Following the ‘climatologist’ humiliation in Antarctica, the all too predictable and desperate alarmist response

It was only a matter of time.  With the MV Akademik Schokalskiy stuck fast in the Antarctic sea ice that was supposed to have melted in line with so many computer model predictions, the humiliated laughing stock that comprises the climate alarmist community has predictably rushed out a story to distract attention from the fiasco, in their default propaganda outlet:

Update: Katabasis, in the comments, points out that the source for the distraction effort story is Professor Steven Sherwood of the University of New South Wales.  As if by sheer coincidence, the ice locked expedition in Antarctica is being led by Professor Chris Turney… one of Sherwood’s team in the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales.  Fancy that!

It seems all this warming will not come in time to prevent the spectacle of BBC and Guardian journalists, ‘climatologists’ and an assortment of non climate academics – who believe themselves able to walk on water, and thanks to the cold conditions in the south have been reduced to doing just that to pass the time – being airlifted from the vessel while a stalled rescue operation continues.

The desperation of the Guardian’s environment hacktivist, Damian Carrington, in rushing this scare story to the top of the Graun’s website while playing down the reality of colder than expected conditions in the southern seas and what this means for the alarmist predictions, is just too funny for words.

Ice locked ‘SS Alarmist’ provides reminder of media bias

We can be very certain that the crew and climate alarmist passengers of the MV Akademik Schokalskiy did not expect to get trapped in a thick ice sheet in Antarctica.  They went in search evidence of the world’s melting ice caps, but instead a team of ‘climate scientists’ have been forced to abandon their mission … because the Antarctic ice is thicker than usual at this time of year (code for ‘it’s colder, not warmer’).

Despite it being the Antarctic summer, when the most ice melt would invariably take place, the vessel and an ice breaker sent to cut her free are both stuck firm.  It’s not the first time conditions have failed to reinforce the narrative.  From this we can at least deduce the warming that is supposedly hidden deep in the ocean is not hiding in that part of the world…

It is rather satisfying to see the alarmists experiencing first hand the reality of conditions that differ wildly from their computer modelled predictions and consistently worrying warnings, that are parrotted obediently and without challenge or question by their fellow travellers in the world’s biased and agenda riddled media.

Had the crew and passengers managed to observe and record dramatic images of ice melt cascading off ice flows, we can be sure the media would currently be packed with ‘we told you’ so climate change/global warming reports prophesising impending thermogeddon and demanding even more ‘action’ and public money to tackle man’s warming of the planet – furthering the green agenda of reversing progress and industrialisation to force mankind back into the middle ages.

Instead, as they have experienced unexpectedly cold and contradictory conditions, they and their media lackeys only make passing reference to the vessel being trapped and package it up as a human interest story.  The bias is glaringly obvious.  Their embarrassment and frustration is palpable.  So clearly there is no mileage in global warming alarmists telling the world it is actually colder, despite all their ‘evidence’ to the contrary.

Therefore, sadly for the alarmists, the latest round of doom laden climate reporting grounded in biased computer models has been cancelled due to the inconvenient truth of observed reality.  The absence of a raft of climate change stories from these ideologues sends a clear message, move along… there’s nothing to see here (unless it fits our agenda).  Science and the media working in concert.  Ain’t it grand?

March of the delusional EUseful idiots

Why should the media subject us to what people like Lord Wolfson have to say, when they spout such ignorant rubbish as this?

I think the most important thing is the principal – what is the EU there for. Is it a vehicle for greater freedom in Europe – free movement of capital, free movement of good, free movement of services, free movement of people?

Or is it a government of governments, a government above governments, a government without democratic licence, but the right to interfere in every aspect of our lives?

I think that is what it is becoming. I think over the last thirty years it has slowly changed itself and become ever more hungry for power.

The EU, in all its guises, has never been anything other than a governance construct designed to centralise power by removing it from nation states so that ordinary people cannot pursue ‘populist’ agendas that conflict with the continent’s elite.  It was not created as a free trade area in the way Wolfson and his pro-EU friends at Open Europe keep kidding themselves.

It has not been changing itself; it has merely been executing the centralisation plan that was always as the heart of the European project.  The EU mimics a state and is striving to function as one, and within a state – a single entity – movement of capital, goods, services and people is not constrained.  The four freedoms are just the by-product, not the objective.

A supposedly intelligent man like Wolfson would know this if he bothered to try to understand the entity he is saying should be reformed.  He either doesn’t know, or is simply misleading people for ulterior ends.  What isn’t made clear is what interest the EU could possibly have in reform when its decades-long plan to remove power from nation states has been progressing so effectively?  That’s an issue the ignorant Wolfson and delusional Open Europe never address as they continue in their roles of useful idiots for the benefit of the EU.

Farage counting cost of being all things to all men for too long

The digital wailing and gnashing of teeth is a sight to behold. It was always only a matter of time before it came to the fore.

Nigel Farage has a track record of masterful inaction and silence when he wants to be all things to all men.  Article 50 is a case in point.  With some in UKIP wisely recognising Article 50 as the only legal process available for commencing Brexit from the EU, and others loudly declaring it to be a vicious trap to be avoided at all costs, Farage stayed silent on the subject for years lest he alienate one of the divergent sections of UKIP supporters.  Eventually he came down on the side of Article 50 in a conference question and answer session, leaving UKIP ‘heavyweights’ like Rodney Atkinson, Torquil Erikson and Professor Tim Congdon on the wrong side of the party’s policy.

