A Tameside Euro-MP is calling for a national network of flower filled “rivers” to be introduced across the UK in an effort to preserve vital insects for future generations. Many plants reproduce by bumblebees and other insects carrying pollen from plant to plant and a recent dramatic decline in the number of bugs could endanger commercial crops such as apples.

Environmentalist group Buglife is pushing for local authorities to provide strips of wildflowers across the country to provide habitats for butterflies, moths, bumblebees and hoverflies and routes for them to move along. The flower filled strips would be 50 metres wide and would run alongside existing footpaths and roads.

Tameside Liberal Democrat Chris Davies MEP wants to see the environment section of the EU agricultural budget used to pay for the scheme. He said, “These corridors of wildflowers will provide beautiful walkways while helping to maintain insect species and wild pollinators that contribute an impressive £400 million to the UK economy each year.

“People have motorways to move around the country for work and now we need similar facilities for the tiny unsung heroes of our farming community, the humble bugs.”

The huge pathways, known as B-lines would cross the country providing nectar for insects to eat and pollen for them to spread. Each county of England would have two lines, one running north to south and one running east to west joining together to make a national network to bring back vital bugs to Tameside.

Chris says, “Everyone would win with this scheme from the biggest industrial farming company through the family farmer and nature enthusiasts to the tiny fauna that make our green and pleasant land what it is.”

Chris Davies MEP

Lib Dem Euro-MP Chris Davies says that people seeking medical help to die should be able to do so at home in Tameside and not be forced to travel to Zurich.

Liberal Democrat Chris Davies has welcomed the result of a referendum in Switzerland rejecting a proposed ban on foreigners taking advantage of the country’s law permitting medically assisted suicide.

More than 150 people from Britain have travelled to Switzerland to seek help from the organisation Dignitas, based in Zurich.

Davies, who has written about Swiss practice and met on several occasions with Ludwig Minelli, who founded Dignitas in 1998, described the law in Britain as “cruel and inhumane.”

He said: “In a civilised country the freedom should exist for people who are suffering unendurably to seek medical assistance to due. It amounts to little less than torture to force people to live against their will in circumstances that most of us hope we will never experience. Continue reading »