So what has the European election changed?

Despite a disparate, disconnected and contradictory smorgasbord of ‘sceptic’ parties having made gains in the European Parliament this week, the answer to that question is ‘nothing’.  As Nigel Farage explained yesterday after his return to Brussels:

There is a big dissident voice now in this parliament. And yet, I just sat in a meeting where you wouldn’t think that anything happened at all.

If anything underlines how meaningless the European Elections are, this is it.

For all the huff and puff, the acres of media coverage and the stream of analysis of ‘political earthquakes’ by the well paid talking heads, the 73 MEPs from the UK have arrived on the continent to find it is business as usual.  The same discussions, the same agendas, the same intrigues… for all the talk of ‘reform’ the EU continues on its journey to political union and the voices of the people still fall on deaf ears.

 

Ukraine signs its Faustian pact with the EU

So there we have it.  The EU has signed its Association Agreement with the self appointed administration in Kiev – which came to power through a coup, rather than waiting for elections promised by Ukraine’s elected President, who is now in exile.

It may be that Ukraine’s electorate might have voted for a party or coalition that remained in favour of beginning the long process of surrendering sovereignty to the bureaucracy in Brussels, but as things stand a political settlement has been rammed through by the political class, without a clear mandate from what remains a disenfranchised population.

Small wonder that Ukraine’s unelected Prime Minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, claimed that Ukraine and the EU share the same values.  That democracy is not one of those values has been reinforced once again today.

The hypocrisy of the EU has broken new ground as it commenced the process of taking control of yet another territory without the approval of the people it will eventually govern. Whatever hopes the people in Ukraine had for a democratic, sovereign future have been swept away with a few flourishes of politicians’ pens.

The country has now been carved up between two rival entities.  The EU is set to take the spoils in the west and north, Russia has snapped up the peninsula in the south.  Another triumph for the political class.

The BBC reports that the EU Association Agreement is designed to give Ukraine’s interim leadership under PM Arseniy Yatsenyuk economic and political support.  What it actually does is give the EU ever greater control over Ukraine.

Flooding: The Baroness Young and RSPB connection is even stronger than first identified

An interesting document has surfaced on the European Commission’s website, which enables us to understand a bit more of the complicated ‘wheels within wheels’ of overlapping organisational responsibility for the deliberate policy of surrendering managed environments to floodwater that has seen much of the Somerset levels submerged.

The document is the ‘Wise use of floodplains – a demonstration of techniques to evaluate and plan floodplain restoration’.  In other words, giving back reclaimed wetland that had been drained and while a managed environment had become home to many small communities and farms.

What stands out about this document is that the project (which is outlined on the short document linked above) is the timing and the funding.  It ran from 1st April 1999 until 1st April 2002 and was co-funded by the RSPB (which was the driving force behind the project) and the WWF to the tune of €1,056,065.85, a sum that was topped up with almost 50% of matched funding from the European Union – some €1,052,044.45 of taxpayers’ money – taking the total project budget to €2,108,110.30.

The timing and funding sources are significant because this kicked off in 1999 while Barbara Scott Young, aka Baroness Young of Old Scone the Labour peer, was the Chief Executive of… the RSPB.  Little over a year later, Baroness Young left the RSPB to take up appointment as Chief Executive of the very public body that would be able to implement the ‘restoration’ of floodplains and wetlands through policy… the Environmental Agency.

The bird loving flooding facilitator

In terms of overseeing implementation of the Water Framework Directive and the Habitats Directive, and their policies of ‘restoring’ wetlands and floodplains to a water covered state, Young’s transfer from the RSPB to the Environment Agency was the political equivalent of putting the fox in charge of the hen house.

In no way can it be argued that Labour put an impartial Chief Executive in charge of the Environment Agency, someone who would use the agency’s substantial human and financial resources to best effect to ensure adequate protection of the communities and businesses located in managed environments such as the Somerset levels.

Labour put in place one of their own to fulfil EU policy underpinned by a number of directives; a woman who was a zealot in matters of wildlife and habitats and whose approach we have already reported was in order to achieve ‘instant wildlife: just add water‘.  A woman whose desired outcome for the pumping stations that prevented the Somerset levels from being drowned was to destroy them with limpet mines to ensure reclaimed land was flooded again, in the expectation that habitats for the birds she values above the lives and livelihoods of the communities that would be swamped.

The moment Barbara Young was put in charge of the Environment Agency, the events of this winter (and last winter on a smaller scale) became inevitable.  When she was appointed what we saw was a RSPB take over the Environment Agency.  Backed by EU directives, the RSPB’s woman in the Environment Agency hot seat set about pursuing the wishes of the bird lovers.  Dredging was scaled back.  Pumping stations were left to ruin.

