Archive for January 2007

Happy Birthday to me

I’d just like to say thank you to Lord Levy and the Metropolitan Police for the lovely birthday present I had this morning when I turned on BBC1.

I am referring, of course, to the arrest of King Tony’s mate Lord Levy in the cash for peerages investigation.

Lord Levy – whose job with the Labour Party is to attract big donations – has already been arrested and interviewed over his involvement in the major Labour donors who were (allegedly) offered peerages in return for their donations.  This time he’s been arrested for (allegedly) perverting the course of justice in relation to the cash for peerages investigation.

The police are getting closer to Bliar every time they arrest somebody.  The only question now is whether he will become the first serving prime minister to be charged or if he’ll resign first.

Shropshire Star: Debunking the myths peddled about EU

It seems that I’ve upset one of my MEP’s.  Conservative MEP, Phillip Bushill-Matthews, is a rampant eurofederalist who seems to have taken exception to my accusing anyone who supports the Europen Federation of treachery.

Debunking the myths peddled about EU

Stuart Parr (Star, January 11) claims I “peddle the myth that the EU cannot impose legislation upon us”.

I did not become an elected MEP in order to peddle myths. Neither did I expect to have to spend so much time debunking the myths peddled by others.

The fact is that role of the European Commission is to prepare legislative proposals that would translate into law what member states have signed up to in treaties.

For example, member states asked the Commission for proposals to halve road deaths within the EU.

The directive Stuart Parr refers to, that road vehicles should use dipped head lights at all times, stems directly from this request.

It will only become law if member states and the European Parliament agree it. The Commission has no powers and no votes.

To add that the EU is the cause of the merger of the RSH and PRH by “imposed” regional government on the UK is moving even further into fantasy.

The regional government agenda in the UK has been driven entirely by John Prescott. The test-bed for his theories was the north east, where he confidently expected the locals to vote for it. Happily they had more sense.

Finally, he suggests that those supporting EU ,mem bership are committing treason. The Tower of Lon don would need to be expanded to llt us all in.

Others suggest that the people who should be locked up are those who distort the truth and describe their deceptions as fact through the letters columns of regional newspapers — but I could not possibly comment.

Philip Bushill-Matthews
MEP, Brussels

Is the Home Office jinxed?

Is it actually possible for every Labour Home Secretary since 1997 to have been utterly incompetent or is there some gipsy curse on the Home Office?

Jack Straw was responsible for some decidedly illiberal laws and allowing General Pinochet to return to Chile without standing trial for human rights abuses and was expected to be demoted in 2001 but was instead rewarded for his incompetence with a sideways move to the Foreign Office.

David Blunkett talked about curbing immigration and cracking down on bogus asylum seekers in public but in reality the Home Office was waving through thousands of asylum claims with only basic checks carried out on their claims.  He resigned after interfering in the visa application of his girlfriend’s nanny to speed the process up.

Charles Clarke, aka the Sweaty Baboon, was utterly, utterly incompetent and deeply unpopular.  He was responsible for pushing through the ID Cards legislation, for trying to merge English police forces and for trying to give the state the power to detain people without charge for 3 months wiping out one of the main protections afforded to citizens by the Magna Carta.  He was eventually sacked for losing prisoners and terrorist suspects.

The current Home Secretary, Scottish MP John Reid, has presided over endless Home Office scandals – inmates walking out of open prisons, prisons full to overflowing, rapists spared prison because there’s no room, foreign criminals walking the streets.  The latest scandal to hit the Home Office is the announcement that 147 convicted drug traffickers who were given travel banning orders never had the orders enforced leaving them free to go about their business.

Surely even Labour can’t produce a succession of incompetent ministers for the Home Office over a period of 10 years.

Britishness lessons in English schools

A report for the Department of Education has concluded that English schools should put more emphasis on a British identity in lessons.

Citizenship lessons are now compulsary for secondary school pupils but the report says that not enough emphasis is placed on Britishness and Gordon Brown’s mysterious values than bind us all together.

Education is devolved in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland so the Britishness lessons will only apply to England.

The “British” identity is virtually extinct in Scotland where most people consider themselves Scottish yet pupils there will continue to be taught that they are Scottish and their lessons will continue to focus on Scottish history and Scottish culture.

My kids are English and I won’t allow them to be told that that’s wrong.

Petition the PM: Abolish regional quangos

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/regionalquangos/ 

England is infested with undemocratic, unaccountable regional quango’s. These include regional assemblies, regional development agencies, regional observatories and the new city regions.

