Fag packet found, the EU renegotiation planning begins…

Arch Europlastic, William Hague is reported this morning as having defined the first element of the UK’s renegotiation wishlist – and as expected this ‘concrete’ proposal is a mish mash of tough talk and hollow content.

The former self professed Eurosceptic, who as Foreign Secretary is now Brussels’ cheerleader-in-chief for all things blue with gold stars, will declare in a speech that national parliaments, such as the House of Commons, should be able to overrule legislation proposed by the European Commission if enough legislatures call for it to be thrown out.  This is almost certainly a kneejerk reaction to the European Commission’s prosecution of the UK for applying rules that force EU migrants to pass a ‘right to residency’ test that doesn’t apply to UK citizens, before they can claim various benefits, which is illegal under the EU law the politicians signed us up to because it discriminates against other EU citizens on the basis of nationality.

While this is good pink meat for the Euroweenies who want a ‘reformed’ EU, in reality nothing would change.  The rejection of legislation by the UK would need a number of national parliaments to support the British stance.  So if insufficient parliaments back what Britain wants, then this country would be forced to adopt the legislation regardless.  The sum of the power repatriated to the UK therefore amounts to nil.

So much for reform.

Move over, Cast Iron Dave, because there’s a new Eurosheriff in town!  Concrete Willy is his name, and he has found an old fag packet and angrily scrawled the first empty repatriation of power demand on the back.  Brussels can breathe easy as Britain’s place under the EU jackboot is safe in Hague’s carefully manicured hands.

This plan first surfaced in 2002 courtesy of Gisela Stuart during the constitutional Convention. It has thus already been chewed over many times and completely rejected.  It’s a non starter.  As such this announcement represents mere game playing on the part of Concrete Willy, who is giving little titbits to the lumpen media to distract them from the fact there is no renegotiation plan, much less any exit plan. The Europlastics, carefully steered by the Foreign Office’s europhile quislings, will do all they can to ensure it never gets that far.

BBC’s omission bias: No, you were not imagining it

With prescient timing only yesterday this blog was highlighting another example of BBC omission bias, as it pointedly refused to identify as Muslim the inmates at Full Sutton prison who beat and stabbed an officer while holding him hostage for more than four hours.  The Daily Wail is giving column inches today to a report into just this behaviour.

When it comes to matters Islamic or immigration related, many people have long argued the BBC’s coverage is outrageously slanted, deliberately taking an editorial line that plays down negatives while heaping focus on any perceived positives.  This bias has now been quantified in a report written by Ed West for the New Culture Forum, which concludes that:

In its coverage of the topic of immigration, the BBC has given overwhelmingly greater weight to pro-migration voices, even though they represent a minority – even elitist – viewpoint. And in its coverage of the economic arguments for and against immigration, it has devoted somewhat more space to pro-migration voices. In terms of the social costs, the BBC has almost totally ignored certain areas.

Sure, there’s nothing new under the sun here, it only confirms what we knew. But it does provide evidence from a detailed analysis of the corporations output that will be impossible to deny.  Let’s see if the BBC, supposedly its own greatest critic, deigns to report about this.

BBC News: All the news that we are willing to report

The BBC has graciously deigned to report on the vicious assault of a prison officer after he was held hostage by ‘three inmates’ at Full Sutton Prison in Yorkshire.

The BBC News website goes on to tell readers that:

‘The North East Counter Terrorism Unit, which is investigating, said two of the suspects were aged 25 and the other 26.

‘The men are not in prison for terror-related offences, a spokeswoman said.’

Eh?

Reading through the rest of the report there is no indication as to why this incident inside a prison is, in a highly unusual step, being investigated by counter terrorist police, and no explanation as to why a spokesman said the inmates were not in jail for terror-related offences.  It’s all very curious.  Well, curious until one casts their eye across other news media…

The Sun

Daily Mail

The Express

The Mirror

Even the Guardian refers to the reports that the hostage takers were Muslims but that the claim was unsubstantiated because the prison PR team had not said as much – despite the flood of information coming out of the prison via unofficial channels.

It is truly pathetic to see the BBC twisting itself into contortions without ‘outing’ Muslim extremists or Islamists when they stand accused a violent incident.  It is worse than disingenuous to self censor and do everything possible to keep viewers, listeners and readers in ignorance of what is being reported everywhere else, simply because of the ‘sensitivity’ of identifying perpetrators of violent and criminal acts as Muslim – ironically the way they proudly identify themselves.

It is hard to feel anything other than contempt for the BBC.

The globalists are worried so they pile on yet more EuroFUD

Methinks the Obama administration doth protest too much.

The scandal-ridden government of the Hopey-Changey one has certainly has developed more than just a passing interest in whether or not the UK remains a member of the EU, as per the American tendancy to stick its nose into the domestic matters of other countries.

As expected the US has taken a side to service its own interests and is spreading propaganda accordingly, with the latest flood of FUD from Obama’s officials saying that the UK would probably be excluded from a trade agreement with the US worth billions of pounds a year if we were to leave the EU.  This follows on from January’s intervention by the US Assistant Secretary for European Affairs, Philip Gordon, who articulated the US view of the world as having the UK firmly inside the EU prompting this response from this blog.

On the face of it this threat is a serious impediment for the withdrawalist ‘No’ campaign.  It certainly provides a killer blow to the badly thought-out and dangerous argument of some withdrawalists that we should simply repeal the European Communities Act 1972, reject all EU law and abrogate all EU treaties to which we are signatories so the UK can be sovereign – without having negotiated access to the single market for our exports, or established transitional treaties with countries whose trade deals with us are only applicable while we are an EU member state.

