Roger Helmer MEP

I was interviewed today (4th May) on the East Midlands part of The Politics Show.

You can access the video of the show here. My bit is 53 minutes 50 seconds in.

However you can access a podcast of what I had to say by clicking this link

The High Court has just decided that a petitioner, Stuart Wheeler, can pursue a judicial review of the government’s decision not to hold a referendum on the Renamed European Constitution, or Lisbon Treaty.
 
Stuart Wheeler, former owner of the spread betting business IG index and a major donor to the Conservative Party, took a case to the High Court on April 22nd, arguing that the government’s breach of its Manifesto Commitment to a referendum had denied him and other electors their “reasonable expectation”, and should therefore be subject to Judicial Review.  Mr. Justice Owen reserved judgement in the case, but at 10:00 a.m. on May 2nd he delivered his judgement.  He agreed with the plaintiff and authorised a Judicial Review.  The government will now have to justify breaking its word, in open court.
 
This is a triumph for common sense and good governance.  It was outrageous that the government should renege on a manifesto promise, and I am delighted they are to be called to account.
 
The expectation is that at least the judicial review process will delay the UK’s ratification of the Treaty.  It is possible that the outcome of the Review could be a requirement that the government make good its commitment to a referendum.  Repeated opinion polls, and other tests of opinion including village polls and a large-scale postal ballot in the East Midlands (in Gedling, Notts), suggest that 80%+ of electors favour a referendum, and that the great majority oppose the EU Treaty.  The decision regarding a Judicial Review in the UK could also influence the Irish referendum on the Treaty, expected in June.

Roger addresses the Youth Wing of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Brussels in April.  This is an Austrian libertarian think-tank that promotes liberty and free markets.  The meeting took place in the congenial premises of the European Beer Association.  He apologises for the flag, which was placed by the organisers.

A Cool Look at Global Warming

Nigel (Lord) Lawson, a former very distinguished Chancellor of the Exchequer (and also former MP for my own constituency of Blaby/South Leics), has written a splendid new book on climate.  He held a launch and book-signing event in Leicester in April.  He is also, by the way, a top-class economist.
 
The book is engagingly — compellingly — readable, whilst remaining reassuringly rigorous.  A short book that you can read in an afternoon, its footnotes and references will be an invaluable resource for everyone involved in the debate.
 
In his first chapter he forensically dissects the science.  The patterns of warming, both spatially and over time, wholly fail to match the computer models on which the alarmist hypothesis is based.  Sea levels are rising no faster than they have for millennia.  Global ice mass is more or less constant.  Far from facing extinction, polar bears are doing rather well.  Current average temperatures are well within the historical range of variation.  The incidence of “extreme weather events” has not increased.  The infamous “hockey-stick curve”, once at the heart of the IPCC/alarmist case, has been comprehensively debunked.
 
But in the rest of the book, he says (in effect): OK, even if you accept the alarmist scenario, what is the best thing to do about it?  He concludes that current efforts at mitigation (that is, at reducing carbon emissions in order to prevent further warming) are doomed to failure, and will be cripplingly expensive.  And in any case, even if you take the very worst IPCC/Stern projections, the estimated costs of doing nothing would mean that our descendants in 100 years would be “only” 2.6 times as well off as we are today, rather than 2.7 times (if we could stop the projected warming).  He rightly questions whether it is worth vast expenditure on an uncertain and hypothetical project to make so small a difference.
 
He effectively dismantles the case for the emissions trading schemes beloved by politicians, the “cap’n'trade” approach, which is not a genuine market, and, like carbon off-setting, is wide open to scams and abuse.
 
He argues that humans can adapt to many different climates, and that if temperatures do rise, we would do better to respond by practical efforts to adapt to change, rather than by doomed and hubristic attempts to change the weather.
 
This is a must-read book.  ISBN 978-0-7156-3786-9.  Duckworth Overlook.  £9.99.

Click here for our St George’s Day message!

EU plans call for the UK to increase its use of renewables in the energy mix from the current 5% to 15% by 2020.  An independent British government commissioned report for BERR, the Department of Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, shows that these plans will cost between €5 and 6 billion annually.  On a per household basis, this could increase the average energy bill for every household in Britain by £160 a year — and that’s on top of increases driven by mainstream energy prices.
 
And in any case, many of the renewables initiatives are set to do more harm than good.
 