But that was an EU related matter and therefore an issue of steadily declining importance in UKIP, which has instead opportunisitically positioned itself to become a rallying point for the disaffected anti immigration/anti asylum constituency as part of Farage’s grand plan to eclipse the BNP by wooing their supporters.  As intended, many former BNP supporters who saw the Nick Griffin bandwagon coming off the tracks saw UKIP, with its own sizeable, vociferous and unchallenged ‘the UK is full, no more migrants or asylum seekers‘ anti immigration rump, as their new natural home.

Certainly, Farage wasn’t saying anything that would alienate them so it seemed the perfect fit .  But what they did not note was that Farage was also saying nothing on the subject to alienate the more rational and realistic members of his party, who recognise that controlled immigration is necessary for a country with an economy like ours and providing asylum to those in fear for their lives is a humane act.  But that has been Farage all over, letting everyone believe he is on their side and in tacit support of their worldview because he was able to stay quiet on anything contentious.  That is they way it remains until silence is no longer an option, or Farage decides there is capital to be made by coming down on one side of the fence.

Over the weekend, calculating a potential advantage that could wrongfoot David Cameron and make UKIP seem more cuddly to potential voters who are otherwise put off by that UKIP faction which wants all immigrants to leave and no more immigrants or asylum seekers – particularly not Muslims – to be admitted, Farage threw one of his legs over the fence and called for the UK to accept refugees from Syria.

Cue the digital equivalent of a collective howl from the small minded little Englanders who had, until that point, believed Farage was in lock-step with them and would pursue a policy of pulling up the drawbridge.  Moderate ‘kippers have been celebrating Farage’s call, as much for the manner in which he has exposed Cameron’s Conservatives as lacking ‘compassion’ as for it being the right thing to do.  However, for the true believers who abandoned the BNP cult for the UKIP cult, some of whom infest the comment threads of the Telegraph and the Mail, Twitter and UKIP’s Facebook page with their obsessive and often illogical rants, the sense of betrayal has been too much to bear as the selection of the comments below shows:

Their reaction is akin to being courted, bedded then dumped just before a big date, after they have spent lots of time being told this is the real thing.  UKIP is going to lose members and gain vocal, bitter critics that were previously sworn brothers in arms.

For this schism Farage has only himself to blame.  He could have avoided getting into bed with these people by making clear what he believed in from the outset.  But his view is why bother alienating people who are in the tank, spreading the word, plastering ‘Vote UKIP’ in every comment thread on news websites and supporting the claim that UKIP is growing and winning new supporters.

Farage might have finally realised that UKIP has a ‘toxic brand’ far worse than the one that causes the Conservatives so much anxiety, but it is one that might now be too embedded for moderate people to ever give the party their support.  That is something for which Farage will have to count the cost.  Sadly for the EUsceptic cause, it is a cost borne there too which adversely affects the likelihood of securing the essential Brexit from the EU.

‘Charities’ taking people for fools for their own ends

It is becoming increasingly difficult to identify worthy and genuine charities, those that prioiritise the delivery of good works for people in genuine need by channelling every penny possible to them.

In the first instance, if a charity relies on state handouts for the bulk of its funding then it isn’t a charity at all, but an extension of the state.  It also suggests the charity does not appeal to donors sufficiently to make them want to part with their money.  Prompting this is a column by Amanda Platell, which reminds us of the corruption of the definition of the word ‘poverty’ by groups such as the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), to suit their own ends.  As their website explains:

What this adopted ‘definition’ shows is that in affluent societies where real poverty does exists but is comparatively rare, the only way a charity like the CPAG can justify its existance is through a corruption of the definition and creation of a problem that isn’t really there.  In that way it can enjoin the state to fork over our money to tackle – if one can describe their work in such terms – ‘relative poverty’.

You may wonder what’s in it for CPAG.  A look at their website makes that very obvious…

What this menu of options tells us is that CPAG is a business.  It has people on the payroll focused on publications, media, education and lobbying.  It is an enterprise that generates income (pg 5) for a staff whose primary focus is merely:

Such awareness consists of adverts and videos like the one below which, while purporting to tell us the truth about benefits Britain, singularly fails to recognise or mention that governments use benefits as electoral bribes and have a vested interest in making people dependent on the state; increase the cost of living through rising taxation; wheezes like fighting ‘climate change’; subsidising wealthy companies and land owner involved in renewables; sending aid money overseas; financing the EU’s largesse and so on.

There is much talk but little direct intervention on show.  I’m sure the ‘poverty’ stricken will be glad of this ‘help’, especially when the first £1,362,314 of the ‘charity’s’ income in the last financial year (pg 20) was spent on salaries, National Insurance and pension contributions, more than £70,ooo of which was spent on the chief executive, Alison Garnham.  At least she has enough money for a selective diet, activity participation and customary amenities:

To keep this show on the road, the Child Poverty Action Group needs to keep the cash coming in.  To keep the cash coming in it needs to keep inventing crises, peddling myths and constructing a narrative to give the impression there is a major and immediate problem that has to be addressed, requiring substantial public funds that have the happy coincidence of meeting the employment costs of like minded activists.  In this it is no different to so many other of these fake charities.