But scratching beneath the surface of the American warning, a look at the detail suggests this is just another piece of EuroFUD dished out from the political establishment in a crass effort to frighten the natives away from the notion of withdrawal from the EU and sovereignty for the UK.   At the very least it underscores the absolute need to carefully negotiate trade and economic agreements before departure from the EU, via the provisions of Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty.

Breaking away from supranational entities such as the EU undermines the effort of the political elite to bring about a formal system of global governance (not global ‘government’, the two are rather different).  The globalist vision is intended to reduce accountability to voters and centralise power within a small, more easily coordinated bureaucratic ‘elite’ that can serve corporatist interests of the uber wealthy at the expense of everyone else.

For the globalists it is frustrating enough that Iceland is unilaterally ending its EU membership ambitions.  But a more significant economy and trading power such as the UK leaving the EU would actually reverse the direction of travel and potentially stimulate other countries to follow suit, which is why it is being resisted so doggedly by the political elite in Europe and elsewhere who should not have any interest in our domestic matters, but are becoming increasingly exercised by the growing clamour of voters to get out of the EU.

Their only answer is to flood us with FUD in the hope we don’t see the wood for the trees and lose confidence in being a self governing, independent nation state.  Expect plenty more of the same and be ready with the counter arguments presented by those who ‘do detail’ and have deciphered the game and learned how it can be won.

The bubble dwellers have nothing to offer

Today I picked up a copy of The Times for the first time in a while.  The reason was to see if there was anything there to justify paying to see behind its online paywall.  I only had to read as far as page two and its lead editorial before I had my answer…

The Slow Death of Politics

All the mainstream parties are suffering a long-term decline in membership. To become representative of voters, they need to adopt a looser model of participation

Clearly, within the bubble, the concept of political parties being representative of voters by, you know, representing their wishes and talking to their interests rather than those of party managers and the whip’s office, is completely alien.

It’s not just the political parties that are in decline and increasingly irrelevant.  The media is in similar decline and the Times’ editorial today is a very good example why.  Neither have anything to offer to those of us outside the bubble in the real world.

 

Is it now too late for Britain? (part 2)

Following on from the previous post, is this quote part of a speech we can expect to see delivered in London some day in decades to come?

Today, this Parliament, on behalf of the people, takes responsibility and apologises for the policies and practices that forced the separation of mothers from their babies which created a lifelong legacy of pain and suffering.

We deplore the shameful practices that denied you, the mothers, your fundamental rights and responsibilities to love and care for your children.

Can we expect to hear and read stories of how some mothers were drugged, while others had their signatures were forged, so the government and its agencies could take children away ‘for their own good and for the good of society’ and give them to childless couples to adopt?

This is what happened between the 1950s and the 1970s in Australia and text above is an edited part of the state apology delivered by Julia Gillard.  The thoroughly evil practice of snatching children from their parents and giving them to strangers was driven by a combination of religious fervour and moral outrage at the existance of single mothers, who were considered to be scandalising society.  I am not a fan of people apologising for the historical actions of others, over which they had no influence or involvement.  But the fact one was considered necessary for those children who were torn away from their mothers and as adults are trying to deal with it even now, speaks volumes.

It was a repugnant policy that was enforced by self regarding, intolerant people who believed they knew what was best for everyone else and abused their power to effect their vision.  That pattern of behaviour should sound eerily familar.

Yet despite that apology being issued in Australia only two months ago, we see in the UK today a Judge advocating exactly that kind of action by the state.

As if this modern day tilt fascist, untrammelled state power wasn’t enough, many of the comments of the brain-dead drones who inhabit the Daily Wail’s comment threads wouldn’t be out of place at a Nazi eugenics conference.  These are the ‘centre right’ people who supposedly rail against an overbearing state intruding into the lives of ordinary Britons.  Yet throw them exactly that kind of proposition, wrapped in the dog-whistle red meat of ‘law and order’, and suddenly the red mist descends, logic evaporates and they believe there aren’t nearly enough jackboots marching along government corridors.

We already have those of ‘the left’ giving endorsement to concept of the state owning the population and doing what it sees fit, when it likes.  This has already resulted in too many children being snatched from families by social services – often without any evidence of a child protection issue or just cause – after secret court hearings that are closed to the public, and with sinister restrictions placed on the families to not even discuss the facts of the case, or risk being imprisoned for ‘contempt’ of court. Some of these children have been pushed through the adoption system, only for their parents to be subsequently exonerated of any wrong doing, but prevented from taking back custody.

Now we have those of ‘the right’ baying for babies to be snatched in exactly the same way from anyone tagged as a criminal, prostitute or drug user.  Clearly they are too stupid to recall just months ago their outrage at children being removed from their foster parents because they were supporters of UKIP and therefore considered by some bureaucrats to be ‘racist’ – and that their approval of snatching children the state has identified as being ‘in the interests of the child’ from other families has the capacity to be extended on a whim beyond ‘criminals’ and used as a broad weapon of coercion to force people who challenge the state into complying with its demands.

This is one of those points where I wonder if the effort of trying to democratise this country is worth it, hence the title of these linked posts.  The spittle flecked outrage of the semi literate morons applauding a disturbing call for a dramatic increase in state power and the ability to steal children in the way described makes me think they deserve to be stuck with the spiteful bastards they are giving succour to.

Perhaps we should let them suffer the inevitable consequences down the line when their willingness to heap power into the hands of unaccountable politicians and bureaucrats who will rig the system still further to suit their own ends, come back to bite them on the arse.  Then they will bloody well have cause to be outraged.  Perhaps it is too late to save this country from itself.

