CentreRight

Who are the deniers now?

By Roger Helmer MEP.

On Friday I went to Norwich at the invitation of the Vice Chancellor of the University of East Anglia (UEA), home of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) which has been much in the news in the last twelve months.

I had been invited following a correspondence with one of UEA’s academic staff.  A couple of months before, I had asked if I could bring a couple of colleagues.  They said yes.  A week or so later, they asked for the names (and any special dietary requirements).  I replied Lord Monckton of Brenchley, and James Delingpole of the Daily Telegraph.  For the next week or so I held my breath, fearing that they might not like to receive two prominent sceptics, but there was no further response.  Not, at least, until a couple of days before the meeting, when I received an apologetic e-mail.  They had just noticed who my proposed companions were.

Apparently protocol would not allow the VC to meet “political activists”.  If Lord Monckton and Delingpole  had any questions, they were free to approach the UEA’s Press Office.  (In passing, I have to say it seems rather odd to describe Lord Monckton as a “political activist”.  An hereditary Peer of the Realm, a former adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a highly respected commentator on the climate issue, and Deputy Leader of the party that came in second place in the 2009 euro-elections.  In any case, I like to regard myself, in my small way, as a political activist, and the VC was prepared to see me.)

I replied that this was deeply embarrassing to me, as I knew that Lord Monckton had made extensive (and expensive) changes to his travel schedule, between a financial conference in China and a business meeting in New York, specifically to attend the UEA meeting.  In reply, they made an extraordinary proposal: Lord Monckton could not meet the VC with me, but he could have a separate meeting after my meeting was concluded.  I decided to invite, on my own initiative, another MEP, Stuart Agnew of Eastern Region.  They could scarcely refuse another parliamentarian.

We’ve been handing powers to Brussels faster than Labour

By Roger Helmer MEP.

Earlier today I spoke to a packed Bruges Group fringe meeting in Birmingham, and I posed this question:

Has the Coalition (and the Conservative Party) lost the plot on the EU?

I’m afraid the answer is YES.

As a Conservative, I have for years received e-mails from constituents asking how I, as a eurosceptic, can remain in a party so obviously committed to the European project, and I have replied that the Party needs a bit of Eurosceptic ballast, that I’m trying to keep it honest, that if all the sceptics leave then the pro-EU trend will get worse.  And I’ve cherished the hope that Conservatives in government would prove the doubters wrong.

So where are we after five months of Conservative-led Coalition government?  Last week Vince Cable told a Brussels audience that the EU institutions had been “pleasantly surprised” by the Coalition’s positive engagement with, and commitment to, the EU project.  And for once Vince wasn’t wrong.  The truth is that we’ve been handing powers to Brussels under the Coalition arguably faster than Labour did before us.  No wonder that the sound and excellent Shadow Europe Minister Mark François was replaced by the plausible and managerial David Lidington.

A couple of months back, we Conservative MEPs in Strasbourg were whipped to vote in favour of the new EU diplomatic service, the EEAS, on “Instructions from London”, despite having been elected on a 2009 Manifesto that explicitly committed us to opposing it.  We had opposed the Lisbon Treaty that provides a legal basis for the EEAS, we had opposed the EEAS itself, and we were right to do so.  The structures of a single country called the EU are being put in place around us, and we are now whipped to vote in favour on the specious basis that we’ll have to work with it, so we’d better pretend to like it.  An EU seat at the UN will be the next thing.

Theresa May has voluntarily signed up to the new EU Investigation Order, so that a Bulgarian prosecutor can demand your bank details or your DNA, and the British police are obliged to obtain these data and pass them to Bulgaria.  No checks, no balances, no appeal, no safeguards for the citizens (just as with the scandalous EU Arrest Warrant).  The police are already protesting about the additional work-load at a time of major cut-backs.  And what happened to data protection?  This is a gross infringement of individual liberty – and the Coalition bought it without a fight.

Then there’s the new EU regulatory structure for financial services.  The City of London has the lion’s share of the EU’s financial services business, yet we’ve agreed for it to be regulated from Brussels and Frankfurt.  Frankfurt tail wags City dog.  Financial services companies and high-net-worth individuals are already buying tickets to Switzerland in consequence.  I pay tribute to my colleague Vicky Ford MEP, who has fought tooth-and-nail, and with some success, to modify the proposals and limit the damage.  But we have conceded the principle, and that’s a gross dereliction of the government’s duty.

