Last month, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that supermarkets will be given a year to end their reliance on "single use" plastic bags. After that they face a fine of 5p or more for each plastic bag they give to customers.

Further, in an effort to force retailers to "go green", if the shop charges customers for plastic bags they will be required to publish how they use the proceeds. This measure is designed to put public pressure on the retailers to use the money for environmental causes.

Brown, of course, is from the Labour Party which occupies the point to the left of what passes for the middle of the political spectrum outside of the US. In other words, he would be perfectly happy cozying up to the Pelosis and Nadars of the US.

Conservatives responded to Brown’s announcement by showcasing Labour’s hypocrisy: over the last 2 years the government has purchased almost 1.3 million plastic bags emblazoned with departmental logos at a cost of over 91 million pounds. Eric Pickles, shadow communities and local government secretary, said:

“While Gordon Brown lectures the public on the environment, his own ministers are fuelling Britain’s throw-away culture.”

But it actually much worse than mere hypocrisy. Please read on.

The campaign to "ban the bag" was recently fueled by photographs in the UK Daily Mail. One showed a sea turtle swimming along side some plastic bags which the article claims:

Cut to the haunting image of a sea turtle, thousands of miles away, struggling through the deep ocean waters as discarded plastic bags wrap themselves around its flippers and body.

The turtle hardly seems entangled, but such is the rhetoric associated with this campaign. Worse, a second photograph shows a turtle apparently eating a bag.

These majestic animals are dying in alarming numbers because they mistake the flimsy translucent bags – which could in theory come from British supermarkets – for jellyfish, a key element of their diet.

The article had more photos, and even more inflammatory rhetoric. In response, environmental groups and publicity-seeking celebrities have flocked to embrace the campaign.

But what is the truth behind these claims?

First, Brown has long called plastic bags "one of the most visible symbols of environmental waste." Yet UK’s DEFRA (Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs) website unequivocally contradicts this "fact" with real facts:

• Plastic bags account for approximately:
  • 0.1-1% of visible litter in the UK
  • 2% of total litter on UK beaches
  • 0.3% of the domestic waste stream
  • 3.5-5.3% of total plastic packaging used in the UK

Second is the "single use" component of the war on plastic retail bags. The aforementioned DEFRA site states that "80% of UK consumers currently re-use their plastic bags at least once for a variety of purposes – such as bin liners, nappy sacks or lunch bags." Confirming this is the experience in Ireland: when a tax was placed on plastic bags in Ireland there was a massive increase of 300 to 500% in the sale of plastic refuse bags and bin liners! Note that these bags are thicker and heavier than plastic retail bags (see the next point below) and therefor the "green footprint" is much heavier. [Note to politicians: ever hear of the law of unintended consequences?]

Third, there are a whole lot of reasons to continue using plastic bags at grocery stores, from reducing energy to fighting shoplifting. And did you know that today’s plastic bags use 70% less plastic than they did 20 years ago, yet are just as strong?

Fourth, the "science" used to support the fight against plastic is really the result of a a misrepresentation of a scientific study. That is, a boldfaced lie:

The central claim of campaigners is that the bags kill more than 100,000 marine mammals and one million seabirds every year. However, this figure is based on a misinterpretation of a 1987 Canadian study in Newfoundland, which found that, between 1981 and 1984, more than 100,000 marine mammals, including birds, were killed by discarded nets. The Canadian study did not mention plastic bags.

Fifteen years later in 2002, when the Australian Government commissioned a report into the effects of plastic bags, its authors misquoted the Newfoundland study, mistakenly attributing the deaths to “plastic bags”.

The figure was latched on to by conservationists as proof that the bags were killers. For four years the “typo” remained uncorrected. It was only in 2006 that the authors altered the report, replacing “plastic bags” with “plastic debris”. But they admitted: “The actual numbers of animals killed annually by plastic bag litter is nearly impossible to determine.”