Is it now too late for Britain? (part 1)

A (thankfully) retiring Judge, Alan Goldsack QC, has made a speech calling for the forced snatching of babies by the state from mothers or families, to stop them from following said parents into crime, prostitution or drug use:

Some people become criminals because they enjoy crime and think it’s a good way of life and if they don’t get caught they think they can have a good lifestyle.

But a frightening thing is the number of people I see who are the grandchildren of the people I have prosecuted and defended 40 years ago – because crime runs in families in the same way that being a doctor, teacher or lawyer does.

We have to get in on the ground and remove young babies from the families that are going to produce the next generation of criminals, and that is why I did family law right up until the end because I think it is very important work.

I have read so many pre-sentence reports where I said to myself ‘why was this person not adopted at birth? All the signs were there’.

How about the likes of Goldsack stopping and thinking about why known criminals who have gone through the justice system are re-offending?  We have too few prison spaces that allow inmates to go through rehabilitation and be helped to change their behaviour and start building skills they can take into the community after their release.  Many just need to be given a chance to sort their lives out. Yes, some people are plain criminal and will re-offend.  Fine. Leave them locked up for longer where they can do no more harm to society.

It’s not the failed care system that should bear all the blame in the way Goldsack asserts.  It’s the failed penal system that keeps turning out on to the street unreformed offenders who have been coddled with a raft of facilities they probably couldn’t afford on the outside, and allowed to take drugs to ensure prison officers get a quieter time of it.  Goldsack’s vision is one of surrender to the inevitability of repeat offending and shifting blame away from the legal system he is part of.  It’s pathetic.

It is only the suggestion of a retiring Judge, but make no mistake the Common Purpose indoctrinated elements of social services will seize upon it and push it up the agenda.  Give this additional power to the state and there will be injustices and corruption by the bucket load as rights are trampled down and the bonds between many mothers and children up and down the country are severed without good cause or effective checks and balances.

The face of Britain in 2013… how long will we tolerate this?

One cannot help but think this scene would not have occured if this country had maintained a selective immigration policy and retained the ability to remove from these shores anyone who abuses our hospitality and forments division and violence.  The image captures a situation borne of fear, which will conveniently propagate more FUD among us so fearful people in desperation plead for our useless and irrelevant politicans to do something.

The fact is, instead of only encouraging and accepting foreigners to come to these shores – yes there absolutely is a place for settlers here – who wish to contribute to our society, be a net producer rather than a net consumer, and respect and emulate the values that made this country attractive to them in the first place, we would not be seeing the kind of upsurge in religio-political violence fanned by people whose families have been allowed to settle here but not integrate.

Instead too many of them foster a cultural and religious superiority complex that results in the terror we have witnessed and subsequently necessitates our police to cover themselves like the terrorists of the past out of fear of their identity becoming known.  The bobby on the beat, the community policeman, has been replaced by intimidating and sinister paramilitary police units to respond to the consequences of government policy none of us was asked to approve.  The political class failed us.

This is not the way Britain should be.  The road to hell is paved with good intentions and now the chickens hatched by the political class are coming home to roost – with ordinary British people paying the price in treasure and blood.  We have been betrayed and compromised by the political class and as a result we experience ever more efforts to turn the population into the property of the state where we are monitored, treated by default as suspects, have our lives and finances intruded into, see a desire for privacy treated as suspicious behaviour and any dissent against the government’s actions viewed as harmful and summarily demonised.

The political class has learned nothing and has no interest in learning anything.  As such is continues to fail us.  How much longer will we tolerate this?

The litany of risible excuses continues as the state ensures no crisis should go to waste

Within hours of the savage murder of Drummer Lee Rigby, some elements within the government and wider political class were already pondering if this outrageous crime could be turned to the state’s advantage in pressing home the effort to increase surveillance and reduce privacy and individual freedom of the general population.

We know this because within days it has slipped out that people were calling for legislation, that had been rejected on the grounds that they would infringe civil liberties, to be revived, amid the sense that the public revulsion at what happened on the streets of Woolwich would make them more accepting of the sweeping powers the state wants to afford itself at the expense of our right not to be treated as criminal suspects and have our communications and affiliations spied upon and recorded.

Today, Cameron’s self appointed media mouthpiece and cheerleader, Matthew d’Ancona, was at it again in a rambling piece that eventually got to its intended destination, when he wrote:

National security, like politics, is the art of the possible. The number of people who might, conceivably, move from agitation to acts of violence is very high – far beyond the surveillance capabilities of a normal police service and domestic intelligence agency. Those who are psychiatrically deranged can be sequestered on precisely those grounds. The law allows detention without charge for a strictly limited number of days. There are other constraints that can be imposed upon terror suspects. But all attempts to strengthen these measures are ferociously opposed on the grounds that they infringe civil liberties – witness Nick Clegg’s hostility to government plans to extend monitoring of emails and internet use. Witness, too, the by-election forced by David Davis when he resigned his seat over Labour’s proposal to extend the maximum period of detention without charge.

Ah yes, the hackneyed old crap that if only these misguided people could be overcome and persuaded to stop resisting the sacrifice of yet a bit more freedom and privacy, the government could do something to help tackle such atrocities.  Spread enough FUD around and some people might be convinced to open all windows and doors into their lives to the government, so it can pry, snoop, monitor and record who they engage with and when as it so chooses, combining that with video footage, financial data, health records and details of movements to build up a portfolio of intelligence information any time it wishes.

How would monitoring the email and telephone communications of every man and woman in this country have made any difference when it comes to the brutal killing of Lee Rigby?  We know there were two attackers.  We know they conspired to indulge their appetite for bloody violence.  We know the arguments they fall back on in a pathetic effort to justify their evil intentions and actions.  We now also know that both men were already known to the security services and had made no secret of their views and those hatemongers they fell into line behind.

