National pride

With pomp, pageantry and ceremony rarely surpassed anywhere in the world, Prince William and Catherine Middleton have celebrated their marriage at Westminster Abbey.  This blog wishes the Royal newlyweds a happy life together blessed with love.

The eyes of hundreds of millions of people from around the world have fixed themselves on London to witness the kind of event that just doesn’t happen with anything like such majesty anywhere else.

If only the pride being felt by so many Britons in respect of this historic State occasion event could be felt for this country itself.

For the United Kingdom is in decline.  Our influence and place in the world has been reduced by people who see virtue in mediocrity and shame in success. Governance of the Realm has been surrendered to bureaucrats overseas in Brussels.  Our strength, economically, commercially and militarily has been purposely undermined. The politicians, rather than preside over improvement and enhancement in the life of all Britons, seek to level downwards and jettison the things that made this country great.  The can-do attitude and yearning to go further, do better and achieve more has been eroded by people who compensate for their lack of substance by mocking those who hold such sentiments.  Those who have secured a place in life, rather than encourage others to do the same, all too often seek to draw up the drawbridge to deny the opportunities they enjoyed being extended to others. These are just some of the problems from which the Royal Family have been largely insulated but have degraded this nation.

If only one day a change could take place in this country that would make us as proud of it as so many people were of the occasion observed by the world today. That would be a real cause for celebration, flag waving and a sense of national pride.

If you read one blog post today, make it this one

We are seeing here structural cuts which remove the UK’s ability to act independently as a nation, and to project our foreign policy. We have moved from independence to a transitional stage where our capabilities have been removed and there is no replacement.  The agenda unfolds.

No, I’m British

Just have a read of this paragraph from an article in European Voice.

It’s about the European Union drawing up a contingency plan for an armed humanitarian intervention in Libya (I know, I laughed too). But stop and think about the language being used:

The ongoing evacuation of EU citizens in Libya is a member state responsibility, with the EU in a supporting role through its Monitoring and Information Centre (MIC), which was activated yesterday. The EU has no embassy in Tripoli and relies on the member states for information. The European External Action Service said that the number of EU citizens still in Libya was unknown, while the Commission put the number at 5,000-6,000. According to the Commission, around 5,000 EU nationals have already left Libya.

EU Citizens, EU nationals… it’s all so casual.  Like the EU itself, these are artificial constructs.  Yet this is what has been done to us by Brussels and our Westminster quislings without our permission.

I’m not an EU citizen and I’m not an EU national. The EU is not a state and it is not a nation, despite the pretences of the bureaucrats.  I’m a British Subject (until such time as the Monarchy ends) update… in the comments folk have corrected me vis a vis the 1981 Nationality Act. No one asked me if I agreed to be designated in this way, I wasn’t given a vote and I do not accept it. So take your flag, your little gold stars and your ode to joy and stick them right up your

Britain’s humiliation

The pathetic David Cameron on the Libyan evacuation farce:

“I’m incredibly sorry that people have had a difficult time. This is not an easy situation”

And it isn’t made any easier by the arrogance and incompetence of people who are paid to do jobs they are singularly incapable of carrying out effectively or properly.  Sorry, it seems, is now the easiest word.  Sorry is what is offered up readily in place of properly carrying out the basic functions of a government.

This is now a nation on its knees.  We have been dragged here by successive governments, staffed by over rated managerialist incompetents, that have intentionally allowed the proper functions of a nation state to decay into uselessness because they don’t believe this country should punch above its weight.  They have the ‘small island’ mentality. The one that recites the narrative that it isn’t our place to be important on the world stage. Never mind the globally significant achievements of this country and its people over the centuries, they believe we must not be a world power and they sneer at anyone who disagrees.  Instead they say we must scale down our capability and our influence to match the small geographical area of these islands because anything else constitutes some kind of arrogance.

Theirs is an artifical construct.  Only a fool would argue that a nation’s influence should be constrained because of its physical size.  What matters is not the amount of land a nation covers, but what the people of that nation can do, what challenges they can overcome, what great strides they can take for the betterment of everyone and what great examples they can set.  Britain earned its place at the world’s top table because of the entrepreneurial and daring mindset of many of its people.

