A muslim woman has been given a 26 week suspended sentence for murdering her newborn baby because she was worried about her family being dishonoured by her having a child out of wedlock.

Firstly … 26 weeks?  182 days for murdering a baby, going out with her family and then burying it in a garden.  Not just a paltry 26 weeks for murdering a baby, but a suspended sentence – she won’t even go to prison!  It’s obscene and a miscarriage of justice.  She put her family’s standing in the muslim “community” ahead of the life of her own baby and the baby died.  She should be punished properly for murder, not given tea and sympathy and let off with a slapped wrist.  A baby was killed for fuck’s sake and she’s walking around with nothing but an ASBO tag on her ankle (if that) by way of punishment.

The criminal justice system in England is an absolute joke.  A woman gets away with murdering a baby because it’s cultural.  Labour’s Lord Ahmed was convicted of causing death by dangerous driving and not only kept his peerage and party membership, but served less half of his outrageously low 12 week prison sentence and looks set to get away relatively lightly with allegedly putting a $10m bounty on the head of Barack Obama and George Bush at a public meeting in Pakistan.  A man was jailed for 70 days for burning a copy of the koran in April last year, a week after a muslim was given a £50 fine for burning poppies outside the Albert Hall on Remembrance Day and shouting “British soldiers burn in hell”.  There is very little justice in the justice system.

Back in January I had a hearing aid fitted after getting fed up of Mrs Sane complaining about me not being able to hear her finally going to get my hearing tested.

The difference it made was astounding – I hadn’t realised how bad my hearing had got. But it did leave me a bit lopsided hearing-wise because the hearing in both my ears is pretty crap, albeit worse on one side than the other.

So I went back to the hospital a week and a bit ago to get a second hearing aid to balance things up and get the T-Loop added to the one I’d already got because it never occurred to me when I said I wouldn’t need to use it how I would use the phone at work!

The second hearing aid isn’t turned up as loud as the first one because my hearing isn’t as bad in the other ear but I can hear at the same volume in both ears and I can tell where sound is coming from again. The T-Loop is also a great invention – I first tried it in the local Co-op and it was pretty amazing to walk up to the counter and be greeted with no sound other than the voice of the girl behind the till.

My desk phone at work has an induction loop in the handset which means I can hear everything loud and clear through the loop in my hearing aid. Sadly my work mobile (HTC Wildfire S) doesn’t work with the loop but I’m sure they’ll replace it with one that does. My HTC Desire worked with it once but I think the amount of times I dropped it must have broken the loop. Luckily it was due for upgrade so the very helpful people at the Three shop in Telford helped me find a new phone that works with my hearing aids, letting me try out lots of different phones until I found the best sound quality (Sony Xperia S).

There are a couple of big problems using mobile phones with hearing aids. The main one is trying to use a phone without a loop – I don’t have those jelly moulds you see on old peoples’ hearing aids, I have a “tulip” end on my hearing aid which disappears into my ear and is barely visible. It also blocks my ear and if your ear is blocked you can’t hear properly (or less properly than usual). Using a phone without a loop means removing my hearing aid and turning the volume up which is hardly convenient.

The other big problem is using a phone with a poor quality loop. They produce lots of noise – so much noise that it’s hard to make out what’s being said at the other end. The Xperia is great with the loop, giving a really clear sound quality as long as the Wi-Fi is turned off otherwise it can be a bit noisy. The new HTC One was OK but not great.

It’s not easy getting used to hearing aids but it’s worth the effort. Itchy ears are a particularly annoying problem, especially if you’ve got sausage fingers like me that just won’t fit down your ear hole! I find that regular cleaning with a baby wipe helps but sometimes you’ve just got to ignore everything that was drummed into you as a child about not sticking things in your ear and have a good scratch with something blunt.

Another annoying problem for me (and I suspect this will only affect you if your hearing aid is amplifying higher pitched sounds) is what beeping things like the microwave, the oven timer, alarms on TV programmes and the chime on clocks do to the hearing aids. Apart from being very loud, it makes the sound distorted and tinny on the hearing aid for a good 30 seconds after it’s stopped, like it’s been overloaded and it needs to sort itself out. And I can’t even begin to describe what a fork scraping on a plate sounds like.

Despite the little annoyances, getting these hearing aids has been a really positive thing. They’re so discrete that most people don’t even notice them. It doesn’t help me to hear in really noisy places like a hall full of chattering people or a train station but in most situations it’s made a real improvement. I don’t know how fast my hearing is deteriorating – I guess we’ll find out next time I have a hearing test – but I can already sign a bit so I’m well prepared!

