Cameron’s arrogance and idiocy shine through yet again

David Cameron has long been UKIP’s biggest and most insulting critic, famously employing his most smartarse comment when describing the party as made up of:

…fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists, mostly.

Today, having seen UKIP figuratively tear his party a new orifice, Cameron laughably attempted to portray himself as being above the very fray he personally stoked, by declaring:

It is no good insulting a political party that people have chosen to vote for.

One of the many things people in this country are sick and tired of is politicians attempting to dispense lessons to them that only the politicians didn’t understand in the first place.  It is utterly pathetic and it only serves to make Cameron look even more stupid.  He may as well have delivered his little monologue to a mirror, because that way his message would have been targeted at the correct audience.

And the scales begin to fall from their eyes…

There is a problem with the people at the top of our political parties. They just don’t listen. They don’t listen to ordinary people or our concerns. The European Union referendum is a good example. David Cameron says he’ll have a referendum, but no-one believes a word he says. I don’t believe a word he says, and I’m a lifelong Conservative.

So says former Councillor Alexis McEvoy, writing in the Telegraph, after being defeated in the South Waterside ward of Hampshire County Council.

The question is, feeling the way she claims to, why did she continue to work for and prop up the Conservative party machine?  Perhaps in losing the council seat her paramount reason for remaining a Tory and supporting a party that had long ceased to be conservative, has now evaporated.  Too little, too late, Lexi.

It’s a bit rich of people like McEvoy to be bleating now about the Conservative leadership ditching conservative values and principles.  It’s been happening for years, which is why many principled people – and I count myself among that number – resigned from the party and walked away long ago.Perhaps the ConservativeHome narrative, propagated by Tim Montgomerie and others, that Cameron would suddenly uncloak himself to reveal his ‘inner conservative’, is responsible for so many Tories clinging to their delusional belief that Cameron was one of them and just executing a cunning strategy.

It is looking more likely that the complaint that the mainstream parties don’t listen to people’s wishes is becoming redundant. Growing numbers of people are now showing they don’t care about being listened to by this lot any more because they are not interested in being represented by these politicians.  Similarly they are no longer bothering to listen to what the mainstream parties have to say.  They’ve heard it all before.  Evidence the fact Labour’s share of the vote has failed to reach even 2005 levels.

People have seen too many crucial promises broken on a whim.  Now it seems there is a move is underway to remove the self serving charlatans from the stage, piece at a time.

UKIP advances as voter anger with mainstream parties runs far deeper than realised

By rights and in keeping with electoral convention, in the first County Council election results that were announced on Thursday night, UKIP should only have managed to win a handful of seats.

To have won 42 seats before the main bulk of the contests have even begun counting, against a backdrop of a concerted smear operation by the Conservatives against UKIP candidates and the absence of anything that could be fairly described as an effective UKIP local organisation, is a stunning result.  This reveals the depth of voter anger with the mainstream parties runs far deeper than perhaps even we realised.

Cameron, Miliband and Clegg will be very fearful men this morning and with good reason.  Make no mistake, if the UKIP advance continues with the results to be announced on Friday this election, and the forthcoming European elections in which UKIP were already expected to do well, could represent a game changer in national politics ahead of the 2015 General Election.  The results could be that significant.

An unexpectedly high tally of seats to accompany a strong percentage of the overall vote is likely to bring about several things.  Firstly, UKIP can expect more scrutiny, but significantly more air time and coverage in the media to present their narrative – albeit in need of urgent improvement and cohesion.  This will result in more potential voters taking a look at the alternative to the mainstream parties, which could lift UKIP’s support even higher.

Secondly, with something now approaching a local base developing, we can expect to see an increase in dissatisfied Conservative councillors defecting to UKIP, as they become confident they have a fighting chance of still being re-elected outside the Tory umbrella.  Don’t underestimate the vested self interest of electoral prospects informing the decision making of councillors, many of whom are sick to the back teeth of Cameron’s evisceration of conservative principles and policies.

Thirdly, with wider coverage and evidence that UKIP can win seats promoting more confidence, party membership can expect to increase in the coming months.  Crucially for UKIP this would also result in more money – and there could now be a real prospect that some current Tory donors might consider switching their money to UKIP, as electoral success from virtually no base will show their cash could be used to achieve some tangible success.

Fourth, the EU referendum strategy, which Cameron has developed around the idea of batting it away into the long grass beyond the next General Election – and only then if the Conservatives win, which is now looking a more distant prospect – is likely to unravel.  Internal pressure within the Conservative party to address the issue much sooner in an effort to arrest UKIP’s progress, will be deafening as the non-wets assert themselves with electoral evidence of the strength of their argument.

