What’s in a name? BBC Northern Ireland conducts cringeworthy contortion

The city of Londonderry in Northern Ireland was given its official and legal name by Royal Charter in 1662.

Although the republican council in the city changed its own identity to Derry City Council in 1984, as a symbol of its rejection of the union with the United Kingdom and desire for unification with the Republic of Ireland, the High Court confirmed in a 2007 decision that the name of the city remained unchanged.  There is no confusion here, even of locals prefer to call the city ‘Derry’ its offical and legal name is Londonderry.

So a certain amount of teeth grinding was provoked today when I heard news presenters and continuity announcers on BBC Northern Ireland – the state’s public service broadcaster – constantly referring to the city as ‘Derry Londonderry’ in a crass attempt to sit on the fence over the city’s name.

Neither the UK government nor the Northern Ireland Assembly in Stormont have changed the name of Londonderry.  So why is the state’s publicly funded broadcaster being allowed to distort the official identity of Londonderry in this ludicrous manner?

It has long been asserted that BBC NI and Ulster Television (UTV) are reservoirs of republican support and sympathies.  This editorial decision by the BBC does nothing to disprove that assertion.  The default position of the self loathers and socialist broadcast activists at the Continuity BBC to place a premium on any stance that undermines anything British, but surely this sop to those who reject and oppose Northern Ireland’s British identity has no place on the state broadcaster.  This contortion over the city’s name is only being carried out to appease the sensitivities of republicans in Londonderry.

Should the day come that the majority in Northern Ireland choose democratically to leave the union and subsume themselves into the Republic of Ireland, and Londonderry is renamed legally, will the BBC still refer to it as ‘Derry Londonderry’ to acknowledge the sensitivities of the unionists living in the city who wish to remain part of the UK and have so far resisited the republican cultural cleansing that has been taking place to drive protestant unionists out?  Not bloody likely.

The BBC is still the United Kingdom’s fifth column, it remains the enemy within.  This is just another example of it.

Cameron in Thatcherite shocker!

According to a piece in the Daily Wail, when asked directly whether he was a Thatcherite, David Cameron replied:

‘No… Other people might call me that. I think the label’s now… it’s slightly become… labels now don’t quite mean what they did then.

‘I was a tremendous Mrs Thatcher supporter… The battles she won were so important for our country, but there are now different challenges and things that need to be dealt with.’

The shock in all this?  That some idiot saw fit to ask Cameron if he was a Thatcherite in the first place.

A cursory look at Cameron’s dismal record, his limp behaviour in opposition, his failure to win an election against the most unpopular Prime Minister in living memory, a quick scan of his front bench at the wets he surrounds himself with – especially that treacherous, backstabbing, europhile quisling and plotter-in-chief who worked tirelessly to bring down Thatcher, Ken Clarke – the accelerating departure from conservative principles, the vacuum that exists where conviction should reside, the two-faced rank hypocrisy, and an absence of any connection or empathy with ordinary people… yet some witless fool has the stupidity to ask if he is a Thatcherite?

For crying out loud.

Germans united in regret (and self interest) over Britain’s EU stance

Different day, same inane rubbish in the media where they repeat the same establishment arguments already made ad-infinitum.  This time it’s the turn of the BBC’s Mark Urban to offer a variation on the ‘Germans are displeased with us‘ theme.

There is no real dissent across the German political spectrum on the issues of integrating the European Union (EU) more closely, apart from on the extreme right.

gushes Urban.  Well Mr Urban, with the exception of UKIP, there’s no real dissent across the British political spectrum on the issue either – Tories, Labour, Lib Dems, Plaid and the SNP all crave more ‘Europe’.

From Ralph Brinkhaus, a local member of the German parliament, the Bundestag, to Christine Lemster, a chemistry student at Hamburg University, we heard a similar refrain – the UK and Germany ought to be natural allies, and it is too bad that they cannot unite around EU issues.

Stop, Mr Urban, you’re breaking my heart.  Of course we can be natural allies and we can unite around issues with Germany.  But where is the explanation about why we need to hand over control of our country in order to do so?

We are natural allies with the United States and unite with them around issues, but no one is suggesting we need to have political union with them to achieve it.  So why do we need political union in Europe?  As ever the europhile and EU grant-grabbing BBC demonstrate the closed thinking that colours their reporting of the issue.

The second issue on which there appears to be wide agreement is that Germany opposes the type of renegotiation of membership terms or competencies that UK Prime Minister David Cameron has talked about.

Well, heaven forbid this country should have the temerity to do something that doesn’t suit the agenda of the political class in Germany, or France, or Spain, or Italy.  How damned unreasonable of us.  We should be bloody well ashamed of ourselves for such harbouring such disgracefully selfish thoughts.

The last topic where the Germans offer Tory Eurosceptics cold comfort is on their idea that Britain, even if it actually left the EU, could negotiate the same type of free trade arrangement with it that Norway or Switzerland have.

We went to the Sennheiser audio plant near Hanover; where something like 10% of their worldwide sales are made in the UK, to canvass their view on this:

“I know how complicated it is to negotiate”, said board member Volker Bertels, referring to Switzerland’s long discussions over the terms of access to the European market, adding that in the case of the UK, “we all need to be careful about putting up additional obstacles”.

Once again the media paints this issue as being about one section of one political party.  They are actually doing contortions now to avoid any recognition that it is voters who have pushed this debate to the forefront through opinion polls and their possible voting intentions.  So it’s hard to get an agreement in a short time.  Switzerland got plenty of bi-lateral agreements because they have what others want and are interested in buying what others have to sell.  Provided the trade rules were in place to allow the free flow of goods and services then the market will do the rest.