Millions of pounds that could and should have been used to safeguard managed environments through proper flood prevention in places like the Somerset levels, instead were allocated at EU behest to hugely expensive and lavish projects to create new habitats on the levels themselves – such as the hundreds of hectares of the Steart Peninsula being transformed into new saltmarsh and freshwater wetlands to attract species including wading birds and wildfowl, rare water voles and great crested newts at a cost of £20 million, while £3 million required for essential flood maintenance in the same area could not be found.  There is no way the Environment Agency left behind by Barbara Young would fight for such skewed spending priorites to be altered.  These kind of projects were what she always wanted and the EA has been delivering them with relish.

While the RSPB – part of Birdlife International – is in this mess up to its neck it does not prevent it from engaging in the most sickening hypocrisy, as in January when it joined with the Somerset Wildlife Trust (which also seems to prioritise birds over other wildlife) to call on MPs and others to press government and its agencies to develop a water management strategy for a more flood-resilient future on the Somerset Levels that benefits both people and wildlife – while expressing ‘concern’ over calls for the very dredging that has previously prevented such flood destruction in the past.  This was just an earlier instance of this week’s example of those who have brought about the situation in Somerset throwing up one vast smokescreen to conceal their complicity in action which directly led to the flooding disaster and magnified its effects.

But what of the RSPB’s partner in this plot to ethnically cleanse people off the Somerset levels, the WWF?  A trawl of their press centre shows they have not issued one release about the impact of the flooding on the Somerset levels on wildlife.  Rare butterflies, wild flowers, badger, vole, mouse and many other species, some of them rare have been killed by the flooding and had their own habitat polluted.  But from the WWF we hear nothing – bar calls for farmers to allow ‘small floods‘ on their land to prevent wider flooding downstream.  There is no mention of their complicity in or support of the ‘restoration’ of wetlands which led to environmental management decisions that have made this flooding so bad.

Overseas the WWF seems quite happy to rush in and comment on flooding, as they did in Poland in 2010, where they criticised development on floodplains.  But even then their intervention had a familiar ring to it.  Cue a reference to our old friend, Making Space for Water which we referenced in this earlier post.  The WWF made a deeply ironic observation that people in the Somerset levels might take issue with, when they claimed that:

More and more rivers around the world have been seeing projects to restore wetlands as natural wet and dry season reservoirs, with dramatic reductions in flood damage being only one of the benefits.

As for the WWF’s direction of travel, we note that earlier this month the organisation announced the appointment of Dr Marco Lambertini as Director General of WWF International.  This is noteworthy because he is currently the Chief Executive of… Birdlife International, the global partner of the RSPB.  Clearly the wheels within wheels are turning at an international level even outside the governance top table of the EU where such organisations sit as equals alongside representatives of national governments, informing and directing policy agendas in their own interests rather than the people in the European Union, who have no vehicle or method to exert anything like that kind of influence.

It is common to hear people say this country is going to the dogs.  All the evidence that is accumulating so far suggests that is wrong.  Thanks to the power wielded by certain organisations it is clearly going to the birds – helped by those who claim to love animals too.

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?

Whatever happened to the selfless commitment to public service?

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

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

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

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

Hypocritical ICIJ stooges lead an assault on privacy to aid state theft of assets

Cyprus was just a stepping stone on a far bigger and more disturbing journey.

Over on EU Referendum, Richard draws attention to another – an ‘investigation’ into offshore tax havens that is leading the headlines in certain publications.  As he explains:

For the last few days in certain newspapers, the dominant story has been a collaborative affair, running under the general title of “Secrecy For Sale: Inside The Global Offshore Money Maze“.

Styled as “one of the largest and most complex cross border investigative projects in journalism history”, it is co-ordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), working with more than 86 journalists in 46 countries in “an attempt to strip away the biggest mystery associated with tax havens: the owners of anonymous companies”.

He questions the motivation of those involved in this inquiry, and with very good reason.  For the ICIJ is an organisation with an unsavoury history – as this blog discussed last year – which is working to a particular ‘big state’ agenda.  For while the investigation ostensibly seeks to shine a light on the business of ‘dirty money’ and shady nominee companies, something it would be hard for anyone to take exception to, its real motivation is demonise tax havens and close down legal avenues for people to shield their wealth from taxation and confiscation by the wasteful, unrepresentative and self serving political class.

