay on social media at the BBC’s decision. Financial Times associate editor Stephen Bush accused the BBC of “muzzling one of its best presenters from making an excellent, wholly factual programme”. Bush added that the broadcaster was an “organisation badly in need of new leadership.”
A BBC spokesperson told DeSmog: “The BBC editorial guidelines are clear that anyone working for the BBC who does an external public speaking or writing engagement should not compromise the impartiality or integrity of the BBC or its content, or suggest that any part of the BBC endorses a third-party organisation, product, service or campaign.”
As previously revealed by DeSmog, the BBC’s commercial content arm, BBC StoryWorks, has been paid to promote oil and gas companies, agricultural giants, fossil fuel states, and high-emission transport firms.
Experts have also highlighted that Davis’s podcast was simply reflecting basic facts about heat pumps.
Energy policy expert Jan Rosenow said: “Heat pumps are a mature technology that has been around for more than 100 years. All authoritative analyses indicate that we need to deploy millions of them to reach net zero. Public controversy stems from poor reporting – Evan tried to change that.”
These sentiments were reflected by fellow climate expert Andrew Sissons, who said: “I’ve said this before but… heat pumps are really quite boring, and it says quite a lot about the state of debate in Britain that we’ve managed to make them controversial. Credit to Evan for trying to make them not controversial.”
It appears that the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) – ultimately, in the final analysis a state broadcaster – is currently forbidden from mentioning Israel’s Gaza genocide. There are local elections approaching on 1st May after all …
I wonder if a DA-notice has been issued – the way to know is probably to watch other corporate media to see if there is a widespread censorship of the Israel Gaza genocide.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAUK Foreign Minister David Lammy confirms that UK government and military are active participants in Israel’s genocides and that the F-35 parts that they suspended from supplying to Israel are instead simply diverted via the United States. He says see https://youtu.be/QILgUHrdWRE
Hehe, I remember when the BBC was banned by the Labour government of the day from using the word “deep”. That was fun.
Yet the Western media will keep treating Israeli lies about war crimes as credible claims
…
So what we have here is an unbelievably grave war crime – the massacre of 15 Red Crescent medics and first responders, which the Israeli military covered up and lied about.
If this had been 15 Israeli medics and first responders butchered by Hamas, the media coverage would be deafening. It would be front page news and lead news bulletins. Every Western leader under the sun would issue damning statements condemning the utter evil of Hamas.Subscribe
But these victims were Palestinian. On the BBC news website, it’s four stories down – but most damningly, the headline is: “Video footage appears to contradict Israeli account of Gaza medic killings.”
“Appears” to contradict? What does this even mean? The footage definitively proves the Israeli account is a litany of lies. What possible room for doubt exists here?
Just imagine this footage had never been uncovered. Indeed, in the case of so many of Israel’s war crimes, there is no such footage, and Israeli claims are simply allowed to stand.
And what’s even more disturbing is this will not change the Western media’s modus operandi. As I’ve noted, Western media outlets have done rebuttals of Israeli claims before. CNN took apart Israeli claims about the so-called Flour Massacre, when over 100 Palestinians were massacred while waiting for flour. The Washington Post took apart Israel’s claims about the November 2023 assault on al-Shifa hospital. The New York Times examined how, contrary to Israeli claims, 2,000lb bombs were being dropped on so-called ‘safe zones’ by the Israeli military.
The point isn’t just that these rebuttals aren’t frequent enough, or given proper prominence, or treated with the requisite gravity – i.e. as evidence of extreme war crimes. It’s that they are orphaned from the wider narrative. Western media outlets should make clear that Israel has a proven record of entirely false statements about such atrocities. But, like a perverse Groundhog Day, they act as though these rebuttals never happened.
Miriana Conte said she had been notified that the European Broadcasting Union had ruled against the word ‘kant’. Photograph: Eurovision 2025/Youtube
Singer Miriana Conte told to change title and lyrics owing to suggestive play on Maltese word for ‘singing’
Malta’s contestant at this year’s Eurovision contest will have to change the title and lyrics of her song owing to the phonetic resemblance between the Maltese word for “singing” and the C-word, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has ruled.
Miriana Conte, 23, will represent Malta at the five-day music event in Basel, Switzerland, on 13 to 17 May after winning the Maltese song contest last month with her song Kant.
While kant, from the Latin cantus, does mean “singing” and does not have a rude meaning in Maltese, the play on the English slang word for female genitalia is clearly intentional.
The chorus of Conte’s empowerment anthem contains the phrase “serving kant” – a queer or drag slang phrase roughly meaning “to express boldness”.
In a Facebook post on Tuesday, Conte said she had been notified that the EBU had ruled against her using the word “kant”.“While I’m shocked and disappointed, especially since we have less than a week to submit the song, I promise you this: the show will go on – Diva NOT down,” she wrote.
Activists hold a banner as they blockade the entrance