There is increasing evidence that biofuels save little CO2, but they are driving up world food prices, and putting huge new pressure on rainforests and natural habitats, threatening species with extinction.  Wind farms provide limited benefit, especially when placed in peaty heath-land environments.  Many of Britain’s new wind-farm development proposals, especially in Scotland, are on soils of this type, where the disturbance of ancient peat deposits for foundations, roads and other infrastructure can release more CO2 than the turbines would save in their lifetimes.
 
There is no point in agonising over fuel poverty, then agreeing plans which will hugely add to energy costs — especially when those plans will fail to deliver the CO2 reductions envisaged.  This is a typical example of EU integration allowing bureaucrats to make mistakes on an heroic scale.
 
Note:
 
POYRY REPORT:  Poyry is a well-reputed energy research and consultancy company, commissioned by the British government (BERR) to do the cost analysis, which despite their insistence on confidentiality has somehow emerged on the BERR website at http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file45238.pdf

The following piece was written by my good friend and colleague Dan Hannan MEP, and I was so impressed with it that (with his permission) I decided to post it here.

Key Quote: “Where the US constitution is chiefly about the rights of the individual, the European one is chiefly about the power of the state”.

1. The European Constitution / Lisbon Treaty will strengthen the EU’s common foreign policy.
Is this in the interests of the United States? In recent years the EU has:
· Declared its intention to sell arms to Beijing
· Pursued a policy of “constructive engagement” towards the ayatollahs in Teheran
· Withdrawn its recognition from the anti-Castro dissidents in Cuba
· Continued to funnel money to Hamas-controlled territory through intermediaries and NGOs, so as to stay within the letter of its own law on financing terrorist organisations
There is a reason why the EU and the US take different positions on these and other issues. In all these cases, the US favours democracy, the EU stability.

2. The European Constitution was rejected at the ballot box
There is a reason that the EU tends to be more accommodating towards authoritarian regimes than the US. Its leaders are often lukewarm about democracy — or “populism” as they call it, when it produces results they don’t like. The European Constitution was voted down overwhelmingly in two referendums in 2005: by 55 per cent of French voters and 62 per cent of Dutch voters. Instead of accepting the result, EU leaders simply pushed ahead with ratifying the same document, making what Angela Merkel referred to in a leaked memo as “the necessary presentational changes” and altering its name to “Lisbon Treaty”. All EU leaders accept that the two documents are essentially the same. The only one who denies it is Gordon Brown, because he doesn’t want to hold the referendum he promised at the last election.

3. It would be rejected again
Eight EU governments promised their peoples referendums on the treaty. Seven have reneged. Only Ireland, whose national constitution requires plebiscites on questions of constitutional change, is giving its people a vote. The reason the other referendums have been cancelled is simple: people would vote “No” again.

4. It’s a bad constitution
The United States Constitution contains 4,550 words in the original draft, 7,600 with all 27 amendments. The European Constitution/Lisbon Treaty has 76,250 words. Where the US constitution is chiefly about the rights of the individual, the European one is chiefly about the power of the state. Where the American concerns itself with delineating the powers of the various institutions, the European busies itself with interfering in every aspect of the everyday lives of our citizens.

5. International judicial activism
The EU is as much a construct of its judges as of its legislators. European integration has advanced through a series of contentious rulings by the European Court of Justice. These are now forming a corpus of international law which judges in every country, including the US, are recognising in their own precedents.

Today (April 9th) the Bureau of the European parliament will hear my appeal against the penalty imposed by the President, Hans-Gert Poettering MEP, as a consequence of our demonstration for a Referendum in Strasbourg in December. My appeal is based on two grounds: the events themselves, and the nature of the disciplinary procedure. The following text is taken directly from my appeal submission to the Bureau.

1 The events of Dec 12th

I dispute that the events that took place were “Exceptionally Serious” (Rule 147 para 1), or that they were “recurrent or permanent” (Rule 147 para 2). The events complained of could be regarded as a robust exchange of views. It is true that MEPs have the option of making their case for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty in the course of regular debates in the parliament, which I and many colleagues have done repeatedly. Yet we have had no proper response: the EU institutions continue in their determination to disregard the democratic will of the French and Dutch peoples, expressed in referenda in 2005, and to disregard the will of electorates in other nations, including the UK, which have been repeatedly demonstrated in opinion surveys and local polls. I consider that I have the right, and the duty, to press the strongly-held views of those I represent, until I get a response. We now have a response, in the form of this proposed penalty, which demonstrates that the parliament is unable to tolerate dissent, and disregards the democratic will of the people.

