Views

Democracy, Liberty and Sovereignty

I believe in democracy, liberty and sovereignty. We must have freedom and must enjoy privacy from the state. I support the seven principles of a free society:

Individual Freedom
Personal and Family Responsibility
The Rule of Law
Limited Government
Free Market Economy
National Parliamentary Democracy
Strong National Defences

Government must exist to serve the people, not act as their master.  The rapid and disturbing erosion of democracy, liberty and sovereignty we are experiencing must be opposed.  The political class has for years been exporting control of our country to an alien entity, undermining our hard won freedoms, dismantling our justice system, reversing the burden of proof, removing our basic protections from state intrusion and turning all of us into suspects. It must be stopped and the wishes of the people respected. While politicians repeated pledge to tackle these issues and give power back to the people their words are nothing more than deceitful rhetoric and they still refuse to give the British people a say on the most fundamental issue of who governs this country and how.

European Union

I believe in mutually beneficial cooperation and genuine free trade with our friends and neighbours in continental Europe.  But I oppose political union and being trapped in a customs union and want an independent, democratic and fully sovereign UK that makes all of its own laws and controls its own judicial system.  However, it is not for me alone or any political party to decide this.  The British people should be asked to give a democratic mandate for either withdrawing from the political structures of the EU, or remaining full members of it, in a binding national referendum.  I would campaign for withdrawal from the political structures of the EU because membership is extremely costly, restrictive to our global potential in trade and bilateral agreements and fundamentally anti-democratic.

English Parliament

The Constitutional vandalism since 1997 has benefited Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in many ways, while leaving England with a farcical and unacceptable democratic deficit.  I believe in devolving power from the centre but it is utterly wrong, democratically and ethically, that representatives of Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish constituencies in the Westminster Parliament are able to vote on and determine matters affecting only the people of England.  No other democratic nation is without its own legislature or accepts representatives from other countries making its domestic laws.  The only democratic and equitable solution to this Constitutional mess affecting England is the creation of an English Parliament to legislate on English-only matters.  A separate chamber should sit for matters affecting the United Kingdom as a whole.

Criminal Justice

Prison works. Or rather it would work if there were more prisons that allowed the inmate population to be spread more thinly. In overcrowded prisons the rehabilitation of offenders and proper preparation for their return to society simply cannot happen. Opportunities to break the cycle of drug abuse are missed and activities to help offenders lead productive lives away from crime are few and far between. If we want to reduce the prison population this essential work has to take place to prevent repeat offending. Saying that we will simply send fewer criminals to prison and increase the number of community sentences to save money demonstrates that the government does not take its responsibility seriously and has no intention of protecting the public.

Immigration

The UK must be sovereign with complete control over whom is allowed to enter and whom must leave when we so choose. The virtually open door immigration policy of the Labour administration has been incredibly damaging. No thought was given to the impact on our infrastructure and public services and the cost of assisting those who had paid nothing into our system. No thought was put into attracting skilled people to live and work here adding to this country’s competitiveness. Our ability to deport people who have committed crimes against the society that has generously hosted them has been taken from us by a combination of EU diktat and nonsensical judgements from the European Court of Human Rights. This is an unacceptable situation and must be reversed, along with giving people who have overstayed their visa duration or come here illegally ‘leave to remain’. Our immigration rules are perverse and demonstrate our government is incompetent and incapable of obeying the wishes of the people it is supposed to serve.

Climate Change / Global Warming / Global Climatic Disruption

The climate has always changed and always will.  The idea that mankind is warming the planet and will cause a 2c rise in temperature by 2100 through CO2 emissions is a hypothesis, nothing more than a theory.  People who accept that are putting their faith in guesswork and unscientific investigation.  Such claims have been shown, through the “Climategate” leak and other incidents such as “Glaciergate” and “Amazongate”, to be based on: a) suspect computer models that have employed carefully chosen data while excluding any data that would undermine the desired outcome, and b) unscientific claims by pressure groups in obscure publications that have not been based on proper scientific research or peer reviewed.  This manipulation of data and spinning of unfounded claims demonstrate this is not a scientific subject, but a tool to achieve certain political, business and financial objectives.  The influence of the sun and other important and complicated natural climatic variations (that are observed but still not fully understood) are completely ignored in favour of the existing narrative.  The climate change theory is all about the centralising of power in anti-democratic global institutions, redistribution of wealth from the taxpayers of the western world to developing countries and to big business in the form of payments for so called solutions to a problem no one can be sure we have caused or have any control over.

Human Rights Act/Bill of Rights

Believing in liberty and freedom does not mean having to accept perversions of justice that undermine the national interest.  We should not be compelled by human rights legislation to continue hosting those who have broken our laws, who have sought to harm this country or those who present a threat to the well-being of British citizens.  Labour undermined this country by incorporating all the case law of the European Court of Human Rights into the Human Rights Act.  The Human Rights Act should be repealed and like other countries in Europe we should refuse to be bound by any elements of the European Convention on Human Rights that have a negative effect on our national interest.  There should be a British written constitution to prevent politicians exceeding the authority we permit them and judges from being judicial activists writing laws rather than upholding them in court. We must also have a Bill of Rights that enshrine genuine human rights for British citizens while ending the ‘rights contagion’ – the proliferation of entitlements being redesignated wrongly as rights. These changes will require us to redefine our relationship with the EU, which makes them all the more attractive.

Afghanistan

The sorry excuse of a failed state that is Afghanistan was for too long a haven for Islamist terrorists.  Al-Qaeda and other groups related to that umbrella organisation were able to operate terrorist training camps in the country and exported their graduates around Europe, the US and Kashmir to commit violence and murder.  Military action to combat the Taleban, which allowed these camps to flourish, is entirely appropriate.  But propping up the corrupt and duplicitous Karzai government and kidding ourselves we can turn Afghanistan into a democracy is one of the most costly examples of mission creep we have ever seen.  We have seen the needless sacrifice of too many of our servicemen in support of the Karzai regime and the government has failed to commit itself fully to winning the campaign.  Either we develop a clear mission and do everything necessary to complete it, which includes the provision of all necessary equipment and manpower for our armed forces, or we bring them home and use special forces for selective actions in our interest.

(work in progress…)