These are people for whom the concept of paying a ‘fair share’ is to say ‘you have money so we are taking it’.  It is a spiteful and devisive approach that feeds on the envy and resentment of people who are not as well off.

Whenever tax havens are discussed they are deliberately associated with ‘dirty money’, quasi criminality and tax evasion.  Yet as the paucity of identified wrongdoing demonstrates that it is mainly hard working, law abiding and successful people who use tax havens to legally avoid and minimise tax liability, and who are having their privacy assaulted as part of this effort to demonise the offshoring of assets.  Note with care the fact that the offshore arrangements of the paymasters of these ICIJ stooges, such as the owners of the Guardian, are strictly off limits.  Orwell’s pigs are taking control.

With its Marxist roots the ICIJ despises the concept of individuals taking steps to prevent government simply helping itself to the rewards other people have earned for hard work, entrepreneurship and personal risk.  This is why the ICIJ is devoting so much energy and resource to this campaign and in the absence of widespread wrongdoing is content to muddy the waters and talks of perfectly legal tax avoidance as if it is something criminal and shameful.  The sole aim is to close tax havens, further the goal of harmonising taxation policy around the globe, and enabling governments to attain the unfettered power to take from citizens, at will, anything they want when they want.  This is the global governance agenda writ large and occasioned by the continuing erosion of liberty, private ownership and personal freedom.

The only shame in all this is that so many people have been brainwashed by a succession of parasitical governments into believing the confiscation of wealth is a socially responsible activity – despite the fact taxpayers have no say in how the revenues seized from them are used and abused by the political class to buy votes at election time with bribes to net consumers, funded with money taken from net producers and irresponsibly borrowed by the billion without realistic means of repayment.

Instead of cheering this nefarious campaign, people should be opening their eyes and understanding this represents the dismantling of what stands between limited government, barely held at bay by the people, and total domination of the citizenry by the real criminals – the undemocratic, unaccountable and unelected elite and their minions in the political class.

Organised crime is the excuse being offered up to justify this campaign.  But it’s not about criminality, it’s about removing the last barriers to total domination of people by unaccountable governments and the vested interests that direct them from behind the scenes – individuals who will benefit from state sanctioned theft by the real organised criminals who are destroying the economies of the world and with them undermining the wealth and prospects of ordinary people.

EU: That famous British influence in action

The EUphiles never tire of claiming that if the UK left the EU we would lose our ‘influence’ over the laws that are made and how things are done.  When asked to detail examples of this influence they go quiet.  It is an illusion.

That much is emphasised again in the Telegraph, which reports on the reaction of DEFRA minister, Owen Paterson, to a series of votes in the European Parliament concerning the Common Agricultural Policy. The minister is said to have condemned the votes, which will see farmers paid twice for doing the same work at a cost of up to an extra £2.6bn per year.  A substantial proportion of that money is extracted from UK taxpayers and the benefit to UK farmers is trivial compared to the subsidy whores on the continent.

The parliament’s agriculture committee, which is dominated by farming interests, backed so-called “double payments” to farmers in order to keep spending on the CAP – currently approaching £50 billion a year – as close as possible to its present high levels.

Crucially, farmers will be able to be paid twice for the same work. Farmers who qualify for money from “Pillar 2”, the part of the budget which rewards “green” practices, such as preserving hedgerows, will now get an automatic right to collect money from the larger subsidy scheme, known as “Pillar 1” regardless of how little work they do for the Pillar 2 cash, meaning in effect being paid twice for doing the same thing.

The committee also voted for more of the controversial practice, reduced under earlier CAP reforms, of subsidising farmers based purely on the amounts they produce – something which contributed to the infamous 1970s “butter mountains” and “wine lakes.”

It is waste, plain and simple. It is an appalling abuse of our money. But as if the fact the vote was carried at the meeting of the agriculture committee at all isn’t bad enough, the manner in which it passed and what was passed along with it is even worse, as a separate piece in the Telegraph makes clear:

[…] the agriculture committee voted, in several ways, to go backwards in time. They passed “recoupling”. This re-establishes, on a smaller scale, the discredited practice of subsidising particular crops for the sake of it. It blocked transparency provisions which would have published the names of all the beneficiaries and the amounts they received.

Now why on earth would transparency provisions be blocked?  The question is rhetorical, for we can already be sure of the answer.  This is the nature of the EU.  Vested interests are being served at our ever growing expense. As the piece continues:

If last week’s vote shows the unreformed nature of much Euro-thinking, it also shows up the EU’s flawed democratic processes.