In a postscript to the correction they admitted that the original Canadian study had referred to fishing tackle, not plastic debris, as the threat to the marine environment.

Regardless, the erroneous claim has become the keystone of a widening campaign to demonise plastic bags.

That’s right, there is no scientific evidence to support the outrageous claims of the granola-chomping, mantra-chanting, tree-sitting crowd (and a lot to discount it), yet the British government has embraced the plastic bag myth. As a result British taxpayer dollars pounds will be wasted and retail prices will rise, all for nothing.

Sounds a lot like the governmental embrace of global warming, doesn’t it?

A survey of 3,000 under-twenties Britians found that:

• 20 percent thought Sir Winston Churchill is a fictional character
• 47 percent believe that the 12th-century crusading English king Richard the Lionheart is fictional
• 27 percent thought Florence Nightingale, the pioneering nurse who coaxed injured soldiers back to health in the Crimean War, was a mythical figure
• 65 percent) believe that King Arthur existed and led a round table of knights at Camelot
• 58 percent believe that Sherlock Holmes was real, and actually lived at 221B Baker Street
• 51 percent believe that Robin Hood lived in Sherwood Forest, robbing the rich to give to the poor
• 47 percent believed Eleanor Rigby was a real person rather than a creation of The Beatles

When you get all your information from television, movies and video games, there’s no telling what you’ll end up believing.

The UK Times claims that a government study is about to be released which shows that knife-point robberies have doubled in the past two years. On average, there were 175 knife robberies a day in England and Wales last year.

And remember, not only do most crimes go unreported (up to 70%), the authorities cook the books when it comes to crime statistics.

One citizen has a three-prong approach to the problem:

1. Mandatory five-year sentence for anyone carrying a knife.
2. A mass, nationwide stop and search.
3. The introduction of ”something to occupy the disenfranchised young people”, like mandatory community-based work or national service (we would call that last one ”the draft”).

Who would feel comfortable in a nation like that? Hitler, Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, and more than a few anti-gun liberals that I know. [Look Ma, they still grow fascists in England!]

After all, outlawing guns did sooooo much good in reducing gun crime. Oh wait, it didn’t.

The UK Guardian prints a three part series written by British author Andrew Anthony. In the day reality hit home, Anthony describes how the attack of 11 September 2001 began him on a journey from “committed member of the liberal left” to a new realization of the world, as he began to question everything from the liberal left’s anti-Americanism to basic assumptions about race, crime and terror.

The articles are extracts from his new book [The Fall-Out: How a guilty liberal lost his innocence, available next month]. Although Anthony’s articles cover a range of topics, I find his realization that something is wrong on the streets of Britain the most compelling. From part 2:

Empiricism and emotion are never more uncomfortable bed partners than in the matter of crime. Figures in Britain, for example, suggest that crime is going down but at the same time the chance of being a victim of crime appears to have gone up. Also crimes that directly affect people, the kinds of incidents that dramatically change our perception of danger, such as rape, street robberies and gun crime, have been increasing. In the 10 years between 1995 and 2005, serious woundings rose by 50 per cent in England and Wales. And it is estimated that up to 70 per cent of violent crime goes unreported. Perhaps this is because victims have little confidence in gaining justice, as the conviction rate for these crimes has been falling. According to Home Office figures for 2006, only 9.7 per cent of all ‘serious woundings’ reported to the police led to a successful conviction. For robberies the figure is 8.9 per cent and for rape, it’s 5.5 per cent. In any case, few would dispute that there is an increased anxiety about crime and much of it, I think, is a reflection of waning communal relations, seen most starkly, but far from exclusively, between adults and youths.

For years, the British authorities played games with how crime statistics were calculated. Now that they’ve been found out and the public is demanding the truth, the statistics are disconcerting. For instance, how can gun crime be increasing on an island which has such strict gun laws?

It’s a surprise to liberals, but comes as no surprise to those of us who know that taking guns out of the hands of the law-abiding citizens does little more than disarm the innocent.

