Boris Johnson's big, green car con

 

Boris Johnson's latest wheeze is to declare that there will be no more new petrol- or diesel-fuelled cars sold in Britain from 2030. Don't get me wrong - clean air is good. Hell, after five years of living in the UAE, working as a motoring journalist, owning a gas-guzzling SUV, and travelling business class for press trips, I should probably atone for my carbon footprint. It was like a coal miner's lung.

It's not the idea that is the problem. It's the lashings of bullshit that come with it.

First, Johnson can say whatever the hell he likes. After all, why break the habit of a lifetime? He knows he won't be prime minister in 2030. He won't have to actually see this idea through. He won't have to take any real responsibility for the government's role in funding infrastructure, determining policy, or liaising with the private sector to make this happen.

It's a calculated risk. He's smart enough to know there will be a bit of an outcry but it's better to have a few people howling about the latest war on cars than let them get too worked up about the government's ongoing mishandling of Covid-19 or the looming Brexit debacle.

It's not all doom and gloom. Charging infrastructure is certainly improving and the range for electric cars has become longer in recent years. Indeed, the range of a couple of hundred miles is ample for the driving many of us do on a day-to-day basis. Electric vehicles often make sense for local authorities too - if the vehicle is only going to be buzzing around the borough, there's little risk of running out of charge. Fast-charging technology is getting better every year.

But for a lot of us, used to being able to fill up a car with a fossil fuel quickly and easily, making the transition to electric cars will take a mindset shift as well as potentially being expensive. Half an hour for an 80% rapid charge will seem like too long for a lot of people, especially when they need a car for work. Business secretary Alok Sharma revealed how stunningly out of touch he is with real people in a pandemic when he was talking about £20,000 electric cars as being cheap on Sky News yesterday morning. 

A decade should be plenty of time to make the transition, if there was a competent government running the show, but I am not convinced that Johnson's electric vehicle policy, part of a 10-point "green industrial revolution" has allowed a big enough budget.

£1.3 billion to roll out charging points in homes, streets and on motorways probably won't be enough. Currently, the government offers up to £350 for households to install a charging point. With around 75% of adults in the UK holding driving licenses, approximately 20 million households will need a charging point - that's potentially a subsidy bill of up to £7 billion. A lot of houses and apartment building car parks will need charging points. 

Obviously, it's entirely reasonable for companies such as BP and Esso to fork out for charging points at their petrol stations. But this smells like the government pulling a big figure out of their collective arses in the hope that we'll all be so impressed by the sheer size of £1.3 billion that we won't work out what it really means.  

Similarly, £582 million in grants to buy zero- or ultra-low-emission vehicles is a petty cash drawer figure in terms of government spending.

And "nearly" £500 million over the next four years - so less than £125 million per year - for the development of mass production of electric vehicle batteries really won't go that far. The government statement on the 10-point plan adds that this is part of £12 billion in state spending on developing electric car manufacturing with "potentially three times as much from the private sector". So that's money that we cannot count on, especially if car manufacturing goes down the toilet post-Brexit. After all, it's not as if we will be able to make all components or source all materials from the UK - with inevitably buggered-up, expensive supply chains from the EU, it becomes a less attractive investment. 

Then there are concerns about the supply chain ethics of certain raw materials for electric vehicles, such as the mining of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which supplies 60% of cobalt for this sector. The second-biggest producer of cobalt in the world is Russia and its output is 83% smaller than that of the DRC. Wonderful.

Of course, there is an attempt in the statement to desperately appeal to their newly won Red Wall voters and Conservative voters elsewhere with the pledge to create electric vehicle sector jobs in the northeast of England, Wales and the Midlands. For the northeast, this pledge comes just as there are renewed reports of Sunderland losing its Nissan plant if a no-deal Brexit goes ahead - this could be a pre-emptive strike to convince people that this is how the jobs will be replaced. Ironically, it is faintly reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher convincing Nissan to build the Sunderland plant to help replace jobs lost when the coal mines closed, with access to the EU market as a major selling point. 

But Boris Johnson has not got any of the convictions of Thatcher and he certainly does not have her work ethic. There's no real detail in his plans for the automotive sector about how the money will be spent, and no breakdown on practical things such as budgets for retraining workers and retooling factories. At least Sunderland has experience with building the electric Nissan Leaf. Apart from the electric Mini and the possibility of an electric Jaguar, a lot of money will be needed to ensure electric cars can roll off production lines in Derbyshire, Swindon, Norfolk, Warwickshire, Cheshire, West Sussex and Luton.

