Booker: neonicotinoids and the tyranny of the Greens

EUReferendum
But, in what has already been hailed by Forbes magazine as a new "Climategate", Booker records week's revelation of a document showing that a campaign which last year pushed the EU into a damaging ban on certain insecticides was deliberately engineered, on the basis of highly questionable evidence, by a group of environmentally committed scientists working for a green pressure group, the International Union for Conservation in Nature (IUCN).  ......But – as we reported earlier, it emerges that IUCN was funded by the EU itself to the tune of £19 milllion, with £350,000 going specifically to a "task force", headed by an environmentalist who was one of the co-founders of the Dutch WWF, to come up with the evidence needed to justify a ban.

Minutes of the task force's first meeting in 2010 show that its only purpose was to find evidence to support a ban. Since 2004 neonics have been successfully used to control crop damage by farmers in 120 countries. On the back of papers produced by the task force, other green lobby groups – some also funded by the EU - launched a Europe-wide campaign calling for a ban, particularly focussed for propaganda purposes on the damage these chemicals were purportedly doing to bees.

When the Commission accordingly proposed its ban, few questioned it more strongly than the chief scientific adviser to the UK's Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), which was why opposition to it in Brussels was led by his minister Owen Paterson. Defra's own field trials had shown no damage to bees, whereas the IUCN relied only on highly artificial laboratory experiments.    .......This is yet another example of the bizarre symbiosis the EU has established with green pressure groups, as it showers out hundreds of millions of euros a year for them to lobby it for the all-too often destructive policies they want.

Among those who fell for the dubious science behind this particular ban was David Cameron. In their final tetchy interview last July he raised it as one of his chief reasons for sacking Mr Paterson: easily the best-informed and most effective Defra minister we've ever had."