So what about the Referendum Lock?  It is a meaningless piece of spin.  They talk about referenda on new Treaties, but because of the passerelle clauses in the Lisbon Treaty, Brussels doesn’t need new treaties.  It can pursue “Ever Closer Union” within the existing Treaty framework.  Our Referendum Lock plans refer to the ratchet clauses, but leave so many grey areas that, given the Coalition’s current attitude to Brussels, we can have little confidence in them.  Not so much a Referendum Lock – more a stable door slammed when the horse is long gone.

Why are they doing this?  Weren’t Cameron and Hague of a broadly sceptic disposition?  Well of course their first priority is, quite rightly, the deficit, and so their second priority is to keep the Coalition on an even keel to deal with the deficit.  For these reasons they don’t want to be distracted by a huge row with Brussels, nor do they want a huge row with the Lib-Dems.

But the underlying problem is that they regard Europe as a separate issue in a separate box, and moreover an issue way down the voters’ priority list.  It’s something that happens “over there”.  They’ve failed to grasp the fundamental nature of the EU threat to our independence, our democracy and our liberty.  Future generations will marvel that we gave up so much, with so little in exchange, and without even a token resistance.  Sometimes, I despair for my Country.

Tax competition between states is good

An Open Letter to John Christiansen, Director of the Tax Justice Network, from Roger Helmer MEP.

Dear John,

I heard your interview on the BBC World Service Radio this morning.  You were fulminating against the behaviour of multinational corporations who move their headquarters to favourable tax régimes.  You implied that this behaviour was damaging and immoral, and you urged, if not full international tax harmonisation, then at least international rules that would obstruct such relocation.  You argued that this behaviour denied revenue to national governments, and made us all poorer.

John, you described yourself as an economist, yet you fall straight into a first-year undergraduate economic error.  You assume that lower tax rates mean lower revenues.  In a static economy, this might be true, and indeed obvious.  But in a dynamic economy, economic actors are free to change their behaviour in response to tax incentives -- and they do.  As an economist, have you never heard of the Laffer Curve?  Don't you know that high tax rates inhibit growth and prosperity, and deter innovation, and entrepreneurship, and investment (including inward investment)?  And that high tax rates create a powerful incentive for avoidance or evasion?

Are you not familiar with the case histories?  In dozens of countries, over many decades, it's been demonstrated that lower tax rates will (counter-intuitively) actually raise total revenues.  When Ronald Reagan proposed reducing tax rates to increase revenues, it was a dubbed "Voodoo Economics".  But it worked.

The choice is, on the one hand, competitive taxes, growth, prosperity, investment, higher revenues and better living standards.  Or on the other, high tax rates, low growth, capital flight, emigration, relative poverty.  You seem to be on the side of high taxes and poverty.

You say on your web-site that Tax Havens create poverty.  No.  On the contrary, they serve a useful function in limiting the scope of other tax régimes to raise taxes too high, and in keeping them honest.

You describe tax competition between nations as "A Race to the Bottom".  No.  It's a race to growth and properity.  Here in the EU, MEPs love to talk about "Harmful Tax Competition".  But there is no harmful tax competition.  All tax competition is good.  All attempts at tax harmonisation are cartels operated by governments against the interests of citizens and tax-payers.

Best regards,

Roger Helmer MEP

Vince Cable couldn't be more wrong about taxing the better off

By Roger Helmer MEP.

Vince Cable has a reputation as a competent and distinguished economist.  Yet in declaring a redistributive tax policy his “Red Line Issue” within the coalition, he makes not one but two elementary, undergraduate-level howlers, and compounds them together.

Fallacy Number One (the “Static Economy” fallacy): Raising tax rates will inevitably increase Treasury revenues.

Fallacy Number Two: (the “Robin Hood” fallacy): You can eliminate poverty by taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor.

Both these statements are clear and obvious and intuitive.  Unfortunately they’re also simplistic and wrong.  And they’re distinctively socialist, not liberal, misconceptions.

The Static Economy Fallacy assumes that you can raise tax rates without affecting anything else.  But the economy is dynamic: economic players change their behaviour in response to incentives.  Raise higher rate taxes, and avoidance and evasion will follow.  Some will retire early, or work less overtime, or put expansion plans on hold.  Some will hire very clever accountants.  They may decide to invest in more favourable tax jurisdictions.  International companies will move their headquarters out of the UK, and individual highly-paid high-flying executives will move abroad (as is happening at the moment, with the threat of the 50% tax rate).  International investors will move Britain further down their priority list.

Cable must surely know about the Laffer Curve.  If you increase tax rates beyond a reasonable and modest level, you rapidly encounter diminishing returns, and very soon negative returns.  This may be counter-intuitive, but it has been demonstrated over and over again in dozens of countries in recent decades.  Reductions in the higher rate of tax can actually increase government revenues, and promote more rapid growth.

