Taxpayers’ money being bunged to mega-rich US firm to keep food on our shelves is scandalous

Bleak bung

IT is scandalous that taxpayers’ money is having to be bunged to a mega-rich US firm to keep food on our supermarket shelves.

Why do we rely on just two UK factories, which can be shut down by American executives on a whim, to ­produce most of the CO2 Britain needs?

We don’t blame Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng for the emergency bailout. What choice did he have?

CO2 is vital for everything from beer-making to meat packaging to slaughterhouses and even some NHS surgery.

But the moment gas prices soared, the US giant pulled the plug on its UK plants.

Such a vital national resource should not be at the mercy of a foreign owner’s profit worries.

And once again our abject failure to produce a long-term energy plan has been savagely exposed.

Fracking, for instance, could have shielded us from global gas price surges.

Instead we are shockingly vulnerable and blowing public money we can ill afford.

Biden’s shame

WE understand why Boris Johnson, in New York, is diplomatic over Joe Biden’s Afghanistan catastrophe.

“America had been there 20 years and it’s a respectable argument to say enough is enough,” the PM argued.

Possibly. Except it also involved the total surrender of the gains of those 20 years and handing back power, plus a vast arsenal, to Islamist terrorists.

There was briefly a straw-clutching theory that the Taliban are more moderate now. Tell that to the girls and women forced back into burkhas, denied ­education, work or political office. Or all those now on the fanatics’ death list.

This was Biden’s career-defining betrayal no one, not even Boris, should defend.

Lagging loons

WE doubt even the boneheaded blackmailers blocking the M25 really think Downing Street will cave in to them.

Every other idiot with a grievance would then halt traffic.

So let us call these eco “protests” what they are: A virtue-signalling performance for TV and social media. And risk-free, since police keep the morons safe and our pathetic justice system barely even inconveniences them.

Imagine, though, being a vicar sworn to doing good yet deliberately inflicting suffering and distress on thousands of drivers in the cause of loft lagging.

Less Martin Luther King, more the vicars of dimly.

Here’s Wally

IT’S the perfect spot to stop over on your way back from a long summer holiday.

The water’s cold, there’s heaps of fish and you’re halfway home to the Arctic.

And that’s why wandering walruses go to Iceland.