Because of a “bizarre distortion in the Government’s flagship crime figures,” three million crimes per year don’t get reported by the UK government. At fault is a decision to ignore all crimes in which the victim has previously reported five incidents in the year.

That’s right. Get robbed for the sixth time and the government just pretends it never happened.

So how bad can this be?

Violent crime is 82 per cent higher at 4.4 million offences compared with 2.4 million in the BCS, the survey claims, including a 156 per cent rise in ” acquaintance violence” from 817,000 incidents to 2.1 million.

Domestic violence is 140 per cent higher, up from 357,000 incidents a year to 857,000, the authors said, while there are nearly three million common assaults a year rather than the 1.5 million estimated by the BCS, a rise of 98 per cent.

Burglary is 20 per cent higher than currently estimated, at 877,000 a year, and vandalism is 24 per cent higher, the report calculated.

Robbery is 7 per cent up on the official estimates, or an extra 22,000 crimes bringing the yearly total to 333,000.

That’s what I call creative accounting.

Salford council has expanded the use of “hat cams”, that is, video cameras mounted on the hat of a police officer, to include allowing privately-employed parking attendants to wear them. But these are not your run-of-the-mill parking attendants, these 20 guys not only write parking tickets but are being given authority to ticket “anti-social behavior”, including loitering, flyposting and letting your dog poop on the sidewalk.

We have 20 parking attendants walking around the city and we decided that they might as well look at more than just cars. One of the biggest issues on people’s minds is the disrespect that some are showing to our environment. The police have not got the resources when they are chasing criminals so this makes a lot of sense.

How long before there’s a camera on every authority figure and public building in Britain?

Shahid Malik, a member of the British Parliment, wrote an article in the Sunday Times titled If you want sharia law, you should go and live in Saudi:

As I have repeatedly said, in this world of indiscriminate terrorist bombings, where Muslims are just as likely to be the victims of terrorism as other British and US citizens, we Muslims have an equal stake in fighting extremism. Hundreds of Muslims died on 9/11 and 7/7. But more importantly, given that these acts are carried out in the name of our religion — Islam — we have a greater responsibility not merely to condemn but to confront the extremists. In addition to being the targets of terrorism, Muslims will inevitably be the targets of any backlash.

Well said.

But the article is about demanding sharia law. Muslims in both Britain and Canada have been demanding this in the last few years. Malik reminds them:

When it comes to sharia, Muhammad ibn Adam, the respected Islamic scholar, says: “It is necessary by sharia to abide by the laws of the country one lives in, regardless of the nature of the law, as long as the law doesn’t demand something that is against Islam.” It is narrated in the Koran that the prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said: “It is necessary upon a Muslim to listen to and obey the ruler, as long as one is not ordered to carry out a sin.” (Sahih al-Bukhari, no 2796 & Sunan Tirmidhi).

This is a great quote to tuck away for the future.

HT to Outside the Beltway via High Country Conservative.

Technorati tags: War on Islamofacism, War on Terror, Moderate Muslim, British Politics, Sharia Law.

In an effort to stop binge drinking, Tony Blair’s administration has pushed through legislation that allows pubs to stay open all the time:

More than nine decades after Britain curtailed pub hours to get wartime munitions workers back to their jobs, round-the-clock public boozing is about to become a fact of 21st-century life. …

Paradoxically, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government is promoting the change as a solution to “binge drinking,” a national problem that leads to city streets and town lanes being awash in vomit and urine nightly from alcoholic overindulgence.

Mr. Blair and his ministers hope the relaxation of the drinking laws will lead to a European-style cafe culture in which patrons linger for hours over a bottle of wine as in Paris or Rome, or a couple of steins of beer as they do in Berlin.

But police, judges, doctors and other critics fear they will, instead, get a quantum leap in the binge drinking that — along with loutish behavior, street fighting and related crimes — already plagues the land.

