Kind of suggests we dont think much of the EU elections But the EU is actually taking more and more control and our own elections are not so important as whoever we elect are being tied by the EU.
15 Candidates on the ballot paper for MEP Election and not one from The Monster Raving Loony Party. I feel disenfranchised.
Some of the other countries are already a bit concerned because we're one of the few net contributors. It would mean that Germany and France will have to put more in.
Oh the shame! France seems to get away with doing very little towards the EU, certainly they seem to go their own way still a lot!
That's why they're quite happy with a lot of the legislation. They agree to it and then totally ignore it
Our region has seven seats available and each of the following parties have put forward seven candidates. Aren't we lucky? The bit after their name is what they have in their heading An Independence from Europe - UK Independence Now British National Party - Fighting Unsustainable Housing Because We Care Christian Peoples Alliance Conservative Party - For Real Change In Europe English Democrats - I'm English, NOT British, NOT European Green Party Labour Party Liberal Democrats NO2EU - Yes To Workers Rights UK Independence Party (UKIP) I have rough idea of what most of them stand for but I'm a bit puzzled about what sort of political platform the Christian Peoples Alliance has. (Can't be bothered to read up on it.) They seem to be mixing religion and politics.
It would be nice if they said what they are going to do and do it not change they minds after they get in If any MP's are reading this, i may not bother even to get up and vote
I'm open to either, but the only parties who want "out" currently have really bizarre and "backward" polices generally. For example UKIP want nuclear power stations everywhere, smoking back in public places etc. Unless one of the three bigger parties push for leaving I doubt it will ever happen anytime soon.
While UKIP has many daft ideas, I don't think this is one of them. Lets consider some facts. I worked on the British Coal miners compensation scheme. The company I worked for held a database of all claimants for just 2 of many different very serious medical ailments that are a direct result of mining coal. This was for just one company (the former state owned, British Coal) and did not count the various smaller privately owned mining companies in the UK. The government of the day had decided when setting the criteria (it was decided in a series of court cases so not an arbitrary decision) that to qualify, someone had to have worked underground in a British Coal mine for a minimum period between two dates. So in essence, the 'pool' of potential claimants was already very limited. Add to that the fact that many miners had died of various causes, work related or otherwise, before the compensation scheme was even conceived, and many surviving ones chose not to make a claim. Despite all this, there were still around 800,000 claimants listed in the database. Almost all of those would die prematurely from COPD as a direct result of producing the coal that fuelled Britain. This figure doesn't take into account the many thousands (or millions - I don't think its even been accurately estimated) that have been made ill or have died as a result of breathing the highly caustic smog (made up of particulates and sulphuric acid, among other things) that is produced when coal is burned. Add to all this, that coal is actually the earth, and when we use it as a fuel, we are effectively burning the ground we walk on. Ok, so not coal. That's not so great. What about oil and gas? Unfortunately I don't have any stats for this, other than to point out that it is not uncommon at all for people to be killed in accidents when working on the extraction, shipping or processing of oil and gas, and then of course there's all the deaths in wars fought over it. Oil also makes up a huge (but rapidly diminishing) chunk of the ground that we walk on, yet again we are digging up the earth and burning it. Ok, so what about renewables? Well, as long as the world is made up of a bunch of nations that can't get on, renewables can't meet our demands. We all hear about the so called green energy from wind farms. Well they simply don't generate enough energy to meet demand, and nobody ever talks about the energy used in their manufacture, shipping, installation, maintenance, and ultimately when they've had their useful life, their disposal. Wind farms are only viable because they are heavily subsidised for purely political reasons, because if you can focus on the fact that once they're installed and running, they produce electricity for free in effect, then it looks very green and eco, which is what people are, quite rightly, asking for. Solar is a similar situation. Ok, I believe solar can be viable, but not the way it is currently done. In Spain they have a solar power station that is effectively an array of mirrors that direct the sunshine onto a boiler which drives a conventional turbine. If every country could work together as a team, we could have similar power stations in every dessert all around the globe, and then share the energy generated, but that wont happen in our