EU regulation: ashes to ashes
Saturday 3 November 2012
Peeping from behind the paywall, we see The Times tell us that it is "impossible to track infected ash trees”. EU rules and "the sheer volume of imports" make tracking ash saplings brought in from infected countries almost impossible.
The Guardian amplifies this, arguing for "rigorous border checks on the billions of trees and plants imported into Britain and Europe from around the world every year for parks, gardens, woodlands and forests". "There is a tidal wave of pathogens coming in", says Martin Ward, chief plant health officer at Defra's Food and Environment Research Agency. "It is terrifying. We have to have a strategic response. Unless we have better biosecurity in the EU and Europe it will be very difficult to stop them coming in. It is difficult to ban all imports. It has to be done on a risk basis". And there you are. "It is difficult to ban all imports …". Another benefit of the EU – to ignore the fact that we are an island, and the benefits that go with it, to adopt a Continental system of control, that doesn't work anyway. This is the brilliant "Single Market" that Mr Cameron loves so much. We are so lucky we have it … no trees, but we can have open borders for dead wood. At least we'll have something to burn when the electricity runs out. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 03/11/2012 |
Denis MacShane: "plainly intended to deceive"
Friday 2 November 2012
MacShane, europhile extraordinaire and Labour MP for Rotherham, is looking at the prospect of being barred from his day job as an MP, for twelve months.
This follows an investigation by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, who found that MacShane had submitted 19 false invoices for his expenses, to the tune of £12,900, in a manner that was "plainly intended to deceive". An unrepentent MacShane states that he "deeply" regrets that the way he chose to be reimbursed for costs related to his work in Europe and in combating anti-semitism, including being the Prime Minister's personal envoy, has been judged so harshly". I suppose this is exactly the sort of thing one should expect from a deeply committed europhile. After all, anyone who believes in the EU can also convince themselves that theft in the name of personal enrichment is perfectly legitimate. After all, there is little difference between the EU and expenses fraud. The only question now, is whether the Plod are going to get involved, or are they too busy smoking out Auntie BBC's nonces to have time to deal with a bent MP? UPDATE: He has resigned after 18 years as an MP. "I have been overwhelmed by messages of support for my work as an MP on a range of issues but I accept that my parliamentary career is over", the thief said. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 02/11/2012 |
Energy: who dares utter the B-word?
Friday 2 November 2012
 They can go anywhere an inspector or a minister decides. Nowhere in Whitehall guidance on turbines is there any reference to natural or visual beauty. This is no surprise to a sector now drunk on public subsidy, but even its opponents feel they must avoid any reference to aesthetics. They talk of wind power's cost and intermittency, its abuse of peat and extravagance of imported minerals, its forcing poor energy users to cross-subsidise rich landowners.He is right to to make this point, as the coalition's plan for onshore turbines, increasing them from some 3,000 today to 7,000-plus by the end of the decade constitutes, he says, is "nothing less than the mass industrialisation of the landscape". However, much as I like Simon Jenkins, he really is the classic "above–the-liner", displaying the characteristic tendency to assume that a subject doesn't exist until he has thought about it, and then written his piece. Thus he frames his argument in terms of who dares to utter the B-word in the wind turbine debate, as if no-one had thought of so doing. But the answer is a lot of people for a long time. He might, for instance, find it educative to refer to the Landscape Institute Scotland, not least for its reference to the Council of Europe's European Landscape Convention (ELC), ratified by the UK government on 21 November 2006. The Convention's aims are "to promote protection, management and planning of all landscapes, including natural, managed, urban and pen-urban areas, and special, everyday and also degraded landscape". It aims, we are told, to organise European co-operation on landscape issues. Perversely, the rush to wind could be in breach of the Convention, and it precisely because of that possibility that an inquiry is being carried out by the Scottish Parliament. And, in England and Wales, a departmental inquiry within Defra has already been mooted. Furthermore, it is not only in the context of wind turbines that the B-word has been uttered. In my book, Death of British Argiculture, published in 2001, I wrote about the value of landscape beauty as a commodity. There can be no dispute, I wrote: … that a well-managed countryside is a real and tangible asset, accessible to the whole community – urban and rural. Its beauty - where this has survived – adds, to use an old-fashioned phrase, to the gaiety of life, providing a backdrop for recreation, sport and other country pursuits which are regarded as essential antidotes to the pressures of urban life. Furthermore, it sustains an important and growing recreation and tourism industry, attracting significant foreign and domestic earnings which, according to the English Tourist Council, amounts to some £12 billion a year.I thus argued that the countryside has an amenity value which delivers more income to the nation in the form of tourism than the food it produces, albeit that the amenity is a by-product of food production. What was needed, therefore, was a system which recognised the "amenity value" of farming and its contribution to rural tourism, which meant devising mechanisms for paying for this " public good". Addressing, CAP subsidies, I argued that production (and environmental) support should cease. Instead, agricultural payments should be made on the basis of the contribution of farms to the amenity value of the countryside, to compensate for the "market failure". There was no free market mechanism for paying farmers to maintain a visually attractive countryside, yet that countryside had real and measurable economic value. By 2004, such a scheme was, to my knowledge, being mooted as a UK policy option, although it fell foul of EU law and could not be progressed. Nevertheless, had it been adopted, this would have massively tilted the balance of utility against windfarming. Farmers who stood to gain from renting land to developers would lose much more from being stripped of their amenity payments. Putting a cash value on beauty would also change dramatically the argument on wind energy, as the adverse effect of turbines on the countryside could be calculated as a direct cost, and factored into any cost-benefit analysis. This may yet happen, as one or more inquiries progress, and Mr Jenkins, who is researching a book on English landscape, could undoubtedly provide some useful input. National treasure though be may be, however, one does wish he would not pretend that he is the only toiler in the vineyard. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 02/11/2012 |
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