The rush for mediocrity and the guilt complex of the self loathing has seen us replace our can-do attitude and sense of self worth with incompetence and failure.  And the self loathing celebrate this.  That is where we are today and that is, in a nutshell, how we were led here.  It is why our self reliance has been supplanted by reliance on the state. It is why every measure of this country’s capability has declined, from the standard of our education to the quality of our goods and services, from the strength of our armed forces to the ability of our public servants.

It is a nauseating disgrace. It is a national humiliation.

The first consideration of any government is the protection and security of the people it serves.  The government failed spectacularly to do that in Libya. While the governments of other countries were busy providing a means of exit in the absence of commercial travel, arranging transit to ports and airports in convoys, generating lists of people to be extracted, and putting on the ground a visible organising presence by embassy staff to manage the operation at the airport, the oh-so-grand United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Office was telling Britons to stay put if they wished or leave on commercial flights.

Listening to the accounts of Britons who had made it out of the country yesterday – before the FCO had shaken itself from its laser like focus on surrendering this country’s interests to the European Union – we heard the humiliating tales of Portuguese and Argentine embassy staff providing assistance to Britons while our embassy staff were nowhere to be seen.

A nation that once governed effectively and ran competently a global Empire in the challenging days of ships and horse mounted couriers, has found itself incapable in the digital age of communicating clearly and mounting a cohesive evacuation operation for several hundred of its citizens stuck in a country only a few hours flying time from London.

That the first aircraft chartered by the FCO to fly people out of Tripoli developed a technical fault and sat on the ground for 10 hours, without anyone having the wit to source another without delay, was truly symbolic.  It was a working example of this nation’s decline and the extent to which our character has been eroded by handwringing wimps.

So it was no surprise that the Foreign Office’s failure should provoke a typically pathetic response from David Cameron that the government must ‘learn the lessons’ from it. What utter bullshit.  This isn’t the first time.  It is code for doing nothing and trying to dodge the deserved contempt of the yet again let down public.

Where are the lessons that have been learned from previous failures?  Anyone can learn from their own mistakes, but wise people learn from the mistakes of others. But not in this country.  With our useless stuffed suits wandering aimlessly around Whitehall we continue to make them and are condemned to continue making them.  These are the kind of people who have transformed Britain into third rate country deserving of scorn.  They did not want us to have a nation of which we can be proud and even now actively play down moments in our history of which we should be proud and that should be inspiring the next generation.

The people of this country have been lulled into a virtual coma by those who want to undermine it. The political parties, the establishment, the media, all of them have conspired actively or through silence in this evisceration of our nation.  It will continue until some people have the courage to take this country back from the quisling, defeatist bastards and make it something we can be proud of again.

Britain’s EU membership is in ________ interests

It’s fill in the blank time… It is a common refrain from the Europhiles, and those business leaders who benefit from cheap imported labour, that Britain’s EU membership is in our interests.

Perhaps it is more appropriate to fill in the blank with Europe’s – as a written answer in the House of Lords this week tells a very different story to the one peddled to we long suffering mushrooms, who are kept in the dark and fed shit by the political class (Hat tip: Ockham’s Razor). Lord Stoddart of Swindon saw fit:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what are the accumulated deficits or surpluses in the United Kingdom’s trade with the other European Union countries between 2000 and 2009 in (a) manufactured goods, (b) services, and (c) goods and services.

The reply (click on the image below to enlarge) shows an outflow of Pounds Sterling to pay for an influx of European goods.

The fact is the EU countries selling these goods to Britain will continue to do so regardless of whether or not we are members of the EU. There is absolutely no justification for surrendering political and legal sovereignty in order to trade with EU member states.

It makes one wonder why that idiot Cameron spends time trying to achieve more balanced trade with China when we are demonstrably incapable of achieving it with the rest of the EU.

‘Dad, I hate Muslims’

That was the comment a youngster in front of me made to her father earlier this evening. She could not have been any older than 12 or 13 years old. But she was clearly so angered by the behaviour of a group of thugs calling themselves Muslims Against Crusades, who burnt a large poppy and protested against British troops during the two-minute silence, she decided she felt hatred for Muslims.