People are being taken for fools.  The current multi-pronged campaign being waged by self serving ‘poverty’ activists on everything from wages to food banks to deprived children, is a scam.  These committed political activists are applying pressure and being joined in their cause by simple minded virtue-mongers who need the supposed issues to be true to justify their chest beating and scattergun condemnation of everyone and everything they believe to be less virtuous than them.

As these entities are reliant on state funding rather than individual donations, the only way to stop feeding the beast is to show up these campaign chartities for what they are – so even the government will not want to be seen by taxpayers as being associated with them.  It’s time for the rip off to end.

Merry Christmas!

Wishing you all the joy of Christmas and hoping this special time is blessed with peace, health and happiness for you and your loved ones.

Bailiffs and Councils squirm under fresh spotlight

The epidemic of criminality by bailiffs and law breaking by local councils is being dragged blinking into the sunlight thanks to the Citizens Advice Bureau, which is accusing councils of letting bailiffs get away with threatening and aggressive behaviour when collecting council tax debts.

The CAB report that in a survey of 500 people who were being subjected to bailiff action instigated by local authorities, 38% said that they were charged fees for visits bailiffs never made and 40% reported that they were threatened with the removal of items that did not belong to them. Both of these actions constitute criminal behaviour.  The bailiffs’ ‘trade body’ (no, really), the Civil Enforcement Association, is aggressively denying the findings and rubbishing the survey’s validity, saying:

This is based upon distorted facts, the use of pseudo statistical analysis and highly emotive and inappropriate language. This self-selecting sample of 500 unhappy individuals cannot be extrapolated to imply that it reflects the situation amongst the general population of debtors.

The problem for the association and the vested interests of its membership is that we know from many low profile stories in the local press, and write ups on blogs, that what is being described in the CAB report is not out of the ordinary, but typical features of bailiff action.

The only reason the Civil Enforcement Association is able to say what has been attributed to its director general, Steven Everson, is that councils wrongly and deliberately refer complaints about bailiffs operating on their behalf back to the bailiffs themselves, where the complaints are routinely ignored.  Even where complaints are made to the police no action is taken, for fear that taking action against entities working on behalf of the establishment will undermine the establishment’s ability to extract monies it has determined for itself as being due.

With enforcement of the law not forthcoming because the police ignore the reports made to them despite the evidence provided, and despite reports of criminal behaviour being wrongly and deliberately written off as civil matters, the only organised voice for a large number of victims of fraud perpetrated by bailiffs and councils, is Citizens Advice.  How long that lasts, before pressure is appliedon the CAB to put the matter back under the carpet, remains to be seen.

For newer readers not familiar with the issues, a brief explanation…

The most common example of criminal behaviour is the fraudulent charges applied for liability orders by councils.  The Council Tax (Administration and Enforcement) Regulations 1992 (as amended), permit councils to charge ‘costs reasonably incurred’ for liability orders to enforce council tax demands.  The court fee cost of liability orders, according to the Magistrates’ Courts fee schedule, is £3.00.  When factoring in administration and postage overheads the total charged to the resident should be no more than £10.  Yet many councils are charging between £80 – £125 per order, making a profit after costs reasonably incurred.  See here and here.  This is blatantly against the law. Also against the law is the practice of bailiffs charging for visits they have not made, charging fees that are higher than the statutory schedule for fees, threatening behaviour and intimidation, and threatening to undertake actions they have no power to carry out, such as entering a home or changing the locks unless payment is made immediately – which happens frequently.  Councils also seek to evade responsibility for the actions of their contractors despite full responsibility resting with them as  is made clear by the government:

The hypocrisy in all this is we have an establishment that uses the law to ensure people who do not pay the council tax demand in full are threatened, bullied and harrassed until the money is prised from them.  Yet the same establishment works in concert to ensure when its own break the law, no legal action will follow.  The rules are only for the little people.

People are being conned by a new set of ‘banksters’

Yesterday’s Daily Mail ran a piece telling readers that pupils in Welsh schools have been told they will not receive an additional portion of food by kitchen staff so they can adopt sensible eating habits. The piece goes on to explain that strict mealtime policies have been introduced because children as young as 14 are receiving gastric bands on the NHS.

This story brought to mind a piece back in October, by Brendan O’Neill writing in the Telegraph.  Something about the food-bank frenzy doesn’t add up, he mused. Continuing, he wrote:

Reading the Dickens-tinged coverage of food banks, of which there are now 400, you could be forgiven for thinking that Britain has done a timewarp back to the Victorian era of emaciated urchins begging for scraps of bread on foggy bridges. Britons are “hungrier than ever”, says the Independent. “Starving Britain”, says one newspaper headline. There is clearly enormous “destitution, hardship and hunger” in Britain, says Oxfam. Even the International Red Cross has got involved, promising to help tackle Britain’s “food poverty”.

