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to a well earned retirement posted in uncategorized 39 comments cop21 climate agreement an eye watering amount of money for virtually no return posted on june 14 2017 by rogeroffice posted in uncategorized 5 comments 100 000 mis spent posted on june 14 2017 by rogeroffice today june 14 th the guardian carries a report that the european parliament proposes to demand 100 000 from me for staff expenses which were allegedly mis spent naturally i have had many media bids from journalists who want more information and i ve had to tell them that in respect of this alleged demand for 100 000 i know no more than they do i have had no communication whatever from the parliament on the question this may seem surprising but it is not the first time that some allegation of this type has emerged through a press leak with no information from the parliament to the individuals concerned indeed the parliament has a technique where it deliberately leaks speculative allegations to friendly journalists and then uses the consequent media reports as a basis for a hostile enquiry this procedure is totally improper and prejudicial but it seems to be common practice the guardian also seeks to link the 100 000 story to my resignation but i signed resignation papers on may 31 st and my first inkling of the guardian story was an e mail yesterday morning from jennifer rankin a guardian journalist i immediately sent the guardian e mail to klaus welle the parliament secretary general demanding an explanation but so far i have no reply the story such as it is is a follows the parliament indicated to me at the turn of the year that it was concerned about payments to two of my uk staff though it was not at all clear why they had such concerns nonetheless i prepared and submitted two very substantial dossiers of evidence supporting the work done by the employees after some time and several enquiries i was able to establish that they had cleared one case related to my regional press officer the other case relates to my constituency manager paul oakden paul joined me shortly after i moved to ukip in march 2012 and had been a hugely committed and effective constituency manager until his resignation in december last initially he worked for me or for me plus my regional colleague margot parker mep in january 2015 margot decided to make other arrangements and i put paul on a half time contract and reduced his salary accordingly by 50 paul naturally decided to seek other employment for the remaining 50 of his time and took a second half time contract with another employer as he was perfectly entitled to do under uk employment law the second contract was with ukip paul s duties for me included running a busy office in market harborough managing two or three administrative staff dealing with or supervising correspondence with constituents organisations companies pressure groups charities and ngos who phoned or e mailed or visited the office in person he had overall responsibility for my uk diary and managed my events in the region he oversaw relations with the media and accompanied me on media meetings he and i had regular review meetings at weekends in the region in market harborough or at the costa coffee shop in lutterworth he also occasionally accompanied me on overseas missions he was even my driver of last resort to get me to the airport when my car was in for service i do not issue my mobile phone number widely but paul s number was on a notice board outside the office he was available to constituents 24 7 he was also available to me 24 7 because of the nature of parliamentary work we often had to talk outside normal working hours at anti social times and over weekends and so on in the dossier i presented to the parliament i provided hard copy records of phone and e mail exchanges during 2016 these were incomplete the parliament s own phone records for example only went back six months while earlier parts of the e mail record were no longer available despite repeated efforts we have still been unable to obtain paul s phone records for 2016 and he frequently called me yet despite these limitations we identified around 830 proven contacts in the year there are typically around 240 working days in the year and paul was nominally working half time though i believe he did more than that but 50 of 240 days is 120 days so we have hard evidence of an average of at least seven contacts every working day if the records were complete i would expect the figure to be around ten contacts per working day against this background to suggest that paul wasn t working for me is simply risible an affront to natural justice the problem of course is that the parliament is judge jury and executioner in its own cause in a criminal case the onus of proof is on the prosecution in a civil case we deal with a balance of probabilities but in the european parliament they demand proof beyond doubt that work was done in other words the rule is guilty until proven innocent had i known that such an enquiry might arise i might have required monthly reports and so on but i come from a business background not a bureaucratic background rather than pile up interminable reports i prefer to hire good people and delegate there is an appeals procedure in the european parliament but it amounts to little more than asking the same people who made the first decision to confirm it and the great majority of bodies in the parliament are dominated by pro europeans who would find against eurosceptics on an automatic ideological basis it may be time to consider other legal options posted in uncategorized 15 comments eu energy labelling confusing consumers and creating problems for industry posted on june 13 2017 by rogeroffice posted in uncategorized 1 comment five live debate on trump and the climate deal posted on june 5 2017 by rogeroffice discussing donald trump and the climate deal on the stephen nolan show click here just under three hours in posted in uncategorized 12 comments the ira and isil posted on june 4 2017 by rogeroffice there is a legitimate parallel to be drawn between the ira and isil or isis or daesh or whatever we re calling it this week indeed i have cited the parallel myself we should be careful to recognise that while most ira terrorists were irish catholics they represented only a tiny percentage of the irish catholic community most of whom rejected violence it was vitally important not to stereotype all irish catholics as terrorists the same is true of isil the great majority of british muslims are decent law abiding people who are appalled by the violence in manchester and more recently in london we can and must condemn the terrorists and their fellow travellers while taking care not to stereotype the whole muslim community but at one point the parallel breaks down the objective of the ira was essentially political they were not fighting for their religion they were fighting for a united ireland now i personally reject that objective for a number of reasons and i absolutely reject and repudiate the ira s abhorrent methods but i can at least recognise that irish unification is a reasonable and legitimate objective for an irish nationalist provided it is pursued through a peaceful political process but this is not the case with isil admittedly it is difficult to get a clear and coherent statement of isil s objectives and difficult to see how mowing down civilians with a hired van or stabbing people