In politics, momentum should never be underestimated.  A combination of opposition to EU membership, anger over immigration, and the opportunity to protest against the cosy mainstream political stitch up and reject the main parties, has given UKIP momentum.

What matters now is how it’s used.  As this blogger has always maintained, with Farage at the helm things have the capacity to fall apart quickly and people might find the party is all fur coat and no knickers.  There are a number of risks but two in particular that stand out.

First, that the lack of cohesion on policy due to Farage’s refusal/incapacity to ‘do detail’ results in contradictory statements and voting which embarrass the party.  Second, that Farage’s autocratic control of the party, which because of its relative size makes him more powerful comparatively than Cameron is over his Tories, means some unsavoury candidates have slipped through the net and as they are exposed – make no mistake, the media poodles will pore over them continually – they bring the party into disrepute.  There is a greater than average chance that UKIP proves to be its own worst enemy for the reasons this blog and others have trailed for many months.

We now wait to see what Friday’s results bring.

Elections 2013 prediction time

Here are my completely unscientific forecasts (like a political equivalent of the Met Office’s output, if you will) for the elections taking place today.  I could get it horribly wrong as I’ve not given it much thought and these are gut feel numbers based on nothing but intuition and prior experience.

South Shields – Labour hold with around 55% of the vote on approx a 51% turnout.
UKIP to come second with around 6800 votes giving them around 21%.  This will be a hoovering up of the BNP votes from 2010, taking a few from Labour and the Lib Dems, and winning over a proportion of the disillusioned previous Conservative vote.

County Council Elections - Labour to take control of seven authorities.
UKIP to win no more 20 seats, but their vote will lead to more second places in wards and Conservative seats being lost to Lib Dems and Labour.

If the UKIP figures sounds low relative to the polling numbers, it’s because the polling numbers are national and UKIP has nothing resembling a coherent local organisation to identify and target their support and concentrate efforts on getting out their pledged voters – in addition they will get virtually no postal votes for the same reasons.

Farage, famously and to UKIP’s detriment, doesn’t do detail.  Whereas what’s left of the Tory machine will work hard to get out their supporters in wards where canvassing shows UKIP is a threat.

Do feel free to leave your predictions in the comments and we can compare them tomorrow.

Whatever happened to the selfless commitment to public service?

There was a time when people who went into local government did so because the rewards were fair, the role they would perform would be stable, it would be valuable to the community, and often they saw it as a way to use their abilities to serve people.

Local government today is less about serving the needs of a local population.  It is now a localised monopoly business.  It is seen as a tool for people who haven’t got the talent to make it big in business to earn huge sums of money off the back of compulsory ‘distress payments’ in return for delivering ever less, while demanding ever more money in taxes and ‘charges and fees’.

That is why, up and down this country, we taxpayers are being increasingly ripped off in short order by councillors with dreams of Westminster or Brussels careers, deluding themselves they are in charge of a mega corporation with bottomless reserves of cash and handing out our money like confetti to grubbing little upstarts like this.

In a democracy, where the people would have the power rather than the servants, we could do something about it.  Of course, the good people of Surrey could simply vote out the current lot and replace them with another lot.  But as we have seen for so long, the only thing that changes is the face attached to the suit.  When it comes to issues the political class and bureaucracy have their issues, which they pour money and resources into, and we ordinary people outside the bubble have ours which remain neglected and treated with contempt.

Mastiff – Our glorious media and their powerful reputation for accuracy

Perhaps it’s time Lord Justice Leveson was prosecuted under the Trade Descriptions Act for his infamous claim about the media having a powerful reputation for accuracy.  Consider this example above from The Week.  In the highlighted paragraph there are no less than four factual errors.  In one bloody paragraph!

For the record, which the media seems incapable of keeping straight, the Mastiff was deployed in Iraq in late 2006 after it had been ordered that summer.  However its subsequent ‘trickle’ introduction in Afghanistan (as fast it became available off the line) came after the Defence Secretary, Des Browne, came under pressure to improve the safety quality of equipment used by our forces there – which was before Gordon Brown even became Prime Minister.  The Mastiff was actually in the Afghan theatre by early 2007.  The Snatch Land Rover does not have a soft top, it is a lightly armoured vehicle.  And how could the Mastiff be called upon to replace the Viking when it had been ordered before the Viking was even deployed.  In fact the Viking was actually replaced by the Warthog.

Surely this article must be a contender for the most errors in a single paragraph in a professional media outlet.