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands.

It was marked here by remembrance services and in Argentina by sabre rattling speeches by politicians pledging to uphold their illegitimate claim to the islands.

Cast Iron Dave has given a Cast Iron Guarantee™ to uphold the right of Falkland Islanders to decide whether they want to belong to the UK or Argentina – a promise he’s going to struggle to keep now that we’ve decommissioned our last aircraft carrier and we’re reliant on the French for military support.

The closest friendly country (if you can call it friendly) to the Falklands is French Guiana.  The closest British Overseas Territory is the Pitcairn Islands which has no facilities that could be used for a military excursion.  The closest friendly countries capable of being used as a launchpad for military action are South Africa and New Zealand.  Our closest military base is 2,400 away at Tristan da Cunha.  The US is siding with Argentina, as is most of South America.

A spangly new destroyer, HMS Dauntless, is on its way to the Falklands and defences on the islands have been bolstered but that won’t stop the continued harassment of Falkland Islanders in non-military ways: threats of legal action against companies doing business in the Falklands, banning Falklands flagged boats from ports and enlisting the help of their neighbours to harass the islanders.

Of course we should defend the right of the Falkland Islanders to choose whether they want to remain a British Overseas Territory or not and everyone has the right to live without harassment or fear but if we are going to make a promise to the Falkland Islanders to protect them then we need to be able to back up that promise with some action.  Right now we’re not in a position to do that thanks to the criminally irresponsible behaviour of successive British governments who have run down our military and over-extended our forces fighting illegal and unwinnable wars.

People are panic buying fuel because tanker drivers said they might want to go on strike and because a couple of idiot British government ministers told people first to stockpile fuel at home in jerry cans (which is illegal) and then not to stockpile in jerry cans but to just buy double what you normally would.  Cretins.

So what’s are the tanker drivers complaining about?  Let’s look at the list of demands sent to the British Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Ed Davey, by the Unite union.  They are demanding minimum standards in …

Health & safety procedures, practices and processes.  Seems fair enough to me if there is a shortfall in what is legally required.  Is there?  A quick Google search to try and find out how many tanker drivers have been killed in the UK returned only one relevant result which was an undated Daily Mail article about a tanker driver crashing off a motorway bridge.  But who knows?  There might be lots of unreported incidents so yep, let’s have a minimum standard of safety for drivers.

Independently accredited training.  Not quite sure what this would achieve to be honest.  Does it matter whether the person telling you how to drive a tanker safely or how to load and unload your truck works for your employer or another company?  Obviously it matters to your employer because paying someone else to do what you can do yourself will cost money but will it actually give the driver anything they haven’t already got except for, perhaps, a qualification they can use to get a job at another company to avoid having to do the training again?

Portable sector pensions.  Is there such a thing outside of the civil service?  This is a company pension that you could transfer from company to company as you move around employers thanks to the aforementioned “independently accredited training” without losing benefits or contributions.  Good for the drivers but not good for employers who will have their hands tied when it comes to offering benefits to employees.

Rates of pay, hours of work and working/holiday/sickness/redundancy arrangements.  Hold on a minute.  There’s a minimum wage, a legal limit on the number of hours you can work, a legal right to holidays, a legal right to sick pay and many, many laws around redundancy.  Do tanker drivers need more rights than they and the rest of the population already have?  Do we really need a separate minimum wage for tanker drivers?  Who’s next?  Who will decide what an acceptable rate of pay is for each job?

Equal opportunities.  A quick Google search for information about racism in the tanker drive industry returned only one apparently relevant result which was for a recent blog entry on Liberal Conspiracy that has been taken down shortly after publication.  A search for plain old discrimination in the industry returned nothing of relevance.  That doesn’t mean that there is no discrimination in the industry of course but equal opportunities is something that should be a given.  I’m not sure tanker drivers need any more protection than the law already affords to them and everyone else in the country though.

Grievance and disciplinary procedures.  Again, there are many laws around grievance and disciplinary procedures and everyone has the right to independent representation and the use of a conciliation such as ACAS to resolve disputes.  Do tanker drivers need more rights than they and the rest of us already have?