at random could serve such objectives however we can reasonably say that their objective is to impose their own mediæval interpretation of islam on the whole world by force in the process they are happy to kill and torture and behead their opponents on an industrial scale they will cheerfully kill any non believer but they are especially keen to kill apostates blasphemers coptic christians and homosexuals and they want to lock women into subservience to muslim men denying them their fundamental rights they want a global caliphate this is not a political objective or to the extent that it could be it is not a legitimate political objective it harks back to the early days of islam when it was imposed by fire and the sword in the case of the ira we could oppose the terrorists without setting ourselves against catholicism but to oppose isil we must be prepared to condemn not the muslim faith as a whole but at least this version of it a version which is surreptitiously promoted in mosques and madrassas in the uk earlier today i tweeted it is quite wrong to stereotype all muslims as terrorists but it is equally wrong to deny that isil is inspired by islam in half an hour it had had forty re tweets and 4 000 views i ve also taken the usual stick from the usual trolls but i stand by the tweet posted in uncategorized 15 comments trump and climate change posted on june 2 2017 by rogeroffice bbc radio 4 world at one on donald trump and climate change 13 minutes in posted in uncategorized 7 comments road map to the eu s bio paradise posted on june 2 2017 by rogeroffice on thursday morning in brussels i attended a breakfast briefing on the commission s plans for a bio economy for europe it was billed as follows in 2012 the european commission adopted the strategy innovating for sustainable growth a bioeconomy for europe including agriculture forestry fisheries food and chemicals stressed the importance of the bioeconomy sector as it provides an annual turnover in europe of 2 trillion employing around 22 million people forest based bioeconomy is an important player in the picture as the forest based industries have a production value of 365 billion providing more than 3 million jobs we heard a lot about the circular economy the green economy the blue economy don t ask and so on forests and other bio products can be used not just for energy and biomass but for chemicals cosmetics textiles i happen to own a sports jacket made from bamboo construction materials and other uses mushrooms blueberries and other food crops can be grown in forests the opportunities are endless apparently the 21 st century economy will be powered by wind and we will have wooden houses each ton of concrete saved represents two tons of co 2 emissions they said it would be unkind to point out that these two technologies wind power and wood construction far from being ultra modern are millennia old after interminable speeches from forest related interests i managed to get a word in edgeways i think everyone in this room this morning will be gratified to reflect that today s elevated level of atmospheric co 2 means more plant growth higher crop yields and faster bio mass formation but i fear that there are some conflicting trends in the use of forestry products i was recently approached by the european chip board industry you will recognise that wood chip board is a key construction material with high insulation properties and will become even more important if we build more wooden houses yet the industry is facing problems previously it was the main user of forest waste from saw mills the branches too small to be used as timber but now with its basic raw material in demand from the bio fuels sector the price of this forest waste has increased and is undermining the chipboard industry i have been following these issues for all my eighteen years in the parliament ten years ago we thought that bio fuels were the silver bullet to slay the dragon of co 2 emissions and global warming then we started to realise that the husbandry of bio fuel crops plus their transportation and processing required considerable energy inputs undermining their emissions savings later yet we started to worry about iluc the indirect land use change consequent upon the allocation of agricultural land for bio fuel crops factoring this in we found that the savings achieved by biofuels ranged from derisory to negative an example from my own country the uk we used to have a large coal fired power station called drax you may have heard of it in a grand green gesture it was converted to bio mass and wood chip so now we cut down mature forests in the usa and we chip the wood a very energy intensive process we truck the wood chip to the port we transport it across the atlantic in diesel powered ships and we truck it or rail it from the uk port to the power station several studies reportedly suggest that the net savings in co 2 are derisory and the power station produces less power than before at significantly higher cost this is gesture politics run mad i think we need to take great care that our bio fuel initiatives do actually achieve the objectives we set for them there was no point on this day when president trump has pulled out of the paris climate deal in raising the point that cutting co 2 emissions is pointless anyway they already knew my views on that posted in uncategorized 6 comments eu energy rules cat s cradle or dog s dinner posted on june 1 2017 by rogeroffice earlier this week i attended a dinner debate in brussels on the eu s proposals for energy efficiency targets the plans are marked like most eu plans by overwhelming complexity and several speakers made a good case that the proposals would have far greater impact on poorer member states with relatively lower capita energy consumption than on wealthier member states i raised my concerns about another aspect of course no one would argue against energy efficiency in a broad sense but the objective of all eu energy policy is to reduce emissions of co 2 i question whether that in itself should be a high priority objective but let s take it as read for the moment the eu has created a huge range of initiatives which aim to support this objective we have renewables targets emissions targets the emissions trading scheme plus other instruments as they like to call them like subsidies feed in tariffs renewables obligations capacity payments and in the uk at least a carbon floor price these overlapping measures frequently create both conflicts and market distortions they are not technologically neutral for example nuclear power contributes powerfully to achieving emissions targets but fails to help with the the renewables targets one might be justified in describing this morass of legislation a cat s cradle if not a dog s dinner in my contribution i pointed out that green measures had already driven up energy prices in the eu to a level where they are undermining competitiveness and driving jobs businesses and investment off shore i mentioned that before politics i had had a real job running real businesses and i remembered very well that the issue of energy costs frequently featured at board meetings even then commercial organisations already had an urgent imperative to achieve energy efficiency today with the cost of energy so much higher that imperative is even stronger so i presented my killer dichotomy either 1 if an energy efficiency measure is commercially viable that is it if provides a commercial ...