So what possible difference would it have made, or will it make in the future with people minded to copy their vicious example, to monitor who they – and every other person living in these islands – emailed and telephone?  What would such intrusion into our lives do to prevent or tackle the kind of barbarous behaviour the people of Woolwich witnessed last week?  How would the state extending its perceived control over us reduce the threat?  And in any case, what is the point when, despite being armed with sufficient information to identify an extremist threat to the well-being of British people, the organs of the state fail to deal with what is right in front of their collective noses?

The state not scrutinising, monitoring and snooping as much into our lives as it wants to is not the reason Lee Rigby died.  His death is being cynically and nauseatingly used for political ends, turned into an excuse to treat the population even more like untrustworthy conspirators who are considered to be up to no good unless evidence shows otherwise.  Well, the government can fuck right off.  The country is the British people, not the parasites in Westminster seeking to assert themselves as a higher class that should have oppressive control over the rest of us.

Too many laws exist already.  The UK is the most monitored and spied upon place in the western world.  We have more CCTV per head of population than any nation on the planet.  Yet none of what the government has in its surveillance arsenal prevented last week’s attack and none of it will prevent a similar one in the future.  Individuals and pairs of people already know not to talk about their plans, or share them electronically across communication networks like the email and phone systems.

So the politicians, such as Dr John Reid, Jack Straw, Alex Carlile and Admiral West, seeking to ram through further infringements of our liberty and freedom in light of last week’s hate killing, are using that incident as an excuse to achieve other self serving  ends, which is nothing short of an outrage.

We are not the property of the state and we should resist its efforts to treat us as such – particularly when such gross and shameless opportunism as using the murder of a young soldier is deployed to justify the contemptible political actions they are planning.

Woolwich murder: A litany of risible excuses

Running second only to my revulsion and anger at the cowardly, savage and inhuman slaughter of Lee Rigby from 2 Bn RRF, is my disgust and contempt at the flood of pathetic excuses and aggressive self justification that surround this barbaric murder.

Primarily this concerns the poisonous alleged killer, Michael Adebolajo, who chose to call himself ‘Mujahid’, when he became a Muslim for reasons I will attempt to explain.

No one who has read or listened to the accounts of this vile animal’s rant and heard details of his background could fail to miss the inconsistencies, contradictions and pathological hatred he exhibits.  Adebolajo has sought to draw equivalence between his brutal and gutless attack on an unarmed young man and British forces engaged in conflict, rightly or wrongly against a fanatical armed group that visits similar brutal and gutless attacks on men, women and children as part of a campaign to intimidate people into abiding by their twisted worldview.

I apologise that women had to see this today but in our lands [this is a man born and brought up in the UK] our women have to see the same. You people [although British he refers to Britons as if foreign] will never be safe. Remove your governments. [he tries to kid himself our government is somehow not his] They don’t care about you. Do you think David Cameron is gonna get caught in the street when we start busting our guns? Do you think the politicians are gonna die? No, it’s gonna be the average guy – like you, and your children. So get rid of them. Tell them to bring our troops back [suddenly they are ‘our’ troops, bloody moron] so you can all live in peace. Leave our lands and you will live in peace. That’s all I have to say. Allah’s peace [after he has just waged cowardly violence he speaks of peace] and blessings be upon you. Salaam alaikum.

All these words follow information that Adebolajo was stopped by the security services from going to Somalia to wage jihad.  Was he going to fight against British troops? No, the fight in Somalia is between Muslims!  And Muslim witnesses to Adebolajo’s recent rants elsewhere reveal he was also speaking of going to Syria to fight.  And what is happening in the civil war there?  Yes of course, Muslims are killing other Muslims.

No, this all shows us that Michael Adebolajo isn’t some self appointed defender of fellow Muslims.  He didn’t take the spineless decision to run over an unarmed and unaware young man walking along the street to incapacitate him, so he could be easily overpowered and butchered with an array of weapons, as revenge or retaliation for the involvement of British troops in Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere else.  It’s just an pathetic excuse.  He did it to indulge his bloodlust and his hateful urges to do murderous violence on other people.

Make no mistake, if it hadn’t been this sickening murder Adebolajo would have committed a different one, citing some other spurious justification.  We can be sure of this because if he is so devoted to the protection of Islamic life, why has he separately attempted and spoken of going to conflict zones to fight where Muslims are waging violence on other Muslims and his violence would result in Muslim deaths?

Adebolajo is nothing more than a dangerous psychopath with a superiority complex, twisted by hate and a desire to do harm.  He was motivated by a wish to intimidate people and wreak violence and mayhem on them, and therefore sought out an avenue that would satisfy his violent urges and give him what he perceived as an excuse to kill other humans, and that is why he latched on to the worldview of similarly hateful cowards like Anjem Choudary and Omar Bakri Mohammed, piggybacking onto their particular interpretation of Islam that sanctions the violence and murder he has long craved to achieve its warped ends.  So he converted to Islam to fulfill his wet dream.

I would prefer not to give any more thought to Michael Adebolajo or his chickenshit sidekick, but it will be impossible to cast from my mind what has happened.

Drummer Lee Rigby was a Fusilier.  When I was serving (1987-1992) I spent a lot of time with the RRF lads.  My old regiment, the Queen’s Regiment, was part of the Queen’s Division along with the Fusiliers, Royal Anglians and a motley crew of Assault Pioneers, until we were merged with the Royal Hampshires to become the Princess of Wales’ Royal Regiment (aka Squidgy’s Own).  Fusiliers and Anglians have suffered an appalling toll of deaths and maimings on active service, which is bad enough, but now one of my old Division’s number has been murdered by hatemongers on the streets of London.  That’s difficult to accept.

