Ross Clark

Natural environment and rural communities draft Bill published A Bill designed to address better the real needs of rural communities and the natural environment through modernised and simplified arrangements for implementing policy was today presented in draft to Parliament by Margaret Beckett, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Mrs Beckett said: ‘The Bill we are publishing today will be key in delivering our commitment to a better quality of life for all with sustainable development at its heart. The new integrated agency will lead the way in delivering an accessible and high quality natural environment contributing to the enjoyment and well-being of current and future generations.

Government continues drive for better, more efficiently organised public servicesIn a guidance pack sent out today to Leaders and Chief Executives of all local authorities in England, the government outlines how local authorities will measure and report efficiency gains they have achieved by means of a three-stage self-assessment process. This method has been determined following consultation with a group of local authorities and organisations including the Audit Commission, Local Government Association and INLOGOV of the University of Birmingham. The pack offers guidance on how change agents such as the Regional Centres of Excellence will support local authorities in delivering efficiency gains.

From this week, we will be picking out some gems from the Panglossian world of government press releases, a world in which our hard-working ministers and civil servants make valiant efforts to better the lives of a grateful public. The title of this column, Everyone Benefits, is a frequent phrase which crops up in New Labour press releases to describe how nobody, least of all you the taxpayer, ever loses out from its initiatives. Lakeside Darts Action Promotes Adult Numeracy The Minister for Skills and Vocational Education, Ivan Lewis, today visited the World Professional Darts Championships at Lakeside to promote adult numeracy learning with the British Darts Organisation.

The national ‘giveathon’ provoked by Boxing Day’s tsunami in the Indian Ocean is an admirable response to an emergency. Rather less can be said of the thousands who fell for this year’s fashionable Christmas present: sending a goat to the Third World. Oxfam, one of several charities to run a ‘give a goat’ scheme, says it has sent 30,000 animals at £25 a time, many of them to East Africa. ‘How many times have you bought your uncle a tie, a plant or a book that he doesn’t need?’ reads the bumf on the Oxfam website. ‘The Oxfam catalogue can solve your problems by allowing you to buy him a really useful present this year — a goat.

Gordon Brown does not usually receive support from this column but he deserves some congratulation on one initiative. He has written to the European Commission to request that it lifts the threshold above which duty becomes payable on goods brought into the EU for personal use. For the past 10 years it has been frozen at 170 euros (about £145). While the EU has been keen to encourage cross-border shopping within the EU, it does everything it can to discourage us from shopping outside the EU. Should you buy a £200 fur coat in New York, you are liable to pay, on your arrival at Heathrow, VAT of 17.5 per cent plus additional duty of 12 per cent — in addition to any sales taxes you have paid in America.

A loftily named environmental pressure group called the Food Commission has been upset by the sale of bottled water from Fiji in Waitrose supermarkets. The water, it complains, has clocked up 10,000 ‘food miles’ before it reaches Western consumers. ‘Transporting water halfway across the world is surely the most ludicrous use of fossil fuels when water is plentiful in the UK,’ it complains. It is also concerned that we are wasting fossil fuels by importing prawns from Indonesia (7,000 food miles) and carrots from South Africa (5,900 food miles). Counting the number of miles travelled by a product is a bizarre and crude way of trying to assess the environmental damage done by an industry.

When Tony Blair made his famous pledge to concentrate on ‘Education, education, education!’, maybe we all misheard, and he really said: ‘Obfuscation, obsfucation, obsfucation!’ After all, that is what his education ministers have spent the past seven years doing with school exam results. It isn’t hard to find a teacher these days who thinks there has been a lowering of standards of GCSEs. The dramatic improvement in pass rates over the past few years have not been achieved by better teaching or brighter children, they say, but by spoon-fed examination answers, excessive reliance on coursework, making it easier to get your parents to earn your qualifications for you.

The Conservative leader Michael Howard says he owes everything to Britain for saving his family from persecution by the Nazis. It is just a good job for him that his own manifesto on asylum and immigration was not in force in Britain in the 1930s. Sandwiched between the personal passages in his conference speech Mr Howard announced a truly nasty policy. If a Howard government takes office, one of its first acts will be to withdraw Britain from the 1951 UN convention on refugees. Presumably Mr Howard is calculating that this will curry favour with Ukip voters, who relegated the Tories to a humiliating fourth place in the Hartlepool by-election. Maybe it will, but at the same time it will earn Britain condemnation around the world — and rightly so.

Don’t you just love those socio-economic league tables which put Britain a miserable 25th, virtually down among the developing nations, while Scandinavian nations emerge on top? The first time I went to Denmark I wasn’t quite prepared for the frumpiness, so often had I seen its social democratic model depicted by left-leaning academics as a paradise on Earth. The Left has another such table over which to bleat about the misery of modern Britain: a Geneva-based organisation called the International Labour Office (ILO) has compiled an ‘economic security index’ which it claims measures health and happiness around the globe. Sweden emerges top, followed by Finland, Norway and Denmark. France is seventh, Germany ninth and Britain a lowly 15th.

The government wants to find ways of helping us to lose weight. It could start by ceasing to shower farmers with subsidies to grow sugar. Remarkably, given the public money that is spent on telling us not to eat fattening foods, the EU gave European sugar producers 819 million euros worth of subsidy last year, either in the form of guaranteed prices, direct subsidies for exports or in other help. Defra, for example, funds a Hertfordshire research centre, Brooms Barn, helping Britain’s 7,000 sugar beet growers to squeeze ever more subsidised sugar out of the East Anglian soil. For this exercise, British consumers have their wallets emptied four times over.

According to the Hollywood film The Day After Tomorrow, the failure of the world to confront global warming is going to result in the royal family being freeze-dried at the breakfast table at Balmoral and our cities drowned in raging tornadoes. Never mind that this scenario — based on the global-warming lobby’s latest hobby-horse, the theoretical displacement of the Gulf Stream — is in direct contradiction to the drought and heatwave which scientists have been predicting for years. And never mind that much of the film’s scenes are physically impossible: to reverse the Gulf Stream, according to some calculations, would involve first having to stop the world rotating.