Sunday, November 18, 2007


Britons face a future of green taxes, higher fuel prices and even flight rationing under anti-pollution laws unveiled yesterday. A Climate Change Bill would make the UK the only country with legally binding targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The five-yearly goals would cost the UK up to 12billion a year for the next 42 years.

The Government was warned that a switch to a low-carbon economy would trigger an economic slowdown and job losses while giving politicians the excuse for unpopular taxes, hike the cost of fuel and even bring in "personal carbon quotas". Critics also point out the move would be pointless if countries such as China, Russia and India refuse to introduce similar targets.

Launching the Bill yesterday, the Government said Britain has a duty to lead by example. It argues that the costs of climate-change related flooding, droughts and illnesses would be far higher if it failed to act.

The Bill does not say how carbon dioxide emissions will be cut. However, it commits the Government to a 60 per cent reduction by 2050. One method could be personal carbon-allowances, where everyone is given a fixed amount of carbon to use each year. Each time they travel in a plane, buy petrol, go shopping or eat out would be recorded on a plastic card. The more frugal could sell spare carbon to those who want to indulge themselves. But if you were to run out of your carbon allowance, you could be barred from flying or driving.

Environment Secretary Hilary Benn said the Bill sets Britain "firmly on the path to the low-carbon economy". He added: "We need to provide the framework that will give a clear idea of how we're going to tackle climate change. "We also need to show that we're taking decisive action within our borders and not asking other countries, in particular poorer countries, to do what we're not willing to do ourselves." Petrol: Would become a 'luxury' under new proposals

According to the food and farming agency Defra, cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 60 per cent would shrink gross domestic product by 1.6billion to 12billion each year as the UK switches to more expensive renewable energy and energy intensive industries shut. That does not include the costs of building "greener" power stations, creating better public transport or closing polluting factories.

The Bill will set up a new quango - the Committee on Climate Change - which will monitor the Government's progress. It will also introduce a carbon trading scheme for local councils, supermarkets and other big retailers. Kendra Okonski, of the development charity International Policy Network, said: "The UK's emissions are insignificant compared to China and India. We are in danger of cutting off our noses to spite our faces. We will impose costs on our economy which will harm the poor, but do nothing to help the climate."

But Friends of the Earth director Tony Juniper said: "Climate legislation is desperately needed but the Government must strengthen its proposals to make it truly effective."


Politically correct Britain haemorrhaging its best and brightest

Insane policing alone would encourage anyone to leave

We all know of the millions of Mexican emigrants who have left their country in the hope of a better life, usually to head to America. Among OECD member states, Mexico counts the largest number of emigrants - some 9.4m of them across the globe. But what few realise is that the second-largest group of exiles - some 3.4m at last count - are the British.

Each day, 1,500 people come to settle here - a figure which is quite familiar, and has political attention. But each day, 1,000 pack their bags for good and skedaddle. A disarming proportion of them are young, well-educated wealth creators who feel - like the Mexicans - that it is time to leave for better opportunities. This silent exodus is laden with economic implication.

If the emigres were to float away in one lump every Christmas, it would be the equivalent of Leicester or Coventry - 380,000 people. The image is of them being pensioners. And there are, indeed, more people drawing a UK state pension from abroad than there are pensioners in Wales and Scotland put together. The people whose taxes built the British welfare state seem understandably unwilling to test the latter part of its cradle-to-grave proposition. But they are less than 10% of the emigres.

The current phenomena is more of a 1970s-style brain drain than a 1980s-style Auf Wiedersehen Pet bricklayer exodus. The OECD showed this for the first time, using the spate of censuses conducted around the world at the turn of the century (2001 for Britain). It found 1.26m British graduates abroad - a higher figure than any other country. It counted only 865,000 German expat graduates, 438,000 French and just 390,000 American.

Expand the definition to "high skilled" and the picture becomes even bleaker. Of all the Brits categorised in this way, a staggering 15% were earning a living abroad - a rate of haemorrhage exceeded only by the famously itinerant Irish and New Zealanders. Even Poland did a better job of hanging on to its best people: just 9% of its high-skilled workers were found living abroad (this was before EU membership). America's retention rate was extraordinary: just 1% of its best workers were abroad.


Deceit comes naturally to the BBC: "The BBC has apologised for adding the sound of babies crying to its footage of quintuplets born to a Russian woman. The five girls, delivered at an Oxford hospital on November 10, are the latest individuals to be drawn into the broadcasting fakery row. The John Radcliffe Hospital distributed clips of the five babies and their parents, who defied doctors in Moscow who advised they abort some of the fetuses. While broadcasters like Sky and ITN ran clips of the footage without the audio, the BBC's footage contains the sound of children crying, even though the babies have respirators in their mouths. A spokeswoman for the Oxford hospital said: "There was no audio on our clip." "The BBC must have put it over. "I thought they weren't supposed to do things like that." A BBC spokesman said the corporation should have left the footage alone. He said: "We received the film without sound and on reflection we should have kept it that way."

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