None of these quango’s are elected and none of them answer to the public yet they cost the taxpayer billions of pounds.

This whole tier of unwanted regional government should be abolished and the powers and responsibilites they have given back to our elected local councils.

Whose right is right?

The British government is trying to pass a law preventing any form of discrimination.  The Catholic Church, which believes homosexuality is a sin, is opposed to the new law because it will make it illegal for their adoption agencies to refuse tp place a child with a homosexual couple.  In light of this the Catholic Church is threatening to close their adoption agencies unless they’re given special dispensation.

I don’t believe in any religion and I don’t believe that religion should play any part in the legislative process.  However, when it comes down to it, this isn’t about religion.

The British government thinks that it can legislate to prevent prejudice but it can’t.  Passing a law banning discrimination against homosexuals, ethnic minorities, women or little green aliens from Mars doesn’t change opinions.  If someone doesn’t like homosexuals or thinks that homosexuality is wrong then you can’t pass a law to make them think differently.

What this boils down to is whose right is right.  If you believe – as the British government does – that homosexuals have a right to adopt children then that infringes the right of a Catholic adoption agency to believe that it is wrong for homosexuals to adopt children.  Catholics have a right to their opinion, homosexuals have a right to theirs.  The British government has committed itself now – it has to decide whose rights are more important and in the process faces a rift in the cabinet.  Both Ruth Kelly and Cherie Bliar are members of Opus Dei, a fundamentalist catholic sect – that should make Sunday lunch interesting.

Home Office Split

It looks like the Home Office is going to be split in two creating a Justice Ministry headed up by Charlie Falconer, the unelected Lord Chancellor.

It has been hypothesised that the proposed changes to the Home Office are a ruse to take the heat off the cash for peerages investigation after one of Bliar’s bitches got her collar felt by the Metropolitan Police in the early hours of Friday and the subsequent complaint by the police over undue pressure from ministers.

It is really quite disturbing that the minister heading up the department responsible for prisons and probation would be an unelected Scottish Labour stooge.  It’s bad enough that Falconer is in charge of the Department for Constitutional Affairs when he has no mandate from the electorate to hold any position in government.

The Home Office is, of course, a large department and appears to be too much for one minister to keep control of.  However, the Home Secretary is one of the four most powerful positions in the cabinet behind the Lord Chancellor, Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer.  Breaking up the Home Office will reduce the influence of the Home Secretary which means that the cabinet is under the control of the three stooges – Bliar, Falconer and Brown.

EDM670: English Parliament

Frank Field MP has launched Early Day Motion 670 calling for an English Parliament.

That this House notes that those polls that have questioned the English report a clear majority in favour of an English parliament; and further notes that it is this issue, and not Scottish independence or even House of Lords reform, that is the issue that voters now put at the top of their priorities for constitutional reform.

Write to your MP and ask them to sign EDM670.

Scottish Accounts Commission Hypocrisy

The Scottish Accounts Commission, an agency of the Scottish Executive, has told the Shetland Islands Council that it must do more to live within its means and start spending only what money it raises.

Does this mean that every council in Scotland is going to be told to only spend what it raises?  Currently, Scotland has a budget deficit of £11.3bn which is plugged by a subsidy from the English taxpayer via the Barnett Formula.

I’ve just sent the following to the Accounts Commission:

Hi,

I read the story that the Shetland Islands Council has been told it must only spend what money it raises and found it most encouraging.

Do you have any idea when you are likely to tell the other councils in Scotland that they must also do the same, thereby relieving the English taxpayer of the £11.3bn burden of the Scottish budget deficit?

Ministry of Deference

It was announced the other day that RAF Cosford has lost its bid to keep the DARA (Defence Aviation Repair Agency) training centre to RAF St Athan in South Wales.

It has been mentioned that the winning consortium contains QinetiQ (formerly DERA – Defence Evaluation and Research Agency) which is 21% owned by the British government and it has been suggested that this may have influenced the decision.

However, what hasn’t been mentioned is that around 18 months ago, RAF Cosford was told that it was not allowed any public money to refurbish facilities but RAF St Athan was given £184m of public money by the Welsh Assembly to build the super hanger which clinched the deal for St Athan.

Bearing in mind that Wales is running at a multi-billion pound budget deficit which is plugged with English taxes, this means that effectively English taxes have paid for the facilities that have enabled St Athan to take the business off RAF Cosford.

St Georges Day petition

The Prime Ministers petitions website has a petition for St Georges Day to be made a public holiday.