Modest taxes for the well-off obviously benefit higher earners: they also stimulate growth and jobs and investment, and generate vitally-needed employment for those on lower wages.  They help everyone.  Vince’s “fair taxes” are fair only in the sense that they make all of us, rich and poor alike, worse off.

Roger Helmer MEP: Conservatives and Labour MPs should work together to defeat Chris Huhne's green zealotry

By Roger Helmer MEP.

The former Labour government, after years of prevarication, had finally come round to accepting the need for new nuclear capacity – at least to replace old capacity coming to the end of its life, and perhaps to increase the overall contribution of nuclear to the UK’s generating needs.

But today we have Chris Huhne, former Lib-Dem MEP and now, bizarrely, the Energy Secretary in the coalition, telling us that we need more wind power, and insisting there will be no public support for nuclear.

Conservatives who sacrificed their shoe-leather canvassing for Conservative candidates last May did not expect to end up with a green Lib-Dem zealot as Energy Secretary, and they did not do it to see a massive increase in wind farms across our green and pleasant land.  Huhne’s policies are untenable, and if he continues in this vein, his job will be untenable too.  The phrase “criminally insane” springs to mind.  Huhne may not be fiddling while Rome burns, but he is playing children’s games with wind-mills while Britain’s energy security is increasingly jeopardised.

In repeating his insistence that not a penny of public money should go to nuclear, Huhne omits to mention the vast subsidies that go to wind, in the form of Renewable Obligation Certificates – which unfairly bias the market for low-carbon generation in favour of wind and against nuclear.

In case you’ve forgotten the problems with wind, let’s summarise.  Ideally we need generating capacity which is continuous and predictable, like coal or gas or nuclear.  Tidal power is discontinuous, but it’s at least predictable.  Wind is the worst option – neither continuous nor predictable.  As some continental countries have found, increasing reliance on intermittent wind creates ultimately insuperable problems of grid management.  And distributed generation creates the need for new investment in the Grid of around £10 billion, over and above the cost of wind farms.

Wind requires constant back-up – conventional capacity fired up and ready to go (known as spinning reserve).  Maintaining this reserve means higher costs and higher CO2 emissions (and actually new conventional back-up capacity as well) – factors which wind advocates rarely take into account.  Indeed they often talk in terms of rated capacity and omit to mention that on-shore wind typically delivers only around a quarter of rated capacity.

Why France, and Philip Hollobone, are right on the Burka Ban

By Roger Helmer MEP.

Damian Green thinks a ban on the burka (burqa) would be “un-British”.  Maybe he should reflect that the burka itself is rather un-British to start with.

As an instinctive libertarian, I must admit that my first thought was to oppose any ban on the burka.  We want the government off our backs, not telling us what to wear.

But the libertarian argument works both ways.  There certainly are Muslim women who choose voluntarily to wear the burka, perhaps as an expression of identity, or of faith, or perhaps out of a misplaced sense of modesty.  On the other hand there is good evidence that many Muslim women wear the burka involuntarily, because of cultural, or religious, or peer pressure, or indeed because they are forced to do so by their husbands or other male relatives.  So a burka ban would be an imposition on the first group, but would liberate the second.

We already accept social or legal constraints on dress in many circumstances.  No one, I suspect, man or woman, would choose to enter a church, or a mosque, or indeed a court of law, stripped to the waist.  Even if some new religion emerged which held it to be a religious duty to go bare-chested, such people would not be welcome, or allowed, in churches.

I have often visited mosques and Hindu temples, and have been perfectly happy to take off my shoes.  I don’t see that as a restriction of my right to choose my own footwear.  It is merely a courtesy to my hosts.  Back in 1984, I visited the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, Ceylon.  I was wearing typical Englishman-Abroad baggy shorts, which I considered perfectly modest, but I was required to rent a sarong to wear over my shorts and bare calves before I was allowed to go in.  Again, I had no problem with that – indeed I rather admired the entrepreneurial spirit of local people who had parleyed Buddhist modesty into a nice little earner, renting sarongs to the tourists.

Roger Helmer MEP: Nick Clegg is not only wrong on the EU, but his caricature of the Conservative position is downright dishonest

By Roger Helmer MEP

As Nick Clegg’s star appears to rise, it is entirely right that other parties should draw attention to the damaging nature of Lib Dem policies.  We in the Conservative Party have pointed out that the Lib Dems supported the defunct EU Constitution; supported the Lisbon Treaty (which amounts to the EU Constitution Mark 2); support (and indeed claim credit for) the EU Arrest Warrant, which is denying some UK citizens the most basic legal rights; and even favour scrapping the Pound and having Britain join the failing euro project.  In fact the Lib Dems have a knee-jerk response to any EU proposal: Vote Yes.