These hugely important changes have emerged almost entirely without public involvement, knowledge or debate. The amendments, and the compromises between them which were passed, were produced in private, and even published only a few days before last week’s hearing.

With as many as 8,000 amendments to consider on Wednesday and Thursday — though the number was reduced by compromises — there was no time for debate, or indeed for anything but the votes.

There is much more besides and reading the whole depressing thing is essential.  But this is what David Cameron wants more of, the UK staying trapped inside a corrupt cesspool with Brussels still pulling the strings, with a few meaningless ‘powers’ returned like crumbs being swept from a table.  All because Cameron and his EUphile stooges says it’s vital this country is at the heart of ‘Europe’ using our ‘influence’.

Just where was this famous influence on Wednesday, as British taxpayers were ripped off for even more money amidst chaotic scenes, as our ‘partners’ not only picked our pockets but at the same time voted to prevent us finding out who exactly was going to benefit from this pork barrel pantomime?  Nothing that Cameron hopes to reform is going to change this.  The only way to stop being abused like this is for the UK to leave the EU.  Stories like this make it that bit easier.

Open letter to Philip Gordon, US Assistant Secretary for European Affairs

Dear Mr Gordon,

I read with interest the following comment you made on behalf of the Government of the United States of America, in your capacity as US Assistant Secretary for European Affairs, regarding the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union:

We have a growing relationship with the EU as an institution, which has an increasing voice in the world, and we want to see a strong British voice in that EU. That is in America’s interests. We welcome an outward-looking EU with Britain in it.

This comes as no surprise as it reflects the thinking of other senior members of the Obama administration, who have previously opined that the United Kingdom should remain a member of the EU.

The President of the United States is considered by many to be the leader of the free world, and the United States itself considered to be a beacon of democracy.  So it is profoundly disappointing to see the United States administration endorsing and encouraging something that is fundamentally undemocratic.  I would like to ask you the following questions.

• Would it be acceptable to you and your fellow United States citizens that over 70% of the laws and regulations they were forced to comply with across all 50 states were created by a supranational government comprising layers of complex political and judicial structures, mostly unelected and unaccountable, and made up of delegates from not only the US, but Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, El Salvador, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela and Peru?

• Would it be acceptable to you, your fellow United States citizens and members of the Senate and House of Representatives that they were routinely handed diktats from the various bodies that make up the supranational government and were bound by law to implement the directives or be fined or dragged into a supranational court operating an alien form of judicial code and process?  Further, that Congress was denied the ability to draft, and the President sign into law, other legislation of national interest whenever the supranational decided it was not appropriate?

• Would it be acceptable to you, your fellow United States citizens and the Justices of the Supreme Court that decisions made by the bench, the highest court in your land, could be appealed to a supranational court overseas with the hearing presided over by foreign judges and if overruled the Supreme Court would have to accept that as a binding ruling?

If these scenarios do not sound very democratic or judicious to you and your fellow Americans it is because they are not.  Intentionally and by design.  But this is the reality of the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union and its associated bodies and institutions.  UK membership of the EU has entailed a substantial loss of power from our democratically elected Parliament as it has been quietly and steadily transferred to unelected and unaccountable bodies abroad – all done without the people of the UK being asked to give their consent for it to happen.

While it may be in the geopolitical interest of the Government of the United States for the United Kingdom to remain a member of the European Union, opinion polls show this anti-democratic situation is opposed by a majority of British citizens.  Membership of the EU dilutes the voice of the United Kingdom.  Seats on various world bodies held by the UK have been given up so the EU can supposedly represent the competing and disparate interests of 27 countries in a wholly unsatisfactory fudge that frequently fails to serve British interests.

I am sure you will recognise the obvious contradiction in the position of the United States, on one hand calling for Syria’s regime to heed the wishes of the Syrian people, while on the other calling for the government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to maintain membership of the EU, despite the wishes of the British people.  I am sure you will also recognise the obvious contradiction of the United States urging countries around the world to embrace democracy, while urging the United Kingdom to maintain its place in political and judicial structures that replace representative democracy with control by unelected and unaccountable aliens who are drawn from a pool of self-selecting career politicians and civil servants.

Would such a situation be an acceptable settlement in the United States?  I think we both know the answer to that is categorically ‘no’.

No one who believes in democracy – people power – would endorse and encourage a continuation of this anti-democratic situation for the United Kingdom.  That is what this issue is about.  So, Mr Gordon, please do not presume to meddle in our affairs and wish on us that which you would aggressively oppose for yourself.

Yours sincerely,

Autonomous Mind