As O’Neill went on to say, against this backdrop something about the rise of food banks and the hand-wringing over “Starving Britain” doesn’t make sense, especially when one takes into account the frequent claims over recent years where we’ve been told that the problem in Britain is that food is too cheap by the very people now who are now claiming that hundreds of thousands of Brits cannot afford food.

Food poor? Money for tattoos and no indication of any lack of nourishment. Click on image for another example of cynical PR in action with no challenge from the media

It shouldn’t add up, but it does.  Because Britain, fresh from being ripped off and conned by one set of bankers, is now being ripped off and conned by another set of bankers – the Food Bankers.  O’Neill again:

Today’s food banks are not fuelled by the needs of the poor so much as by the needs of charities and campaigners. I think the main beneficiaries of the fashion for opening food banks, and for press-releasing these openings to every media outlet in the land, are the poverty industry rather than the poor. The poverty industry is made up of those campaigners who depend, for their very existence, on the idea that there exist hordes of helpless, hapless poor folk – and so the more these campaigners can fuel that idea, the better.

He got this part spot on.  But there is another driver behind the actions of the food banksters that goes beyond the concept of ‘poverty porn’ and a desire by the so called ‘third sector’ to keep the charity bandwagon – with all those extra paypackets picked up by taxpayers or donors – rolling along smoothly, and that is a naked political agenda.  We see it in action today in the Guardian – where else? – where the food banksters are playing politics for all they are worth:

Iain Duncan Smith, the embattled work and pensions secretary, is refusing to meet leaders of the rapidly expanding Christian charity that has set up more than 400 food banks across the UK, claiming it is “scaremongering” and has a clear political agenda.

The news will fuel a growing row over food poverty, as church leaders and the Labour party accuse ministers of failing to recognise the growing crisis hitting hundreds of thousands of families whose incomes are being squeezed, while food prices soar.

Responding to requests for a meeting from Chris Mould, chairman of the Trussell Trust, which has provided food supplies to more than 500,000 people since April, Duncan Smith has dismissed claims that the problems are linked to welfare reforms and attacked the charity for publicity-seeking.

What O’Neill was pointing out a couple of months ago is now very much coming to the fore.  We are seeing the blatant abuse of statistics – such as the dropping into the article of a reference that in 2010, the Trussell Trust provided food to around 41,000 people, but in the past eight months the number has increased to more than half a million, a third of whom are children.  The Graun has already explained that the ‘charity’ is rapidly expanding, so of course more people will take advantage of the opportunity to get food for free so they can spend money on other things – which from what I have sadly witnessed tend to include such essentials as cigarettes, drink, DVDs, games consoles and lottery tickets.  Don’t forget this comes at a time of falling unemployment and more people coming off benefits to take up work.  It doesn’t add up.

What is sickening about Labour’s involvement in this scam is that it, more than any other party, bears responsibility for legislative actions that have driven up taxes, increased energy costs and reduced disposable income of the lowest earners.  As much as I loathe the Conservatives, Labour’s hypocrisy is contemptible.  Their placemen supporters in the ‘charity sector’ are now repaying the debt they owe their comrades for getting their grotesquely large salary packages ahead of being enobled to suck further from the public teat as their fat rent-seeking arses sink onto red benches in the House of Lords.

Picking up the cost of all this are the general public who take personal responsibility and live within their means, accepting that some things cannot be afforded on their income and therefore are eschewed.  Yet their taxes are taken to fund this political con trick being perpetrated by the food bankers and their friends in fake charities who push the poverty narrative for all its worth because it is in their own vested interest to do so.  These troughing rip off merchants backed by their well remunerated PR machine should be ashamed of themselves.

So pleased for the BBC

There are few sights as heartwarming as seeing the BBC writhing around in orgasmic ecstasty, but that is what we have been able to enjoy today.

We can only feel pleased for the corporation, for no less than 120 Beeboids were shipped to South Africa to cover the Nelson Mandela memorial service for TV, radio and web.  And rightly so, because no opportunity to visit far flung corners of the world for a well deserved jaunt on full expenses and with no luxuries spared should ever be passed up.  It has been earned.  And in return our intrepid and fearless expeditionary force rewarded us with an impossibly large range of news angles to tell us in many, many different ways that Mandela was special.

Not only were our BBC truth seekers able to get moist while listening to a conveyor belt of eulogies to one of their biggest heroes, who transformed the world single handedly without any hint of a stain or blemish on his character, they were also treated to what may be the final curtain call for BBC favourite Archbishop Desmond Tutu; and were privileged to have been in the presence of a Cuban Castro – names which have featured so prominently in impartial and balanced BBC coverage for decades.

But best of all for Team Auntie, they have experienced the thrill of seeing, live and in the flesh, their hero of the modern era, President Barack Obama.  The World’s President stood like a giant, holding forth in full effect, working that teleprompter like no one else can, before taking a few selfies with a Danish blonde and an Old Etonian with narcissistic tendencies and a delusion disorder.  Truly he is great.

In fact, such was the BBC delerium at seeing Obama it was hard to tell from the news reports whether the most significant event just outside Johannesburg was Madiba’s memorial or Obama’s tribute to his hero.  Naturally it was a fine line to tread, but one the Beeboids did with poise and without the slightest hint of sycophancy.

