Attended the regular quarterly of the East Midlands Regional Assembly at Melton Mowbray. Am horrified to hear the report by Regional Health Authority - who tell us that our region is the most obese not just in the whole of the UK but the most obese region in the whole of Europe!
When I get my five minutes to speak to the assembled councillors, I ask them to start giving me opinions or lobbying advice about forthcoming EU laws which are under consideration in the parliament. But I receive the usual Westminster-type “ya-boo” response. A Labour councillor making the asinine comment that “you should sort yourself out”, and a Tory councillor saying that he found Helmer satisfactory (even though Helmer has been expelled from his political group in the European Parliament), and then proving to me that he did not know about the EU Postal Directive (which liberalises distribution of letters from 2001 within the EU but has nothing to do with the UK Labour government closing rural post offices which the Tory insisted it did).
I sometimes despair at the inward-looking confrontational attitudes of Westminster which the Tory and Labour councillors copy. We all now live in a globalising world, and need to work together to match the growing might of China and India, rather than continue shouting “ya-boo” at each other in the goldfish bowl that Britain is in danger of becoming.
At a briefing for MEPs given by EASA (the European Air safety Agency) we are told that they “can reduce aircraft emissions by 12% at a stroke”. Challenged to explain how, the answer is to create a single European air space”.
At present, aircraft weave their way across Europe and are subject to instructions from each country’s air traffic controllers. The result is a zig-zag flight-path across European skies. If there were a single set of traffic controllers - as there is for the USA - aircraft could come in to land on a straight line and thus save lots of fuel. Why doesn’t this happen? Because each national government in Europe wants to keep control in its own little hands, rather than seeing the bigger beneficial picture.
Lunch with one of the men who will take over when Bill Gates retires from Microsoft in June. Asked about Climate Change, he says the world’s only hope is a technology breakthrough and the problem which worries him out is whether the breakthrough will be allowed to get to market. The breakthrough, he says, is unlikely to come from a big corporation but from some smaller outsider.
There is plenty of energy around us, but hydrogen will not be the big source. We need a better electricity buffering mechanism. The future may lie with lots of individual energy generators, most probably solar powered, and linked together by a grid.
The biggest change in micro processors of the last 30 years will come in the next five years because computer manufacturers have reached a physical heat emission limitation with current microchips. Over the next ten years the speed of computers will increase fifty fold, voice recognition may become perfect, equipment will be integrated so there will be no separate telephones for example. One can foresee that simultaneous interpretation will be done by high-speed computers and they may perhaps replace human interpreters.
At a briefing for MEPs by Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, we hear about the fake medicines which are starting to find their way into chemist shops and appear to be in genuine packaging.
The speaker also said that Pfizer also wondered who buys Viagra on the internet when it is highly likely to be useless or even dangerous? Pfizer did the research to find the answer. They discovered that Viagra is bought on the internet mainly by middle-aged men in suits: these men say they buy it that way “because there is no time to go to the doctor” and they gamble that the pills will be genuine. In sad contrast, men in Africa buy Viagra on the internet because it is cheap and they also gamble that it will be genuine.
So, either way, the organised criminal gangs who are behind the internet advertisements, make money with fake pills made in China.
Welcome to my Blog.
It’s purpose is to provide you with occasional valuable snippets of information which I come across in my role as the MEP for the East Midlands. It does not try to be a diary of every event.
I hope you find some of it useful.
You are most welcome to comment about it.
You can also contact me by email. My email address is bill.newtondunn@europarl.europa.eu
I promise to reply to you.
Best wishes, Bill