So many words written by Mark Urban.  Yet none of them are devoted to any examination of the UK’s interests.  Instead he uses his platform to effectively shill for the Germans.  Such is the mindset of the establishment’s state broadcaster.  Is there anyone in the British establishment who gives a damn about this country’s interests rather than agonise about how inconvenient our potential actions might be for other countries?  There’s a word for these people.  Quislings.

More Guardian hypocrisy and another David Leigh link to the KGB

Hot on the heels of the implosion of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) for falsely asserting Conservative peer Lord McAlpine was a paedophile, the Guardian is leading with a story about ‘the existence of an extraordinary global network of sham company directors, most of them British’ citing yet another organisation of ‘investigative journalists’.  The Graun goes on to explain:

The UK government claims such abuses were stamped out long ago, but a worldwide joint investigation by the Guardian, the BBC’s Panorama and the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has uncovered a booming offshore industry that leaves the way open for both tax avoidance and the concealment of assets.

Concealing assets if they are subject to taxation is tax evasion, therefore illegal.  Fair enough.  However once again we see an agenda at work to demonise the perfectly legal and responsible activity of tax avoidance.  This is the latest example of outrageous hypocrisy on the part of the Guardian, given that its parent company makes use of offshore arrangements in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying tax in the UK.  It even resulted in a protest by Guido co-conspirators outside the Graun’s plush offices in London.  Strangely, the piece doesn’t make any mention of Guardian Media Group’s behaviour, let alone criticise it.

So why is the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) focussing on this issue?  Could it be because it has a political agenda that ignores the sins of the left and focuses on eeevil capitalists?  Of course it could.  Here is a little bit of history of the ICIJ courtesy of Gerard Jackson…

The ICIJ is the offspring of the Centre for Investigative Reporting (CIR) which in turn was founded by the notorious Institute for Policy Studies, a Marxist organisation which acted as a front for the KGB during the Cold War.

It’s unsurprising therefore that we see the Guardian’s David Leigh right in the thick of the ICIJ, listed as one of the consortium’s five UK based journalists.  He of course denied being part of the BIJ, despite having never corrected his Guardian colleague Roy Greenslade’s long standing claim that he was part of that group.  Perhaps Leigh, whose name is headlined as co-author of the Guardian piece, will be content to accept his membership of this particular group of self important hacks.  But if he does, it risks opening an old can of worms for Leigh.

Why so?  Here’s a name from the past.  Richard Gott.

Richard Gott was the Guardian’s literary editor but in December 1994 he resigned after Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky contradicted Gott’s denial that he was a paid agent of the KGB.  In the finest traditions of Guardian weasel words, Gott went on to say:

“I took red gold, even if it was only in the form of expenses for myself and my partner. That, in the circumstances, was culpable stupidity, though at the time it seemed more like an enjoyable joke.”

This seemingly left Leigh looking like an idiot as he had come bounding to Gott’s defence and ranting against the security service after the BBC’s attempt to hire Gott in 1981 was prevented because Gott failed to obtain security clearance.  Gordievsky’s subsequent story put that failure into context.  But when you consider Leigh is part of an organisation that was itself a front for the KGB, perhaps Leigh knew exactly what he was doing all along and just supporting a comrade in need.

There is something very wrong with the Guardian and the people it hires.  Rank hypocrisy, double standards, treachery, deceit, smear campaigns, acting as a mouthpiece for those who despise our country… all are synonymous with the bile-filled ‘progressive’ activists who infest the office in Kings Place.  No wonder the KGB loved the Guardian and considered it highly susceptible to penetration.  The only surprise is that Guardianista weren’t signing up in their droves to join the Soviet intelligence community.

Richard Corbett and his trivial 5% figure

During the media’s scratch at the surface of the EU’s budget discussions former Labour MEP Richard Corbett, who was rejected by voters in 2009 yet nonetheless continues to suck at the teats of the taxpayers in Brussels, has been keen to push the narrative that the EU’s bureaucracy and administration ‘is only 5% of the total budget’.

This is a deliberate line being taken by a fanatical EUphile career bureaucrat to avoid stating the embarrassingly huge monetary cash amount the EU spends on itself.  It’s so much less painful to hear ‘it’s only 5%’ rather than hear the actual figure.  So for the sake of transparency let’s assume Corbett’s 5% figure is accurate and put the monetary value on it that he avoids stating at any cost.

The EU’s Financial Framework 2007-2013 set the global level of commitment appropriations, namely the budget, at €864.3 billion.  That equates roughly to £700 billion over the period. The 5% Richard Corbett is so fond of referring to was therefore a bill of around £35 billion over the last period that was picked up by taxpayers across the EU.

If we consider Herman Van Rompuy’s proposed budget for the next period of €973 billion (around £787.3 billion) Corbett’s beloved 5% becomes £39.4 billion.  Not such a trivial figure when put into proper context, is it Rich? It makes all those £120 bottles of wine possible.

As for our useless establishment fawning media, when will a single journalist listening dumbly to Corbett trotting out this 5% figure do their job, put him on the spot, and ask him to tell viewers and listeners the actual monetary amount?

The usual suspects, a grab for power over the media, and a fetish for our tax pounds

In themselves the articles barely scratch the surface of what is going on behind the scenes, in the shadows where movers and shakers who are virtually unknown to the general public are exerting staggering influence and control over the direction of this country, its politics and its civil service and state broadcaster.

Three articles in the Daily Mail today do however shine a dull light on the ‘usual suspects’ who are known to a small band of folk who try to explain these powerseeker ‘wheels within wheels’ on their blogs and who are often derided as conspiracy theorists for their trouble. It is worth taking a few minutes to read the articles just to get a top surface idea of who’s who in this de facto coup of Britain’s public life. Article 1 | Article 2 | Article 3.