It’s just as well I will never get anywhere near Adebolajo or his boyfriend.  The overwhelming urge to tear them apart with my bare hands would be too difficult to control.  At least, unlike them, I wouldn’t be making up contrived excuses for my actions.

Rest in Peace and God bless you, Drummer Rigby. My thoughts and prayers are with your baby son and family.

Article 50: UKIP’s crucial weaknesses under the spotlight

Writing in the Telegraph today, City AM’s Allister Heath delivers a balanced if whistlestop article exploring some of the major problems that UKIP faces yet is doing little to overcome.

However Heath’s otherwise valuable piece gets off on the wrong foot from the get go with its title, ‘Nigel Farage’s biggest problem is Ukip doesn’t do details’.  For the piece to be more accurate that should have read, ‘UKIP’s biggest problem is Nigel Farage doesn’t do details’.  After all, Farage alone calls the shots and the party dances to whatever tune he chooses to play on any given day.

Even so, some of the analysis is penetrating and underlines much of what this blog has been arguing, even if Heath’s colour commentary about ties with the EU needing to be ‘significantly loosened’ is weak fluff.  The emphasis below is mine:

Ukip’s problem is that its policy positions are uncosted aspirations, rather than properly thought-through proposals. Until this is sorted, they risk being torn to shreds as media scrutiny increases. Those who simply wish to protest against a snooty establishment, or who like how Farage “represents people like us”, won’t mind; but much of the country will, and Ukip’s bubble would deflate almost as fast as it takes its leader to down a pint.

In particular, Ukip doesn’t have a plan to exit the EU and to introduce alternative trading arrangements that reflect the complexities of the modern economy. The challenge is especially acute when it comes to complex rules of origin for manufactured goods, and to protect London’s financial services industry against protectionism. This problem is shared by the broader Eurosceptic movement, including in the Tory party; a lot of work is needed, and fast. For those of us who agree that the European project is a busted flush and that the UK’s ties with the EU need to be significantly loosened, this is a source of major frustration.

The absence of a cohesive UKIP exit plan and vision for new trading arrangements is the most critical issue for the whole Eurosceptic movement.  This gap is a knife to the heart of the credibility of withdrawalists. It is the equivalent of a boxer not lifting his gloves and instead allowing his opponent to rain blow after blow on him.

Without a plan that triggers negotiation to bring about a replacement trading arrangement and access to the single market before the UK leaves the EU and abrogates existing treaties and agreements – which can only be achieved by invoking Article 50 – voters will be convinced to stick with the status quo, through a combination of Europhile FUD and the all-too-accurate exposure of the damaging consequences of simply leaving before securing trade deals that safeguard our economic interests.

Unless and until Farage gets serious about withdrawal, does detail and understands the mechanics and states the strategy to enable the UK to leave the EU, while maintaining our access to the single market – and crucially ensuring we can trade with those other countries around the world with whom trade agreements only cover EU member states – the ‘No’ campaign will lose any referendum.

Article 50 is the path to restoring our independence after which we can unpick the acquis at our leisure, secure in the knowledge we have access to the markets our businesses are so worried about losing.  If the Eurosceptics present a robust plan to give businesses confidence that decoupling from political union does not mean we lose access to the single market or the countries with whom we have EU-negotiated trade deals, they have no economic basis for opposing the out campaign.

And the basis for this claim is…?

Dismissing those who argue that Britain could negotiate a trade deal with the EU once it had left – note carefully the FUD-inducing avoidance of any reference to negotiating before leaving the EU, which Article 50 provides – Kevin Daly, an economist with the universally admired and respected investment bank Goldman Sachs, is quoted by the Daily Telegraph:

Given the size and importance of the UK economy, it is unlikely that the UK could negotiate the same access to the EU single market that Switzerland and Norway have achieved.  In particular, the UK’s ability to conduct business in financial services across the European Union is likely to be severely compromised by a departure from the EU.

And what of the evidence for this assertion?  Come on reader, you didn’t actually expect such a facile claim to be supported with any evidence did you?  That’s not the way FUD works!  But clearly the FUD flood season is upon us.

This is the same Goldman Sachs which encouraged its investors to get their money into gold investments last year as it predicted the value would rise to $1,840 per ounce, then this year, in concert with other investment banks, encouraged its investors to sell out of their ‘paper’ gold positions forcing the price to crash – enabling Goldman and the others to cash in by stocking their own vaults with physical metal on the cheap while their investors were forced to trigger stop losses and pay huge amounts to cover margin calls.

We won’t be taking any lessons from this lot of self interested troughers either.

We won’t take any lessons from these self interested Europhiles

According to a claque of pro-EU corporate captains, we eurosceptics are putting ‘politics before economics’.  In other words, we are being accused of putting democracy and self determination before the money making interests of these extremely wealthy individuals.  How very dare we put the democratic rights of millions of people before the bank balances of the well connected claque.

But even that premise of ‘politics before economics’ is utterly flawed, as there is no earthly reason for us to be trapped in a political union simply to be a part of the single market.  And when they try counter this fact with their claim that in leaving the EU we would allegedly lose our ‘influence’ and have to accept all the rules without shaping them, they are talking utter bullshit.

Do we shape the rules of the Chinese market?  Or the US?  No, but that doesn’t stop us trading with them.  So where do they get the idea that being politically independent means we won’t be able to trade with the EU?

Because of our EU membership, countries like China and the US perversely have more say in shaping our rules than we do – because the EU speaks for the UK in all trade matters on global bodies, whereas China and the US speak for themselves in their own interest.  The UK’s interest, however, is diluted to accommodate the wishes of 26 other countries.  So much for influence.  Norway and Switzerland have more say in shaping the single market trading rules that affect us than we do, and they are non-EU countries with access to the single market.  This is the reality we need to spread far and wide so people with no or little interest in governance understand the contempt this country’s people are held in by the political class and corporate tycoons.  They have some other agenda because their argument does not stand up to scrutiny.

