Christopher Booker‘s Notebook
By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 1:48am GMT 25/11/2007
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/25/nbook125.xml
We are set on a course of ‘planet saving’ madness
The scare over global warming, and our politicians’ response to it, is becoming ever more bizarre. On the one hand we have the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change coming up with yet another of its notoriously politicised reports, hyping up the scare by claiming that world surface temperatures have been higher in 11 of the past 12 years (1995-2006) than ever previously recorded.
This carefully ignores the latest US satellite figures showing temperatures having fallen since 1998, declining in 2007 to a 1983 level – not to mention the newly revised figures for US surface temperatures showing that the 1930s had four of the 10 warmest years of the past century, with the hottest year of all being not 1998, as was previously claimed, but 1934.
On the other hand, we had Gordon Brown last week, in his “first major speech on climate change”, airily committing his own and future governments to achieving a 60 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 –
which is rather like prime minister Salisbury at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign trying to commit Winston Churchill’s government to achieving some wholly impossible goal in the middle of the Second World War.
Mr Brown’s only concrete proposal for reaching this absurd target seems to be his plan to ban plastic bags, whatever they have to do with global warming (while his government also plans a near-doubling of flights out of Heathrow).
But of course he is no longer his own master in such fantasy exercises. Few people have yet really taken on board the mind-blowing scale of all the “planet-saving” measures to which we are now committed by the European Union.
By 2020 we will have to generate 20 per cent of our electricity from “renewables”. At present the figure is four per cent (most of it generated by hydro-electric schemes and methane gas from landfill).
As Whitehall officials privately briefed ministers in August, there is no way Britain can begin to meet such a fanciful target (even if the Government manages to ram through another 30,000 largely useless wind turbines).
Another EU directive commits us to deriving 10 per cent of our transport fuel from “biofuels” by 2020. This would take up pretty well all the farmland we currently use to grow food
(at a time when world grain prices have doubled in six months and we are already face a global food shortage).
Then by 2009, thanks to a mad gesture by Mr Blair and his EU colleagues last March, we also face the prospect of a total ban on incandescent light bulbs.
This compulsory switch to low-energy bulbs, apart from condemning us to live in uglier homes under eye-straining light, is in practice completely out of the question, because, according to our Government’s own figures, more than half Britain’s domestic light fittings cannot take them.
This year will be remembered for two things.
First, it was the year when the scientific data showed that the cosmic scare over global warming may well turn out to be just that – yet another vastly inflated scare.
Second, it was the year when the hysteria generated by all the bogus science behind this scare finally drove those who rule over us, including Gordon “Plastic Bags” Brown, wholly out of their wits.
Billions of MoD spending is off target
The great row over under-funding of our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, led in the Lords by five former Chiefs of the Defence Staff, has so far missed a hugely important part of the story, although it was hinted at by General Sir Mike Jackson when he was interviewed on the Today programme.
Alas, John Humphrys failed to pick up the significance of Jackson’s observation that “we may not have enough to do the things which we do now and the things which we may have to do in the future”.
The problem with our defence spending in recent years is not that the Ministry of Defence has been starved of cash. On the contrary, it has been earmarking colossal sums for projects designed to equip us to fight imaginary wars in the future, as part of the European Rapid Reaction Force to which Tony Blair and Geoff Hoon committed us around 2000: £20 billion on the Navy’s two giant carriers (with planes and infrastructure); £16 billion on FRES, a new family of vehicles for the Army; not to mention the £20 billion already committed to Eurofighters for the RAF.
It was the diversion of resources into planning for that imaginary future that took the eyes of the MoD and the then-Chief of the Defence Staff off the need to equip our forces adequately for the totally different type of insurgency war they have actually been having to fight.
The MoD is belatedly trying to make amends for this disastrous blunder, for instance equipping our troops with properly mine-protected Mastiffs, instead of the unprotected Snatch Land Rovers that have caused so many deaths. It may also help that enthusiasm for the EU’s fantasy armed forces of the future has been on the wane.
But no one at the time shared that enthusiasm more obviously (or was happier to send those hopelessly inadequate Land Rovers to Iraq) than the officer who was then Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Mike Jackson.
Schools minister neglects homework
Desmond Swayne, MP for New Forest West, tells me of a fearful problem affecting Hampshire schools, which have been told by the county education officer, Ian Beacham, that under new rules teachers must no longer drive pupils in mini-buses unless they have a full “passenger vehicle licence” – “a huge and expensive undertaking which entitles them to drive a coach or bus”.
Threatening many extra-curricular activities, such as away sporting fixtures, this is causing such grief that Mr Swayne has asked in Parliament whether it is right that teachers should be forbidden to drive children in this way.
Schools minister Jim Knight didn’t know the answer but said he would look into it. Harriet Harman, Leader of the House, suggested that Mr Swayne should move for a debate on the issue.
Had those ministers or Hampshire’s education officer learned to use Google, they might have found in seconds that this is all a fuss about nothing. The two relevant EU directives on driving licences, 91/439 and 2003/59, make clear that teachers are exempted from the licensing requirements, as does a leaflet available at the click of a mouse on the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency website.
But does it not say something about the way we now allow our laws to be made in Brussels that neither ministers nor a council official responsible for enforcing them appear to know what those laws say?
• On October 19, 1999 I reported here a remarkable “personal message” sent out to Britain’s small businesses over the signature of Nick Montagu, then head of the Inland Revenue Board. He told them how “exciting and important” it was for him and his staff to be “at the forefront of implementing the new Labour Government’s policy agenda”.
How apt, in light of the mega-grief they are currently causing the Government, that eight years later our incompetent tax-gatherers appear to be playing such a significant part in New Labour’s impending downfall.