I did not hear the father’s response. Having returned home and seen the reports and images of these so called protesters, their faces contorted into hate filled expressesions, it is easy to understand why that little girl said what she did.

Why should people in this country have to tolerate the poisonous presence of Islamist extremists who take what this country has to offer but despise it in return? People who select a solemn occasion dating back decades that now marks the sacrifice of altogether too many young men and women who lost their lives in wars to defeat tyranny, and use it to slander young men and women who serve their country today.

It is they, not the men and women of our armed forces, who are the terrorists. It is they who engaged in fighting with police. It is they who sought to offend people with their ignorant protest deliberately aimed to spark a reaction. It is they who demand Britain conforms to their warped medieval vision of an Islamic caliphate. It is they who conveniently ignore the fact that the majority of people who have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan have died at the hands of similarly aggressive and hate filled Muslims.

Who was it blowing up hundreds of innocent people at a time in markets and bazaars around Baghdad and other towns and cities? It wasn’t our armed forces. It was Sunni slaughtering Shia and Shia slaughtering Sunni. In Afghanistan who was it cutting the throats of people for having educational qualifications or bringing medical aid to civilians? Who murdered people for playing music or supporting the idea of girls attending school? Muslim terror writ large. It was the product of intolerance, hatred and a view that their form of the Islamic faith was somehow more correct than any other.

Where were these London based poppy burning pieces of scum when that was happening? Most likely they were talking big behind closed doors while shitting themselves at the idea of standing up to their ‘brothers’. Too terrified to stand against the real terrorists in their supposed Muslim homelands, they chose the coward’s way and picked a disciplined target that is trained to operate within the rule of law and would not represent a threat to them. Men and women who helped tidy up after the carnage dispensed by the adherents of the laughably self titled ‘religion of peace’.

The real victims of these hypocritical zealots will be those Muslims who have no truck with extremism and just want to live their lives here in peace, but who will be tarred with the same brush. Yet more Muslim casualties of Muslim violence. Ironic, no? Perhaps they need to put a whole lot of distance between themselves and these vile parasites in our midst.

Ignore Special Immigration Appeals Commission – remove Abu Hamza’s passport

We’re stuck with him. That is the decision of the morons on the Special Immigration Appeals Commission – it would be more accurately described as the Special Immigration Abettor’s Commission – who say that Abu Hamza al-Masri cannot be stripped of his British passport and therefore deported.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the government to take decisive action to put this right. They will roll over as they always do at the first sound of the words ‘Rights, Directive, Judgement, European’.

Surprise, surprise, it is the Human Rights Act once again that comes leaping to the defence of another lawbreaking alien who hates this country and works actively to do it harm, yet cravenly seeks the protection its liberal laws provide. Despite there being no proof that Egypt has withdrawn Hamza’s citizenship, the Commission has decided it is so and said Hamza must keep the British citizenship he acquired through marriage, or else he would become stateless.

So bloody what?

Perhaps if we showed some guts and acted in our own interests the spiteful hate mongers who come to this country and are determined to attack it at every turn would learn there are consequences for their actions and stay away. This bleeding heart decision is a travesty and exposes how we have been weakened by the community of activists judges and campaigners who pontificate about moral superiority and are loathe to take action against those who mean us harm.

As it is Abu Hamza is still fighting a case in the European Court of Human Rights to prevent deportation to the United States for investigation into alleged terror offences. No doubt the left wing academics who make up that illegitimate kangaroo court will fall over themselves to rule that he must not face justice and must stay in Britain, taking up a prison cell or sponging off the welfare state.

Abu Hamza al-Masri and his ilk will be laughing like drains at the stupidity of these moronic commissioners whose hand wringing further undermines the interests of this nation. The man is Egyptian. His own country despises him and refused him a new passport, but it has never stated that his citizenship has been revoked. We should test it by putting his oversized, taxpayer subsidised arse on a plane to Cairo and permanently refusing him entry to this country again.

If the Egyptians don’t want Hamza, for a few hundred dollars they can strap him into seat on a plane bound for Washington where the Americans are very eager to play host to him. In fact, a phone call to the US Embassy would probably see a transport aircraft divert to Egypt to pick him up and save Egyptian taxpayers the trouble of sending him packing.

