They Blog For You

              The government has a target to cut the administrative overhead by 30% over the life of this Parliament. This is a demanding target, but one that can be hit. It will be easiest to do so, if full use is made of people leaving public service to retire or [...]

Angela Merkel rightly called Fukushima “a turning point for the world”.   It is.   This was no glitch in an unsophisticated backwater of a State that could be explained away by poor design or low operating standards; this happened in one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world with [...]

  Mayor Boris appears to be getting his way in wiping Brian Haw's peace protest from the face of Parliament Square. He has been there for ten years.  On many winter nights I have admired his fortitude as I went home to a warm bed while he continued his protest regardless [...]

   Where are the consoling voices of Friday?  It was ‘nuclear expert’ Malcolm Grimsom who cooed that nuclear safety was proved because only one reactor had problems in Japan. The following day he said that the first explosion may have been a good thing in some ways. Today the Army tried to dump water [...]

                  Mr Huhne has brought out a publication entitled  “Carbon Plan”. In it he says: “Climate change is one of the greatest threats to both UK and global security and prosperity…..without action to curb emissions there is a very high risk of global warming well beyond 2 degress relative to pre-industrial [...]

              As someone who has urged the use of natural wastage to control staff numbers and costs in government departments, I have just asked a series of questions to see how Ministers are getting on.            One of the first to come through are the figures from the Department of Energy and [...]

Delyn MP David Hanson is urging his constituents today to save money on their household gas and...

Delyn MP David Hanson is urging his constituents today to save money on their household gas and electricity bills and reduce their carbon emissions by taking up the energy efficiency measures that energy companies in the UK offer. Following an agreement with the government in September 2008, the major energy [...]

There are many other disturbing issues about PC Mark Kennedy’s 10-year under-cover rampage against environmental activists than whether he slept with a number of female participants to gain information.   Perhaps the most obvious one, which seems to have gone unremarked on so far, is how it is justified for the police, given the pressure on resources [...]

After yesterday’s champagne-popping as the FTSE-100 rolled past the 6,000 mark, share prices surged, and the Tory press hailed the New Year as the turning point of recovery, comes the cold truth of the next day’s dawn.   There is a very real risk that a febrile recovery in the UK-US [...]

letter from Dame Lucy Doolittle to all departments Dear Colleague,             I am writing to urge all departments to stress in all their output the importance of tackling climate change vigorously. I have been disappointed to see the lacklustre response of some in the media and amongst the commentariat to the bold [...]

Cancun never came near to doing what is necessary to ensure that the human race can survive on Earth.   After two summit failures and with the Kyoto Protocol becoming defunct in 2012, can anything be done to obviate Earth’s 6th mass extinction?    The brutal truth is that the rich-poor North-South [...]

             As a campaigner  for deregulation I have continued to take an interest in what the government proposes. Chosen sensibly, getting rid of rules and regulations can give business an effective tax cut at no cost to Treasury. Even better, it can also result in savings for government itself.             The Coalition [...]

I’m grateful to everyone who took the trouble to contact me about the difficult issue of fees. I’ve thought long and hard about it, as you might imagine. I’ve had to consider two key things – the content of the policy and the things we said before the [...]

The climate change deniers, the jeremiahs, the vultures are already gathering over the Cancun summit in Mexico.   It’s doomed, they say, because Copenhagen failed a year ago, there’s a loss of momentum, and the exposure of the University of East Anglia emails has knocked the stuffing out of the Kyoto [...]

Do read this hilarious article, published in the Independent ten years ago. It quotes a scientist from my old university, University of East Anglia, warning that snow could disappear from our lives, thanks to global warming. "Children just aren't going to know what snow is" warned the expert. "Sledges, snowmen, [...]

Thank you very much for that incredibly kind introduction and I suppose I should say to you welcome to the frozen south. Who says there is a North South divide when it comes to the weather? Thank you all for braving the elements to come here today. Congratulations to Peter [...]

Before the election Cameron was anxious to convince environmentalists and a sceptical public that he hed a different Tory party with good green credentials.   He did this in two ways.   He caught the plane to Svalbard in the Arctic Circle to appear in a photo-shoot on a dog-sleigh.   He also [...]

This week, I met the Shell UK expert helping China with low carbon solutions to its infrastructure challenges and I was also particularly cheered to hear of the news that at the GLOBE forum chaired by Lord Deben held in Tianjin last week, China announced plans to introduce comprehensive climate [...]

  Evidence pours in by the day on the mounting evidence of the subsidies being shelled out for the nuclear lobby. Nuclera power has never been profitable and the nuclear waste headache is for life. Will future generations judge us as the stupid generation for neglecting the immense clean power of the [...]

  I traipsed up to London to tell the coalition's energy spokesman what I thought of him. He was loud in his condemnation of the wasteful subsidies  to nuclear power./ Now Chris Huhne has fallen in love with the nuclear mirage. Even though the new policy to embrace nukes and dump renewables [...]