The Evening
Standard

Better Inside

Many people will sympathise with the magistrates who yesterday remanded in custody the director of Greenpeace, Lord Melchett, rather than allow him to leave on holiday for Tanzania after he led a group systematically destroying GM test crops in Norfolk.

With aristocratic hauteur, his lordship is reported to have told the farmer whose crop he assaulted that the matter was too urgent to wait upon democracy. As the head of one of the more hysterical groups on GM crops, making such a grand gesture is Lord Melchett's privilege.

But it is the privilege of the Norwich magistrates to exact a price. They have done it admirably by leaving him to cool his heels inside for a day or two. Environmentalism is admirable. Fanaticism is always ugly.