SOME RECENT PRESS RELEASES

19/2/7 NO TO ROAD PRICING BUT MORE DRIVING TAXES SHOULD BE SPENT ON IMPROVING OUR ROAD INFRASTRUCTUE

The 9% Growth Party believe that proposals for road pricing would be expensive & involve the sort of expensive computerisation which the government has repeatedly had failures & mass cost overruns.

We also consider that the civil liberty aspect - that it would give government complete information & ultimately control over where anybody who drives is - has not been properly considered.

We also point out that tax on petrol already provide, at much lower collection expense, a pretty fair analogue of congestion costs in that town driving uses much more petrol per mile than country driving & waiting in queues even moreso.

We have instead called for more money to be spent on improving roads. Currently the Scottish Executive are committed to spending 70% of their transport budget on 'public transport" which is largely code for railways, despite the fact that rail makes up about 2% of traffic. We could also call for money spent on rail to be put towards fully automating selected systems.

The Glasgow/Edinburgh "motorway" should be widened & instead of putting a bullet train between the cities a far simpler automated line running 24/7 with carriages leaving every few minutes should be considered.

We have also supported building a monorail to Glasgow airport for a quoted price of £20 million rather than over £200 million for a rail link.

Spending £610 million on a rail tunnel into Edinburgh airport when all that is needed is a moving walkway from the rail line that passes by is also a waste of money.

Open quotes for a new Forth crossing should be invited from the world's engineericompaniesies. We are convinced that a tunnel would turn out to be the most cost effective option. Norway has built 730 km of tunnels at between £3.5 & £11 kilometre & we have seen no explanation as to why we cannot do so here.

We would like to see the building of tunnels not merely under theForth but also Gourock/Dunnon. to Bute, to Kintyre, to Arran, to Jura, to Islay, to Mull to the Hebrides & if the £1 billion planned for the Forth crossing hasn't run out, to Orkney, Ulster & Man.

Road traffic is the most convenient & flexible sysrem that exists & it is government's duty to spend more of the money they raise from motorists on roads - not merely for the benefit of drivers but as one of the few ways the government can help the entire economy the entire economy.

13/2/07 CZECH PRESIDENT DENOUNCES GLOBAL WARMING SCARE

"Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so. It is not fair to refer to the U.N. panel. IPCC is not a scientific institution: it's a political body, a sort of non-government organization of green flavor

it's an undignified slapstick that people don't wait for the full report in May 2007 but instead respond, in such a serious way, to the summary for policymakers where all the "but's" are scratched, removed, and replaced by oversimplified theses

Other top-level politicians do not express their global warming doubts because a whip of political correctness strangles their voice.

Environmentalism as a metaphysical ideology and as a worldview has absolutely nothing to do with natural sciences or with the climate. Sadly, it has nothing to do with social sciences either. Still, it is becoming fashionable and this fact scares me.

Q: Don't you believe that we're ruining our planet?

A: I will pretend that I haven't heard you. Perhaps only Mr Al Gore may be saying something along these lines: a sane person can't. I don't see any ruining of the planet, I have never seen it, and I don't think that a reasonable and serious person could say such a thing"

Vaclav Klaus, dissident, Czech President
http://www.drudgereportarchives.com/data/2007/02/12/20070212_161315_flash.htm

Perhaps Ross Finnie, who says anybody who doubts the impartiality of Al Gore's film, as we have, is "from Mars" may wish to retract.

The 9% Growth Party wishes to congratulate Mr Klaus, who is clearly able to recognise a politically correct lie, even when it is supported by a monolithic media campaign, when he sees one. One could wish that politicians not brought up under communism had developed similarly sensitive antennae.

Note that this was not picked up by any paper. This is unsurprising when you consider that his remarkable statement has been missing from virtually the entire mainstream media.

6/2/07 BBC ARE WRONG TO SAY WINDMILLS GIVE CHEAP POWER

This morning BBC Radio Scotland did a feature on the proposed new line of pylons across the Highlands to carry windfarm electricity.

During the programme the presenter referred to this as being "cheap & renewable". In fact onshore windmills cost 5.4p a unit, twice the cost of coal power & 4 times what French nuclear costs.

http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:XUGG4sNU4NsJ:www.countryguardian.net/generation_costs_report.pdf+nuclear+cost+royal&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&ie=UTF-8
Neil craig twice rang the programme to ask them to correct this inaccuracy. but they did not do so.