What is especially pleasing is that in recent days the BBC has achieved all this by making liberal use of license fee money and managing to triage the news in order to sift out trivial domestic events, such as the worst storm surge in the last 60 years that has flooded hundreds of families out of their homes and businesses.  Make no mistake, this is a triumph.

The BBC identified what was important to them and their worldview, then put their backs into ensuring we all shared in the experience.  They did this safe in the knowledge that any small minded person who lacks the education and intellectual depth required be able to respect the BBC way as the right way and who deigns to complain about this, will be brushed off in the usual manner; and that thanks to the entirely proper and not at all hypocritical Freedom of Information exemption enjoyed by the corporation, have done all this safe in the knowledge the editorial decision making process will remain secret and beyond accountability.  As it should be, naturally.

Well done Beeb.  So pleased for you.

How can Labour be ahead in the polls?

The other day, the Guardian covered Ed Balls’ interview on Sky News where he said that most people did not spend their time watching Commons debates and that what was much more important was winning the debate among the public at large.  Balls was quoted as saying:

The nature of politics is, you either spend your time in the bubble, obsessed, reading all the diary columns, worried about the Daily Mail, or you think let’s go and talk to people about what’s happening in their lives.

One wonders who does the talking in this supposed dialogue with the people. Of particular interest is whether Balls acknowledges in these big conversations that much of what is going on in people’s lives today, from a financial perspective, stems from the economic policies and reckless borrow and spend he presided over.

Judging by what passes for Labour economic policies these days, the evidence suggests not.

On planet Balls, the financial mismanagement and mountain of debt that built up that took place under Labour before May 2010 has nothing to do with him or his champagne socialist friends. Every financial ill and economic woe is the fault of the Con-Dem coagulation.

He rails against and criticises everything, but the sum total of how he would manage the economy is to say ‘not like this’, or ‘we would not have gone this far this fast’, or to attack the ‘slowest recovery in history’ while most other countries are not recovering at all.

The factors that brought about Labour’s worst election performance in 2010 are unchanged.  They still believe in the same bankrupt dogma that saw the much of the electorate still willing to vote turn against them.  So quite why so many people seem prepared to give them another five years to wreak more havoc, both economically and socially, only this time under Ed Miliband, the architect of rising energy prices to subsidise corporate interests, eludes rational explanation.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter if Labour wins or not.  Whoever takes office will maintain the same corporatist direction of travel at our ever rising expense, regardless of the colour of the rosette.  But even so, Labour’s lead in the polls defies logic.

The tide of ignorance of EU law laps over the wall of reality

The Mail has bought and run as its own a piece from the Guardian about what its like to work for Amazon.

It focuses on the working conditions, low pay, use of agency labour and number of jobs they estimate the company’s rise has cost elsewhere.  But no such attack piece on a company like Amazon is complete without bringing up taxation:

It is taxes, of course, that pay for the roads on which Amazon’s delivery trucks drive, and the schools in which its employees are educated.

Taxes that all its workers pay, and that, it emerged in 2012, Amazon tends not to pay.

On UK sales of £4.2 billion in 2012, it paid £3.2 million in corporation tax. In 2006, it transferred its UK business to Luxembourg and reclassified its UK operation as simply an ‘order fulfilment’ business.

The Luxembourg office employs 380 people. The UK operation employs 21,000. You do the sums.

One can understand this line.  One can also sympathise with it to a degree because it underlines what is wrong with the corporatist system we have, something that too many people wrongly describe as capitalist.  But that sympathy erodes somewhat when what follows a few paragraphs further on shakes us back to our senses and reveals yet again the sheer ignorance of the people railing against this situation:

MPs like to attack Amazon and Starbucks and Google for not paying their taxes, but they’ve yet to actually create legislation compelling them to do so.

All too often these left leaning campaigning writers are pro-EU, they love the idea of knocking over nation states to create a nationless unions such as the EU.  Yet they are either too stupid to understand the reality, or too dishonest to report it, by not pointing out it is EU law and one of the four freedoms (of movement of capital) that prevent MPs creating legislation to tax profits made in the UK when that company’s UK operation is merely ‘passported’ because its base is in another EU state.

Such is the pisspoor calibre of our media, they continue to misinform, mislead and misdirect their slowly dwindling audience, ensuring the sum of knowledge is minimised yet rousing rabbles to attack MPs for inaction where in reality they have no power.

Rather than attack MPs for not applying taxes they are barred from levying, these prestigious know nothings should be attacking them for allowing power to be taken by Brussels, leaving the UK without sovereignty.  But this is what happens when we are flooded by a tide of ignorance so big the walls of reality are breached.

Despite no evidence media deliberately seeks to link tidal surge to climate change

It’s not just shabby, it’s downright dishonest.

The Independent – a viewspaper not a newspaper – having taken it upon itself as part of the establishment to push the climate alarmist narrative relentlessly, is even ignoring what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said about no evidence of a link between ‘climate change’ and ‘extreme weather’ and is trying to connect the east coast tidal surge to climate change.  But in a snide piece of journalism it is doing it in an underhand way, designed to be subtle while being blindingly obvious, by making references to Owen Paterson’s comments about the potential benefits of climate change.

