Ross Clark

The European Union’s social chapter has been so successful in suppressing economic growth in Europe that it is no surprise to find the US presidential candidate John Kerry seeking to emulate it. Not that he intends to saddle American businesses with more red tape, mind: he wants to try to strangle the booming Chinese economy through a kind of international social chapter. Kerry says that on taking office he would launch an ‘immediate investigation into China’s repression of workers’ rights’ and increase state funding for the Bureau of International Labor Affairs, a government agency which campaigns ‘to create a more stable and prosperous international economic system in which all workers ...

Ten new members join the European Union on Saturday and thousands of economic migrants are queueing up at the borders, raring to go. I refer, of course, to Western European property investors hoping to make a killing on property markets in the East. While we have heard a lot of grim warnings in the press about Eastern Europeans descending on Dover by the busload to take our jobs, steal our women and eat our children, buy-to-let investors have received nothing but encouragement: last weekend’s property sections were brimming with suggestions as to where to invest, what to buy and how much rent it is possible to screw out of your Estonian tenants. Such is the hypocrisy we show towards free trade.

Slaves transported from Africa to the New World in the 18th century had a wretched time, but does the same apply to their distant descendants? It does according to Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, who with seven other descendants of slaves this week filed a lawsuit demanding $1 billion in damages from Lloyd’s of London, FleetBoston and the tobacco company R.J. Reynolds. These companies, claims Ms Farmer-Paellmann, who has had her DNA traced to the Mende tribe of Sierra Leone, ‘have destroyed our national and ethnic identity’. She accuses them of ‘aiding and abetting the commission of genocide’ by financing and insuring slave ships.

I have never had much confidence in heritage legislation since I discovered that I would need to seek permission to have a row of leylandii trees in my garden felled. This, not long after the Highways Agency’s bulldozers had torn their way through Twyford Down, and half of Smithfield Market was condemned for redevelopment. No matter how ghastly or inappropriate, every tree in my garden is officially protected because I live in a conservation area. I can’t prune, fell or lop without informing my local tree officer. Nor can I remove the 1970s garden wall or change my 1980s plastic window frames without permission.

New citizens of the United Kingdom may soon have to undergo a citizenship test, pledging their allegiance to the Queen, demonstrating their knowledge of English language and culture and quite possibly promising to cheer on the England cricket team. What they needn’t bother to do, on the other hand, is to take too much notice of the law. The Metropolitan Police Authority has declared that the police stop and search a disproportionate number of people of ethnic minority background, and that they must stop it at once. In 2002, we learn, 34 per cent of people stopped and searched were black; yet blacks make up only eight per cent of the population. One is not, of course, allowed these days to make the point that an awful lot of London’s muggers are black.

At last, some good news for the anti-war lobby. British servicemen will not be forced — in fact will not be allowed — to do America’s dirty work for it. That is my interpretation, at any rate, of Dodd Amendment no. 2660 to the Jumpstart Our Business Strength Act, passed by the US Senate last week by 70 votes to 26. The amendment prohibits companies working on federal and state government contracts to outsource work abroad. The Senate isn’t even bothering to try to dress up its actions as a security issue: this is a shameless piece of protectionism. American unions have cried foul that companies are increasingly cutting costs by outsourcing certain administrative operations, especially to India, and so senators have obliged. From now on, Samuel J.

The great food terror is upon us again. On Friday, 23 January the EU Commission banned all imports of chickens and chicken products from Thailand in response to fears over ‘Avian flu’, which two Thais have contracted from the birds: ‘Although the risk of importing the virus in meat or meat products is probably very low the Commission wants to make sure that any possible transmission is avoided.’ The chances of contracting Avian flu from a Thai curry from your local takeaway aren’t just low, they are non-existent. Imports of live chickens and hatching eggs from Thailand to the EU are already banned; all meat that comes here is already cooked or frozen and is no more likely to give you flu than a tigerskin rug is likely to bite your head off.

