News in brief

A poor show by the BBC

A few weeks ago Chiltern Radio did a service to Bedford by bringing to the public attention the way an innovative possible development - NIRAH - was being handled.

Last week the BBC Look East screened a programme that cast cold water on the scheme. If the makers of this programme, together with the (steadily becoming infamous) Nadine Dorries succeed, they will have set back one of the most sensible and forward-looking projects of the century - a project that could have had an incalculable beneficial effect on Bedford and the county in general.

It is truly difficult to know where on earth Nadine Dorries comes from. She said, at a meeting a few weeks ago, that she was in favour of the Nirah project, but as Patrick Hall MP commented, one wonders what she would have said, had she professed to oppose it! She is an MP, but what other qualifications she has to justify her stance no-one, except the perhaps gullible BBC makers of the Look East programme, can quite grasp.

I personally have respect for organizations (like the BBC) that scrutinize what goes on in public life. Investigative journalism is something we need, when so many attempts are made by organizations to hide truth. But on this occasion my respect for the BBC has been somewhat dented by the unbalanced and misleading comments that emerged in the programme. An suggestion - or so it came over to me - appeared to be made that there was something rather tawdry about the chairman of NIRAH also being a director of other companies with an interest in the project. So what?! No new thing here. Aspersions were also made about the deputy chairman of the East of England Development Company being on the board of NIRAH. Again, why was this supposed to be a startling revelation?! It was a jolly good thing: the Bedfordshire Consortium and the East of England Development Agency had clubbed together to loan (note loan, not give, as sometimes has been stated) some three million pounds to NIRAH, and it made perfectly good sense to ensure that someone was in there, making sure that the best interests of the consortium were being looked after. But it was all made to appear somewhat sinister.

The BBC seemed to fail miserably to grasp the idea behind NIRAH. Some serious academics are wanting to provide specimens for research. But like most academics, they need money to do this, and this requires money in order to put a proposal before going to venture capitalists. Of several possible locations that were discussed, Bedfordshire came out tops, and the project would not only provide employment opportunities, not only bring a sleepy county into the twenty-first century, not only be a wonderful environment for research and study, but would also have dealt with what at present in an eye-sore, in the form of pits that can be filled up.

While the county prevaricates, I am reliably informed that Liverpool can't wait to open its chequebook and host the project. What can one do when a so-called responsible authority that can hardly get anything right (least of all, recently, its education policies) can so skillfully behave with such a degree of incompetence and lack of vision? And as far as this week's apology for a political programme is concerned, Nadine Dorries and the BBC - at least in my view - have done a real disservice to the county of Bedfordshire.