Trade union facilities.  And there we have the real motivation behind the threat of strikes and list of demands.  How many tanker drivers are genuinely demanding better facilities for trade unions at the expense of their employers?  ”Facilities” presumably includes more pilgrims – union officials paid by their employer to work for their union rather than do the job they were employed for – which is more about saving the unions money than bettering the rights of workers.

These threatened strikes are part of the unions’ war against non-Labour government.  They were behind the student protests, they’re behind the “anti-cuts” protests and they’re behind this one.  They are open about their motivation: they want the Tories out and their Labour poodles back in.

I hope the union agitators are prosecuted under the “anti-terrorism” laws their Labour government brought in and sacked.

An important case was heard today in the High Court from a sufferer of a debilitating disease who wanted the right to choose when and how we was going to die and to have a doctor euthanise him.

It’s important because legal challenges of this sort are usually brought by people capable of taking their own lives who want to protect their loved ones from prosecution for facilitating their suicide whereas in this case the person in this case, whilst mentally sound and able to communicate his wishes, is physically incapable of taking his own life without intervention.  What he is asking for is the right to choose the time that he wants to die and to ask someone to administer a lethal drug overdose.

The whole subject of assisted suicide or assisted dying is an emotive one and no answer will ever satisfy everyone but there are some very important principals at stake, primary of which is who actually owns your body.  Whilst the state can deprive you of your possessions and your liberty, the one thing which is entirely yours and nobody else’s is your body.  So why does the state presume to have the right to decide what you can and can’t do with your body if you are of sound mind?

Another important principle is that of free will.  If a person decides to end their life they may legally do so (yes, it required an Act of Parliament to decriminalise suicide – feel free to have a WTF moment) but only if they end it themselves.  If a person decides to end their life by having someone else pull the trigger, administer the dose or whichever method they choose then that is a criminal offence.  That person has made the choice to end their life and chosen a method of doing it – why does it matter if they are the one holding the gun or the syringe or if they’ve got someone to do it for them?  If you induce someone to carry out an illegal act you are guilty of that illegal act yourself so why is inducing someone to carry out an act that is legal for you to do illegal?

Tony Nicklinson is arguing that under the Human Rights Act, his right to life also includes the right to end it.  The Ministry of Injustice is arguing that assisted dying is murder and if the courts rule otherwise they are changing the law and that is for Parliament to do, not the courts.  The Ministry of Injustice is arguing against something that isn’t happening.  Parliament makes law and the courts interpret it.  Whether their interpretation is what was intended when a law was drafted or what Parliament wants is a moot point, it is how they interpret the law that counts.  If they interpret the right to life in the Human Rights Act as the right not just to have a life but to own your own life then that is the law – not a change in the law but a ruling as to what the law actually means.  It doesn’t matter that Parliament didn’t intend that to be the case, that’s their fault for making a law that doesn’t actually say what they meant it to say.

Terry Pratchett’s documentary on assisted suicide just over a year ago had quite a profound effect on me.  I had long been of the opinion that if someone wanted to die then they should be allowed to do so and that if I was in the position where I had no quality of life I would want someone to do the honourable thing and put me out of my misery but I hadn’t actually seen someone take their own life in that way, nor had I really thought about how it would feel to be in that position.  It took a couple of days for me to really think it through and come out unequivocally on the side of assisted suicide and assisted dying being right.  I do think it is right and that’s my considered opinion having seen the really quite disturbing suicide of Craig Ewert and imagining myself in his place.

There are many moral and ethical arguments for and against assisted suicide and assisted dying but ultimately it boils down to your right to personal self determination.  We can smoke and drink ourselves to death, we can put our lives in daily danger through extreme sports or high risk jobs like bomb disposal, we can gorge ourselves on fatal quantities of unhealthy food but we can’t choose to take our own lives peacefully and on our own terms at a time and place of our choosing?  For me that’s just wrong and I wish Tony Nicklinson the best of luck in his appeal.

Last year the BBC moved filming of Casualty from Bristol, where the programme is based, to Cardiff.

Since moving to Wales, most of the extras are now Welsh – presumably recruited from the local population.  We now have the ludicrous situation where, if you watch Casualty, you would be led to believe that most people in Bristol are Welsh.

When the filming of Dr Who was moved to the same studios in Cardiff, the Doctor suddenly found himself talking to an awful lot of Welsh people and spending a lot of time in Welsh towns and villages.  No doubt the new series of Upstairs Downstairs that is being filmed there will be based in a London full of Welsh people as well.