And Nick Clegg’s answer to these accusations?  Shocking, even by the mendacious standards of the Lib-Dems.  He asks (and I quote from today’s Daily Telegraph):

“Do we really think we can pull up the drawbridge, and (that) ranting and raving from the sidelines is really going to help us be stronger and safer?”

Who are these people who want to “pull up the drawbridge and rant and rave from the sidelines”?  There may be a few in some fringe parties, but none that I have met in the Conservative Party.  We are a Party of free trade, and not given to pulling up drawbridges.  We would like to see global free trade, but failing that, free trade across Europe is a good start (although many of us regret that the EU is, of course, not a free trade area but a customs union).  We are an internationalist Party (although unlike the Lib Dems, we recognise that there is a world beyond Brussels).  So we are strongly in favour of international cooperation, both with EU countries and with non-EU countries, in dealing with all the issues that cross borders, like crime, terrorism, trade, pollution and so on.

So where are our differences with Clegg?  Simply that while we want trade and co-operation, we also want to participate as a free, independent and democratic nation, not as an off-shore province in a quasi-country called Europe, which is neither democratic nor accountable.  The EU has a malign momentum of its own, and (as we have seen in referendum after referendum) it treats the will of the people with utter contempt.  Even Clegg admits, with masterful understatement, that the EU “is not a model of democratic efficiency”.

The implicit falsehood in the Lib Dem position is the assumption, absurd when you spell it out, that we can only achieve trade and co-operation if we sacrifice independence and democracy.

And Clegg knows this.  During the time when we both sat in the European parliament representing the East Midlands (1999-2004), I several times debated against him.  I vividly recall him remarking to me (he now conveniently insists that he has no recollection of the statement, but I remember it very clearly):

“When I first heard your views on Europe, Roger, I thought you were mad.  But now that I’ve heard you argue your case, I can see that you have an intellectually defensible position, even though I disagree with it”. 

So he knows that no-one in the Conservative Party wants to “Pull up the drawbridge and rant and rave”.  And his deliberate use of this mendacious caricature is downright dishonest.

Debt relief can do more harm than good

By Roger Helmer MEP.

Labour's attempts to promote debt relief for poor countries appear superficially admirable.  In reality, the Private Member's Bill sponsored by Labour MP Andrew Gwynne, which has reached committee stage in the House of Commons (March 9) is one-sided and ill-informed, and will serve only to limit developing countries' access to secondary capital markets, isolating them from future prospects of public and private lending.  It is beset with perverse incentives and unintended consequences.

Susceptible to the charms of celebrities like Jason Donovan, the British public is deceived about the probable outcomes of this legislation. The only way to alleviate poverty and spur growth in the developing world is (God forbid!) to let free markets flourish.  Gwynne's Bill forces investors to comply with arbitrary levels of debt forgiveness and denies creditors access to due process to recover reasonable levels of debt from sovereigns with the ability to pay.  More importantly, the Bill potentially encourages corruption in the developing world by allowing debt relief for kleptocrats who have continuously looted such loans from their citizens.  Does Labour want the UK to become a safe haven for the attachable assets of corrupt governments? Or is it a jurisdiction where contracts are respected?

Unilateral and arbitrary debt relief rewards the profligate and punishes the prudent.  It creates moral hazard.  It cuts off the recipients from future access to funds -- and may thus increase the demand for foreign aid from the British tax-payer.

As Conservative MP Christopher Chope (Christchurch) observed in the Commons debate on the Bill:

“My heart goes out to the people of heavily indebted poor countries. They are heavily indebted because, for the most part, their leaders have been corrupt. We need only take a look at the leaders of Liberia and other countries. Many of them have substantial funds in, for instance, Swiss bank accounts. For such countries that are essentially corrupt, we seem, in effect, to be saying that we should indulge that corruption by writing off these debts, even when they have been incurred as a result of commercial transactions.”

Private Members Bills are usually a flash in the pan – an opportunity to score points with constituents or against the opposition. However, the Gwynne Bill, backed by the government and an emotive public campaign by Jubilee Debt, has the potential to become British law, and British taxpayers will pick up the costs for the developing world’s continued reliance on aid.

Thanks for the coal, WWF

By Roger Helmer MEP.

