Ken Livingston was trained as a teacher but entered politics at an early age. After a successful coup in 1982 he took over the leadership of the Labour Group on the Greater London Council. Margaret Thatcher was so horrified that in 1986 she abolished his parliament and sold off County Hall…a stone’s throw from the Houses of Parliament…to a Japanese Hotel Consortium. The Sun liked to refer to him as ‘the most obnoxious man in Britain’.

Red Ken won the nomination to be the Labour Party MP for Brent one of the largest constituencies in London. Then in 2000 despite…or because of…being disowned by Labour Party’s apparatchiks and thrown out of the Labour Party he became Mayor of London...effectively for the second time. The Sun is right. He is an old-style Socialist.

Hugo Chávez served in the military for seventeen years before his failed coup in 1992 put him in a Venezuelan jail for two years. An admirer of Fidel Castro his election to the Presidency of Venezuela in 1999 sent alarm bells ringing in Washington.

Over in Outer Darkness amidst the Moral Majority, the TV Evangelist and Right-wing Republican Pat Robertson suggested that the CIA should ‘take out’ Senor Chávez after his well-publicised remarks that ‘Capitalism leads us straight to hell’ and ‘The USA brought 9/11 on itself with its imperial foreign policy’. These are hardly newsworthy utterances in a South American context. But then Venezuela has oil…and the USA has an Oil Addiction.

Our Socialist London Mayor believes that western foreign policy is responsible for breeding Islamic Terrorism. He is also on record as saying that ‘worldwide capitalism kills more people every day than Hitler did’…qualified of late with the remark ‘and he was crazy’ to avoid inflaming the Holocaust Defence League.

The thing that really got Margaret Thatcher's goat was Red Ken’s insistence that London needed to talk to the IRA because the IRA were bombing the place. Twenty years later he has taken the logic of this statement one stage further by exploring the idea of Direct Barter between London and Venezuela. And it looks like he may have got himself a deal with Venezuela supplying diesel to London’s 8000 buses at 40% below market price...and BP or Shell responsible for delivery.

Earlier this week a two-page memo was leaked from the London Mayor’s Office with some suggestions about the favours Londoners might trade in return for their cheap Venezuelan oil. It makes for interesting reading. Top of the list is access to London’s CCTV and Genetic Fingerprinting expertise. Other ideas are how to operate a city’s security and public order systems operate; how to integrate and manage overground traffic; how to route buses; how to limit carbon dioxide emissions and how to develop adult education programmes. Click here to read the Venezuelan President's reply.

Meanwhile across the Irish Sea, out in the country and down on the farm Policymakers have discovered that Irish Agriculture accounts for 29% of Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions…and that half of this emerges from the front and back ends of the animals which give us Irish Beef and Kerrygold Butter.

Methane is twenty times as lethal as Carbon Dioxide in Global Warming Theology. One country where this is very stale news is New Zealand which discovered some years back that its thirty million sheep and ten million cows were giving off thirty seven million tons of methane a year…more than any other part of the economy. How was it to meet it’s Kyoto Commitments?

A Flatulence Tax on the country’s sheep, cows and deer is the answer New Zealand’s Labour Government has come up with. You couldn’t make it up. The idea was not to persuade the dumb beasts to hold back their wind but to delude the dumber politicians that the £14 million a year raised by the tax would be used to subsidise research into ways of getting the animals to give off rather less of the noxious gas sometime in the future.

The nationwide guffaw of incredulity was soon followed by a roar of protest from New Zealand’s 130 000 farmers who launched a Fight Against Ridiculous Tax…FART…campaign.

Polls showed that only 12% of the population were green enough to think the Fart Tax was anything other than a bad joke. On behalf of the 84% opposed to the tax, farmers blocked the streets of Wellington the capital with 200 tractors. One Member of Parliament even drove a tractor up the steps of the parliament building in protest…and earned himself a bossy reprimand on health and safety grounds from the country’s Prime Minister Helen Clark for his pains. A local newspaper gave out free baked beans to the demonstrators so they could make up for all the cows and sheep which could not be resent.

Up until now New Zealand’s farmers were best known for the fact that alone in the developed world they receive no Government Subsidies. Since these were abolished agriculture has become the fastest growing sector of the economy. New Zealand’s farmers are now so efficient they can transport their lamb and butter half way round the world to Britain and still compete on price with their lavishly-subsidised European Union counterparts.

But terrified that their country might get the reputation of being a bastion of the free market New Zealand’s politically correct Labour Party Ministers seem determined to make their country the laughing stock of the farming world. At least Ireland hasn’t announced plans to do the same…yet.

But the really terrifying thought is that when the Department for Environment Farming and Rural Affairs works out that Britain has even more sheep and cattle than either of these countries the English might be commanded to save the planet by following New Zealand’s example.