But the media inaccuracy continues apace as Richard demonstrates on EU Referendum today.  The news that a 27 tonne Mastiff has been destroyed by a huge IED, killing three Fusiliers and injuring several more, has had various outlets reporting its weight variously as 15 tonnes in the Daily Mail, 17 tonnes in the Daily Express, 24 tonnes on Radio 4′s PM and 25 tonnes on BBC One news.

The public is being fed a diet of inaccurate, badly researched tosh that will form part of the historical record.  Generations in the future will look back at the articles and listen to the clips believing they are an accurate record of our history, and get misinformation and downright erroneous material.  This is not a trivial matter.  It is a gross distortion and it is a de facto airbrushing of our time.

Miliband’s fake High St listening exercise shown up for what it is

By way of an update to the last blog post, the Guardian’s Wintour and Watt blog has the full exchange between Miliband and the unemployed British man from Cleveleys.

What it shows, setting aside Miliband’s economic illiteracy, is a politician who talks about listening to people, then no less than three times stops the man from making his point as he played to an audience of mainly Labour party members who, with typical socialist compassion and receptiveness, jeered the poor bloke for his comments.

Having promised the man his say in return for a free run to deliver a sermon to the deluded faithful, Miliband ended the conversation without bothering to find out what points the man wanted to make.  That’s Miliband’s ‘One Nation’ narrative in action.  One Nation where the politicians are stuck in transmit mode, immune to any contrary opinion and determined to silence any dissent, even when they take to the streets for a ‘listening’ exercise.

Miliband is indeed full of shit.

‘Make me the prime minister and I will get you the job’

So said Ed Miliband, to a disgruntled unemployed man in Lancashire whose frustration at the effects of Labour’s open-door immigration led him to say of politicians, ‘You’re all full of shit.’

Miliband told the man that employers undercutting wages – rather than immigration – was the cause of the problem.

This is the Ed Miliband whose supporters never tire of telling us he has a Masters degree in Economics from the LSE.  Yet with that answer he demonstrates that he fails to grasp the most basic impact on price of an increase in supply, in this case a dramatic increase in the supply of unskilled and semi skilled labour.

Businesses exist to make money for their owners in return for the supply of goods or services, and the greatest challenge for most businesses is controlling their costs.

However, the fetish of politicians and bureaucrats for creating ever more regulation, combined with the financial impacts of government policy at EU and national level, the costs associated with running a business have been continually increasing.  So when an opportunity to reduce labour costs – typically one of the biggest expenditures in small and medium businesses – presents itself, why wouldn’t a business hire the migrant worker who is prepared to work for a lower rate?

Miliband supported the influx of hundreds of thousands of migrant workers who increased the supply of cheap labour.  Miliband supported the scandalous borrowing splurge that has resulted in more pressure on tax revenues to service the spirralling debt.  Miliband supported and also directly implemented policies that have increased the costs of running a business.

Yet despite all this, Miliband has the temerity to blame employers for that unemployed Lancastrian being out of work and brazenly promises that if he is made Prime Minister he will get that poor man a job – presumably by further increasing the size of the unproductive public sector, thus further adding to pressure to increase the tax revenues taken from the wealth creating private sector.

That Lancastrian man was then schmoozed and flattered by a deceitful, delusional hypocrite to the point he exchanged a handshake with him.  That man was right the first time.  Miliband and his ilk are full of shit.

Cameron in Thatcherite shocker!

According to a piece in the Daily Wail, when asked directly whether he was a Thatcherite, David Cameron replied:

‘No… Other people might call me that. I think the label’s now… it’s slightly become… labels now don’t quite mean what they did then.

‘I was a tremendous Mrs Thatcher supporter… The battles she won were so important for our country, but there are now different challenges and things that need to be dealt with.’

The shock in all this?  That some idiot saw fit to ask Cameron if he was a Thatcherite in the first place.

A cursory look at Cameron’s dismal record, his limp behaviour in opposition, his failure to win an election against the most unpopular Prime Minister in living memory, a quick scan of his front bench at the wets he surrounds himself with – especially that treacherous, backstabbing, europhile quisling and plotter-in-chief who worked tirelessly to bring down Thatcher, Ken Clarke – the accelerating departure from conservative principles, the vacuum that exists where conviction should reside, the two-faced rank hypocrisy, and an absence of any connection or empathy with ordinary people… yet some witless fool has the stupidity to ask if he is a Thatcherite?

For crying out loud.

The Benefits of Smart Appliances

If you were worried this would be some geeky piece extolling the virtues of ‘smart’ fridge freezers, ovens, washing machines etc, then you can relax.  The benefits of smart appliances are not designed for consumers, instead they are designed for the convenience of the political class and corporate interests.  Richard puts it into context on EU Referendum.

