'Coffins on wheels' - why did MoD get it wrong so often? - Telegraph But in 2004 we sold off our mine-protected Mambas for peanuts, including nine to Estonia which later operated in Afghanistan alongside British troops still forced to use IED-vulnerable Wimiks, No one deserves more credit for having tried to blow the whistle on this astonishing policy failure than my colleague Richard North, who has constantly exposed the MoD's folly through his Defence of the Realm blog, through briefing this column and various MPs, and through his book analysing our humiliating failure in Iraq, Ministry of Defeat. In 2006 he established a hotline to the Secretary of State for Defence, the underestimated Des Browne, who grasped the problem, and who managed later that year to get mine-protected Mastiffs deployed to Iraq. But the Army, then under Sir Richard Dannatt, still insisted on equipping troops in Afghanistan with Vectors (dubbed "coffins on wheels") in which five men died with many more injured, before they were withdrawn in 2010. At a Wiltshire inquest in 2008 into the deaths of four soldiers, including 2nd Lieutenanat Joanna Dyer, when their Warrior was blown up by an IED in Basra, the coroner criticised the vehicle's lack of "armour" against roadside bombs. But even he did not grasp that armour alone cannot provide the right kind of protection unless the vehicle is fitted with that all-important blast-deflecting hull. Four years later the Army is still sending patrols into harm's way in the same unprotected Warriors, as we saw last week from the worst single incident of troops being killed on the ground in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the MoD is spending £1 billion on upgrading the armour to Warriors, which will do nothing to protect them against roadside bombs (and will not be ready until 2018). So the tragedy continues. The Taliban surely cannot believe their luck that we British are so stupid. Biomass blaze highlights bizarre nature of 'renewable" energy On February 27, 120 firemen were rushed to deal with a major incident at Tilbury, east of London, where 6,000 tons of wood pellets had caught fire at what is now "the world's largest biomass power station"." Until recently Tilbury was one of England's 14 remaining coal-fired power plants. But, attracted by the 100 per-cent-plus subsidies we pay to help meet the EU target whereby within eight years, 32 per cent of our electricity must come from "renewables"," the plant's German owners, RWE, have converted it to burning more than half a million tons of pellets a year, imported from Georgia, US, where the wood is grown and processed. One problem is that large quantities of green wood are liable to combust, the most likely cause of this fire (the second such in Britain in recent months). Another is that wood generates energy so much less efficiently than coal that the plant's output has fallen from 1,100 megawatts to only 750MW. However, this is still two-thirds of the power generated on average by all our 3,500 wind turbines combined. Rather more serious, though, since the claimed purpose of "biomass"" is to help reduce Britain's emissions of carbon dioxide, is that the wood actually emits more CO2 for each unit of electricity it produces than the coal it replaced (not to mention all the additional CO2 emitted by processing and shipping it across the Atlantic). This recently led that bizarre body, the Committee on Climate Change, set up to advise the Government under the Climate Change Act, to recommend that biomass power stations should only be permitted to operate if they are fitted with "carbon capture and storage"," designed to pipe away and bury all the CO2 they emit. So, in order to reduce our CO2 emissions, we subsidise power companies to burn wood which ends up emitting much more CO2 than the fossil fuels it replaces, so that the Government is now told that this should only be allowed if the firms then remove that CO2 by a process so CO2 intensive that it doubles the cost of the electricity, in order to bury it under the sea using technology not yet commercially developed and which, according to various scientific studies, will never work anyway, Yet according to the Department for Energy and Climate Change, "biomass"" is going to be as important to meeting our EU targets as those useless windmills. Thus in every direction do the "green dreams"" of those who rule us in London and Brussels collide with reality. A mother who deserves to make history As the number of children seized by social workers soars to a record level of more than 225 a week, David Cameron merely urges that we must speed up the process whereby only 4 percent of those taken are being adopted - oblivious to the possibility that many should never be removed in the first place. One story, as astonishing as any I have reported, centres on the devoted mother of two small sons, who held a well-paid job with a leading bank, For two years she has been harried by social workers, even though they have not yet been able to remove her children, whom she has not harmed in any way, But in 2010 they persuaded a judge to impose a Prohibited Steps Order, forbidding her to move from the area where she lives, which is close to her ex-husband, the children's father, diagnosed as a "paranoid schizophrenic"," who has a long record of violence. Because she couldn't move, she had to travel with her children for up to four hours a day, to put them in nursery care near her office, She could not accept the bank's offer of a responsible new post 100 miles away. So difficult did the social workers make her work life, insisting that she take calls from them at work up to an hour long, and that she must return home at awkward times to allow the father to have "contact"," that the bank reluctantly had to terminate her contract. At Christmas she was only allowed to make a fleeting visit with the children to her family in Scotland on strict conditions laid down by the social workers as to who she could stay with, with contact details so they could check on her. Being familiar with the law, she decided to apply for a High Court ruling that this order was in breach of Article 8 of the Human Rights Act, which guarantees respect for privacy and family life without needless interference by "public bodies"." This led recently to a Kafkesque day at the High Court, being shuttled between a judge, the administrative office and back again. Each told her that responsibility lay with the other. She was told that a court was not a "public body"" and her application must be made to the junior judge who had imposed the order. Only when she pointed out that a court is indeed a public body under the Act and that such an application can only be heard by a full High Court judge, did she finally meet a senior lawyer willing to assist her. By now it was so late that she had to return last Thursday to be given help with making the applications - for a case which deserves to make legal history.