The disruption on Dec 12th was very largely the result of the over-reaction of the President of the parliament himself. I and the dozens of colleagues who demonstrated on the 12th had intended to mount a silent and dignified protest against the Lisbon Treaty, on the occasion of the formal signing of the Charter of Fundamental Rights. It was the decision of the President to instruct the Ushers (to their obvious embarrassment) to confiscate the banners and placards which led to the disturbance. In fact it is commonplace for members to display banners or placards in the parliament without this sort of provocative over-reaction. In January many members displayed placards calling for the release of Ingrid Betancourt in Columbia. On March 27th, I and other colleagues displayed the flag of Tibet, as a protest against Chinese policy in that country. In neither case was there any call for the removal of flags and posters, still less any attempt to confiscate them. The President’s behaviour on Dec 12th was exceptional and provocative, and led directly to the shouting and disturbance.

2 The disciplinary Procedure

The parliament’s disciplinary procedure is a travesty of due process, and provides prima facie grounds for a further appeal to the ECJ if this current appeal fails.

One man — the President of the Parliament — is witness, prosecutor, judge and jury. He is also (presumably) Chairman of the Appeals Committee — the Bureau of the parliament. This is wholly unacceptable. The President is also a deeply unreliable witness. One of the MEPs originally indicted, Andreas Molzer, was in fact in Frankfurt at the time in question, not in Strasbourg at all. It is clear, therefore, that the President’s evidence is not to be relied on. It seems he was proceeding on the basis of his personal prejudice against those he regards as troublemakers, and not on the basis of accurate observation.

The process is partial and discriminatory. On a conservative estimate, some sixty to eighty MEPs participated in the demonstration. But only thirteen (after the exclusion of Mr. Molzer) were indicted. One prominent participant, Nigel Farage, rose afterwards on a point of order to demand to know why he had been overlooked, and concluded his question (in a reference to a well-known cinema epic) with the words “I am Spartacus!”. It appears that ten members have received penalties, which range from a reprimand to a five-day fine. There appears to be no evidential basis either for the selection of those who were indicted, nor for the discriminatory nature of the penalties imposed.

1  Is the world getting warmer?  No.  It warmed a little from the mid 70s to 1998.  Since then global temperatures have been static or declining.  This is much more consistent with a cyclical trend than a straight line.
 
2  Is the warming down to human activity?  Almost certainly not.  The predictive climate models on which the global warming hysteria is based all show that most warming should take place in the high atmosphere, between 5 and 10 kms up.  But all the observations (both satellite and weather balloon) show that what warming there was, was most marked at the surface.  Meantime astronomical observations show warming on Mars (where the frozen CO2 ice-caps are shrinking), as well as on other planets and moons.  This is consistent with a solar cause, not a terrestrial cause.  Even the IPCC admits that the CO2 greenhouse effect is logarithmic — a law of diminishing returns.  At current levels of atmospheric CO2, even significant further increases in CO2 levels would have little effect on climate.
 
3  Will the current proposals to counter climate change have any effect on climate?  Any effect will be trivial.  Most experts agree that full implementation of Kyoto (which will not happen) would make only 0.2 degrees C difference to average global temperatures — and that not until the end of the century.  Talk of a “Tipping Point” is so much nonsense.  Changes to CO2 emissions would take decades to achieve, but reductions in consequent levels of atmospheric CO2 would take centuries.  (It’s rather like the way that changes in birth rates take decades to feed through into population figures).  For good or ill, we can’t make any significant difference.
 
4  What will the effect be on our economies?  Disastrous.  I’ve just seen credible estimates that the EU’s biofuels targets would cost €300 billion.  The Stern Report suggested that the costs of inaction exceeded the costs of mitigation.  But that assumes that mitigation would have some effect: it won’t.  And it uses the wrong discount rate.  OK, so it’s a bit technical, but the discount rate allows us to compare present costs with future benefits.  The costs of mitigation today will be vast.  The imagined benefits in fifty years time, properly discounted, are much less.  And the damage we do to our economy today will leave us less well-placed to develop alternative solutions and energy-efficient technologies.  We would do better to spend the money on alleviating poverty and providing health care and clean water in the third world, than on chasing unachievable climate targets.
 
Global warming is a politicians’ scam designed to centralise power and increase taxes.

There is a pattern emerging in policy-making in Britain.  We Conservatives propose a policy.  The Labour government ridicules and vilifies it.  They question our motives and our sanity.  Then, soon afterwards, they adopt essentially the same policy themselves, although often in a bowdlerised and vitiated version.  The most striking recent example was the issue of the Death Tax last October.
 