The names that have been published, interwoven and incestuous as they are between a cabal of well funded trusts, think tanks, ‘educational’ and campaigning bodies, do now enable a large number of people who usually ignore these things to get a small taste of what is going on in the background.

• Common Purpose
• Ofcom
• Media Standards Trust
• Hacked Off
• Demos
• Social Market Foundation
• The Leveson Inquiry
• Bureau of Investigative Journalism
• Esmee Fairbairn Foundation
• Pearson Foundation

And there’s more besides.  All of them entwined and staffed by ex-Labour, BBC and Guardian political animals bent on subverting what remains of our democratic structures and shackling Britain in socialist handcuffs, spreading their creed throughout the media, civil service, the police and business.

While the Mail pieces focus on charitable monies, these organisations also benefit from public cash, both directly, and indirectly through fees, to fund their activities.  And all without so much as a ‘by your leave’ sought from the taxpayer.

Small wonder the focus of the campaigns of these groups has been to crush the Murdoch media empire, attack the Conservative party and its prominent supporters and look to reshape the public landscape in the image of their political ideology – all without a single reference back to the supposedly democratic process or a mandate from a single voter in a ballot box.

Fellow bloggers, please read the articles, get curious, dig deeper, identify more parts of the spider’s web and crowdsource them into public view.  It’s the difference blogging can make.

Sadiq Khan MP and a lesson in historical ignorance

From the Daily Wail…

A left-wing MP has claimed that new immigrants know more about the nation’s heritage than many Britons.

Labour justice spokesman Sadiq Khan said that it  ‘frustrated’ him to see newcomers obliged to sit citizenship tests when many people ‘know b***** all’ about British history.

Mr Khan, the son of Pakistani immigrants and MP for Tooting in South London, said he met many people who have gone through the citizenship ceremony who  feel ‘so excited and enthused’.

But he added: ‘Then I’ll be canvassing in my area and there’ll be people who have lived in the same home for three or four or five generations who know b***** all about our country, about our heritage.

‘It frustrates me that you’ve got new citizens who have an obligation to learn about our country but we aren’t doing enough to make sure everyone shares that knowledge.’

It is hypocritical of Khan to protest in this way.  For many years Khan and his socialist ilk have strived to demonise the history of this country and teach only a slanted and pejorative version of our past.  They have consistently cited our imperial and colonialist history as something of which this country should be ashamed and therefore should be swept under the carpet – denying younsgters the chance to learn with balance some of the positives of what we also contributed to the world in those days.

The socialist airbrushing of our past has been reflected in the history syllabus in state schools as the focus switched from teaching historic facts about our country and its place in the world to indoctrinating youngsters with the kind of marxist nonsense spewed forth by the likes of the arch-apologist for communist inspired genocide, Eric Hobsbawm.

Aidan Burley – censorship, censure and cynical agendas

A look at the ‘news’ on any given day sums up the self destructive idiocy of those who try to hold sway over the rest of us.

Life in this country is now nothing more than a mission to censor and censure anything and everything that falls outside the narrow and bigoted worldview of a small number of spiteful morons, aided and abetted by the useful idiots who are terrified of getting on the wrong side of the thought police.  Even those who are supposed to be well meaning end up doing the dirty work for the control freaks.

Just look at the furore over Aidan Burley MP.  He’s a Tory MP so he’s bound to be an idiot by default.  He attended a stag do where one guest dressed as a Nazi SS officer and another gave a ‘toast’ to the Third Reich.  This lampooning has apparently has been portrayed as grievously offensive glorification of the Nazis.

Aidan Burley, spineless in the face of the politically motivated onslaught against him and the feartie over reaction of his own party leader, lest he lose a single vote by appearing to stand firm against the thought police, issues a grovelling apology.  Clinging on to a job seems to take priority over having principles these days.  But that’s the political class for you.

Since when has lampooning Nazis by playing dress up and throwing mock salutes been cause for such craven behaviour?  Stupid, yes.  But do these thought police seriously think for a moment the party goers were dwelling on the past and longing for the vicious Nazi oppression so many died to put down?  Come off it.  Yet there they are in the media, wetting their pants in their spittle flecked fervour to hound a man into submission and out of a job so a rival they approve of can take over from him.

No doubt some will try to paint me as an apologist, but nothing is further from the truth.  I write this as someone who fights against real anti semitism and hatred.  Someone who rails against the spite filled animosity directed against Jewish people and Israel every week in the pages of the Guardian – which curiously remains free from the ire of those who are demanding the demise of Aidan Burley.  I am proud of the distinction winning roles that members of my family played in the RAF and Army in fighting against Nazi Germany and the battles against extremism carried on by their sons and daughters in the years since.

Did these people at the stag do go to a far right rally?  Did they assemble to lament the defeat of Hitler?  Have they called for the eradication of Jews, gypsies or other minorities?  Do they endorse militaristic domination by an oppressive regime?  Are their political beliefs aligned with those of Goebbels, Himmler and Speer?  No, their ‘crime’ was nothing more than playing dress up and being immature and boorish.  But in a free society that is supposed to be allowed.

So do we see the offence seekers picketing fancy dress shops demanding the removal of Nazi uniforms?  Do they call for re-runs of ‘Allo ‘Allo to be banned because of the uniforms and salutes on show?  Do they rally outside the Guardian’s offices in London demanding the removal of anti semitic rants from the pages of Comment is Free?  Or do they only selectively take offence when someone – a friend of a political rival – puts on a mock uniform and lampoons in juvenile manner the behaviour of a hated and defeated foe that sought totalitarian control of a type some of these offence seekers are exhibiting?

We seem unable to move in this country without someone seeking to take offence at something or other and demanding other people modify their behaviour to suit the wishes of others.  What will it take for people to stand up against these miserable opportunist control freaks and tell them to bugger off?