But this is not a government that does details.

The point in the plan about public transport has nothing much to say to areas where public transport is non-existent. There is a pledge to spend £4.2 billion in "city public transport". Given that in London, TFL's 2019-2020 budget was £10.3 billion, £4.2 billion across all UK cities is going to spread out very thinly indeed. Again, Boris Johnson pukes out numbers that are more than we'll ever see in our bank accounts and expects us to be impressed without question. 

Still, it's all on brand for Johnson. It's all big-sounding numbers and bumper sticker soundbites, as ever. He was supposedly a green Tory mayor for London but that was a con too. This is the idiot mayor who wasted £1.4 million in a failed attempt to "glue" pollution to the capital's roads and removed the congestion charge exemption for hybrid cars. Basically, he got away with developing a reputation for being an eco-friendly mayor because he was photographed riding a bicycle like a saggy-suited clown.

Boris Johnson's figures for his "green industrial revolution" are as rubbery as the condoms he seems to be incapable of using. It's bluster and waffle, there's a strong whiff of pork-barrelling, it is more simplistic sloganeering.

He is a charlatan, a fraud, a major league con man, someone who has fooled voters for years on an industrial scale, the wrong person to be in charge of anything let alone an environmental programme this nakedly ambitious - put that on your electric car bumper sticker.

Childhood memories up in flames

In 1982, I was six years old and we lived in a cul-de-sac called Nicholi Crescent in Wagga Wagga, Australia. Everyone knew each other - we used to play tennis on a makeshift court painted onto the road by a neighbour, safe in the knowledge that no cars would ever speed through. At the end of the dead end, there were acres of long grass - we played there too, never thinking of the possibility of a snakebite, in pre-nanny state Australia. These days, the long grass has been replaced by houses, the cul-de-sac bulldozed into a street, although it's still called Nicholi Crescent. A snoop on Google Street View shows that our old house still has the terrible yellow 1970s glass on the front, although the magnificent Nicholi gum tree, the one in which I got stuck in 1986, is gone.

One warm Thursday night in 1982, we got home from late night shopping to find the end of Nicholi Crescent on fire. Everyone was staring from their front lawns as the fire brigade went to work. I even remember what I was wearing - pale blue pedal pushers and a blue floral shirt handed down to me from close family friends with slightly older daughters. My photo ended up in the local paper, the Daily Advertiser. It was a picture of me, my mother and the old lady next door with concerned expressions on our faces, but nobody was hurt and nobody lost their home.

It was terribly exciting. 

Being in the paper was akin to being famous for a few days in Wagga Wagga in the 1980s. The next day, I got to wear my pink dress to school - unafraid of burglary, the windows were left open when we went shopping and my uniform, lovingly, nerdishly laid out for Friday, reeked of smoke. I had a great story for class news that day - a fire, the newspaper photographer, my pink dress in a sea of blue and yellow checked school uniforms - I loved the attention.       

But that was 38 years ago. I can't remember what caused the fire at the end of Nicholi Crescent but neither can I remember any discussion of climate change. Throughout my Australian childhood, serious bushfires across the country made the news in summer, there were long, hot days, and droughts. But this summer's fires and temperatures have gone to the next level. This time, bushfire season started in September, which is still spring in Australia. 

It has been relentless. For many farmers, droughts have become the norm rather than the exception, and yet still, Scott Morrison refuses to accept that the climate is changing, that it cannot be ignored as a factor in these horrific, destructive fires. 

In 2013, the CSIRO (Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) released a report which found that Australia can expect higher temperatures, more extreme heat and longer fire seasons. Then, in 2014, the CSIRO released a report that found since the beginning of the 20th century, average annual temperatures have increased and, crucially, in the 50 years leading up to 2014, temperatures increased at twice the rate than in the previous 50 years. Alongside this increase, rainfall has decreased. The data is real and there was a time when it wasn't being ignored.

In 2011, Prime Minister Julia Gillard introduced a carbon tax - in three years, this tax helped reduce carbon emissions but in 2014, Prime Minister Tony Abbott repealed the tax and ramped up coal production and carbon emissions have been increasing ever since. The summers keep getting hotter, the coral of the magnificent Great Barrier Reef is suffering a visible extinction event, and this year's bushfires have, at the time of writing, destroyed more than 900 properties, killed nine people with four people missing, and burnt more than 5.1 million hectares. Oh, and funding for the CSIRO has been cut by the federal government, which should surprise nobody who knows about this wretched government's anti-science, anti-environment agenda.

