Booker: Patten, the Beeb and badgers
Sunday 28 October 2012
Definitely up Booker's street this week is the first of his stories, this one about the BBC and its current "tsunami of filth" or, more to the point, "the peculiar role played at the head of the BBC's affairs by Lord Patten".
Rather like the media in general, the BBC in recent years – according to a particularly egregious member of the media corps - "has been colonised and captured by a narrow, greedy, self-interested and self-perpetuating liberal elite, contemptuous of ordinary people and of ordinary morality". In other words, the unspeakable Savile affair is a symptom of a deeper corruption that has pervaded the BBC for years. Apart from a desire to award each other grotesquely inflated salaries, one of this elite's most alarming traits has been the contempt they show for the BBC's legal duty, under its Charter, to report on the world with "due accuracy and impartiality". There is an ever-longer list of issues on which the BBC has a clear "party line", which it pushes with shameless disregard for balance. A year ago, Booker published a report on the consequences of a deliberate decision by the BBC's top brass in 2006 to throw all its prestige into propaganda for climate-change alarmism. Equally blatant, a few years earlier, was a campaign, through its news programmes, for Britain to join the euro – which looks even more deluded now than it did at the time. The man, above all, with a legal duty to ensure that the BBC meets its Charter obligations is Lord Patten, as chairman of the BBC Trust. Yet on these issues, as on many others, his views and those of the self-important mediocrities making up the BBC hierarchy are indistinguishable. Patten has long been a global-warming zealot. Last year he endorsed an absurd report for the Trust which called on the BBC to show more bias on climate change, rather than less. Back in the late 1990s, when the Today programme wheeled on luminaries almost daily to extol the benefits of the euro, constantly appearing alongside Michael Heseltine, Geoffrey Howe and Leon Brittan was EU Commissioner Chris Patten. He is the last man who would see a need to call the BBC back to a semblance of balance in its reporting. If the moral and intellectual shambles into which that once-proud organisation has sunk could ever be cleaned up, it is certainly not going to happen with Patten in office. Glimmering here and there in the twilight, there may still be a good many things about the BBC we would miss. But, with its Charter due for renewal in 2016, recent events are likely to make the case for breaking up this vast, corrupt, publicly funded empire stronger than ever. In his second story, Booker takes on the Badger cull, noting how odd it is that opponents of the cull seem to know or care so little about the hapless badgers themselves. TB, as we know, is a very nasty and infectious disease, both for animals and humans. But until 30 years ago it posed little threat because it was kept under control by farmers still allowed to gas badger setts wherever it appeared. When, in the early 1980s, not only gassing but any killing of badgers was banned, their numbers soared. TB reached epidemic proportions, condemning vast numbers of badgers to a prolonged and miserable death. Increasingly, the disease spread to cattle, bringing disaster to all those herds that had to be destroyed, at a cost last year to taxpayers of £100 million. This crisis could soon become much worse, because the EU is now so concerned about Britain’s failure to get TB under control that it threatens to impose, within a year or two, a complete ban on our exports of beef and dairy products, losing us earnings of more than £2 billion a year. To many country folk, the consequences of this explosion in badger numbers are only too obvious: not only the frequent sight of badgers, weakened by TB, dead on our roads, but also the vanishing of many other creatures that badgers prey on, from hedgehogs and bumble bees to ground-nesting birds. But to all this the "environmentalists" and their political allies who sentimentalise badgers seem to remain oblivious. They dismiss all the evidence, from Ireland and other countries, that keeping badger numbers under control drastically reduces the incidence of TB. (A trial cull in Donegal cut TB in local cattle by 96 percent.) They bleat on, as they did again in the Commons last Thursday, about the need for a cattle vaccine, even though no effective vaccine yet exists, and none is likely to be developed in the foreseeable future. Even if it did, its use would be illegal – under EU directives which it would take years to change. The one politician who knows more about badgers and TB than any other is Owen Paterson, our new Environment Secretary (who, as a boy, kept two badgers as pets). Last week, he was reluctantly forced to postpone until next summer two trial culls planned for the West Country. Mr Paterson, who once broke a parliamentary record by putting down 600 technical questions on TB and badgers, is particularly keen to see progress made with a PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test which would make it possible to target only infected setts. But in the meantime, writes Booker, as he is forced to listen to a stream of vacuities from all the supposed "badger-lovers", who seem quite unconcerned by the sufferings of the badgers themselves, Paterson remains determined to avert the consequences of political folly which now threaten to inflict on Britain a disaster even greater than that brought about by the madness over BSE back in 1996. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 28/10/2012 |
Regulation: a pointless debate
Saturday 27 October 2012
 Latest in this mind-numbing litany is a complaint today that the government is ordering a review of "regulations covering building standards, including fire safety and wheelchair access". These, says the Guardian, "could be torn up in a government plan to cut costs for the construction industry and boost the economy". But actually, it is extremely unlikely that any regulations will be "torn up", and especially those which deal with wheelchair access and matters to do with disability. The reasons for this are not very hard to find. Even with superficial research, it becomes apparent that such issues are bound up with the European Union and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, along with the anti-discrimination provisions of the ECHR. At an EU level, disability issues are currently under review, with the launch of the European Disability Strategy in 2010. There, the EU Commission calls in aid the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (TFEU), which it says "requires the Union to combat discrimination based on disability when defining and implementing its policies and activities (Article 10)" and "gives it the power to adopt legislation to address such discrimination (Article 19)". This, on top of EU case law, ECHR judgements and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities – to which the EU subscribes – means that the UK is no longer a free agent when it comes to defining law relating to the treatment of disabled persons. Should the Government attempt to row back on law already in place (much of which has been enacted to meet EU and UN requirements), it will doubtless find itself having to deal with the EU commission. It will also become embroiled in legal cases through the ECJ (which has been a major player in this field), and the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, doubtless driven by state-financed NGOs, which are adept at using such provisions to block change. The point at issue here is that, nowhere in the the endless government propaganda or the whining of the Guardianistas, do you find any reference to the famous "elephant in the room". In the currentGuardian piece, and 390 comments (at the time of writing), there is not a single mention of the EU. There is absolutely no merit, though, in having a debate about regulation - and what the government might or might not do - without first addressing what the government is able to do within the constraints of EU and international law. This, of course, also applies to government statements, and politicians who are raising quite unrealistic hopes of "cutting red tape", seemingly unaware that their freedom of manoeuvre is extremely limited. Generally speaking, Governments (of whatever colour), have lost the power to remove regulation. Their "power" exists only to frame regulation at the behest of others. Thus, there is simply no point in ministers making commitments to cut regulation until they have gone through the process of determining precisely what they are able to do. Otherwise, all we get are optimistic statements, followed by the inevitable disappointments, as the realisation creeps in that nothing can be done. That, to an extent is why William Hague's "audit of EU competences" is being carried out. But I now fear that the huge complexity of this exercise is going to defeat its best intentions. To write what amounts to a "Doomsday Book" of the powers of modern government, and where they lie, seems beyond the capability of this administration. But, until or unless this is done – and done properly – there is absolutely no point in having a debate about cutting regulation. It is a complete waste of time and effort. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 27/10/2012 |
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