I don’t care a toss about Aidan Burley or his friends.  But I do care about this accelerating slide towards defacto criminalisation of people, who have done nothing wrong, by a self selecting tribal group of agenda-driven witch finders who are determined to bend everyone to their will and authoritarian groupthink through such cynical means.

Why ‘we are the 99 percent’ has got it wrong

In the comments to a previous post, Permantexpat asked for my opinion on the burgeoning ‘we are the 99 percent‘ movement in the US.  I say the US because the UK boasts an altogether more positive 99 percent organisation with a different agenda.

In the US, ‘We are the 99 percent’ has emerged from the leftist agitprop of the Occupy Wall Street foolishness.  There are many tragic stories of misfortune among those who are now identifying with the 99 percent movement, but there are also many people who are involved for no more reason than they embody the politics of envy, the politics of entitlement, the politics of something for nothing.

There is a peculiar mindset among many on the left.  It leads them to argue that if someone has wealth the state should take a slice of it and give it to others who are less wealthy. Never mind that many of those people with wealth have earned it through hard work, long hours, risk taking, personal and emotional commitment and a determination to succeed; they have it and the Wall Street occupiers believe that without putting in the same effort they are entitled to some of it.

I am part of the 99 percent whose costs are increasing, income is falling and for whom the economic mess is proving harmful.  But I do not endorse or support the insipid, big state, authoritarian rent seekers who are leading desperate people down a dead end path.

The decent people who are suffering in the current economic situation, and through desperation are climbing aboard the leftist bandwagon, are right to protest.  However they are protesting against the wrong people.  The focus of their anger should not be Wall Street, it should be the White House and Congress. The root cause of what angers them is not those in the financial sector, regardless of the way many of them operated.  No, the root cause is a combination of themselves and the government.

• Themselves because they allowed the politicians to con them into believing the state has all the answers and could be relied upon to throw a never ending stream of money at various agencies they could milk
• The government because successive administrations have gradually made millions more people dependent on the state for assistance and handouts, while pursuing policies that have driven up the costs of essentials

What has been lost on too many people is the adage that a government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.  The consequences of allowing this to happen are now coming back a vengeance.  Now the handout tap has been turned down a large number of people are finding they have been living beyond their means.  No one denies the difficulty this causes for many decent people, but demanding the handouts continue by taking money from those who are more fortunate is not the answer.

Occupying Wall Street will change nothing.  Sleeping outside St Paul’s Cathedral will change nothing.  The first thing to do is focus a campaign on the politicians – because it is they who have encouraged and embedded this situation – and demand a change in the scandalous government spending priorities and regressive policies which are driving up the cost of food and energy, hitting the poorest hardest.

What is required is an end to the corporatism that masquerades as democratic government. It won’t happen by protesting outside the offices of bankers and financiers.  It won’t happen via movements which are steered by those who want to replace the damaging corporatist system with a damaging socialist system.

But when the decent majority wake up, stop being manipulated by the Marxists and leftists and demand action on their terms and focus on the political class, it will create the conditions for government in the people’s interest – where policies do not impoverish and the power games of the politicians are pushed out to the margins.  We might at last get proper representative democracy.

Rioters without a cause

It is not a protest.  There is no cause, ideology or grievance.  The acts we are witnessing are completely and utterly without justification.  As many commentators have rightly said, what we have seen in recent days and what is happening again tonight is just criminal behaviour.

As usual the talking heads such as Marc Wadsworth and Darcus Howe spill onto our TV screen and our airwaves to tell us why the behaviour we are witnessing is the fault of anyone and anything but those black youths who make up the majority of those carrying out the violent and criminal acts. Socialist politicians emerge to make political capital out of the events – always careful to sidestep culpability for their role in creating the conditions that have bred this generation of thugs.

What we are seeing is the product of the gang culture that has been allowed to develop and impose itself in a number of towns and cities.  These feckless, selfish, grubbing morons have grown up worshipping at the altar of gang culture and drug culture, with a chip on their shoulder the size of a planet, with aggressive claims that the world owes them something.

Not only are they togged up in the latest designer labels and £130 trainers, while sporting iPhones and BlackBerrys and gold jewellry, they have grown up being told by handwringing apologists that they are not responsible for their own actions.

Whenever they do wrong it’s always the fault of their ‘environment’, or ‘society’, or ‘lack of opportunities’ or a ‘failure of government’. The worse their behaviour, the more the sociologists fawn over them and say we aren’t putting enough ‘resources’ into their areas and that we are to blame for the supposedly understandable consequences.

We are not to blame.  The blame lays squarely on the shoulders of those who choose – who choose – to carry out criminal acts.  There are plenty of youngsters from identical backgrounds who shun the gangs and choose to make something of their lives.  They show commitment and they work their way out of their situation to make a better life for themselves.  They should be applauded.  If they can make it, there is no reason others cannot do so too. But the others don’t because they would rather have everything handed to them on a plate, or steal it from others, because they don’t want to make the effort.

I for one am sick of people excusing the behaviour of these thugs, who can generally be found on sink estates – carrying drink and drugs and selling drugs on to make some easy money – hanging around in groups attempting to intimidate people and demanding ‘respect’.   They have to demand it because they do nothing to earn it.  They are the antithesis to respectability and they themselves respect nothing, particularly not society’s norms or authority.

Until these feral beasts learn they alone are responsible for their behaviour and until the consequences for their wrongful actions are made severe this kind of lawlessness will continue on some scale or other.

By the same token, we need the police to revert to being a fair, honest and respectful police force – i.e. not polluted and corrupted by political correctness and quasi politician senior officers – instead of being uniformed social workers.  We also need the courts to hand down proper punishments to those who commit crime and make an effort to deter others from making the same bad decisions.  We also need more prison places to uncrowd the system and make proper rehabilitation possible to reduce reoffending.