At any time the BBC should show a concern for truthful reporting. particularly on political issues. With a Scottish election coming up the BBC, who have a long history of giving large amounts of airtime to "Green" issues, spokesmen & politicians while denying it to supporters of technological progress should exercise particular caution in reporting truthfeveny & evn, in theory, without political bias.




2/2/7 IT IS WRONG & AGAINST THE LAW TO TELL CHILDREN GORE'S FILM IS IMPARTIAL

Is "An Inconvenient Truth" genuinely a non-political & impartial documentary giving nothing but the truth, the whole truth & nothing but the truth about alleged global warming. I think not. Irrespective of whether warming let alone catastrophic warming is really happening the assurance that we are going to have massive sea level rises etc. is at best highly improbable & purely spinning a questionable partisan line.

This film is being shown to every Scottish schoolchild by order of our political masters.

Ross Finnie says that there is no debate in Scotland over warming & that anybody who says there is is "from Mars". This is pure eco-fascism - when any free debate is allowed to ordinary people it has been repeatedly shown that the sceptical view is predominant & highly defencible on the facts. I would like to remind the Executive & indeed head teachers of their lawful duty:

1966 Education Act section 406 "The local education authority, governing body and head teacher shall forbid .... the promotion of partisan political views in the teaching of any subject in the school." Section 407 requires that "where political issues are brought to the attention of pupils .... they are offered a balanced presentation of opposing views."

To show the Gore propaganda film in isolation would surely be in flagrant breach of the law.




30/10/06 STERN REPORT

The Release by the government of the Stern report, with attendant media hullabaloo is being used as evidence of global warming. It is no such thing it is merely a listing of the worst possible cases in the event that the world temperature were to grow somewhere (anywhere) between 2 & 5 degrees.

In fact the total temperature increase in the last century was 0.6 degrees & still well within known temperature highs during the Medieval & Late Roman Warming Periods. With the mathematics of the Hockeystick Theory, on which the original IPCC report leaned heavily, having been proven invalid, & the temperature being stable since their report promising massive increases, there is no credible evidence to support a higher temperature.

The Stern Report does not mention the supposed costs of an increase of less than 2 degrees though this is obviously vastly more likely. This is because the effects of such a rise would largely be beneficial.

Perhaps not coincidentally the government are, at the same time, trailing proposals for massive tax increase to be sold to us on the basis of the need to fight global warming. With the Lib Dems having already made such proposals & the Conservatives visibly on the verge of the same we are clearly being prepared for massive tax increases in a Scotland where 54% of every pound spent is spent by the government. Whatever pleasures this might give the professional politicians it would increase poverty & have a disastrous long term effect on our economy.

The 9% GROWTH Party is unambiguous in saying that catastrophic Global Warming is a myth & that we do far more harm to ourselves through such fears than warming could ever do. With Kyoto costing £400 million a day worldwide & having, according to its own calculations, cut global temperature by 2 thousandths of a degree we, virtually alone, are offering the voters reasonable policies.



26/10/06 NUCLEAR POWER

Energy analysts Wood MacKenzie have warned that Britain faces the real possibility, though not yet probability of blackouts this winter because we are not replacing our ageing reactors.

There is no question that we will face winter blackouts on a massive scale if we do not replace our current reactors & the portion of our coal power that will fail to meet new emission standards the EU have imposed for 2015. In Scotland this amounts to half our electricity. There is no possibility whatsoever that this can be fully replaced by windmills, tidal, cabin capture. fusion or fairy dust within this timescale.
Whether we have blackouts & deaths this winter or not we will inevitably have them soon if we don't build new nuclear power before Hunterston closes in 2011.
Electricity has to be produced somewhere it doesn't just come out of the sockets by magic.

Every single "environmentally aware" politician & activist knows this. Every single one of them who has opposed nuclear power is quite deliberately guilty of killing 24,000 UK pensioners who die because of fuel poverty every year. Every single one of them will be as guilty of each death occurring during blackouts as Stalin was for the Soviet famine deaths. Such people should be brought to justice.

There is no excuse whatsoever for current high electricity prices which kill people & damage our economy & even less (if less than zero is possible) for the coming blackouts

At the spring 2001 Scottish Lib Dem conference the 9% Growth Party leader, Neil Craig, who was then a Lib Dem said in a speech that a failure to support new nuclear power "would be & would be seen to be grossly irresponsible". In reply Ross Finnie guaranted that the Scottish Executive would not 'allow" blackouts. Mr Craig stands by his statement & asks the Executive to repeat their guarantee.