The BBC’s desperation to spread the British brand through the “nations and regions” has ruined one of its flagship programmes and frankly, I couldn’t care less if I never see Casualty again.

The British government’s Science and Technology Committee yesterday said that the Met Office needs to spend lots of money on new supercomputers to enable them to more accurately predict the weather 5 days in advance.

Despite being one of the top three weather prediction services in the world, the Met Office struggles to predict tomorrow’s weather.  Only a couple of weeks ago they predicted several inches of snow overnight and we got nothing at all.  The other day they predicted no snow at all and we had snow.  How often have you watched the weather forecast, gone on a day trip and been caught in a deluge despite the Met Office predicting a glorious day?

People have very little faith in the Met Office’s ability to predict the weather and rightly so.  The media are slowly turning away from the Met Office because of their poor track record and turning to alternative providers.  According to Chaos Theory it should be possible to predict the weather from any event – a butterfly flapping its wings in China can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world, it’s all cause and effect.  The computing power required to calculate an accurate weather prediction based on the small amount of data available is phenomenal though and it’s never going to be possible to get a completely accurate forecast.

With enough technology and accurate data, it would be possible for the Met Office to produce weather forecasts with an acceptable margin of error.  But the technology doesn’t exist yet, the data isn’t accurate enough and the costs involved in developing the technology required would be prohibitive.

All of this raises an important point: the Met Office, by its own admission, can’t predict the weather 5 days in advance but they are one of the primary sources of data for the British government’s global warming tax scams.  It’s hard to believe that the British government would employ fund managers to manage UK Plc’s investments if they had a track record of losing more money than they made or economists at the Treasury who’ve consistently been unable to budget more than a week in advance so why do they employ the Met Office, who can’t predict tomorrow’s weather with more than 70% accuracy, to tell them what the weather is going to be like in 10 years’ time?

How many times have you been told “it won’t snow, it’s too cold”?  Hundreds I expect but has it ever occurred to you how it manages to snow in Antarctica where the temperature never goes above freezing point, even at the coast?

There is only one temperature where it is too cold to snow and that’s -237°C, the temperature at which atoms freeze.  The colder it gets the less likely it is to snow but it can snow, theoretically, at as high as +8ºC.

Too cold to snow?

Thanks to the wonders of medical science and an uncharacteristically prompt service from the NHS, I can now hear properly out of my right ear.

Whut?

Mrs Sane has nagged me for a long time about my bad hearing so a few months ago I went to see my GP about it.  A nice student doctor asked me some questions, stuck a tuning fork behind my ear and referred me to an ENT consultant.

A week before Christmas I went to the hospital and had a hearing test which showed a bit of a dip in the mid range which is where human speech is and it drops right off at the high range which is things like running water, rustling paper, birds, etc.  The consultant shoved a camera up my nose to see whether there were any blockages up there that might be causing the problem (not a pleasant experience and there was nothing wrong up my nose) and then pronounced that I needed a hearing aid, an MRI and they would send for me shortly.

I was expecting a 6 month wait at least but was pleasantly surprised to get an appointment for a month later for an MRI and then to be measured for a hearing aid the following day.  I was even more surprised to actually walk out with a hearing aid on the day, expecting to have to wait months for one to be ordered or for someone to die so I could inherit theirs!

So that was a week ago today and what a difference it’s made.  I walked out of the hospital and the first thing that struck me was how loud the world is.  I could hear people talking, car doors slamming, birds singing – I really hadn’t realised how bad my hearing had got.  It does take some getting used to though.  Running water is particularly loud, especially the toilet flushing.  I’ve had to ask for a new keyboard at work because the clattering of the nice Dell keyboard I had was too loud and noisy places can be a bit overwhelming.

It’s well worth having though and if anyone is experiencing problems with their hearing I would definitely recommend going to get it checked out.  Saying it’s been life changing would be exaggerating a bit but it’s made a real, positive difference.  It’s a tiny thing and unless they’re looking for it, most people don’t even notice it’s there.  After a while I forget I’m wearing the hearing aid but when I take it out it sounds like I’ve got cotton wool stuffed in my ear.  Even after just a week, if I didn’t have it I’d really miss it.

So, I suppose it’s about time I blogged about the Scottish independence referendum as it’s been in the news for a week or so.

Basically, this is the story so far:

Alex Salmond has been dicking about for a few years saying they’re going to hold a referendum on Scottish independence but keeps putting it off because a) they won’t vote for independence and b) the longer he threatens it, the more he can screw out of the Brits at our expense.