What is the common thread in all this?  The politicians.

It is their policies that have allowed this subclass to develop, and their policies that have made it possible for this subclass to continue receiving substantial handouts for doing nothing productive with their lives.  The political class has cultivated this problem and refused to correct it.  The politicians must pay a price for what they have allowed to happen and the law abiding majority of this country must now hold them to account.

Hilarious if they were not so dangerous

The good Dr North at EU Referendum draws our attention today to two related pieces in that newsprint spattered bastion of Marxism known as The Guardian.

It seems a left wing, self appointed band of self professed worthies has announced that they are launching a campaign to hold to account Britain’s ‘feral’ elite for the series of crises which have scarred the country.

Expenses, bonuses and hacking crises share the same origins, says this campaign group, which proposes to create a 1,000-strong “public jury” that would be selected at random and ensure that power is taken away from “remote interest groups” which currently treat the public with contempt.  As North explains:

This is the view the likes of Greg Dyke, Caroline Lucas and Lord Smith of Clifton, who think we need a “people’s jury” to apply a “public interest first” test more generally to British political and corporate life. Overworked as a cliché or not, you really could not make this one up.

And he’s right.  The ‘feral elite’ they describe is comprised of figures from the establishment.  Yet without any sense of self awareness or the evident rich irony, the campaign group itself is made up of 56 academics, writers, trade unionists and politicians from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Green party – in other words, left wing figures from the establishment.

A look at the list of signatories to their open letter in the Graun betrays the motivation and the objective of this little enterprise.  This is not about holding the ‘feral elite’ to account, it is about undermining their rivals in the establishment in order to secure more influence for themselves and their liberal-left worldview.  If you don’t believe that, just look at their stated priority areas for attention in the background article about the campaign:

• Media ownership and the public interest

• The role of the financial sector in the crash

• MP selections and accountability

• Policing and public interest

• How to apply a ‘public interest first’ test more generally to British political and corporate life

Quelle surprise seeing media ownership, code for ‘nail Murdoch and any opposition to the BBC and Guardian’ right up there at number one.  You can almost see the conversation where these people were asking themselves what could they do to capitalise on the current anti News Corp sentiment and solidify the dominance of the BBC on the airwaves.  This campaign is their vehicle to control the levers of power without having to share the cockpit any longer.

As if there are not enough clues as to the real aims of this campaign – oxygen of publicity by the Guardian… main figurehead the former BBC Director General Greg Dyke… supported by Media Standards Trust (deputy chair, Julia Middleton, the CEO of Common Purpose) board members Helena Kennedy QC, BBC hack Robert Peston and Amelia Fawcett who is also chair of Guardian Media Group…  – the activity is being facilitated by Compass.  Note their slogan.  The one thing absent from the campaign is any form of ideological balance.  That should tell us all we need to know.

This is nothing more than a raid.  It is an attempt to get support from unwitting people, who would reject the leftist dogma out of hand if presented to them openly, who feel concern at what they see around them.  But people who will fail to realise the state of affairs this campaign claims it wants to tackle has largely been shaped by its very signatories since 1997 because it suited their interersts in their establishment positions.

The campaign is nothing more an attempt to use people as pawns in the power games of the elite.  As North rightly concludes in his blog post:

The trouble is, you will never get the “feral elite” offer anything that amounts to the transfer of real power. If we want power, we are going to have to take it. The time is not yet, but what we are seeing here is the elites falling out. The time must be near.

That time cannot come too soon.

The Guardian’s influence is increasingly reliant on the BBC

A couple of weeks ago the Audit Bureau of Circulations figures for national newspapers for June was reported in the Press Gazette. It shows that newspapers are fishing an increasingly shallow pool as readers turn away from them.

The average drop in year on year average circulation figures across the dailies was 7.9%.  However, as you can see from the table below, some fared worse than others…

(The Up/Down figure is the year-on-year percentage rise or fall in circulation)

The New Labour supporting Times and increasingly confused Telegraph both showed above average falls in average daily circulation, reflecting their lack of relevance.  But it is the left leaning papers that are really suffering.  The Daily Star recorded the biggest drop and The Guardian saw the third largest decline.

The Guardian is firmly on track to fall below the quarter of a million average daily circulation figure.  But that notwithstanding it continues to enjoy audience reach through its broadcasting arm, the BBC, which spouts the Guardian editorial line as if it were a given truth.  Again, this raises the question of the disproportionate influence The Guardian has over the BBC.  Despite the fact readers are rejecting The Guardian newspaper in greater numbers than the industry average, it is referenced far more by the BBC than any other organ and more journalists from The Guardian are called upon to offer commentary and opinion than from any other paper.

We could hope the BBC Trust might take time to commission a review into plurality of opinion among its invited guests, but if recent ‘independent’ reviews are anything to go by they would probably maintain their incestuous relationship by asking Peter Preston to conduct it, and the outcome would likely be a recommendation that the BBC stops inviting any journalists on air except those from The Guardian, current or retired, and that Alan Rusbridger be given his own primetime TV slot to share his views on Britain, News Corporation and the world.

Without the BBC the fact is the Guardian would be sinking much further even quicker. From the advertising revenue to the visibility and platform afforded to the paper, the licence fee payer is being compelled to subsidise a declining business under pain of fine or imprisonment.  Bar the grumbling what is anyone doing to address this outrageous state of affairs?

Putting the threat to our freedom into context

In a private exchange with a fellow blogger several days ago he speculated that the Anders Breivik mass murder would bode ill for dissenters.  Well, one assumes it was private, but who knows what is being monitored and by whom…

Anyway, being a ‘glass half full’ kind of chap I replied that seeing as the Norwegian intelligence service has shown Breivik up to be a dangerous and well armed Walter Mitty, attempts to tar dissenters with the same brush will fail.  I stressed the importance of continuing to cite evidence and push our arguments so the powers that be will be forced to speak to them.