Having long peddled the lie that renewable energy is the answer to this country’s energy needs, under a new order where the establishment has declared war on hydrocarbons as part of its deranged obsession with fighting climate change, the reality can no longer be contained.

The future of this advanced industrialised nation is not one of continuing progress – save for the corrupted definition of the word which means the diametric opposite – rather it is being structured to bring about the end of energy supplied on demand at the flick of a switch.  Under the new order control over how power is used is to be shifted to the corporations with power being rationed when the dangerously inadequate energy generating solution, pursued and implemented by the politicians, cannot deliver sufficient electricity to meet our needs.

America’s leaders are taking advantage of its shale gas to power its economy and drive down prices. China’s leaders are building a coal fired power station a week to power its economy and support its growth.  Germany’s leaders (inspite of EU strategy) is turning away from nuclear and building a raft of new coal fired power stations to power its economy and ensure adequate supply for the needs of its population.  Even Japan is starting a new dash for coal as part of its efforts to reduce reliance on nuclear power and still ensure affordable and adequate energy supply for its people and meet the needs of its people.

And the the UK?  Well, our political class, convinced within its self reverential bubble of its virtue and righteousness, is shutting down coal fired power stations despite there being no replacement for the lost generating capacity, is pursuing an approach that constrains exploration and exploitation of shale gas, is driving up prices through rising charges for carbon, and has a ludicrous strategy of building of inefficient and intermittant wind turbines at huge cost that cannot come close to meeting our energy needs or servicing industry.  To make this work they have a master plan.  Rationing power and controlling what energy private citizens can use in their homes by rolling out smart applicances and dressing these up as being of benefit – and charging us billions of pounds to make it happen.

Welcome to your progressive future.

And they call this ‘government’

As the BBC reports, Iain Duncan Smith has said that wealthy elderly people who do not need benefit payments to help with fuel bills or free travel should voluntarily return the money to the authorities.

The Work and Pensions Secretary has told the Sunday Telegraph that he would ‘encourage’ people who do not need such financial support ‘to hand it back’.

Well that should do it!  Thanks very much, Iain.

For decades the political class in this country has served its own interests, with naked bribes to voters in return for being able to enjoy the trappings of power.  The cost of welfare and the other promises that make up many of these bribes is largely responsible for the staggering level of borrowing and the horrific debt this country simply cannot repay.

Once again reality meets political expediency and instead of doing the right thing by British taxpayers Ministers are trying to do the best thing for their own electoral prospects while doing contortions to appease the plethora of bodies constructed by the transnational overlords and follow rules everyone else avoids.

Collectively this is why the government doesn’t get serious about only spending our money on essential services and supporting the vulnerable people in our society.  This is why our money gets spent supporting overseas based families of migrants who have contributed barely anything to the pot in the short time they have been in the UK.  This is why now hear the government enthusiastically ‘plays by the rules’ in forking over hundreds of millions of pounds for healthcare costs for UK nationals treated overseas, while permitting the NHS to fail to keep accurate records of foreign nationals treated here under the services British taxpayers fund, so we only get back a fraction of what we are due for use of our overstretched resources.

The government could slash taxes, but instead it chooses to hoover up our money so it offer some of it back in credits and benefits in return for votes.  Too many voters don’t understand that while they are being given these bribes with one hand, they are crumbs from the table as much more is siphoned off and wasted on administration and diverted for spending on things people do not support.  The government could rejuvinate the economy and reduce borrowing dramatically if it simply let people keep more of their own money and spend it on what they want, rather than fritter it away on boondoggles, wheezes, special interests and these disgraceful, self serving bribes.  But it won’t because if it controls the money it controls everything.  It can  build the insipid client state and increase the size of government to justify the ever worsening kleptocracy that has developed.

Voting for any of the political parties is an endorsement of the continuation of this scandalous behaviour.  Voting for any of the political parties props up the faux democracy that exists in this country.  It does not result in change.  It results in the electorate and taxpayers continuing to be treated with ever more contempt.

What we need is not a reshuffle of the deck chairs, nor a rotation of faces who are all committed to perpetuating the same corrupt system that holds sway in this country.  We need a complete overhaul of the system, to bring about real democracy where control and decision making rests with the people and where the executive serves the people rather than dictates to them.  We need a genuine revolution.  The potential alternatives to this, borne of desperation and anger, are too awful to contemplate.

