The Huntsman

Of Animal Husbandry, PIGS and The 'Don't Know' Tories

2010-02-10T14:21:00.010+01:00

Pinky Barroso: So what shall we do tonight, Brain?

Brain von Rumpy-Pumpy: What we do every night, Pinky:

try and set up a Euro Government and

so take over the world!

APOLOGIES FOR THE PARAGRAPH GLITCH: FOR SOME REASON BLOGGER IS PLAYING SILLY BUGGERS WITH THE FORMATTING! > MARKS A PARAGRAPH

> I am in the very heart of the enemy's camp, to wit the European Parliament - or it would be the 'heart' if the entire circus had not gone off on its monthly peregrination to Strasbourg and posting will now come mostly from here. Today the European Council is engaged in some animal husbandry, that is saving the PIGS.

> Saving their own bacon, more like. That which was foretold when the Eurozone was established - with the Euro as a vanity currency designed to give the European Union one veritable and visible sign of its being a Sovereign Independent nation State in its own right - has indeed come to pass. This is that the Euro is not and can never be a 'one size fits all' currency, especially when candidate entrants lie about their economic and fiscal status and even then the rules are bent by the EU Comrades to squeeze countries of doubtful compliance with the rules into the corselet that is the Euro.

> The Euro removes from the members of the Eurozone any sort of genuine economic independence and sovereignty - as it is intended to do - so that soi-disant 'governments' no longer have the flexibility and nimbleness of devaluation and interest rates at their command to manoeuvre their way out of the sort of economic crises that now beset the so-called PIGS nations: Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain (and, one might add, with the probable inclusion in due course, when the market gets round to it, Italy).

> By comparison the UK went through this particular nightmare in 1992 on 'White Wednesday' when the markets assailed our currency and forced the UK from the ERM, thus trashing John Major, Norman lamont and the Tory party's reputation for economic competence in just twenty-four hours.

> Now the same nightmare is being played out for the PIGS. Greece is the current basket case and it is to address its particular torture that the European Council assembles this day in Brussels. Talk is of a bail-out, something which is supposed to be forbidden under the rules of this particular EU fantasy, ie The European Stability and Growth Pact and the Maastricht Treaty.

> Thus Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Daily Telegraph informs us:

> Germany backs Greek bail-out as EU creates 'economic government'
> Germany is preparing to drop its vehement opposition to a rescue package for Greece, fearing that a rapid escalation of the debt crisis in Southern Europe could endanger German banks and damage the euro.

> It may be in the 'rules' that you cannot bail out a country that is imploding financially, but, hey, what are rules when set against the objectives of Le Grand Projet, to wit the creation of a Super State called Europe? In fact the EU Comrades will see in this particularly black cloud and distinctly silver, not to say golden, lining. What better reason, in their eyes, can there be than such a crisis but for the EU to sweep aside national governments' control of their own economies and replace them with, yes, you've guessed it, control of the entire EU economy by the PolitbEURO.

> The Telegraph goes on thus:

> Herman Van Rompuy, the EU's new president, has submitted a text calling for the creation of an "economic government" that shifts responsibility for economic planning from national authorities to the "EU level". In a parallel move, Commission chief Jose Barroso said Brussels has treaty powers allowing it to take the reins of economic management.
> "This is a time for boldness. I believe that our economic and social situation demands a radical shift from the status quo. And the new Lisbon Treaty allows this," he said.
> "Economic policy isn't a national, but a European matter. No modern economy is an island. When a member state doesn't make reforms, others suffer because of that."

> Let it be quite clear then: the EU plans to take away the final rights of government from the member states to manage their own affairs. Just savour the sentence: "Economic policy isn't a national, but a European matter." The threat to the UK's final vestiges of indpendence cannot be clearer. So the plan, whilst the ink is still dry on Lisbon, is to proceed full speed to European Government.

> The Independent too has its own take on this:

> The new President of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, is using the financial crisis sweeping the eurozone to launch an audacious grab for power over national budgets, leaked documents reveal.
> The Independent has seen a secret annexe to the letter being sent by Mr Van Rompuy to European Union heads of government inviting them to the summit to be held tomorrow in Brussels.
> In an early and muscular assertion of authority over national governments and over the EU Commission, the Van Rompuy note states: "Members of the European Council are responsible for the economic strategy in their government. They should do the same at EU level. Whether it is called co-ordination of policies or economic government, only the European Council is capable of delivering and
sustaining a common European strategy for more growth and more jobs."
> [....]
> "An EU source explained:
> "It has become clear to everyone that this economic crisis can't be solved by individual member states, such as Germany helping out Greece. What we need is the same kind of mechanism that we have now imposed on Greece in order to monitor and survey eurozone countries. So the idea is to put all European economies under surveillance. You can expect some important decisions to be taken this week."

> So there you have it. The game, people, is soon to be over and the likes of Brown, Cameron, Sarkozy, Merkel and the priapic Berlusconi, not to mention the Zapteros, the Papandreous, Balkenendes will soon be relieved of any further responsibility for the messes they have or might yet create. They can no longer be trusted not to make a total horlicks of economic management.

> Let the EU technocrats run the show.

> This is all set down for Thursday's summit here in Brussels. Curiously, according to the Indie, this little Cabal is keen to avoid the limelight:

> "The summit will be held away from the usual redoubts of the Euro bureaucracy, in Brussels' Solvay library. "Van Rompuy wanted to create a far more intimate atmosphere without an army of advisers," a source said. "There are a lot of tensions between member states right now, which he is why he decided to get them to talk in an open, friendly setting, starting with aperitifs. The idea is to have a proper brainstorming session and hear everyone's thoughts."

> In other words a secret deal is to be reached stitching up the economic governance over canapés, caviar blinis and champagne, in the time-honoured manner of the erstwhile 'smoke-filled room'. The people of the erstwhile member states (known formerly as 'voters') will not be invited to this particular little gathering, nor, you may be sure, will they ever be asked their opinion of it all for the last referenda ever have already been held. We will simply be presented with the New Order.

> Meanwhile, you could do worse than read Simon Heffer's thoughts on this particular travesty of democracy and EU law-breaking. One way or another it looks as though the people of Greece are being awoken to the fact that their ruling political class has spent the last few years in selling them all into, for the want of a better word, helotry.

> And what, I hear you ask, for ask you should, of our 'elected representatives', our MEPs in the European Parliament, that fig-leaf of democracy for the EUSSR? Where are they whilst all this is going on?

> It is a very good question. It might be thought that they would be close on hand awaiting their turn to say 'yea' or 'nay' to this particular development.

> Er, no.......they are actually all this week in Strasbourg paying court to the vanity of little Nicholas Sarkozy and France, taking part in the one-week-a-month Plenary at the EP's second home, deciding whether, inter alia to approve or disapprove of the new Commission.

> No need, then, for them to be distracted with something like an EU power-grab for economic government of the EU by the EU. They are, after all, not important in the scheme of things. Such matters are best decided, as they say, at a European level, i.e. by a small Camarilla of like-minded politicians keen to arrogate more power to themselves without the intrusive antics of democratically-elected politicians.

> The Commission, surprise, surprise, has been approved. UKIP rightly voted against its approval. The Tories? They abstained. To crown their risible policy on the EU since Cameron about-faced on his "cast-Iron guarantee" to hold a referendum on the EU Constitution, when it comes to deciding if they approve or disapprove of the body that will be promoting new legislation (lots of it) and executing policy (lots of it) in Brussels, they have concluded that they are a party of "Don't Knows".

> Thus is a great party with a history going back three hundred years reduced to irrelevance and impotence by its duplicitious leader: to say they are a joke is simply too kind. This is the party whose leader has told us that he is all in favour of our membership of the EU (in respect of which he has decided that there will not be an IN/OUT referendum on his watch) because membership, in his view, is in the interests of the UK, so there. Yet on a genuinely important issue such as who is to propose 70-80% of the laws that will come into force in the UK, the Tory Party cannot make up its mind.

> If it is contempt for Cameron that you feel on reading this, then that, I suggest, is to be mild and polite. I can think of other epithets for him, but this might be read by those of a sensitive disposition, so I shall forebear from deploying them. Meanwhile 'Old Cast-Iron' has been spraying 'guarantees' like confetti over at the Daily Express:

> "Q What is your position on Britain joining the single currency – we see some of its members, notably Greece, struggling badly at the moment?
> A. Very simple, one word: never. I was in the Treasury when we were in the Exchange Rate mechanism, and I said to myself: “Never again should we give up control of our domestic interest rates.” If I am Prime Minister and for as long as I would be Prime Minister, I would never take Britain into the euro, full stop, end of story.We should never have got ourselves into the financial mess that we are in but at least we have the flexibility of our own currency and our own interest rates."

> The problem with this is Dave's egregious record on little things like promises: he fibs. When he uses the word 'never', it should be taken with a pinch of salt (salt, people, salt).

> One fly in Dave's unguent is our old friend Article 3.4 of the Treaty on European Union which has a rather different view:

> 4. The Union shall establish an economic and monetary union whose currency is the euro.

> Note the word 'shall' here, which to any lawyer explicitly comports the notion of 'obligatory' or 'mandatory'. The time will come when Cameron, who has already shown his yellow-streak over Europe, will simply be told to get on with taking us into the Euro or else. At which point he will assume the position and abolish the pound.

> Finally who is actually doing the job of being an opposition in the European Parliament, now that the Tories have decided that they have no opinion on such things?

> Why, UKIP's Nigel Farage, of course. Whilst the Tory party awaits the call to power, it has shoved Europe not so much on´to the backburner as down in the cellar. Given its leader's own pro-EU proclivities, it is terrified lest the business of Europe spills out into public discussion during an election period (perish the thought) of its own ludicrous EU policies to which he has, unilaterally and without so much as a 'by-your-leave' from his party, committed the Tories. Tories have now become the Basil Fawltys of politics when it comes to the EU: "For God's sake don't mention the EU!".

> So here for your delectation is Nigel doing what he does best, sticking it to the EU in characteristic fashion. But it is not merely giving the EU Comrades a hard time that is the point: ths issue of the EU is far too serious a matter for mere obloquy:

> People of Buckingham take note: you could do a lot worse (such as re-electing Squeaker Bercow) than putting Nigel Farage into the House of Commons to reflect the 2.46 million people who voted UKIP at the European elections last June and at the same time to provide the genuine voice of Euroscepticism which the ruling political class seeks at best to sublimate and at worst to suppress whenever it can. Perhaps then he might become a focus for dissent on Europe (and other matters attractive to those of the right) for the new intake of Tory MPs in May who may find little solace for their own views on such things in the utterances of Cameron, Hague and the rest.

COMMENT THREAD

Our Man In Havana.......is a Bulgarian

2010-01-22T11:47:00.007+01:00

Sir David Scott c. 1945 in full Diplomatic fig.
Nowadays Our Man In Havana is more
likely to be dressed in a rumpled
brown suit made in Sofia or Bratislava

An EU Foreign Minister ('High Representative for Foreign Affairs' in EU DoubleSpeak) only became a legal reality just 53 days ago. First appointee Baroness Ashton of UpMoscow has yet to be confirmed in office. The EU Diplomatic Service ('External Action Service' or 'EAS' in EU DoubleSpeak) likewise is 56 days old: yet already it has opened 50 'EU Embassies' across the world. That was quick, I hear you say.

Er, well, not really...........The EU Comrades were so supremely confident of getting the Treaty of Lisbon signed, sealed and delivered that they had, long before the final ratification by the Czech Republic just ten weeks ago, been spending, utterly unlawfully,Taxpayer's money on setting up both the service itself and having arrangements for Embassies - the ultimate vanity symbols of the EU's new-found statehood - securely in place.

Thus we are told by The Daily Telegraph's Bruno Waterfield:

Embassies in the key capitals of Beijing, Kabul and Addis Ababa, the seat of the African Union, are regarded as marking a major shift to giving the EU a role as a global player to rival nation states.
The embassies will takeover national bilateral missions in the 54 countries where they are set up, headed by ambassadors who are empowered to speak on behalf of the EU as a whole.

We should not, however, be in the least surprised by this news, for it has long been an open secret that the EU was preparing for this moment well in advance.

Two things are vital here.

The first is that we must take very careful note of the importance that the EU Comrades place on the rapid, nay instant, build-up of the physical embodiment of its new-found legal personality as an entity empowered to enter into foreign relations under Article 37 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU):

The Union may conclude agreements with one or more States or international organisations in areas covered by this Chapter.

That is no more and no less than the legal arrogation to itself by the EU of its right to enter into foreign relations in its own right, to which I shall return in a moment.There is also a second reason behind all this haste. It is the impending General Election for the soi-disant UK Parliament, an event which has been troubling the EU Comrades from the very moment that ~~Smuggo~~ Tony Blair graciously told the British People that they would, on this one occasion and as an act of great condescension, be allowed their say on the matter.

Since then both Labour and the Liberal Democrats have junked their commitments to a referendum as quickly as they could, leaving only David Cameron and his 'cast-iron guarantee' as a potential stumbling block.As we now know, Cameron's 'cast-iron' guarantee was also junked as soon as he could decently off-load an embarrassing and unwanted policy: within hours of the Czech ratification all pretence that he wanted us to have our say was abandoned with a huge sigh of relief.

But, pending that shameful and utterly dishonourable act of duplicity, the EU Comrades could never be sure that final ratification of the Treaty would come before a UK general Election and with it a UK Referendum which would kill Lisbon dead for ever - well, for as long as any Zombie is ever dead, that is. They were utterly terrified that the British People would, by the negligence of the Collabos in the Tory Wing of the collaborationist EU Party (Britain's ignoble heirs to the likes of Degrelle, Mussert and Laval), stop Le Grand Projet in its tracks.

Phillipe Pétain & Pierre Laval:

Collaborationists who came to a sticky end

Thus the EU Comrades have been getting their ducks in a row long before they had legal authority to do so. Until 1st. December last they had no right whatsoever to be spending Taxpayer's money on leasing/buying 'Embassy' buildings or on staffing them. Yet here we are but eight weeks into the birth pangs of EUtopia and we have fifty EU Embassies up and running. They had, in fact, been spending hard long before the result was known.

It is, far and away, the most visible sign to the outside that the EU is no longer just any old international organisation but that it is now able to say: "L'Etat, c'est moi!"

And why, you might be forgiven for asking, is that so important? Well, we have been here before. In fact here, here, here and, indeed, here.

Or, to put it another way, why is it, do you think, that so much of the energy of Lisbon is directed at the nuts and bolts of the office of EU Foreign Minister and of the EU's External Action Service?

If one looks at Treaty on European Union (TEU) and The Treaty on The Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) - the product of the road from Rome to Lisbon via Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice - , the changes to the Institutions of the EU are actually not fundamental. But by comparison acres of space are devoted to the EU's 'common foreign and security policy' and its sibling the 'common foreign and defence policy'.

There is good reason for this. The Montevideo Convention on The Rights and Duties of States 1933 sets out the criteria for a state to be, in customary international law, identifiably a sovereign independent state:

Article 1

The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications:

a ) a permanent population;
b ) a defined territory;
c ) government; and
d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.

Of these, (a) and (b) are indisputably satisfied by the EU.

As to (c) Lisbon's adumbration in Article 13 of the TEU of the institutions of the EU is merely a recital of the work done by Maastricht, Nice and Amsterdam. On any rational view those institutions are the institutions of government.

But the final link, the final piece of the jigsaw was missing. Sure, the EU had some foreign relations power pre-Lisbon. But Lisbon was, as a matter of international law, the final, missing piece of that jigsaw in providing that full capacity to enter into foreign relations and the physical capacity to do so (The EAS).

The news in the Telegraph today is simply confirmation of the fact that the EU is de jure and de facto a State in customary international law.

One of the effects of all this is that, as the Telegraph points out, many UK missions are being closed, the Foreign & Commonwelath Office being sutiably relieved at the saving of money thereby occasioned. For this Glrious Moment in the EU's history has arrived at a moment when the member states are faced, in effect, with the Perfect Storm of a major recession and economic crisis. The saving of money by cash-strapped Chancelleries from Dublin to Valetta and from Lisbon to Helsinki is nothing more than a moment of ectasy and opportunity for the EU Comrades.

Thus, when next you lose your passport after a night of salsa and rum on your next run to Cuba, you may well find out that 'Our' man in Havana is..........a Bulgarian.

The fate that awaited Laval was a rather

summary trial and an appointment

with the firing squad...........

FINAL NOTE: On 1st. December 2009 I posted a GrumpyPost suggesting Dan Hannan had not acknowledged my earlier posts on the Montevideo Convention. Indeed I sent him a GrumpyGram email to the same effect. He has now emailed to say that he reached the Montevideo Convention by other means, a proposition I now accept entirely and I thus withdraw any suggestion of larceny.......and hope he will accept this apology, in the spirit that, of course, great minds think alike............

COMMENT THREAD

Where There's Brass, There's Muck

2010-01-01T10:26:00.008+01:00

Rick: How can you close me up?
On what grounds?
Captain Renault:I'm shocked, shocked to find
that gambling is going on in here!
[a croupier hands Renault a pile of money]
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
Captain Renault: [sotto voce]
Oh, thank you very much.
[aloud] Everybody out at once!
[Casablanca (1942)]

Here's another angle on the scam that is Carbon Trading. When debit cards were first introduced in the UK I prosecuted several supermarket checkout girls who had been helping themselves to customer's money using the newly introduced cards. The company security officer witness told me that it took their staff under a week from the moment of introduction to work out how to steal using the cards.

It will, therefore, not come entirely as a surprise to learn that the bad guys have worked out how to subvert the European Emissions Trading Scheme to help themselves to loads and loads of money.

What is even less surprising is that they have chosen to use one of the most prevalent scams that exists in the European Union, the so called 'carousel fraud' scheme (also known as 'Missing Trader Fraud').

Given that carousel fraud is so widespread, you would have thought that the EU would have thought twice before making the trade in carbon emissions credits liable to VAT and that they should have thought to make it subject to a special trading tax.

Those of you who know the EU only too well will thus be unsurprised to discover that, yes, they did indeed decide to make it part of the VAT regime. Doubtless the unelected and unaccountable officials of the Brussels Diktat simply saw the word 'Euros' followed by lots of zeros as being the putative take for the Euro Coffers and wet their pants in their haste to batten onto the vast sums that might be accreted to service Le Grand Projet.

Others plainly saw matters differently. The Daily Telegraph gives us an example:

It is a building site, formerly a derelict car park, in a deprived part of West London, where the neon glow of curry houses and late-night grocery stores could not be further from the wealth and glamour of London's financial markets.
Described as a "consulting" business, this is the address of a UK company that has signed up to trade carbon permits under the European Emissions Trading Scheme in Copenhagen. But there is no trace of its existence on the Companies House database.

At the newsagent next door, nobody has ever even heard of emissions trading – the system where companies buy and sell the right to emit carbon dioxide – and there has not been a building there for many years.

That in many ways encapsulates just how simple it is to defraud this scheme, and, indeed, the EU as a whole. For it forcibly reminds us that the EU Court of Auditors has refused for over a decade to sign off the EU accounts on the grounds, inter alia, of the vast amount of fraud within the system. This is but another exemplar of the egregious nature of the European Union.

What the Telegraph report also suggests quite clearly is that the Scheme is not subject to any sort of even the most cursory of checks:

.............hundreds of UK companies selling anything from hair loss treatments to electronics have mysteriously registered to buy and sell carbon permits in the Scandinavian nation – mostly in the last 18 months.

Many give addresses in the regions such as Yorkshire, Lancashire, Essex and other places not known for their links to the world of finance.

This suggests that ten minutes of an investigator's time and a search engine would rapidly reveal the dodgy nature of some of those entities which are registered to tarde under the scheme. It also suggests that no such checking is undertaken.

We are not, of course talking about small potatoes here. The sums involved are those which would keep a small African country afloat, even one (and there are many) with a rampant kleptocrat as President:

Just a few weeks ago, Europol, the cross-border police force, said that carbon trading fraudsters may have accounted for up to 90% of all market activity in some European countries, with criminals mainly from Britain, France, Spain, Denmark and Holland pocketing an estimated €5bn (£4.5bn).

Just read that figure again: up to 90% of all such trading in some parts of the EU is fraudulent.

Of course one of the attractions of the scheme is that it involves no tangible goods, merely a set of digital impulses in computers which might be bought and sold at the click of a mouse, unlike the typical carousel fraud which often involved, for example, mobile phones which had a least to be shipped around the EU for the scam to work properly.

Belatedly the levying of VAT is to be ended and replaced by some other impot: cue the sound of a very large stable door being closed after a whole herd of shire horses has bolted through it.

Unless and until more stringent checks are introduced, however, the criminals will find other ways to defraud the taxpayers of the United Kingdom of huge sums of money, indeed billions of pounds at a time when Gordon Brown has so beggared us that we need every penny we can get.

So just as we have seen the splendid stripping bare of the financial interests of the great Dr. Rajendri Pachauri by my blog colleague Richard North at EU Referendum, we are now getting a look at the dirty entrails of the schemes which he and his ilk have foisted upon us. Thus we are able to contemplate two very different scams: the cult of Anthropogenic Global Warming and the Cult of Mammon dancing merrily hand in hand on their way along the street to who knows where and to the general acclamation of a lot of very stupid people.

You really could not make it up.

COMMENT THREAD

Titter Ye Not At John Selwyn Gummer

2009-12-30T12:29:00.004+01:00

Gummer once forced his young
daughter, in a shameless
exercise of exploiting his family,
to scarf a beefburger to persuade
us of the safety of British Beef
during the scare about
Creudzfelt Jakobs Disease (CJD).
How nauseating.

John Selwyn Gummer, a used leftover from the Major years still to be found peddling EuroCrap in the House of Commons, has announced his retirement from Parliament. This will bring belated Christmas cheer to all free-born Englishmen for this is a genuine dyed-in-the-wool member of the EuroTaleban. A Champagne day, then. His observations to the East Anglian Daily Times (EADT24) (Hattip: ConHome) concerning his departure are, however, utterly beyond parody:

Bitterly disappointed at the failure of the Copenhagen summit earlier this month, Mr Gummer said he had to choose his priorities for the next few years.

“Copenhagen was a total disaster,” he said. “Telephone conversations with colleagues throughout Europe convinced me that international action is needed if the calamity of climate change is to be avoided.

“My Suffolk Coastal constituency has 74 miles of coastline. That makes me doubly determined to do everything I can to stop a calamity happening.