The petition is here.

Apology from Rural Payments Agency

The former boss of the Rural Payments Agency has apologised for the agency’s shambolic administration of the payment of farming subsidies.

Thanks to the RPA’s inability do their job, countless farmers were forced to sell their farms or go bankrupt.  The whole cock-up cost English farmers an estimated £21m but only affected Welsh and Scottish farmers who also farmed in England as the administration of farming subsidies is handled by agencies of their devolved governments under a different scheme to England.

Unfortunately, apologies don’t pay the bills and this apology is too little too late.

Was it worth it?

The head of communications at Shropshire County Council has been suspended from his job pending an investigation for trying to cheat a BBC poll.

The county council is trying to promote the establishment of a unitary authority covering the whole county of Shropshire (excluding Telford & Wrekin) – regionalisation by another name – but has been faced with overwhelming opposition from the outset from both members of the public and some district councils in the county.

The BBC had a poll on their website asking if Shropshire should get a unitary authority following a BBC Politics Show on the subject last Sunday.  Paul Masterman, the head of communications at Shropshire County Council, decided to send an email to all employees telling them how to cheat the poll so they could vote more than once.

The email was leaked to the BBC, the poll was closed and Mr Masterman has been suspended.  The best bit of it is, though, despite the cheating by the council the poll still showed only 32% support for the proposals!

BBC say the “E” word

The BBC have been uncharacteristically keen on discussing the break-up of the union, nationalism and they even seem to have rediscovered the “E” word (England).

A BBC-commissioned poll showed that 61% of people were in favour of the establishment of an English Parliament.  This is despite the BBC weighting the Scottish and Welsh contribution to the poll so that they made up around 3/5ths of the people asked.  Old habits die hard I guess.

This mornings BBC News carried the story every half an hour, BBC Radio 5 also had a phone-in on the subject and even good old BBC Radio Shropshire were in on the act interviewing Edward Higginbottom, the Shropshire Branch co-ordinator for the CEP.

Newsnight will tonight be welcoming Scilla Cullen and Christine Constable, the chairwomen of the CEP and the English Democrats respectively, onto the panel where they will get a chance to lock heads with Charlie Falconer.

Hain tells Welsh to protect union

Anglophobic bigot, Peter Hain, has followed the Tartan Taxman by warning that the union is being attacked by the Tories and nationalists.

He tells the Welsh that “the contribution of Wales to the industrial development of Britain was enormous, helping to create prosperity and to turn us into a world power.  In return, Wales has long benefited from support from the Treasury, with Welsh public spending almost £1,000 per head higher than in England.”

He repeated the Ignorant Jock‘s claim that nationalists and the Tories were trying to balkanise Britain – something Labour has already done with the regionalisation of England and the re-establishment of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as “nations” within his “nations and regions of Britain”

“By trying to whip up and then harness nationalist sentiment in England, they risk unleashing forces which can lead to only one thing: the Balkanisation of Britain. That would damage Britain and damage Wales.”

“Unless we see it off, it will prove a one-way street to the disintegration of the United Kingdom – and a one-way street to irrelevance for Wales.”

Not only is Hain a bigot but he is also a hypocrite.  He openly reminds the Welsh that they are reliant on English taxes to balance the books and that without England, Wales is an irrelevance.  Don’t get me wrong, I like Wales and in the past Welsh coal and water has helped our economy boom but nowadays Wales is a drain on English resources.

For the benefit of English taxpayers and for the benefit of Wales’ self respect, a fully federal union or complete independence is the only way forward.  The balkanisation of Britain has already happened thanks to New Labour and their anglophobic devolution project.  It’s too late to stop it happening and nationalism will keep rising no matter how many times these self-serving politicians talk about “shared values”.

Crap service

I had a doctors appointment this morning and as I turned up 10 minutes early I went to the chemists next door to pick up my father-in-law’s prescription.

There were eight people behind the counter at the chemists but only one person serving.  I had to wait 10 minutes to get served while the other 7 staff milled around getting things off shelves and chatting.

Man considers moving for cancer treatment

A man living in England is considering moving to North Britain so that he can get a cancer treatment that he is not allowed in England.

The man, who is in remission from a rare terminal bone cancer, wants to be prescribed Velcade when his cancer comes back but the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) won’t allow it to be prescribed in England.

The drug is available free of charge in North Britain where the health system is subsidised extensively by the English taxpayer.

