ConservativeHome's Platform

Roger Helmer MEP: What's the worst way to cut CO2 emissions?

Roger Helmer, MEP for the East Midlands, looks at some of the counter-poroductive attempts to reduce carbon emissions.

Put ten economists in a room, and they'll come up with eleven different opinions.  But there's one thing they'll agree on, and that is that taxes (if we must have taxes) should be clear, fair, predictable, easy to understand, cheap to collect, and above all, non-discriminatory. They should not distort markets and economic activity.

The EU takes a different view.  It wants to limit CO2 emissions by creating economic incentives.  But its approaches break all the rules of good and fair taxation.  Their first attempt was the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).  Phase One was a huge disaster.  It was vastly bureaucratic and expensive to operate.  It created serious distortions between member-states.  And it wholly failed to reduce emissions.  Open Europe has done a couple of excellent reviews of ETS's failure.

Phase Two of the ETS started at the beginning of this year, which the EU says will be much better.  But they've been saying that about the CFP for thirty years, so don't hold your breath.

Roger Helmer MEP: Conservative MEPs in the EPP - Two down; 25 to go

At a "Mini-Plenary" in Brussels on Jan 31st, my good friend and colleague Dan Hannan MEP was expelled from the EPP group, in circumstances uncannily similar to my own expulsion three years earlier.

In the December Strasbourg session, we had agitated for a referendum (see my website).  In January, we decided to stay strictly within the rules, and do what little we could -- not very much -- to delay the business of the house.  We called for recorded votes on all amendments.  We applied for verbal "explanations of vote" -- one minute for each MEP, for each proposal.  Pretty modest stuff, and as Dan likes to say, the worst we could have done was to keep them from their lunches for a little while.  But they cannot tolerate dissent.  Although our action was within the rules, the President of the parliament Hans-Gert Poettering (former leader of the EPP group) asked the Constitutional Affairs Committee (which deals with parliamentary rules) for a "re-interpretation" of the rules to enable him to set aside such requests where he deemed them to be vexatious.

But this was by no means a "re-interpretation".  The rules allow all MEPs to demand roll-call votes and explanations of vote.  What Poettering was really demanding was that he have widespread and arbitrary powers to disregard the rules entirely, whenever he suspected they were being exploited by sceptics.  We used to be a rules-based institution -- but no longer.  As the Poettering request was put to the vote, Dan rose on a Point of Order to condemn the wholesale disregard of democratic principles.  In a very courteous and tangential way, he compared it to the "Enabling Act" requested by the then-Chancellor of Germany in 1933, which allowed him to disregard the rules.  It seemed to me a very fair parallel, but of course Rule #1 in the parliament is "Don't mention the war", and any reference to Adolph, no matter how indirect, is a hanging offence.

Roger Helmer MEP: British government backs the Mad Mullahs

Roger Helmer, MEP for East Midlands and Chairman of The Freedom Association, argues for the PMOI to be delisted as a terrorist organisation.

"We have accepted a promise we know Iran won't keep, in exchange for making a statement we know to be false".

An extraordinary headline, but a sad truth. The British government has bowed to pressure from Iran's Ahmadinejad régime, and has proscribed the most prominent and effective opposition-in-exile to the Iranian government, the People's Mujahideen of Iran (PMOI), arguing that it is a terrorist organisation. Worse, it has persisted in its proscription despite adverse rulings in the British courts, and in the European Court of Justice. No court has found any evidence that the PMOI is a terrorist organisation. Extraordinarily, our government has even persuaded the EU to back the proscription of the PMOI, in defiance of the ECJ.

On Dec 18th, I had the privilege of meeting the leader of the PMOI Madame Maryam Rajavi (pictured above), at a Press Conference in Brussels. So far as I could see, she was not carrying a Kalashnikov.

In August a group of 35 MPs and peers took a case to the British Proscribed Organisations Appeals Committee (POAC), a branch of the High Court, which has found the government's position "Perverse", and has refused leave for the government to appeal. Yet despite losing at every turn, despite failing to provide rational grounds for its proscription of the PMOI, our government intends as a last throw of the dice to go to the Appeal Court in a final attempt to overturn the POAC ruling. Following this ruling, both the British government and the EU now have a great deal of egg on their faces.

Roger Helmer MEP: Let freedom ring!

Roger Helmer, MEP for East Midlands and Chairman of The Freedom Association, describes some lessons on liberty from America.

"I have heard more about conservative values in one hour in Philadelphia than I have heard in years in the Conservative Party".

So said one of the Conservative MEPs with me on a visit to the 34th Annual Meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in Philadelphia (July 25/29).

ALEC is a major US public policy institute bringing together hundreds of conservative State legislators with an A-list of corporate partners.  They debate policy, develop model legislation, and provide a major force for conservative values in American politics.  And they talk constantly and confidently about their core beliefs, or as they would put it, "Jeffersonian Principles".

They believe in Freedom.  In liberty with responsibility.  Enterprise and free markets.  Small government and low taxes.  Family and nation. Indeed much the same values as those of our own Freedom Association, of which I recently became Honorary Chairman.  And they proclaim those values.  It was a rare speech in Philadelphia which did not hit some of those hot buttons, and each time the speaker was rewarded by a warm audience response.

Roger Helmer MEP: A different view on climate change

Nick Hurd MP has previously written for this site to warn against 'climate change scepticism'.  Today Roger Helmer MEP writes about his Counter-Consensual Climate Conference due to take place in the European Parliament with Lord Lawson next Wednesday, 18th April.  PDF flyer here.

Is the earth getting warmer? Slightly.

Is there good evidence that the rate of warming is increasing and becoming catastrophic? No.

Is it caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions? Probably not.

Do proposed policy responses like Kyoto make sense? Definitely not.

Climate change hysteria has become an industry, with scientists, lobbyists and journalists making a good living from it. Many politicians are happy to connive, seeing opportunities both for higher "green" taxes, and for the global governance initiatives close to their hearts. David Milliband suggests re-branding the EU as "The Environmental Union", and adds for good measure that you can't be both green and eurosceptic (see Neil O'Brien's rebuttal of that notion here).

Worse yet, there are all sorts of pressures being put on the scientific community to fall in line behind the alarmist consensus. Counter-consensual papers aren't published. Their authors lose funding. Even work with only a tangential relevance to climate change can increase its chance of funding with the addition of the phrase "in the context of global warming".