eurealist.co.uk

Doing a bit of Surfing based on my own draft folder in which I put links that to posts and article and sites which grab my interest, I came across this letter on the Labour Movement for Europe Site

Written by an Administrator and subsequently locked to prevent any chance that someone might possibly inject a measure of inconvenient truth on the subject of the EU and the Regions, the letter is a lazy attempt to confine the claim that the EU is involved in the creations of the Regions to the Eumyth bin.

Over the last few years, there has been significant confusion surrounding the emergence of regions within the United Kingdom. You often read letters claiming that these regions are part of some sinister EU plot to wipe England off the map.

The reality is somewhat different.

The regions to have been developed by successive British governments, originating with the economic planning regions of the 1960s. They are entirely an internal matter for Britain.

The European Union merely recognises Britain ’s own internal structures, as it does for every member country.

Whether we have such regions or not, how we define their boundaries, whether they should have elected assemblies or not, and whether they should be used as police authority boundaries or not - all these are entirely matters for Britain to decide.

Anti-European campaigners want to conjure up an image of Brussels wanting to break up Britain, but the UK’s regions have nothing whatsoever to do the European Union. That is just another euromyth.

This is quite clearly a load of crap;

I culled this from Bryan Smalley`s The Regionalisation of Britain - a diary account http://www.regionalassemblies.co.uk/3239.html

1965 - The EU published its first Memo on Regionalisation confirming that it is EU Policy.

1972 – Heath took Britain into the EU (EEC) he arranged that money which was returned to us from Brussels should come via the regions

1973 - Regional Development Fund established. Heath instituted Local Government re-organisation with a view to moving local government towards regionalisation.

1986 - Single European Act was passed ‘Regionalisation became the central policy of the EU’.

1992 - The Treaty on European Union (the Maastricht Treaty) established the Committee of the regions with its Headquarters in Brussels.

1992 - The European Commission published a map - ‘The European Community - a Community with no internal frontiers’. The map showed Great Britain which included Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and nine other regions. There was no mention of England.

1995 - Following a review of the local government structure 46 Unitary authorities were established between 1995 and 1998. Evidence shown later in this paper proves that this was part of the regionalisation plan.

1997 - Labour Government took office. It quickly introduced devolution (i.e. Regionalisation) in Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales & London leaving 8 remaining regions in England

1998 - the Labour Government launched ‘the Democratic Renewable Debate’ and in the same year the Regional Development Agencies Act was passed allowing the establishment of Regional Development Agencies. RDAs co-ordinate Land use, Transport, Economic development, Agriculture, Energy & Waste. All RDAs have Brussels offices. Each region will ultimately have two sections of government: an elected assembly and a development agency.

1999 - Regional Assemblies were established - Members are ’stakeholders’ and councillors from local authorities. Representatives are appointed (i.e. not elected).

2001 - Committee of the Regions published its latest paper on Regionalisation entitled ‘Major Steps towards a Europe of the Regions and Cities in an Integrated Continent’.

2001- Government issued a Planning Green Paper. It removes County Councils from the planning process.

15th November 2001, the DTLR Minister Lord Falconer stated in the House of Lords that ‘three tiers of Government are too many’ and the government is ‘looking at county and district councils’

May 2002 the Government introduced its White Paper: ‘Your Region, Your Choice - Revitalising the English Regions’.

3rd Dec 2003. In answering a questions in House of Commons Nick Raynsford MP said: ‘Where an elected regional assembly is established, existing two tier local government will be restructured as unitary authorities. It is now quite clear that County and District/Borough Councils will be replaced with Unitary Authorities and Regions

Also in 2003 the District Auditor upheld complaints that the North East Assembly was misusing funds by paying for the publication of propaganda promoting an elected assembly. This breached the Local Government Act.

1965 First Commission Communication on Regional Policy. The Commission emphasised that its authority on regions came from the treaty of Rome and said every country must draw up regional economic policies.

In 1969 in a second more substantial statement, the Commission said that all economic and social policy had to be determined at the European level or the region but NOT by nation states…and I quote ‘if member states were to remain responsible for regional policy then development of the Community would be jeopardised’.

The EEC began to give grants on a regional basis ensuring that the member countries would have to change their systems of local government in order to receive the grants Brussels.

Article 198 of the Maastricht treaty (http://europa.eu.int/en/record/mt/title2.html) provided the basis of the EU’s regionalisation policy. It introduced the Committee of the Regions and specified how representatives from each region across the EU would sit on that committee.

it was by making funding region based that the EU forced John Major to set up the first regional bodies). Regulation 1260/1999 ‘Structural Funds’ ) details this process.

Direct control will come through Regulations aimed directly at the Regions. The EU parliamentary report illustrates how the EU will exercise direct control of the regions.

Regionalism - An alternative strategy for Europe?