“I feel passionately about the subject. This is the danger that most faces us and unless something is done, the world will be in real trouble.

“But if I am to concentrate fully on the environment, I cannot devote the time I would wish to my constituency. I fully intended to serve one more term as MP for Suffolk Coastal, but Copenhagen changed all that.

“I sincerely hope and believe that David Cameron will become Prime Minister next year with a large majority. However, if the Conservatives end up with just a small majority in Commons, the pressure will be on all his backbenchers to be full-time MPs, especially in the first year when legislation has to be carried.

“I realised I could not do both jobs well and therefore I have reluctantly told my constituency association that it must look for a new candidate.”

Nothing to do, of course, with his moles for the removal of which he got the Taxpayer to pay.

Reading his little homily, I am moved to enquire: Why do so many politicians think that they have it within their gift to save the world?

I suppose it must have something to do with having people fawn over you for donkey's years. Eventually such constant sycophancy leads its object actually to believe he or she can indeed walk on water.

The balance of the EADT article provides a further large dollop of mephitic manure:

Mr Gummer travelled to Oxfordshire just days before Christmas to consult Mr Cameron about his plans. [I really liked that bit: Elder Statesman seeks advice of young whippersnapper.....oh la!]

European experts on climate change agree that Mr Gummer is uniquely placed (sic!) to play a pivotal role in trying to bring a post-Copenhagen consensus on the issue. And Mr Gummer believes the United Kingdom has a huge advantage in global negotiations.

“We are an important part of the European Union and we have a better way of talking to the United States to ensure that it is prepared to cut emissions,” he said. Mr Gummer believes the new member states of the EU have to be helped by the bigger economies to work towards cutting carbon emissions. [Which is presumably why the Brussels Diktat is forcing Lithuania to junk its nuclear power station and replace the 70% of Lithuania's energy it produces with energy produced by CO2 emitting technology]

“We have to demonstrate to nations such as Slovenia that it is worthwhile - indeed vital - to make the effort,” he said. He believes one of the big tasks ahead is to hold intelligent conversations with members of the public to convince them that every action they take, however small that seems, will make a contribution for the greater good.

Mr Gummer said: “Attitudes change. Take the stand-by buttons on electrical appliances - today's machines use far less energy in stand-by mode than they did even a few years ago.

“In 1998, I held meetings with Coca-Cola about phasing out harmful hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) from their processing plants. The company invested in the technology and has announced that it has achieved this aim.”

As an MP for a rural constituency, Mr Gummer knows communities need the incentive of sustainable transport to enable them to reduce their dependency on cars.

“I would like to see every parish clerk with their own laptop so that they can organise transport,” he said.

“For instance, lists could be made available which would enable car-sharing to become a reality for work and shopping.”

Barking, absolutely barking......

COMMENT THREAD

Lithuania: The EU Bill Falls Due

2009-12-29T17:13:00.004+01:00

Lithuania generates 70% of its domestic
energy at Ignalina Nuclear Plant.
Now it must be closed because of a fiat
from the Brussels Diktat.
Goodby energy security! Goodbye sovereignty!
Goodbye freedom of action! Goodbye public debate!
Goodbye democracy!

Lithuanians were doubtless told in 2003 - as many an aspiring EU member had been before and will be again - that joining the European Union would bring jobs, prosperity, streets paved with gold, fields filled to brimming with milk and honey, peace, Eden and mother's apple pie all rolled into one.

Now, however, the Lithuanians are about to be presented with the bill.

Some seventy per cent of her domestic energy is generated by a Soviet-era Chernobyl-style nuclear power station called Ignalina. As part of the deal struck by the ruling Lithuanian political class in its headlong rush into EU membership the plant was deemed to be a potential disaster in the offing and they therefore agreed to close it.

The world five years on is a very different one, energy-wise, from that in which Lithuanian politicians cheerfully tossed their energy security into the greedy hands of the Brussels Diktat.

Now, however, the EU says it must shut.

For Lithuanians the price is going to be very very painful.

In the first instance the cost of energy is set to rise by an eye-watering 30%. Think of how that will jigger the household budget of your average Lithuanian......

Next is the little problem of energy security. Lithuania was proud and pleased to regain its independence after some sixty years of groaning under the Russian yoke and counted Ignalina as an important manifestation of that independence. Now they are going to be forced to replace its energy with ebergy derived from its hated enemy: Russia. And, since Russia strong-armed Ukraine with an energy cut-off not so long ago, Lithuanians will understand only too well what the loss of energy security will now mean: having to kow-tow to Russian bully boys once more.

Indeed, as the Telegraph reports, they have already had a taste of Russian tactics:

In 2007 Russia shut down an oil pipeline to Lithuania for "technical reasons" in the wake of sale of a Lithuanian oil refinery to a Polish company instead of a Russian firm.

Note the date: membership of the EU did not stop Russia from flexing its muscles. Nor will it now. A 30% hike is probably a politician's figure: chances are it will be a lot more than that in short order.

But what of the wider implications for Lithuania?

The fact is that their politicians betrayed their independence in a fundamental way for a mess of pottage to a group of foreign unelected and unaccountable functionaries. Orders now come from the centre. Why is that any different from the way it used to be in the old Soviet Union?

Now it may well be that this plant is a nightmare waiting to happen. It may well be that it should be shut. But that, given the consequences of shutting it, should surely be the subject of informed public debate amongst the citizens of Lithuania whose bills are now set to rise so dramatically. Surely those who have to pay the bill should be the ones to decide how best to solve the problem?

But no such debate can now take place. It is set in stone and must close. Democracy? Let the Little People talk and then do as they are told. They should be grateful they were allowed in so quickly. The plant begins to close in the next couple of days.

Thus it ever is with the Brussels Diktat. It is the Big State writ large. Mummy knows best, so shut your plant and get your wallet out.

COMMENT THREAD

Smuggo: A Prophet Without Honour

2009-12-21T12:46:00.006+01:00

Whatsoever a man soweth,
that shall he also reap

It is devoutly to be hoped that history will be profoundly unkind to Anthony Blair. No man has had a more malign effect, by a very long chalk, on British politics and the British body politic than this charlatan of a snake oil salesman. His words of hurt indignation at the galling disdain of his fellow countrymen reported this weekend will have brought pleasure to many.

He no longer stops the traffic here and may never do so again unless it be in the back of the Black Maria on the way to the Bailey for his trial. Of this fact he complains to The Sunday Times:

He’s all but given up trying to convince people in Britain he means well. “I’ve got a problem with the UK media. They don’t approach me in an objective way,” he says. “Their first question is how to belittle what I’m doing, knock it down, write something bad about it. It’s not right. It’s not journalism. They don’t get me and they’ve got a score to settle with me. But they are not going to settle it.”
He gets a better hearing abroad these days, which is one of the main reasons he spends so much time overseas. “It’s not true that nobody likes me! Reading the papers in Britain, you’d end up thinking I’d lost three elections rather than won them. There is a completely different atmosphere around me outside the country. People accept the work that you are doing, as it is. They don’t see anything wrong with being successful financially and also doing good work. If I did what these people who criticise me here wanted, I’d end up sitting in a corner, but that is never going to be me.”

Aw, Diddums! Here is the authentic voice of the man who has been found out for what he is.

Some of us, of course, never fell for Blair or Blarism, or the clever addition of the word 'New' to Labour. New Labour was merely Old Labour wearing an expensive Armani suit. That we know for sure given the way in which Old Labour has re-emerged under Gordon Brown: they never went away, you know.

Others, notably the gullible middle classes (who had lost their collective folk memory of how Labour governments always end up by trashing the UK economy and always end up siphoning off the resources to prop them up from the pockets of that self-same middle class) fell for Blair in a big way.

The Tories too fell under his spell, indeed to some extent the Old Sorcerer is still wielding his wand over them, though these days it is mostly by proxy through the Sorcerer's Apprentice, one Lord Mandelson. That any Tory leader should think of himself, even vaguely, as 'the heir' to Blair is shocking but now that we know a lot more about David Cameron, perhaps unsurprising. Perhaps too such admiration is reflected in the hesitation many true Tories feel in embracing Cameron.

It was the Ecclestone affair which should have alerted the swooning masses as to the true nature of the little crook they had actually installed as Prime Minister.

Labour had pledged to ban tobacco advertizing in its manifesto for the 1997 General Election, supporting a proposed EU Directive banning tobacco advertising and sponsorship.

At this time all leading Formula One Teams carried significant branding and loot from Big Tobacco.

The Labour Party's stance on banning tobacco advertising was reinforced following the election by tough statements from the Health Secretary Frank Dobson and Minister for Public Health Tessa Jowell (wife of convicted businessman David Mills who was corruptly bribed to perjure himself by Silvio Berlusconi who is, in turn, one of Blair's best friends).

With some serious money at stake, Ecclestone appealed 'over Jowell's head' to Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's chief of staff, who arranged a meeting with Blair. Ecclestone and Mosley, both Labour Party donors, met Blair on 16 October 1997, where Mosley argued:

"Motor racing was a world class industry which put Britain at the hi-tech edge. Deprived of tobacco money, Formula One would move abroad at the loss of 50,000 jobs, 150,000 part-time jobs and £900 million of exports."

On 4 November 1997 the "fiercely anti-tobacco Jowell" argued in Brussels for an exemption for Formula One. It was a shameful and disgraceful turn-about.

One might point out that tobacco sponsorship of F1 is now long gone. F1 is still here, as storng as ever. It reminds us in microcosm of the big lie that is put about by Europhiles about the Uk losing jobs if we we ever managed to extract ourselves from that appalling institution.

Media attention initially focused on Labour bending its principles for a "glamour sport" and on the "false trail" of Jowell's husband's links to Benetton. But then the newshounds caught the scent.

On 6 November correspondents from three newspapers inquired whether Labour had received any donations from Ecclestone.

Lo & behold, he had donated £1 million in January 1997. He had read the writing on the wall for tobacco sponsorship of sport and was quick off the mark to ensure he had an ear to bend in new Labour.

On 11th. November Labour promised to return the money on the advice of Sir Patrick Neill. On 17 November Blair apologised for his government's mishandling of the affair and stated "the decision to exempt Formula One from tobacco sponsorship was taken two weeks later. It was in response to fears that Britain might lose the industry overseas to Asian countries who were bidding for it."

In 2008, the year after Blair stepped down as Prime Minister, internal Downing Street memos revealed that in fact the decision had been made at the time of the meeting, and not two weeks later as Blair stated in Parliament.

Thus was exposed the fact that from the word 'Go!' Blair was wont, whenever the mood took him, to lie through his back teeth. Astonishingly the media and the public allowed him to get away with this piece of knavery and this huckster remained in office until 2007. We now know that Blair awoke every morning with a lie on his lips and delivered himself of untruths morning noon and night.

Now, of course, after the grave matter of taking the nation to war with Iraq on a false prospectus, after 'cash for peerages', after his debauching of Cabinet government, after his poisoning (along with Alistair Campbell, the most controversial Propaganda Chief since April 1945) of the well of political discourse in the UK, after gifting us Gordon brown, the once-deluded public knows better, a lot lot better, the true nature of this veritable mountebank.

I advocate a careful read of the Sunday Times piece. It lays bare so much of the man and how he has proved to have been a deeply malignant cancer at the heart of british public life.

There is one particulalry telling quote. Had Alistair Campbell been at his side, he might have been prevented from informing us:

I’m a social entrepreneur now,” he says defiantly. “I can engineer social change on my own terms, outside of a big government bureaucracy.”

Social engineer? Who, pray, anywhere in the world, let alone in the UK, has given Blair a democratic mandate to indulge in some social engineering?

This is, of course, the true nature of the man. He has never cared for the accountability thingy and is now able to indulge his meddling without interference from anything so obstructive as an electorate. Here then is the anti-democrat at work.

In theory the Chilcot enquiry ought to put this shyster firmly beyond the pale for ever and a day. Sadly that enquiry lacks the teeth of any proper cross-examination. I had been looking forward to Blair being turned over good and proper but instead he is to be interviewed by an establishment club. They might just as well have poured the whitewash over it all now and saved us the money.

Still, we may have the odd bit of pleasure from this process. The fact that Blair knows that he is now a prophet without honour in his own land and that it rankles is something which brings a warm glow.

COMMENT THREAD

eBorders Leak Through EU Sieve

2009-12-18T09:34:00.004+01:00

The UK Borders Agency loves this sort
of picture as bolstering its image
as the tough guy on the block
rousting illegals. The reality is that
UK Borders are about as
secure as Tiger Woods' zipper

The Treaty on the Functioning of The European Union (TFEU) may not be Joe Public's bedside reading - like all Eurospeak documents it is not exactly accessible to ordinary folk - but time and again it comes back to kick the interests of the British People in the teeth. Now it has carefully trashed the heart of Labour's much vaunted eBorders scheme, effectuvely neutering it.

The theory of eBorders is that anyone who wants to come into the UK will, regardless of citizenship, place of residence or whatever, have to provide copious information to the UK authorities before travelling to he UK or face refusal of entry thereto.

Such things as your credit card details or how you paid for your ticket, passport details, travel plans, indeed pretty well anything relating to your journey that you might hitherto have regarded as strictly private would now have to be handed to the UK Border Agency who would store the same in some huge database - and we know, do we not, just how wonderfully secure that would be, do we not!

Given the sheer size of the number of visitors each year to the UK, it is self-evident that such a scheme is going to cost us lots and lots of money.

Unfortunately for the STASI-state in which we now live, this Orwellian desire to track everyone's movement (why don't they just microchip us and have done with it?) has just run onto the rocks of, apparently, our old friend The Treaty of Rome in its latest transmogrification, The TFEU, or rather Article 45 thereof.

This is one of the keystone provisions of the EU without which the whole idea of the single market would very rapidly collapse: the guarantee of free movement of people for the purpose of employment.

Thus the Daily Maily reports to us:

Labour's £1.2billion 'electronic borders' scheme to protect Britain from illegal immigrants and terrorists descended into a shambles last night.
The project's success depends on logging every passenger movement in and out of the UK so police, border guards and the security service know who is here.
But, in order for the scheme to be ruled legal by EU bureaucrats, the Government has been forced to make a raft of concessions to Brussels.
These include EU citizens and their relatives - regardless of nationality - being allowed to enter the UK even if they refuse to hand over their personal details in advance.
Effectively, the crucial compulsory element of the eborders scheme has been stripped away for millions of people.
Even non-EU citizens will be entitled to fly to Britain without providing the details in advance to eborders so they could be scrutinised. They could, however, then be refused entry.
There is also a promise that carriers - such as airlines - will not face sanctions if they do not pass on passenger data.
It leaves a potentially gaping hole at the heart of a flagship policy which was supposed to make borders secure.
The fiasco emerged on a day of drama for the Home Office, which had been insisting all was going to plan with the hugely expensive project.
The scheme involved forcing passengers to give a raft of details before making any journey via UK ports and airports so these could be shared among police and customs officials.
The data included credit card details, holiday contact numbers, travel plans, email addresses and even any previous missed flights.
They were then supposed to be checked against lists of terrorists, criminals and immigration offenders. Those who failed the checks would have been refused permission to fly.
But in a report shown to the Home Office yesterday, MPs on Westminster's home affairs committee said the policy was likely to be struck down by EU law.
EU countries must allow free movement of each others' citizens as long as they hold a passport - a right which demanding advance travel information would infringe.

Whoops!

It does not take much imagination to realise that any would-be terrorist has merely to lay hands on some documents purporting to show he is an EU citizen and, under this regime, he's in.

In short the whole programme is useless.

Now it might be thought desirable to have a scheme which did permit us to check anyone coming here in the manner envisaged. Just a moment's thought will remind us, however, that the determined terorrist, if he really wants to come here uannounced, can pretty well so so with impunity. We are, let us remember, an island with several hundreds of miles of coastline. So the whole idea is rubbish anyway. Far better instead of trying the scatter-gun approach to spend the money thus wasted on some rather more effective intelligence-led processes.

So all the eBorders scheme will do is to create an enormous database much of which is likely to be inaccurate in any event and which will open up yet new sources of identity insecurity as these same details are left collecting and mouldering electronically in the computer databases of airlines, Eurostar and ferry lines.

Al-Quaeda operatives meanwhile will simply buy a yacht and sail here.

There is a cheerful irony here.

It has dawned on the British People that the three Collaborationist parties have effectively blagged the sovereignty of the United Kingdom (which, as any fule kno, belongs to that selfsame People) and hocked it to a load of unelected and unaccountable foreigners.

Those parties - Labour, Tory and Lib 'Dems' - have worked this out and thus find other sticks with which to beat the Euro drum.

One example of this has been the Lib 'Dems' who managed to come fourth in the elections to the EU parliament such is the national enthusiasm for their 'sell your granny to the EU' approach. Realising that their serial acts of Federasty go down with all the hydrodynamic qualities of a one pound lead ball in a pond, they have of late resorted to claiming that we 'need' the EU because it 'ensures' co-operation in the fight against international terrorism and international organised crime.

That particular piece of rubbish now lies in the skip. Far from ensuring our security, our membership of the EU is actively undermining our (admittedly feeble) attempts to protect our borders.

Again.

More money we do not have is simply pissed down the drain.

Again.

COMMENT THREAD

Comrade Ashton of UpMoscow Speaks

2009-12-17T01:09:00.007+01:00

Herman: Und zo, Mein Liebling Cathy,
vot shall vee do tonight?
Cathy: What we do every night....
you rumpy whilst I pumpy and
when you're done, we take over the world!

Baroness Ashton of UpMoscow, lately the doxy of one Duncan Rees, erstwhile General-Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, has relieved herself over the leader pages of The Times of her first pensées as the Andrei Gromyko of the EU. They are, for someone who has risen, as they say, without trace, predictably anodyne.

Her offering may have all the attraction of a bowl-full of brussels sprouts but I fear that I cannot allow this momentous occasion - the arrival on the scene of a new star in our Great European Sky - this Castlereagh, this Salisbury, this Curzon, this Eden, this Bevin, - to pass without succumbing to the temptation to stick the boot in.

Thus this Colossus of British Political Life,tells us:

The reputation of the EU in the world is a good one, based on our strong values of freedom and democracy

Er, that is the EU which has such respect for democratic values that it either ignores or requires to be reversed any Referendum the result of which is 'NO' to their project, isn't it?

We are also a superpower economy made up of half a billion people.

And we would like to be a superpower. But we won't ask the half billion people if they want us to be one as they might not get the right answer.

All the charisma of a
dead haddock:
Baroness Ashton of UpMoscow
arrogates to herself the right to
speak for 500 million citizens of
the EU, not one of whom has ever
been asked to vote for her.

After all, I am the Chosen One, The Select of 27 heads of government, a deal done at a sumptuous dinner. That is democratic enough, isn't it? Saves on the ballot boxes, doesn't it?

What we also need is concerted action to achieve our goals.

And if that squirt Miliband sticks his oar in, I'll kick him where it hurts and tell him where to stick his banana.

The European External Action Service will be based in Brussels, with representations throughout the world. It should be a network that is the pride of Europe and the envy of the rest of the world, with the most talented people from all member states of the EU working in our common interest.

The Diplomatic Services of the Member States will be stripped of anyone who is any good at this diplomacy thingy: after all, now we are a super-state, these provinces do not need diplomats, do they?

European foreign and security policy is relevant to European citizens, even if the work is by its nature often happening outside our borders. So we must continue to have an open and serious debate within the EU on our foreign policy goals.

Open & serious debate? In The EU? Oh please..........

Throughout my career, I have tried to make actions speak louder than words

Such as going on lots of demos at Aldermarston and Greenham Common with a view to undermining the security of the United Kingdom and giving aid & comfort to my pals in Moscow.

I also have a strong record on equality, civil liberty and social justice as a UK minister

I am so sad that I was never given the chance to receive the approbation and acclamation of the erstwhile citizens of the former United Kingdom by seeking election to that public office. Getting Tony to grease the pole for me was a whole lot easier.

Er, that's all folks.

COMMENT THREAD

The BBC Used to Believe in Global Cooling

2009-12-15T12:05:00.004+01:00

The BBC was once just as fiercely
a proponent of global cooling as
it is today a proponent of
global warming.

As I listen yet again to the Government Propaganda Service (aka The BBC) allowing an Anthropogenic Globing Warming fanatic oodles of unfettered and unchallenged airtime asserting that he is right and we are wrong, I was reminded of another time when the BBC was just as determined to persuade us that we were on the cusp of a new Ice Age.

A while ago I suddenly remembered that sometime around the early 70s the BBC had as its 'Book at Bedtime' a scary novel which it put out under the title "Fratellini's Winter" to which I listened with some fascination.

I have since been trying to find out more about the book, but no search produced such a title. A little creative googling has now unlocked the mystery. This revealed that it was actually culled from a novel by Sam Youd called "The World In Winter". One can see why they might have changed it....

Anyway this is the opening premise:

The story involves a new ice age hitting Europe, British refugees fleeing to Nigeria, and what a later group find when they return.

As the story opens, Andrew Leedon, a London-based television documentary producer, is given a new story to research: an Italian scientist, Fratellini, has proposed an imminent fall in solar radiation for the forthcoming few years which may lead to harsher winters. Leedon meets with David Cartwell, a Home Office civil servant and useful source, to see if he can find out more. Cartwell quickly becomes a close friend of Leedon, but also begins an affair with Leedon's wife, Carol.

The winter of that year is, as predicted, long and harsh, but by January is it becoming clear to insiders that the solar downturn is worse than Fratellini had calculated and no upturn is in sight. By March, food stocks are becoming dangerously low, rationing has been imposed and the Government imposes martial law. Those in the know, including Andrew's estranged wife, sell up and move south to the tropics and countries such as Nigeria. Leedon stays behind, as inner London is finally cordoned off from the rest of the UK to protect the seat of power – an area called the London Pale – as the rest of the country is abandoned to starvation and barbarism.

Finally Leedon is persuaded both by Carol and by David Cartwell to exit the country while safe passage is still possible. Taking with him Carwell's wife Madeleine, he moves to Lagos in Nigeria, finding that the tables have now turned – white refugees fleeing from the ice-bound northern countries are living in slums, unemployed or with only menial jobs, and penniless, as African governments have withdrawn recognition of currencies such as Sterling and no longer recognize the British Government, with reason, as it no longer exercises sovereignty over its own land.

