The point of Left-wing propaganda is to make us feel powerless. Garbage of all kinds is constantly stated as fact on the airwaves.

We know it is tripe, but we can do nothing about it. By submitting to it, we are demoralised and weakened.

I learned this during years of visiting and living in Communist countries, where ludicrous banners and lying media proclaimed wicked falsehoods and dared you to protest.

The tiny few who did ended up being dismissed as officially crazy by shameless toadying psychiatrists, exiled or locked up in camps.

It was only when, gloriously, enough people found the courage to defy this that these regimes came to an end, often very rapidly.

But in our squelchy Leftist State, there seems to be no escape. The BBC increasingly functions as a sort of Thought Police.

Even its complaints system has been turned into an arm of conformist repression.

One of the articles of faith of the new despotism is that climate change is caused by human activity.

It has to be an article of faith because there is no objective testable proof that this is so, the normal requirement in science.

We are told instead that there is a ‘consensus’ or a ‘vast majority’ in favour of this belief.

But scientific questions are not decided by majorities. They are decided by hard experiments, repeatedly verified.

Precisely because it is a faith rather than a fact, a special intolerant fury is turned on any who publicly doubt it.

Here is an example. Last week, the BBC’s own ‘Executive Complaints Unit’ (ECU), with which I have had many dealings, condemned Radio 4’s Today programme. This is something I have been trying to get it to do for years.

I have many times battled my way through the futile outer defences of the Corporation’s complaints system. This was long ago outsourced to an outside contractor, Capita.

I get the strong impression that Capita is there solely to soak up the anger of viewers and listeners. I can get no straight answer from the BBC about whether complaints made to it are even passed directly to the programme-makers involved.

You have to persist mightily to get past this to reach the ECU, which most complainants never manage to do because they don’t even know it exists.

Today is an overrated, increasingly dull and badly biased programme which repeatedly gives a free run to propagandists for the decriminalisation of dangerous drugs, a cause mysteriously popular among BBC persons, among whom drug abuse is totally unknown.

Ill-informed presenters listen obediently to this bilge, and recently (for example) allowed a guest to broadcast the street prices for cocaine, which it is a crime to sell or buy, without rebuke or interruption.

It gives no matching publicity to opponents of this mad cause, who are lucky if they get on the air at all.

But the ECU somehow cannot see that this is a blatant breach of the BBC Charter and Agreement, which requires impartiality on issues of public controversy.

Contrast this with its righteous response when a listener complained that Lord Lawson, who had expressed doubts about the claims of the climate change lobby, was not properly challenged by the presenter involved.

In fact, this claim had some merit. Lord Lawson’s statements about global temperatures were open to challenge. I would not myself have made them.

But while my complaints about presenters’ failure to interrogate the claims of drug legalisers, or to be impartial on the issue, are repeatedly flatly rejected, this complaint was upheld and resulted in a formal apology.

This is straightforwardly unjust. Complaints against the BBC are only upheld when it is not Left- wing enough.

There are only two responses to this. One is fury, and the other is laughter. But is there any escape from the web of incessant lies in which we are now entangled?

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Ssmoke screen: Liv Tyler (left) plays a Roman Catholic rebel in Gunpowder smoke screen

Gunpowder’s blown real history to pieces

Ronan Bennett, writer of the new TV drama Gunpowder, about the Guy Fawkes plot, said in October 2000 that he would not turn in the Omagh bombers to the Royal Ulster Constabulary, if he knew who they were.

This is a historical fact, unlike many of the events shown in the drama itself. And I hope it causes you to wonder a bit about who and what this programme is for.

I am one of the last few surviving Englishmen who was brought up as a Protestant patriot, to revere the first Queen Elizabeth as our greatest monarch and Sir Francis Drake as the saviour of his country against the Armada in 1588.

How fortunate we were, I thought then, and think now.

Oddly enough, I was taught this period of our history by a proud Roman Catholic, an excellent teacher whose lessons I still recall more than 55 years later. There was no hint of bigotry in those lessons. Why should there have been? We were told that the Queen’s Roman Catholic subjects were, by the standards of their times, treated generously. The problem (here’s another fact) was that Pope Pius V had instructed them all in a decree of 1570 (‘Regnans in Excelsis’) to engage in treason against Queen Elizabeth, whom the Pope denounced as a ‘servant of crime’. And his church then sent priests into the country to foment that treason, allied with ever-present threats of foreign invasion.

Most English Roman Catholics sensibly ignored this foolish foreign plotting. Those few who sheltered such priests were (quite reasonably, in my view) considered equivalent to those who today shelter the agents of Islamic State.

They were not burned to death for holding to their faith, as Protestants had been under the appalling and intolerant Queen Mary. The whole picture of the era in Gunpowder is wrong, including the fictional scene in which a woman is stripped naked before being crushed to death.

As for the graphic disembowelling of a captured priest, it is interesting that the BBC is ready to show this gruesome thing but remains reluctant to show the equally grisly truth about what happens in an abortion.

It is propaganda, which is why nearly all the major actors on the rebel side, such as Liv Tyler, are good-looking, and nearly all the main characters on the Protestant side are ugly or otherwise despicable.

I would love to know the process by which its interesting author came to be chosen.

The new BBC drama stars Kit Harington (left) and Liv Tyler (right). After the death of Elizabeth I, King James of Scotland claims the English throne, and the country goes to war with Catholic Spain and English Catholics are persecuted and driven into hiding in the series

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I spent Tuesday evening haranguing a student gathering in a Liverpool street about the non-existent ‘war on drugs’. Luckily, it didn’t rain.

I hadn’t meant to do an open-air meeting, but it ended up outside mainly because I wasn’t allowed to use the university buildings (things weren’t helped when the owners of a hastily booked alternative venue didn’t turn up to unlock the door). I had refused to agree to outrageous conditions demanded by the university authorities, and common on British campuses.

The pretext for these rules is, of course, terrorism. It always is. But in my view they are a threat to liberty. For instance, I was told ‘speakers may be asked to provide written undertakings about the conduct of the event and the content of their speech’; and ‘speakers may be asked to provide an outline of their speech for approval prior to the event taking place’. Police could also be asked to attend and the identities of the audience might be checked.

What bothers me is that other speakers must be accepting these police-state conditions without a murmur.

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