The World Wildlife Fund has just sent me a piece of coal.  It's a rather small piece of coal, in a little translucent paper sachet, and it's fixed to a card with a message.  The card is cleverly printed to look as if it's carrying dirty, sooty fingerprints, although in fact it's ink.  The message is simple, and short enough to quote:

"Today more than sixty new coal-fired power plants are being built or planned across Europe.  These investments push our climate goals out of reach.  What will you do?  Introduce CO2 standards for new power plants in the Industrial Emissions Directive.  Get dirty coal under control!"

Maybe they didn't know, or didn't care, that China is building a new coal-fired power station every week, with India not far behind.  We hear a lot about China's green technology developments.  Those Chinese know a good marketing opportunity when they see one -- and they know how to exploit Western angst and Western subsidies, under the UN's Clean Development Mechanism.  But they also know that economic growth requires electricity.  Lots of it.  And they know that the only way to guarantee reliable baseload generating capacity is with mainstream technologies like coal and nuclear.

What the Chinese are doing makes eminent good sense in economic terms.  And given the current collapse of the Great Carbon Myth, following the IPCC and CRU revelations, it makes pretty good sense in environmental terms too.

Al Gore and his followers are losing the climate change debate

A new BBC poll (Feb 5th) shows a rapid increase in climate scepticism.  A Times poll in November 2009 showed that 59% of respondents did not believe in man-made global warming.  This has now risen to 74%.  Only a quarter of voters are true believers.
 
We know that the sun is the major driver of the earth's climate.  Solar irradiance is modulated, for us, by cloud cover, albedo, cosmic ray flux in the upper atmosphere and a host of other factors.  Global climate change is driven by astronomical cycles like the Milankovich cycles, and terrestrial cycles like the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
 
Yet along comes Al Gore, like the detective in some Agatha Christie novel, saying "It's the Butler!".  In Al Gore's case, he chooses to finger a single trace gas in the atmosphere.  CO2 makes up less that 0.04% of our atmosphere, and while it is indeed a greenhouse gas, it's not even the most important one -- that's water vapour.  Frankly, to approach a complex and only partially-understood multi-factorial problem like climate, and to pick on CO2 as the only important factor, is little short of lunacy.  Yet the world, the media and the political establishment have been trapped in this lunacy for a decade.
 

Roger Helmer MEP: EU lies and Lib Dem spin

By Roger Helmer MEP

With the wretched Lisbon Treaty coming into force this month, we had a briefing on its implications today in the European Conservatives Group in Brussels.  This included, inter alia, a briefing from my good colleague Ashley Fox, who represents South West England, on relations with national parliaments.

Apologists for the Lisbon Treaty, like the Lib Dem MEP Andrew Duff (Eastern England), like to claim that Lisbon enhances the powers of national parliaments.  Duff is a pleasant enough chap, and I hesitate to accuse him of the mendacious deceitfulness which characterises his party.  But he must know that this claim is nonsense.  Let's consider the process.

Lisbon gives national parliaments certain rights to be informed of EU decisions (as if they could not be so informed).  It then offers the right for a third of national parliaments, acting together, to express their reservations to the Commission if they feel that a Commission proposal compromises subsidiarity (a right they presumably had anyway, with or without Lisbon).  This is the so-called "Yellow Card".   The Commission has to consider this objection but can proceed with its proposal if it doesn´t consider it is justified.

Should the Commission ignore the "yellow card" then a simple majority of national parliaments (currently fourteen) can raise a second objection to the Commission.  This is the so-called "Orange Card".  And this requires action: the Commission must then refer the objection to the Council and the European parliament for a resolution.

So how will this work in practice?  For a start, there is no trans-national mechanism for co-operation between national parliaments, so it is difficult to envisage the Yellow/Orange Card procedure being invoked at all.  And if it is invoked?  The Yellow Card is a paper tiger.  It has no teeth: the Commission can ignore it.   And the Orange Card?  Given that the Council consists of national governments, who broadly control their national parliaments, and given further that the European parliament always favours more, and more rapid, EU integration, it is extraordinarily improbable that the Council and parliament together would act to block a Commission proposal and to support a demand for subsidiarity.

So the procedure is likely to have no effect at all, even if invoked, which is unlikely in the first place.  Why, therefore is the procedure in the Treaty at all?  It is merely window dressing and spin.  It is there simply so that people like Andrew Duff can talk about "increased powers for national parliaments", knowing those "powers" to be so circumscribed as to be meaningless.

Needless to say, there is no Red Card.

Philip Blond fails the Thatcher test

By Roger Helmer MEP.

