Tough on Climes, Tough on the Causes of Climes

In the wake of the Stern report on climate change, and with 2006 set to be the hottest year in the last two centuries, the British government is, as one would expect, ordering the country's leading climate change research centre to cut its budget. The Met Office says it has been "asked" (or, in Standard English, told) to cut at least five million pounds over three years from sixty million it gets for "equipment for the main forecasting centre". The sixty million comes from the Ministry of Defence. There is also a possibility of cuts from another seventeen million which the centre receives from the War Office and Defra, the Department of Environmental Fragging, for the purposes of climate change research. The Ministry for Humanitarian Slaughter says that it has to make "efficiency savings" of 2.8 thousand million over three years, some of which might possibly help to pay for the Son of Trident boondoggle; but that "specific details, including Met Office funding, were not formally set". A spokesbeing for the Department of Environmental Fustian, Recalcitrance and Avoidance claimed there were "no 'plans' to cut Met Office funding", which of course is as good as saying that they expect half the staff to spend Christmas filling in job application forms. The Hadley Centre forecasting programme is "under review" and Defra is "'looking at ways to work more closely with' other UK research centres". Presumably, in the tradition of New Labour's merged police forces, Kentucky Fried Healthcare and the forthcoming national identity lottery, this means we can look forward to the institution of a single, profitable, gargantuan, cutting-edge, profitable research centre, financed by a tax on the use of tap water (henceforward to be monitored with detector vans by a specially-created green subsection of the Special Branch) and run in PFI partnership with BP, the nuclear industry and Ryanair.