Environment

I wish I could make up shit like this

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Columnist Dominic Lawson opining in The Independent, Friday 16 February 2007:

In a sane country, Bernard Matthews would be a hero… Yet Matthews is written off by the British red-top press as “Bird-flu Bernie”, while the more middle-class newspapers sneer that his mass production approach to husbandry – “cheap food for the proles” – made inevitable the sort of infection which temporarily closed down his Suffolk factory.

It’s understandable that the promoters of less intensive farming methods should make this point to journalists – apart from anything else, they stand to gain from any collapse in Bernard Matthews’ sales; but the facts about the H5N1 virus don’t fit their argument.

The countries where the virus is endemic, such as Indonesia, Vietnam and Nigeria, are ones in which poultry is kept by individuals rather than by corporations: good old subsistence farming. According to Indonesia’s chief vet, 80 per cent of households in her country keep poultry, and bird flu is rife in 30 of the nation’s 33 provinces; but in a country where 3,000 a year die from dengue fever, it’s not easy to persuade homes that the risk of keeping sick poultry is one they can’t live with.

Compare that with the images from the Matthews operation that we have seen on our television screens over the past week: if the NHS was able to achieve a similar standard of hygiene in its hospitals we would all be much better off.

Journalist Andy McSmith reporting in The Independent, Saturday 17 February 2007:

Bernard Matthews, Britain’s best-known turkey breeder, could face prosecution over lapses in hygiene at his plant at Holton, Suffolk, where thousands of birds were slaughtered last month after an outbreak of avian flu.

A government report says inspectors who visited the site in January saw gulls feeding from uncovered waste bins, carrying turkey waste away and roosting on the roof of the turkey houses.

An inspection of the infected plant showed several points where rats, mice and small birds could get in. Polythene bags of waste had been left where they could have been blown about. There were also “extensive” leaks in the ceiling, which could have allowed infection by rain.

National Express

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George Monbiot: I’m all for putting more vehicles on our roads. As long as they’re coaches in today’s Guardian.

The M25 has 790 miles of lanes. If these are used by cars carrying the average load of 1.6 occupants, at 60mph the road’s total capacity is just – wait for it – 19,000 people. Coaches travelling at the same speed, each carrying 30 passengers, raise the M25′s capacity to 260,000. Every coach swallows up a mile of car traffic. They also reduce carbon emissions per passenger mile by an average of 88%.

Finally, someone has noticed Emperor Eddington’s new threads.  As ever, Monbiot addresses the real issue without the encumbrance of the straitjacket of party politics.

Ticket To Ride

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Sir Rod Eddington‘s report into the future of the UK’s transport infrastructure seems to have drawn remarkably little media flak.

Personally, I find it odd that the task of developing the blueprint for UK transport was handed to the man whose Chief Executive high-back, leather chair at British Airways was still warm from his butt cheeks.

It seems to me a bit like, for example, recruiting the sitting Chief Executive of Virgin Trains to become both the Chairman and Chief Executive of the Strategic Rail Authority and then wondering why the SRA revoked the licence of Silverlink, the only direct competitor to Virgin Trains on the route between London and Birmingham.

Nevertheless, Sir Rodders has seen the future and – fuck me gently with a chainsaw – it involves masses more air travel and huge airport expansion. The airline industry, you will doubtless know, does not pay tax on aviation fuel, despite the proven damage it does to the planet.

Eddington says that air travellers should pay full environmental cost of their journey through taxes and surcharges. That’s air travellers, you note – not air carriers, who will presumably therefore still be free to fly half-empty planes around the globe with impugnity.

Eddington also says that he has found little evidence to support a truly high-speed rail link between London and the north. Not least because, at £200 for a Standard Class Open Return rail ticket between London and Manchester, it is now actually cheaper to fly between the UK’s first and third cities. And, given the shambolic state of the West Coast Main Line, it’s very nearly as quick to fly, too.

There is one part of Eddington’s report with which I agree: the re-regulation of buses outside London.  Deregulation was one of Thatcher’s maddest follies, made during that wild-eyed period when she seemed to have no clue what the day, month or year were.  Since deregulation we mere provincial mortals have seen bus routes slashed, fares spiral and timetables rendered increasingly meaningless.
There are no cheap, easy or painless answers to 40 years of underinvestment, corner-cutting and neglect: it’s going to cost a lot of money and take a lot of time to sort out the messes that are this country’s current road, bus and rail networks.  “New” Labour has wasted nine years and appears to have fudged yet another opportunity; let’s hope that the next Prime Minister – whoever he or she is – has the cojones to grasp the nettle properly and stand up to the air lobby.