 It is no longer terribly exciting. 

The fire at the end of my street in 1982 happened at a time when there was limited awareness about the human impact on climate. It all seemed so innocent at the time but we had no idea that we were contributing in ways big and small to the situation we have today. 

It's easy to mock Greta Thunberg for saying her childhood has been stolen. It is easy to say that she should be in school, that she is being manipulated by powers bigger than her, but she is right to suggest that economic growth is meaningless if it comes at great environmental cost. Instead of directing ire at a teenager (and in some vile cases, expressing a desire to inflict physical violence on her), that energy would be better spent finding solutions.

Unfortunately, I can't see the Australian government stepping up any time soon.

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If you're feeling powerless to help Australia, especially from other countries, here are some links where you can make donations, although it would be nice if the federal government stepped up and ensured adequate funding made its way to the states. If this summer is any indication, Australia will not be able to continue to rely on volunteers to back up the full-time firefighters. Scott Morrison's thoughts and prayers can, with all due respect, get in the bin.

Red Cross Bushfire Appeal 

New South Wales Rural Fire Service

Victoria Country Fire Authority

St Vincent de Paul

The Lions Club appeal for the north coast of New South Wales

Port Macquarie Koala Hospital

  

Photography by Kim Newberg

Clean for the Queen: A load of rubbish

If anyone spots me putting rubbish in a bin, ensuring my rubbish and recycling are separated, or not throwing crisp packets and banana skins out of car windows, I would like to make it perfectly clear that I am not doing it for Queen Elizabeth II.

I do it because I really hate littering and I believe in taking responsibility for my small role in keeping Britain tidy. As far as I can remember, I've only littered twice in the almost-40 years I've been alive. A plastic wine glass blew out of my hand when I was on a boat off the coast of Cyprus in 2014. I still feel awful about that. And one night in 2006, I was walking home from a film screening in Dubai while eating Burger King. A man attacked me, tearing my tights and putting his hand down the neckline of my dress, leaving scratches on my decolletage. I got away by elbowing him in the chest, throwing my burger at him, ducking under his arm and running away, leaving a trail of meat, bun, lettuce, tomato, onion and sauce in my wake. I don't feel quite so bad about that one.

The reason why I am making this bizarre statement about not being motivated by the Queen in my quest for cleanliness is the pathetic, embarrassing, forelock-tugging load of toss that is Clean for the Queen.

According to the absurd Clean for the Queen website, the campaign aims to "clear up Britain" in time for June 2016, when apparently it is compulsory to celebrate Liz's 90th birthday or else risk being sent to the tower for high treason.

The website is urging schools, local councils, community groups, businesses and individuals to "do their bit" and clean up the country. Without a trace of irony, the website asks us: "What better way could we show our gratitude to Her Majesty than to clean up our country?".

Oh, I dunno. How about we let her retire, declare a British republic, have an elected upper chamber instead of the bloated farce that is the House of Lords, and grow the hell up?

Or how about instead of just keeping Britain tidy for a few days in June, why don't we ensure that local councils are properly resourced and people are educated so that we can keep Britain tidy at all times?

And while we're on the subject of keeping the place spick and span, perhaps the Queen herself can show a bit of damn gratitude herself and pay her cleaning staff a living wage? The arse-kissing sycophants will say it's an honour to clean Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, and it's great experience (always the excuse of apologists for poverty line wages or, worse, working for free). But if you clean places such as Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, not only are you expected to do more than a cursory turn with a feather duster, you will also need to live in commuting distance of your place of employment - and neither place is renowned for cheap rental properties.

Another look at the laughable website reveals the weird claim that when the Queen came to the throne in 1952, "litter was not the problem that it is today" and goes on to blame "food packaging, plastic bottles, takeaway meals and cigarette butts".

Did people really only start dropping fag ends after 1952? Before plastic bottles, did everyone in Britain really dispose of all their rubbish responsibly? And even if 1950s Britain was a litter-free utopia, it was also a time of coal fires and cars powered by leaded petrol. Fifty-five new coal-fired or oil-fired power stations were opened after Elizabeth II ascended to the throne.

But the mentality behind Clean for the Queen is about rose-tinted nostalgia, of harking back to the so-called good old days, even if there were plenty of things about the good old days that were actually pretty crap, and even if things that have improved since 1952, such as literacy levels, life expectancy and child mortality rates, have precisely nothing to do with the existence of the Queen.

