Climate change sceptics are to be targetedin a hard-hitting government advertising campaign that will be the first to state unequivocally that Man is causing global warming and endangering life on Earth. When Peter Kendall, NFU president, suggested that the Tories' attitude to Europe could damage their ability to influence matters in Brussels, Nick Herbert, the Tories' rural spokesman, went off "like a firework".
The £6 million campaign, which begins tonight in the prime ITV1 slot duringCoronation Street, is a direct response to government research showing that more than half the population think that climate change will have no effect on them.
Ministers sanctioned the campaign because of concern that scepticism about climate change was making it harder to introduce carbon-reducing policies such as higher energy bills.
The advertisement attempts to make adults feel guilty about their legacy to their children. It features a father telling his daughter a bedtime story of "a very very strange" world with "horrible consequences" for today's children.
The storybook shows a British town deep under water, with people and animals drowning. Carbon dioxide is depicted as rising in clouds of black soot from cars and homes, including from a woman's hairdryer. The soot gathers into a jagged-toothed monster menacing the town.
The daughter asks her father if the story has a happy ending and a voiceover cuts in, saying: "It's up to us how the story ends" and directs viewers to the Government’s Act on CO2 website.
Now, let me get this straight ... the government is pissing away £6,000,000 of our money on this facile propaganda in a bid to convince us that we need to pay higher energy bills? Why are we not rising up and slaughtering these people?
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Herbert promised that the Tories would be much more diligent in turning up to the endless meetings in Brussels and Strasbourg to fight our farmers' corner. He also vowed to argue for greater cost analysis of European directives that are making farming a misery.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the Tory policy on agriculture: "We will be much more diligent in turning up to the endless meetings in Brussels and Strasbourg to fight our farmers' corner." There's one to go to the barricades for.