We need real change.  It will never be realised by playing the political class’ game and using their rules – and that includes the charade of traipsing to polling stations to vote for the least worst option in the certain knowledge that on the major, substantive issues nothing will change.  They will continue to take their steer from unelected, unaccountable, self selecting entities instead of us, the people they are supposed to serve and whose wishes they are supposed to execute.  It is time for people to assert themselves and take the power back.

We have to define the game and set the rules that should be used.  We have an outline of how they should look.  Now we need people to consider how they can be realised.  In the meantime, while that discussion takes place and the approach is refined, we need to withdraw our consent by refusing to play their game and refusing to heed their desperate attempts for validation as they plead for people to use their vote.  Don’t feed the beast.

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“We are the State” but it needn’t be so…

Guest Post by Andy Baxter

The current system of public protection was updated (there has been a ‘Public Guardian’ to protect the vulnerable for a very long time) by the Mental Capacity Act 2005 and its provisions which tightened the legislation regarding mental incapacity (supposed more stringent tests to determine capacity and removing the ‘enduring’ power that was being abused in many cases to one of ‘lasting’ power that could be automatically revoked on demonstration of capacity) all this took effect in legislation 1st October 2007.

Being an IFA and reading of this sort of issue constantly in my trade press and having come across it many times in a long career it forms the foundation of financial planning where protection is concerned for my clients.

I am reminded of one particular case (from our trade press) where a farmer who suffered an accident and went into a coma where his wife approached the public guardian to seek the power to manage the affairs of the farm and her husband. The court sensing mega bucks refused this power to his wife!!! On the grounds she was not qualified to make these decisions despite having been involved in the management of the farm and their personal affairs for decades.

A court official was appointed and her husband lingered for over 7 months in a coma before eventually dying. The court official sold some of the farm’s land to meet the fees of the court and its agents! completely against the long term financial interests of the farmers wife and the family, this also created a tax burden that she then had to meet from his estate! The wife is on record as saying and I quote “it was a relief when he died for then I was able to take back control of our affairs once more under probate” her comments regarding the ‘service’ and ‘costs’ of the court are unprintable.

The situation described could have been avoided totally but for the expenditure of a few hundred pounds to create Lasting Powers of Attorney (LPAs).

These documents if completed correctly totally remove the States power to determine not only the financial decisions regarding someone who loses mental capacity on their money ‘financial and property’ affairs but also removes the State’s power to determine ‘health and welfare’ issues even and up to including decisions regarding ‘life sustaining treatment’.

With these documents properly completed and then registered with the ‘Office of the Public Guardian’ an attorney YOU trust appointed by yourself duly endowed with such legal powers to make decisions as if they were YOURSELF to protect financial, property, health and welfare issues can then give the proverbial two finger salute to any officials or agents of the State as they have the legal power to act as if they were yourself.

Want to know more about how one can protect yourself and your loved ones from an interfering State? And for a cost thousands of pounds below what a solicitor would charge and with no VAT either?  e-mail me (work) at andy[at]wmifa.co.uk (replace the [at] with @)

What a load of old pony

Some may not know that ‘pony and trap’ is Cockney rhyming slang for excrement. But if they have the misfortune to read the increasingly detached Peter Oborne writing in the Barclay Brother Beano, they will no doubt reflect on the piece as just that.

Here we are just days after the funeral of the last radical political leader this country had, with the eulogies and the reflections on the transformation she brought about to the competitiveness and standing of the UK, still fresh in our minds.  Yet Oborne, in the style so beloved by the vacuous cabal of media sycophants, presents a ‘nothing new under the sun’ review of Nigel Farage which leads him to a typically brown-nosing conclusion in support of David Cameron and counsel not to ‘lurch to the right’ that stretches the bounds of credibility well beyond breaking point, which includes this:

I think Mr Cameron’s best bet is to stay where he is, and to fight on his record as a brave, competent and radical prime minister. Adopting such an attitude will take nerves of steel, and could lead to his premature exit if the parliamentary Tory party – that increasingly tremulous body – panics, as it probably will.

Brave, competent and radical? Cameron?

Only a shameless sycophant could describe Cameron in such a way.  What Oborne labels bravery is what most people recognise as insufferable ignorance, a refusal of Cameron to be swayed from the destructive path laid out by his masters in the EU and a plethora of international governance bodies.

Competence? A man who declared his war on deficit and debt has barely scratched the surface of the first, while presiding over a terrifying explosion of the second.

And radical?  There is nothing radical in being a lapdog for a self selecting global bureaucracy that has snuffed out anything resembling democracy and perpetuated the slow burn decline this country has experienced since the neo-social democrats wets removed Margaret Thatcher, and who along with their ideological soulmates but rivals for the illusion of power in the Labour party, commenced the reversal of this country’s recovery and the state’s coup over individual liberty, personal freedom and privacy.