You can just see there why it would have appealed to the pit of Marxist Vipers that is the BBC. They must have loved the idea of the destruction of the UK and all us white folks become the menial servants of Africa - a nice little morality tale.....

Yet it was for another reason that it stuck in my mind as I recall that when the reading ended there was a discussion programme at the end of it which went on about global cooling and then moved seamlessly into 'of course this could all happen if nuclear war were to occur and we have a nuclear winter', thus allowing an easy excuse for them to enagage in a bit of CND propaganda. I wonder if Baroness Ashton of UpMoscow was listening.......

The reason I remember all that is because it was the first time that I realised that the BBC was not in the least bit impartial but was in fact a leftist-inclined institution that had an agenda. Nothing has changed over the years. I had until them been persuaded by the myth that the BBC was the purveyor of impartial facts and balanced opinions. In short I had my penny dropping moment.

Since the next Ice Age seemed to have stalled, the BBC has swopped horses, as we know. Yet the purpose is the same: climate is a cudgel with which to beat those nasty wicked plutocrats who stand in the way of kind, compassionate liberals as they go about their business of making this world into a delightful, peaceful, if warm, land of socialist milk & honey.

COMMENT THREAD

Between The Devil & The Deep Pinky-Blue Sea

2009-12-14T12:29:00.005+01:00

The Collaborationist policies of
Cameron - a seriously lightweight
PR spiv - and Hague - surely one
of the most over-rated politicians of our
age - present UKIP voters with
a desperate & distressing dilemma:
Vote UKIP and get more of
The Brown Terror.

The current dip in the Conservative Party's poll ratings have brought on considerable jitters in its ranks. Labour has seized on it as evidence that the game is still on and all is to play for. But it has also sharpened the nature of the personal decision that some voters will have to make about their vote come the General Election.

The problem that faces the many people who voted UKIP in June 2009 - 2.5 million of them - and put it into second place at the Euro elections is a frankly appalling, not to say distressing, one.

Does one vote for UKIP again as the party with the best policy on the EU and risk another bout of Gordon Brown socialism or vote Tory to get Brown out but face having Cameron claim one's vote as support for his EU policy - a policy which is not simply risible but deeply subversive of the UK's sovereignty and independence?

Many will, one suspects, swallow their understandable and considerable distaste for Cameron and his party's Collaborationist policies and 'lend' their votes to him just to see the back - and perhaps the humiliation - of Gordon Brown. But then to have Cameron claim it as vindication of his EU policies would stick in many craws.

Perhaps we should ask the people of Great Yarmouth where a solid UKIP vote might deny the Tories a win against a non-incumbent Labour candidate. What has the Labour Party and the EU ever done for Great Yarmouth beyond destroying a fishing industry with a thousand years of history?

Personally I may not face the dilemma. Phillip Hollobone here in Kettering is a member of the 'Better Off Out' campaign and may well thus avoid a UKIP candidature. But I would still find it impossible to vote for him and risk that vote being trumpeted as vindication of Cameron's EU stance - a stance that I regard as both deeply flawed and incapable of delivery.

And claim it he will. He does not have the skill, I judge, or the personal courage to acknowledge gracefully the loan of UKIP votes and to acknowledge the principled and deeply-held views many hold. Instead he will be unable to resist abusing UKIP in the campaign and he will crow and crow hard if he wins. It is that that I cannot abide.

COMMENT THREAD

Cowardly Gordon Brown Plays 'War Hero'

2009-12-14T10:48:00.004+01:00

Churchill at the Rhine 1945:
The BBC's latest nauseating attempt
to puff Gordon Brown as a war hero
falls far short of the mark

Our Prime Minister may be many things but courageous is most certainly not one of them. Exigencies of space militate against a lengthy adumbration of examples of his gutlessness but his bottling of a mandate-seeking General Election two years ago will come to most minds. Nor does one need to indulge in a litany of his other egregious character flaws to remind us that this Prime Minister is quite the most unpleasant individual to occupy Number 10 Downing Street in several lifetimes.

So, with an election looming, the Spinners are at it puffing him as hard as they can. Thus he nipped off to Afghaninstan to pose amongst soldiers in the hope that some of their bravery might somehow rub off on him. This, of course, was the Prime Minister who evokes such revulsion in military men that when he went recently to the Selly Oak Hospital wounded soldiers snubbed him by closing off their curtains and refusing to speak to him. The spin put out on this latest trip is doubtless in reaction to that highly negative state of affairs.

Brown was surely miffed that the wounded men seemed unable to recognise him as the saviour of the world for his spinners made sure the world, mostly through the medium of the Labour Party's Propaganda Arm, the BBC, knew that he had stayed overnight 'in theatre' and that this was the first time, as they coyly put it, 'since The Second World War' that a British PM had done so.

No need, in that case, for anyone to mention Winston Churchill to invite favourable comparison with that great man.

Unlike Brown, concerning whom words fail me, Churchill was the real deal. He was only dissuaded from going to Normandy on D-Day when King George VI strong-armed him into staying at home. He had, of course, seen action aplenty on the NW Frontier, The Sudan, South Africa (as a soldier) and Cuba as a war correspondent.

The last occasion a PM stayed overnight in theatre to which reference was being made was, I think, March 1945 when Churchill and Sir Alan Brooke visited Montgomery at The Rhine. Churchill clambered on a bridge across the river which was close to enemy snipers and within three hundred yards of which engineers were working under artillery fire. Brooke noted in his diary that Churchill, when encouraged to come away, grasped an upright girder in a hug and "looked over his shoulder......with pouting mouth and angry eyes!" .

Brown's attempt to be compared with Churchill simply emphasises the grubby nature of the man and his utter shamelessness as a spin merchant. And the BBC as usual plays its own partial part in support of the party it loves so much.

COMMENT THREAD

Mr. Speaker: A Politically Corrupt Little Shyster

2009-12-13T09:56:00.006+01:00

The kind of constitutent Mr. Speaker
would prefer: a dumb ape who will
vote for anyone who will
give it a banana

Nothing so points up the rank corruption of our present ruling political class than the news in today's Mail on Sunday that Mr. Speaker Bercow so fears the judgement of his fellow citizens that he wishes to remove himself from the risk that such judgement might be unfavourable.

In what would, beyond a peradventure, the most brazen act of gerrymandering in modern times and mark the return to the age of the Rotten Borough, Mr. Speaker bercow has proposed the creation of a new Parliamentary seat just for the Speaker:

Speaker John Bercow wants to switch to a new seat with only MPs as his ‘constituents’ so he can avoid a humiliating defeat by former UKIP leader Nigel Farage at the nextGeneral Election.
It would mean abandoning his Buckingham seat for the newly created one called St Stephen’s – the name of the old House of Commons chapel – where, effectively, it would be impossible to challenge him.
He put forward the idea amid speculation that he may struggle to defeat Mr Farage, who stepped down as UKIP leader to take on Mr Bercow in defiance of the custom where the Commons Speaker is not challenged by the main parties.
If the tradition ended, said Mr Bercow, it could be hard for any Speaker to survive for more than one parliamentary term.
Mr Bercow suggested giving the Speaker ‘a separate constituency, known as St Stephen’s, representing a small area around Westminster’.
The Speaker’s original constituency would hold a normal election and choose a new MP, he explained.
‘The Commons can always decide to do that if it wants,’ he told Total Politics magazine. If MPs supported such an idea, he would not oppose it. Ordinary members of the public would not be allowed to be ‘constituents’ of the Speaker’s St Stephen’s seat.
Any Election challenge would have to be made on an individual – not a party – basis, making it harder to unseat the Speaker.
Mr Bercow said: ‘It is both possible and necessary for the Speaker to continue to be a highly active constituency MP.
I suspect I won’t face major party competition – but I will face opponents.’

As to the last point: you bet he will face opposition.

Clearly the vibes from Buckingham are not very good as the good burghers of that fair town contemplate the prospect of re-electing this grubby little creep to be their MP. Bercow's conduct in relation to expenses has shown him, some may think, to be a serial trougher. He managed to be elected to the Office of Speaker only by courting the votes of Labour and Lib 'Dem' MPs, Tory MPs voting almost exclusively for anyone but Bercow. As soon as he got into the Speaker's Chair he started spending public money like confetti. And his 'reforms' have been decidedly 'New Labour', trashing every tradition he can, reducing the great office of Speaker to that of a drab little functionary.

This is before one contemplates his wife who wishes to compromise in an obvious way the necessary convention that Mr. Speaker is and is seen to be totally non-partisan by standing as a candidate for the Labour party in local and Parliamentary elections. That is quite apart from her admissions to having spent a fair chunk of her twenties as a drunken slut.

We should remember that in certain circumstances Mr. Speaker can have a decisive vote in House of Commons business: as recently as 1990 the Deputy Speaker had occasion to vote decisively in a division of The House. That means he must be made subject to the accountability of his fellow citizens, not to a tiny little electorate of the 'Chumocracy'.

This is an utterly undemocratic proposal designed to save the rotten career of a second-rate politician from the verdict of his fellow citizens. It should - must - be opposed with every breath in our bodies.

COMMENT THREAD

The EU's Repo Man Cometh

2009-12-11T09:34:00.007+01:00

From the world stage to..........

Super chump told to sit
outside in the corridor

There you were, bombing along in the fast lane. Chauffered about in your limo, your police outriders stop the traffic for you at every junction with strident whistle-blasts. The world's most powerful woman hangs on your every word as you bill and coo in her ear. Then one morning you come downstairs and the limo has gone. Bang: The EU's Repo Man has been.

Such is the fate of Miliband Major and, indeed, every other democratically elected Foreign Minister in the EU. As Adam Boulton reports to us:

But the embarrassment continues.
David Miliband has become a fixture by Gordon Brown's side at EU summits.
But yesterday, to the surprise of his own officials, he told MPs that he had been banned from coming to Belgium today.
And so it transpires.
Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, who is the last national leader to chair a summit before Van Rompuy takes over for good, has told national foreign ministers that they are no longer welcome becaue High Representative Ashton will represent them all when leaders gather.
This has not gone down well with the national leaders gathering here and tonight at their dinner they will discuss whether or not they should be allowed to bring their own foreign ministers in future

This should, however, have come as no surprise to the man who almost single-handedly railroaded the Lisbon Treaty through its ratification into UK law without the consent of the British People. Had he bothered to read the document with any assiduity he would have realised that in the European Union of Soviet Socialist Republics there is no place for rivals to the centre. Thus Article 15 of the Treaty on European Union makes it plain that in the European Council (the meetings of Heads of Government) the business of foreign affairs will be dealt with by The High Representative:

Article 15.2

2. The European Council shall consist of the Heads of State or Government of the Member States, together with its President and the President of the Commission. The High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy shall take part in its work.

No mention there of the Foreign Ministers of the Member States, is there? And notice, if you will, that word "shall": that to a lawyer signifies a mandatory state of affairs, so one is driven to conclude that it is specifically and definitively exclusive of mere Foreign Secretaries.

One wonders if this little squirt of a politician is now quite so pleased that he recommended the Lisbon Treaty quite so fervently to The House of Commons as being so very much in the interests of the UK. One is also enormously pleased at the surprise of his officials. Oh to have been a fly on the wall when they had to go and tell him the bad news.....!

The delicious result is that a major stage upon which this second-rater was wont to strut is now removed. Gone is one of the major props to boost his image for a possible challenge for the Labour Leadership in 2010.

One wonders at the stupidity of such as he. What did he think the EU Comrades meant by a 'common foreign and security policy'? It takes no great thought to realise that such a policy can only be articulated by a single individual. And he, of course, eschewed the chance to be parachuted into this post, leaving the field clear for Baroness Ashton of UpMoscow.

Thus we are now forcibly reminded of the transfer of authority in the EUSSR from the hands of democratically elected politicians (such as Miliband) into the hands of an unelected and unaccountable clique of Euro Apparatchiks.

The Heads of Government are not pleased. But if they cut up rough about Ashton being the exclusive voice of Foreign Affairs and insist on the Milibands of this world coming along, then her authority is immediately diminished. If she remains the sole voice, a major element of democratic accountability is immediately trashed and the sense of consolidation of the EU supra-state palpable.

Thus does Miliband Major go in one short, swift, sweet move from exchanging sweet nothings with Hilary Clinton to being the stupid twerp holding the banana.

COMMENT THREAD

Where are The Reds now?

2009-12-07T11:18:00.006+01:00

Do you ever wonder what happened to that
posh toff public schoolboy (Loretto)
from the 1970s?

Yes, former scion of the Trotskyite
International Marxist Group,
Alistair Darling,
is now in charge of
fucking up the UK's
economy

Have you ever given thought to what all those homegrown Commie bastards did after their dreamworld was trashed? To quote Sinn Fein-IRA's Gerry Adams, "they haven't gone away you know".

No indeed.

Courtesy of the Daily Mail, we now know that Baroness Ashton, EU Comrade and putative EU Foreign Minister, spent the latter three years of the 1970s being porked by one Duncan Rees, then General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain - think of him as the would-be Leonid Brezhnev of a People's Soviet Socialist Republic of Britain - and general secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) from 1975 to 1979 and its national organiser from 1981 to 1985.

He talent-spotted her for the cause and got her slotted in as National Treasurer of CND in the early 1980s when it was at the forefront of trying to undermine Britain's will to defend itself. From there she went on to greater things such as being chairwoman of the Hertfordshire Health Authority.

And Duncan Rees? Alas, to the regret of so many on the Liberal-Left, the CPGB is no more, swept away into the building-skip of history.

But here's an interesting thing (The Mail again):

Today, Mr Rees is Welsh regional organiser of the Co-operative Group and last year was chairman of the Wales Fair Trade Forum.
Mr Rees says he no longer belongs to any political party but is still a member of CND.
Yesterday, he was acting as a steward at the climate change protest in London.

A classic example of how our enemies reckon there is always more than one way to skin a cat.

Meanwhile we learn another interesting but unsuprisng fact about Baroness Ashton from the Grauniad:

"When Geoffrey Van Orden, the veteran Tory MEP, suggested she should resign when Cameron won the general election, Ashton offered to let him listen to the supportive voicemail from Cameron after she won the post a fortnight ago at an EU summit.

"Your leader was one of the first to congratulate me. I was extremely pleased he welcomed me so warmly," she said.

I daresay some members of the Tory party would be really really thrilled to hear Dave billing and cooing down the telephone of La Ashton.

It tells you quite a lot about the Ruling Political Class in Britain, does it not? If it had been me I should have dropped her a postcard suggesting she not get too comfortable in her Brussels Palazzo as the UK government would soon be vigourously pressing for her removal.

Not Dave. He instead, as one member of the club to another, punctiliously remembered to congratulate her. Warmly. Nothing like doing a bit of sucking up, is there? After all Dave might find himself doing a bit of selling-out of the UK interest to her in time, so best not to make things awkward before you start, don't you know?

Isn't the world a funny place? And does it not cease to amaze how what goes around comes around in this life?

COMMENT THREAD

Lisbon's Bills Fall Due

2009-12-07T09:39:00.007+01:00

Angela: What are we going to
do tonight, Nicolas?
Nicolas: What we do every night.......think
up ways to make the perfidious
Anglo-Saxons pay for everything!

With the ink on the Czech Republic's Instrument of Ratification of the EU Constitution still wet, the EU Comrades continue to move with considerable, if unsurprising haste, to consolidate their seizure of power from the member states. First Nicolas Sarkozy's personal attack dog, Michel Barnier, was installed as EU Commissioner in charge of the single market. Now a French Poodle has picked up the Agriculture Brief.

The former protests that he for one is nobody's poodle:

The Frenchman who has emerged as Britain’s favourite bogeyman is bewildered by the fury in London over his appointment as the European Union’s single market commissioner.

“There’s absolutely no sense in it,” said Michel Barnier, referring to British suspicions that his appointment is part of a plot by Paris to usurp London’s role as finance capital of Europe.

“I’ll be acting in the European interest,” he told The Sunday Times. “I will be an independent commissioner. I will work with everyone — for the European interest, not for any one group.”

That, of course, is precisely the problem. Europe's interest may well be very different from that of the United Kingdom's. We derive a huge proportion of our GDP from the City and the financial sector. Others may see divvying up some of that particular cake as being in 'Europe's' interest. As an inherently Socialist racket, the EU Comrades that run the show would love to do a bit of 'spreading the wealth about'. Now those hostile to British success in this sector have their very own man in place to do just that. And this is to be compounded by the appoinment, as we shall see, of a Franco-Romanian as Agriculture Commissioner. Oh how those Lisbon Invoices are about to come due.

The proof of the pudding will be in the eating, of course, but whatever reassuring noises Barnier may make, the damage has already been done by Sarkozy. Some elements of the City of London will draw their conclusions from the words of Europe' political elite and not from those of mere functionaries. There will be those that are already planning for a future beyond the deathly grip of Brussels. They can read the writing on the wall just as well as anyone. And it is a wall upon which Sarkozy will feel compelled to write often.

This appointment is, of course, proof positive of the failure of Gordon Brown to act in the UK's interest. So desperate was he to secure a 'top job' for the UK that he managed to slot into the post of EU Foreign Minister one Baroness Ashton who spent the early part of her adult life as, at best, a fellow traveller of Communists and an important functionary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament at a time when that wretched confederacy was busily doing the handiwork of the Soviet Union in undermining our defences and NATO. Meanwhile Sarkozy was inserting into a job of real importance his very own placeman.

Hard upon his heels comes yet further evidence of the disastrous nature of Labour's policy in Europe and the singular failure of our engagement with the EU.

One of the very worst aspects of the EU from a British point of view has always been the Common Agricultural Policy. It is to fund this crooked and fraud-ridden racket that the UK pays out huge net contributions to the EU. Labour's record on tackling this is particlarly egregious, almost non-existent in fact. Now to compound Brown's failure over the financial brief a French lickspittle from Romania has been inserted into the Agriculture slot.

This is one Dacian Ciolos who is being hailed by the French as the "second French commissioner" and who is, so the Daily Telegraph tells us, a protégé of Monsieur Barnier:

As agriculture minister [Barnier] staunchly defended the massive subsidies to France from the EU budget - and last year urged Africa and Latin America to copy Europe and set up their own versions of the CAP.
He now has a perfect opportunity to push his views on European farms policy through his friendship with the new EU agriculture commissioner, Dacian Ciolos, 40, a Romanian technocrat who has spent so much of his life studying and working in France that he regards it as his adoptive country.
Mr Ciolos, whose wife is French, has been nicknamed the "second French commissioner" by newspapers in Paris and Bucharest.
He studied agriculture in Rennes, is a fan of the French system of farm subsidies and production - and is also a friend of Mr Barnier.
"The second victory is that our friends, the Romanians, have agriculture," Mr Sarkozy boasted after learning that his discreet lobbying for Mr Ciolos' appointment had borne fruit.While considering his stance on reform of the CAP, which in any case benefits backward Romanian farmers more than most in Europe, Mr Ciolos will have a powerful voice whispering in his ear: that of Mr Barnier.
Mr Barnier told French reporters that he would be keeping the work of his colleagues, and particularly Mr Ciolos, whom he cited by name, under close watch.
"It is a duty to participate and be interested in what others do," he said. "He (Ciolos) will be independent but I will give him my opinion."
In case Mr Ciolos was uncertain of that, Mr Barnier added that he saw it as essential to "preserve farm regulations, because feeding people is not a service like any other."
The fact that the two men are friends and hold similar pro-regulation and pro-subsidy views on European agriculture reveals just how skilfully the French president played his cards over the Commission appointments.

It will be remembered that the EU Rebate so skilfully won by Margaret Thatcher was partly surrendered by Tony Blair against a promise to review the CAP. We now know what sort of review we are going to get: instead of reforming the CAP, or preferably abolishing it altogether, we are going to have an even grander and more expensive scheme thrust upon us:

The French government has summoned a meeting of what it called the "G22" - senior ministers from 22 European states - in an attempt to influence a rethink of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

It has not, however, invited Britain or other so-called "reform nations" - the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Malta - all of which have argued for a full overhaul of EU farm subsidies.

Bruno Le Maire, the French agriculture minister, said the aim was to "produce a battle plan to defend a strong common agriculture policy, to support a renewed CAP."

Just in case there should be any doubt about the nature of this particular group, it has the Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) strength under the transitional arrangements inforce until 2014 ( The Nice Treaty rules) and is thus well-placed to deliver a 'strong defence' of the CAP. So, whatever this Cabal comes up with can be pushed through whatever the UK's views may be. You may be sure that that defence will not involve a diminution in the size of the UK's contributions!

Now it must be said that direct responsibility for the situation in which the UK finds itself lies in the hands of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Quislings who cheerfully sold the British Interest down the river with nary a care in the world and deliberately went out of their way to avoid seeking the consent of the British People to their shameful surrender of UK sovereignty.

But never let it be said or suggested that the leadership of the Tory party lacks its own Collaborationist tendency. After all Dave has made his views clear as to where he stands, as he told Andrew Marr on the latter's eponymous programme on 22nd. November 2009:

"DC: I'm disappointed. I wanted us to have a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

AM: You could promise a referendum on the principle of Europe now.

DC: What I cannot do is a referendum on Lisbon Treaty because it is now part of the European Law, so if you had one it would either be a pointless tilting at Europe or it would effectively be an IN/OUT referendum. Now I think we should be in the EU fighting for the sort of Europe we want. We want a Europe of trade and co-operation, not a superstate, so I do not want an IN/OUT referendum because I do not think 'OUT' is in Britain's interest."

There you have the Ruling Political Class's view of our membership of the EU, neatly encapsulated. They all reckon, for reasons they seem curiously unwilling to expand upon, that it is a 'Good Thing' and they are not going to run the risk of The People deciding otherwise for all the goats in Greece.

Aux armes citoyens! Vive La Révolution!

UPDATE: Not brilliant but worth five minutes of your time

COMMENT THREAD

We Are All Climate Saboteurs Now

2009-12-04T15:02:00.005+01:00

New Labour, Old Labour, it matters
not: Socialists are deeply intolerant
of dissent and opposition by nature:
just ask any survivor of the National
Socialists' Concentration Camps
or The Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics' Gulag.

Such is the twist into which protagonists of Anthropogenic Global Warming have got their knickers following the so-called 'Warmergate Scandal' exposing their trickery to the light of day that at least one of its more rabid puffers, one Ed Miliband (scion of a foreign Marxist professor) has come out as the Felix Dzerzhinsky of his day.

