Kagey

The evidence that Bio-fuels are neither a magic bullet  solution to climate change or a sustainable energy alternative is already proven. That it is an environmental and human rights disaster is already clear.

Yet on 15th April, the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) will be introduced across the UK.  From that day, all forecourts will have to sell petrol and diesel with a 2.5% minimum blend of biofuels unless they choose to opt out at a penalty cost of 15 pence per litre.

The government has accepted that there is a problem and has ordered a study but rather than postpone its move to make Bio-fuels compulsory they are pressing ahead with the deeply flawed logic of turning food into fuel and rainforest into green deserts of bio crop.

Every day indigenous people are being forced from their homelands to make way for plantations, often by violent means.

From next month we will be forced to be complicit in the destruction of the rainforest and it’s teeming diversity because this government cannot accept it got it wrong.

Join the campaign to halt Bio-fuels

 

Boris Johnson jokingly said that he was in favour of Sharia law to deal with bicycle thieves after getting his nicked.

Extreme as it seemed even in jest, cutting off the hands of bike snatchers didn’t even stir the ex-Synod members, retired Generals and Brigadiers, the likes of whom who called for the sacking of the Arch Bishop of Canterbury for even discussing something altogether milder.

These last weeks I’ve been wondering if Boris is as enthusiastic about Sharia Law as he was having been caught hiding over a Quarter of a Million in donations received from wealthy individuals to his campaign coffers. That and taking a rent free office from a property developer needing help with a local planning issue in Westminster.

As a candidate for Mayor of London this guy is a joke. It pretty much sums up the state of politics that he is the best man the Conservatives can field for the job of running the Capital. Ken must be quaking in his boots!

While the London Evening Standard does it’s best to trash Livingstone’s hopes, Boris does a pretty good job on himself.  You should check out some of his gaffs on You Tube, I especially liked the football tackle. What a prat!

On the bicycle affair, Paul Merton put it beautifully, “If he can’t look after his bike what chance has he of looking after London!”

Of late there’s been much talk about our ‘broken society’ from the likes of David Cameron and the Arch Bishop of Canterbury. According to them the glue that binds society is breaking down and our sense of community is in decline.

I would agree that we are becoming disconnected from one another and our true nature but if anything is broken it is our political system. It’s a system broke of ideas. It’s one that trots out the same agenda election after election regardless of party. So homogenised that it hardly seems worth voting.

If society is disconnected its no surprise when parliament is inhabited by a bunch of schizophrenics. Climate change is now regarded as our biggest threat and yet while piloting a bill through parliament to control emissions this government plans for more runways, roads and coal fired power stations.

This week members of parliament were indignant that one of their own should be bugged while talking to a constituent in prison. However the following day Gordon Brown found it appropriate to make it easier for the security services to bug the rest of us.

And while just about every week a politician is embroiled in one kind of a fiddle or another the government launches a benefit fraud campaign. It invites the general public to shop their neighbours with a confidential hot-line. If there’s one thing that divides people its fear and suspicion. So while the politicians talk of the need to mend society; to build bridges it turns neighbours into snoopers. Catching fraudsters should be police business.

Crime and Justice will no doubt be high on the agenda in the forthcoming election campaign. Governments love prisons and and while they’re busy building more they hardly seem to question why they don’t work as a deterrent or deliver reform. They love long sentences too, as long as it doesn’t apply to them.

Having been grassed up for paying his son money for work he was less than entitled to, Conservative MP Derek Conway is hardly repentant. His penalty is hardly draconian either; he will have to pay back just £13,000 of the £40,000 he scammed from his bit of HP Benefit Fraud. It doesn’t look like he’s going to do time other than a ten day ban from the Houses of Parliament, hardly porridge. Meanwhile a single mother-of-four has been jailed for eight months for illegally claiming half that. The council spooks caught her living a ‘high life’ on Burger King money while claiming benefit.

While politicians live in their disconnected world the policies they put forward will continue to miss the point. To be pointless and without benefit… Benefit Fraud