But that’s the dumbed down poodle media for you.

We are the state. We are public servants. You will comply.

Via a story in the Daily Mail a light has again been shone on police state Britain and the disturbing and sinister way citizens can be treated by the authorities.

We do not know the full story, but we do know that Wanda Maddocks was imprisoned for contempt by a judge sitting in the Labour-created ‘Court of Protection’ in the High Court.

Her crime?  She refused an order to not remove her ailing father, John Maddocks, from a care home, where the local authority – Stoke-on-Trent city council – decided he should be placed and should remain.  The Mail reports Mr Maddocks was in the care home against his family’s wishes, kept there under the Mental Capacity Act.

The wishes of Wanda Maddocks and her family, who were concerned about her father’s welfare in the home because he was unhappy, confined to the building, barred from going out on trips with this family and even attacked by another patient, were ignored.  The state, in the form of the local authority and the Court of Protection, decided it knew what was best for Mr Maddocks and rejected the family’s wish to care for him.  When Wanda Maddocks took matters into her own hands and took her father away, Judge Martin Cardinal jailed her for five months for contempt of court.

As if all this wasn’t bad enough, it happened in secret, behind closed doors, without Wanda Maddocks even having legal representation.

If this is not an example of state power running out of control because of the establishment’s desire not to be challenged by the people the state is supposed to serve, then what is?  The local authority has sought to justify its behaviour thus, with Councillor Gwen Hassall, Stoke-on-Trent city council  cabinet member for social services, saying:

‘This is clearly an extreme case, but one that the Court of Protection supported the council on. It was the court’s decision to issue a custodial sentence to Wanda Maddocks.

‘Our chief concern was always centred around the welfare of her father, who was suffering from a deteriorating condition and required 24-hour supervision in a stable environment.

‘This was a decision reached by medical consultants, geriatricians, social workers, community psychiatric nurses, dieticians, consultant health and nursing professionals and others who were involved in assessing his needs.

‘This decision was also ratified by the Court of Protection, which carried out its own  independent assessment of his needs.

‘Unfortunately safeguards had to be put in place to ensure he had the support of a stable environment because there were no signs that this could be provided otherwise.

‘Safeguards also had to be put in place to protect the care professionals who looked after Mr Maddocks.’

One wonders what safeguards were put in place to protect John Maddocks, who was assaulted in the home despite supposedly being under 24-hour supervision in a supposedly stable environment.

When the state can behave in this way, holding secret trials, not giving defence lawyers an opportunity to represent their clients, handing down custodial sentences for upsetting the court when people guilty of violent offences stay on the streets, and affording itself the power to do all this without the permission of the British people, it proves we are no longer citizens, we are slaves to the self selecting establishment.

We need genuine change in this country. We need to shift the balance of power by taking it back.  We need nothing short of an intelligent, well planned revolution to change the way this country functions.

The media’s powerful reputation for accuracy… again

Another one for Lord Justice Leveson.

This time it is Reuters demonstrating that oh-so powerful reputation for accuracy that so impresses Hacked Off’s favourite judge, hizzoner Leveson LJ.  The corporate news provider states on their video report on wealth safe havens, by hack Tara Joseph, that gold has slumped to its lowest price in 30 years!  (I would embed the video if anyone can tell me how to do it on WordPress).

Let’s see if Reuters are right, shall we?  We won’t even go back 30 years, we’ll go back just 10.

The sad thing is, people still trust the mainstream media.

BBC narrative on ‘homegrown’ Boston bombers falls apart

During this morning, NBC News in America has been reporting that the suspects in the Boston Marathon twin bomb attacks are brothers of Chechen origin.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, born in Kyrgyzstan remains on the run while his brother who was killed in a shoot out with police is being named as Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, born in Russia.   Sky News has also been carrying this information, along with news media around the world.

Meanwhile (at the time of writing) on the BBC, despite the time that has elapsed there is still no mention of the names or nationality of the bombing suspects.

Having pushed so hard the idea of ‘homegrown terrorism’ by Americans on American soil, by people who presumably hate the United States as much as the BBC does, it is as if the BBC cannot now bring itself to acknowledge and report that the authorities have identified the main suspects as foreign nationals who originate from a region well known for its Islamist fundamentalism and terrorism.

Of course the BBC will likely say they were waiting for more confirmation in order to be ‘accurate’ in their reporting, rather than first with the story.  But once again, on a major issue where the BBC has form for grudging reporting of the facts, they seem to be last to the party when the story fails to validate what their worldview expected it to be.

