Not only does the BBC have its brilliant Verify team with its world-leading fact-checking, but it can also understand why President Trump chooses to use the language that he does. In a sarcastic hit piece which was rushed out following the Donald’s criticism of “windmills” it told us that:

For clarity, there are no windmills in the North Sea.

Windmills mill grain into flour. What he’s seeing are wind turbines.

But making them sound like centuries old technology is a way to deride their worth.

As it happens, I share the BBC’s dislike of the mis-labelling of wind turbines as windmills, but for rather different reasons (although I agree that as they do not mill anything, they should not be called windmills). I am every bit as cynical as the BBC journalists who wrote that piece, but my cynicism sees things differently. I tend to assume that the people who refer to wind turbines as windmills are generally enthusiasts for the technology, and they prefer to describe them in this way because it makes them sound less industrial, more bucolic, and as though they fit in with the landscape. The reality, of course, is that they are getting ever taller, reaching heights of 250 metres, and before long they will probably be as tall as the Shard or the Eiffel Tower. And President Trump is correct – they do kill birds. In very large numbers. SSE’s own environmental impact assessment assumes that over the planned 35 year life of the newly-approved Berwick Bank offshore wind farm, it will kill 31,000 seabirds.

Speaking of Berwick Bank, here is Stephen Flynn MP declaring that the Berwick Bank approval is “Big news for all us windmill fanatics”. I suppose it’s possible that his use of the word windmills is a tongue-in-cheek pop at President Trump, or perhaps he thinks the use of the word makes the bird-mincers sound nicer?

When Andrew Kersley, a freelance journalist who writes, inter alia, for the Guardian, referred to “a new generation of floating windmills” in a 2020 article in Labour List, was he “deriding their worth”?

Similarly, when Boris Johnson (remember the “Saudi Arabia of Wind” claims?) said “...we will build windmills that float on the sea – enough to deliver one gigawatt of energy by 2030, 15 times as much as the rest of the world put together…” I suppose he was deriding the technology too.

When Ecotricity publicised exports by its Britwind subsidiary, it wrote:

Britain’s greenest energy company, Ecotricity, has sold more than £1 million of small windmills to Japan through its Britwind subsidiary, to become the country’s leading small wind exporter.

Britwind launched in November 2014, producing windmills that are designed and made in Britain and has now shipped 130 small 5kW wind turbines to Japan in the past 18 months, with a further 30 windmills set to be dispatched by the end of March – an order totalling more than £1.3 million.

This latest shipment will include the very first of Britwind’s new H15 windmills – a 15kW machine that can power the equivalent of 13 homes.

Deriding their worth?

A couple more, just to make the point – Lord Deben (he of the Climate Change Committee) on 23rd July 2013, during the 7th Day of the Committee stage of the Energy Bill, Lord Deben said: “Manifestly, in the long-distant future, it would be quite sensible to have a lot of windmills when there was wind and a lot of solar when there was sun.” Yes, that sounds like he’s denigrating turbines. Similarly Lord Rooker, speaking in a House of Lords debate on 18^th September 2023, said “I find the windmills magnificent, whether they are in the Lake District, Cornwall or anywhere else…”. And yes, he was referring to wind turbines, not to actual mills.

In other words, BBC, please don’t presume to read the mind of President Trump when you choose to question his motivation. I suggest you stick to reporting facts instead.

Postscript

While I’m being grumpy about the BBC, I thought I would mention that on the BBC Radio 4 weather forecast earlier this evening, I was told that the upcoming “Storm Floris” is what we get in winter, not in summer. I can’t read Tomasz Schafernaker’s mind any more than the BBC can read President Trump’s, but I was left with the distinct impression that I was supposed to assume that this is another terrible example of anthropogenic climate change in action. That is a view reinforced by the BBC website article whose headline told me that “Storm Floris [is] to bring ‘unseasonably disruptive’ rain and wind to UK”.

As it happens, I am currently reading Stephen Church’s excellent “King John – England, Magna Carta and the Making of a Tyrant”. Referring to what was a disastrous year for King John, he says this of the summer of 1205:

At the end end of July, England was battered by hurricane-force winds and huge thunderstorms; to many this presaged the Day of Judgement.”

Today, I have little doubt, they would rush out a weather attribution study and solemnly assure us that it’s all our fault – anthropogenic climate change and all that. I’m not entirely sure they would say it presaged the Day of Judgement, but give it time.