The assortment of Snodgrasses and Ponsonbys who make up the British Committee for the Restitution of the Elgin Marbles have launched yet another chapter of their long campaign to return the fragmented statues to Greece. How very appropriate, they argue, if the arrival of the marbles were to coincide with that of the Olympic flame later this summer. That is, presumably, assuming the Greek authorities get their finger out and manage to finish the Athens stadium in time; sending the marbles to Seoul, which has offered itself as a back-up location, would seem a little odd. Were the committee’s campaign modelled around the idea of sending Greeks back to Greece, along with their restaurants, oily kebabs and unpalatable retsina, it would quite rightly be reviled as ethnic cleansing.

Is your food industry being forced out of business by nasty foreign importers who insist on selling a similar product at half the price? Don’t worry: just start a health scare. It’s cheap, it’s rapid and the World Trade Organisation hasn’t yet got to grips with the possibilities for promoting protectionism via fear. Last week the American journal Science published a paper by a team from the University of Albany, New York reporting high levels of various contaminants, including polychlorinated biphenyls (pcbs), dioxins and DDT in Scottish farmed salmon. Already one Scottish salmon farm has been driven out of business. It turns out that this is not the first difficulty that the Scottish salmon industry has had in selling its products in America.

Every year, according to a new report by the World Health Organisation, 150,000 people succumb to the effects of global warming, which, it asserts, is responsible for 2.4 per cent of cases of diarrhoea and 6 per cent of cases of malaria. And if we in the first world think we can feel smug, it adds, 25,842 Europeans died in last summer’s heatwave, while Britain sees a 12 per cent increase in salmonella cases for every one degree rise in temperature. But what about all the elderly and infirm people who would have died had this winter been as cold as those frequently experienced in Europe during the 19th century? Strangely, these non-deaths do not appear to feature in the World Health Organisation’s one-sided ledger on the effects of global warming.

Given President Bush’s refusal so far to lift his illegal tariffs on steel imports, European retaliation is almost inevitable. But a potentially even graver battle is brewing between the US and its fourth largest trading partner, China. Last year America ran a $103 billion-dollar deficit with China, something US unions blame on ‘unfair’ trade practices. Last month US commerce secretary Don Evans warned the Chinese that they faced retaliation, saying, ‘China’s current trade practices are exploiting our open markets and are creating an unfair advantage that is undercutting American workers.

The Food Standards Agency has decided that the nation is too fat, and has suggested several policies aimed at persuading us to eat more healthily. The measures include stopping the likes of McDonald’s and Walkers crisps from sponsoring sports events and banning junk-food ads during children’s television programmes. One does not have to walk far down a high street to agree with the FSA’s assessment that a lot of children eat too much. But its suggested measures smack less of a fight against obesity than one against global capitalism.

Ross Clark says we should ignore the eco-brigade’s hysteria over genetically modified food After years of trampling crops, the anti-GM food lobby believes that it has finally drawn sap.

Ninety-eight per cent of the British population, according to the results of the government’s ‘national debate’, say that they do not wish to eat genetically modified food. Eighty-four per cent say that GM food is ‘an unacceptable interference with nature’, and 93 per cent say that not enough is known about the long-term health effects of GM foods. So much for the views of the average Briton, chomping his way through a burger of mechanically recovered meat and slurping some lurid concoction from a can plastered top to bottom with E numbers.

Sven Goran Eriksson and David Beckham have launched a charity to bring about world peace through football, with Mr Beckham's immortal words: 'I think my advice to any children out there looking for world peace is, you've got to enjoy life, be happy, and if football or sport is going to make a difference, then, you know, go for it, because it's important to people.' If football really is a promoter of peace, Mr Beckham might like to try to explain why Britons, many of whom simply wish to potter harmlessly around cultural sites, have been advised, for their own safety, to stay away from Turkey on 11 October, the day England plays Turkey in a European Championship qualifier. Football does play a role in international relations, but it is not the one imagined by Messrs Eriksson and Beckham.

In spite of our late and grotty trains, it comes as a relief to return to work in Britain. A fortnight in France reveals a country that has been greatly affected by the obligatory 35-hour week since I last took the family on holiday there in 2001. It is peculiar to be driving through the middle of a holiday district, Brittany, in the middle of August to find restaurant after restaurant shut for business. When we do eventually find somewhere to eat – a pizzeria, a supposed ‘fast-food’ outlet – the food takes an age to come. After several days of this, we give up and eat at our rented apartment instead. Fortunately, the flat faced away from the street, which in the absence of any effective cleaning smelled like a toilet.