James Delingpole James Delingpole

Sorry, Anne Glover, but you were just too scientific for the Green Blob

Holding the ‘correct’ view on climate change is one thing, but you also have to swallow the official line on GM crops

The Green Blob which did for Owen Paterson has claimed another victim. Her name is Anne Glover and she was, until recently, chief scientific adviser to the President of the European Commission.

‘I believe her outstanding background and calibre will bring invaluable expertise to the Commission,’ said former president José Manuel Barroso when she was appointed in December 2011. Indeed they did, and that was the problem. As with its chief accountants (see Marta Andreasen), so it is with its chief scientists: the very last thing the EU wants is pesky experts presenting inconvenient truths which threaten to impede it from doing whatever the hell it likes. Especially not if those truths upset its powerful allies in the green lobby.

Up until May this year, Professor -Glover had seemed an ideal fit for the job. Most importantly — as Alex Salmond’s former chief scientist — she held the ‘correct’ views on climate change, even to the point of suggesting that global warming might lengthen the hours of daylight in Scotland.

But then she made the fatal mistake of being rather too outspoken and independent in a speech to Eurochambres, the Association of the European Chambers of Commerce and Industry, on the subject of the manipulation of science for political ends sometimes known as ‘policy-based evidence-making’.

One of the worst examples, she noted, was the EU’s ‘Reach’ regulation on chemicals adopted in 2006. Though as many as 36 different independent impact assessment studies had demonstrated that this would have a disastrous effect on business, the EU preferred to ignore them all in favour of its own impact study which, unsurprisingly, showed that Reach was a jolly good thing.

Another example she might have mentioned was the EU’s ban in May last year on neonicotinoids — an effective pesticide which till then was widely used in Britain on crops like oil seed rape, and which green campaigners had decided on the flimsiest of evidence was causing bee colonies to collapse.

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