Two stories in yesterday's news (Nov 27th) caught my eye.  First, someone called Phillip Blond (sic), and described as a "Tory Guru", has come up with a series of way-out policy proposals.  He is said to have the ear of David Cameron (though an un-named front-bencher was reported as saying "I've no idea what he thinks and I couldn't care less.  He'll be gone in three months and someone else will be in fashion").  Mr. Blond (sic) is described as a "Red Tory", and runs a new think-tank called ResPublica.

So what gems of wisdom is the Red Tory offering us?  He challenges the "neo-liberal account" of free markets, saying that Margaret Thatcher's 1980s reforms had "failed to produce the right results".  This will come as a surprise to most Conservatives.  He says we should "Break up the big-box retailers" -- he seems to be thinking of the big supermarket groups -- and return to the idea of taxing supermarket car-parks.

The Party floated the idea of taxes or charges for supermarket car parks a couple of years ago, and met such a firestorm of protest that it backed off pretty smartish.  Now Mr. Blond (sic) wants to start the same hare running again.

He should pause and reflect that supermarket groups have achieved success because we, the consumers, choose to shop there.  We find an enormous range of choice, that would have bewildered our grandmothers.  We find ease and convenience.  And we find highly competitive pricing (though prices would be even lower if we could get out from under the EU's Common Agricultural Policy).  Of course there are risks with supermarket dominance, but that is what the planning process is there to control, to give local authorities and local voters a say in development.  As localists, we Conservatives should be giving more say to local people, but we should not presume to have the right to go to successful businesses and to "break them up".

Stern Warning to go Vegetarian (but first eat the dog)

By Roger Helmer MEP.

Lord Stern, the pin-up economist of the climate hysteria movement, and author of of the Stern Report on the costs of global warming, has delivered himself of a new gem.  He predicts that "eating meat could become as socially unacceptable as drink-driving".

Livestock farming has come under fire in recent years from environmental campaigners because methane from cattle and pigs is a significant source of greenhouse gases.  They seem to have forgotten that when humans first reached North America the plains were black with buffalo, and the savannahs of Africa with Wildebeest.  This is called life, and the earth has been quite good at sustaining it for many hundreds of millions of years.  They have also forgotten (if they ever knew) that compared to geological history, today's atmosphere is impoverished in terms of CO2, levels of which have been up to ten times higher than today's.  And in those CO2-rich days, did we observe a "tipping-point", with "run-away global warming"?  We did not.  In fact we had the greatest ice-age in geological history.

Roger Helmer MEP: Sustainable Energy - without the hot air

By Roger Helmer MEP.

David MacKay is a Professor at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge.  He is an expert on renewable energy, and has just published a book with the above title (find it at www.withouthotair.com).  His opinions on renewables in general, and wind power in particular, are doubly interesting, as he has just been appointed as Chief Scientific Adviser to the Minister for Energy and Climate Change, Ed Miliband.

Professor MacKay struggles very hard to be balanced and even-handed, but it is impossible to read his chapters on wind power without concluding that he has very serious doubts about the technology -- and therefore, presumably, about this government's "Dash for Wind".  Forgive me, by the way, for returning obsessively to the subject of wind energy, but I believe it poses a huge threat to the British economy, firstly because British wind power will be hopelessly uncompetitive --two to three times as expensive as French nuclear power -- and secondly because the government's plans are simply undeliverable, and we are threatened with a capacity short-fall in a few years' time which will leave us liable to power cuts, rolling blackouts and the three-day-week.

The good Professor debunks a lot of the glib claims of campaigners.  "Offshore wind could power all UK homes", they cry.  Yes, replies MacKay, but homes represent only 4% of British energy demand.

He asks how much power we could plausibly generate from on-shore wind, and bases his calculation on 10% of the UK land area.  This figure, when you think about it, is enormous, and many might think it not plausible at all.  At that rate, wind might provide 20 KWh per person per day.  That's about half the energy used to drive an average fossil-fuel car thirty miles a day.  And to do this, we should require 50 times the entire wind turbine fleet of Denmark -- one of the most wind-intensive countries in Europe.

Edward McMillan Scott: A delicate flower

By Roger Helmer MEP.

EMS, the (former) Conservative MEP, has just been expelled from the Party, for failing to fulfil the solemn commitment he gave in writing before the June 2009 election regarding the formation of a new group in the European parliament.  Urbane and occasionally charming, EMS has always been a committed Europhile, and determined to keep British Conservative MEPs within the uber-federalist EPP group, so as to render the Party's opposition to EU integration ineffective, at least in Brussels.

