A busy week so far on the Committee front!
Posted on 26. Jan, 2010 by Nick Griffin in EU News
Over the last two days I have had sittings of both the Environmental (ENVI) and the Industry, Trade, Research & Energy Committee (ITRE) in the wake of Copenhagen.
The head of ENVI, German socialist (and veteran anti-nuclear agitator) is Jo Leinen. He’s a very charming and amiable man, but a sharp political operator and – according to several of the ‘mainstream’ MEPs who associate with me when no one else is watching, subtly but effectively biased against “people like us”.
A consummate politician, he is, however, clearly aware of the growing tide of Climate realism – and the fact that one of its best placed spokesman, namely yours truly, is sitting just a few yards from him and has a right to speak in his committee. So he takes an early opportunity to acknowledge the excruciating embarrassment caused by Himalayangate – the revelation that the IPCC’s headline claim about vanishing glaciers in Nepal and Tibet is as much a recycled and groundless fantasy as are the drowning polar bears.
Acknowledging how serious a blow it is to the credibility of Climatology, he goes on to spout climate fakir Pachauri’s ridiculous ‘explanation’ about how it was just a typo, whereby the year 2350 became 2035. Then he goes on to say that it doesn’t affect the ’science’ or ‘our’ determination to combat climate change. Whacky stuff, but I don’t get a chance to challenge him on it.
FISHY BUSINESS
I do, however speak at ENVI during a debate on a draft report about Aqua-culture in the European Union. Fish farming is an industry that is growing around the world, but stagnating in the EU, where production is steady at about 1.3 Billion tonnes per year.
This is primarily because EU and Member State regulations on pollution, animal welfare and the like act as a brake on the industry (something about which, like most people and as a keen fish eater, I tend to be in two minds – red tape regulations on struggle small businesses can be unfair and destructive, but at the same time we don’t want to eat food that’s full of growth hormones and pesticides).
The draft report (reproduced for your delectation below) on this is pretty typical of the many put before us: Full of things that are in themselves often quite good, but often involving an unwelcome increase not just in EU power, reach and cost, but also of Nanny State initiatives that struggling economies can ill afford.
This one has been put together by Kartika Liotard, a Dutch socialist MEP since 2004 who, in addition to being an ally of Sinn Fein/IRA, is also heavily involved in gender equality matters and EU relations with the countries of North Africa. I’m sure you get the general picture. Wonderful company I have to keep!
Still, there is much in this report which, if it was being proposed by a British politician in a British Parliament making rules for Britain (or a Scottish or English one making local rules for Scotland or England) would be perfectly reasonable. And indeed, when it comes to voting in Plenary Sessions, it is not uncommon for the voting patterns of Ms Liotard’s Nordic Green Left Confederation to be closer to that of the Nationalists than either group is to the mass of Big Business friendly Conservatives and Liberals who infest the centre of the Chamber.
GENDER BENDING – and not an ex-UKIPer in sight
So in speaking I acknowledged that it is a good report on an important industry (bet she loved getting kind words from me!) and simply concentrated on a glaring flaw in Paragraph A:
You’ll see how this includes carbon dioxide in the list of dangerous problems in the water. So I started off by pointing out that C02 is a fertiliser which all aquatic plants need to live and grow, before moving quickly on to make a positive contribution.
(While we intend to keep on being a thorn in the side of the federalist/multi-cult/climate change crackpots here, Andrew and I believe that positive engagement, by which we can just possibly make a few practical improvements to laws that are coming whatever we, and find common ground now and again so as to undermine the dehumanisation process to which we Nationalists are subjected.)
I point out that the list omits so-called ‘gender-bending’ plastic-related chemicals and oestrogen, which together are implicated not only in the growing problem of hermaphrodite fish, but also in human reproductive problems and the artificial feminisation of men.
While not a result of aqua-culture, this is a problem that is clearly is related to it, and I point out that if we fail to address it then public confidence in this industry is going to be badly damaged.
My guess is that only the hardcore feminists on the Committee will have noticed that even this apparently purely practical point in fact has a political/ideological sting, since it’s pretty obvious that a left-feminist would feel uncomfortable with it on the same grounds, and would either consciously or subconsciously block it out.
One (Centre Right) MEP in fact appear to take it purely on the practical level, and in her own speech mentions mine as one of the useful contributions to the discussion.
DON’T DRINK THE WATER
A good contribution is also made by Struan Stevenson, a Tory MEP from Scotland. He’s also a farmer and has an honourable record of campaigning for the victims of Soviet nuclear tests (at a time when most of the socialists in this place wouldn’t hear a word said against the Workers’ Paradise) and against the revolting import trade of cat and dog fur from China.