Climate activists and their media mouthpieces keep suggesting extreme weather events are being caused by climate change.  Yet that would mean the weather events they have latched on to would be happening only because of a tiny amount of temperature change that has been recorded.  Paterson did himself no favours by describing the flooding this week as ‘quite exceptional’.  They were comparable to the floods of 1953, lower in some areas and higher in others, which pre-date the warming cited as a cause of weather events that have occured many times over the centuries.

But where there is an agenda being pushed by people who put their fingers in their ears to block out anything that undermines their belief system, and who refuse to provide balance in their reporting by publishing anything that contradicts it, we get what the media is serving up.

The poor value wind turbines deliver in return for the subsidy

When Christopher Booker isn’t ploughing a lonely furrow exposing the disturbing secret behaviour of the courts as they put children into care or take them to be put up for adoption; he is making the weather on the wind turbines – and specifically this week reminding us of how the weather reduces their already poor performance to even more rotten levels.

Yet even though the facts Booker has presented are accepted by DECC – meaning their projections for wind power generation are being significantly overstated – DECC is continuing to use their incorrect and inflated numbers to justify the proliferation of wind turbines at vast expense to taxpayers, in return for even less energy than the fraction of capacity they already deliver.

Cameron’s supposed challenge to free movement in the EU is going nowhere

On the day when much of the world lost all sense of perspective and proportionality, to beatify by acclaim the media constructed legend of Nelson Mandela, the outcome of discussions that directly impact on the lives of Britons – and therefore matters rather more – was quietly released.

Home Affairs ministers from around the bloc have taken note of the European Commission’s communication on ‘the free movement of EU citizens’ and responded to it, making clear that.

The overwhelming majority of member states agreed that the free movement of persons is a core principle of the European Union and a fundamental right of all  EU citizens that should be upheld and promoted. They also agreed that individual cases of abuse have to be combated within the existing legal framework and in cooperation with local authorities in the member states.

Moreover, the Visegrad countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia) circulated a joint statement on this issue (17395/13), considering that the selective  application of core freedoms by member states leads to an erosion of the single market.

This, coupled with the process of qualified majority voting, means Cameron’s attempt at a putsch to dilute one of the European project’s four fundamental freedoms is dead before it even gets out of the gate.

As if to reinforce the point – and provide a timely reminder that many of the worst impacts of mass migration here are the result of the UK government failing to use powers at its disposal – the ministers, whose UK representatives were Chris Grayling and Theresa May, generously suggested actions that should be carried out instead:

In order to help national and local authorities to effectively apply EU free movement rules, the document presents five concrete actions to be implemented together with member states:

– helping member states to fight marriages of convenience (handbook);
– helping authorities to apply EU social security coordination rules (practical guide);
– helping authorities to meet social inclusion challenges (funding);
– exchange of best practices between local authorities;
– training and support of local authorities in applying the EU free movement rules.

From a democracy perspective this is valuable and instructive, as another example of how the EU circumvents national governments and talks directly to local authorities to ensures they deliver what the EU wants at a local level.  This sees to it there is no need to overcome potential resistance from Parliaments.  Westminster will therefore once again be by bypassed as our supreme government talks to the lowest levels of government and hands them their orders – which are enthusiastically followed by pro-EU council officers.

Of course, voters in local elections are never asked if they agree with what their local authorities plan to do on their behalf in respect of dealing with immigration.  They are not even told what measures will be taken or how many tax pounds will be allocated for this work, let alone have any say in what actually happens, or any veto over it.  Despite this people still witter on about this country being a ‘democracy’.

The media will not report this.  The Cameroon sycophants will ignore it, as they ignore everything that challenges their inaccurate beliefs and delusional shibboleths.  Most people will know nothing about it.  Rather than focus on how we are ruled and decisions are made without our consent, time and money is devoted to lauding a man who used violence to help achieve his ends – with one increasingly unhinged commentator even drawing comparisons between Mandela and Jesus Christ.

Perhaps the solution is for people to use social media to start sharing information like this that the media deliberately withholds from the public, and stop simply being used by the media to link to stories it has chosen to cover in pursuit of an agenda that serves interests other than ours.

UKIP’s marginal seat polling – fun with hyperbole and badly spun numbers

Alan Bown’s money is generating headlines for UKIP that are better than the actual polling numbers themselves suggest.

The headline figures of these UKIP commissioned polls are being reported somewhat selectively.  I don’t know why this is happening, but with such a small sample in each constituency (only around 500) and by only publicising the figures that exclude undecided voters and those who refused to say who they would vote for, the poll is largely meaningless.

For example, in Great Grimsby the realistic polling figures (page 6 of the table, figures rounded) are:

Labour 29%
UKIP 16%
Conservative 15%
Lib Dems 8%
Others 4%
Undecided/Refused to answer 28%

With nearly a third of respondants not knowing or not saying who they will vote for, this poll really tells us nothing.  Bown is wasting his money, or at best paying well over the odds for some favourable short term headlines in the Tory hating press.

