Burberry’s bonfire of vanitiesv EU milk powder madness

Bonfire the tip of the iceberg! BBC News, July 19:

Burberry, the upmarket British fashion label, destroyed … [goods worth] £28.6m last year to protect its brand … [and more than £90m] over the past five years … Burberry said that the ­energy generated from burning its products was captured, making it environmentally friendly … Environmental campaigners are angry about the waste … said Lu Yen Roloff of Greenpeace. “The growing amount of overstock points to overproduction, and instead of slowing down their production, they incinerate perfectly good clothes and products … Burberry is just the tip of the iceberg,” she said. 

Let them burn milk! Emmet Livingstone, Politico, January 29:

Milk lakes and butter mountains were meant to be a relic of Europe’s past. …[but] in the teeth of a dairy crisis, Brussels has … used public money to buy some 380,000 metric tons of skim milk powder … more than … dairy powerhouse … France produced in 2016 … On Monday, EU agriculture ministers … conceded that stocks of almost 400,000 tons … [created] “a very clear risk of oversupply”. [On top of 380,000 tonnes of skim milk powder in storage] Erwin Schopges of the European Milk Board … [said]: “This is … [how the EU] manage crises.” … Officials [are considering using milk powder] as fuel.

And to CAP off the craziness. Ciaran McGrath, Express, February 23:

Pieter Cleppe of Open Europe said the … [EU] “had its head in the sand” … [on] farming subsidies … [Former UK PM’s wife] Samantha Cameron’s aristocratic father, Sir Reginald Adrian Berkeley Sheffield … has received at least £614,577.26 in [Common Agricultural policy] payments between 2008 and 2016 … [and] may have received … £2.7m in the last 15 years.

Make US waste great again. Jacob Bunge, The Australian, July 23:

America’s pork pileup: tariffs help create a meat mountain

Cake in the sky? Leo Varadkar, Irish PM, press conference, Thursday:

The UK is part of the single European sky … [in] a no-deal hard Brexit … the planes would not fly and Britain would be an island in many ways … You can’t have your cake and eat it [or] take back your waters and then expect to take back other people’s sky.

Simon Osborne, Express, July 20:

Freedoms of the air are not guaranteed by the EU but by the 1944 International Air Services Transit Agreement … MP [Jacob] Rees-Mogg said: “Air traffic control continued between Russia and the Ukraine after Russia invaded the Crimea so this idea is just silly … [most EU-US flights] pass through UK air traffic control so this rather lightweight Irish gentleman is proposing an absurd act of a masochistic nature. His words are those of an airhead.”

Punch in the cakehole. Rod Liddle, The Sunday Times, July 22:

It is true, of course, that we have oppressed Ireland since the financial crisis by bunging it more than £20bn of UK taxpayers’ money to bail out its wrecked economy, for which we expected no thanks and, indeed, did not receive any. That was, I dare say, perceived as colonialist and patronising by Mr Varadkar and Mrs [Theresa] May should probably apologise to him … Leo’s latest offensive is … another … false threat … And yet he is not alone. The entire process of negotiating our exit from the EU has been accompanied by … empty threats and vindictiveness flung at us each week by the rabble of drunkards and lawyers the EU employs to make sure that anyone who wishes to leave the benighted institution gets, first of all, a punch in the face and then, later, a punch in the face.