The Parliamentary Debate on Neonicotinoids

I have to apologise for suggesting that signing the "don't kill our bees" petition here might be useful. I didn't realise that forcing a parliamentary debate with almost 100,000 votes would be such a useless exercise.

The format is: A proposer, followed by a string of "speeches" which are interrupted almost every other sentence by other MPs in the debate. Then the government Minister responds to the debate.

The highlights included:

• Dozens of childish bee puns
• The Chairwomen was wished a happy birthday all night long
• Most debaters (and the proposer) said they were not an expert - and then went on to prove it
• Only two MPs made a useful contribution, but they were interrupted constantly for trivial points like "Would the RT Honorable Gentleman like to congratulate the West Lothian Bee Keeping Association (BKA) on their latest bee initiative."

The Minister had an easy task of dismissing all concerns and congratulating the various BKAs.

Many MPs stated they had just as much correspondence (in one case over 50,000 letters/emails) as they had on the war in Syria. People are really concerned about pollinators, and they deserve MPs to properly debate the issue when they have the researched the facts and shut up when they haven't a clue or a useful contribution.

A far better system would be an expert panel, not MPs, from both sides of the debate in touch with the latest research, asking the minister really searching questions.

Head over here if you can stand seeing democracy inaction (oops there should be a space between those words).