Now Alan Johnson emerges to tell us of his plan for “patient health budgets” which will enable patients to take the NHS funding available for their treatment, and to shop around in the public and private sectors for the best deal.  We Conservatives have been talking about this idea for a long time.  Call it a patient’s budget, call it health passports, call it education vouchers.  The only way to introduce market disciplines into public service provision is to make the citizen a customer, not merely in the rhetorical sense (doctors now seem to call patients “clients”), but in the real sense that they have money (or its equivalent) in their hands, and they spend it as they choose.
 
This year, Adam Smith would have been 285 years old, if he’d lived.  Yet many of us still don’t quite believe in his invisible hand. In our heads we know that free markets are the best and most efficient way to allocate resources, and to drive innovation and quality, but our hearts haven’t quite come to terms with it yet.  For many in the soft centre of British politics (including some Conservatives) vouchers are a step too far.  We are so accustomed to the state’s social security comfort blanket, to the Beveridge dispensation that has been in place for most of our lives, that we are reluctant to abandon it even when it has failed consistently for decades.  Education vouchers?  Patient passports?  Surely these are wild-eyed neo-con ideas espoused by free market ideologues, not the nostrums of practical men?
 
We still hear people (usually Lib-Dems) saying that they don’t want choice for the individual patient or pupil.  They want every hospital, every school to offer uniformly excellent service.  They haven’t grasped that that’s what we all want, and that consumer choice and patient power are the way to achieve it.
 
It is nonetheless an astonishing volte-face that this Labour government is coming up with such proposals.  At the next general Election, the choice will not be between left and right.  It will be between a Conservative Party wedded to market-based reforms because it understands them, which adopts them out of commitment, and a Labour Party that hates them, but holds its nose and adopts them out of desperation.

It’s unfashionable to quote Kipling, so I will.  I have recently acquired a rather nice Folio Society edition of Kipling’s selected verse. In his wonderful poem  “The Ballad of East and West” we find this splendid line: “So thou  must eat the White Queen’s meat, and all her foes are thine”.  That,  broadly speaking, is what we in Britain have said to the Gurkhas, and  they have eaten the White Queen’s meat, and fought in the White  Queen’s wars, for more decades than I care to remember.  They have  done so, broadly speaking, with courage, and discipline, and  determination, not least in the Falklands War, where the rumour of their coming and the threat of their kukris struck terror into the  hearts of the Argentines.
 
With little publicity, they continue to contribute honourably to today’s campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We used to let them go home on rather modest pensions.  Since 1997, we have  improved their pensions.  And we have allowed those who left the  service recently to settle in England.  But we deny those rights to  Gurkhas who left the service more than a decade ago. This is  shameful.  Surely those who fought in the British Army, in Britain’s  wars, deserve better, and the older ones perhaps have the greater claim on us.
 
We are prepared to let in every Tom Dick and Harry from around the world (including the legendary one-legged roof-tiler).  We have EU  citizens, economic migrants, illegals to whom we turn a blind eye, and “asylum seekers”, some with rather limited credibility.  We have  organised criminals and gangs and people-traffickers.  We let them all  come, in their hundreds of thousands.  Yet we fail to offer a place to  those small numbers of Gurkhas who have given their best years, and risked their lives, for us and for our country.  It will not do.
 
Both the Conservative Party, and The Freedom Association (which I have  the privilege to Chair), have criticised our government’s failure, in  a host of ways, to honour the Military Covenant (I published a prominent article on this in the March issue of Compass magazine). The Gurkha issue is a small part of the duty we owe to our soldiers,  but it is a key test of our commitment. We cannot ask them to fight for us, and then throw them out at the end of their careers. Those who have eaten the White Queen’s meat deserve better of us.

We’ve campaigned.  We’ve lobbied.  We’ve marched.  We’ve demonstrated (in December, you recall, I was fined £600 for demonstrating for a referendum in the Strasbourg parliament).  We’ve collected signatures on petitions.  We’ve printed leaflets.  There have been dozens of village referendums.  We’ve run “I Want a Referendum” postal ballots with stunning response rates, and 89% against the Treaty.  Yet still the wretched Treaty goes on, and while the House of Lords, or the Irish Referendum, or the Poles could still put a spoke in the wheel, I’m not holding my breath.
 
No wonder so many on our side of the debate are spitting with frustration.  We’ve won the arguments hands down, but the Treaty marches on like Frankenstein, impervious to attack.  We haven’t landed the killer blow.