Act should be repealed
Congratulations to Alistair Carmichael on his own and his party’s election success. The coalition is something completely new so, while I didn’t vote for either party, let’s give them a chance to see if they can improve our country. Lord knows it’s needed.
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has announced a raft of parliamentary reforms which might bring a breath of fresh air, following the cynical manoeuvring and manipulation of the system for political and financial gain that we have seen over the past few years. Not before time, the House of Lords is to become an elected chamber: how ironic, and telling, that it could be the Tories and Liberals, not Labour, who bring it about.
Mr Clegg’s call for the public to nominate laws for repeal is welcome, but I suggest that he first repeals the Climate Change Act. I won’t detail the list of countries which have withdrawn or delayed climate change commitments (it’s long). Alas, we cannot follow suit since the UK parliament committed us, unilaterally, in law, to make carbon dioxide emissions cuts of 34 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050. So while everyone else reneges on promises spun and fashioned in hot air, we can anticipate the spectacle of our government prosecuting itself for not meeting its own unattainable, quixotic, targets.
Others are backing off because, as I have explained in previous letters, the so-called “settled” science of global warming is falling apart, the global economic crisis means there is no spare cash for luxuries like “green jobs” (Spain has discovered these cost 570,000 euros each and destroy 2.2 jobs elsewhere) and finally, it follows that voters and even governments have recognised the folly and are voting with their scuttling feet.
Let that be a lesson to those who would advocate unilateralism in future.
Incidentally, anybody concerned about the imminent inundation of Bangladesh highlighted by Professor Glover at the Shetland Climate Change Summit needn’t fret. Local scientists in the Dhaka-based Centre for Environment and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS) say the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) failed to consider the billion tonnes per year of sediment that flows down the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers which will keep that country safe from even the highest of the IPCC’s predictions of sea level rises. Maldives? No. Vanuatu, Tuvalu? No. Well, what’s a “few more little errors in a very big document”.
Secondly, how about repealing the laws that permit councils to act like the Soviet Union, mugging innocent citizens who come to spend their hard-earned cash in a town or city and have the effrontery to bring their cars to carry home armfuls of shopping (£18 per day to park in Glasgow, a good way to empty parking spaces – and shops), charging you £2 for a pee if you don’t have the right change and snooping with CCTV cameras at what people put in their bins or laws that have the police harassing kids playing hopscotch on the pavements. Ye gods!
And what about councils who squander millions on a string of ne’er-do-well entrepreneurs and anybody who turns up with a big city lawyer and who waft aside conflicts of interest: then when the money runs out, they seek, unctuously, to economise by cutting the children’s music and knitting lessons – high time somebody kicked over the money lending tables at the Town Hall and “suffered the little children to come unto” their free music and knitting lessons. Shame on you. Shame!
John Tulloch
Lyndon,
Arrochar.
