A "loophole" in the law

Tuesday, December 09, 2008

A "loophole" in the law

In the print edition of The Daily Telegraph - but not repeated in the online edition, which publishes a very similar story - reference is made to a "loophole" in the law which allows Irish pork to be labelled and sold as British.

The online edition of the story, headed "Irish pork dioxin fears expose 'made in Britain' rules", retails that the discovery of "cancer causing dioxins in Irish pork" has shone a spotlight on the confusion faced by shoppers in being sure that what is labelled British is in fact from this country.

British pig farmers, we are told, have been calling for better regulation several years to prevent products such as sausages or pork pies being labelled as British when they contain meat from other countries. Then we are blithely informed that:

Because there is no watertight definition of the term "county of origin" in UK or European law, meat packers can label sausages, pork pies or other processed meat products as "made in Britain" even if the original raw materials are from other places, including Ireland.

One looks at this with a sort of weary disdain as we wonder how it is that our journalists – in this case John Bingham, but assisted by that idiot Harry Wallop in the print edition – can be so malevolently stupid, or just plain ignorant.

The issue here is of long-standing and goes right back to the original EEC laws that prevailed when we joined the "Common Market", when the rules then – and do now – prevent "national discrimination".

Far from being a "loophole" or "confusion", the now EU law is specifically designed to prohibit traders from distinguishing between goods containing produce of just one country of origin and those containing material from other EU member states.

This is, of course, all part of the broader plan to break down national boundaries and create a single market in European goods, the result of which is exactly what we have today, the total inability to distinguish between produce of home and Irish origin.

For sure, this rigor broke down with beef, with the introduction of the Beef Labelling Regulations, devised primarily at the behest of the French and Germans, whose producers wanted to be able to isolate British beef during the height of the BSE scare. Facing "illegal" national bans of British beef, the commission caved in to pressure and allowed this single exception to its general rules, but has held the line on all other products.

But what you don't get from The Telegraph or its idiot journalists any sense that we are in this situation entirely as a result of EU law. Instead, you get such gems as, "The Food Standards Agency, which is responsible for all food safety issues in Britain …", and the sequitur, "...admits that simply following its advice to avoid pork labelled as from Ireland might not be enough to be sure of avoiding produce from the country."

The point, of course, is that the Food Standards Agency is not "responsible for all food safety issues in Britain". Food safety is entirely an EU competence. The FSA is simply an agent which, under the aegis of the European Food Safety Agency, is not giving "advice" but explaining the effect of EU rules.

It gets even worse when the paper tells us that, "In its guidelines to the industry the FSA relies on World Trade Organisation rules which only require manufacturers to name the place where the meat underwent its "last substantial change", heedless of the fact that the WTO "rules" are simply a copy-out of EU rules, which are in any event implemented by EU law.

To conclude the dire tale, we have cited: Stuart Roberts, director of the British Meat Processors Association, who is allowed to say – with reference to the beef labelling scheme: "I think it a very legitimate question to be asking is 'Is it time to revisit whether a similar framework of regulations ought to be applied to other species?'"

Er … possibly. But since these are EU "regulations", we would have to go cap in hand to Brussels and ask them to consider changing them. That is unlikely to happen, for the very reason that it would undermine one of the most treasured and fundamental precepts of the single market.

But, in its muddled piece, you won't get The Telegraph saying that. We must step round the elephant and leave it unmentioned.

And … by the way, this whole dioxin "scare" is a crock – much ado about nothing. It is a mirror image of the Belgian dioxin scare, which we deal with at length in Scared to death. The experts agree but still we have not found a way of dealing with these issues which, like global warming, end up costing massive amounts of money for no good reason.

We're eating pork tonight.

COMMENT THREAD

Grecian flames

In the third day of riots in Greece, the unrest – which started in Athens - has spread to the central cities of Larissa, Trikala, as well as in Corinth to the west of Athens, Piraeus, Corfu and the northern town of Veria. Now,Deutsche Welle is reporting that the violence is set to continue.