Looking at the figures objectively, the Labour lead is no surprise.  This was a seat the Tories failed to win, even against the most unpopular Labour government in history, falling 700 votes short of Austin Mitchell in 2010.  Looking at that result gives the impression of this seat being a marginal.  But in reality, the Tories have shot their bolt and now they are part of an unpopular government they were always going to fall away to more normal levels of support.

To put things into context, below is the result from Great Grimsby in 2005, which shows the more normal order of things in the constituency.

Getting back to this Survation poll for Bown/UKIP and the comparison with 2010, the Guardian’s report is little short of ludicrous:

Meanwhile Ukip is significantly outperforming its projected figure from most national polls, up 15 points on 23%, far above the 15% projected from national polling.

The UKIP vote was 6% in 2010, but when you look at the full numbers in the Survation poll, including the all important undecideds and refusals, UKIP is up 10 points to 16% – which is 50% less than the Guardian is trying to spin and completely in line with the 15% vote share projection from national polling.

It’s not a bad increase, but it is nothing like what the media is trying to spin.  This is another example of the lamestream media trying to concoct a story out of nothing.

Further, when one considers UKIP’s recent election results have seen increases in their vote directly correlating with the previous BNP vote that has lost its home, the 16% today is only 5% higher than the combined UKIP/BNP 2010 share in Great Grimsby of just under 11%, shown below:

Of course, in this poll some of the refusals might be UKIP supporters and some of the undecideds could break for UKIP in 2015, so a 23% vote share is still possible, if somewhat unlikely.  But as with the polling numbers released last week for Thanet South, the media coverage seems to be following an agenda that gives UKIP false hope that they are performing better than they actually are.  The devil is in the numbers that are being deliberately ignored.

I have not yet looked at the Dudley polling, but I’ll wager the pattern is continued there and the headline numbers are overstating the real support the parties are getting.

Straitjacket of EU membership laid bare over China

Following on from the previous post about David Cameron’s inauspicious jaunt to China, we find a report on the BBC that is helpful in reinforcing why EU membership is a straitjacket for a country like the UK.

Irrespective of whether a free trade agreement of the type Cameron has called for is a good thing or a bad thing for the UK, the fact remains the UK cannot form such a trade relationship with China even if it wants to because the EU does not let member states make such agreements.  Any trade agreement with China would have to be made between Beijing and Brussels.

The UK and its business community can be as outward facing as they like, but unless the EU – with its slow moving bureaucracy, 28 member state bloc and all the competing interests that throws up – makes a deal, the UK is powerless to act.  Even if the EU does make a deal, it may still fall far short of what would give the UK and its economic sector maximum benefit.

It is constraints such as these which demonstrate once again that the UK could only seize all opportunities that are in its interests if it were independent.

There are many positive reasons for leaving the EU and its Little Europe mentality.  Opening up other markets to our goods and services and accessing overseas goods and services more cheaply than we do now is just one of them.  Another is being able to speak with our own voice, in our own interests, and helping to formulate the global rules and regulations concerning trade, as members of the global organisations where we have no seat because the EU ‘represents’ us.

For the UK to be able to maximise its influence and potential and seize opportunities, it has to walk tall on the global stage as an independent nation.

The first step in that process is to recognise the EU is and always was intended to be about centralising political power; economic benefits, where they arise, are merely incidental.  So for the good of our country it is imperative that we free ourselves from the EU straitjacket.

‘… just an old European country’ Britain’s self inflicted mediocrity ridiculed

So how is this EU membership lark working out for the UK?  Remember how we keep being told that being part of the EU increases Britsh influence in the world?

Sky News reports how the Chinese state media, the directed mouthpiece of the government in Beijing, has certainly not held back in giving its dismissive opinion of Britain:

The Cameron administration should acknowledge that the UK is not a big power in the eyes of the Chinese. It is just an old European country apt for travel and study. This has gradually become the habitual thought of the Chinese people.

This is utterly humiliating.

While Cameron is in China, desperately trying to raise money for investment in projects that we British should be developing for ourselves and our strategic interests, and lending support to British businesses looking to make deals to sell to the Chinese, he is shilling for a Sino-EU free trade deal like an obedient little servant of Brussels.  This is what Britain has become.

Cameron postures like a statesman yet his hosts correctly mark him down as the pygmy that he is.  He and his ilk have turned the UK into a proxy for the interests of a supreme government on the continent.  Britain is not even in the room when the rules of the game are agreed.  Negative sentiments such as those in China’s Global Times, from increasingly confident nations that are sovereign and run their own affairs, are a consequence of our being subsumed into a homogenised, over regulated, backward looking political union that has in reality dramatically reduced British influence in the world and lessened us as a country.

The Chinese, like most other independent nations, respect strength.  And they don’t see strength in a country whose ‘leaders’ do not have  confidence in their nation’s ability to chart its own path, willingness to ensure its population is educated and competitive, to work in its own interest, to represent itself with pride on the world stage and to trade on its own terms.  Britain in the EU cannot ever be a trade partner with China, the partnership belongs to the EU.  That is why our Prime Minister is now a mere salesman, complete with a fake smile, sharp suit and a patter in rhetoric, but ultimately powerless and unworthy of respect.