…but I can’t trace time

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Apparently it’s the first anniversary of Plastic Dave Cameron’s ascension to the Tory throne.

Apparently this means it’s time for State Of The Party pieces in the Sunday broadsheets.

Apparently the State Of The Party is confused.

In the Sunday Telegraph, a focus group thinks Plastic Dave is:

“[a] family man; posh; English; nice but dim; quasi cyclist; highly intelligent; cheerful; unknown quantity; slick; interesting; directionless; PR friendly”… Something stark is becoming apparent: Cameron is inspiring the most admiration among those who usually tend towards Labour, the Lib Dems or minority parties or who didn’t vote at the last election. He provokes the most critical comments from those who most frequently vote Tory.

Tory traditionalists are hostile towards Cameron for the same reason socialists (remember them?) were aghast at the rise of Mr. Tony Blair – because he’s full of shit as far as they’re concerned.

Consider that previous Conservative Secretaries of State for the Environment number the notorious greens Nicholas Ridley, Michael Heseltine and Peter Walker (who were, in fairness, complicit in the destruction of our coal industry, thereby significantly reducing the nation’s carbon emissions – if you don’t count the emissions involved in now shipping in all that cheap coal from Poland), Kenneth Baker and – oh, yes – Michael Fucking Howard: that line up shows you exactly how serious the last 30 years’ worth of Tory leaders took their responsibilities to the planet.

All of a sudden the annual conference finds itself addressed by a plastic man who rides a pedal cycle (as alien a concept to them as it was to Katharine Ross in Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid) standing in front of a picture of a tree scrawled by a five-year-old with ADHD. When conference ends, the delegates drive home in their Jags and 4x4s and go back to work in businesses raping the planet with gay abandon. They don’t “get” it any more than Scargill and Benn “got” the blue-pencilling of Clause IV and the fellating of business tycoons.

And it would, of course, be more convincing to the rest of us if that pedal bike wasn’t being shadowed by a car carrying Plastic Dave’s change of clothes.

Almost everyone thinks he is caring and compassionate… Jane adds: “It seems to come naturally to him.” Even Colin agrees: “There is sincerity in him. You can’t fake that.”

You can’t?

Can’t you?

CAN’T YOU REALLY?

The Observer worries that Plastic Dave’s approach to politics might lead voters to see that the emperor is naked:

The greatest risk David Cameron takes is that being fashionable will go out of political fashion.

The newspaper’s Andrew Rawnsley also points out that eventually someone is going to ask Plastic Dave actually to say something meaningful instead of mouthing sanctimonious platitudes.

But then, what’s this in The Sunday Times?

David Cameron, the Conservative party leader, is facing an official investigation for hosting a series of fundraising events in the House of Commons. He and other senior Tories have hosted 32 fundraising lunches or dinners in private parliamentary rooms in the past two months. They are thought to have raised more than £100,000.


Last week, two backbench Labour MPs filed a formal complaint with Sir Philip Mawer, the parliamentary commissioner for standards.

Parliamentary rules ban the use of Commons dining facilities for fundraising. They state: “The private dining rooms are not to be used for direct financial or material gain by a sponsor, political party or any other person or outside organisation.”

The sale of dinners in the Commons is the latest fundraising controversy to hit Cameron. Last week the Tories disclosed they had taken substantial loans running into millions of pounds from several offshore trusts and companies at rates below those offered by conventional banks.

Thank fuck for that: sleaze and money. After a year, at last I can identify with the Tory leader.

Oh-oh, atomic

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You know if nuclear power is so safe and our Government is so confident about building all these new nuclear power stations and nuclear powered and armed submarines?

Then why the Hell are they running around the country impounding planes and shutting down restaurants just because a bloke who died of nuclear poisoning flew on them or dined in them?

Just a thought.

Saw Jeremy Hardy tonight. A very funny man. He doesn’t like wasps either.  His description of Scary Ruth Kelly as the Buggery Czar was a particular highlight.

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