Instead, we have a Clean for the Queen campaign that unsurprisingly, is robustly supported by the government. The Environment Minister, Rory Stewart, is admittedly one of the more sensible people on the government's side of the House of Commons but he still said, in support of Clean for the Queen: "Her Majesty The Queen is an inspiration to all of us. Her 90th birthday is a unique opportunity for people to come together in celebration of Her Majesty's long service and dedication to this country."

Yes! What an opportunity! To pick up litter that litterers should have put in the bin in the first place! To do for free what people should be employed to do! It's scarily similar to businesses such as Tesco taking advantage of work-for-unemployment benefits as a source of free labour instead of being the job creators they profess to be! Well, fancy that!

As a bonus, Clean for the Queen is supported by the Countryside Alliance, those champions of hunting foxes in the most cruel way possible. Let's forget that these people think setting dogs onto foxes is an actual sport and instead congratulate them on picking up some litter.

No. Just no. Clean for the Queen? I'll settle for my local council collecting my rubbish, food waste and recycling every week regardless of who's on the throne.


Photo by Circe Denyer.

Australia! Land of the kitty killers!

The Australian government did something this week that actually makes sense. Plans to cull two million feral cats over the next five years were announced. The internet, predictably, reacted with a barrage of uneducated horror. The way people were carrying on, one could be forgiven for thinking Australia was about to morph into a nation of psychotic kitty killers, with gangs of rogue marksmen taking pot shots at pet shops and beheading much-loved house cats as they slept peacefully on their owners' beds.

People who'd never been to Australia, much less seen an Australian feral cat in real life, were typing in capital letters, such was their fury. And naturally the arguments against the cull were, overall, daft and ill-informed.

Ironically, there were calls for a tourism boycott of Australia. That was particularly idiotic because Australia's amazing natural environment, including native wildlife, is one of the main reasons tourists visit my home country. Feral cats have been linked to the extinction of 28 native species and are threatening at least 100 more. These cats do not belong in Australia. Along with foxes and rabbits, they should never have been introduced by the British in the 1800s. The problem is being dealt with more than 100 years too late - but at least it is being dealt with.

"But humans are the worst destroyers of the planet! Leave the cats alone!" was another wail from the peanut gallery. True. We humans are doing a pretty good job of polluting the place when we're not busy killing each other for stupid reasons. But because we humans have the ability to think rationally and examine scientific evidence, we are best placed to solve our problems, including what the hell to do about a country that is overrun with an estimated 18-20 million feral cats.

The calls for a trap-neuter-release programme are well-intentioned but still misguided. The size of such a task with so many cats in a country the size of Australia would be gargantuan - and completely and utterly ineffective. The neutered, released cats would still kill native wildlife. And when they're not killing native wildlife, they are killing and injuring domestic cats and contributing to the spread of Feline Immunodeficiency Virus as well as diseases among livestock.

To support the cull is to support the survival of native Australian wildlife and responsible cat ownership. Feral cats have been breeding rampantly for generations in the wild and sometimes domestic cats end up going feral too. Cat owners need to get their pets neutered and microchipped and bring them inside at night to be part of the solution.

But if you don't want to take my word for it, click here to get the views of scientists on this issue. Feral cats are not cute kitties. The cull has to happen.



Photo courtesy of the government of the state of Victoria

Fracking and feminism...

Zara is a 10-year-old girl growing up in a developing country. She does not go to school very often because she has to help her mother gather firewood for fuel. In Zara's country, "keeping the home fires burning" is still literally what has to be done to keep the household running. There is no electricity so even if she does make it to school, she won't have any light by which to do her homework at night. She can't access the internet and she has to help her mother do laundry, a labourious task without a washing machine or iron. Keeping floors clean and cooking meals in their basic shelter are not easy tasks for Zara and her mother. They don't have a vacuum cleaner, a dishwasher is an impossible dream, and meals are cooked on a wood-burning stove. This is the reality of an impoverished life without electricity. Zara will go to bed exhausted. If she gets sick, her demise may well be hastened by a substandard hospital with a sporadic electricity supply.

The next day, Zara might make it to school, she might not. It depends on the household fuel situation. Her 12-year-old brother is excused from household chores because that is just the way it is in a traditional, patriarchal society. He gets to school most days - it depends on whether the school bus is running in an area where fuel for transport is at a premium - and he will probably stay in school for longer than his sister will and he might have a few more opportunities in this world. Of course, he won't always get his homework done because of the lack of electricity but he does get to class more often than not.

But Zara will miss out, marry young and have children young because this is the only real prospect for an uneducated girl who is costing her family money to keep alive.