Salmond knows that the Scots won’t vote for independence so he’s come up with a great wheeze: devolution max.  Devolution max is almost, but not quite, a confederation between Scotland and “Britain”.  The Scottish government would be almost on a par with the British government, Salmond and Cameron would meet each other as equals rather than provincial administrator and imperial overlord.

Cameron got fed up with Salmond dicking about and told him he’s got to have his referendum sooner rather than later and he can’t offer devolution max, just a yes/no to independence.  Salmond told the media London was dictating to Scotland; Cameron said he wasn’t dictating, he was merely telling the Scottish government what they can and can’t do in a dictatorial manner (I’ve paraphrased slightly).

At some point the British government decided that after years of indecision, an independence referendum held by the Scottish government would be illegal.  Nobody has offered an opinion as to what they would do if Salmond held his referendum and ended up as Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Scotland – the thing about a unilateral declaration of independence is that it’s, well, unilateral.  Salmond retaliated by saying he’d order the Scottish police not to man polling stations if the ballot papers didn’t have his options on them (yes, he can do that but technically the British Home Secretary trumps the Scottish First Minister which would make for an interesting pissing contest wouldn’t it?).

The brief posturing is over with no clear winner and now the two sides are setting out their stalls.  The Brits are making the case for the union to the Scots, humming Rule Britannia whilst Britishly tearfully extolling the British virtues of the British union and good old British Britishness in British Britain and British Scotland.  Some of them are suggesting wrecking manoeuvres such as giving people in England a vote on Scottish independence as well, although they seem to have gone quiet since Survation (an up-and-coming polling company with a very good record so far on political polls) found that more people in England want to see Scotland declare independence than Scots.

The Scottish nationalists are doing what they usually do – confusing England with “Britain”, throwing some random numbers on paper to show they’re subsidising England and … well, that’s about it but even so the Survation poll says that Salmond is quite comprehensively winning the “referendum war”.

Unsurprisingly and true to form for the Brits, virtually nobody is thinking about England in all this.  The Labour MP for Torfaen in Wales, Paul Murphy, has called for the balkanisation of England by resurrecting Prescott’s rejected local government reorganisation with regional assemblies but that’s about as far as it goes.  Other than that it’s been Scotland, Scotland, Scotland as if the future of the UK and the relationships between the member states in it are the exclusive domain of the Scots.

I don’t want a vote on Scottish independence because it’s Scotland’s business but if Scotland has a referendum then a referendum should also be held on English independence, Welsh independence and Northern Irish independence.  If the union is to continue then it should be because most of the people in all four member states want it to, not because 4 million voters in Scotland say so.

I would love to hear the British nationalists making the case for the union to England like they are for Scotland.  I would love to hear them explain why we should stay in a union where we have no voice, where £20bn of our taxes are taken from us on threat of imprisonment and given to the other three member states of the UK to spend on things that we can’t afford, where politicians elected in another country are allowed to introduce and vote on laws that only apply to England when they can’t even vote on the same things in the country they were elected in and where we are generally robbed, put upon and despised.  I’d love to hear them make the case for that union because right now all I’m hearing is Scotland, Scotland, Scotland when quite frankly I couldn’t give a damn whether they stay or go.

The celtic dog has been wagging the English tail for too long and it has to stop.  The British establishment is full of people who are, quite frankly, irrationally fanatical about Scotland.  They are 5m people (and falling), we are 51m and increasing.  They spend the money, we foot the bill.  They have an inferiority complex, we have to make ourselves subservient to them to make them feel better.  The obsession is with what the Scots want, forgetting that actually it’s England that would make or break the union.

So what’s the answer?  It’s quite simple …

Hold the referendum in Scotland with the three options – independence, current level of devolution or “devolution max”.  At the same time, hold a referendum in England, Wales and Northern Ireland offering the same choices (“current level of devolution” in England being what the Scots have now).  This will result in an English Parliament being created.  Take out the unconstitutional, unworkable English Votes on English Laws fudge (there’s no point trying to implement something that can’t work, it’s just wasting time and money) and support for devolution in England is overwhelming.  This may result in assymetry as it’s not guaranteed that all four member states of the UK will vote for devolution max (I’m thinking of NI here) but it would be through choice, not because the British government is prejudiced against one country.

