IS nothing sacred under this government?

The latest news is that the famous British scientific institution the Meteorology Office, along with its supercomputers, has lost its contract with the BBC to supply the forecasts that we all rely upon, and which is also essential for farmers, fishermen and seafarers, and transport infrastructure.

The Met Office has been supplying scientific-based forecasts to the BBC since radio broadcasts started in 1922, and it is news to me that their essential services have now been placed under a renewable contract which no doubt has the hand of the government behind it, who see yet another opportunity to penny-pinch at the BBC and further put the boot in to the organisation.

Evidently, a row that ensued between the ‘powers that be’, with those getting the upper hand in the decision being the self same people who a few years ago decreed that a map with simple isobars showing ground wind flow direction was too difficult an idea for the majority of the public to grasp, and it needed to be radically dumbed down, with the concept disappearing all together.

In fact, the pressure charts, as they were known, did in fact disappear completely from BBC TV broadcasts for approximately an 18-month period, which turned a scientific and very informative forecast into nothing other than a meaningless piece of nonsense.

In the New Year we will all be blessed, or much more likely cursed, with new BBC weather forecasts, or at least the source of the scientific information behind them will have changed, and indeed may prove not to be so trustworthy or indeed scientific.

The jury seems to be out over what effect the radical move will have upon the way that the information is presented, and, much more importantly, the effect that there may be upon the jobs of the BBC weather forecasters presenting it.

My greatest fear is that science has been sacrificed for the sake of dogma and penny-pinching at the BBC with the hand of government clearly behind it, and that we will all end up with a ‘US game show'-style, totally unscientific forecast complete with some unqualified idiot just pointing at a chart, whilst exclaiming there will be sun here, showers over there, and a bit of fog towards the coast, and that will be it within a period of about 30 seconds flat.

I recall my anger when BBC weather presenters were very often quite rudely and blatantly cut off in mid-sentence, as the following programmes or the trailers in between them were considered to be of more importance.

I have not fully recovered from the shock that was the zany weatherman Fred Talbot on the ITV breakfast programme, who energetically hopped around from place to place on a map of the British Isles floating on a boating lake, whilst spouting a load of totally unreliable and unscientific gibberish.

He recently became more memorable for other exploits that he had been getting up to during that time, which I will not go in to.

Finally, I fear that if this ‘sabotage of science’ does take place in the New Year then we will all be left very much poorer intellectually, and with nothing that we can rely upon, unless enough of the people of this fair land get together and protest that some things should be sacrosanct and not put out to contract for the sake of political dogma.

In this case it is surely going to prove to be ‘penny wise and a pound foolish’ as the time held saying goes.

G A WOODWARD Nelson Street Swindon