Lords produce waste paper on waste policy
There was a time when, if a Lords committee had been asked to investigate a massive policy failure, a scandal which continues to make daily headlines in the press, it might have made some effort to ask why things had gone so horrendously wrong. But when 12 peers last week reported on the shambles engulfing the way that Britain disposes of its rubbish, the result was 127 pages of such anodyne verbiage that no one ploughing through it would have any idea that we have a national crisis on our hands. In fact the headlines about the disintegration of Britain's system of waste disposal - from householders being fined for putting rubbish in the wrong bin to the epidemic of flytipping - reflect only a small part of the disaster. Even more outrageous is the fact that, wherever one looks at it, our waste handling system is in breakdown, so that, for instance, millions of tons of rubbish supposedly collected for recycling must be shipped out to China or the Third World because we no longer have any way to deal with it. The reason why this has happened - and why it was ignored by those 12 dutiful little apparatchiks from the House of Lords - is that we have handed over direction of our waste policy to Brussels, which requires us to implement a strategy wholly inappropriate to our needs. Until recently we still had a waste system as efficient as any in Europe. We had a fast-growing recycling industry, mainly reliant on private enterprise. But we also used much more of our rubbish than other countries for the ultimately beneficial purpose of reclaiming otherwise unproductive land by landfill. What has thrown all this into chaos has been the imposition of a wholly different EU policy which seeks to eliminate landfilling (originally because some countries, such as Holland and Denmark were running out of land to fill). The EU puts recycling at the top of its priority list, followed by incineration. Only then can what remains be buried. To conform with the Euro-model, we have therefore been required to discourage landfilling by closing down our rubbish tips and imposing ever higher "landfill taxes", to build hugely expensive incinerators and to collect far more waste for "recycling" than we can actually recycle. Instead of all this being admitted, it has become shrouded in propagandist humbug. We are repeatedly told we are "running out of sites for landfill", when every year we quarry out 110 million cubic metres of soil and rock, more than the refuse we produce. We are told that incineration is cheaper than landfill, when in fact it can cost as much as £190 a ton, as opposed to a maximum landfill cost of only £62. To please the EU we claim to be collecting millions of tons of rubbish for recycling which is then either shipped abroad or just landfilled regardless. We have created a shambles of a system which is failing in every way - so that we still face the prospect of massive fines from Brussels for failing to conform - while the once-friendly relations between binmen and the public are reduced to open war. And what is the response of those noble lords? They babble on about the need for "waste prevention to be integrated into sustainable business models". They "welcome the establishment of the Centre of Expertise for Sustainable Procurement". They suggest the Government should lower VAT rates to "promote the development of sustainable products". They don't even seem to know that VAT rates cannot be lowered without permission from our real government in Brussels - the one which set all this disaster in train in the first place. Mrs Smith takes on the ministry - thanks to you On Thursday it was widely reported that Sue Smith had lodged papers in the High Court supporting her claim that the Ministry of Defence breached the Human Rights Act by sending her son Philip Hewitt to his death in a Snatch Land Rover in Iraq in 2005 - fully aware that these vehicles gave no protection against mines and roadside bombs. What no one reported was that Mrs Smith could not have proceeded with her case without the help of Sunday Telegraph readers. When, at the last minute, the Legal Services Commission threatened to withdraw legal aid unless she contributed a sum towards her costs which it knew she could not afford, the readers of this newspaper raised £7,000. Mrs Smith is bringing her case in a bid to call the MoD to account for its recklessness in continuing to send troops into danger in these vehicles, long after it became clear that they were absurdly vulnerable. To date at least 34 men have died in Snatch Land Rovers, several of them killed in recent months. Mrs Smith's only aim is to halt what has become a real national scandal. Correction: things are worse than I thought Last week I reported on the dangerous unreality overtaking US energy policy, as television commercials for both presidential candidates focus on the need to build more wind turbines. To highlight its absurdity I said that the 10,000 US turbines already built generate only 4.5 gigawatts (GW) of electricity, little more than one big coal-fired power station. The reality, it turns out, is even worse. The notional "capacity" of America's turbines is 19GW, but their actual output, as shown by an Amherst University study, is less than 17 per cent of that - even less than that of a large coal-fired plant. So the two men vying for the White House are centring their policy on an energy source that currently provides barely 1 per cent of America's electricity. Some 50 per cent of it comes from coal. Yet such is the power of the "green" lobby that of 151 new coal-fired power stations proposed last year, 59 were vetoed by state governments, while the rest face court challenges. Whether it is McCain or Obama, stand by for America's lights to go out. A dream of gold for the ring of stars The 2008 Olympic medals table, dominated by China and the USA, may look different from those of the nine Games from 1952 to 1988, when the Soviet Union outstripped the rest of the world. In fact little has changed. The 140-plus medals won by the 15 ex-Soviet countries still far outweigh those won by China and the US. Inevitably, however, an EU official, George Doutlik, has boasted that if the 27 EU states competed as one, it would put everyone in the shade. It may be true that the EU's 250-plus medals, with more than 80 golds, would dwarf the 100-plus won by the US and China's 50-odd golds. But if Mr Doutlik thinks the day will come when we Europeans are happy to sink our differences in EU-nationalist fervour he can dream on. |
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