The BBC is becoming concerned with news and more concerned with agenda setting and propaganda.

(Update: Shortly after this post, the BBC has updated their news page with the details, well behind the other news media.  Anyone relying on the BBC for information spent more time this morning being less informed than users of other outlets.)

Demand for physical gold and silver contradicts the market

The doom and gloom mongers who gaze upon the fantasy world that is a commodity market where people buy and sell fresh air in the form of heavily leveraged futures, have been out in force in the media, parroting the line that gold is finished as a safe haven / investment / store of wealth (* delete as appropriate).

There was an objective to last week’s raid… and a lot of people are making a convincing argument that it was designed to stop investors turning their back on the dollar and moving into wealth into such safe havens, while making millions on the side into the bargain.  If the bankers could scare people out of gold, the thinking went, the people would put their money where the Fed wants it, into the dollar.

Meanwhile in the real world, away from the investment banks who encouraged their sheep-like clients to dump their paper gold to force a dramatic drop in price that also, err, enabled investment banks to buy the real physical product more cheaply to squirrel away in their underground vaults, we see that people around the globe aren’t buying the establishment line that gold is over – indeed they are buying it as fast as they can.

From Zero Hedge:

We noted here that the plunge in the paper price of gold (and silver) had prompted considerable renewed demand for physical and now it seems the scramble among the “more stable investor base” is increasing. The shake out of ETFs and futures has left the Australian mint short of deliverables and Japanese and Chinese gold retailers seeing a “frenzied” surge in demand. The customers are not just the ‘rich’ or ‘elderly’; in China “they tend to wear water shoes and come directly from the market…;” in Australia, “the volume of business… is way in excess of double what we did last week,… there’s been people running through the gate,” and Japanese individual investors doubled gold purchases yesterday at Tokuriki Honten, the country’s second-largest retailer of the precious metal. The panic selling by a weaker ‘imminent inflation-based’ investor base has sparked physical shortages – “there’s been significant sales made as people see this as great value.” It seems our previous discussions of a rotation from paper to physical were correct and this physical demand will eventually leak back into the paper markets.

The piece goes on to give more specific reports of surging demand and buying activity from China, Australia and Japan.  These are the people who understand they are only in gold and silver if they own the physical metal, not pieces of paper that give title to a quantity of gold to multiple people.  With prices down significantly with the biggest single drop in decades, to sit their lowest level for three years, there is value to be had and the next few weeks look like an excellent time to invest a proportion of your money in gold and/or silver.

To help people, who have not invested in precious metals before, to understand their options, AM’s short guide to Getting into Gold and Silver is nearly finished and will soon be published.

The short guide is designed to provide a quick, simple launch pad that caters for British small investors who want to invest in gold and silver but don’t quite know where or how to start, by compiling some relevant and basic information in one single place so buyers can choose the right products for them and where to purchase them without paying over the odds.  It will pay for itself many times over with the money you will save.  The guide covers:

Why buy gold or silver?
Grading of gold and silver
Pricing, premiums and taxation
Your options – physical ownership, ETFs, Futures and Stocks
Gold and Silver Coins
Gold and Silver Bars
Regular investment in Gold
Where you can buy
Where you can sell

If you are interested in buying a copy of the guide, via Amazon or direct, just drop me an email to register your interest.

Conservatives cost you less, do they?

From Richard at EU Referendum we have a story about the growing power of the European Parliament, relative to that of the European Commission.  But what the story also does is give lie to the often made claim by Conservatives that they cost you less.

The story is about the European Parliament rejecting a Commission plan to force up the price of so-called carbon credits, by delaying the auction of a variety of credit denominations until the end of the 2013-20 period, known as ‘backloading’.  The cost of carbon credits are passed on to consumers, driving up the cost of energy and goods.

But it is the background to the story which should be more interesting to British voters, as it demonstrates that the publicly stated concern of David Cameron and his crew of neo-Social Democrats about the energy prices people in this country pay, is a deceitful sham.

It transpires that David Cameron instructed Conservative MEPs to vote for the Commission’s proposal, in favour of forcing up carbon credit prices.  No, you did not misread that.  The official British position was to support the Commission’s attempts to ramp up the carbon price.   Some of the Tory MEPs rebelled and voted against, contributing to the rejection of the proposal by a mere 19 votes.  Think back to Cameron’s very public concern about energy prices for the hard pressed consumers and threats to legislate against the energy companies to force them to put customers on their lowest tariffs, then consider what happened in Brussels, and we have (more) hard evidence that Cameron is a duplicitous fraud and the claim that Conservatives cost you less is a blatant lie.