Missing the point of military cooperation with France

Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, ventures forth in the Sunday Telegraph today to set out his view that a closer alliance with France will be good for Britain. In doing so he intentionally attempts to mislead the public about the long term direction of Britain’s defence policy.

But his derisory effort to give the impression that Britain’s interests come first, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, is worthy of scorn. It is a disgraceful attempt to deceive the British public. If you are not sure what I mean, try to make sense of Fox’s opening sentence:

Too often, the debate on defence within Europe has been focused on what the EU should or should not do. Yet it has always been my view that defence must be a sovereign, and therefore an inter-governmental issue.

The visions are mutally exclusive. You cannot have sovereign defence and make defence an inter-governmental issue. Fox continues:

When nations can benefit from co-operation without losing sovereignty, they should aim to do so – which is why this week will mark the beginning of a long-term commitment to closer defence and security links with France.

This is delusional rubbish. It doesn’t stand up to even cursory scrutiny. Any national defence capability that is dependent on the active cooperation and involvement of another nation before it can be deployed is, by definition, not sovereign. The Fox rationale of ‘cooperation’ being important in saving money is a red herring. The problem with our defence spending has not been the amount spent, but how it has been wasted on the procurement of the wrong equipment, usually at grossly inflated prices.

Let us be clear, Fox is not talking about international cooperation – a good example of which is NATO. Cooperation equates to the sovereign and independent defence capabilities of a number of countries coming together to achieve specific operational goals of mutual interest. What Fox is describing is interdependence – where the military force of a country (in this case Britain) is incapable of acting unilaterally and can only be deployed if another country provides the missing elements required to conduct operations.

This is not good for Britain.

As a number of people commenting on Fox’s Telegraph piece point out, everyone can think of conflicts in recent years where France would have refused to allow its assets to be deployed to enable British operations, because involvement in such actions would have a negative impact on French trade or financial interests. We know that even the closest of friends and allies sometimes oppose actions undertaken in our self interest – America during the Suez crisis anyone? We know that the interests of our friends and allies often conflict with our own wishes – France selling warships to Russia anyone?

But the observations of nearly all the commentators on Fox’s essay fail to make the final step on their journey. For any number of reasons they fail to recognise what the end game really is, perhaps because the destination is such anathema to them they could not conceive our government would work towards such an outcome… namely that defence is being readied to become an EU responsibility.

The goal is that the defence of the United Kingdom will cease to be the sovereign responsibility of the British government and that it will be, at some point in the future, managed by the EU. The goal that the most essential pillar of self determination of a nation state will be removed as a part of the objective of ever closer union on the path to full federal governance from Brussels.

No matter how close our friends and allies might be the United Kingdom absolutely must maintain an independent and sovereign military capability that can be deployed unilaterally to protect this country and defend this country’s interests overseas. Liam Fox, David Cameron, the coalition government and the rest of the political class are not serving Britain’s interests, but serving the wishes of the EU. And yes, the Tories with their weasel words and attempts to wrap themselves in the flag are complicit in this and have actively driven this forward.

Without being melodramatic there is only one word for such behaviour and that is treachery. When are people going to shake themselves out of their slumber and stand up against the dismantling of this country? How fitting it is that the word treachery comes from the Old French trecherie, from trechier, meaning to cheat, compare or trick.

The England conspiracy

Blogosphere exclusive:  John Inverdale, the BBC presenter fronting the Scotland v England Six Nations Rugby today, said a few moments ago on BBC1 that Christine Bleakley successfully managed to water-ski ‘across the whole of the British Channel’ yesterday.

Inverdale is an excellent presenter and I know he was ad-libbing rather than reading from a script, but come on.  He’s at an England rugby match for crying out loud!

Seeing as the comment was made live in Edinburgh, perhaps conspiracy theorists will discover dark Scottish forces at work and learn that this was really a subliminal part of Gordon Brown’s big ‘Britishness’ campaign…

Joking aside, England still suffers from a disgraceful and unacceptable democratic deficit.  Laws that only apply to England are made and voted through by MPs from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.  The other three countries have their own devolved assemblies and parliaments to legislate on their domestic issues.  It is only right that England should have its own Parliament to determine matters that only concern the English.