Thus he informs us that deabate, the enemy of Socialism, is due for the treatment that all dissidence and counter-revolution deserves, namely suppression:

Mr Miliband warned that in the run-up to the crunch talks in Copenhagen, where world leaders will attempt to secure a new deal on cutting the emissions causing climate change, there were attempts to "throw dust" in people’s eyes over the issue.

"We must resist that, and keep listening to the science and not subscribe to people who are frankly flat Earth-ers," he said.

"There will be people that want to use this to try and undermine the science and we’re not going to let them."

http://tinyurl.com/yzfvsjz

Ed Miliband, the Climate Change Secretary, has accused senior Conservatives of being “climate saboteurs” and undermining the Copenhagen summit, which starts on Monday.

Mr Miliband said: “We have to beware of climate saboteurs, the people who want to say that this is in doubt and want to cast aspersions on the whole process. The science is clear and settled.

http://tinyurl.com/y9qo5o9

"We’re not going to let them". The debate, people, is over and those who have the temerity now to deny that AGW may be utterly bogus or nowhere near as bad as they make it out to be are not going to be allowed to advance their views.

Worse the State has now introduced the language of criminality to describe those of us on the other side of what should be a democratic debate. Its view of the dissentient mob: we are 'saboteurs'. Only the crunch of jackboots on the drive, the closed train and the snowy landscapes now await us.

What a deeply unpleasant little shit this particular Miliband is. His brother is, as we know, a weird little geek who looks as though he has just escaped from short trousers. But they say Little Ed is the sharper pin in the cushion. It may be so but for this appalling descent into the language of the CHEKA, he must be accounted enormously stupid.

Ever since my days at school when the Chaplain's response to probing about the validity and truth of Christianity was to announce that, as God was on his side, he was right and we were wrong, I have immediately taken against little dictators of his ilk such as Miliband Minor who try and close down debate because he is right and we are wrong.

It was a particularly, spectacularly bad idea to denounce us who are more than just a little dubious about all this as 'saboteurs'.

I wear the sobriquet, therefore, with pride. If I can do anything, anything at all to be the instrument which pricks this self-righteous little prick's balloon, then let me at him.

Sadly I fear I shall have to fight my way through a rather large crowd.

COMMENT THREAD

Where Power Resides

2009-12-03T15:35:00.004+01:00

What are we going to do tonight, Nicolas?
The same thing we do every night Angela....
try and take over Europe!

In the week when the United Kingdom ceased to be a sovereign independent nation state, when Gordon Brown became a mere Provincial Governor of the EU, when the Tory Party suddenly woke up to a decline in its ratings dating to its raising the white flag over Lisbon, to where are now drawn all eyes and ears over matters European?

Well it certainly is not the Palace of Westminster where, as I write, the Collaborationist Parties are holding something laughingly called a 'European Affairs Debate'. The Pétainsts have managed to get some twenty MPs at most to turn up. They have just given up.

By contrast even a cursory glance at the press, online and dead tree, reveals that all eyes are now firmly on events in The Palace of The Soviets in Brussels where the future of the UK is now decided. As Sarkozy menaces British jobs and British prosperity, some might think that the Tories at least would turn up en masse to provoke a raising of Westminster's temperature. But then Dave is a keen supporter of the UK's membership of the EU, so one imagines that those interested in getting their noses into the Ministerial Trough next year will have decided that now is not the time to rock the boat lest it harms their careerist plan.

Meanwhile the UK and The People can go and get stuffed.

COMMENT THREAD

You Can Lead The Horse to Water........

2009-12-01T16:58:00.008+01:00

Slow on the uptake? It has taken this Tory Eurosceptic
two and a half years to cotton on to the
impact of the Montevideo Convention 1933
on Britain's sovereignty.
And the Tories say we should trust them on Europe!

We should be grateful for the existence of Dan Hannan. If there were more Tory MPs & MEPs like him we might have a political party in power in 2010 that was actually serious about our relationship with the European Union. Pity then he is so slow on the uptake.

I posted this here in late August 2007. A month before I had, however, sent Hannan an email suggesting he think about the status that the Lisbon Treaty would give to the Euro Comrades' project within the terms of the Montevideo Convention 1933.

I hoped that he having a rather more significant soap-box than I might use it to draw people's attention to the very grave dangers to the sovereignty of and status as an independent nation state of the United Kingdom.

Now that the Treaty is in force he has got around to blogging about those implications.

A bit bloody late for that, isn't it?

COMMENT THREAD

Hague: 'I'll Dilly-Dally All The Way To Brussels'

2009-11-09T12:52:00.006+01:00

To some this is fully justified as 'fair comment'.
But to some rather precious Tories it lowers
the tone of debate. Happy enough to stick
plenty of ad hominem boot into Gordon Brown,
when the Vichysoisses find themselves
thus assailed, such things become unacceptable.
Pot, Kettle, Black!

It is bad enough that the Tories, who will, barring some unforeseen event, form the next 'government' of the United Kingdom, should have reneged upon their 'cast-iron' promise to hold a referendum on the EU Constitution (ake The Lisbon or Zombie Treaty). Now comes news from the horse's mouth that the Tories' EU policy upon coming into power will amount to inaction, procrastination and William Hague examining his navel very, very, very carefully.

Thus he told Andrew Marr at the weekend:

"There will be no instant bust up with Europe with a six month deadline or anything like that to achieve these objectives because you have to find your moment to achieve these objectives whenever it may be...So we will possibly have to take our time in order to achieve those things...We recognise it’s difficult and that’s why we say these are things to look for over the life time of a parliament...I am very determined that those things will happen."

The Euro Comrades will be really really thrilled to hear this. For years they have been preparing for the moment (1st. December 2009) when the European Super State comes into being. They have been hard at work in anticipation of the event: the EU's Foreign Diplomatic Service, for example, has, despite not being lawful, been long in preparation so that its new out-of-the-box Foreign Minister (who may, or may not, be David Milisquirt - a Pétainist if there ever was one - depending on the divvy up taking place amongst The Comrades as I write) can hit the floor running as soon as he or she is appointed.

So the news that William Hague is going to dilly-dally for perhaps three or four years before addressing the issue of the UK's relationship with the EU will have come as an enormous boost to the guardians of Le Grand Projet.

Furthermore this is potent evidence that the Tories are not in the least bit serious about dealing with the threat that the EU poses to the United Kingdom, its sovereignty and our way of life: rampant procrastination is cemented into the Tories policy on the EU even before they get into power. The Euro Comrades must be laughing themselves silly this morning.

Will they, in turn, be content to wait whilst Little Willum gets all his ducks in a row?

Don't be naive.....The EU Comrades have not spent the last eight years or so arrogating to themselves all the powers and power necessary to make a Sovereign State out of the EU just to let the Tories come along and trash it just at the moment of victory.

No: they will be pressing ahead as fast as they can from the moment Lisbon comes into force, consolidating their position, exploring the parameters of their power, crushing the last vestiges of opposition and setting in concrete their de facto position as the fons et origo of power, law, justice and policy within the EU.

This should not surprise us one whit. 'Cast-Iron' Cameron has just recommitted his party to the UK's continuing membership of the EU, including, one must therefore presume, the whole box of tricks from the Treaty of Rome to the Treaty of Lisbon, from the Common Agricultural Policy to the Common Foreign & Security Policy. What could send out a more federast signal than that, pray?

With Cameron's gutless and dishonourable surrender on the matter of Lisbon, all three mainstream parties have now joined themselves in the unholy trinity of conspiracy against The People of the United Kingdom to, at the very least, acquiesce in the hand-over, lock stock and barrel, of the UK's ability to govern itself, its sovereignty without the consent of The People.

Very well then: we, The People, should take note of this fact. We should understand that The Ruling Political Class in the United Kingdom has decided to dispense with any last vestige of our consent as to the manner in which we would be governed.

They must not, in those circumstances, expect The People to stand idly by. Instead they must expect that we make plain that we intend, unless they act swifly, to withdraw from them our consent to be so governed and that we intend to resist the illegitmate coup d'état which they have carried out against us.

Meanwhile, ConservativeHome and some of its more self-righteous commenters are fulminating against the application to their party of such sobriquets as 'The Vichy Party' or the description of the EU as 'The EUSSR'. These same people are perfectly happy to countenance the use of 'Macavity' or 'McStalin' and so forth to describe the Prime Minister or "ZANU Labour" as a seemly epithet for The Socialists. Now, when what some might think of as 'fair comment' is deployed against them, they start to bleat, leaving the indelible impression that 'they don't like it up'em' and that they can happily dish it out but cannot take it themselves.

'Cast-Iron' Cameron has made it abundantly plain that he fears the EU more than he fears The People. Let us therefore bring home to him in every way we can, by wounding word and potent deed, the unwisdom of telling The People to bugger off.

Aux armes, Citoyens! Vive La Révolution!

COMMENT THREAD

After the surrender of 4th November

2009-11-04T19:35:00.002+01:00

After the surrender of 4th November
The Leader of the Conservative Party
Had leaflets distributed all over Westminster
Stating that The People
Had forfeited the confidence of The Party
And could win it back only
by redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for Cameron
to dissolve The People
And appoint another?

With apologies (albeit somewhat insincere ones) to Bertolt Brecht

COMMENT THREAD

A Province Once Again!

2009-09-17T16:11:00.007+02:00

With apologies to the late
Thomas Osborne Davis

Quite why the Irish should spend a lot of blood and seven hundred years of effort to regain her independence only to toss it casually away ninety years later will be the one of greastest puzzles of human history if they vote "yes" in the forthcoming referendum.

Then they will have to change the words of this song somewhat:

A PROVINCE ONCE AGAIN!

When boyhood's fire was in our blood
We read of ancient bondsmen,
For Greece and Rome who bravely stood,
Three hundred men and three men;
And then we prayed we yet might see
Our fetters put on again,
And Ireland, long a nation, be

A Province once again!

A Province once again,
A Province once again,
And lreland, long a Nation, be
A Province once again!

And from that time, through wildest woe,
That hope has shone a far light,
Nor could love's brightest summer glow
Outshine that solemn starlight;
It seemed to watch above our head
In forum, field and fane,
Its angel voice sang round our beds,

A Province once again!

A Province once again,
A Province once again,
And lreland, long a Nation, be
A Province once again!

It whisper'd too, that serfdom's ark
And service low and lowly,
Would be profaned by freedom’s mark
And passions high and holy;
For, serfdom comes from Brussels’ hand,
And needs a easy train;
And wicked men must make our land

A Province once again!

A Province once again,
A Province once again,
And lreland, long a Nation, be
A Province once again!

So, as we grew from boys to men,
Bent we ourselves to that bidding
Our spirit of each noble plan
And loyal passion ridding;
For, thus we hoped some day to aid,
Oh, can such hope be vain ?
When our dear country shall be made

A Province once again!

A Province once again,
A Province once again,
And lreland, long a Nation, be
A Province once again!

COMMENT THREAD

Do Something Popular, Mr. Cameron!

2009-09-14T14:15:00.007+02:00

JAN PALACH: In January 1969
this man set fire to himself in
Wenceslas Square Prague
rather than knuckle under
to the Soviet-backed Quislings
who had subverted the
Czech People's bid for freedom
the previous year.
Does David Cameon
have any of his courage?
We shall soon discover.

The moment when we discover whether Mr. David Cameron is a politician of genuine principle and valour or simply a gutless mountebank may be fast approaching. If the opinion polls being touted about are correct, then the Irish are about to make serious fools out of themselves by concluding that when they said "No!" they really meant "Yes".

Of Mr. Cameron, more in a moment. My colleague Richard North and, indeed, others, detect a further victory for the "No!" camp though he looks askance at the return of Declan Ganley who so energized the "NO!" campaign in 2008. Mr. Ganley may yet energize the "NO!" camp. We shall see.

If this be right, then some pollsters who have it that a thumping victory awaits the "Yes" camp in October are going to look mighty silly. Only the counting of the votes will tell us who and who are not the chumps in all this.

One aspect of the "Yes" campaign is the re-emergence of the use of terror to achieve political ends. One does not mean by that observation that bombs are being set off outside the offices of the "NO!" campaign nor that its campaigners are being 'disappeared' by the Garda. Rather the people of Ireland are being subjected to a constant wave of propaganda that has the effect of terrorizing them into craven submission. How else can one explain these hysterical remarks reported in The Irish Times?:

On the treaty, one woman said: "Last time I voted 'No' but that's because I thought we could afford to do so. Now I have changed my mind because I know we can't."
And a male respondent remarked: "We have to vote 'Yes' -- it would be suicide if we don't. Who wants to go back to the Ireland of the Fifties?"

If that is in the least bit representative, then one must acknowledge the brute skill of the EU and its Quisling acolytes in deceiving the Irish People by quite simply terrorizing them into voting "Yes".

It is something for us to note now and to store away against the day when we, The People, finally seize our chance to have our say on the rotten tyranny that is the EU. We shall need to store that memory because the very same tactics and more will be deployed against those of us who wish to end our present relationship with the EU when our moment comes and we shall need to be ready for it and to deal with it - and in due course its fomentors - so that we might utterly thwart it.

Let us, however, take the polls at face value and assume a victory for the terrorists over a cowed and supine Irish people. That will leave but the flimsy veil of the Poles and Vaclav Klaus between a Treaty which awaits ratification and one which is fully in force.

The Poles, one fears, will find some delicacies being bunged their way by the Euro Nabobs and will suddenly find compelling reasons to complete once and for all their ratification of the Zombie Treaty.

That leaves just Vaclav Klaus and the thin blue line of the Tory Party between us and the end of the UK as a genuinely soveriegn independent nation state.

Is it just possible that Mr. Klaus is going to shame us all by NOT leaving us in the lurch at the last minute but that he will find some way of spinning out the business of evading appending his signature to the Treaty on the Czech Republic's part? If so it would be an act of extraordinary personal and political courage, not least because of the vile vituperation visited upon his head when he attended the EU Parliament during the Czech Presidency of the EU recently.

That would truly be a delicious irony. But we cannot count upon it and few of us would go hard on him if he finds himself prey to the sorts of intolerable pressures that we may be sure will be brought to bear upon him by the EU Terrorist Leaders. But I have in my mind's eye the images of Jan Palach self-immolating in January 1969 in Wenceslas Square in Prague in protest at and rather than allow himself to be down-trodden by the Soviet dictatorship that had overthrown democracy in his country. he was followed a month or so later by one Jan Zajíc who similarly did himself to death. So we know that the Czechs do not lack for courage in adversity and so perhaps Mr. Klaus will yet stand upright amongst so many reeds blown down in the wind.

I might add, on a personal note, that the actions of Jan Palach and Jan Zajíc had a profound effect on me at the age of fifteen. Their sacrifice spoke of the lengths to which man will go in order to be free and in order to draw attention in the most shocking of ways to the cause of freedom. If they had the same effect on many of my contemporaries, then their sacrifice was not in vain.

If, however, he is broken on the wheel of the federalist's wagton, were he to yield, at last, then Mr. Cameron will find he has run out of people to get him out of the mess into which he has carefully got himself over the Lisbon Treaty. It is a mess entirely of his and William Hague's making. They believe they can close down the debate over what must now happen over Lisbon by confining any further discussion of it to the immediate period of the next general election.

That Cameron and Hague are planning to withold their views on the minor matter of the UK's independence until April 2010 was vouchsafed to us by Mark Francois to the Sunday Telegraph only last week:

"If the Lisbon Treaty is in force at the time of the next election then in our view political integration would have gone too far, the Treaty would lack democratic legitimacy in this country and we would not let matters rest there. Naturally, we will set out how we plan to take things forward in the manifesto we will put to the British people."

That is as maybe. But why wait until then?

We have grown too used to the duplicity and treachery of our political class not to suspect that this is a very carefully calculated move. And suspect it we should.

The hope, surely, is that any argument about Europe will be wholly drowned out by the sounds of battle on other fronts - the economy, cuts, the NHS and other such saced cows, O stupid ones! - and that any attempt to nail down what is and what is not the attitude to Europe of the man who would be Prime Minister will simply be overwhelmed by the frenzy of electioneering. The very last thing the leader of the Conservative Party - a party which remains committed, let us recall, to our membership of the EU and thus to our adherence to the Treaty of Rome with its call for 'ever-closer Union' - wants is actually to have to discuss the one issue which fightens the heebiejeeebies out of Tory leaders, to wit Europe.

Yet the matter will surely not wait.

Todya the Daily Telegraph reports that the EU is already far along the road to installing permanent proto-Socialistic measures in the field of employment, dressed up in the guise of 'human rights'. Thus the appointment of a new human rights commissioner by the Eu heralds yet another assault on the rights of workers (which in turn will be dressed up as 'protecting their rights' in EU Doublespeak) to work as and when they wish by a further tightening of the Working Time Directive, the promise of which Emperor Jose Barroso has thrown to the Left in the EU as so much red meat to get himself reappointed.

Le Grand Projet rolls relentlessly along, yet the Tory party fiddles whilst the United Kingdom's independence burns.

Well, those of us to whom that independence is a matter of some moment will not, to coin a phrase, leave matters there. We will keep fighting until our dying breath.

After all, we have the British People firmly behind us, according to a poll for the Daily Telegraph:

today’s poll found that 57 percent of those questioned believe that a future Conservative government should offer a referendum on the ratified treaty, with only 15 percent saying there should be no such vote.
More than forty percent (43 per cent) of those polled said that Britain should leave the EU altogether rather than accept the Lisbon Treaty without a vote.

Twenty-six percent of those questioned said that Britain should accept the Lisbon Treaty rather than leave the union.

The YouGov poll was commissioned to mark the start of a major series in the Telegraph over the next fortnight which will analyse Britain’s relationship with Europe.

There is growing concern over the increasing reach of Europe in the domestic, rather than economic and commercial, affairs of this country. Less than 20 percent of those polled thought that Europe should be integrated further.

Just 13 percent of people polled said they would vote for the treaty in a referendum with 36 percent saying they would vote against. However, 39 percent said they were unsure how to vote.

Tha percentage of people wanting a referendum is rather greater than those who indicate that they are minded to vote conservative at the next election. Commonsense suggests that a pledge to give us a referendum come what may would garner some of those votes. And at the same time doing that which the majority of Britons wants to happen might actually be a popular act. With so much that is likely to make the Tories unpopular after the next election, might it not be wise to put something in the bank against a rainy day?

COMMENT THREAD

A Cowardly Lack Of National Leadership

2009-09-06T09:18:00.008+02:00

Does this man have the personal
courage, moral fibre and
stomach for a fight with
the EU on any matter, let
alone the indpendence of
the United Kingdom? Answers
on the back of a real
ale beermat, please.

Gordon Brown has rightly been attacked for his evasions and obfuscations over the release of the Libyan mass murderer Al-Megrahi, in particular for evading the question of what his opinion on the matter might be. One might think that this is as spectacular a lack of National Leadership as one might find in a politician. Not so, for David Cameron is guilty of a far greater one.

Melissa Kite in the Sunday Telegraph points up once more the disturbing failure of national leadership by the man who in eight months or so is likely to be the Prime Minister in Her Majesty's Government over the little matter of the independence and continuation as a sovereign nation state of the United Kingdom. ConservativeHome has linked to the article and it is worth observing the degree to which comment has been provoked notwithstanding the late hour of the post by Jonathan Isaby.

Mr. Cameron and Mr. Hague are desperately hoping that the Irish or the Poles or the Czechs or even perhaps the Germans will get them off the Lisbon Hook and that they will not have to get their hands sullied in any way.

What sort of National Leadership is that, pray?

It is, I am afraid, redolent of the sort of politics which has brought Gordon Brown into utter disrepute, hoping that something, anything, will come along to permit them not to be found at the scene of the crime of sticking it to the EU.

That is so that they will have a nice easy time of it when they are then next ushered into the presence of Merkel and Sarkozy: "Not me Guv!" is the position they would like to be able to take at their first post-GE summit, all the while staring carefully at their feet.

Failing to explain now what is meant by 'we will not leave matters there' reveals a gutlessness on the part of this party's leadership which bodes ill for their willingness to stand up for the interests of the United Kingdom and her people when they have their hands on what little power remains to the member states of the EU.

Yet Mr. Hague has already (to CH just before the Euro elections) conceded that this Treaty is inimical to British interests and that that will remain the case when the Treaty comes into force.

How then can those who would be Her Majesty's First Minister and Her Foreign Secretary have no policy (or at least one that they have the courage to share with the voters) on something which is so inimical to the UK's interests?

Make no mistake: the Lisbon Treaty is about whether the British People will continue to have control of the laws by which they are governed, indeed whether they are governed by British people at all. Yet, much as Macavity goes missing at any given moment when it gets a bits tricksy, Cameron and Hague are missing in action when it comes to the Lisbon Treaty and the EU.

The suspicion, of course, is that if the Treaty comes into force these two will shrug their shoulders and announce that it is now too late to do anything about it. And that that reaction will have been born from a lack of the courage and stomach to take on the EU.

Of course there will be EuroLovers out there who opine that there are more important things out there to worry about such as the economy and Brown's Himalayan Debt Mountain/

Perhaps they might care to tell us why the UK's continued existence as a Sovereign Independent Nation State and the ability of the British People to govern themselves as they would wish are not matters of equal importance.

This refual to say what the policy is on a matter which affects the governance of the nation is, I suggest, as morally reprehensible as anything which Brown gets up to in evading the issue and both Cameron and Hague stand condemned for an egregious lack of leadership and courage by not coming out and saying what is meant by 'we will not let matters rest there' which is an evasion and obfuscation too far.

If, as the polls suggest, some 65-70% of the electorate would vote this Treaty down if we had the chance, they are going to have to come up with a really really good reason why we should not have a referendum IN ANY EVENT upon it.

There is none, of course, and a failure to grant the people one after the dishonourable and dishonest conduct of Labour (and let us remember, the Lib 'Dems') which cheated us of our say on the matter will be deeply unpopular and seen for what it is: an act of shameful cowardice.

The present shiftiness, circumlocution and evasion is doing the party nothing but harm.

Time to come clean, some might say.

COMMENT THREAD

Let Us Destroy The Big State

2009-09-01T16:22:00.003+02:00

The continuing contempt of MPs who resent the public

knowing about, let alone voicing their anger

concerning their expenses may yet have

consequences that are for the

moment wholly unforeseen.