For the European Union to continue seriously upon a path of ever closer integration, and the plans for a single currency are surely an integral element of that strategy, it must also have a long-term coherent plan for the development of relevant political structures. The policy of widening membership of the EU makes the necessity of closer political ties more desirable if we are to avoid political stagnation. What is required is an overall strategy for constitutional and political reforms that more accurately reflect the needs and wishes of its citizens. Short term national interests will by their nature, occasionally conflict with the long term advancement of the integration process in Europe. A gradual but deliberate reduction in the emphasis placed upon the political power and influence of Nation States will allow a more objective long-term strategy of wider European advancement to succeed.

A Tangled Web posts that 2005 data from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide “ice caps” near Mars’s south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row. So it would seem to add to the evidence that the long-term increase in solar irradiance is heating both Earth and Mars which of course rather undermines the human Co2 global warming scam.

Also this morning Tim Worstall links to a Guardian article by their Science editor Robin McKie who puts the boot into Channel 4 The Great Global Warming Swindle, which is described as a documentary which says claims that carbon emissions are causing global warming are ‘lies’ and that attempts to debate the subject are being suppressed.

In order to undermine any effect this program might have on the global warming debate and yes to close down the debate, McKie places the suggestion that the ICCP might have got it wrong, alongside other well known conspiracies. “Princess Diana was killed by Nazis; 9/11 was the work of the US government, while the manned lunar landings were hoaxes filmed in TV studios. To this list of internet-fuelled daftness, we can now add a new plot: that the world’s scientific community is not just wrong about global warming, but is collectively lying when it says industrial carbon dioxide emissions are heating up the planet”

Then misinterpreting as Tim Worstall points out the recent ICCP summary for policymakers as. “Given that the world’s climatologists have just published a careful, sober report showing global warming is real and worrying,” (The full report is still a couple of months away, currently being rewritten to make sure it accords with that summary.)

McKie says “the programme is an astonishing foray into the debate. Certainly, there many reasons to deride it. Its contents are largely untrue, for a start. That is Channel 4’s problem. Yet a couple of important points do emerge from this nonsense and we should not make the mistake of ignoring them.”

Before launching into a virulent Ad Hominem attack

“To back his case, director Martin Durkin interviews climate-change deniers including Phillip Stott, Piers Corbyn, Nigel Calder and Nigel Lawson who reveal their antipathy to the idea we are altering Earth’s weather systems.

These names are scarcely unknown. Listeners to Today and viewers of Newsnight have been hearing Stott and the rest promote their views for years. Indeed, they have dominated and distorted the whole global warming debate, a point stressed by Alan Thorpe, head of the Natural Environment Research Council. ‘These people are never off the radio or TV, yet now they claim debate is being suppressed? It is preposterous.’ So what, we might ask, is the deniers’ problem? Examine their movement and you see a common thread: most proponents are elderly, only a few are scientists and several have pronounced pro-market views. And hereby hangs a tale.”

Later in the article McKie tries a little bit of double think when he writes;

The problem is that denial - in all its ludicrous glory - makes it easy for us to gloss over genuine concerns about society’s right reaction to global warming and carbon emissions. And that is what is wrong with Durkin’s programme. It opts for dishonest rhetoric when a little effort could have produced an important contribution to a critical social problem.

Society’s right reaction is most likely reliant on the acceptance of real scientific proof and not on a political controlled UN summary of the state of scientific knowledge. More so when the last two summaries issued by the ICCP in 2001 and 1995 have both been comprehensively shown to be biased towards the human causes of global warming and the Mann Hockey stick graph on which the ICCP based its claims last time out, has been proved to be totally unreliable.

But the morsel which I found most instructive was Mckie`s attemt to justify himself against any suggestion of double standards, when he says

“I refuse to feel guilty because I have a family holiday in Spain and then write about the threatened glories of the Great Barrier Reef.” As “air travel accounts for only 2 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions”

If we are to accept this basis then why on earth should we in Britian feel guilty at all, as according to government figures in Britain humans contribute only 0.06% of total world output of Co2.

It also seems according to Eureferendum that the EU is doing its bit for global warming by claiming a bit of Hollywood glamour. Because the Oscar winning Al Gore documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” drew on some results produced by the EU-funded EPICA environmental project.

Christopher Booker informs readers of his Notebook in the Telegraph that “In terms of meeting the EU’s targets, the moment when waste disposal counts as “recycling” comes when it is collected and registered for that purpose.”

After that it can be and in many areas, often is simply dumped in landfill sites, there would of course have to be a payment of £21 per ton Landfill Tax to Gordon Brown but the councils will not be fined by Brussels.

Booker explains “The main reason why so much composted green waste now ends up in landfill is that, under last year’s Agricultural Waste Regulations, so much hassle and expense is involved in giving farmers an “exemption” allowing them to spread “waste” on their land. To obtain an exemption, the soil has to be tested, an agronomist must be called in, hefty fees have to be paid, until before long a large farmer may be having to pay tens of thousands of pounds just for spreading compost on his fields.

And who charges those fees and has set up this scheme, the cost of which makes the sensible use of compost so prohibitive that much of it now ends up in landfill? Why, none other than the Environment Agency: the body which is calling for “a united effort to beat the waste cheats”.