So, terrified of these facts and the reality dawning on a generally disconnected docile nation, we are once again treated to a huge dose of FUD – fear, uncertainty and doubt – which is the only line of Europhile attack.  But, what is also interesting is the history of some of these great sages who presume to tell us to sod our interests, as conveniently collated by Guido…

• Roland Rudd – corporate lobbyist for multinational firms and campaigner for Britain’s membership of the single currency which he still believes in.
• Richard Branson – non domciled, campaigned for Britain to join the Euro and wants a single European army.
• Martin Sorrell – Chief executive of advertising agency WPP – Roland Rudd’s boss who owns Rudd’s Finsbury PR.
• Dame Helen Alexander – former chief executive of the Economist.
• Lord Kerr – Foreign Office and UKREP career as a diplomat who helped draft the EU constitution.
• Sir Andrew Cahn – career civil servant and worked for Lord Kinnock at the EU Commission, who infamously with his wife Glenys received more than £10 million in pay, allowances and pension entitlements during their time working at the European Union in Brussels.
• Sir Nigel Sheinwald – non exec director of Shell, who brokered the ‘deal in the desert’ between Tony Blair and former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
• Sir Roger Carr – Chairman of Centrica who criticises business for their “greed” while hiking energy costs. Outgoing President of the Euro-loving CBI.

Oh yes, these people are really representative of the man on the street who suffers the consequences of living under EU rule.  Why would anyone be bothered about what these people have to say, when they’ve spent their entire business lives servicing their interests at the expense of the rest of us?  They see us as expendable cash cows who are saying we should shut up and stay out of their way.  For heaven’s sake, some of them don’t even live here so they don’t have to put up with that they wish to have imposed on the rest of us.

We should all say no.  The spin, distortions and casual deceptions of the FUDmongers must not be allowed to con and scare the voters into staying part of this anti democratic, corrupt, wasteful club, built by and for a self selecting elite that sees us as nothing more than funding fodder for their games and personal enrichment.

Curious creatures these defecting Tories

Very interesting to read in the Telegraph today that Conservative activists have begun defecting to the UK Independence Party in protest at the Tory leadership’s ‘arrogant and insulting’ attitude towards grassroots members.

So let’s get this straight.

• These Tory activists have stayed part of the Cameronista through broken promises over a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, the craven failure to repeal the Human Rights Act and a raft of conservative principles being torn up.
• They have seen the selection of candidate short lists taken out of their hands.
• They have seen candidates they have voted to select in European elections passed over in favour of women who received far fewer member votes.
• They have hung in there as a raft of EU budgetary demands have been paid in full.  They have sat tight as more and more law-making power has been thrown over the fence to Brussels.
• They have remained in the blue corner as public borrowing and debt has escalated to shocking levels.
• They have put up with Liberal Democrats derailing implementation of fairer parliamentary constituency boundaries.
• They kept up their membership as wasteful and inefficient wind turbines are being imposed on communities against their wishes and reliable power stations are shut down.

And despite these and numerous other instances of the party leadership treating them with contempt and eroding their autonomy, only now are some choosing to defect to UKIP, apparently because someone in Cameron’s circle is alleged to have described party members as swivel-eyed loons.

While UKIP may be celebrating these additions to its membership, one has to ask if that party really needs to take on people who compromised their political principles for years by staying in the Conservative Party, only leaving when they perceived they had been insulted.  You’ve got to wonder about people that willingly tolerated such a sustained and overt assault on what they claim to stand for, yet leave on the basis of an as-yet unsubstantiated rumour.

Regardless, if it weakens the conservative-in-name-only Tories, then long may the defections continue.

He was wrong then and he is still wrong now

Time has done nothing to diminish the pompous stupidity of the sopping wet Europhile Tory, the Rt Hon Geoffrey Howe – now of course Lord Howe – when it comes to matters of ‘Europe’.

During the recent tributes and look back at some of the key moments in the political career of Margaret Thatcher, Howe’s resignation speech in the House of Commons, was referenced and used in audio/visual clips time and again.  The clip used, that was so devastating back then, has allowed people to see in hindsight just how wrong Howe had been about the Euroclub, its aims and direction and its approach:

We commit a serious error if we think always in terms of “surrendering” sovereignty and seek to stand pat for all time on a given deal–by proclaiming, as my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister did two weeks ago, that we have “surrendered enough”.

The European enterprise is not and should not be seen like that–as some kind of zero sum game. Sir Winston Churchill put it much more positively 40 years ago, when he said:

“It is also possible and not less agreeable to regard this sacrifice or merger of national sovereignty as the gradual assumption by all the nations concerned of that larger sovereignty which can alone protect their diverse and distinctive customs and characteristics and their national traditions.”

I have to say that I find Winston Churchill’s perception a good deal more convincing, and more encouraging for the interests of our nation, than the nightmare image sometimes conjured up by my right hon. Friend, who seems sometimes to look out upon a continent that is positively teeming with ill- intentioned people, scheming, in her words, to “extinguish democracy”, to “dissolve our national identities” and to lead us “through the back-door into a federal Europe”.

What kind of vision is that for our business people, who trade there each day, for our financiers, who seek to make London the money capital of Europe or for all the young people of today?

These concerns are especially important as we approach the crucial topic of economic and monetary union. We must be positively and centrally involved in this debate and not fearfully and negatively detached. The costs of disengagement here could be very serious indeed.

