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 Press the BBC on its


pension investing As a Guardian reader, I support the paper’s campaign to persuade major charities and pension funds to disinvest from big oil. So, as a retired BBC journalist with a BBC pension, I was shocked to find my pension fund was a major investor in big oil – around £60 million in Shell and BP. I’d been happy to receive my pension without checking


how the pension fund generates its cash. I’m not happy now. The fund’s administrator, Jeff Webley, says they are aware


of the issue but prefer to keep their oil investments so they can influence policies. He points to success at the BP annual general meeting, where they gained support for a climate risk resolution, and a similar resolution is being put before Shell shareholders. But £60 million is one hell of a price to pay to maintain


influence. And it begs the question whether similar tactics would work in coal, tobacco and armaments. The BBC pension fund also invests in Glencore, one of the world’s largest coal exporters, Imperial Tobacco; British American Tobacco; and BAE Systems. Mr Webley says the pension fund is operating “within a


socially responsible investment policy.” I don’t think so, Jeff. I admit that for BBC journos, faced with job cuts and the


day-to-day toil of broadcasting, pension fund investments may well be down their list of concerns. But if you are concerned, contact the BBC pension fund. Dave Hulme


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Life after doing election battle with Boris Johnson At the end of March I took voluntary redundancy from the BBC after 18 years and embarked on a General Election campaign where my opponent was none other than Boris Johnson. After months of knocking on doors in Uxbridge & South Ruislip as the Labour candidate I ended up barely making a dent in the Tory majority. Anyone who heard my speech at the


count may have concluded I was a bad loser. Guilty as charged. I resented being comprehensively beaten by a man who ignored two hustings but got


24 | theJournalist


airtime by being Mayor of London. Boris – one voter told me – was “a


breath of fresh air”. But I will pick myself up and start


over.


Now I’m an unemployed journalist looking for paid work. I fear for my old employer – John Whittingdale is no fan of the BBC and has likened the TV licence to the poll tax.


Meanwhile I have taken on a new


website – totalcrime.co.uk – and will be publishing regular articles of crime journalism, which is my first love and is a genre which has been sadly


neglected by the BBC, PA and most newspapers. There is no money in it. But hey, I’m a journalist, not a


banker. Chris Summers (former Labour candidate for Uxbridge & South Ruislip)


Beware of Cameron’s offensives in Europe David Cameron is the most transparent politician of the age and by “transparent” I do not mean open. His visits to European heads of state are a cynical charade. Cameron does


Email to: journalist@nuj.org.uk Post to: The Journalist 308-312 Gray’s Inn Road London WC1X 8DP Tweet to: @mschrisbuckley


not for a moment want to leave Europe and must be worried at how things may turn out. He made the promise of a referendum to shift seemingly rampant UKIP off his back. What will happen after several rounds


of “tough negotiations” is that he will win minor concessions. He will then claim that he has made major progress in his efforts to renegotiate membership terms and will employ all the Government’s powers of propaganda to suggest that our role in the union is much enhanced and that we must stay in Europe at all costs for the continued health of the economy. Members of the public should ignore his posturing when casting their votes. William Kent London


Who was that man in the last Journalist? Who was the tubby chap seemingly kicking a dog, pictured over nearly a page in the last issue of The Journalist? There was no caption (just a credit of the source) nor a reference to it in the text. I recognised it as Harold Wilson, the


Labour prime minister of the 1960s and early 1970s. But then I am one of the union’s more geriatric members (joining in 1964). Would younger members born after Wilson’s death recognise him? Sadly, The Journalist is not the only culprit. It is rare nowadays to see the contents of a picture simply described in a caption printed below it. Instead, a reference to it is buried in the middle of an article which has to be searched for (and sometime the subs forget to include it). Or several pictures are scattered all


over a page and there seems to be a reluctance to place individual captions under them. One all-embracing caption attempts to describe them all, starting with phrases such as “Clockwise from top left”. If they are haphazardly positioned, however, it is often difficult to puzzle out which is which. Pictures of several people also used to


TIM ELLIS


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