He relates the horrible truth about those tempting displays of farmed fish from Vietnam (most often sold as Vietnamese Cobbler). Most of this is grown in industrial sized fish farms in the Mekong River – one of the most polluted in which fish can still live in the world. In addition to the artificial additives, dodgy growth hormones and biocides used by the ‘farmers’, the fish swim around in a soup of industrial and farming chemicals which flow into the huge river.
I don’t know whether any of the dioxins with which the Americans killed forests harbouring the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War are still in the water and food chain over there, but I for one won’t be buying any of that again.
But, as Mr Stevenson rightly points out, unfair competition from such unregulated, unhealthy, uninspected imports undercuts fish farmed to proper standards at home. Sounding for all the world like another BNP MEP, he calls for restrictions on such imports. So too does North West Lib-Dem MEP Chris Davies, who also proposes that we should protect consumers and home producers alike from ‘unfair foreign competion’.
In the real world, this is known as ‘Protectionism’, and is one of the Cardinal Sins in the eyes of old fashioned free trade Liberals like David Cameron and Nick Clegg. A pity our Membership is still frozen or I could offer both these converts to commonsense and BNP policy one of our splendid new membership cards!
AND FINALLY . . . .
In the evening I do a spaghetti carbonara for the five of us working over here this week (it vanishes rapidly, helped down by a bottle of 14.3% Croatian red, which Andrew was given on account of his being a member of the EP delegation to Croatia (Has Mr. Brons thereby been sucked into a web of corruption? Should he declare a vested interest in matters Croatian? Are the pigs turning into farmers? No, but it was quite a decent wine).
Then cook a huge cauldron of cock-a-leekie soup to go with the family of haggises at present corralled in our fridge awaiting slaughter with a genuine Scottish dirk this evening in a slightly belated Burns’ Night celebration. We intend to initiate various Frenchs, Flemish, Hungarians, Italians and the like into one of the rituals of the British Family of Nations. Photos tomorrow!
TUESDAY.
Another couple of minutes on ENVI, this time in the debrief session following Copenhagen. Most of the others complain bitterly about how some members of the EU delegation were literally shut out in the freezing cold for hours on end, and how we had effectively no access to the meetings at which the US, China, India etc tried and failed to reach agreement.
All this when the Europhiles have committed European taxpayers’ to a ruinously masochistic programme of energy taxation, power station closures and ‘investment’ into subprime wind factories to the benefit of the Green-Industrial complex. How ungrateful these really foreign foreigners turned out to be!
My short speech should be available shortly. I say that the event primarily involved us “talking about what other people were talking about” and that it was a total waste of time and taxpayers’ money.
Naturally this goes down like a lead balloon with the leftists and greens, who make various noises, then some more as I say that I intend to stay positive in committee where possible. But they fall silent and listen as I give the briefest possible outline of the only useful thing I saw at COP15.
Miracle product?
This was a small and under-funded display stand manned by a solitary Bavarian, who had a beautiful model of a bridge. This was made, I quickly discovered, of thin slices of granite laminated with carbon, an innovative process that produces a brand new construction material which is the weight of aluminium, the strength of steel, at least four times longer-lasting than concrete, compared to which it also uses just half the energy to be produced.
Obviously I would rather this was a British invention, but even though it is not I was deeply struck by the fact that the only productive, honest, decent, useful thing in the whole absurd Copenhagen anti-technological guilt-fest, was being ignored by all and sundry.
I also know that the granite quarries of Blencathra in Cumbria, such as Honister, have been laying men off for years on account of the large scale use of granite for building having come to a virtual end.
Furthermore, this technology has been patented and licenced for future use in any place and for any purpose which is environmentally sound, and I can think of few better ways to help the environment and workers in that part of my constituency than by going back to building bridges and shops and even houses with relatively small quantities of locally quarried granite rather than by lugging energy-guzzling, short-lived and desperately ugly concrete up from Shap.
So I promised the enthusiastic exhibitor that I would do what I could to draw attention to the technology and its huge potential, which process I duly begin by telling the Committee that this is an opportunity to hep develop something real and useful and practical, which could still be helping our own countries, and poor people in the Third World, long after the whole Climate Change fraud has collapsed.
Much of the rest of the day is, as usual, spent on emails and calls about matters that need my attention back in the UK. These combine with the parliamentary routine to create a frantically packed schedule, in which the work is never finished, but in which an awful lot gets done. And it’s getting better as the pieces of the jigsaw of living and working here and back in Britain steadily drop into place.
