Tuesday, 16th December 2008
Brussels Briefing, December 2008
1) THE POLICE STATE
The deepening recession is the latest manifestation of this atrocious Labour Government's eleven years of misrule. To make matters worse, Gordon Brown's police state moved one step closer with the arrest and detention of Damian Green, our Shadow Minister for Immigration. It seems incredible that he was arrested in a car park in Kent by three counter-terrorism officers and held in detention for nine hours, while his constituency office and unbelievably his House of Commons office were ransacked and nine counter-terrorism officers searched his home. His blackberry, mobile phone, home telephone system and laptop computers were seized and his email account closed down and files confiscated, preventing him from carrying out his role as an elected parliamentarian.
From the shambolic account of this debacle given to the House by Gorbals Mick, it appears he gave the police permission to raid Damian Green's office at Westminster without the need for a search warrant. He then tried to blame the Sergeant at Arms and his staff and almost everybody but himself! What a sorry state of affairs.
Damian Green should be congratulated for bringing to public notice the failings of a Home Office which first lied to the public about the levels of immigration (as it has lied to the public about crime levels) and then spectacularly failed to control immigration as it promised. As John Reid, a former Labour Home Secretary, said, the Home Office is "not fit for purpose". Now, the same is true of the whole Government.
The whole debacle is a timely reminder of what eleven years of Labour government has brought us. We are now looking at a level of national debt which even our grand-children will be unable to pay off, simply because the supposedly 'prudent' Gordon Brown - the so-called 'Iron Chancellor' - refused to put any money aside during the years of plenty, but rather chose to throw it at public services as if there was no tomorrow. When Alistair Darling rose to give his recent pre-Budget report in the House of Commons, the national debt stood at £612 billion. By the time he sat down again it was nudging £1 trillion.
Labour has nationalised our banks, raised taxes on the rich and promised a new welter of financial regulation. After all the promises of ‘no more boom and bust’ they’ve given us the worst financial recession in decades. They've given us two wars, a housing crisis, worsening poverty, a dire health and education system and growing unemployment. We watched as Brown raided our pension funds and sold off our gold reserves at bargain basement prices.
We've also seen state intrusion into our lives reach levels which would have brought a smile to the face of Nicolae Ceaucescu. We have seen the spread of surveillance cameras so that our every move is watched. We saw an anti-war protester arrested for reading out a list of war dead at the Cenotaph in 2006. We saw an 82-year old Jewish escapee from the Nazis being manhandled out of Labour's annual conference for daring to yell "nonsense" at the foreign secretary. We've seen the attempts to introduce ID cards despite widespread opposition. We've seen attempts to introduce a 42 day detention period and now, to cap it all, Jacqui Smith wants all new born babies to be fingerprinted and issued with passports.
We witnessed the arbitrary shooting of Jean-Charles de Menezes in the London underground. And earlier in December we learned about the brutal attack on a war veteran in Wigan by three policemen, who sat on him, rubbed his face on the road, bashed his head against the tarmac and then repeatedly punched his face. He said he had survived Afghanistan and Iraq and thought he was going to die on his own main road. Incidentally, he was charged and convicted on two counts of attacking police officers - until in earlier this month he won his appeal at Liverpool Crown Court based on CCTV evidence. So the erosion of our personal liberties has reached an unprecedented scale and the first task of an incoming Conservative Government must be to roll back this tide of intrusion.
2/ WE NEED SANCTIONS ON POORLY SITED WIND FARMS
The ‘ecosystem service’ provided by upland habitats should be assessed before any consideration is given to building wind farms on such sensitive sites according to a new report– “Impacts of Wind Farms on Upland Habitats” - prepared by the John Muir Trust, a Scottish environmental organisation.
I welcome the Trust’s report because it entirely vindicates the position that I have voiced for some time. The construction of giant wind turbines on sensitive upland habitats and particularly on deep peatland in Scotland damages the environment and adds to global warming. I have long argued that deep peatland is a natural global sink for CO2 and disrupting these sensitive habitats with the construction of giant turbines and their associated concrete foundations, access roads, pylons, borrow pits and cabling trenches, simply destroys the peat bog and releases vast quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere, rendering the whole development CO2 negative in terms of its impact on climate change. Such developments also prevent the peat bog from continuing to function as a carbon sump, as well as destroying important habitats for wildlife. Allowing wind farms to be built on such sites is the Scottish equivalent of cutting down rain forests in the Amazon. Scotland has a unique resource in these precious upland areas and the service they provide to the environment both nationally and globally should be carefully assessed before any consideration is given to allowing their disruption.
Carbon dioxide is absorbed into forests and forest soils by trees and other plants which store carbon and release oxygen into the atmosphere. The gradual process of decaying organic material leads to a build up over many thousands of years of CO2. Peat bogs in the EU, the majority of which are in Scotland, store billions of tonnes of CO2. I urge the Scottish Government to call a moratorium on all proposed windfarm developments on peatland in Scotland, including Dava Moor in Grantown on Spey and Kergord in Shetland, where vast areas of peatland habitat will be destroyed. I have already brought the John Muir Trust’s report to the attention of the European Commission to see if they can incorporate its recommendations into future EU environmental guidelines.
