Gordon Brown: save food, you pigs!
You can’t help but laugh at the hypocritical fathead. The prime minister of the UK, Gordon Brown, blames the people for wasting too much food, and says this is what causes high food prices. The solution? Buy less food, and throw less away.
Britons will today be urged to make saving food as important as saving energy, with the publication of a government report which reveals that more than 4m tonnes of food are wasted each year at a cost of hundreds of pounds per household.
Note that Brown didn’t bother to place his claim of food waste in context. Each year, he says, 4 million tonnes of food go to waste. In a well-worn classic of prevarication — using statistics to lie — there’s no denominator. Four million tonnes of how much food goes to waste? Is it a lot, or a little? One percent? Five percent? Ten percent? If it really is a lot, I fail to see why people won’t notice rising food prices and discover: “Hey, neat, I can buy just legs of lamb, instead of buying the whole thing and throwing the rest away!”
How does the UK government know all this anyway? Do the English fill out annual food returns? Are waste dumps carefully analysed for suspicious substances that may once have been food? Do Britons pay taxes to employ people to audit the garbage? And what does Brown propose doing about it? Get people to buy food in smaller quantities, so packaging and distribution costs — not to mention plastic waste — go up instead?
Typical of a government official to blame the citizens for things that are none of the government’s business, are out of their control, are the errors of government, or all of the above.
After all, Britain’s government offers tax incentives for users of biofuel, which is here.) The bureaucrats admit this, but by yesterday had only agreed to “amend, not abandon”, its misguided state intervention to give biofuel an advantage over cheaper alternative energy.
Nevermind that most of the rest of the rise in food prices is a function of higher oil prices, since producers rely heavily on fuel in both the production and transport of food, and that the higher oil price is largely a function of the weak dollar, inflationary monetary policy worldwide, and high demand from large emerging markets.
No, it’s because you don’t eat your greens, young man! Does big brother have to make you finish your food? It sure sounds like it, with all that talk of “global plans” to find “global solutions” to “global problems”.
But wait, it gets better. On his first day at the summit in Japan, Gordon Brown and his wife enjoyed course after course after course of the most lavish food imaginable. To wit:
The dinner consisted of 18 dishes in eight courses including caviar, smoked salmon, Kyoto beef and a “G8 fantasy dessert”.
The banquet was accompanied by five different wines from around the world including champagne, a French Bourgogne and sake.
To complete the irony, heads of state from Ethiopia, Tanzania and Senegal weren’t invited. “I say, old chap, nice caviar. Be a waste to feed it to the darkies. They might get used to it and drive the price up, what what?”
No wonder nobody likes him.
Insanity and hypocrisy of this scale is not surprising. Witness the incredible edible “energy revolution”!!… Windmills:
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2008/06/madness-exposed.html
Nice one Hard Rain!
One of the biggest shortcomings of the human genome is its’ seemingly inbuilt need to follow leaders. (It’s a ‘reptilian’ archaic hindbrain thing)
From ‘Dubya’ to Thabo Mbeki, (or Pol Pot, or Kim ill singing Yong the
Seventh, or whatever he calls himself) these feeble half wits assault the brain with their self serving crap which we are to accept as some sort of guiding light.
Plain lies and hypocrisy seem to have lost any meaning, and utterances emanating from the ‘organs of state’ have degraded into some sort of patronizing insult to the intelligence.
I feel like becoming a Guru on a mountain top, and let them get on with it!
Gordon Brown should call an election. He has just about as much legitimacy as Mugabe, but then in this democracy the party elects the leader. Today a new car license was introduced by Gordon which punishes owners of cars seen to be bad for the environment. If he really wanted to reduce consumption, he should raise fuel tax, not punish people for ownership. The ability to pollute should not be punished, especially when many people bought their cars before the new tax was introduced.
The TV channels here in Hokkaido are full of coverage on the G8 summit. The main theme? What they’re eating. But instead of worrying about the waste (and the clearly-evident hypocrisy), the Japanese media are more fascinated at just what’s on the menu.
Let’s forget about global conflict, soaring energy prices and the main discussions about the summit. George Bush is eating Japanese beef! Sugoi!
I hate the world… :p
@Alwin: Not that I favour a progressive tax, but that vehicle tax of Brown’s is actually regressive. I’ve never done more than call for a flat tax, on the everybody-is-equal principle. Gotta hand it to a fella who calls himself labour but then taxes the poor because they don’t drive eco-beemers. He should call an election. He can print posters saying “Pox on the Poor”.
To be fair, in the UK households do throw away a ridiculous amount of food (at least one quarter of all food bought, by some estimates). In addition, “health concerns” mean that sell-by labels are strictly adhered to and vast mountains of perfectly edible food are discarded by supermarkets.