lifetimes, purely, again, for political reasons. So what's left? What if there was an energy source that was zero emission, used such a small amount of fuel that mining for it didn't tear up the planet, produced all the energy we demand (I'm reluctant to use the word 'need') and is statistically very safe? Well there is, its nuclear energy. I'm not going to guess on behalf of individuals, but I think generally, the reason why many people think nuclear energy is dangerous, stems from two fears. Firstly, there's the radiation. And secondly there's the fear of the sheer awesomeness of its power. I'll come to the first point in a minute, but first the second point. Many of us grew up during the cold war, and some of us (not me) might have been around in WW2, but either way we all know that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were practically annihilated from one bomb (as an aside, when the Hiroshima bomb detonated, "Little Boy" it was called, dropped from a plane dubbed "Enola Gay", there's a song about it), it is estimated that only 9kg of U235 actually exploded. The rest was blasted clear as vapour and plasma, its atoms scattered too far apart for fission to occur. We all know about how NATO and USSR had a massive race to see who could build the biggest and the most nuclear warheads since then, and that is a terrifying fact. Then there's Chernobyl. What a mess that made, and continues to make as the area is still unsafe now. You don't get these issues with 'conventional' or 'renewable' energy sources. Well, as for the military use of it, that's simply not the same thing as the civil use. The two simply cannot be compared. A controlled fission reactor is not built to a design that has any similarity to a bomb. As for Chernobyl, that was just extremely bad luck combined with a very outdated and long since discontinued design. To control a fission reaction, you stick rods made of boron in between the rods of uranium. The boron absorbs the neutrons that fly off the uranium, thus preventing them from hitting more uranium and dislodging more neutrons. In a modern reactor, the boron rods are suspended above the uranium, and it uses electricity to hold them up against gravity. In the event of a catastrophic failure, where even the computers can't get a signal into the reactor, if it gets too hot and starts to run away, the power supply to the assembly that holds the boron rods fails, and under gravity, the rods drop, automatically shutting down the reaction. Unfortunately Chernobyl didn't work like that. The boron rods were not suspended, but required a motor to physically push them into place. Once the reactor overheated, the mechanism to control it seized, and there was nothing anyone could do. Reactors are not built like that any more. I said I'd come back to the first point, the radiation. Just a couple of points on that. Firstly, uranium is a natural material that occurs in abundance in the ground in various places. One such place is Cornwall. If you go to Cornwall, you are most likely walking on top of uranium. Its not a secret, but most people don't know it simply because lots of people live there or visit there, and they don't glow in the dark or anything (ok, some do, but that's nowt to do with the bedrock, that's more about the Old Rattler that they serve in some of the local pubs). The other thing is we're actually constantly bombarded with exactly the same type of radiation that comes from uranium, all the time. We're surrounded by space. In space, there are the remnants of the big bang, as well as the remnants of many, many supernovae. These things produce what the boffins call Cosmic Background Radiation. Most of that is gamma radiation, the stuff of nightmares that comes from uranium. It becomes a problem when the intensity is too high of course. When I was at school our physics teacher took a piece of U235 (the refined stuff used in reactors) about the size of a £1 coin, and pointed a gieger counter at it from about 6 inches away. The gieger went a bit mad. Then he pointed the same counter straight up. The meter went off the scale. Just to finish off, consider this. If you take out Chernobyl, a disaster involving an outdated an largely unused reactor design, and the deaths from aggression featuring nuclear, there have been far fewer deaths from it than any other type of energy source. Even if you don't take out aggression and Chernobyl, by some estimates, nuclear is still statistically safest.
That's a long and detailed post Clueless, thank you for taking the time to write and post it! It's certainly given me a lot to think about surrounding the subject. I think I just don't like the idea of having a Nuclear power station (or any kind really) as my next door neighbour, I'm sure that is true of most people though! In a way I like that the EU regulate how many and where they can be placed to an extent, where as the way I remember UKIP presenting the proposal was that they could go practically anywhere and they would be numerous. On one hand I do understand and agree with you, on the other I'd like power to be an issue so future developments have to be made for the good of humanity, i.e. if oil was going to run out in the next 5 years we'd already have replacement cars in place .