Who can blame the Chinese for disrespecting our declining country when a shallow, lightweight hypocrite like Cameron talks a great game, but instead of leading and representing the British people, whores on behalf of the EU and begs for money like a Dickensian street urchin, attempting to strike deals while operating only with the permission of others in Brussels?

What makes this all the more disgraceful is that it is highly likely the UK is deliberately being positioned by our political class as weak; a position engineered in order to justify the continued EU membership they desire, under the pretext of it being the antidote to our malaise and diminishing stock. It is beyond treachery and is absolutely sickening.

Time spent on this UKIP infighting is time not spent fighting for UK independence

UKIP is in a state of civil war in Scotland.

A parachuted ‘Friend of Farage’ candidate, resignations, sackings, dissolution of the party’s Scottish committee, internal party intrigues, accusations of control freakery, a party spokesman so detached from events he can’t offer comment.  It’s political self destruction driven by egos, vested interests and patronage running amok.

This underlines the point made on this blog several times that relying on a political party, to drive the campaign for Brexit and independence for Britain, is a mistake.  Party management and maintenance uses up energy and focus and the time spent by UKIP as Farage tries to impose his control on the party in Scotland is time not spent on the pressing issue.

What is even more frustrating is that this is all about who UKIP sends to Brussels as an MEP if they secure sufficient votes in Scotland.  It is ultimately meaningless to the Brexit campaign, but means a lot to the likes of David Coburn who is top of the UKIP candidate list, and would climb aboard the Brussels gravy train and by the end of the next European Parliament would have received well over £1m in pay, expenses and perks.  That is a pretty generous thank you from Farage for Coburn’s loyalty – albeit a thank you paid out of our tax pounds.

This latest internal spat in UKIP harms the whole Brexit cause.   Those of us who want the UK to withdraw from the EU deserve better, much better, than this.  With Farage as leader we are not going to get it.

Stolen child scandal: Where do you turn when the establishment is out of control?

This is one of the most horrific stories concerning judicial and local authority excess I have ever read, courtesy of Christopher Booker.

• A pregnant Italian woman visits the UK for a training course being run by her airline employer
• It is reported the woman suffers from bi-polar disorder and has been neglecting her medication, resulting in a panic attack
• Having called the police in a distressed state because she can’t find the passports of her other children, the police tell the woman’s mother over the phone they are taking her to hospital to ensure the unborn baby is ok
• The woman discovers she has been taken to a psychiatric hospital, and when she asks to go back to her hotel she is physically restrained and sectioned under the Mental Health Act
• Social services are involved
• Five weeks later, still detained under section, she is refused breakfast without explanation
• She protests and is strapped down and sedated
• When she regains consciousness she discovers she is in hospital – and that the baby has been cut out of her via Caesarian section and taken away by social services
• Essex social services obtained a High Court order in August 2012 for the birth “to be enforced by way of caesarean section”
• Unbelievably, High Court judge, Mr Justice Mostyn, had given the social workers permission for this
• The woman was deliberately not told what was happening, was not represented properly by the local authority appointed solicitors and had no opportunity to object to what was being done to her and her child
• The woman is subsequently refused permission to see her child
• The woman is escorted back to Italy, without her child who, without justification, is kept in British custody
• The High Court in Rome expresses outrage at what had been done to an Italian citizen “habitually resident” in Italy. But the judge there concluded that, since she had not protested at the time, she had accepted that the British courts had jurisdiction – even though she had not known what was to be done to her, was deemed to have no “capacity” to instruct lawyers because she had been sectioned, and had only been represented by solicitors assigned to her by the local authority
• The mother returns to the UK to plead for the return of her daughter
• The judge admits that, since resuming her medication, the mother seemed impressively articulate and a different person from the one he had seen earlier. But, because he could not risk a failure to maintain her medication in the future, he ruled that the child must be placed for adoption
• No offence had been committed, there had been no abuse of the child, there was no evidence of any risk to the child, but the child had been stolen from a foreign and temporary visitor because of a panic attack
• Supported by the mother, her American husband – from whom she is amicably separated, and who is the father of her eldest daughter – asked that the baby be sent to Los Angeles to live with his sister, herself a very capable mother
• Essex social services ruled that this was unacceptable because, even though she was the aunt of the baby’s stepsister, the American woman had no “blood” tie to the baby. So, rather than allow the child to be looked after by her “kin”, she must be sent to live with complete strangers
• Lawyers for the woman are demanding to know why Essex social services appear not have contacted next of kin in Italy to consult them on the case
• An Essex county council spokesman said the local authority would not comment on ongoing cases involving vulnerable people and children – the standard response in the textbook effort to avoid being held to account

This is the most extreme example yet of ‘child protection’ services – which routinely ignore actual abuse when it involves the need for visits, investigations and supervision – going after an easy target who had done nothing wrong, over which they have no jurisdiction, where there was no evidence a child was even at risk – cutting the child out of the mother so it can be put it up for adoption.

If this story does not underline the brutal nature of ‘public servants’ and ‘court officers’ whose actions demonstrate they are completely out of control and giving themselves authority that is wholly excessive and unjustified, nothing else will.  It is shocking, disturbing, frightening, and it makes me ashamed of my country and the dictatorship it has become.

This abuse of power must be defeated.  Whatever it takes.