The Hype Office strikes again

Met Office forecasts are seemingly becoming ever more sensationalist.  Observed weather conditions too often show that predicted extreme weather either fails to materialise, or turns out to be nowhere near as extreme as forecast.

Yesterday was another case in point.  The media was saturated with worry-inducing forecasts of high levels of atmospheric pollution at concentrations never before seen in this country. The Met Office were at pains to spread the warnings around.  And they are at it again today.

Yet in the event, the ‘high or very high levels of air pollution across southern England and the Midlands’ came nowhere close to the predictions. It turns out the pollution levels three weeks ago were worse than yesterday’s ‘7’, but that hardly got any coverage and hardly anyone except those with severe respiratory conditions actually noticed any difference.

There’s method in the Met Office’s hype madness, from all these ‘weather warnings’ and triangles on TV maps that now appear in seemingly every other forecast for conditions that are almost always perfectly normal for the time of year, to the Met Office’s new overblown pollution predictions.  They know that people will only remember the overblown warnings and the media’s fealty in reporting them with due prominence.  It is all intended to embed a sense that our weather is becoming ever more extreme, to fit their narrative on human induced climate change – and justify ever more millions for ‘research’ and ever more lavish computer systems.

The Met Office’s typically quiet concession after the fact that things actually didn’t get as bad (£) – or even close to as bad – as they believed, for some reason or other, never gets the same prominence of course.  They are able to say they corrected the record if challenged, but they quietly make the correction in the same manner in which a newspaper will bury an inconvenient correction on page 31, in a single column inch of tightly spaced lettering near the foot of the page.

Then everything is fine again. Until the next time. Meanwhile the bonuses continue to flow from our pockets into theirs as reward for alarmism rather than accuracy, and the propaganda continues to gush out of their site in Exeter, and the sites of their alarmist University allies in Reading, Leeds and East Anglia.  Also, to ensure these fearmongers are never challenged on their hype, the BBC commissions ever more ludicrous reports to criticise giving airtime to people who seek to counter the ‘consensus’ and point out flaws in the science, thereby justifying the naked bias in editorial decison making and coverage of the subject.

It seems the greatest warming that is happening is that of our hearts as we joyfully fork over ever larger sums to fund this nonsense without complaint or revolt.

Negative, negative, negative. Ignore the EuroFUD and seize the positive!

Another day, another steaming pile of fear, uncertainty and doubt bullshit from the pro-EU corporatists.  Roland Rudd’s insipid tentacles have been unfurled again and the media, biased beyond belief and fully paid up members of the pro-EU club, meekly repeat the latest instalment of fearmongering with uncritical fealty.

This time the federalist fanatics at the Guardian play host to the latest dose of dishonesty.  Never mind that less than half of UK exports are actually destined for EU member states, there’s more lies to boot in there.  Martin Barker is the joint-Managing Director of Rowan Precision Ltd.  However, he didn’t just decide out of the blue to submit a piece to Comment is Free; he is an EU enthusiast who plays an important part in advocating the agenda of Rudd’s extreme pro-EU Business for New Europe (BNE) and is one of their signatories.  As such he is also referenced by another Conservative pro-EU front organisation, British Influence, and provides soundbites on demand to keep the Europhile drumbeat going.

What is really interesting is the language being used by the EuroFUDers.  They have clearly been stung by the positive narrative coming from the blogosphere.  As blogs such as EU Referendum have exploded the myth that leaving the EU and its political control does not mean leaving the single market and its economic benefits, the EuroFUDers have adjusted their pitch to what we see in byline (emphasis mine):

Limited or restricted access to the EU’s single market would be an impediment to growth, job creation and innovation.

This shows us they are admitting the game is up for their dishonest sweeping claim that leaving the EU means leaving the single market and all that would entail.  The fear has been removed.  So a new anxiety is required, hence the launch of this revised argument that is designed to suggest that yes, while we could leave the EU and remain part of the single market, that involvement would in some way be limited or restricted.

More fear, more negativity, and yes, more dishonesty.  The fact is a country is either part of the single market, or it isn’t.  There is no question of limited or restricted access.  Such a notion has been dreamed up to maintain FUD.  The narrative is as predictable as it is disingenuous and deceitful.  A perfect example can be seen in the comments.

