Search facility temporarily suspended

Unfortunately Google has made some modifications to its custom search engine, which seems to have resulted in it failing to find any search results, this has affected a number of users world wide myself included. As a result of this I have had to pull the search box from the site until I am able to come up with a replacement.

The theme of the last few post taking a dig at DEFRA continues this week with the news that Natural England is in the process of ditching the Discovering Lost Ways project, which devoured almost £5million from the DEFRA budget, and delivered nothing. Not a single lost way has found its way on to the definitive map. Despite this the department is about to “invest” £50million in a scheme to introduce a statutory right of access to the English coast – driven, apparently by the rationale that it will help combat obesity and depression. Strange thing is 70% of the coast is already accessible and the remainder is full of commercial ports, military establishments and mudflats. Why spend so much on something most people don’t need?

And while DEFRA is busy spending so much money on such a worthwhile project it is having to slash approximately £170million from the animal health and welfare budget, oh, and the supposedly ring-fenced research and development budgets are also coming under pressure. It is likely that rigorous and practical field research will be replaced by desk analysis, with all the corresponding implications for the management of disease such as blue tongue and avian flu

To finish with here are two of my favourite pull quotes from the last few weeks;

“We will never see BBC ‘Wildlife’ running straight reports on the fact that the Wildlife Trusts cull deer, or that the RSPB kills deer, foxes and crows on some of its nature reserves”

“So, they’re all at it – MPs, MEPs, the whole stinking, rotten lot of them. They’ve got their snouts in the trough and they don’t want us to see what they’re doing”