This raises the spectre of one or more member states of the UK voting for independence.  Scotland is probably less likely to vote for independence than England despite the overt nationalism north of the border.  Of the four member states of the UK, only England pays its own way and only England would thrive outside of the union.  Despite the protestations of some Scots, they do extremely well out of the union whilst England does extremely badly out of it.  If one or more member states vote for independence then the British government should be prepared with a firm plan for a British confederation.  I won’t dwell on the virtues of a confederation, just follow the link.

The independence of one member state would raise some interesting challenges when it comes to the inheritance of treaties.  For instance, who would keep the UK’s seat on the UN Security Council?  If Scotland declared independence then “Britain” would probably still exist for a short time and once it fell apart, England would naturally be the successor state.  But if England declared independence and Scotland didn’t, “Britain” wouldn’t last any longer but Scotland would naturally be the successor state.  Salmond wants to demilitarise Scotland and on the international stage Scotland is a non-entity (“Scotland, isn’t that in England?” – you get the picture) – the UN isn’t going to have a bunch of whining skirt wearing with delusions of grandeur on the UN Security Council.

EU membership is another question that needs considering.  Scotland is the most europhile member state of the UK, it would probably want to remain a member.  The EU would want to keep England to pay the bills.  New countries joining the EU have to agree to join the €uro – Scotland might not be too fussed about joining the €uro but England?  It’s unthinkable.

What about the British Overseas Territories?  Who will inherit those?  If a confederation can successfully be created then problem solved.  If not, it’s open for negotiation – they may opt for independence, they may choose their own “protector” to pay fealty to.

The Vienna Convention on Succession of States in Respect of Treaties says that it’s basically up to succeeding states to decide who takes on what treaties with the assumption that if no agreement is made, all the treaties currently in force will apply to all successor states.  That means that the default position is that all member states of the UK declaring independence would remain members of the EU, UN, NATO and party to all the other treaties the UK has signed up to since 1978 unless they agree to divvy them up.  Contrary to what British politicians say, independence of any of the member states of the UK does not necessarily mean losing the memberships of international bodies the UK currently holds.

None of the perceived problems are insurmountable so what reason is there for the union to continue?  This is the case the British unionists have to make to all of us, not just the Scots and this is precisely what won’t happen.  The British are so obsessed with what the Scots want that they won’t see what’s happening under their noses until it’s too late.

You’d have thought the de-facto leader of a failing political party crippled with debt and haemorrhaging members would have better things to do with his time than Google my name every day to see what I’ve been doing and researching my past but apparently not.

Steve Uncles’ latest “exposé” on me is the startling revelation that I used to vote Lib Dem, once supported the English Democrats and didn’t support UKIP.

I’m quite open about my political past – it’s all over the internet and I’ve never tried to cover it up.  I voted Lib Dem when I was younger because I didn’t support Labour or the Tories.  I didn’t really know anything about the Lib Dems, I just voted for them because they weren’t one of the other two.  This is where the Lib Dems’ vote mainly comes from – the “None of the Above” vote.  In 1997 I voted Labour because Tony Blair seemed to me to be a nice enough bloke and because I wanted to make sure the Tories lost the election.  When I was a kid my parents did quite badly out of the Thatcher years so my view of the Tories was influenced by their loathing of Thatcher so I decided (like most of the country) that it was time for a change.

I’m a relatively recent convert to euroscepticism as it happens.  In 2005 when I wrote the blog post the racist-loving terrorist-appeaser has quoted (yes, he’s that desperate to dig up some dirt he’s gone back 7 years … and still not found any) I was marginally pro-EU.  I thought a single currency was a good idea (some of the arguments for it are still valid such as saving companies from currency charges) and I thought that on balance the EU was a good thing for the country.

Just like supporting the English Democrats, my support of the EU was a product of the naivety of youth and a lack of real information about what I was supporting.  Over time, I came to realise that the EU was an affront to democracy, an undemocratic, corrupt organisation hell-bent on destroying my country.  I realised that voting for someone you don’t want to get rid of someone else you don’t want is a waste of a vote and only ends up with you getting someone you don’t want.  Over time I also came to realise that the English Democrats were not the party for me and that Steve Uncles in particular was not somebody I wanted to be associated with.  When I turned down his offer of setting up a branch of the English Democrats in Telford, help with elections and funding many years ago I knew I had made the right decision – I instantly became an enemy of England and this barely-sentient knuckledragger has made it his mission to harass me ever since.