The exposure of numerous MPs and Peers over the summer as nothing so much as looters of the public purse is actually no more than a mere bagatelle. The real story of waste and profligacy of The People's money by the State lies elsewhere, buried deeper than a Nuclear Waste facility. It is time to disinter the facts and thus destroy once and for all The Big State.

Given the outrage which the discovery that a significant proportion of our MPs were living high on the hog at public expense caused, let us think a moment how we might to our eternal advantage deflect the outrage of our citizens (which, given the continuing lack of contrition of most MPs about their larcenies, is as yet unassuaged) from those undoubted swine onto the State as a whole. Outrageous though their conduct is, the sums involved are not exactly large when set alongside the humungous sums of money being bunged at the Banks or at the work-shy or the NHS.

If The People knew just what their money was being spent on and in what amounts, I am certain beyond a peradventure that they would be deeply shocked at many of the things upon which their hard-earned money is spent....or rather blown. And once they had got over their shock and their surprise, they would roll their sleeves and their emotions up and a huge balled fist of anger would then be shot out at those who have so enjoyed spending their money down the years, those self-same politicians who have made sure for years that they did not miss out in any way on their places on The Gravy Train.

So how might we achieve this?

The answer is one of such blinding simplicity that all will wonder why we never thought of it before. But the real power of the exercise derives from our ability to disseminate the detail of how our money is spent in a way that has only just become available, a way so devastating that its deployment in this regard will have profound effects on governments not just here in the United Kingdom but all over the world.

Wherever democratic governments are forced to follow the prescription which I shall shortly set out, there will be a revolution. It may not be a revolution in which The Ruling Political Elite is placed with its back against a wall and is summarily despatched nor one in which The People storm the seat of government or its symbols of oppression. But revolution there will be, a revolution in the way the state deprives its citizens of their hard-earned money and spends it.

So, it is proposed that every public entity which is in any manner whatsoever in receipt of Taxpayer's money which it then spends in our name shall be forced to publish online the details of every contract of employment worth more than £45,000 per annum together with the details of any expenses, allowances, golden handshakes, golden parachutes, incentives or other rewards which are received by such people which take the value of their emoluments in total beyond £45K.

Next each and every such body, from the highest Ministry to the lowliest Quango, from the Mayoralty of London down to the most humble of Parish Councils shall be obliged to publish online the details of every contract for the supply of goods or services or of any kind whatsoever where public money is disbursed that amounts to £10,000 or more. It shall be accompanied by a brief statement as to why this expenditure is necessary or, in the case of employment contracts, a copy of the job description for the post.

There will, of course, be howls of protest at this, just as MPs have been prodded at the tip of a pitchfork into the limelight, squealing and whining all the way.

There will be claims of personal or commercial confidentiality. These complaints must be quite ruthlessly brushed aside. If there was complete openness about the nature of commercial contracts one may be sure that there will be enormous savings. Greedy contractors will find their ability to sink their snouts into the trough radically circumscribed by the knowledge that whilst they may have been able to get away with skinning the public when only a few councillors knew of their gluttony, they will no longer be able to swing the lead with the eyes of 50,000 voters upon the way in which they swing the lead.

And as for contracts of employment, how long will any 'Gender Awareness Officer' appointment subsist once the taxpayer becomes aware of how such posts are rewarded? Especially when those Council Tax bills with eye-watering above-inflation increases drop on the doormats of the nation (or, I suppose these days, ping into the email boxes of the same). On that day will the Jobsworths of this land hear the very sound of the tumbrils rolling and they will shake with fear as their Empires totter and break.

It will take time, of course and money too. But its expenditure will be repaid many thousandfolds as the Taxpayer begins to reap the rewards of this exercise.

The real fear they will have is that the Taxpayer may take the view that he is really very very angry at how his or her money has been wasted by their elected representatives and that that anger will boil over into demands not so much that things have to change but that both they and the system they have been cheerfully milking all along must be utterly swept away into the dust bin of history and a new way of governing be found.

They have had a little taster for ten of the public's ire over MPs and Peers expenses. Magnify that ten thousand times and more when they public work out how they have been robbed blind for ever and a day to pay for the swill that fills the troughs whereat our political masters have been dining for so long. Then we shall a true revolution.

And if they cavil at it, as MPs have cavilled and continue to cavil at the detection of their felonies, they may yet discover what the whoosh of the guillotine blade sounds like.

If we can make this happen, then the days of The Big State will be over for ever. The People will no longer tolerate, as they delve onto the fine print of it, the utter waste that is perpetrated in their name. The streets may become unsafe for the political class but that is because they and their schemes will have been found out. From now on, every decision to spend our money will be fully in the public domain. We will be able to make our minds up for ourselves and if we don't like it then our representatives will find themselves doing a very low kowtow a bit sharpish. Let each of us become, therefore, with the power of the internet, our own adminsitrators for then the Gravy Train will find itself blown from the rails, there and then. It will be like Big Brother in reverse as we watch their every move and whap! There goes another Gender Awareness Officer's post.

Whilst we get this Revolution under way, pause for a moment and contemplate the modest, though nonetheless pleasing start which has been made by The new Mayor of Doncaster, concerning whom one is grateful to ConHome for this post: "The Inspirational Peter Davies". He is, by the way, not a Tory but an English Democrat. Time for the big three to ponder the meaning of the "None of the Above" Box which ought to appear on every ballot paper from now on.

COMMENT THREAD

To Nobody's Surprise

2009-08-31T11:26:00.008+02:00

The Euro Nabobs opine that it

has better things to

do with its time than

have a comprehensive review

of its spending, such as

planning how to divvy up

all the nice, new FatCat jobs

they have created for themselves

It is usual for British Prime Ministers and others in senior government posts who are on the point of yet another Quisling spasm of surrender to the EU to proclaim that whatever shameful act he is about to do is about 'putting Great Britain at the heart of Europe'. Sooner or later, and usually sooner, The EU in turn utterly traduces what ever the UK was promised in the latest such squalid deal.

Today the Daily Telegraph reports on yet another shameful instance of the way in which the craven bending of the knee to our Imperial Masters is rewarded.

It will be recalled that Margaret Thatcher, who in her early years, despite being a very great person, fell for all the EU guff and imagined herself to have influence 'at the heart of Europe', negotiated a substantial and apparently permanent rebate in the vast payments that were being made to the EU so that it might sustain, for example, goat farmers in Greece in foetid cheese.

This lasted, however, only until our late, and wholly unlamented, Prime Minister, Tony Blair one day in December 2005 found himself faced with a Euro lynch mob demanding that he give up the rebate so that the Euro Nabobery might have loads more dosh to spend on 'important projects' (which in EU parlance means 'money with which to bribe our voters').

Now Tony Blair has no more of a backbone than does the utterly gutless Gordon Brown and he rolled over at the first hint of trouble. A huge chunk of the rebate was surrendered, actually and forever, against a vague promise that the EU would engage in due course in a comprehensive review of its spending, especially of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). This was always a meaningless exercise for, even if such a review had ever taken place, it would always have concluded that everything was for the best in this best of all possible worlds, indeed that the EU did not have enough money to spend. Besides hell will have frozen over with several miles of ice-sheet before the French let anyone so much as lay a finger up, let alone tinker with, the CAP.

Now the EU is so confident of its power as against the former nation states that make up its membership that it does not even have to go through the charade of holding such a review any more. Such would be a considerable waste of time that might be more profitably used on building up the Empire. Thus we are told by the DT:

Now the "full and wide-ranging review" of EU spending promised to Mr Blair for this year is being abandoned because officials fear that it would be too contentious - and would disrupt other work which they regard as more important.
A failure to hold the "comprehensive reassessment" of European finances this November will come as an embarrassing blow to Gordon Brown as "progressive percentage reductions" in Britain's annual EU rebate kick in over the next four years.
The 25-year old British "abatement" was supposed to compensate for the high costs of the EU's Common Agriculture Policy (CAP), which benefits France, with a large farming sector, at the expense of Britain. During the 2005 negotiation, Mr Blair delayed the first cut in the annual rebate to this year - when a top-level EU review was due to propose reforms to spending.
Mr Blair and Gordon Brown, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, had hoped that the review "covering all aspects of EU spending, including the CAP" would lead to promises of reductions in farm spending, providing political cover for cutting the rebate and increasing British payments.
However the review, already delayed by several months, has now been cast into serious doubt because of a crowded and sensitive political timetable for the European Commission, which must make the initial proposals.
Officials are wary of triggering a heated debate between Britain and France over the CAP just when Europe's leaders must agree on appointing new European Commission, the EU's first "foreign minister" and its first permanent president – all required under the Lisbon Treaty if it finally comes into effect from next year.

So much for being at the heart of Europe and using our position there to influence the decisions being made by unelected and unaccountable foreigners as to how they will spend our money. That particular notion is by this story once more demonstrated, as has been amply demonstrated before, to be so much moonshine.

This entirely predictable denouement arrives when, as a result of Tony Blair carefully burnishing his credentials for the job of President of the EU, the Danegeld we pay to the EU for the non-existent benefit of being a member is eye-wateringly ratcheted upwards by 68% in two years. This amounts to £257 for every household in the UK or, to put it another way, £113 for every man, woman and child in the land, including the feckless two million who have never ever had a job of any kind and who themselves are permanently affixed to the hind teat of the rest of us who are thus being asked to pay, pay, pay and pay again. And, given the need for Gordon Brown to have enough money with which to ~~bribe the electorate at the general election~~ pay off the Himalayan Debt Mountain he has created, all this comes at a time when we need every last billion to keep the country afloat and solvent.

We are now in the run up to a general election which will likely be held in May 2010. It now seems highly likely that what is probably the worst government since the introduction of universal adult suffrage - nay, since the Great Reform Act of 1832 - will most surely and summarily be defenestrated by a sullen and angry populace to be replaced by.........Dave and his merrie men.

So will he take action to ensure that the agreement reached by Blair in 2005 is honoured and that a comprehensive review of EU spending is conducted in 2010?

If you believe that, then you have plainly got millions of fairies at the bottom of your garden. It is already plain as a pikestaff that Cameron and Hague lack the stomach, the personal courage, moral fibre, honour and integrity to do anything about the EU Constitution if it has come into force by the time they get their hands on the driblets of power still left to a government in the United Kingdom. If it were otherwise we would have been promised in clear and unambiguous terms a referendum on The Treaty of Lisbon come what may.

And they will surely be in 2010 in that ludicrous mode affected by all incoming UK governments of wanting to show that they have influence with their new-found chums Nicolas, Angela and the priapic Silvio. At which point they will not want to be doing anything which might cause them or their new friends indigestion at the next sumptuous banquet for the Euro Nabobery (which will doubtless be at the beginning of the new Buggins' Turn in July 2010 when the Presidency will be held by perhaps the most slavish adherents and lovers of good food of the EU, the Belgians) and so what little remains of British Independence will be sacrificed in favour of the efficient workings of Cameron's digestive tract and a good night's sleep.

For sure one wants to see the back of this unpleasant, deeply incompetent and scary government. The damage it has done to our pockets, our freedoms and our independence as a nation is grievous. Labour has suborned our constitution, trashed our economy, debauched our currency and all but broken the back of our Armed Forces. Its ending will come as a moment of ecstatic bliss until we come back to earth and contemplate the reality of its replacement.

That will be but a Labour Lite version of what we have got now. It will be the defining quality of Cameroonism and its advent will fill one with little pleasure. A Tory government it may well be, but a conservative one it will not.

We have, after all, been here before.

In the period 1955-1979 we were governed by something which was given the sobriquet of 'Butskellism' (named for arch-appeaser Rab Butler and the then leader of the Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskell) which was, in essence, the product of an unspoken promise by the Tories that whilst they might generally govern according to conservative principles they would do nothing to unravel the dispensation of 1945 - the welfare state, nationalistion and all the other useless detritus of Socialism. So we are promised by Dave and his chums. Not for nothing does he see himself as 'the heir to Blair'. Nothing will be done to upset the post-Thatcher dispensation of Blairism, the bunging at money at the NHS and all the rest of the Quangocracy in the forlorn hope that they might be made to work.

In particular nothing will be done to upset the applecart of us being 'at the heart of Europe', a badge which our leaders wear, for a while, to signify that they are important people, taken seriously by the leaders of France, Germany, Italy and the rest of the EU gangster crew, for Cameron is one who has an even greater desire to be loved than does Tony Blair.

By way of excuse we will be told that the economy is in such dire straits that 'now is not the time' for rocking the EU boat. Besides, Tory policy is to support our membership of the European Union, which in turn implies that it supports the siren call for 'ever-closer Union' and all the other baggage and impedimenta of the new Soviet Union

Sadly history has taught us only too well where all this leads: national and moral bankruptcy and the terminal diminishing of this once great nation.

Thus it shall come to pass that Cameron and Hague will, when push comes to shove over the EU, get down on their hands and knees and munch the pillow just as Brown, Blair and Major did before them. And afterwards, with a rictus smile on their cherubic little faces, they will affect enormously to have enjoyed the experience.

UPDATE: Perhaps suprisingly, for Tim Mongomerie has come out of the closet as a supporter of the "Better Off Out" movement, ConservativeHome makes no mention, thus far today of this issue. Is it perhaps, one asks, that we are now about to enter the fianl lap before the next General Election and Tory activists are about to enter a period of self-imposed purdah or, if you will, a prolonged period of intoning under their breath "for God's sake don't mention the war"?

COMMENT THREAD

Clive Betts: Sleazocrat & Porkocrat

2009-07-13T15:08:00.008+02:00

Clive Betts MP and a couple of his Porkocrat Chums

Is Clive Betts (see this in the Times) the suino di tutti suini, the Porker of All Porkers? Maybe, maybe not, as Jonathan Djanogly seems to be making a play for the Title. Readers will have their own candidates for which MP is the biggest porker of them all but there is something particularly 'Animal Farm' about Mr. Betts.

The Times' piece on Betts is a reminder of one of those things which so many dislike about Socialists and about Labour MPs. They are very keen on distributing wealth provided it is other people's wealth, whilst at the same time amassing their own property portfolios. Betts, Hoon and a legion of others have been assiduous about playing the system and enriching themselves at the Taxpayer's expense.

Plenty of Tories and a few Lib 'Dems' have done much the same. One expects Tories to be keen on wealth and its creation, even if the circumstances are of dubious morality though strict legality.

Labour, however, has always had a down, publicly at any rate, on wealth and wealth creation, seeing wealth and the wealthy merely as a milch cow to enable money be transferred over to the non-productive element of society who are thus made Labour's clients and core vote.

So angered has been the electorate by the simple facts of what has been going on that the politics of the expenses scandal has got lost in the noise. What it has revealed is the vast hypocrisy amongst labour MPs when it comes to their own wealth creation. Here, for example, is Betts on housing and the economic climate:

The economic situation is the worst since 1997. We have the twin impact of the credit squeeze and rising mortgage rates which are helping to slow down the economy, while at the same time rising prices of food, gas an fuel are reducing real disposable income and creating real inflationary pressures.

The Bank of England would like to reduce interest rates to counteract an economic slow down, but that will not be possible while inflation is in excess of 3 percent.

2 further related problems are falling house prices and demand for wage increases. House price falls in most cases will have no effect on individuals, but if people have borrowed more than the house is now with and then have problems in paying negative equity can become a real problem. Many people have also been using rising house prices to enable them to re-mortgage and provide credit for other purchases and if this is not now possible consumer demand could be hit.

No mention of his own susbstantial interest in the property market there, you may think. He pontificates on the problems of the mass of us in our housing needs yet has been resolutely milking the Taxpayer to pay for his own housing needs. He has not had to worry too much about where the money for his own enrichment comes from for a long time. He has been at the forefront of the protection of MPs perks and now we understand why: in particular we understand why he was a supporter of David Maclean's odious and notorious bill to exempt MPs expenses from public scrutiny. here, you may think, was an odious hypocrite using a Parliamentary Bill to advance his own protection from scrutiny by the Taxpayer. What a prime example of personal corruption that is and what a sleazy porkocrat Mr. Betts is!

He sits for an industrial seat in Sheffield, one of Labour's safest. His electorate is one of those which might reasonably be called 'deprived'. Yet what has Labour ever done for them, save keep them in thrall by an enormous system of demeaning hand-outs that discourages all of them from the sort of wealth-creation that Mr. Betts so evidently espouses?

He is a contemptible hypocrite who by rights the electorate ought to turf out at the first opportunity. Sadly, unless there is a move to deselect him, he will be back in the next Parliament, though almost certainly no longer lording it over us. The voters of Sheffield South East (as it will be at the next election) deserve better but have only themselves to blame if they vote this Porker back into office once more.

COMMENT THREAD

Brown downgrades penalties for expenses fiddlers

2009-06-24T07:49:00.010+02:00

Many voters think this is what should
be happening to those MPs who have
been claiming for phantom mortgages.
But it is clear that Gordon Brown &
Harriet Harman think such
behaviour is relatively trivial.

It will not save those already caught in the glare of the Daily Telegraph's headlights, but Gordon Brown, Harriet Harman et al. are working hard to ensure that any MP caught in future with his or her trotter in the trough will not have to face very much jail time, if any. That is if we have the chance to catch them at it.

Those MPs who are alleged, for example, to have claimed for reimbursement of mortgages which had already been paid off are likely to be prosecuted for one of two offences, at a minimum.

Where the claim was made before 15th. January 2007 the appropriate charge will be under Section 15 of the Theft Act 1968, alleging that by falsely representing that he/she had made a payment on a mortgage when in fact no such mortgage existed, property (reimbursement of the sum claimed) was thereby obtained.

After 15th. January 2007 Section 15 was abolished and the offence would now be charged under Section 2 of the Fraud Act 2006. Now the MP will be charged with making a false representation (that the mortgage existed and a repayment had thus been made), intending by making that representation to make a gain for him/herself.

It is possible that other offences, such as False Accounting or fraud by failing to disclose information may also come into play, but those are matters for the keen drafter of Indictments.

Now here's the rub: Section 15 of the Theft Act 1968 and Section 2 of the Fraud Act 2006 both carry maximum sentences on indictment of ten years imprisonment. Ample, most rational people would think, to cover those situations illuminated by the excellent Daily Telegraph's exposure - though there are some people who have left comments on blogs or elsewhere who think that only the guillotine will do.

Gordon Brown's latest exercise in trying to secure advantage in the expenses scandal is to propose that MPs cheating on their claims should be subject to what The Times ludicrously and laughingly calls "draconian" sentences.

Under the headline "MPs face draconian criminal sanctions on expenses", Sam Coates, Chief Political Correspondent, tells us that measures are 'being rushed through Parliament' introducing 'draconian' new sanctions. Three new offences are to be created: knowingly making a false claim for an allowance, failing to register outside interests and receiving money to lobby for outside interests. Curiously Mr. Coates does not tell us what these 'draconian' sentences are to be.

For that we have to turn to Rosa Prince in the Daily Telegraph:

MPs found guilty of filing “misleading or false” claims will be punished with unlimited fines and up to a year in prison. There will also be offences of “failing to comply with rules on registration” and breaching rules on “paid advocacy” — being paid by companies to influence legislation. These two offences will attract unlimited fines, but no prison sentence.

So, if Joe Public makes, say, a false insurance claim for £10,000 he will be prosecuted under Section 2 of the Fraud Act 2006 and faces a maximum of ten years imprisonment. But if Horatio Bottomley MP makes a false claim for MPs' expenses in the sum of, say, £40,000, he will only face a maximum of one year in clink. You just couldn't make it up.

All this is predicated, of course, on the assumption that we will have access to the sort of information that the DT has provided us with covering the last few years.

The DT's other news on expenses today is that future releases of information about MPs expenses are still to be redacted in such a way as to prevent proper scrutiny by the Taxpayer taking place:

Despite repeated promises by Gordon Brown of greater transparency, there are no plans to reveal MPs’ addresses when claims relating to 2008-09 are published later this year. Without this crucial information, many of the worst abuses of the system Parliamentary allowances exposed by the Daily Telegraph in recent weeks would not have been possible.

It is quite unbelievable that, after all that has happened, Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman think that it is acceptable for this information to be withheld. One wonders upon which planet they have been residing for the last few weeks. Perhaps they know only too well that their party, which has done a good line in legalised thieving for the best part of the last century (it's called 'Socialism', by the way), remains peopled with those who cannot resist helping themselves to other people's money and so are trying to minimise the pain for the next batch of Labour MPs found out in larceny. If, that is, there ARE any Labour MPs after the next election.

Still, this last news will cheer up Mr. Speaker Bercow's little chum, Julian Lewis, who has campaigned so assiduously to have MPs' addresses concealed. Lewis was about the only Tory who had the gall to support this wholly unsuitable individual's campaign to be Speaker. Bercow mouths off about reform and all that. Given that he has been a prominent abuser of MPs expenses, one is bound to be doubtful. In any event, by his friends, shall you know the man.

By-the-by, when I first started blogging I did so in part because of the gathering storm over the abuse of Taxpayer's money by greedy MPs. At that time I naively submitted a petiton to the No. 10 website calling for all expense claims to be placed online as those of the Scottish Parliament were: it got 77 signatures. I tried to interest the MSM in this petition but was universally fobbed off. One political journalist asked me if I had got support for this from any MP. Upon telling him that I had not, his disdain and disinterest were palpable.

Yes, Quentin Letts, I am talking about YOU!

I also proposed a draft bill for Online Parliamentary Expenses Registers. I am pleased to note that I proposed some offences specific to MPs and Peers. And that I proposed a maximum sentence of ten years for false claimants. I reckon I got there first and got it right.

I also proposed that anyone convicted of offences under the Act should be barred from public office for life. Now there's an idea.

UPDATE: I see The Times' Sam Coates has now amended his article.....and the word 'draconian' has now vanished (as well it might)

COMMENT THREAD

The Moving Finger Wrote

2009-06-19T11:25:00.006+02:00

Mr. and Mrs. Balls: Serial "flippers"
- but who would have known if MPs
had had their way?

Parliament has given us two fingers. Only an immediate General Election will now do. This Parliament has no moral authority to speak of and must be effaced before it does yet more harm. Meanwhile I am reminded of this from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Had our MPs been better read, they might have remembered this truism and saved themselves considerable grief. As it is, they spent so much time face down in the pig-swill that they took leave of all their senses at once.

One grieves for the good, decent and Honourable Members of Parliament - there are some - but far too many have been found out in venality. Only an immediate dissolution and a fresh Parliament can have the requsite authority to begin mending that which they have broken.