I made Zara up but the details of the story are played out in multiple developing countries all over the world. Last year, I attended a conference in Paris organised by the United Nations and the International Gas Union. It had a strong focus on issues affecting girls and women in the developing world related to fuel poverty. Stories like Zara's were shared by frustrated speakers, by women who work as gas engineers as well as in the arenas of government and development. There are still way more girls than boys who miss out on even a basic education and one of the biggest contributing factors in this injustice is lack of access to energy, something we take for granted in the developed world.

Imagine then, if shale gas or oil was discovered in Zara's community. Do we get our Sarah Palin on and drill, baby, drill?

This would lead to jobs being created, access to energy for towns and villages so families would have light at night, there would be money to buy labour-saving devices such as vacuum cleaners and electricity to power them, refrigeration would mean food would keep for longer, Zara would not miss out on going to school, Zara's mother would be able to cook dinner in a fraction of the time, Zara's mother may even have time to get her first job because her life is not revolving around finding fuel and trying to cook and clean without electricity, the school bus might run every day so boys and girls can all get to school, there may be enough money kicking around to buy a better bus or more buses, reliable access to energy would transform the experience of going to school as well as the lives of people in their homes.

These hydrocarbons would prove to be a great liberator of girls and women.

But to get them out of the ground, fracking would be required.

If you want equal opportunities for girls and women and you disagree with fracking, even if it is the only way to unleash fuel in some places, you have a conundrum. You are essentially opposing access to the one resource that could offer immense freedoms to girls and women. If you are sitting in a developed country reading this and freaking out about fracking, you are opposing access to a resource which probably played an immense part in you being able to complete your education.

So, what do we do?

We could look at best practice in fracking from around the globe and see what could be best applied to Zara's community. Germany has just declared a seven-year moratorium on shale gas fracking but is still allowing tight gas fracking - and Germany has several decades of successful fracking behind it so there are some good lessons to be learnt there. If Germany were to frack some more, they could end their dependency on Russian gas and that'd be a political game-changer. And it is important to know that fracking may not have the same environmental impact on a wide open space with nothing in sight as it would around, say, Blackpool. Not all shale gas sites are created equal.

Or do we say no to all fracking?

OK, fine. Let's say no to all fracking then. But that won't change the fact that fuel poverty is holding many developing countries back - and the resulting disadvantages this creates affect girls and women horrifically and disproportionately.

That fuel needs to come from somewhere.

So, how about we look at our foreign aid allocations? The notion of foreign aid is not a bad one but its implementation is frequently dreadful. How about we look seriously and constructively at ways to help bring energy to developing countries as part of our foreign aid programmes? This obviously raises new questions about whether aid recipients want a nationalised energy supply or to open it up to the free market. But even developing countries have the right to decide on what sort of energy economy they'd prefer and it is arrogant imperialism to suggest otherwise - and it would require sensitive negotiations about whether public-private partnerships would be involved.

If we are not keen to send fuel extracted by fracking to developing countries, or to frack such countries if unconventional oil and gas is found there, but we are serious about alleviating fuel poverty, we need plans B, C, D and E.

Could developed countries that are serious producers and consumers of renewable energy bring their knowledge and technology to the places where aid is needed? Bringing energy production to the developing world is a far better way to spend aid money that to send money directly into government coffers. I realise this is all very utopian, and helping a developing country produce energy could end up being a new way for a corrupt government to line its own pockets, but ending fuel poverty is an essential factor in ending all poverty.

Yet as we sit on our hands, non-fictitious Zaras are not going to school across the world and poor access to energy is a big part of this problem. Access to energy in homes, schools, shops, hospitals and communities - just as many of us have taken for granted for our entire lives - has the potential to be an incredible liberator of girls and women.

The annual farce that is Earth Hour

What did I do for Earth Hour last night? Er, I watched a movie with my husband, an act which required the magic of electricty. We had one light on, the fridge was still running, it was a bloody cold night in London so the heating was going, and the router was turned on because we're nerds who look stuff up while watching movies so we can say: "Oh yeah, she was in that thing with that other bloke...".

In short, we didn't do anything out of the ordinary for the hour. We weren't being extravagantly wasteful and, besides, sitting miserably in the cold and dark struck us as a ridiculous way to make a point about saving the planet.

But every year for Earth Hour, the terminally self-righteous come out of the woodwork and declare to all and sundry how they turned everything off for 60 minutes. To add to the stupidity, a mass switch-on at the end of the hour can actually place additional strain on the grid. It's a token gesture and if you're at all serious about environmental issues, surely it's better to set an example all year round and campaign on the bigger issues.