Damage so far is estimated at €100 million, and rising, with more than 130 shops in central Athens having been torched and looted.

Needless to say, the Greek government is anxious to project the disturbances as "vandalism", strongly emphasising the youth element and "self-styled anarchists". This line is very much reflected in an AP reportwhich has prime minister Costas Karamanlis casting himself in the role of the upstanding supporter of law and order, declaring, "The state will protect society."

However, while the riots first erupted across the country last Saturday after a 15-year-old youth, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, was fatally shot by a police officer in Athens, the sheer scale of the rioting, and its duration suggests something more than a simple reaction to the shooting. 

Not least, there seems to be a reaction to a brutal police force, which is regarded as out of control, having been involved in a number of unexplained violent incidents where deaths have occurred. That two police officers have been arrested and one has been charged with murder in relation to this incident sindicates that something very sinister is going on.

Certainly, The Daily Telegraph is directly reporting that the shooting has been but a catalyst for the violence. It comes against a background of high youth unemployment, the rising cost of living, stalled pension reform and a widening gap between rich and poor. 

Furthermore, the centre-right government, with a wafer thin majority of one, is massively unpopular. Not least, it stands accused of doing little to help low-income Greeks who are in the grip of the current financial crisis, while at the same time pumping €28 billion into a support package for national banks. Many of these are privately owned, associated with multi-millionaires in a society which is riddled with corruption.

There also, according to a letter in The Scotsman, seems to be a strong immigration element to the riots, the correspondent referring to earlier PA reports, the day before the shooting.

These indicated that the riots were the direct result of asylum seekers being told there would be no further residential applications for the week. "Hundreds of migrants waiting to submit asylum applications rioted in central Athens, setting fire to rubbish bins and attacking passing cars," it said. Twenty years ago, Greece had no visible immigrant community. In 2008, one out of every ten residents in Greece is foreign-born. 

Buried in all this, unmentioned by media reports, is a broader resentment that the governing élite has lost touch with its electorate, being tucked up with EU "colleagues" and unresponsive to national priorities and needs. 

Reuters is reporting that, with the funeral of the shot youth taking place today, violence is sure to continue. And, although currently denying reports, the government is meeting today with party political leaders to consider the declaration of a state of emergency.

Altogether, we seem to be looking at a deeply disturbed, dysfunctional society, with a government that is losing control. And, while Greece has perhaps a more recent history of major violence than the UK, there are enough factors between this troubled country and the UK that it would be rather unwise to suggest that something similar could not happen here.

COMMENT THREAD

Monday, December 08, 2008

Compare and contrast

Read this account of a report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, an organisation which describes itself as "one of the world's largest and most reliable sources of comparable statistics, and economic and social data."

Then compare it with this. 

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How Long Before We See Eco-Terrorism?

A guest post by Christopher Booker

Today's news that Stansted airport, the third largest in Britain, had been shut down for five hours by a group of "climate activists" provides yet further evidence that we are faced by a dramatic new escalation in the battle over "global warming".

More than 50 flights were cancelled and thousands of dismayed passengers milled about in chaos and confusion, as the protestors, under a banner reading "Climate Emergency", blocked off a runway with metal barriers and padlocked themselves to fences.

Although the police eventually arrested 57 people on various criminal charges, what was significant was that the young demonstrators, most between 18 and 23, declared that they were so "terrified" by the threat of global warming that they were quite prepared to break the law in support of their demands that the government must take much more immediate and drastic action to "save the planet".

This was precisely the kind of thing we were warned of three months ago after a landmark case involving another group of "climate activists" charged with causing criminal damage to a power station in Kent.

The six Greenpeace members who had invaded the ageing Kingsnorth coal-fired power station to protest against plans to build a new power plant on the site argued that they were only committing their criminal acts to draw attention to the far greater "crime" of global warming.

Their case became an international cause celebre when their chief witness was Dr James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the scientist who more than any other, with his friend and ally Al Gore, first set the worldwide panic over global warming on its way 20 years ago.

