Advertising really does work. When the European Parliament declined to go along with demands for a ban on deep sea trawling last year -- presumably after having looked at the science and weighed up the implications -- the greens decided to take matters into their own hands.

An Internet comic strip designed to be shared and tweeted, and populated with cuddly cartoon fish and malevolent caricatures of fishermen attracted nearly a million signatures, effectively bulldozing science, evidence or any of that irrelevant stuff aside.

Now