COMMENT THREAD

Expenses: The Commons Exocets Itself

2009-06-18T11:49:00.006+02:00

A group of MPs doing what come naturally.........

Thinking to sink HMS Telegraph, the House of Commons this morning fired off an Exocet missile in the form of publishing its own thoroughly bowdlerized version of their expenses. All they will have achieved thereby is many more hectares of newsprint and gigabytes of internet coverage as their attempts to cover up the extent of their larceny stands exposed.

The Daily Telegraph holds chapter and verse and rightly makes the point that we would never have known, for example, of Kitty Ussher avoiding capital gains tax in a manner which your average juror, whether in a criminal or a defamation trial, would readily describe as 'dishonest' if we had to rely on the Commons fairy story version of MPs' expenses.

By publishing their expenses in this format MPs have thus caused their Exocet to do a rapid U-turn, whereupon it has buried itself in the vitals of Parliament and exploded. By allowing the public to see how it is they have tried to conceal from us what they have been up to they have inflicted an enormous further wound upon themselves.

It also timeously destroys Mr. Speaker Martin's self-serving and pompous valediction in which he sought to claim that if MPs had adopted proposals made last year, all would have been well, the implication being that he had been at the forefront of such changes and had been thwarted by the House.

This from the man who spent hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money trying to conceal every last detail of MPs's expenses from the public gaze. This from the man wh many believe lay behind and gave his enthusaistic support to the campaign to thwart taxpayers from knowing how their money was being spent.

Lest it be thought I make a point out of snobbery and class hatred, I should say that I was a considerable fan of Mr. Speaker Thomas and Madam Speaker Boothroyd, the other two Labour Speakers of the Broadcast era. They were a credit to their party and to Parliament. Not so Mr. Speaker Martin who has proved himself to be nothing less than a malignant cancer at the heart of our Parliamentary process who has singlehandedly done so much to destroy the reputation of the Parliament which he was supposed to protect.

His valediction was a fitting epitaph for his Speakership: so unsuited to the job was he that he could barely read coherently the words on his two pages of A4. And the words themselves might have been written by a sixteen-year old school pupil, so simplistic were they. It was a whining, second-rate effort from a second-rate man of whom we are well rid.

This is where I came in: when I first started blogging it was with a view to getting MPs to publish their expenses online after the example of the Scottish Parliament. Even of the basis of early stories about MPs claiming for fish tanks, plasma TVs and iPods and the wicked attempt to exempt MPs' expenses from disclosure under FOI provisions, it was evident that MPs were utterly terrified of the truth coming out.

I confess, however, that I had not anticipated the sheer scale of how MPs and, let us not forget, some Peers have been lotting the public purse for, in most cases, plain and simple personal enrichment, getting the taxpayer to pay their way in life rather than do it themsleves.

But it remains vital that in all this we not merely remember to see the wood for the trees but actualy get our heads out above the leaf canopy so that we can see the horison of all this the more clearly.

The electorate is not stupid, whatever Gordon Brown may think - his calculated personal mendacity over the issue of whether Labour would cut public spending has not fooled the public for a second - and it well understands that MPs no longer do or have responsibility for very much in our constitution.

In the 1960s Parliament typically would pass sixty or seventy Acts of Parliament in every regnal year. That figure has dropped to around 33/34 per year now, a particular decline having taken place since the turn of the century. Shocking? Maybe, but it comes as no suprise.

If, as most now believe, 75% of our law emanates from a a clique of unelected, unaccountable foreigners in Brussels and is nodded thhrough Parliament untrammeled by amendment, MPs have become increasingly irrelvant. People have noticed they only seem to work from Tuesday to Thursday and then only for about thirty weeks or so. And they have noticed that even such laws as we are allowed to discuss for ourselves are not subject to proper discussion but are subjected to automatic guillotines so that MPs can go off to the real business of filling out their expense forms.

So the electorate, having worked out for themselves where power actually lies in the United Kingdom (in an office in Brussels), they have rightly decide to ask themseleves why we are paying 646 MPs several shedloads of money to be glorified social workers.

Brown, Cameron and the increasingly shrill Clegg have all been bleating off about radical constitutional change, mostly concerning areas of our constitution which were not broken in the least. yet each of them has demonstrated themselves unwillng to address, or, more importantly, to allow us to have our say on how we are to be governed.

If MPs voted to seize back our Sovereignty from the unelected and unaccountable EuroNabobery and began once more to exercise control over all areas of law instead of acting as stooges for the Brussels Diktat, we might then own that they were worthy of being paid £60k per annum and merit having expenses and allowances commensurate with their actual responsiblity. Until then it is going to be downhill all the way.

Give us our country back!

COMMENT THREAD

Tory Dishonour

2009-06-16T15:59:00.006+02:00

Ken Clarke: betrays the People of the

UK with as little compunction as

flicking the ash from his cigar

It sometimes seems to mere mortals that the Conservative Party does not actually WANT to win the next General Election. How else to explain Ken Clarke's freshest act of disloyalty to his party and his country in which he decided without so much as 'by your leave' to set Tory policy on the EU, notwithstanding that this is not his brief?

Actually, part of the accusation of disloyalty may be quite erroneous. Disloyal to the notion of the UK as a Sovereign Independent Nation State it most certainly was, but, in the absence of any serious denial from either Mr. Cameron or Mr. Hague, it seems that he did nothing that was not heartily approved of by those individuals. Indeed Clarke may well have been put up to do the dirty work which has been long in the planning of getting the Tories off a very nasty hook (as they see it). The sinuous snake-like gyrations of Cameron, Hague et al. as to promising a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty if it has come into force by the time the Tories get into office have been deeply unedifying. So much so that one may properly contend that their disingenuous, at best, or utterly dishonest, at worst, circumlocutions on the subject will have driven a significant number of people to vote UKIP at the EU election earlier this month.

At least UKIP has a policy which one may readily and simply identify. The Hague formula of 'we will not let matters rest there' advertised in advance that the Tories were preparing to weasel their way out of the problem if they possibly could. Beyond that it was quite impossible to say what Tory policy was on a ratified and in force Treaty of Lisbon (aka The EU Constitution). Now, thanks to Ken Clarke, we know only too well that we are to be betrayed afresh by the Tory Party on matters European.

One notes this exchange in the ConHome interview with Hague published on 2nd. June 2009 - so close to the election that any aspiring voter might have taken it to be something of an indication of a Tory promise to hold a referendum come what may:

CH: Do you accept that the Lisbon Treaty continues to be against the interests of the UK even if it has come into force? If not, what is it about the Treaty that will have changed so as to make it in the interests of the UK to accept it? If yes, is it not entirely logical and wholly honourable that we should promise a referendum on the Treaty notwithstanding that it has come into force?

William Hague: The provisions in the Lisbon Treaty that we think are against Britain’s interests do not become beneficial by virtue of coming into force. That is indeed logical. If the Lisbon Treaty is in force at the time of the next election they will be an issue that the next Conservative Government will need to deal with and we would set out what we intended to do in advance of that election.

Now, this is the very point I have been making time and again in CH comments from my sick bed and has been perfectly formulated by Tim Montgomerie (whose conversion to the Better Off Out campaign is, I hope, significant, given ConHomes undoubted influence). Hague accepts that the Treaty will continue to be against the interests of the United Kingdom. Yet, in advance of any attempt at negotiation upon it with the EU, they have supinely surrendered the one weapon which strikes terror into the heart of everyone with the EuroPox: the Referendum. Talk about going naked into the Conference Chamber!

Every referendum upon the Constitution has given it a whopping great raspberry. To have it hanging in the air at the first meeting of Cameron, Hague and the EuroNabobs in 2010 would concentrate minds wonderfully. Yet now they have thrown the weapon away and, notwithstanding that the Treaty is against the interests of the UK, they will not let The People deliver their verdict upon it.

This is, I suggest, every bit as dishonest and dishonourable as the act of Brown and Clegg reneging on their manifesto commitments to hold a referendum on the Treaty of Lisbon. Indeed in many ways it is considerably worse. Brown and Clegg at least aver that the Treaty is in the UK's interest and can thus, however speciously, justify their disgraceful conduct. But Hague admits that the Treaty is, in whatever mode, inimical to the interests of the UK and its People. The Tory refusal to let us have our say come what may is, I submit, every bit as dishonourable as Chamberlain's shameful pact in Munich in 1938. Worse, by virtue of the legal implications of the Treaty, Cameron, Hague and the rest of his clique are thus actively delivering us over into the power of unelected foreigners.

We have yet to see how they will deal with the matter in office. But the signs are not propitious: Clarke was blathering on about the UK trying to get back powers over employment policy. That will make a whole lot of difference to our status as an EU poodle, won't it?

One wonders if anyone has actually asked themselves why 2.5 million people voted for UKIP at the EU elections. Were the Tories consistently scoring in the upper 40s in polls, it might be that they could afford not to worry too much about them. But there are signs that the Tory party has been both damaged by the expenses scandal more than they care to admit and that the electorate is as yet not in the least bit persuaded that Cameron and Osborne have got what it takes. They linger with the hue of the sea-sick on 38% in the polls when, in the face of the worst government in living memory and a Prime Minister that the nation loathes, they ought to be on 48%. Their lead is brittle.

In those circumstances one might have thought that it was worth the effort of trying to lure some of the 2.5 million back for the general election. Instead we have the treacherous Clarke throwing in the towel even before the match can start.

Armed with a vote rejecting Lisbon, Cameron could get pretty well whatever he were to ask for. Instead the EuroNabobery must be laughing itself silly, sure in the knowledge that it will get Lisbon after all, with all the oodles of naked sovereign power that that implies.

This incident has been very revealing. It tells us much about Cameron, Hague, Osborne and the rest of what the Tories are pleased to call their their 'leadership': it is that they utterly lack the personal courage and moral fibre to take on the EU when something which is against, as they admit, the UK's interests. The EuroNabobery will have taken note and will know that when push comes to shove, Cameron and Hague will roll over like a couple of kittens in the face of further Federalism and more 'ever-closer union'.

If UKIP helps thus to deny them a working majority in the next Parliament they have only their own deeply yellow cowardice to blame.

COMMENT THREAD

Up Close & Personal With The NHS

2009-06-16T14:42:00.005+02:00

In the midst of the worst and

sharpest recession for

nearly seventy years,

Cameron plans to install his

chum Osborne as Darling's

replacement. His qualifications

for a job requiring considerable

moral fibre and backbone

seem elusive to some.

Having been laid low by a serious kidney infection (hence no blogging), I have had an 'up close & personal' look at the NHS after twelve years of Labour throwing money at it. The front-line bit remains a welcome safety net into which to fall at such times and I have naught but praise for doctors, nurses and ancillary staff.

But having spent a fair amount of time waiting in hospital for this or that to happen, one has an opportunity to study the administration tail that is attached to what is supposed to be the body. I just could not believe the number of people who seemed to be working in the back office areas.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that the admin was actually larger than the front-line bit. Few of them seemed to have their noses wedded to the grindstone and I was much struck by the number of admin staff who seemed to have time to stop and chat with one another for a quarter of an hour at a time and more.

For this reason I cannot say that my lifelong opposition to the way in which we organise and fund the NHS has changed. I am also quite certain that we could wield the knife deeply on the NHS adminsitration without any noticeable loss of efficiency.

Instead the Tories plan to ring-fence NHS spending, thus keeping hordes of adminstrators who are otherwise otiose beavering away at nothing very much.

At a time when Labour has bankrupted the nation for the fourth time since the Second World War, we ought to be paring back all this dead wood with a large panga. Instead that little squit Osborne wets his shorts every time Brown or Balls or Mandelson hisses the words 'Cuts'. It is enough to make one cry.

Ten per cent cuts? That would be merely to tickle the hide of a large rhino.

COMMENT THREAD

Where The Huntsman leads, the hounds follow

2009-04-06T15:54:00.003+02:00

"Watch Out! There's A Thief About!"
And the Home Secretary
should know, shouldn't she?

Nigh on two years ago I first wrote, in indignation, of the wretched state of affairs concerning MPs expenses. Whilst not the first so to do but well before the bandwagon hove into view, I proposed that MPs expenses must be place in full, unexpurgated, unredacted beauty online as are those of MSPs by the Scottish Parliament. I also proposed some swingeing prison sentences for those who cheated. I now recognise my errors.

My indignation was aroused by the Maclean Bill which sought to exempt MP's expenses from scrutiny via a Freedom of Information Act request, a shameful and disgraceful plot which would have put MPs above the law, a place in which they should never be put. That attempt was defeated because, notwithstanding its utterly shameful passage through the Commons (inter alia voted for, surprise, surprise, by, Harry Cohen and Tony McNulty and, as we shall see below, a certain other MP), no Peer could be found to touch the thing with a bargepole, not even those of their Lordship's House who themselves know a thing or two about feathering their nest. Since then, however, we have seen just how fierce has been the counter-attack of its supporters and how they have managed hitherto to keep their expenses under wraps.

We now know, however, what we then suspected: that there was a jolly good reason why MPs were prepared to risk the opprobrium of granting themselves special exemption from the Freedom of Information Act, namely that the opprobrium that would be occasioned by letting details of their expenses ever see the light of day was considerably greater. And so it has proved.

Back then I was persuaded that the vast majority of MPs were entirely innocent of any wrongdoing. With each passing day, however, my willingness to make such a concession diminishes and is diminished by the sweeping tide of revelations of just how deep the malaise is.

Though there will yet be further Tory victims swept away by this particular tide of sleaze, the vast majority of malefactors will prove to be representatives of ZANU Labour, entirely in emulation of their Zimbabwean counterparts. Thus is explained why it was in May 2007 Labour's Whips turned out in such numbers, as I wrote back then:

Far more significantly, however, out of 13 Government Whips, 11 voted during various divisions on the Bill, of whom all were in favour of the Bill. These were Jacqui Smith (Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury and Chief Whip) Alan Campbell, Claire Ward, David Watts, Frank Roy (Lords Commissioner), Liz Blackman, Ian Cawsey, Michael Foster, Huw Iranca-Davies, Stephen McCabe and Jonathon Shaw (Assistant Whips).

Pausing there a moment, and reflect, if you will, upon the name of the leader of the gang back then: none other than Jackboots Jacqui herself, who was then Labour's Chief Whip before she was plucked to wield her incompetence on the office of Home Secretary. Although she did not vote (perhaps with an eye to the future?) in the 3rd. reading of the bill, she had voted throughout that day on various divisions upon Maclean's Bill.

Given the depth to which she has personally shoved her loathsome snout into the public purse, her orchestration of the Whips who in turn were able to procure such a sizeable Labour turnout that day is explained in its entirety by what we now know of her venal, self-enriching, thieving ways. She was, in short, looking after Number One (and, indeed, Numbers One to Three Hundred & Fifty) just as she has been looking after Number One all these years.

And to those of you who would opine that this is 'all within the rules', I have to say to you that I, for one, care not a fig for your opinion. Nor, lest any of the people I have named herein is inclined to sue for Defamation, would any member of your average English Libel Jury. It may be within the rules, but there is, as one is taught at Law School, a world of difference between that which is lawful and that which is immoral.

Much of what has been going on here is utterly immoral. Some of it may also be criminal: at least one of these shysters is under investigation by The Met (which laughingly describes itself these days as a 'police' service), but in the way of these things I am not holding my breath on their account.

There is, however, more to this particular business than it being a tale of greedy, thieving, venal, lying, cheating MPs robbing us blind to set up their retirement trust funds.

There is something else which underlies this despicable state of affairs, something which goes to the heart of our failing democracy.

It is that the position today of MPs in our body politic has been well and truly rumbled by the electorate. They understand only too well that MPs have shuffled off responsibility for about 80% of our lawmaking to unelected, unaccountable foreigners in Brussels and elsewhere by virtue of our cessions of Sovereignty over our affairs. The electorate understands only too well that MPs now do precious little that is of real importance and, given ZANU Labour's utter contempt for Parliament and its Zimbabweanization of our economy and of our political life, that MPs actually count for next to nothing in the great scheme of things. Were they shouldering responsibility for the affairs of a fully Sovereign Independent Nation State, the electorate might be inclined not to take such a dim view of their kleptomane ways. But as they simply nod through and rubber-stamp 80% of our laws (and. let us remember, the bits that really count) whilst they loot and pillage the public purse, the public whose purse it is finds itself no longer willing to be mugged on a daily basis.

So, as almost every member of the Cabinet, our discredited Home Secretary, our ineffectual Chancellor of the Exchequer, grasping Geoff Hoon, Bilking Beckett, Uncle Tom Cobley & All, shove their thieving paws deeper into our pockets, let them understand that we are not merely angry about them and their ways, but about the system over which they preside.

Therein lies grave danger for The State. Revolutions have started from the sorts of positions in which we find ourselves today. When the governing class so sets itself apart from the governed whom they pretend to represent, such that, for example, they effectively exempt themselves from paying a tax (Stamp Duty ) which everyone else has to pay come what may, the result may be a very different one from that which they envisaged when they first decided upon looting and pillaging as a way of life.

It will, therefore, not be enough for Hattie The Harpie to promise , for the umpteenth time, that something will be done. It is simply time for these expenses to be put online, now. We will then be the judge of them, as is our right. And if individual MPs find that their electors care not for what they find, then they only have themselves to blame.

But the real problem lies elsewhere. And thus we must now wrench back control of our affairs to ourselves from the Brussels Diktat and force Parliament once more to become the final arbiter of our fate. With that high responsibility will go just and proper reward. Right now, however, the swine presently resident in the Palace of Westminster may have to be hurried off to the political abattoir.

I wrote at the top of recognising my errors in this affair. My principal one was to propose in my draft Bill some wholly inadequate sanctions for MPs who made false statements to get expenses. I now reckon that they ought to be treated as on a par with organised drug dealers, paedophiles and rapists.

Having a string of MPs carted off to start some really condign sentences would be a satisfactory and welcome start to this particular programme.

I may not quite have been the first to get on this case, but I reckon I got it right back then. Where The Huntsman leads, the hounds follow.....

COMMENT THREAD

The Home Secretary Is Also Stupid

2009-02-13T16:52:00.003+01:00

Geert Wilders: Thanks to our extremely

stupid and utterly supine Home

Secretary, he has had a shedload

of free publicity.

Doh!

The exclusion of Geert Wilders, who, let us keep in the forefront of our minds, is a democratically elected member of the Parliament of a friendly nation, marks a number of new lows in the erosion of Liberty in the United Kingdom. Few, on either side of the political spectrum, come well out of the affair and over it all hangs the olid mephitis of abject appeasement.

It should come as no surprise that the villain of this piece is none other than Jackboots Jacqui Smith. Garlanded by her own problems of mellifluous sleaze all week, she doubtless thought that, in Geert Wilders, she had found a means of distracting everyone from her kleptomaniac tendencies. Instead she has merely managed to remind us of just how utterly incompetent she is, the consequences of her action in banning Mr. Wilders having palpably been to give him and his opinions pages and pages of written and online publicity.

Had she been in the least bit bright, she would have realised that banning Mr. Wilders from entering the United Kingdom would set off a veritable chorus of protest at her suppression and censorship of free speech. Alas, if you gave our Jacqui a penny for her thoughts, you'd get a pocketful of change in return. Thus she failed to realise that banning Mr. Wilders was the best thing she could have done for him. Witness an internet now groaning with links to Mr. Wilders' film and overflowing with that which she so earnestly sought to prevent, namely debate on whether Wilders is right or wrong or, indeed, whether he is what she says he is.

It will, from this incident, be blindingly obvious that, by dint of the paucity of competent, high calibre competition in Labour's ranks, Jackboots Jacqui has risen without trace to the office of Home Secretary (once one of the Great Offices of State but, nowadays, a by-word for its sheer incompetence and utter traducing of the British people) where, when she is not enriching herself by looting the pockets of hard-working and long-suffering Taxpayer, she has stumbled from one piece of nincompoopery to another. And when she is not being a nincompoop, she moves from one utterly illiberal action to another, usually for reasons of short-term political advantage to the Labour Party and its electoral prospects rather than with a view to the genuine public interest.

That, some may think, is what this episode of stupendous stupidity is really all about. This was not done because she thought that, were Mr. Wilders to have his say, the streets of England would at once be laid waste by hordes of ravening Muslims bent on murder and mayhem. No, it was rather done with a firm eye on labour's electoral prospects in those constituencies which have significant Muslim populations and which feature high on the list of seats upon which the Conservative party have their beady eye firmly fixed with a view to getting a substantial majority in the next Parliament, such as, by way of example, Dewsbury in West Yorkshire where there is a sitting Muslim Labour MP with a majority which local Tories are quietly very confident of overturning. It is to such galleries that this sort of act is directed.

No matter that its effect is to act as censorship of free speech, Jackboots Jacqui reaches for her pen, largely without thinking and hands mr. Wilders a publicity coup of stratospheric dimensions. Just how dumb can you get?

Herewith the text of the letter by which she banned Mr. Wilders:

Home Office
UK Border Agency

Mr Geert Wilders
For delivery via
British Embassy in The Hague

Dear Mr Wilders

The purpose of this letter is to inform you that the Secretary of State is of the view that your presence in the UK would pose a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat to one of the fundamental interests of society. The Secretary of State is satisfied that your statements about Muslims and their beliefs, as expressed in your film Fitna and elsewhere, would threaten community harmony and therefore public security in the UK.

You are advised that should you travel to the UK and seek admission an Immigration Officer will take into account the Secretary of State's view. If, in accordance with regulation 21 of the immigration (European Economic Area) Regulations 2006, the Immigration Officer is satisfied that your exclusion is justified on grounds of public policy and/or public security, you will be refused admission to the UK under regulation 19. You would have a right of appeal against any refusal of admission, exercisable from outside the UK.

Yours sincerely,

Irving N. Jones

And herewith the link to Mr. Wilders' film:

It is for you, dear reader, to decide if that film amounts to a row of beans or, as our dim but undoubtedly authoritarian Home Secretary asserts, represents a "genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat to one of the fundamental interests of society". And it is for you to decide if Mr. David Miliband, surely the biggest busted flush of 2008, is right to say of it that it contains "extreme anti-Muslim hate".

There have been other offerings from the usual suspects and other assorted members of the Left that have ranged from the hysterical to the utterly ludicrous. i especially enjoyed watching Newsnight last night wherein even Kirsty Wark (not usually one of my favourite presenters) found her jaw dropping to the floor at the breath-taking effrontery of Keith Vaz who gave a performance of humbug and cant that was laughable (even by the very high standards already set by this oleaginous brown-noser). His performance may be found on the BBC's iplayer. Another example of the level of debate on the BBC may be found here.

