CentreRight

Mandelson must remember his place

Might I be one of the first on Conservative Home to ask Mr Mandelson politely to think a little before speaking out in the way he does. He has escalated the public feud with the President of France by writing in the Sunday Telegraph to criticise leaders who take "populists and self-serving" stances to secure their positions domestically while ignoring the needs of the world as a whole.

Mr Mandelson has crossed the Rubicon in his latest criticism of the French President and is opening a Pandora’s Box in this matter. He is precipitating a situation whereby democratically elected Heads of State within the EU can be contradicted and challenged in the most public way as a matter of course by totally unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats such as Mr Mandelson.

Chairman of All Party Group for Dairy Farmers to fight Government over inaction on Bovine TB

As Chairman of the All Party Group for Dairy Farmers I am devastated at the news on Bovine TB announced today by the BBC. Reports claim that on Monday the government will announce that they intend to ignore official expert advice to have a limited cull of badgers. Predictions across the country are that this year alone up to 40,500 cows will have to be slaughtered as a result of Bovine TB costing the taxpayers hundreds of millions of pounds in compensation to farmers affected. Many readers will know the emotional stress and misery that this disease is bringing to our rural communities and the extraordinarily damaging effect it is having on our farmers' livelihoods.

I have sat with a farmer in my constituency who has been brought to his knees by Bovine TB and I do not mind admitting that I cried for the first time in 20 years when I heard what had happened to him and his livelihood. I will fight to the end to protect my farmers and feel so very angry about the Socialists' total disregard for our farming community. Hillary Benn, Margaret Beckett, David Milliband and all the others have shown nothing but shallow platitudes to me and others whilst happily ignoring our deep concerns and wilfully taking no action to address the crisis.

I am incensed that as usual we have to hear this news from the BBC rather than from government itself. Yet another leak to the media shows the contempt that DEFRA Ministers have for us. I have tried to go through all appropriate channels to raise this issue with the government by securing numerous debates in the Commons on Bovine TB and asking many official parliamentary questions on the matter, all to no avail.  That is why we have no option but to go to the High Court to seek a judicial review over Government inaction. I shall be approaching various business people and sympathetic organisations to secure the funding for such a review and will fight the Socialists through the Courts until our dairy farmers have justice.

Challenging the campaign against the arms trade

In a healthy democracy like ours organisations like "Campaign Against Arms Trade" have the right to scrutinise government over their export policies. We in Parliament however have not done enough to scrutinise organizations like this one and seem to have taken their objectives for granted with very little probing. With this in mind I have arranged for a representative of this organisation to meet with me today to discuss their objectives and to hear some of my concerns about their actions.

Of course we are all united in our opposition to the exports of weapons of any kind to despotic regimes that brutalise their own people. Concerns would also be shared if British firms were exporting to very poor neighbouring countries like Ethiopia and Eritrea engaged in a very costly border dispute. As a member of the International Development Select committee I have concerns about some of the poorest countries spending vast sums on arms which in many cases they can ill afford.

There is however a huge difference in exporting weapons to a regime like Zimbabwe where the President is using foreign imported weapons to suppress his people and exporting tanks and aircraft to a stable democracy like the Czech Republic. Many countries that have recently joined NATO for the mutual security this organisations provides need to purchase new equipment to start to improve standards up to NATO levels. Does the Campaign Against Arms Trade object to such exports as well to fellow NATO partners? This is one question I will be putting to them today.

EU Ban on Pesticides will affect us in a detrimental way

The EU plans to curb the use of pesticides have caused concern in communities across the UK.

The proposals stem from an agreement reached by European agriculture ministers this week which substantially changes the criteria for pesticides approval. The shift is from a risk-based assessment of the impact of pesticides, to criteria based on the hazards presented by the pesticide with no account taken of how substances are used by operators. This appears to me to show a lack of common sense.

Potentially, the changes could lead to between 5 and 15 per cent of pesticides being removed from the market, having widespread implications for horticulturalists across the UK, not least for Shrewsbury, which has a long history of horticultural excellence.

EU Regulations in every aspect of our daily lives

I went into my local garden centre in Shrewsbury to ask for some solution to kill off the carrot fly which has infested my carrots. I was told that the EU had banned the substance I needed. It is this very fact that they are getting into every single aspect of our lives which is so very annoying and totally unacceptable. Why should these faceless unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats decide how we in Shropshire should deal with our kitchen gardens!?

I have 16 raised beds and am very proud of being able to grow all of our own vegetables for the family. Everything is grown naturally without fertilizers and I have not used any chemicals at all this year. This is the first time this summer that I have needed to do something like this to save a crop and the EU has prevented me! I become so desperately disillusioned with the EU when these types of things happen!

Please see below some information on carrot fly and the chemical 'dieldrin' which used to be used to treat it, but is now banned under the EU directive 79/117/EEC.