Outspoken climate denier Roger Helmer MEP bought a gas-guzzling Jaguar sports car after installing solar panels on his wife Sara’s stables so he could claim green energy subsidies which he himself has attacked as “regressive” and “morally dubious.”
The member of the European Parliament for the East Midlands is the Energy and Industry spokesman for UKIP and has sat on the Temporary Committee on Climate Change despite regularly attacking the science of global warming.
Helmer (pictured with Alec employee) has been at the centre of a perfect storm of controversies on both sides of the Atlantic in recent weeks. He has been caught in a row about corporate sponsorship of climate denying think tanks in the US and then photographed entering a “sleazy” massage parlour in the UK shortly before lunch one Friday.
DeSmog UK has today published a short extract from a speech made by Helmer at the seventh International Conference on Climate Change meeting held by the oil and tobacco funded Heartland Institute in Chicago during 2012 where he boasted about milking taxpayer-funded subsidies.
Helmer said during his talk: “Governments across Europe are cutting subsidies across Europe to green energy projects – and about time too. One of the most dramatic cuts has been in my country, in the United Kingdom.
“I have to say this briefly. It might be a surprise to hear this, I’ve actually got a solar PV system at home. It’s on the roof of my wife’s stables. It’s a 2.4KW instillation. Now, I didn’t do this because I have suddenly become…to listen to the need to save the planet. I did because of these of the absurd subsidies.
Closet Green
“Let me describe these subsidies to you. You can make a unit of electricity at a power station for about 4p in this country. As a householder I can buy unit of electricity from the Grid for about 12p in this country. Every unit of electricity I get off the solar PV system I have on the roof of my wife’s stables I get just about 50p for.
“So I am getting 12 times the cost of producing that electricity, and four times the amount it would cost me to buy it from the Grid. I would be mad to refuse. So I put that in place. Oh, by the way, that it guaranteed for 25 years. It’s inflation protected. And it’s tax free.”
He added: “I really don’t want you to come away with the idea I am a closest green. So I will tell you that I have just recently purchased a Jaguar sports car. It has a five-litre V8 engine…by European standards it’s big.”
Helmer, who lives in a sprawling farmhouse in Lutterworth, Leicestershire, confirmed to me immediately after the Heartland Institute talk that he had bought a black Jaguar XLR, which new costs up to £78,965.
He then attacked renewable energy subsidies on the basis that they helped transfer wealth from poor households paying energy bills to wealthy landowners and homeowners, describing the payments as “a regressive tax” and “morally dubious.”
The MEP regularly attacks climate science and policy. He has argued: “The truth is climate alarmism has become the most expensive, and the most wasteful, project in the history of the world. It is junk economics built on junk science.”
Despite this unequivocal stance, the Euro MP was among the signatories to a letter to Google expressing fury that the Internet giant had decided to cut off the funding to ALEC claiming the think tank was not in fact denying the science of climate change.
Sleazy Massage
The letter said: “[Y]our calculated departure from ALEC is based on misinformation from climate activists who intentionally confuse free market policy perspectives for climate change denial…no ALEC model policy denies climate change.”
The MEP was recently embarrassed when the Sun newspaper reported he had visited a “sleazy massage parlour” called Victoria House in Lutterworth, at 11.47am, on a Friday in October this year.
The parlour website features near-naked women on its website, advertises an “adventure of the physical kind” and boasts the staff have been “Driving Men Wild Since 1999.”
One 24-year-old massure’s profile reads: “Lutterworth Escort, Imogen: Fabulous, F*ckable and Hot. Full of passion laid back and really dirty, sweet sexsations in store for you, she will arouse you in the most pleasurable ways possible.”
Responding to the report, Helmer said: “MEPs are entitled to a private life. I work extremely hard and when I do occasionally have time off I enjoy a massage. I hope my constituents will agree people are entitled to enjoy their leisure time as they please.”
Asked if his wife (whose stables house the solar panels) was aware of his massage parlour visits, he answered: “Er, she be will tomorrow I dare say.” Helm asked for his private life to be respected.
The newspaper Pink News pointed out that Helmer had attacked the LGBTQ community claiming gay people “undermine” marriage and had compared same sex marriages to incest.
The article added: “Mr Helmer has sought to interfere in the private lives of millions of gay couples on several occasions, claiming previously that he should be able to dislike gay people in the same way as different types of tea.”
One environmental campaigner said: “With enemies like Roger Helmer, who needs friends?”
Picture: Via Twitter.