There is, I am sad to say, one aspect of all this which has dismayed, it is the supine acquiescence of the Conservative party's front bench to this piece of censorship. I am normally a fan of Chris Grayling but his support for the Home Secretary's blunder has been a sorry tale. Firstly one expected a little more common sense and judgement from him. Secondly one is firmly left with the sense that the Conservative party is only too willing to engage in appeasement (and it, of all parties, ought to know where that leads) of what it perceives to be Muslim opinion, no doubt with an eye on the same sort of short-term political advantage that Smith has evinced.

Had he thought it through he would have seen the obvious pratfall into which he was falling. Not a good day for the Conservative party in making this decision of which this long-standing Tory is thoroughly ashamed. This feeling is enhanced even more in the light of the totally inadequate offering by Justine Greening on BBC's Question Time last night wherein the soundest judgement was from the Respect party representative (a thing I had never thought to write). The Conservative party should be at the forefront of the defence of free speech and robust in its defence. Its response this time was grovelling and pathetic.

What is so alarming about all this is that Labour has let in to this country all sorts of appalling people who end up declaiming real hatred and real threats to our people. It has shown itself, in its appeasement of its Muslim supporters, all too willing to turn a blind eye to the real threats to our country.

Could it be that because Mr. Wilders also espouses a lot of things for which Labour does not care that they have decided to act against him? The reality of Mr. Wilders is that he is prone to speaking some uncomfortable home truths which many in the Liberal left establishment would much rather went unsaid. He is in fact out of the same strand of thought that produced the late Pym Fortuyn who was murdered some years ago. It is that strand of thought that sees Islam as a major threat to the way of life we have established in the West. Far from being of the Far Right, as the BBC was desperate to assert, Fortuyn was actually very much a Liberal who saw Islam as a fundamental threat to his own homosexual life style (and one should remember that in some Muslim jurisdictions homosexuals are routinely subjected to judicial execution by the State as a matter of official policy, something which the appeasing Left in this country equally routinely ignores).

Mr. Wilders' film is crude, it must be admitted. But as a means of stimulating debate it has, with the considerable assistance of our extremely stupid Home Secretary (and the shameful connivance of the Conservative party), proved a considerable catalyst. In that sense Labour and its lickspittle claque of hangers-on has done us all a great service and has ensured that Mr. Wilders and his views get enormous publicity. Talk about being hoist with your own petard!

COMMENT THREAD

A Sly BBC Smear

2009-02-12T19:55:00.004+01:00

Jan Smuts: By modern standards he was no

Saint in matters of race but when he hosted

King Georger VI and his family in 1947,

the policy of 'Apartheid' was

but a promise in the Opposition's manifesto

The BBC is institutionally incapable of resisting the chance of smearing those for whom it does not care, whether that be Lady Thatcher, Israel, Republicans in the USA, George Bush or any one else on its 'hate' list. Today the PM programme slipped in a quick smear against Her Majesty the Queen.

In a piece about HM's refurbished website, the then Princess Elizabeth's stirring pledge to her future subjects whilst on a Royal visit to the Union of South Africa was played:

"I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong."

The reporter need no further encouragement, declaring that this had been broadcast from "Apartheid South Africa".

The visit of the King and Queen and their daughter was made in 1947 when Jan Smuts was still Prime Minister. The policy of 'Apartheid' was not introduced into law until after the election of 1948, won by D.F. Malan's National Party.

Thus, by a sly lie, was a little smear generated against the Queen, implying something dishonourable in her having been in so wicked a place as South Africa in the first place. The use of the phrase "Apartheid South Africa" was both unnecessary and deliberate and utterly petty to boot.

The sooner this menace to society is disbanded, the better.

COMMENT THREAD

Home is where the heart is, Home Secretary

2009-02-09T12:30:00.008+01:00

Child Trust Fund? Some might reasonably

conclude that both Balls & Smith have been

assiduously building theirs up.

shamelessly looting the public purse by means

of their Parliamentary Allowances

Let us cut to the chase. Home is where the heart is and for the Home Secretary to assert that her 'main home' is her lowly set of digs at her sister's house rather than her £300k West Midlands house where she keeps her disingenuous husband, her children (who attend local schools) and has her constituency is an insult to the Taxpayer's intelligence. She is, in short, a dishonest crook.

No wonder she has been a consistent supporter of keeping the details of MPs expenses hidden from the prying eyes of the Taxpayer. All along she has been, notwithstanding the weaselly circumlocution 'cleared by the Commons Authorities', effectively looting the public purse to maintain her family home. The idea that a room where she lodges perhaps three, perhaps four nights a week is genuinely to be regarded as her 'main home' is a fiction designed to enrich her and her family at the public expense, no more, no less.

In cases involving dishonesty which go before a Jury, the Trial Judge always directs them that 'dishonesty' is a matter entirely for the Jury to decide upon, on the entirely reasonable basis that any Juror will be able to recognise dishonesty when he or she encounters it and needs no further instruction from a professional lawyer on the point.

In Miss Smith's case I am utterly confident that a Crown Court Jury (or, for that matter, a Libel jury in the Queen's bench Division) would call what Miss Smith has done 'dishonest'. In thirty years experience at The Bar I can scarcely think of an occasion when a Jury has got it wrong and this particularly unsavoury set of facts would present them with very little difficulty. They would, in short, retire just long enough for the usual cup of coffee, and come back to nail her for the crook that she is.

We might, for issues of character are important, you may think, also recall that not so long ago she was a dopehead, routinely breaking the Misuse of Drugs Act.

What does it tell you about the Home Secretary. A lot, I suggest.

It says she is utterly unfitted to be in charge of criminal law and policing if she is unable to recognise that this self-enrichment is no better than a fraud on the public purse.

And what sort of example does it set to the nation? Only that chiselling on your expenses is acceptable. And they have the brass neck to lecture Bankers on their moral turpitude.......

Still, from ZANU-Labour we have learnt to expect little more than this sort of grubby embezzlement. This is no more than par for the course.

Fortunately Miss Smith, a whiny ex-comprehensive school 'teacher', has a thoroughly modest majority in her West Midlands seat. She would do well to be talking to a recruitment agency to prepare for the summer of 2010 when she is kicked out on her ear by the outraged, deeply long-suffering and over-taxed citizens of Redditch who will be less than pleased to discover their MP has been screwing the public purse for years.

She is, of course, by no means the worst offender in this regard. The arrangements that Mr. and Mrs. Ed Balls (respectively now the MPs for Normanton and Pontefract & Castleford) have whilst both collecting huge sums of money in allowances from the House of Commons are notorious.

It may well be that the Commons Standards and Privileges Committee has held it to be reasonable for Mr Balls and Ms Cooper to register their house in Castleford as their official home for the purpose of their allowances, allowing them to claim housing allowances worth £24k apiece for their £655k London accommodation, but that was a decision of a cabal of fellow MPs.

Well, they would, wouldn't they? If they had decided otherwise, the whole edifice of MP's housing allowances would have had its flying buttresses removed and come crashing down, which would scarcely have done anything much for the popularity of members of that committee.

Applying my earlier test of what a Jury would make of it, I am also confident that they would think differently from the Standards & Privileges Committee and swiftly adjudge it to be a thoroughly dishonest wheeze.

Come the witching hour, May or June 2010, Mr. & Mrs. Balls have to expose themselves to the electorate. Ed Balls has, by dint of the usual carve-up, been selected for the new seat of Morley and Outwood following the abolition of his existing seat. Mrs. Balls stands for the new seat of Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford. The electors of these two new seats will thus have a chance to decide for themselves what they make of such free-loading.

Whilst other matters will doubtless at that moment be uppermost in the minds of the electorate, as home repossessions and unemployment mount in these erstwhile Labour rotten boroughs, it is unlikely that the sight of this unlovely couple getting their snouts so deeply into the trough of Taxpayer's money will do them any favours whatsoever.

Perhaps then Mr. Balls, who is so insouciant when it comes to the matter of the high level of taxes to which he likes so much to help himself, might find that the electorate would like someone else to take up the burden of representing them and leave him to make his own way in the world. As he has never had a proper job in his life, that should present him with an interesting and demanding challenge when there are the best part of four million unemployed.

It could not happen to a nicer chap than to public school educated Mr. Balls.

COMMENT THREAD

Another Fine Mess

2009-02-05T09:05:00.006+01:00

We pay these nincompoops lots of money

to foul things up & then nobody is

prepared to own up when they do so.

No wonder we are going down the tubes.

Today of all days some of us really really need traffic information. And how does the Highways Agency measure up to this task? It comes as no surpise that their traffic information website crashes due to the large numbers of people trying to use the service, as the above graphic amply demonstrates.

Moving on to the 'disruptions page', it cheerfully reported that in respect of the A1(M) that "There are no disruptions to display for the supplied search criteria". This is despite information culled from contacts to the effect that the situation on this road in Huntingdonshire (that thousand-year old entity so callously and carelessly expunged from the map by Ted Heath in the 1970s) is dire.

This is simply not acceptable. It suggests gross incompetence of the highest order.

The Highways Agency is an offshoot of the Department of Transport. The former is headed by someone called Graham Dalton, who, it seems, is a time-serving apparatchik from the DoT, which, as we all know, is headed by that limpet-like nincompoop, Geoff BuffHoon, one of new Labour's 'Jack of All Trades & Master of None'.

Both must be deemed to be utterly incompetent in the discharge of their duties.

Notwithstanding the ample, and, dare one say for a change, accurate warning of inclement weather they have had, they seem utterly incapable of managing the affairs of their departments so that a relatively modest IT resource actually works and serves the people who pay for it, the Taxpayer.

What a shower!

Will either man resign or say sorry? Hold not your breath.

COMMENT THREAD

The Evil That Walks Invisible

2009-02-02T15:50:00.005+01:00

Polly Toynbee: reaches heights of
sanctimoniousness and hypocrisy
hitherto uncharted. In the
interests of transparency,
perhaps she might care
to publish her tax return?

"A hypocrite is in himself both the archer and the mark, in all actions shooting at his own praise or profit."

Thomas Fuller

Holy and Profane States--The Hypocrite (maxim I, bk. V, ch. VIII)

Arch-hypocrite and Tuscan property guru Polly Toynbee has unburdened herself on the subject of corporate tax of a piece of sanctimonious, pompous finger-wagging in today's Guardian under the title "It's time to rattle and bang in protest at this outrage". Her synthetic outrage is, of course, the work of one of the nation's foremost humbuggers and as fine an example of Pharisaism as you could wish.

Fortunately for the world this particularly loathsome bladder of hot air has been not so much pricked as kebabed by Guido who has brought us news of just how little tax the Guardian, which keeps La Toynbee in Champagne and Caviar, itself pays to the Exchequer. On the face of it, not a brass farthing, that state of affairs being achieved by just the sort of lawful wheezes against which she rails.

This is the whole thing about Socialism. It is a creed which is inflicted on the great mass of the populace who pay for its wastefulness and excess but the effects of which are studiously avoided by those who inflict it upon us. A Comprehensive school education for the kids? You jest, surely. Sit in a surgery waiting room full of wheezing working class smokers? Yeugh!

This is the nice little graphic which how The Guardian made a profit in 2007/08 of £307.2 million and paid nothing by way of tax on it. Doubtless and in the interests of transparency The Guardian will wish to give us details of how this little miracle was achieved. Don't hold your breath, though.

It will, as Guido observes, have everything to do with just the sort of schemes against which the likes of La Toynbee and other apologists for Socialism routinely rail. Her piece must thus be read with an entirely appropriate expulsion of methane gas.

"Paying taxes makes us citizens. Living and voting together, citizenship means belonging to the community that decides how much tax to levy and how to spend it. Most people can't avoid PAYE and they are rightly outraged by those who go to great lengths to avoid paying their fair share."

So, Polly, are you outraged this day at the lengths to which your employer has gone to avoid paying tax?

This odious, pompous bag of cant goes on to lecture big companies about their duty to be good citizens:

"The way to prove they are the "good corporate citizen" they claim to be is by paying the modest 28% that is the starting rate for all companies."

Doubtless the Guardian's cheque for £86,016,000 is in the post to HMRC.

The title is from Milton, Paradise Lost (bk. III, l. 682): "For neither man nor angel can discern Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks Invisible, except to God alone, By his permissive will, through heav'n and earth.

COMMENT THREAD

COMMENT THREAD

Hain: Dishonest or Grossly Incompetent. Take Your Pick

2009-01-23T10:56:00.004+01:00

Hain:this grossly incompetent and
negligent nincompoop was once in
charge of your pension

Sleazebag (and, let us remember, convicted criminal) Peter Hain plainly reckons he has a come back to public office up his sleeve, notwithstanding the judgement of MPs that he had been, in failing to declare £100K's worth of donations to his leadership campaign, guilty of "serious and substantial" failings. One supposes that if unconvicted mortgage fraudster Mandelson can do it, anything is possible.

Hain hangs his hopes on his assertion that:

“The Cabinet Secretary stated that I complied fully with the Ministerial Code, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) exonerated me and now the Parliamentary authorities have also accepted that the mistakes I made were honest mistakes. I have been asked to repeat my apology on the floor of the Commons, which I am happy to do.”

I'll bet he is.

Let us, for a moment, take this wretched man at his word - though we could all be forgiven for not being quite so charitable - and assume that he was indeed scrupulously honest in not noticing that he (a) had received into his campaign accounts one hundred thousand smackers and (b) had failed to notice this vast sum of money and thus, 'honestly, guv', (c) had failed to realise he had to declare it all to the Electoral Commission. The only rational and reasonable alternative explanation is that he was completely and utterly incompetent and grossly negligent in so failing.

That being so, why on earth does he or anyone else for that matter think he is a fit and proper person for public office of any kind, whether it be as Neath Rat Catcher or as a Minister of The Crown?

Still, given the incompetence of his erstwhile colleagues in government, appointing him to a ministerial post would hardly be surprising, would it? And given ZANU Labour's tendency to reward disgraced Ministers with a fresh chance or three to lord it over us, we could be forgiven for thinking it won't be long before this nincompoop is ordering our lives for us once more.

COMMENT THREAD

Uneasy Lies The Head That Wears A Halo

2009-01-21T13:02:00.004+01:00

It is usual to wait some years before
elevating people to Sainthood.
Obama has had Sanctification
thrust upon him.

It will doubtless soon become a Thought Crime to speak ill of 'The Blessed Saint Barack Obama', to judge by the tone of the BBC and other ludicrous organs of the nation's Liberal-Left media. If so, I shall doubtless find myself swiftly arraigned. Well, I shall also have to ask for offences concerning the 'Blessed Saint Nelson Mandela' taken into consideration at the same time.

I shall, one supposes, find myself in the dock with Melanie Phillips whose dissenting piece appeared in yesterday's Daily Mail. There are plenty others of us out there, but such has been the nauseating puffing of Obama, that they have decided to keep their heads down for the moment.

The problem I have with him is threefold.

Firstly, he spoke in his campaign of 'spreading wealth around'. That is shorthand for something of which we know much in this country: it is called 'tax and spend socialism' whereby the hard-working, wealth-productive part of our nation has its wherewithal transferred by State fiat to the feckless unproductive part. it does not work here and will not work in the USA and is simply a means of making sure that equality, the Nirvana of our Liberal-Left Onanists, is achieved by making everyone equally impoverished. In time there is little or no wealth left to 'spread around' (steal), at which point we find ourselves well and truly buggered (a word for which I make no apology whatsoever).

Americans may well yet have to find themselves having to adjust to a much more modest standard of living when he gets round to the sort of legalised larceny lefties eventually find themselves unable to resist. After all, there are all those new voters whose expectations will have to be assuaged if he is to be re-elected. The easy way to do that is to help yourself to as much created wealth as you can get away with and then pour it down the drain as quickly as possible.

Secondly, he undoubtedly talks a good speech. Indeed, if success were measured by degrees of rhetoric, 'Saint' Barack would swiftly advance to the ranks of the deified. Upon examination, however, his words have a frightening tendency to be long on hype and short on substance. This may, of course, be deliberate, in that, having made few, if any, positive assertions as to what his policies might be, he can do much as he pleases now without being accused of doing this or that U-turn. One suspects, however, that, much like our very own Smuggo in the mid-1990s, the real reason is that he does not actually have an original idea in his head and that the USA is now about to undergo a trashing such as the electorate is just beginning to appreciate that Labour has delivered here.

Thirdly, one is left with the uneasy thought of his Chicago origins. It is difficult, if not impossible, to secure advancement within the Chicago body politic without, at the least, coming into contact with some of the very worst corruption that exists in US politics. The recent exposure of the shenanigans of Governor Blagojevic was merely the modest lifting of the lid of a simmering pot of malodorous graft which is utterly endemic to that part of the world. One fears that in due course as those who care not for Obama and his politics dig into this suppurating mass, they will find things which, shall we say, reflect badly upon him and his chums. In short, we may discover that the feet he uses to walk on water are actually made of clay. At which point the expectations which have been built around him to an absurdly high level will be confounded and it will all end in tears, lots of tears. His fall from grace would be, in such circumstances, almost too much to bear for those who have invested so much emotional and political capital in him and who have utterly unrealistic expectations of what he can and will do.

We shall see. He may yet prove to be a paragon amongst politicians. I, for one, will not be holding my breath.

COMMENT THREAD

They Cannot Send All Of Us To The Gulag

2008-12-04T13:23:00.009+01:00

"So, where ARE your papers?"
Soon, if we bury our heads
in the sand,
scenes like this will
come to a town near you

There are some of you out there who have not yet or affect not yet to have heard the crunch of Jackboot Jacqui's footsteps on the gravel drive outside. Time, one might think, for a visit to the Doctor to have the ears syringed, a record of which will swiftly wing its way to every civil servant, police officer, social worker and local government officer in the land.

There is a modest bit of good news in the struggle of Freeborn Britons against the oppression of the State today, to which we shall come in due course. But, one suspects, this will simply prove to be a case of 'reculer pour mieux sauter' as Labour strives ever harder, day by day, to install our very own homegrown 'Blockwärter' society.

'Blockwärters' were, you will recall, members of the Nazi Party who were selected for every block, every street and every quarter of every city town or village to receive denunciations of anti-state activity or other infractions deemed injurious to the Party or State.

Latest ominous signs that this is what Labour has in mind for us comes from Liberty who report one effect of the Immigration and Citizenship Bill:

Powers to examine identity documents, previously thought to apply only in UK ports of entry, will be extended through hidden clauses in the bill to criminalize anyone in Britain who has ever left the country and fails to produce identity papers upon demand.

Thus, by the time they have done with it, pretty well any Jobsworth with a mind to will be able to demand of you that you prove your right to walk the streets of England and if you cannot (or, as they may find will be often the case, have a mind to refuse such an impertinence), you will be banged up and given a criminal record.

What a truly appalling state of affairs that, without any reasonable basis so to do, an Apparatchik of the State will thus be given a power that is malodorously redolent of a Tin Pot One Party Banana Republic. It has been the hallmark of being British that we have (save during the obvious necessity of world war) been able to go about our business without having to produce at the whim of authority our right so to do. It is, for many of us (but obviously not for members of the Labour Government and many of their supporters) something which defines our Britishness.

Thus does our proto-tyrant of a Prime Minister make a mockery of his own claim to value 'Britishness'. His idea of 'Britishness' is one which comes shod with jackboots and armed with a whip to dragoon us all into line.

Well, for all that he pretends to be a student of history, one suspects he missed out on the bits about how we the people won our freedom from the mighty oppressiive power of the State. Thus he may well have miscalculated our power and willingness to refuse to comply with his tyranny. Let us therefore commit ourselves now to fill his gulag with dissenters who do not want to kowtow to his vision of Britishness. He cannot send us all to prison, after all.

Next comes this report in the Independent which reminds us of how Brown wants to treat us much as you would treat cattle. That is he wants to tag us at birth and collect every intimate detail of our existence to be shared about assorted Apparatchiks so that they can check that we are not offending against his Diktat in any way and if we are can quickly be put up before the Beaks:

Personal information detailing intimate aspects of the lives of every British citizen is to be handed over to government agencies under sweeping new powers. The measure, which will give ministers the right to allow all public bodies to exchange sensitive data with each other, is expected to be rushed through Parliament in a Bill to be published tomorrow.

The new legislation would deny MPs a full vote on such data-sharing. Instead, ministers could authorise the swapping of information between councils, the police, NHS trusts, the Inland Revenue, education authorities, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority, the Department for Work and Pensions and other ministries.

It may well rush through the Commons, of course, wherein the Labour Backbenches are filled (though not entirely) with lickspittles and toadies who would like nothing more than to have the power to let any official look at our medical records, financial records or whatever. They may, however, have rather more of a problem getting this Orwellian prospect through the House of Lords which, for all its imperfections, is still something of a repository of resistance.

A modest victory in the struggle to roll back the overweening ambitions of Jackboots Jacqui and her desire to have us all microchipped, tagged and databased comes with the finding that the keeping of DNA samples of wholly innocent individuals (and, a fortiori, their fingerprints too) is a breach, on two grounds, of the human rights of our citizens.

Some, who cannot see the wood for the trees, will opine that this will inhibit the solving of crimes. Yet it is a matter of some conjecture how many of the 850,000 people innocent of any crime whose DNA is unlawfully stored on the Database have, as a result, been fingered for a crime of any sort, let alone a serious one. I have not the citation for it but i do recall reading somewhere that the number of people from that group who have been caught for anything let alone a seriosu crime is statistically insignificant, so it is at best a very serious case of overkill.

In any event it is now unlawful to keep such samples and those thus affected may now have an action for damges for the brech of human rights thus caused. That, however, seems not to have occurred to Jackboots Jacqui who seems bent on perpetuating the unlawfulness of the database:

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said: "DNA and fingerprinting is vital to the fight against crime, providing the police with more than 3,500 matches a month, and I am disappointed by the European Court of Human Rights' decision.

"The Government mounted a robust defence before the Court and I strongly believe DNA and fingerprints play an invaluable role in fighting crime and bringing people to justice.

"The existing law will remain in place while we carefully consider the judgement."

There being no higher court than the European Court of Human Rights to which HMG might now appeal, the database is illegal as far as those unconvicted of crime are concerned and by keeping the DNA of those innocent people on it she is in flagrant and grave breach of the law.