After all, I pointed out, 7/7 didn’t really change anything and subsequent plots haven’t really changed anything, so therefore it follows a Norwegian mass murderer will not change anything either.

At this point my blogging friend said he was not so sure.  He qualified his concern by providing me with a link to a piece on the French language version of EurActiv, translated roughly by Google.

Reading and reflecting upon it made me reconsider my inital assessment, hence my post yesterday.  All bloggers should take a few moments to take the article on board.

Mentioned in that piece is European Commission spokesman Michele Cercone (pictured).  It seems old Michele has had a fair bit to say lately – some of it extremely illuminating and far reaching.  Consider this, attributed to Cercone by Balkans.com:

The European Commission is building a security system to issue early warnings on threats of extremism, xenophobia and other forms of radicalism

Or this quote reported by Hurriyet Daily News:

Compromises are more easily reached after shocking events like those that happened in Norway.

And International Affairs Magazine, explained that: ‘Various forces will be trying to capitalize on Norway’s bloody drama. Interestingly, the European Commission championed the cause. Breivik left a thorough description of the costs of the bomb ingredients, the result being that the EU rushed to impose regulations on the sales of chemicals that can be mold into explosives,’ and reported Cercone as saying:

The European Commission will speed up the introduction of new regulations on chemicals sales after a Norwegian extremist who killed 76 people in last week’s bombing and shooting spree admitted he used fertilizers to make explosives.

But virtually none of this has been reported by our world beating media corps, which is too busy devoted column hectares to its navel gazing over phone hacking.  Should we be worried by this?  Absolutely.

It is a fact that the European Commission, an arm of the EU, is now increasing its efforts to apply control over people in the member states.  No crisis must ever be wasted.  The EU, being unelected, unaccountable and therefore wholly anti democratic, is seizing the moment to empower itself still further at the expense of our personal freedoms.  We are being dictated to by an entity that is taking an opportunity to use the actions of one individual as justification to clamp down on anyone who opposes this essentially socialist construct – hence the focus on right wing ‘extremism’ where the EU decides what constitutes extreme.

The issue is one of mission creep.  We have seen it all before, where legislation enacted for one purpose becomes a convenient measure that is applied for a different purpose that was never intended.  The EU is engaging in naked opportunism to exert greater control, while setting itself as the sole authority to determine what dissent against it will be tolerated.

It is frightening that the EU, with its goal of eradicating the nation state, will be deciding whether its opponents are too radical, whether their views can therefore be shared on the internet, and will define what constitutes xenophobia and whether that should be punished – all backed by European courts and European arrest warrants.

In hindsight I got it wrong.  We are indeed staring into an abyss where our enemy, the EU, could take advantage of the Breivik attacks to effectively criminalise anti EU sentitment, or at the very least prevent people from sharing those sentiments with others, citing them as ‘extreme’, ‘radical’, ‘xenophobic’ or even potential ‘lone wolf terrorists’.  This response isn’t being driven simply by Breivik’s actions, but crucially the rationale he gave for them.

You asked why – here is the answer

Following the revelation that the mass murders in Norway were carried out by a white Nordic man rather than Islamists, hours of radio time and a good amount of TV broadcast time were devoted to trying to make a number of people feel stupid for having initally suggested the attack had been perpetrated by Islamist terrorists.

Plenty of bloggers and media talking heads, whose worldview favours the notion of mass immigration, seized on the news that an Anders and not an Ahmed had carried out the atrocities in Oslo and on Utoya and posed effectively the same question in a range of variations:

Why do we always assume Muslims are behind every terrorist outrage?

The idea for this was to make people feel stupid and guilty for having made an incorrect assumption, to make them feel bigoted and prejudiced for jumping to conclusions.

But the fact of the matter is the reason so many people rushed to the Islamist terrorist conclusion is that in recent years so many attacks and foiled attacks have been carried out by people citing passages from the Qur’an as justification for their attempts to kill people they view as infidels. Whether it is exploding themselves on tube trains and buses, engaging in a concerted copycat effort two weeks later, plotting to blow up shopping centres, trying to kill people outside nightclubs with car bombs, attempting to denotate explosives in shoes or ignite underpants over the Atlantic, drive a car bomb into an airport terminal building or plotting to mix liquid chemicals together in coordinated fashion on a number of jets simultaneously, the common theme of this incredibly disproportionate number of attacks and attackers is Islamism.

This has been re-emphasised today with the updated news that the two German nationals arrested at Dover and charged at City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court with collecting or possessing data likely to be useful in a terrorist act, Christian Emde, 28, and Robert Baum, 23, are fanatical Muslim converts.

So it should come as no surprise that suddenly all those ‘right on’ voices determined to apply the labels of racist, xenophobe and bigot to people less ‘internationalist’ than themselves seem to have gone rather quiet again. And they will remain so until there is another rare non-Islamist assault on civilians.  It is a safe bet that the phone ins on Five Live, LBC and other stations will not be editorially re-focused to ask why so many fanatical Muslims are hell bent on attacking western countries and killing as many people as possible. It doesn’t fit in with their narrative of telling us how wrong we are to rightly point out the Islamist threat dwarfs all others.

There are a number of threats this country faces, foreign and domestic, and it is not racist or bigoted to state the fact that the biggest and most determined of those threats comes from fanatical Muslims who subscribe to the Islamist mindset.  The evidence supports it.