The nightmare image envisaged by Thatcher was frighteningly accurate.  What has characterised our experience in Europe is being faced with ill-intentioned schemers whose behaviour seeks to further aims that have eroded and continue to erode democracy, that have dissolved national identity and are building a federal Europe.  Howe was wrong then and he is still wrong now – only ignorance can be no defence for Howe after all these years.

As always, the same justifications for this larceny is presented, economic interests and the needs of business and employers.  As always, the question about why economic and trade relationships require this country to give up control over its laws, borders, international relationships and immense sums of our money, is never asked by our agenda-ridden excuse for a media and never volunteered by the likes of Howe and the political class – who slither through the corridors of what used to be a seat of power and influence, but is now a provincial hub of managerialism and execution of the diktats faxed over from Brussels.

Howe has clearly not learned – or more likely not wanted to learn or acknowledge – the reality, which is why the human-cum-dead sheep is still there even today declaring that if a proposed referendum led to the UK leaving the EU, there would be dire consequences for the country’s global influence.  Compounding this quisling’s idiocy is his willingness to perpetuate the impression that not wanting to be governed from overseas by unaccountable politicians and bureaucrats over which we have no democratic control is ‘anti European’:

The ratchet-effect of Euroscepticism has now gone so far that the Conservative leadership is in effect running scared of its own backbenchers, let alone UKIP, having allowed deep anti-Europeanism to infect the very soul of the party.

The Conservative Party’s long, nervous breakdown over Europe continues and what is essentially a Tory problem is now, once again, becoming a national problem.

Serious mistakes have been made, but the situation is not irretrievable.

The ‘situation’ to which he refers is the perceived bad behaviour in some people in the Conservative Party daring to question our EU overlords and having the temerity to disagree with their rule over us from overseas.  For the situation to be retrieved, those who wish to rebuild democracy, maintain a national identity and oppose a federal Europe – namely those things he derided all those years ago as conspiracy theories and scare stories – need to be silenced and beaten into submission by the party leader.

The irony – perhaps that should read hypocrisy – of a man calling for the leader of the Conservative Party to rein in dissenters, when he resigned as a minister for being reined for his dissent against Thatcher, is not lost on us.

Howe and his ilk are the enemy within. These carefully deceitful and treacherous fifth columnists have spent too many years seeking to destroy this country’s status as a nation state to see their anti-democratic enterprise undone now and people given the opportunity to say No to the political class.

Eurobollox

We’ve seen it all now.  Think back to Ireland’s impressive launch of the Riverdance phenomenon and compare that to the Swedish ‘interlude’ on the godawful Eurovision Song Contest tonight.

This is the part of the show that is supposed to showcase a country.  All it is doing is pushing every politically correct, leftist progressive stereotype against a backdrop of the constant mind control message to the audience of millions that ‘we are one’.

It long since became a parody of itself.  But now the politicisation of the event has ceased to be subliminal element of the drive for a united Europe hidden behind a music contest,  the whole thing is now an overt and blatant propaganda exercise where the music is incidental.  Like the EU itself, it’s a joke.

Farage meltdown

Confession time.  No way did I think Nigel Farage would inflict so much damage on himself so quickly after such a high profile improvement in his party’s fortunes.

His badly thought out appearance in Scotland was bad enough.  Requiring a police escort away from protesters was humiliating.  But what has followed – his ill-tempered name calling and undignified petulance in putting the phone down during an radio interview when walked into confirming the somewhat  embarrassing fact UKIP has no elected members north of the border, suggests the shine is coming off the blessed Nigel incredibly quickly.

UKIP insiders are all too well aware of Farage’s ignorant refusal to brook any challenge or opposition to his views.  But Farage’s demonstration of his inability to rise above the abuse he experienced on the street and defuse its sting won’t play well with voters, who are entitled to expect potential leaders to deal with such things in a gracious and magnanimous way.

I honestly pity Farage’s press adviser.  I am certain in my own mind that Farage would have been told how to handle this incident and respond assuredly to the unpleasant and seemingly intimidating experience, but refused to take the advice on board.  He could have told the media that seeing those Scottish protesters enjoying their freedom of speech was a welcome sight because such freedom is essential in a democracy – and that the political class increasingly censors people and the deeper we are integrated in the EU the less democratic this country becomes.  He could have added that while he strongly refutes and disagrees with their arguments and accusations he defends their right to express them and he would respond fully and openly to their claims.

Instead we have seen a senior politician engaging in pathetic namecalling that would be considered immature on a playground.  Far from being the bloke one would he happy to have a pint with, I would now be more concerned he would smash some glasses and kick some tables over if he hears something he doesn’t like.

Farage, as predicted, has just done some damage to UKIP and its credibility.  That party deserves better.

The political class is frit

Writing in the New Statesman’s blog, The Staggers, on Tuesday George Eaton made the following observation about what would happen if the current polling percentages were repeated at a General Election:

The Conservatives can have no complaints about the outcome delivered by an electoral system they have consistently defended and Labour governed for a full term after winning on just 35 per cent of the vote in 2005 (it bagged 55 per cent of the seats). But party figures have told me that they fear Labour could face a “crisis of legitimacy” if it wins an outsized majority on a thin slice of the vote. A share of 34 per cent would be the lowest winning percentage of the vote since 1832.

The language is interesting.  Set aside for a moment the idea of such a large majority for Labour if it only secures 34% of the votes cast at the General Election on a turnout of around 65%.  The real crisis of legitimacy that would finally emerge as a talking point following such an election ‘victory’ is that there would be a Labour government, imposing its will on the entire country without check, balance or accountability to voters, that was voted for by only 22% of registered voters.