Keeping the pubs open longer will not change yobs into sophisticates. Mr. Blair needs to champion victums rights, arm the law-abiding citizens so they can defend themselves and get tough on the yobs that are running wild in the streets.

To be sure, there are many great naval battles from which to choose, from the Battle of the Masts (in the year 651) to the Battle of Midway (1942).

But on 20 October 1805 Admiral Lord Nelson led his fleet against a numerically-superior force and won a stunning victory, changing the course of history.

As Napoleon’s armies tramped at will through Europe, he tried to amass a flotilla capable of transporting his troops to Britain. The tiny island nation fended off the tyrant by ruling the waves.

Two French and Spanish fleets combined to create a force of 33 ships of the line; Nelson had only 27. Rather than engaging in the traditional tactic of forming his ships in a long line parallel to the enemy and trading broadsides, Nelson divided his force into two columns and attacked the middle of the French/Spanish line. In this fashion Nelson, confident of his sailor’s superior gunnery (the Brits could fire at twice the rate of the enemy) and seamanship, forced individual ship-to-ship action.

In the light breeze the ships moved no faster than a slow walking pace; it took six hours for the two armadas to close. The enemy formation stretched for four miles across the horizon.

Nelson’s flagship, the 100-gun Victory, led one column and suffered more casualties than any other ship in the Royal Navy, with 57 killed and 102 wounded. Because the column headed directly for the enemy as it crossed in front, the Victory was under unanswered fire for 40 minutes before engaging the small French ship Redoutable. Nelson himself fell to a sniper’s bullet and was carried below. Three hours later he was told that the battle had been won and he uttered his last words, “Thank God I have done my duty!”

The courage and discipline of the British sailors was astounding. Imagine being on a ship of the line, decks cleared for action, cannon at the ready and men at their stations, approaching a hated enemy at a painfully slow pace while they fired upon you and all you could do was wait in frustrated anticipation for your guns to bear. And bear they did; Nelson’s ship split the enemy column with the French Admiral Villeneuve’s flagship, the Bucentaure with 80 guns, on the port side and the best captain in the combined fleet in the Redoubtable (74 guns) on the starboard:

So the Victory turned towards the stern of the Bucentaure and, as she passed the array of elegant windows lighting the admiral’s and captain’s cabins, she unleashed her broadside: fifty guns loaded with two or three roundshot each, blew in her stern, dismounted twenty guns and killed or wounded half her crew. Then the Victory herself was raked by a broadside from the French eighty-four-gun ship Neptune, crossing her bows. Billowing smoke hid the collision of the fleets as Hardy ordered the helm over again to steer for the Redoubtable: the ships crashed together, their yards and rigging locking; their guns firing, muzzle to muzzle. Through the smoke, Lucas could be seen assembling boarders on deck to swarm across the bulwarks until a blast of grapeshot from the Victory cut them down. Astern of the British flagship the Temeraire followed through the gap she had forced, as the two British columns, ship by ship, joined battle. At the heart of it the two admirals and their heaviest ships fought in a vortex of smoke, flame and shattered ships.

“Engaging the French and Spanish admirals, one on each side,” wrote Thomas Johns, an able seaman in the Victory, in a letter to his parents, ”we was so involved in smoke and fire not to be seen by any of our frigates looking on for about half an hour and they thought we was blown up or sunk, having no less than five ships on us at the time, but we were bravely seconded by the Temeraire or we would have been sunk, it being their orders and intention to capture or sink Lord Nelson’s ship.”

At the end of the day, the French and Spanyards lost 22 ships; the Royal Navy lost none. The British lost 449 men killed and 1,241 wounded (some of whom subsequently died), the French and Spanish fleets lost 4,408 men killed and 2,545 wounded.

Among the 20,000 French and Spanyards captured was the French Admiral Villeneuve. On his return to France, he was found stabbed six times in the chest in his inn room while returning to Paris. His death was ruled a suicide.