Away with the fairies

That is probably the most polite description we can come up with for the Observer’s editorial staff.  Casting its eyes across the Irish Sea, the Observer uses its editorial today to opine:

The Irish people have suffered enough. Europe should back off

The new government in Dublin deserves a supportive EU, not a punitive one

Since when has there ever been in history a centralising, power hungry, unaccountable entity that was benevolent and supportive?  Since when has any entity stuffed to the gills with special interests, and dedicated to furthering the objectives of their barely visible establishment friends in the big corporations, ever undermined those interests?

The sentiments of the Observer demonstrate that its editorial team is either in complete denial of the reality of EU governance and the consequences of an all powerful state, or is deliberately deceiving its tiny readership with naked propaganda. The editorial says:

The Irish have delivered a savage verdict on those who turned their country from the envy of the world into an object of pity. In the process, they have smashed one of Europe’s great political machines, the Fianna Fáil party that enjoyed a near monopoly of power since 1932. This is a striking example of democracy at work.

But does it matter? Voters damned Fianna Fáil’s disastrous decision to underwrite the staggering losses of grotesquely reckless banks. They are, however, stuck with those same policies in the shape of the deal made with the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. It ties the new government into ever-more brutal austerity for at least the next four years, while continuing to lavish public money on insolvent banks.

It is all so confused it is difficult to know what on earth the Observer is trying to say. It seems to want to have its cake and eat it. The Observer lauds a ‘striking example of democracy at work’ on Ireland, but it believes totally in government by the anti democratic European Union.  It refers to the ‘disastrous decision to underwrite the staggering losses of grotesquely reckless banks’, yet supported and pressed for the bail out of the banks with public money. It criticises the IMF and EU’s conditions for bailing out Ireland, yet ideologically supports such unaccountable internationalist bodies possessing such political and financial power to the detriment of nation states.  There is more in the same vein.

Surely the only conclusion any reasonable person can come to is that like so many in the media, the Observer is in utter denial, it is disconnected from reality, it is away with the fairies.

Prof Freeman Dyson rousts Indy churnalist

Let’s see the Met Office fall over themselves to link to this piece by Steve Connor in the Independent. Or do they only do that when he writes puff pieces for them when they’re under pressure?  They should be pleased because Connor is firmly on message and gives them another mention in this article.

Titled ‘Letters to a heretic: An email conversation with climate change sceptic Professor Freeman Dyson‘, Connor’s piece could just as easily be a piece by Prof Dyson called ‘Responses to a scientific illiterate: An object lesson in biased media and ignorance‘.  For despite being a science editor Connor seems remarkably one dimensional and out of his depth.

The best Connor can summon up is the appeal to authority, and he does so right off the bat in his by-line as he refers to Dyson as one of the few true intellectuals to be so dismissive of the global-warming consensus. From the outset Dyson set out his very high level rationale for AGW scepticism when explained (paragraph bulleted for ease of reading):

• First, the computer models are very good at solving the equations of fluid dynamics but very bad at describing the real world. The real world is full of things like clouds and vegetation and soil and dust which the models describe very poorly.
• Second, we do not know whether the recent changes in climate are on balance doing more harm than good. The strongest warming is in cold places like Greenland. More people die from cold in winter than die from heat in summer.
• Third, there are many other causes of climate change besides human activities, as we know from studying the past.
• Fourth, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is strongly coupled with other carbon reservoirs in the biosphere, vegetation and top-soil, which are as large or larger. It is misleading to consider only the atmosphere and ocean, as the climate models do, and ignore the other reservoirs.
• Fifth, the biological effects of CO2 in the atmosphere are beneficial, both to food crops and to natural vegetation. The biological effects are better known and probably more important than the climatic effects.
• Sixth, summing up the other five reasons, the climate of the earth is an immensely complicated system and nobody is close to understanding it.

But despite this explanation, Connor persists with what Dyson labels as the ‘party line’ focusing on what he sees as narrow technical issues, the premise of which he doesn’t accept.  So Connor, lost for an angle of attack to discredit Dyson, returns to his appeal to authority when he churns out:

So I guess my question would be, what if you are wrong? What if all the other scientists connected with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UK Met Office, NASA, NOAA, the World Meteorological Organisation, and just about every reputable university and institute doing research on climate science, happen to be right? Isn’t it a bit risky for me and the rest of the general public to dismiss this vast canon of climate science as just “fuss” about global warming when all I’ve got to go on is a minority opinion?

This was written despite earlier references in the email exchange to Alfred Wegener (theory of continental drift) with Dyson having already pointed out that there was even a consensus against Wegener among a small group of experts.  Connor clearly cannot square with the notion of a small number of outstanding scientists disagreeing with the pack. When will Connor ever ask himself and readers, what if the consensus he is so desperate to endorse happen to be wrong?  History is littered with examples of consensus opinion and ‘evidence’ being undermined by actualite.

In Dyson’s response to Connor, he reasonably writes the following:

Of course I am not expecting you to agree with me. The most I expect is that you might listen to what I am saying. I am saying that all predictions concerning climate are highly uncertain. On the other hand, the remedies proposed by the experts are enormously costly and damaging, especially to China and other developing countries. On a smaller scale, we have seen great harm done to poor people around the world by the conversion of maize from a food crop to an energy crop. This harm resulted directly from the political alliance between American farmers and global-warming politicians. Unfortunately the global warming hysteria, as I see it, is driven by politics more than by science. If it happens that I am wrong and the climate experts are right, it is still true that the remedies are far worse than the disease that they claim to cure.

Then follows the equivalent of the punch that Ali never gave Foreman…

I wish that The Independent would live up to its name and present a less one-sided view of the issues.