Via their sockpuppets they will argue that the structure of Norway’s economy is more limited than ours, as if they makes any difference to the ability of companies to export to EU member states or UK consumers to import from them, which is the rationale for single market membership.  They will also claim that access needs to be re-negotiated, doggedly avoiding the fact the UK could simply join the European Free Trade Area (EFTA) – an organisation co-founded by the UK – to remain part of the European Economic Area (EEA) aka the single or internal market.  Then there’s the spin and deceit about Switzerland’s relationship with the EU, which in no way restricts their single market access as they are also EFTA members.

All these twists and turns by the EuroFUDers must be happening for a reason.  Their only stated concern is the ability of the UK to maintain access to the single market, because they only cite worries about any loss of business or economic benefits to the UK.  So when a clear solution is presented that enables the UK to retain those benefits, why all the contortions to falsely declare them unworkable, limited, or restricted?  The only possible answer is that their true agenda is political, not economic, and their only aim is to keep the UK firmly part of the EU under the political control of Brussels.

That is the only logical explanation.  Why else would they eschew a continuation of the single market membership they claim to prize above all else, but also coupled with the UK being able to arrange future trade deals solely on the UK’s and third country’s own terms, rather than the consolidated compromise fudge deal scrunched up to suit partial interests of all 28 EU members?

There is a positive future that awaits the UK outside the EU.

A future with the capacity for much better trade deals on much more advantageous terms, offering far greater opportunity for British businesses and consumers.  Not only that, but the UK being able to sit at the global top table on international bodies in its own right, determining and influencing global regulations long before the EU member states have them handed over for implementation by Brussels.  As the quislings at Business for Rule from Europe and Brussels Influence see their strawmen knocked down one at a time, they will be unable to escape having to address this argument.  Who knows, even UKIP might finally find its voice!

EU FUD Watch: Speaking truth to propagandists

Update: The comment thread over on EUobserver (linked below) has seen a couple of Euroweenies trying to hold their fatuous line, but they are having their arguments systematically broken. This is what happens when people challenge ludicrous EUphile claims with facts from the real world.  They have no answer.

EUobserver describes itself as, ‘The trusted source of EU related news and information. Editorially independent, open-minded and balanced news about the European Union.’

In other words it is a propaganda organ of the EU, publishing stories with that service the EU view of itself and the world.  As usual, the party line is followed to the letter today by EUobserver‘s resident Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) spreader, Benjamin Fox, who gleefully tells readers:

Japan has become the latest economic power to urge the UK not to leave the EU, warning that the move could put over 100,000 jobs on the line.

The warning comes as the UK government prepares to publish the first batch of audits on EU policy making this week as part of its ‘balance of competences’ review.

This is a story that Richard has already covered on EU Referendum.  The fact is the EU and the single market are different things.  The EU is political, the single market is economic.  We can leave the EU and still remain part of the single market, so none of the FUD about jobs being on the line or our export markets being closed to us is justified.

Given its readership, it is worth the effort to correct the record in the story’s comments section, in other words speaking inconvenient truth to the propagandists.   Being uncertain of EUobserver’s treatment of voices that challenge the party line, it remains to be seen if the comment will be permitted to stay online.  But just in case it doesn’t, a screenshot of it is shown below:

The media is determined to ignore the truth and deny a platform to those who want the British people to know and understand that leaving the EU does not mean we cannot still be part of the single market, membership of which is extremely important to UK businesses that export to other single market members and import goods we want to buy from within the single market.

Leaving the European Union is about extracting this country from political control by the bureaucrats in Brussels.  Nothing more.  There is a mechanism for it that enables us to negotiate an agreement to remain part of the single market.

An independent Britain will have the opportunity to take a seat at the ‘top table’ where rules and regulations are made at the global level – before they are handed down to the EU to implement throughout its member states.  An independent Britain can strike its own trade deals that suit British interests, rather than accept compromise deals borne of the muddled and contradictory interests of 28 competing EU member states.  This is the reality the politicians don’t want the British people to know or understand.

So spread the word loudly, far and wide.  There is a beneficial alternative to the status quo.  There can be a brighter future and a new world of opportunities for this country – and the enabler is leaving the EU.

The globalists are worried so they pile on yet more EuroFUD

Methinks the Obama administration doth protest too much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the basis for this claim is…?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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