On Saturday she looked stark and rather sad as she stood in the middle of an exclusion zone held at station by two tugs in Whitsand Bay near Plymouth Stripped of her mast, she looked every inch the ghost ship. Around her a considerable crowd had gathered to bid farewell, including a flotilla of 200 ships.When the tugs pulled away a flare went up and then David Bellamy, the conservationist and a passionate diver, pressed the detonator box. She is, or rather was, a big ship, weighing in at 2,500 tons and 272 feet in length. A grey ship on a calm grey sea against a grey sky would not ordinarily attract much attention.

The monochrome setting off south-east Cornwall, however, was deceptive camouflaging as it hid one of the most historic and unusual maritime events to take place in UK waters: the creation of Europe’s first artificial reef.
The agent of this was HMS Scylla, a decommissioned Leander class frigate. known to be toxic to aquatic environment and human health”.Mr Morley said that the Government is in favour of the EU directive and believed that targets for collection and recycling are “challenging but achievable”. The directive will also require Britain to collect 80 per cent of nickel cadmium household batteries and all car batteries.Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrat environment spokesman, said Britain was the “dirty man of Europe” when it came to the disposal of batteries and warned that it was facing a crisis similar to that faced over the collection of fridges.”These figures demonstrate starkly how poor Britain’s record is on collecting batteries and how far the Government is lagging behind other countries such as Belgium where half of all their batteries are collected,” he said. In particular, the two countries’ politics remain very different. You can see this, for example, by analysing the results of the French regional elections.
In French politics, the best way of calculating dissatisfaction with the political process is to add up abstentions and spoilt ballot papers and then take into account votes for extreme parties that have no chance of forming a government or even a regional administration On this measurement the recent trend has been alarming. Between the presidential elections of 1974 and 2002, the proportion of the electorate thus rejecting the mainstream parties rose from 19 per cent to 51 per cent. As well as a steady fall in actual turnout in elections, votes dispersed more and more, first the far right parties and then the far left began to find increased support.But is this growing disengagement now coming to a halt? The only comment which President Jacques Chirac allowed himself between the two Sundays of voting was that at least the turnout had marginally improved.

While that may not have been much comfort for a president whose party had just suffered a slap in the face, it was nonetheless important. Like the Spanish two weeks earlier, French voters took part in greater numbers than on the last comparable occasion.While terrorism was not an issue in choosing French regional assemblies, half the voters admitted being influenced by national rather than local issues. Perhaps the Spanish example was enough in itself to show that the vote matters. And is it clutching at straws to note also that, across the Atlantic, Democrat party members were more active in the primary elections to select their candidate for the forthcoming presidential contest?In the French regional elections, not only was turnout a little higher, but the far left lost ground and the far right stalled. Could this mean that the elections for the European Parliament due in June will also get a bit more attention than usual? In Britain, for instance, might the electorate want to use them to deliver a rebuke to the Prime Minister, Tony Blair?As a matter of fact, in France, much more so than in Britain, electors regularly rebuke their governments.