Do not approach this stalker, he has serious delusions of adequacy and if excited may attempt to engage you in barely coherent and slurred conversation

Even when I first started supporting UKIP I said that I wouldn’t want a UKIP government, just enough UKIP MPs to set the agenda.  I make no secret of that either, it wouldn’t take a genius to go on Google and find places where I’ve said that on the internet – after all, Steve Uncles can manage to turn up something I said 7 years ago so any creature with opposable thumbs should be able to do it.  Just like I changed my opinion of the EU and the English Democrats, I changed my mind about a UKIP government and I can’t imagine a party that would make a better job of running the country.

As for the aforementioned Garry Bushell – he lost that election but he also came to see the English Democrats for what they are and declared his support for UKIP.

I know why fat boy (as he’s known to his colleagues) stalks me – it’s because I refuse to cave in to his threats, intimidation, libel and harassment.  What I don’t understand is what he thinks he will achieve from it.  I don’t read the English Pisspot libel factory unless someone tells me that he’s obsessing over me again and everyone that reads what he writes just thinks he’s a cock and let’s be honest, they’re not far wide of the mark are they?  He cosies up to BNP racists, tried to do a deal with Sinn Féin terrorists, makes jokes about suicide victims and abuses and threatens anyone who stands up to him.

Still, he does serve a purpose: no matter how bad you think things are, you can always take comfort from the fact that you’re not Steve Uncles.

An out-of-work university graduate was forced last year by her local Jobcentre to stop volunteering at a museum and do a voluntary work placement at Poundland to keep her unemployment benefits.

When challenged about this, the DWP which administers unemployment benefits said:

Yep, I get that.  But surely better work experience for someone looking for a career in a museum is working in a museum?  Like the museum she was already working in you cretins!

And here was me thinking the slave trade had been abolished.

Tarmac your drive? Terty grand.

Shropshire Council is spending a million pounds on 22 new pitches for travellers.

A million quid!  For 22 pitches!  That’s 45 and a half grand per pitch!  Multiple exclamation marks!  They’re a sign of a diseased mind!

Let’s see how much value for money Shropshire Council are getting …

How much would a 56 acre caravan site with a fully-stocked 21 acre fishing lake with planning permission for 79 static caravans, 58 already sited, multiple out-buildings and planning permission to convert 3 holiday cottages set you back do you think?  Going on Shropshire Council’s figures, that’s £3.59m just for the pitches without taking into account the out buildings but no, it’s available for a mere £1.5m.

What about a 10.5 acre caravan site with 80 pitches and 135 storage bays?  That’s £97.8m at the £45.5k a pitch Shropshire council are paying but amazingly the owners only want £800k for it.

How on earth can Shropshire Council justify spending £1m on 22 pitches for travellers when that sort of money can buy you a fully developed, profitable caravan site with four times the number of pitches and facilities already built?

We must cleanse the streets of the racialist taxi drivers!

I don’t know whether to despise Diane Abbott just that little bit more or whether to pity her for her evident stupidity.

Not content with insulting one fifth of the world’s population, she’s also said that taxi drivers are racist!

A spokesman for the Licensed Taxi Drivers Association, Steve McNamara, said:

You can always rely on a cabbie to tell it how it is and I would so love to see her flag down a black cab and be told to get stuffed!

Meanwhile, the bungling idiot Ed Dave Ed … whichever one it is … Milliband had an unfortunate Freudian slip on Twitter earlier:

Diane Abbott MP, well known for her snide racist remarks, has finally stepped over the line saying that “white people love playing divide and rule”.

Abbott has tried backtracking after being outed as a racist, saying the comments were taken out of context but if you read the exchange of tweets that the comment is part of, she clearly believes it’s “us and them” and that black people should close ranks.

Taken in context, the comment is even worse.  The Labour Party is institutionally racist, I have said this before.  They are prejudiced against the English and now one of their MPs has openly made racist remarks about white people on Twitter.  Perhaps we need an inquiry into the institutional racism in the Labour Party?

Bim Adewunmi actually makes a bloody good point which will sadly be lost in the furore over Abbott’s racism which is a shame.  I find it extremely irritating when the media, politicians and police talk about “the black community” and “black community leaders”.  Have you ever heard the term “the white community” or “white community leaders”?

Abbott is a racist, I hope she gets hung out to dry and deselected.  We have enough problems with racism in this country already without racist politicians making it worse.

Three weeks ago we submitted a Freedom of Information Request for a copy of the EU treaty that David Cameron was supposed to have vetoed.