I well remember our initial delegation meeting after I was first elected in 1999.  EMS was the Leader of our delegation at that time.  William Hague had just announced a new deal with the EPP, under which we should remain members, but at arm's length -- the new arrangement was described as "merely an administrative umbrella" -- and we should be free to pursue our own agenda in opposition to the Brussels establishment.  Or so I thought.  At that first meeting, EMS said with evident relief that we had seen off the threat to our relationship with the EPP, and we could continue as before.  I was deeply shocked, and angry, and said so in no uncertain terms, calling down on my head the displeasure of some other members, including notably Bill Newton Dunn, who chose to defect to the Lib-Dems a year later, but was also of the EMS/Europhile persuasion.

The altercation that followed set the tone for delegation meetings for a decade, and I sometimes despaired of ever getting out from under the EPP, and of ever working with like-minded Conservatives from other countries to oppose the federalist agenda.  But then came David Cameron, elected to the leadership of the Party on a promise to take us out of the EPP and to form a new group.  It took longer to deliver that promise than some of us hoped or expected, but none-the-less we finally succeeded in forming the group of the European Conservatives, after the 2009 election, and all our 25 Conservative MEPs were committed to joining it.

Roger Helmer MEP: How come Gordon Brown can apologise for the treatment of a gay man in the 1950s, but yet not for the state of the British economy?

By Roger Helmer MEP

To bowdlerise a well-known phrase, Gordon Brown is an apologetic man with much to apologise about.  And now he has decided to issue a "personal apology" for the treatment of mathematician Alan Turing in 1952.

Alan Turing was an amazing intellect.  He did groundbreaking work on artificial intelligence.  He created the conceptual framework for modern computing.  His work at Bletchley Park during the Second World War made an extraordinary contribution to victory, by unravelling German codes.

He was also a homosexual, at a time when homosexuality was a criminal offence in Britain.  In 1952, he was prosecuted for homosexuality, and convicted, and, apparently, "chemically castrated".  In despair, he killed himself with cyanide (though there were suspicions of foul play).

To us in the 21st century, it is almost inconceivable that anyone, least of all a war hero, should be prosecuted, shamed and cruelly punished simply for being homosexual.  It is something which all decent people will surely regret, and see as a grave injustice.  We should be glad that we live in more tolerant and liberal times.

But I still have a problem with the need felt by politicians to apologise for deeds that were done while they were still in nappies, or before, and for which they clearly bear no personal responsibility.  We regret the persecution of homosexuals.  We regret eugenics.  Going further back, we regret the slave trade.  We regret the Roman practice of sacrificing early Christians to the lions in the arena.  But for those who played no part in these abuses to affect to apologise for them is merely mawkish and self-indulgent.  And for the distant descendants of ancient victims to claim compensation on behalf of their ancestors, as is now the case with the slave trade, is preposterous.

Gordon Brown has plenty of things to apologise for where he is genuinely responsible, where he carries a heavy burden of responsibility for the damage he has done to Britain and the British economy.  Let him start to make reparations for those things, rather than offer spurious apologies for things he never did.

Preventing violent extremism

The TaxPayers' Alliance has today released a new report on the Prevent strategy, particularly grants from local authorities to community groups.  Our report presents the full data showing how much each group has received for each project in each of the three years Prevent has been in operation.

Paul Goodman MP has, for some time, been fighting in the Commons to get this kind of information.  The Department has only given him the amount of funding provided to each council and then a list of the groups the council has funded.  They have also stalled on releasing the data for 2008-09.  Freedom of Information requests to the Department get the same response, a list of councils and the amount of funding they have received.  All this suggests that either the Department doesn't have information on the amount each group has received or it is ignoring its duty to respond fully under the Freedom of Information Act.

It clearly isn't acceptable for there to be so little information on the extent of funding to different groups under Prevent, so we sent Freedom of Information requests to every single council and challenged those who refused to provide the information.  That way, we managed to get a full and detailed account of what has happened to the £12 million spent on grants under Prevent that the Department couldn't, or wouldn't, provide.

That detail has been invaluable in better understanding how the scheme has operated.  Now we know, for example, that affiliates of the Muslim Council of Britain have received around £850,000.  Also, some misleading statements from Ministers can now be corrected.  The Cohesion Minister told the Commons:

“We are aware that Tower Hamlets council terminated the funding agreement they had in place with Cordoba Foundation for 2007-08.”

I think most people would take that to mean that the Cordoba Foundation received no funding in 2007-08.  In fact, Tower Hamlets council have told us that only £4,000 was withdrawn and they still received £34,000 that year.