Unfortunately for the man involved, you have to live in North Britain for 3 years before you qualify for the special medical treatment that your taxes are paying for.

Hat-tip: Blog of Kev

The Penny’s Dropped


English wankers

If you listen very carefully you can still hear the tinkling of the dropping penny down at Downing Street.According to our leader-in-waiting, the UK is being menaced by an “opportunist group of nationalists” who are “playing fast and loose” with the union.

Apparently, “it is very important to recognise that Britishness and Britain itself is not based on ethnicity and race” but “it is founded on shared values that we hold in common: a commitment to liberty for all, a commitment to social responsibility shown by all, and a commitment to fairness to all.”

On the subject of the Conservatives “English Votes on English Laws” proposal, the Tartan Taxman said that it would pull the union apart.  However, he fails to offer an alternative solution to the West Lothian Question whereby he and his colleagues elected in Scotland can vote on matters that only affect England and not their own constituents.

Alex Salmond, the leader of the SNP, says that the Ignorant Jock is only protecting his own interests and that “he is equally blind to legitimate English grievance of bossy Scottish Labour MPs interfering in English only matters, such as health and education”.

The hypocrite then goes on to say that “it is now time for supporters of the Union to speak up, to resist any drift towards a Balkanisation of Britain and to acknowledge Great Britain for the success it has been and is.”

Balkanisation, for those of you who may not be familiar with the term, is the act of breaking up a country or region into smaller competing regions.  Labour have done just this by giving Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland back their nationhood with their own governments and breaking England up into 9 euroregions.

How dare this ignorant, hypocritical fool criticise nationalists when he is one of those responsible for the rise in nationalism and seperatism thanks to his anti-English hypocracy and discrimination.

School leaving age to be raised to 18

It looks like the school leaving age in England is going to be raised to 18 by 2013.

Apparently, this is to mop up the 18% of children that don’t currently go on to further education because 82% of kids going on to college and university isn’t acceptable.

Frankly, I’m astonished that 82% of kids go on to further education.  Who are the 18% that don’t?  Do they want to go on to further education or do they have jobs lined up in a family firm, no desire to continue education or perhaps they simply don’t have the necessary mental capacity to do further education.

The Chancellor is already trying to decide the best way to make us save 50% of our gross annual income because he’s already spent our pensions blowing up Afghanistan and Iraq and so many OAP’s are living to an inconveniently old age that the drain on our taxes has reached the critical point where the retirement age has had to be increased to keep the baliffs from reposessing Downing Street.  It is astonishing that the British government should now plan to add an even greater burden on the taxpayer by forcing 16 year olds to stay on in education for an extra 2 years against their will.

Kids currently spend a minimum of 11 years at school, most spend 12.  In 6 years time we’re going to see kids spending 14 years of their lives in compulsary education.  Will boarding schools be required to provide married quarters for childhood sweathearts who decide to get married at 16 or will the minimum age for getting married be increased to make sure you don’t end up with married couples spending double Science arguing about who’s cooking the dinner when they get home from school and why they have to have the mother-in-law round for Sunday dinner that weekend?  What about couples who decide to start a family at 16?  It’s perfectly legal – will schools start providing crêche facilities?  Who will pay for them?  Will 16 year old girls be entitled to maternity leave from school?  What about the benefits that will be paid out to these people who have a family at 16 but can’t work because they have to go to school until they’re 18?  Ok, so most 16 year old parents would rather laze around on benefits rather than get a job but not all of them do.  Upping the age you can get married to 18 won’t work either.  You need your parents consent to get married at 16 or 17 in England now but there’s nothing to stop you going to Scotland and getting married at 16 without your parents permission because the law is different there.

UKIP Plymouth Branch has NOT been disbanded

The following just dropped into my inbox from a senior UKIPer:

Dear All,

There have been various unofficial reports concerning Plymouth branch recently and many of you have voiced concern, or have asked whether the reports they have read are correct.

Having checked with Piers Merchant the situation is that 4 or 5 disaffected members of the Plymouth committee have resigned, including the branch chairman. At least one of the disaffected has resigned from UKIP, but will not be missed! One of the others has been in touch with the local press saying that the whole branch membership has also resigned.

This is not true.

An Acting Chairman is in place pending an EGM in the next couple of weeks, when a fully functioning committee will be put in place. The branch, which has about 160 members, is continuing to function normally.

I hope this clarifies the situation.

Kind regards

David Samuel-Camps BA (Hons) Dip PA

Political Assistant to Nigel Farage MEP Party Leader