Following the vote the price of credits dropped to an all-time record low and the carbon market finds itself in a fair bit of trouble.  You might think this is good news and the end of the matter.  But there’s more.  Because to compound Cameron’s cynical actions we are reminded of something rather important by Richard :

Sadly, though, Britain does not get the benefit of this market collapse, Mr Osborne having already decided to add to the cost of the carbon credits, with an additional £4.94 in carbon tax. This, while continental industry and electricity consumers will be paying something like £2 per ton of carbon dioxide produced, the British equivalents will be paying about £7.

With the UK government committed to driving the carbon price up to £18 in 2018, to £30 in 2020 and to £70 in 2030, using the carbon tax mechanism, we now face the spectre of the EU’s carbon market collapsing completely, leaving the UK as the only country in the EU handicapped in this way.

As this blog always encourages people, ignore the spin and the weasel words and judge politicians by their actions.  We have the high borrowing, high taxing, wasteful spending antics of Labour and Liberal Democrat incompetents and, with this story, yet more evidence should any be needed that the Conservatives are absolutely no different.

Assuming in your area the Conservatives still have sufficient members to go door-to-door canvassing ahead of the County Council elections, if you want to have a little fun, share this story with them and ask them to explain how Conservatives cost you less.

Take advantage of the corrupted market

The media has made much of the news that the price of gold has just experienced its biggest fall in over 30 years.  The price of silver has experienced a similarly dramatic decline, to which we can add falls in oil, copper and other commodities.

Talking heads have been emerging from the woodwork since gold and silver started turning south in recent weeks, spouting the establishment’s nonsense that gold is finished, it isn’t a safe haven, its collapse proves the government can print money without consequences for the wider economy etc, etc.

But what we have seen in recent days is a classic bankster raid as part of a governmental war on alternatives to the dollar.  Doing the Federal Reserve’s bidding, the investment banks and big institutions took advantage of a modest decline in gold and silver prices over recent months to attack the market. The dollar must be preserved at all costs, so the US government’s financial industry puppets have stepped up to use Fantasy Commodity paper to

After Goldman Sachs last week advised clients to close their gold positions (‘paper’ gold futures), on Friday the dealing team at Merrill Lynch apparently dumped a futures sell order of around 4 million ounces or 124.4 tonnes of gold, worth approximately $6bn.  Ironically this is the same Merrill Lynch that in September last year said it could see gold soaring in price to $2400 per troy ounce by the end of 2014.

You can be sure Merrill – and Goldman Sachs – still believes gold’s price will soar, which will explain their physical gold buying.  This market manipulation through worthless paper to drive down the price serves to enable the likes of Goldman and Merrill to buy up much larger quantities of gold in anticipation of the longer term price rise, while persuading their dozy investors to part with the illusion of owning gold and pump their money where the US government wants it – into equities and US bonds.

‘The scale of the selling was massive and again underlines how one or two large banks or hedge funds can completely distort the market by aggressive, concentrated leveraged short positions,’ wrote the Got Gold Report.  It’s clear the markets have become so badly corrupted it is now common to see billions of dollars wiped off the value of a commodity by way of a paper exercise.

Thankfully there are still people who have their wits about them and have been seizing the opportunity to buy gold and silver at a lower price.  They can see the unchanged financial fundamentals that make gold a safe haven, namely:

• spiralling national debt becoming increasingly difficult to service
• huge inflationary pressures waiting to burst into the open as a result of reckless printing of money
• an overpriced stock market ripe for a crash where share prices have inflated because of the increase in the money supply
• interest rates that will eventually break out from the efforts to hold them down
• additional tax hikes to fill the gap between receipts and ever growing public spending
• governments that have quietly changed the law to enable confiscation of bank deposits at arbitrary levels

When one sets aside the fantasy paper trading of the banksters that has given the media and uninformed people the idea that gold and silver have lost their value, and instead looks at the real, physical market, one will see quite a different story…

When the economic effects of government policy kick in – and they will despite the lengths to which they are going to suppress the consequences of their actions – all that ‘smart money’ that is diving out of worthless paper gold and silver at the current low price following the advice of Goldman and Merrill will be looking for a safe haven.  They will want to get into physical gold and they will find the price rising, low supply, and the people who advised them to get out of gold sitting atop of a huge pile of the real stuff in high security vaults, bought cheaply by way of a grotesque manipulation of the market.

My tuppence worth of advice is don’t wait for the lumpen herd, get in now and protect some of your wealth from the economic mess that is coming over the hill and set to hit all of us head on.