Paul Nuttall MEP (UK Independence Party)

Date published: 12/03/2010

It has been another debilitating week in Strasbourg. It isn’t hard graft, unlike when I worked in a timber warehouse in my younger years, but the travelling is ridiculous and depressing: Liverpool to Manchester by car, then Manchester to Paris by plane and then Paris to Strasbourg by train.

All I am missing is John Candy as an irritating companion and it really would be Planes, Trains and Automobiles!

Why we have to take part in the farce is anyone’s guess. There is already a parliament in Brussels, so why drag us to Strasbourg once a month? The answer, if you hadn’t guessed it, is the French.

The French are adamant that the Strasbourg parliament remains, so we all have to spend a whole day travelling to a city that the French make impossible to get to direct by air. Absolutely ridiculous.

Once you get to Strasbourg, the city is beautiful and I would recommend it to any tourist. The parliament itself is couple of miles out of the centre and is an appalling bit of architecture, so I would recommend that the would-be tourist gives it a miss.

Once inside, the building is a labyrinth of grey corridors and the offices of dingy and equally dismal. It certainly is not the neo-gothic splendour of Westminster.

I made a couple of speeches this week: the first on my ‘hobby horse’ of so-called man made climate change and the second to the High Representative, Baroness Ashton of Upholland.

During the climate change debate, I implored the Commission to “think, pause and consider the ramifications of implementing policies that could wreck economies, lead to job losses and possibly create energy chaos.”

Of course they won’t think and pause; they will continue down the road of green taxes and unrealistic targets, and won’t give a damn about what the people think or who they harm.

I remember a couple of months ago when I questioned the President of the Commission, Jose Manuel Barosso, about the job losses at the Corus steel plant in Redcar and he replied that the losses were an “unfortunate consequence.”

The Commission also pays no attention to fact that the pseudo science, which it consistently quotes, is now falling apart. First we have had the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia, then the debacle of Himalayan glaciers and now there are questions about how ‘climate change’ will effect the wildlife in Amazon rainforest.

I genuinely think now is the right time to ‘take stock’ and think about the consequences of our actions. It is just a pity the Commission dismissed my suggestion out of hand.

My second speech came at the expense of Baroness Ashton. The good Baroness was appointed High Representative late last year. The job title, High Representative, is also misleading, for she is, in effect, the Foreign Minister of Europe.

We, in the UK Independence Party, were opposed to her appointment from the start for we rightly pointed out that she had not been elected to anything in her political life. Unbelievably, she is the highest paid female politician in the world and nobody has elected her.

I started my speech by informing the Baroness that I would be blunt, as “one Lancastrian to another.” I then told her that she is stumbling from one crisis to another and that she is completely out of her depth.

It is also reported that Baroness Ashton will be provided with a private jet, as the Commission believes she will travel up to 300,000 miles a year.

“This is enough to get you to the Moon” I said, “and perhaps that is where you should stay.”

Baroness Ashton obviously didn’t like what I had to say and responded by ‘pulling faces.’ It was all good fun, it ended up being shown on the BBC Ten O’clock News, but it all had a very serious point: Expect the Unelected.