So fanatical is Dr Hansen in his belief that global warming is threatening the world with extinction that he has recently been campaigning to see every coal-fired power station in the world closed down.

When he told the Maidstone court that the proposed new power station alone would be responsible for causing the extinction of "400 species", the judge and the jury were so awed by his evidence that the activists responsible for causing £35,000-worth of damage were acquitted.

Outside the court, a spokesman for the protestors warned that this bizarre judgment, seemingly giving the green light for "climate activists" to commit criminal acts to further their cause, was only a start. Many more such actions would follow, as today's chaos at Stansted confirmed.

Not the least remarkable feature of Dr Hansen's willingness to fly across the Atlantic to appear in a British court on behalf of people accused of criminal acts was that he was doing so as a senior employee of the US government. 

Furthermore it was reported that, before travelling down to Maidstone, he had a meeting with the British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, himself a passionate believer in the threat of global warming.

It was David Miliband, in his previous role as environment secretary, who ordered that copies of Al Gore's highly controversial propaganda film An Inconvenient Truth should be issued to every school – and it is now his brother Ed Miliband, as fanatical about global warming as himself, who has been appointed as Brtain's first Secretary of State for "Energy and Climate Change".

We thus have key senior ministers seemingly so sympathetic to the general aims of the "climate activists" that it would be hard to distinguish between them.

It was Ed Miliband, for instance, who recently put on the statute book the government's new Climate Change Act, the most ambitious piece of legislation on this issue anywhere in the world, committing Britain by law to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by a staggering 80 percent in just 40 years.

As many experts privately observe, it is hard to imagine how this could possibly be done without closing down most of Britain's economy. It is potentially the most expensive law ever put through Parliament – yet our MPs of all parties approved it by such an overwhelming majority that only five voted against it.

Such is the power of this issue to arouse passion, however, that. even though our politicians, ministers and the EU now seem unanimously committed to the cause of "combating climate change", for the environmental activists themselves this is nothing like enough.

When the US President-elect Barack Obama recently pledged himself to a set of policies on global warming almost as extreme as those now adopted by the British government, our leading journalistic champion of the more extreme environmentalist cause, the Guardian's columnist George Monbiot, pronounced that, although such measures might have been welcome a few years back, the crisis now facing the world is now so desperate that they are no longer "relevant".

The "Great Moonbat",as he known in more sceptical circles, came up with his own "six point plan" for saving the planet, which included cutting back on air travel by 95 percent and imposing such "stonking" taxes on any industry which emits CO2 that most of what remains of our industry – including our power companies - would be unable to survive.

The awful fact is that belief in the threat of global warming has become like a fanatical religion, egging on its believers to vie with each other in becoming ever more hysterical and extreme in their demands.

Nothing should alarm us more in this respect than the newfound conviction of its adherents – as we saw again at Stansted today - that their cause is of such all-transcending importance that to further it can justify breaking the criminal law.

Even more alarming was that Maidstone verdict showing that the courts of the land are now willing to uphold the campaigners’ belief that they are above the law – that the cause of "saving the planet" overrides everything else.

Once we begin to travel down that path, where does it end? The late Michael Crichton, the best-selling science-fiction writer who was a considerable sceptic on global warming, wrote a novel a few years back, State of Fear, predicting that environmental fanatics would become so carried away by their cause that they would eventually resort to acts of organised terrorism to promote it.

Some, including James Hansen, have already suggested that those who dare encourage "denial" of global warming, such as the chief executives of power companies, should eventually face trial for their "high crimes".

Reading the comments of those responsible for today's closure of a major airport, costing millions of pounds, we do seem to be inching ever nearer to the day when "saving the planet" from global warming might seem in some eyes to justify even more destructive and violent acts of "eco-terrorism".

At least it may be some faint consolation to know that, from the Alps to North America, recent days and weeks have seen some of the heaviest snowfalls for decades. As plummeting global temperatures continue to defy the predictions of all those computer models on which our politicians base their policies, is it is just possible that nature could release us from this madness before it is too late?