A sense of proportion is urgently required. Steve Hughes, a fantastic stand-up comedian, said it best: "They're running around the world dropping depleted uranium all over the Earth, sitting there letting nuclear weapons off under the sea, and the rest of us, what are we going to do? Sit at home, with a special light bulb and a shopping bag for life."

While there's no harm in using energy in a sane manner, recycling and generally showing a bit of respect for the world in which we live, sanctimoniously living like an Amish person for an hour a year is idiotic.

This year's Earth Hour happened in the same week that George Osborne, Britain's woefully unqualified Chancellor, announced compensation for communities adversely affected by energy companies seeking to develop Britain's shale gas industry. Meanwhile, it looks like hybrid cars will no longer be exempt from London's congestion charge as of July, thus reducing the incentive for private motorists and companies to buy such cars. Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, wasted £1.4 million of public money on technology that is meant to "glue" pollution to the roads, but it doesn't work. All this probably should have attracted a bit more noise from environmentalists. Nah, sod it. Let's sit in the dark for an hour!


Photo by Paul McMillan

Donald Trump, Alex Salmond and a load of balls

The bulldozers have moved in and acres of once-unspoilt rugged Scottish land have been destroyed so that Donald Trump can build what he claims will be "the world's best golf course."

Except this allegedly amazing course in Aberdeenshire only sort-of opened on July 10, 2012. It's just one of two planned courses, it's served by a temporary clubhouse and the rest of the development, which was to include a hotel, holiday villas and luxury homes, is now on hold. Apparently, Trump is upset that the rest of the course will have to suffer with views of a proposed wind farm if construction continues. In his world, a sustainable source of energy is uglier than flattening a glorious landscape of scientific significance.*

Determined residents are still living on the Menie Estate amid the half-done development, constantly under threat of eviction by compulsory purchase orders. Trump decided not to build a hotel with a view of what he called "a slum". Obviously, Trump has never been to an actual slum because then he would realise that Michael Forbes' farm, with assorted outbuildings and machinery that is either operational or set aside for recycled parts, is not a slum. Indeed, plenty of people who live in real slums can only dream of living in such a property.

Over the course of the development, residents were deprived of electricity and water, earth was moved to build massive berms to both hide the houses from the sensitivities of rich golfers and to obscure any shreds of remaining pleasant views from the recalcitrant residents.

The 6,000 jobs that were supposed to be created have not materialised.

Trump took it upon himself to rename the Menie Dunes "the Great Dunes of Scotland." That would be the dunes that have been bulldozed beyond recognition and turned into Technicolor golfing greens.

The website for the development** features a gallery of idyllic, heavily PhotoShopped images of golf courses by the sea. There are some images featuring earthmoving equipment, parked alongside greens that are being wastefully watered or sitting by flattened out sand. They look like Matchbox toys rather than brutal beasts of ecological destruction. There are pictures of smooth stretches of sand with footprints - they look like those cheesy "Footprints" posters you get in Christian bookshops, only they are shots of areas where only the privileged can leave footprints these days.

Kevin Cameron, the photographer, should be ashamed of himself but he was probably paid well enough to abandon the luxury of principles. Just as Scotland's First Minister, Alex Salmond, abandoned any pretence of respect for the natural environment or the rights of residents when he let this whole shameful development go ahead unchecked, when he did nothing about journalists being arrested on the site for trying to do their job, for maintaining a lack of transparency by refusing requests for interviews about the development.

But Trump has now bitten Salmond on the bum. A tacky image of battered wind turbines is the only blatant propaganda on the website - with Trump's spruikers saying that Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond wants to build "8,750 of these monstrosities". This is how Trump rewards loyalty.

Salmond is too busy these days flying the flag for Scottish independence - but he is in charge of a country he is not fit to run.

__________________________

* To see more on this complete and utter disgrace, here is the excellent BBC2 documentary You've Been Trumped: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01nln7g/Youve_Been_Trumped/

For people outside the UK, here are some helpful links to the You've Been Trumped documentary

The documentary on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jp2ehUOV9cQ

How to buy the DVD: http://www.youvebeentrumped.com/youvebeentrumped.com/BUY_DVD.html

** In case you feel like being a little bit ill, here is the golf course website in all its glory: http://www.trumpgolfscotland.com/Default.aspx?p=DynamicModule&PageId=278788&ssid=153035&vnf=1

Image courtesy of www.kozzi.com