pumpkinstrokemarrow

And then we have my Marks & Spencer. I was intrigued by a claim plastered over a branch at Worthing that they plan to have a carbon neutral operation in the British Isles (including here the second largest as well as the first largest of them) in the not too distant future. How on earth are you going to produce food in the tropics, process it, package it up and deliver it to Worthing carbon neutrally? Are they proposing to buy up huge swathes of forest which they then devote to carbon lock-down to offset all the carbon blow-up in the rest of their operation? Sufficiently intrigued to work my way through to the corporate part of their web site where I quickly track down something called Plan A, fully of entirely worthy eco objectives. Goal 3 thereof is indeed to make operations in said isles carbon neutral. Worthy indeed. Action 1 thereof will ensure that six hard core agricultural products - for example beef - come from sustainable sources that do not involve deforestation. Worthy but a long way short of carbon neutrality. Action 2 will look into ways of reducing the carbon footprint of six hard core food products. Ditto. Action 3 will have a go at the carbon footprint of 100 clothes factories. Ditto. Action 4 will make their refrigerators more efficient. Ditto. Perhaps I am missing something but on my reading so far my M&S is claiming in its head line a lot more than it is planning to deliver any time soon. Perhaps they have been taking lessons from our politicos. Or perhaps I should be glad that they are trying and stop whinging about their puffing?

Thinking back to the difficulties of politicos, yesterday's Guardian devoted a couple of pages to the killing of a demonstrator in the course of a demonstration which turned nasty. All very sad and made worse by the failure to pin the blame on anyone in particular - and in this case someone bashed the demonstrator very hard on the head and would, to my mind, be hard put to put all the blame on institutional anything - but it was thirty years ago. Are we still so uneasy about our policemen that we are still dragging over stuff which is that old?

And it devoted a couple of column inches to the proposed incarceration of a British football fan in Portugal for an offence committed four years ago. It seems that some football fans ran wild after a match and the presumably infuriated Portuguese handed out some fairly summary justice, more or less the next day. Our chap was given a custodial sentence which he thought had been commuted to deportation but now, four years later, the Portuguese are now calling him in. A process which is facilitated by our integration into the machinery of European justice. Our chap also claims that he was entirely innocent. All very odd. But has the Guardian got the balance of coverage right here? Would a hard-core of discussion of this current issue have done more good in the world than raking over the old one?