Connor indulges himself with another lengthy dose of pseudo-intellectual nonsense attacking what he believes to have been the varying arguments of the sceptics, before a clearly bored and unimpressed Dyson extracts himself from the exchange with this telling and penetrating summation that should give those who accept at face value all they read in the media pause for thought:

Your last message just repeats the same old party line that we have many good reasons to distrust. You complain that people who are sceptical about the party line do not agree about other things. Why should we agree? The whole point of science is to encourage disagreement and keep an open mind. That is why I blame The Independent for seriously misleading your readers. You give them the party line and discourage them from disagreeing.

With all due respect, I say good-bye and express the hope that you will one day join the sceptics. Scepticism is as important for a good journalist as it is for a good scientist.

Freeman Dyson has shown that Steve Connor is a case study in the modern media phenomenon that investigative journalist Nick Davies has apparently labelled ‘churnalism’ – which is when journalists are ‘reduced to passive processors of whatever material comes their way’ (referenced earlier by Ockham’s Razor).  In other words we don’t have journalists rather we have churnalists, mere cut and paste merchants who spew out press releases as news without any attempt at critical examination and questioning of the content.

It is another example of why we cannot trust the modern news media and how the public is ill served by these over rated churnos.

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.

Gaddafi Jr and the London School of Economics

It’s as if the raft of state sponsored terrorist attacks, the murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher and the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie  never happened:

The London School of Economics, one of the top-ranking universities in Europe, on Monday (21 February) acknowledged it had received a gift of €1.78 million from the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation, chaired by Saif al Islam, one of the Libyan dictator’s seven sons and a former graduate.

The university also admitted it had “delivered executive education programmes to Libyan officials”, but said it had now decided to sever all those links “in view of the highly distressing news” about hundreds of protesters killed by armed forces.

“The school intends to continue its work on democratisation in north Africa funded from other sources unrelated to the Libyan authorities,” it said in a statement published on its website.

Only now is the LSE severing links with the Libyan regime, as if the actions of the Gaddafi regime over the last 40 years haven’t given enough clues about its violent and repressive nature.

But then, what else could we expect from such a bastion of left wing radicalism that embraces climate alarmism’s chief media attack poodle Bob Ward as part of its extended team?  No doubt as more people trawl over this obnoxiously pungent relationship between the Gaddafis and the LSE, the college will employ the same kind of diversionary tactics as Ward does when trying to smear someone who tells the inconvenient truth.  Birds of a feather…

Alan Rusbridger – Hypocrite and a coward

It seems people at The Guardian like asking tough questions, but they don’t like answering them.  After using this blog to share details of the sheer hypocrisy of The Guardian for its assault on Barclays – while using exactly the same tax avoidance measures itself to keep money rolling in despite the pisspoor newspaper continuing to make a loss and see its sales fall 7% in the last year – I tweeted this message:

Needless to say, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has not replied, via Twitter or any other medium.  In fact, in trying to see what Rusbridger has to say about Guido’s revelations I noticed I was no longer following his tweets on Twitter.  This was curious as I had not ‘unfollowed him’.  I soon found out why he had dropped off my list… (click to enlarge)

The man is truly fearless.

The Guardian’s rank hypocrisy on tax avoidance

Following two major articles on the ‘front page’ of the Guardian’s website – ‘Barclays bank forced to admit it paid just £113m in corporation tax in 2009’ [link] and ‘How the Guardian was gagged from revealing Barclays tax secrets’ [link] – the 2.74% Guardian has also published an editorial titled ‘Corporate tax avoidance: Impoverishing the public’, which you can read here.

Many may feel angered that Barclays managed to use tax avoidance measures (perfectly legal, as opposed to tax evasion which is not) to pay only £113m Corporation Tax to the UK Exchequer.  But that is the way the system is set up and it is worth remembering that even with such a miniscule effective tax rate on their earnings (a mere 1%) Barclays provides employment for thousands of people and loans to businesses and individuals.  So despite their focus on generating returns for shareholders, Barclays still provides something to the UK.

But the focus of this post is not to condemn Barclays for their actions, plenty of other people will do that perfectly adequately. After all, who in all honesty would not use legal means to reduce their tax liability if they could?  Even the sanctimonious champagne socialists who own the Guardian do the same. The socialist scribes at their little organ, with its 2.74% share of the national newspaper market, churn out stuff like this:

It is a simple equation, and may not be an easy one for Whitehall to implement. But the Guardian’s Tax Gap series meticulously documented squillions of pounds in avoidance, establishing beyond doubt that the seepage of revenue was on a scale that constituted a pressing public concern. Fixing the leaks may not save every last swimming pool, but it could make a big difference. Barclays is an iconic case for making the point, seeing as bankers’ determination to minimise their contribution to public funds is matched by the lavishness of the benefits they have enjoyed at public expense.

but their employer is no better. Let the Tweets of blogger Guido Fawkes explain all (no doubt more on this will follow on his Twitter feed):

Ah, you might say. The Guardian is a newspaper and therefore not being underwritten with the guarantees provided to the banking sector with our money, it does not benefit from public funds.  Wrong.

The Guardian is bolstered by its stranglehold on public sector job adverts for government, local authorities and its incestuous partner at the BBC. It also earns money from its education propaganda tool Learn Premium (more to come on that at a later date), which sold to schools seeks to indoctrinate our school children with leftist texts and media.  Our tax pounds are poured into the Guardian to pay for these ads and tools, so the paper benefits financially at our expense.

Having lavished our tax pounds on this newspaper – just as we have with the banking sector – we find exactly the same corporate tax avoidance games being played.  The Guardian’s hypocrisy on this subject stinks.

• Where does their ‘Tax Gap’ series mention Guardian Media Group’s own behaviour?
• Where are the stories from their own journalists about GMG’s tax avoidance?
• Where is their righteous indignation at the behaviour of their owners?

Alan Rusbridger’s silence and that of his journalists on the Guardian owners’ own behaviour, is deafening.  Hypocrites.