There is not just fear within the political class about the impression that would be made by a large Labour majority on a very small percentage of the vote.  There is fear people will wake up and declare it to be unacceptable that with approaching 40% of voters rejecting all the parties, any of them can claim to represent the people.  The illusion of legitimacy for the political class will be crumbling.

We can expect to see another push for Proportional Representation as part of an electoral reform package.  Perhaps even the first moves to make voting compulsory.  Not just because the distribution of votes would make party representation in the House in terms of seats ‘fair’, but because it would allow for the appearance of legitimacy as the political class will seek to focus attention away from turnout and purely on to share of the vote – while increasing numbers of Britons refuse to support any of them.

Does being a Common Purpose graduate mean never resigning for incompetence?

In the news today is Joanna Simons, the lavishly renumerated Chief Executive of Oxfordshire County Council, whose social services department comprehensively failed to help the young girls who were being systematically raped and pimped out by so called British Pakistanis around the south of England.

Despite the catalogue of failings Oxfordshire Social Services, and even one of the abused girls detailing on radio last night how social services had threatened her family not to make waves when they failed to act to safeguard the girls from the abuse, Joanna Simons refuses to accept responsibility and resign.

Being such a familiar pattern, I wondered if there was another similarity between La Simons and a number of other local authority trough plunderers who it transpired were members of the insiduous organisation, Common Purpose.

Well what do you know!  You could knock me down with a feather.  My flabber is well and truly ghasted.

The pattern continues.  Where there is a fat snout in a publicly funded trough, coupled with a catalogue of failure and incompetence, there is a Common Purpose marxist refusing to be accountable and resign.  Clearly taxpayers should ask for their money back – the leadership development Simons has been through at their expense doesn’t seem to have developed any leadership qualities at all.

Labour and Lib Dems ask: What do you think this is, a democracy?

It has long been argued that Labour, and to a lesser extent the Lib Dems, have been waging a class war in this country.  The evidence of this is clear.  The political class has declared war on the class most simply defined as ‘everyone else’.

The defiant refusal of Labour and Lib Dems to support a referendum on our continued membership of the European Union, is the most serious and pressing political story of our time.  It has far reaching implications for the democratic process.  Yet the media, for reasons we understand all too well, is ignoring the most obvious questions this issue poses.  Where has a single BBC, Sky or ITV news journalist asked Ed Miliband or Nick Clegg:

‘Why are you refusing to let the British people decide if this country should be part of the EU?’

This position goes beyond arrogance.  It is the continuation of a nothing less than a coup d’etat.  The British people have never been asked for their permission to consign the independence of the United Kingdom to the dustbin.  They have never been asked if they consent to more than 75% of the laws and regulations by which they are bound to be created by alien bodies overseas.  They have never been asked to approve the wholesale export of billions of tax pounds to Brussels to be spent in the way special interests and other nations see fit.  They have never been asked if they want our borders torn down to enable millions of foreign nationals to set up home here and take advantage of benefits and infrastructure to which they have never contributed a penny of funding.

It is this way because the political class does not want to know or hear the answer.  When the wishes of the people are ignored and even suppressed this country cannot be called a democracy.

Even when some tiny vestiges of democracy are permitted by the establishment, such as the requirement put on local authorities to hold a local referendum if they want to increase council tax by more than 2%, the response is a desperate and aggressive campaign by the politicians and bureaucrats to eradicate that need to ask permission to tax people more.  They want our money to fund what is of interest to them, such as first division civil service salaries for senior bureaucrats, index linked pensions far more generous than anything in the private sector, and hugely expensive rafts of sustainability related positions and campaigns to service an repressive and controlling agenda set down by UN bodies and the EU, which have never been put to or approved by the electorate.

This is why we see the Labour, Lib Dem and not a few Tory members of the Local Government Association, a kind of cross-party self interest ‘union’ for councils, demanding the right to extract as much as they like from local taxpayers without the need to get our permission or approval.  They have done this is such a stunningly brazen and transparent manner because the local authorities consider themselves to be above challenge, untouchable by ordinary people.  They believe they should be able to do what they like and feel they can.

Democracy in this country is a myth.  Being allowed – increasingly pressured – to vote every 4-5 years is not democracy.  What marks a democracy is the control the people have over their representatives and public servants between elections.  We have none, because this is not a functioning democracy.  The British people are not permitted to decide how this country is run or by whom.  Every election cycle is characterised by pledges to ‘change’ yet the only changes are the faces of the grubbing parasites that infest our town halls, county council chambers and parliament.  No matter who people vote for the outcome is a continuation of the same agenda handed down from supranational bodies.  The wishes of the people are trampled upon, scoffed at and ultimately ignored by those who like to tell us they know best.

Increasing numbers of people are seeing that voting in elections is meaningless.   They are increasingly rejecting the political process.  Tellingly the political class is becoming nervous about this because they know the lower the percentage gets, the weaker their claims of systemic and personal legitimacy will be.

That is why we see their ideological allies in ‘think tanks’ coming up with ideas such as compelling 18-23 year olds by law to vote in the first general election that takes place after they attain the age of majority, or face a fine.  Other ideas include making voting compulsory for all, or moving voting to the weekend in the hope of increasing turnout.  All these ideas have one objective in mind – preserving the legitimacy of the political class.

Participating in the process gives it legitimacy.  As long as people continue to vote they are validating the political class and enabling it to continue eroding our democracy while continually reducing accountability.  It’s not enough to want to vote the current lot out by voting an identikit lot in.  It plays into the hands of the parasites and maintains the illusion of democracy.

To achieve genuine democracy – and thus take back for ourselves the power to address the vital issues that are before us instead of dancing to the political class’ tune – we need a different approach.  We need to educate and inform people and show them how we can take back power and eject the parasites.  The strategy for doing this is being developed.  More to follow in due course…