The Foreign & Commonwealth Office have responded today with the following:

The latest Stephen Lawrence case has finished and his murderers are going to be sentenced shortly.  Great, let’s get this over and done with and get it out of the news.

Still no National White Police Association?

It is because of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry that an accusation of racism when committing a crime automatically makes that crime worse than if it was committed against a white person.  It is because of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry that the police have to consult “the community” if they want to do anything that specifically targets members of an ethnic minority – even if that something is a terrorist raid.  It is because of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry that black police officers have special status and are fast-tracked for promotions to fill diversity quotas.  It is because of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry that police are criticised for stop and search statistics that show them disproportionately targeting black people despite said statistics proving that black people commit a disproportionate number of crimes.

The two people who murdered Stephen Lawrence were wrong and committed the ultimate crime but why is there this fixation on it being racially motivated?  So what if they killed him because he was black?  If they’d killed him because he was short or because he had brown eyes then it would have just been a “normal” murder, their prejudice against short people or people with brown eyes wouldn’t have even been mentioned or if it was mentioned it would probably only be to prove that they were mentally ill.  Murder is murder, it is the worst crime you can commit and it doesn’t matter whether your motivation is the victim’s colour, religion, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality or any other prejudice – it’s just murder.

I’ve no doubt that racism existed in the police before the Stephen Lawrence inquiry and I have no doubt that it will continue to exist long after I’ve shuffled off the mortal coil.  The Stephen Lawrence inquiry undoubtedly did some good in tackling it but it’s done a lot of harm as well.  It’s put ethnic minorities on a pedestal where the law is concerned and the police spend an inordinate amount of time pandering to over-sensitive “community leaders”.  The special treatment ethnic minorities get at the hands of the police does nothing to promote community cohesion, it just causes more racial tension.

The pair got minimum sentences of 15 years, 2 months and 14 years, 3 months.  The judge sentencing them said that he was handing down long sentences because it was a racist crime despite the fact that they were supposed to be sentenced as if they were teenagers (which they were when the murder was committed) and under the guidelines in place at the time which didn’t impose extra punishments for racially-motivated crimes.

Thirteen years ago, before the Stephen Lawrence inquiry published its findings, everyone was equal before the law regardless of their race, colour or ethnicity.  This is no longer the case and that isn’t a positive thing.  If a crime is committed against me then it’s not right that the same crime committed against someone else with different colour skin to me is automatically considered worse and the perpetrator more severely punished if they did it because of the colour of that person’s skin.

The British government’s Christmas gift to the English this year was minimum pricing on alcohol, a tax that will penalise the millions of occasional drinkers who cause absolutely no problems whatsoever and the off-licences who are already struggling to make a living in the face of stuff competition from supermarkets.

The Calais booze cruise is part of life in the south east of England where you can catch the ferry over the channel for a few quid and bring back a boot load of cheap booze from a hypermarché for half what it would cost to buy it here.  Elsewhere in England coach companies run organised booze cruises and groups of people get together to share transport costs for their own booze cruises.

Booze cruise costs are prohibitive for a lot of people but what if your booze “cruise” was a drive across the Welsh or Scottish border where minimum pricing won’t apply?  It would only cost me about a tenner to drive to the Welsh border and back where I could buy cheap booze that isn’t subject to the British alcohol unit tax.  My annual alcohol consumption is roughly what your average binge drinking teenager would consume in a weekend and Mrs Sane drinks infrequently so a boot load of cheap Welsh booze would last us a year.  What incentive would there be for me to buy booze from a local supermarket or off licence?

Retailers in the south east are already losing out because of British taxes on alcohol and tobacco and they’re increasingly losing out from people travelling to France and Belgium to fill up their lorries, vans and even cars with diesel which is currently about 15% cheaper than in England.  Naturally it’s the English that lose out most from repressive British taxes due to our colonial status but not exclusively so.  The Northern Irish border is dotted with petrol stations on the Irish Republic side of the border reaping the benefits of low fuel duty which of course costs Northern Irish retailers on the border a great deal of money.  The Northern Irish do have the pay-off of cross-border trade the other way as food and clothes are cheaper in Northern Ireland so they are in a slightly better position than England.

All four home nations lose out because of the misguided big state, high tax policies of the British government under any of the LibLabCon parties but the English disproportionately so because we’re under the direct rule of a fundamentally anglophobic British government.  The sooner we take control of our own affairs from the British the better.