As a result of Trafalgar, Napoleon had to abandon his invasion plans and eventually turned eastward in a disastrous campaign against the Russians. And the British controlled the world’s oceans and seas for the next one hundred years. And on this, the 200th anniversary of the great battle, we remember the bravery of Britain as it stood steadfast against a tyrant that had nearly all of mainland Europe on its knees.

Sources:

• Nelson’s Navy
• Nelson Society
• Wikipedia

Bloggers with Trafalgar anniversary posts:

• Majority Rights charges the BBC with racism in celebrating the anniversay.
• Blood and Treasure says that Trafalgar Day is a protestant thing.
• The Guardian has a rather nice Flash animation of the battle, via Tom Worstall who has a blog roundup.
• This, from Geoffrey Wheatcroft in a NYTimes op-ed:
  

  Even now, French politicians wince when they reach London by way of Waterloo station and look up Whitehall on their way to Downing Street toward Trafalgar Square, with Lord Nelson atop his vast column

• Finally, you simply must read this satiric post from Author’s Seat.

The July 7 bombings in London’s subways shook the island nation, but the discovery that those responsible were born and raised in Britain shocked the populace. Yet for all the talk of “native bombers” one thing has become very clear: the bombers were not British. They were Islamofascists that were allowed to be indoctrinated in hatred while inside of British borders because of the tolerance for allowing cultures to exist in Britain, but outside of British life.

This is clearly outlined in a report called The Poverty of Multiculturalism:

The report, from the right-of-centre think-tank Civitas, criticises what it called “hard” multiculturalists, who insist that no culture is better than any other and that society should celebrate difference.

“They simultaneously assert that no culture is better than another, but they will happily elaborate that Western culture is actually inferior and shy away from celebrating it for fear of causing offence,” the report says. “We are witnessing the revolt of the civilised against civilisation.”

“The fruits of 30 years of state-endorsed multiculturalism have seen increased inter-racial tension and inter-racial sectarianism,” the report, titled The Poverty of Multiculturalism, says. “The fact that the London suicide bombers were born and bred in Britain, and encouraged by the state to be different, illustrates that hard multiculturalism has the capacity to be not only divisive but decidedly lethal.”

Given the clear lesson of 7/7, one would think that even the most lefty leftist would reconsider the policies that have led to fostering hatred in your own back yard. But London Mayor Ken Livingstone continues to exhibit the myopia and inability to learn from experience that permeates the liberal movement everywhere.

Background: Trafalgar Square is a central landmark of London, named for the decisive navel battle of the Napoleonic wars. Admiral Lord Nelson led 27 British war ships against a numerically-superior force of 33 French and Spanish ships of the line. The French and Spainyards lost 22 ships; the British lost none. As a result, the British navy ruled the waves for more than a century.

The square is decorated with statues of busts of British heroes from a long and proud history: Major-General Sir Henry Havelock, General Sir Charles James Napier, Admiral Beatty, Admiral Jellicoe, Admiral Cunningham and (of course) Admiral Lord Nelson surrounded by lions said to have been made of bronze recycled from cannons from the defeated French fleet.

London Mayor Ken Livingstone wants to erect a 9-foot-tall bronze statue of former South African President Nelson Mandela in Trafalgar Square and his reasoning is classic lefty lunacy:

Shortly after his 2000 election, Livingstone suggested replacing the military statues with figures “that ordinary Londoners would know.”

“I have not a clue who two of the generals there are or what they did,” he said. …

Livingstone said critics complaining about the statue’s location were hiding their true motives.

“I actually think it’s what he represents they don’t want to see depicted, because in that square one Nelson signifies the birth of the British empire and 100 years of global dominance,” Livingstone told Labour delegates. “Nelson Mandela would signify the peaceful transition to a multiracial and multicultural world, and I would be proud to have that in London.”

In other words, Mayor Livingston is ignorant of his own country’s history and believes multiculturalism should continue to be fostered even though his city was brutally attacked because of it.