That should come as no surprise from this second-rate functionary whose reaction to having evidence of her department's utter incompetence leaked to MPs was to set the Secret Police on the unfortunate individual who had had the temerity to broadcast her incompetence to the world.

Let us keep our fingers crossed and hope that the tide that is swirling about the buckled patent leather pumps of Mr. Speaker sweeps him and her away down the Thames like so much noxious mephitic effluent.

COMMENT THREAD

Unelected Peer Attacks MPs For Doing Their Job

2008-12-03T13:50:00.007+01:00

The last person from whom we
need pontification about law-breaking
is unconvicted mortgage
fraudster Peter Mandelson

The MSM seem to think Lord Mandelson's intervention into the Damien Green affair over the airwaves this morning to be something of a masterstroke. That, one is inclined to think, is more of an indication of their fawning ways than of reality. Another view might be that it was, by way of change, a spectacular Mandelson misjudgement.

In reality it was a salutary reminder that Mandelson was, along with fellow Triumvirs Blair and Campbell (surely the most interesting Propaganda Chief since April 1945), at the heart of the debauching of truth and openness in government in the heyday of the Blair years.

Some may think his calculated intervention was, for once, singularly ill-advised:

Lord Mandelson told Sky News: "I understand the anger expressed by some MPs because it touches on what they see as their rights and privileges.
"I also have to say I think that for many Conservative it is a self-serving smokescreen, behind which to hide their own apparent collusion with a Home Office official who was allegedly systematically leaking Home Office papers to the Conservative Party, in order to pursue his own personal political ambition."

The Business Secretary added: "I would like to know from the Conservatives whether their frontbench and their leader knowingly colluded with that civil servant in riding a coach and horses not only through the Civil Service code but also through the law."

In the first instance he has chosen to launch his attack on Cameron and the Conservative opposition who are, of course, elected representatives of the people. Mandelson, on the other hand, has been elected by no one at all and is simply a Labour placeman planted in the Upper House to help Brown save his skin. He thus has very little democratic standing in this matter when compared to MPs.

Secondly his excoriation of the Tories might just as well be applied to Gordon Brown and any number of other Labour Ministers (and, who knows, someone may yet today dig up an instance of the nation's best known mortgage fraudster revelling in some leak or another in days gone past) who used leaks about Tory policy as so much grist to the mill.

Thirdly, as the chances of a prosecution being commenced, let alone succeeding, are almost zero, he is almost certainly going to end up on the losing side in this row. Not a battlefield that a wise man would elect to fight, some might think.

We also heard from Sir Paul Stephenson, acntingt Metropolitan Police Commissioner, who sought to deflect criticism of The Plod by claiming that the reason for the use of Counter Terrorism Branch was explained by the fact that this Branch subsumed the Special Branch a while back which explains the appropriateness of the deployment.

Older ones amongst you will recall that the Special Branch was established in the 19th. Century as 'The Special Irish Branch' to counter Fenian terrorism in Ireland (some evils are ever with us) and in between times was deployed against enemies of the State (genuine ones, that is) such as spies, terrorists and other assorted persons who operated against the interests of the nation.

Sir Paul's explanantion simply, therefore, does nothing to exculpate himself and others in the Met who have made a drastic error by, at once, conflating Damian Green (whose only crime has been to help embarrass the Government) with the likes of George Blake, Kim Philby, the IRA and assorted Islamic Terrorists and, by the pernicious use of the word 'grooming', with paedophiles.

The offence that these comparisons gives is entirely understandable and reflects very badly on Stephenson and all those whose flawed judgement has embroiled them in this particular piece of State-sponsored intimidation.

Meanwhile, if this ill-judged investigation is to continue, perhaps a formal complaint should be made to the Counter Terrorist Branch about the activities of one Gordon Brown betwen 1981 and 1997, there being no statute of limitations in this country. He could then become the second Labour PM in a row to help Mr. Plod with his enquiries, this time as to whether he "knowingly colluded with [a] civil servant in riding a coach and horses not only through the Civil Service code but also through the law".

On the subject of Mandelson we have this report on Coffee House of Dominic Grieve's view of the Noble Lord:

"This morning, Lord Mandelson has been banging on about national security. We don't believe there is any national security angle to it at all.

This is fantasy land, being spun by Peter Mandelson. This is what worries me so much. The political element keeps on creeping back in.

I don't trust Peter Mandelson. I don't think he should be in political office, I don't think he's fit for it."

I rather take it that Grieve is less than impressed with Mandelson. He is not, I think, alone.

Meanwhile we have had Mr. Speaker's explanation of how he and his staff managed to allow an MPs office to be turned over by the Police.

It is always unedifying to see someone in a position of responsibility and authority desperately shovelling dirt over subordinates and was no less so on this occasion. It may well be that others failed in their duty, but the overwhelming sense one gains from his pathetic explanation was that, instead of galvanising himself to ensure that the proper form was followed and the ability of Damian Green to serve his constituents was protected, he allowed the cock to crow thrice whilst sitting firmly on his hands.

I though, too, that he sounded like a broken man for whom this has all been too much. He is plainly well past his sell-by date and for most people who want a robust, impartial Speaker for the Commons (whether of humble or of aristocratic origins or mien), the next election and a chance to eject this failure from office cannot come soon enough.

COMMENT THREAD

EU Moolah for French Banks?

2008-12-02T11:10:00.005+01:00

Sarko, living symbol of 'Le Coq Sportif',
plans to rip up EU State Aid rules.
This is not news, merely part
of his job description.

Europe's own Bantam Cock, M. Nicholas Sarkozy, has spoken: "France calls on EU to suspend state aid rules during financial crisis". Thus the Daily Telegraph's headline. But why is this thought to be news? It is surely the most predictable event since the sun rose this morning.

That Sarkozy should want to give French Banks an edge is what he does: he is President of France. What we should worried about, though, is the window of opportunity this would give France to prope up a wide range of French concerns under the guise of staving off depression, a window through which they will surely pour trillions of Euros as hard as they can.

Just as ZANU-Labour has died and been well and truly buried by Brown, so one of the of raisons d'être the EU will be quietly discarded, never to be resurrected, by the EuroNabobery which is more interested in electoral vanity than pursiung genuinely beneficial economic policies.

In time British taxpayer's money will end up being applied to propping up failed Euro Companies, with little complaint from the likes of Brown, Mandelson or David Miliband (who, in case you have forgotten, has both leadership ambitions and a sigularly bad dose of the EuroPox) who will do the usual compliant, complaisant lieing back and not thinking of England when they are asked to cough up to keep some dinosaur of a smokestack industry in an electorally sensitive part of France alive.

COMMENT THREAD

Perverting the Course Of Justice Is An Offence, Harriett

2008-12-02T10:09:00.004+01:00

Organising a cover-up of matters
that later become the subject of court
proceedings may amount to perverting
the course of public justice.
Harriett the Harpy as a
QC should remember that.

This Labour Government's assault on Parliamentary Democracy proceeds apace. How astonishing it is that they have managed to attract unfavourable comparisons with (a) Richard Nixon, who was a dab hand at setting the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service on political and media opponents (b) Stalin, who simply liquidated them; and (c) Mugabe, who is a byword for political thuggery.

Now they are trying to ensure that the fix is in. Iain Dale has brought us details of the leaked email which Harriet The Harpy sent out to various co-conspirators. It is this email which the Conservative Party claims, with considerable justification, demonstrates that Government Ministers are being corralled into a cover-up of how Police came to be permitted to ransack the office of a member of the Opposition Front Bench.

Let us start with the Harperson's profferred explanation for this summons. It is said that the requested meeting was merely to discuss matters of procedure arising from the planned making of a statement by discredited Speaker Martin on his part in this affair.

For a number of reasons that explanation simply does not stack up, as seems now to be admitted by the Government who have given Nick Robinson a revised explanation.

Firstly, if that was even remotely true, a discussion about Parliamentary Procedure does not require the presence of The Justice Secretary, The Home Secretary, The Head of the Cabinet Office (and a sidekick of his) and a representative of No 10 Downing Street, none of whom has anything whatsoever to do with the running of the House Of Commons and its procedures.

This is not an agenda to discuss
Parliamentary procedure but
it is one that is a framework
for a cover-up

Secondly, if this meeting was only to do with matters arising from procedure concerning the Speaker's Statement, why does Harriett Harperson's amanuensis set out in extenso an agenda that can only be germane to a discussion of the substance of the Speaker's proposed statement, under the heading 'Parliamentary Privilege: Four Principles'?

The only reasonable inferences be drawn from the presence of that agenda are (a) the parties are to be invited to discuss how to frame the Speaker's storyline so that, as far as possible, it has him striving manfully to uphold those principles & (b) that the initial proffered explanation by Harperson's Office is a straightforward lie.

That latter point is now implicitly conceded by the fact of the reported new explanation recorded by Robinson who sensibly queried why the Head of the Cabinet Office was needed to discuss parliamentary procedure. Now the line is that :

"they just needed to check the lie of the land, that they all understood each other's positions".

Given the mix of invitees and that admission, the only proper conclusion to draw is that Harriett Harperson was specifically trying to co-ordinate a cover-up to save the skins of the likes of Jacqui Smith and the Speaker from the wrath of the Commons when it reconvenes.

In addition she is responsible for lying to us all when her office suggested that the meeting was simply concerned with procedural matters. The phrase 'all understood each other's positions' is but shorthand for 'let's make sure we get our stories straight before the shit hits the fan', i.e. a cover up to you and me. That is fundamentally a different explanation from the one first offered up and thus the latter was a bare-faced lie.

Harperson is, of course, a Barrister. She should have a care lest she be involved further in this disgraceful cover-up so that she does not engage in conduct incompatible with her status as a member of that profession. Since a criminal investigation is involved here she must be most careful to ensure that she is truthful at all times about what has happened and that she does not become embroiled in cobbling up an untrue explanation of events which might later become the subject of evidence under Oath in the Crown Court.

If someone does that, it is called 'doing acts tending and intended to pervert the course of public justice', an offence contrary to the common law, just like 'misconduct in a public office'. Perhaps we may yet see her office being raided by the Counter Terrorism Branch, her dabs and DNA being taken, her house being turned over by Mr. Plod and all that has happened to Mr. Green being visited upon her.

The pleasure that that would give so many in the nation is unquantifiable........

COMMENT THREAD

Emperor Barroso of La-La Land

2008-12-01T20:00:00.005+01:00

Mandy: Is he thinking about
life after ZANU-Labour and
where the next Thirty Pieces Of Silver
is coming from?

In the La-La Land occupied by the EuroNabobery and other assorted EuroLuvvies and those with a serious dose of the EuroPox, lives a particularly ludicrous oaf called Emperor Barroso. At the risk of causing this blog to be placed on an EU Blacklist, I shall go further. As well as being an oaf, he is also a fantasist with a deep streak of imperial arrogance. He may also be quite barking mad.

Others have made their observations on his latest pronouncement and I will try not to go over ground already heavily marked by their ammunition boots. But to claim thus:

"people who matter in Britain are currently thinking about"

joining the Euro is surely to be ranked along with the sort of thing a pubescent youth might dream of before he has his first girlfriend.

If there are indeed wacko Labourites out there planning to take us into the Euro, one wonders if they have perhaps arrived recently by Flying Saucer from the planet Zog.

Before this could happen there is the little matter of having a referendum (unless, of course, Gauleiter Brown dictates that such a referendum is unnecessary because it is a different Euro we are joining from the Euro upon which all parties have heretofore promised such a referendum) which, however tricky our situation might be, is unlikely to be won by the Federasts. Labour would be utterly mad to embark on trying to persuade us into the Euro at the moment, though I readily concede they might just be stupid enough to try and distract us all from the shambles they have already created and the wasteland that is to come by doing so.

But it is the sheer arrogance of Our Divine Emperor that takes one's breath away. It is, surely, a sign of just how much of an antidemocrat he and his kind have become that the only people who matter to him in this land are a few discredited politicians of the governing party who are batty enough to think that the Euro is the answer and mad enough to tell someone else of their loss of the old marbles.

Unfortunately for him, and despite the best efforts of our very own antidemocrat, Gordon Brown, there are many millions of people in this country who also matter (they are called, quaintly, 'voters') who are definitely NOT thinking of joining the Euro as they have quite enough to be thinking about with the mess into which the said Brown has dragged us all. And if they do think about the Euro at all, it is but to curse Brown and his troupe of performing chimps for so mismanaging things that it now costs an arm and a leg to go to Europe for momentary relief from the misery they have inflicted upon us.

Brown, who may well be pretty incompetent (and, I suggest, a nasty bit of work to boot), is not, however, entirely stupid and has swiftly ruled this piece of nonsense out. But we should remember that there is at least one person in Government who is a potential viper in the nest: Lord Mandelson, who brings an enormous conflict of interest (his Fatcat EuroNabob Pension) to the heart of Britain decision-making processes. It would be entirely unsurprising if this nasty little crook tried to sell us down the river now that he has a clear idea of how the ZANU-Labour experiment is going to be brought to an end in 2010 and he will be out on his ear looking for a new job. He must be the prime suspect for whoever has been billing and cooing into The Emperor's lugholes about us wanting to join the Euro. Still, Mandelson will comfort himself that inflation has turned thirty pieces of silver into something altogether more agreeable.

COMMENT THREAD

Light in The Darkness

2008-12-01T19:03:00.004+01:00

Winner of The Month: David Davis
might permit himself a wintry smile
this week as his position on English
Liberties is spectacularly vindicated.
And, to boot, the battle field is
littered with the bodies of many
enemies, all of whom have inflicted
grievous wounds upon themselves

As the world has unravelled lately a profound depression of the soul has set in, making it impossible at times to articulate the fear that all the hard work of the years 1979 to 1990 was on the point of being pissed down the drain by this truly awful government. But, imperfect though Cameron & Osborne may be, perhaps we have turned a corner.

I have found it very difficult to blog of late. I loathe Socialism with a very considerable passion and the very idea of this particular Vampire which sucks out the lifeblood of our nation rising from the grave wherein we thought it had been consigned by Margaret Thatcher has been simply too awful to contemplate. For a moment it has seemed as if we had returned not to an era of managed decline such as we saw between 1945 and 1979 but to an era of decline actively desired by most of the Labour Party and much of the Left Commentariat. Into the slough of despond one drifted.

Slowly, though, common sense and clarity are focusing people's attention on the real reasons why this country's problems are unique and are not attributable to factors which arose outwith the UK and one begins to have a feeling that Gordon Brown's emulation of Josef Goebbels' theory of the 'Big Lie' has, as people have picked away at the reality of what has happened and what is being done, not succeeded in pulling the wool over the eyes of the electorate.

Some inkling of that has emerged in some polls which point to the likelihood that voters understand only to well who it is who has thrust them into the ordure. Whilst the Conservative party of 2008 leaves a lot to be desired in terms of policy and robustness, it is, surely, a better answer than the wizened lump of putrefaction that is the Brown Government. It may well be that a Cameron government proves to be less than wonderful but it would have to try very hard indeed to plum the depths of incompetence and nastiness exhibited by Labour.

The latest spasm of the Stasi State, the brutal turning over of an opposition MP's office and home in an unsubtle attempt to intimidate the Opposition will have, I believe, a considerable effect on voting intention. Scales will fall swiftly from people's eyes as they contemplate this piece of Jackbootism on the part of Gordon Brown and his henchpersons and they will recoil in distaste and revulsion from conduct which most associate not with the home of Parliamentary Democracy but with the likes of Soviet Russia, Castro's Cuba, Mugabe's Zimbabwe or Hitler's Germany. Thus will this shabby government have destroyed itself and thus it will be recalled in years to come.

One breathes a little more easily.

The greatest winner this week? David Davis whose apparent emulation of Don Quijote tilting at windmills seemed to have trashed his political career and influence has been demonstrated to have been utterly right about the true nature of this government. Who now can deny, unless they are supporters of the Jackboot Tendency of the Left, that he now occupies the moral high ground?

COMMENT THREAD

Nooks & Crannies of The Common Law

2008-12-01T17:29:00.004+01:00

Mr. Speaker Lenthall who,
when faced with an overweening
King bent on intimidating
Parliament, told His Majesty,
ever so politely, to take
a running jump. Today's
Speaker is an unworthy
successor to him, but is representative
of the small, second-rate
people at the heart of
this piece of nastiness.

With the widespread publication on the Web of Gordon Brown revelling in his use of leaks back in the 1980s the tiny possibility of a conviction for any offence - let alone one carrying a theoretical life sentence - of anyone in the Green affair has metamorphosed into the absolute certainty that any reckless attempt at prosecution now will be met with derision and contempt.

Anyone listening to the howls of such derision which greeted Geoff BuffHoon's specious, mealy-mouthed casuistry on the issue on Any Questions last Friday could be in no doubt that the public already knows what is going on here well in advance of being told once more and a thousand times more by Leading Counsel for the Defence: that far from being a legitimate and worthy attempt to ensure the Ship of State is well-caulked against potential enemies of our interests, this is a cack-handed attempt by a tired, shrivelled and gimcrack group of individuals (I hesitate to use the word 'government' of the people who hold office at Her Majesty's pleasure as Ministers of The Crown) to intimidate Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition into not holding it to account.

Thus the various individuals involved in this unsavoury matter find themselves in a very deep hole. It behoves them to recall the old aphorism about getting themselves out of a hole, the first step of which requires them to stop digging.

Sadly this does not seem to have occurred to any of the cast list of utter second-raters who have had a hand in this imbroglio. In particular Jacqui Smith, the incompetent,whining ex-comprehensive school teacher who has somehow ended up holding one of the great Offices of State, has skilfully manoeuvred a top-of-the-range JCB into her own personal hole wherein she is digging as hard as she can for the Antipodes.

Of these, more here and elsewhere in due course.

What has caught my eye in this affair is the use of the Common Law offence of 'misconduct in a public office' to be the sledgehammer with which to crack the nut.

There is nothing wrong with Common Law offences. There are several of them, some in daily use up and down the land on a daily basis: perverting the course of public justice comes readily to mind. Most were developed long ago to deal with conduct which all jurisdictions find objectionable. There is no magic nor malice in them.

Since the heyday of botched prosecutions for leaking in the 1980s (though when it really mattered, such as the leaking of defence secrets, Juries were perfectly happy to convict), most acts of leaking have essentially been confined to the realm of civil not criminal law. The reform of the Official Secrets Act 1920 occasioned by the passing of the Official Secrets Act 1989 had, everyone thought, put the dissemination of the merely embarrassing revelations of government incompetence or dishonesty outwith the criminal law and into the realms of breach of contract as between the Civil Service and Civil Servant. Until, that is, someone came up with the bright idea of using 'misconduct in a public office' as a means of intimidating leakers and leakees alike.

I do not believe for one moment that the Counter Terrorist Branch came up with that wheeze. After all it is not an obvious fit with their remit of dealing with mass murder, bombings, plotting, possessing and making explosives and other assorted forms of mayhem as practised by real enemies of the State. It is not an offence which Mr. Plod goes round thinking about on a daily basis in the way he might think of burglary, robbery, rape and murder. No, this is one for the lovers of the more arcane nooks and crannies of the criminal law, those who delight in thumbing old law books rather than having to deal with the real world.

This was an idea that germinated somewhere in the bowels of the Home Office or Cabinet Office as some civil servant with a legal background (there are plenty of these: a few are absolutely first-rate but many are but the dross of the the legal profession who could not hack it in private practice. It is one of the latter I suspect in this instance) thumbed an old copy of a criminal law text book and lighted upon this offence. Upon which the idea was spun out to Mr. Plod who, one strongly suspects, failed to take any or any adequate advice on the chances of a conviction for an offence that is occasionally used (I recall a police officer being potted for it not so long ago after he was found to have been using his Police Car for his bonking hobby) but is really quite esoteric.

'Misconduct in a public office' was held in Bembridge (1783) 3 Doug. 327 to be an offence at Common Law whereby ' a man accepting an office of trust concerning the public is answerable criminally to the King for misbehaviour in his office.....by whomever and in whatever way the officer is appointed' (per Lord Mansfield LCJ). Now one can see that on paper the act of leaking confidential documents might fall within the ambit of this offence. But I do not believe for a nanosecond that any Jury would convict anyone of such an offence for the act of leaking documents which catalogue the government's deceit, dishonesty, disingenuousness and rank incompetence and which were received and used by an MP to expose the government's failings. If you doubt that, then listen to the reaction of the audience on Any Questions to Geoff Hoon (as I noted above). He could hardly get a word in edgeways as the audience howled its contempt and derision for his position. After that, pop down to the bottom of the garden for a chat with the fairies that live there.

Thus I am reasonably certain that the decision to pursue this offence has not been subjected to any sort of proper scrutiny by anyone who actually knows what they are doing. In failing to do so someone in high office has managed potentially to trash the careers of an astonishing number of other people in high places: the Speaker, The Serjeant-at-Arms, The Clerk of the Commons, the head of the counter-terrorism branch, the acting head of the Metropolitan Police, the chief civil servants of the Home Office and the Cabinet Office, The Home Secretary and even the Prime Minister himself.

What this tells me is that those involved in taking the decision to deploy the offence as the means by which to intimidate the opposition have not the slightest judgement whatsoever, as the fall out from the affair amply demonstrates.

The whole incident may well become, in years to come, an apt metaphor for the end of the Blair/Brown years. We have finally arrived at the predictable conclusion of a government which is deeply incompetent, riddled with dishonesty, has all the hallmarks of a tendency towards an antidemocratic impulse to bully the opposition, is paying the price of politicizing the Police and the Civil Service and which, rather than tell the British people the truth, reaches for a whole armoury of deeply unattractive weapons from the Blair-Brown-Mandelson-Campbell school of political gangsterism when it is caught out.

Much has been made of Mr. Speaker Lenthall's confrontation with Charles I during the last few days. Perhaps we might now remind ourselves of the words of one of his contemporaries when faced with a Parliament which had long passed its sell-by date. Thus Oliver Cromwell to the Rump Parliament on 20th. April 1653:

"You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately...Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!"

This was devastatingly deployed by Leo Amery during the vote of no confidence that toppled Chamberlain in May 1940, making the Prime Minister flinch, it is said. A modern Parliamentarian might now brush it off and use it once more to wound deeply the rotting cadaver that is the Brown Administration.

COMMENT THREAD