It is wind power that will send our bills sky-high Such madness makes me almost as angry as the discovery, when I recently paid £244 for my flight ticket to India, that I had to pay £386 on top of that in taxes - most of them designed to save the planet from global warming. A victory on the Snatch Land Rover, thanks to our readers A good many readers of this column might take quiet satisfaction in the Court of Appeal's decision on Friday in the so-called "Snatch Land Rover case." Without their remarkable generosity in 2008 in donating £7,000 at a crucial point in that convoluted saga, the case might never have got on the road in the first place. Friday's judgment, upholding one in the High Court last year, has made legal history by ruling that the Ministry of Defence owes a "duty of care" to soldiers, and must ensure that they are not sent to war with equipment which needlessly exposes them to danger. It was back in 2006 that I first exposed the scandal of Snatch Land Rovers, in which nearly 40 soldiers met their deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan because they were hopelessly unprotected against roadside bombs. I was able to do so thanks to the expert researches of Richard North, whose attention was drawn to these death-traps by an attack on a patrol in Basra in 2005 which left three men dead and two wounded. One of those killed was Pte Phillip Hewett, whose mother, Sue Smith, was so angry when she learnt how unsuited these vehicles were to their task that she wanted to bring the MoD to court to face the consequences of its folly. Our readers raised the money she needed to get legal action under way, and although her own case is ongoing, she has already achieved much of her real aim, which was to bring the Snatch scandal to public attention. Dr North's criticism of the Snatch and other similarly vulnerable vehicles, laid out in his book The Ministry of Defeat, was so compelling that his expertise was consulted at the highest level when Des Browne was defence secretary. Mr Browne was responsible for the replacement in Iraq and Afghanistan of both the Snatch and that other "coffin on wheels," the Vector, by properly mine-protected Mastiffs, saving many lives. Last year, our readers gave a further £7,000 to save from deportation another victim of that 2005 incident, the badly injured Fijian "Pex" Uluilakeba, who had been Pte Hewett's best friend. The death and suffering of those two brave men have not been entirely in vain. How the EU ruined Royal Mail A nespaper diatribe headlined "Stopping first-class post would prove we've become a second-class nation" rightly identified the key part played in the degradation of our postal service by the decision in 2006 to sell off to private firms the most lucrative part of its operation: the bulk mailing of business post. It was this that turned its previous profit into a hefty loss. What the article did not mention - although this was clearly set out by the Hooper report in 2008 - was that this decision was forced on the government by three EU postal services directives. This official report suggested that one way to meet the resulting crisis might be to scrap the "universal postal service" which, since 1840, had guaranteed swift "same price" delivery to every part of the UK. When I was born in Eastbourne, East Sussex, at 6.30 in the morning of October 7, 1937, my father immediately sent off a birth announcement to The Times, which arrived in London at noon, to be published next day. In 1968, when the "two-tier post" was introduced, my father was intrigued to discover from our local Dorset postman that, if he posted a letter with the new first-class stamp (5d, or 2p in today's money), the letter would still be taken three miles to the nearest town and almost certainly delivered next day. A second-class letter, however, would be taken to the same town, then on to Dorchester 16 miles away, where 24 hours later it would be returned to our local town for onward delivery as if it were first-class. We agreed that this was possibly the first time in history when a system had been deliberately designed to reverse the direction of "progress" by being more inefficient. My father could not, however, have anticipated the arrival of the EU and those postal directives which forced the Royal Mail to sell off the most profitable part of its business to private firms, which now rely on the Post Office to deliver their bulk mail at half the price. Nor could he have foreseen that in 2012, in a desperate bid to stay afloat, the Royal Mail would be charging 60p for a first-class letter, the equivalent of 12 shillings in old money - or 96 times what he paid in 1937 to have the news of my birth delivered from Sussex to London in less than six hours. Our rulers in Brussels puffed up like bullfrogs when the EU won a Nobel Prize for its contribution to "peace and democracy." But they might recall that the peace prize was won in 2007 by Al Gore and Rajendra Pachauri's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for their splendid work in alerting the world to the threat from man-made global warming. Since then, of course, Gore and the IPCC have become so discredited that in many eyes they are little more than objects of ridicule. The EU, as it sinks further into its worst-ever crisis, is not far behind.