You thought David Cameron’s EU vision was full of platitudes and meaningless phrases? Check out those of Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett – oddly published in a Romanian newspaper, far out of sight of the British public… (via)

Lots of guff about climate change and “building the world’s first competitive, energy secure, low carbon economy” – and precisely tit-all on the more important, short-term problem of, erm… precisely what is the UK’s current position on the much-needed reform of the EU and the constitution?

And then, of course, there’s the (by now all too familiar) hypocrisy of the whole thing:

an analysis showed that [Beckett] had taken 134 flights on ministerial business between 2002 and March 2005, clocking up 102,673 miles and 191.08 tons in CO2 emissions.

The latest figures produced from a careful study of all flights by Mrs Beckett include long-haul flights on scheduled airline services, not included in the list of trips she made using the Queen’s Flight, which caused an outcry yesterday. She has used the Queen’s Flight for short hops from London to East Midlands airport, near her constituency, and also for one-day return trips to Brussels for EU ministerial meetings.

And that, please note, from BEFORE she was Foreign Secretary and actually had the occasional genuine reason to jet off all round the world…

Nice one, Marge. Ever heard of “practice what you preach”?