In light of all this, it is our view that the scheme should be scrapped.  Given the difficulty central Government has had in finding reliable partners, we can't expect councils to really be able to control who their grants support.  Taxpayers' money can't wind up in the hands of radicals.

There will definitely be plenty more to discover in the data set that our research has produced.  It will take time and the right expertise to get the full picture.  Hopefully, with transparency the debate about Prevent can really begin.  The full report is available on our website.

Why Norman Tebbit is wrong (for once)

By Roger Helmer MEP.

I yield to no one in my respect for Lord Tebbit.  In the Tory pantheon, I place him just a little behind Margaret Thatcher.  I was hugely grateful some years back when he wrote a foreword for my first book, "Straight Talking on Europe".

So I was particularly disappointed when he issued his recent advice to voters that they should show their disgust at the Westminster expenses scandal by eschewing the major parties in the up-coming euro-elections, and vote for minor parties instead.  He was careful to exclude the odious BNP, but many commentators thought that he stopped just short of endorsing UKIP.

Let me declare an interest: as an MEP, I was naturally disappointed that he should ask Conservative voters to take out their justified anger on euro-MPs, when their concern was mainly with Westminster MPs.  It seems an affront to natural justice that we should carry the can, particularly as Conservative MEPs went through a detailed and rigorous process, only a few months ago, of creating the most thorough and transparent declaration of expenses ever seen in the European parliament.  It is all there on our web-site.  I feel that we (and David Cameron, who drove the process) deserve at least half a cheer for that, rather than a call to boycott the Party on June 4th.

But leaving aside an MEP's special pleading, it seems a bit curious that voters should be asked to show their anger at the Westminster scandal by voting for a party whose record is no better and arguably worse.  In 2004, UKIP astonished the political establishment by gaining a remarkable 12 MEPs out of the UK's 78.  What has happened since?  No fewer than four -- fully a third of them -- have left UKIP, or been expelled.  Ashley Mote went to jail for fraud (I understand he is planning to appeal).  Tom Wise is facing charges of fraud in relation to his parliamentary staff expenses, and may receive a custodial sentence.  Robert Kilroy Silk (elected in my own East Midlands region) sought the leadership of UKIP, failed, left in a huff, created a new party, "Veritas", which crashed and burned, and has now retreated to his villa in Spain, while still claiming his salary and expenses.  He is seen rarely in Strasbourg, and apparently not at all in the region he is paid to represent.  Occasionally he comes out of the woodwork to table hundreds of Written Questions (some of them highly eccentric) to the Commission.

Christopher Beazley and Caroline Jackson are wrong about the EPP

By Roger Helmer MEP.

Shortly after I was first elected in 1999, a Conservative Press Release announced that British Tory MEPs would have a new arm's-length relationship with the EPP -- "merely an administrative umbrella" -- and would have full independence.  I rejoiced, thinking in my innocence that the vexed EPP question had been resolved.  Then I arrived in Brussels to find that it was business as usual.  Nothing had changed.  My first lesson in politics: announcements in press releases may be less than they are cracked up to be.

So my ten years as an MEP have been dominated by this issue of the Tories sitting in a passionately federalist group.  Four years ago I was expelled from the EPP and lost the Conservative whip for a while -- I now have the whip back, though I remain outside the EPP.  A year ago, Dan Hannan was also expelled from the EPP in very similar circumstances, though the Conservative delegation, perhaps chastened over my own experience, refrained from withdrawing the whip from Dan.  It was Dan's status as a Non-Inscrit member that allowed him to make that magnificent speech on Tuesday attacking Gordon Brown to his face -- the only Conservative to speak in that debate.

Then David Cameron was elected Leader on a commitment to take us out of the EPP.  That started out as an immediate commitment, which then became "months not years", and finally became years.

Now, however, the die is cast.  A couple of weeks ago William Hague formally advised the EPP that we would be leaving in June, and our plans to form a new group are well advanced.  And the predictable backlash from the uber-euro-quislings has begun.  Caroline Jackson (SW), retiring this year, launched a sad but vitriolic attack, saying: "It is a serious mistake and will leave the UK even more semi-detached from the rest of Europe. The danger is that it will leave both the Tories and Britain isolated in Europe and the decision is simply not in the interests of either our party or the country".  Of course Caroline's MP husband defected from Conservative to Labour a while ago.  Caroline says (indecisively) that she is "minded to leave the Party", and will presumably join her husband on the wrong side of the tracks.  No quips about rats joining sinking ships, please.