English Rights Campaign

OVERSEAS AID

2012-02-06T18:04:00.002Z

It has now emerged that India does not even want the aid which the Liberal Democrat/Tory coalition government is lavishing that country. India was the largest net recipient of aid in 2010. Pranab Mukherjee told the Indian parliament:

'We do not require the aid. It is a peanut in our total development
spending.'

It has been revealed that British officials begged India to accept the aid:

'They said British ministers had spent political capital justifying the aid to their electorate. They said that it would be highly embarrassing if [India] pulled the plug.'

This is a truly disgraceful state of affairs, that scarce resources are being squandered on this scale simply to make a bunch of wet liberals look good.

The Tory MP Peter Bone said:

'India has its own foreign aid programme so it is absurd for us to be giving them aid. They are more than capable of looking after their own issues.

As for the 0.7% target, it is a vanity project that is being pursued for no good reason at all. I do not understand the Government's position on this and I don't think the British public do either.'

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

2012-02-06T17:52:00.002Z

'The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.'

- Lenin

This quote is worth remembering bearing in mind the news that British employers are advertising many thousands of jobs in Romania despite the high levels of unemployment at home. Jobs such as taxi drivers and even junior doctors are being advertised, despite, for example, there being an estimated 3,000 unemployed junior doctors in the Britain.

The Forum for Private Business is trotting out the usual cliches about there being a shortage of skilled workers, poor numeracy and literacy and a poor attitude. These anti-English insults should be ignored. The employers are recruiting foreigners because they can hire people at a lower wage than they might otherwise have to pay; they also believe that being pro-mass immigration makes them look good.

Once again it is the English taxpayer who has to pay for this. It is the English taxpayer who has to cover the cost of extra demands on essential services [eg schools and the NHS] and the other costs of mass immigration such as the needless levels of unemployment.

THE NATION STATE

2012-01-26T15:26:00.002Z

There has been some talk in certain quarters about a crisis of capitalism. Even David Cameron has spoken of the need to make capitalism work and the Financial Times has been conducting a Capitalism in Crisis debate.

Last week BBC weighed in with an edition of Newsnight devoted to the issue. The Newsnight slant was to raise the issue of whether or not Marxism was an alternative. Ellie Mae O’Hagan, from UK Uncut, opined that socialism had been discredited as people had been conditioned by the Cold War and Stalinism. We were then treated to an interview with Eric Hobsbawm, a longstanding Marxist historian and communist apologist. Jeremy Paxman asked that ‘when we see capitalism clearly in crisis in the West now’ why was there no Marxist solution. Eric Hobsbawm’s response was that Marxism was a definition of problems that we need to deal with, and that he was pessimistic for the future that the next 20-30 years held.

There then followed a debate between Danny Finkelstein, Tristram Hunt MP [Labour], and Julie Meyer [an entrepreneur]. Tristram Hunt believed that the parameters of the debate are centre-Left and progressive. Julie Meyer defended capitalism and made the point that the government needed tax revenues and that you cannot tax a loss [a point made long ago by Enoch Powell, see the English Rights Campaign item dated the 3 May 2005]. Tristram Hunt went on the say that the capitalist model in Brazil, India and China was different from that of Western Europe and that Marx’s great achievement was to historicize capitalism.

Danny Finkelstein was unimpressed by the reverential awe being expressed of Marxism and pointed out Eric Hobsbawm’s longstanding support of the Soviet Union, which Tristram Hunt dismissed as ‘trivial and facile points’. When Danny Finkelstein pointed out that the Soviet Union ran short of paper to draw up the lists of those to be executed there were so many, Tristram Hunt dismissed this as ‘Sixth Form debating points’, proceeded to say that ‘the models of socialism that were implemented were very different to Marxist thinking’ and even quoted from Engels, although he did acknowledge that Marxism was not an alternative in the sense that we would return to the Marxian model of the 1850s. Tristram Hunt said that he favoured a John Lewis model economy.

There was a general consensus that the economy had been focused too much on the City and the financial sector.

There are several points to be made in response to this. Firstly, Marxism is a bloodthirsty revolutionary creed and not some intellectual attempt to understand the meaning of capitalism [see the English Rights Campaign item dated the 27 April 2005]. Secondly, the fact that more than 100million people were killed in the name of communism in the 20th century is being glossed over. Communism, of whatever sect of pretended intellectual status, is a vile and evil creed. Thirdly, the Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation does not understand this. Would we expect to see Nazis on Newsnight opining that the Hitler model of Nazism was not true Nazism?

Fourthly, the agenda of the debate is being set to exclude the real culprits of the crisis which we undoubtedly face: globalization, including mass immigration and the EU. In capitalism a business failure does not necessitate the state staking the entire country’s wealth behind bailing out the failed business, and yet that is precisely what the British ruling class have done with the banks, whose overseas lending was in large part the cause of their demise. Yet the global economy has not bailed them out, it is the English taxpayer who has had to bail them out. Likewise, it is the national taxpayer who is has to fund the Welfare State which is now catering for a variety of nationalities, ditto the NHS. Mass immigration is ruinous to the country as a whole and the economy, and the determination to repopulate England with non-English peoples is incompatible with the survival of the English nation. The less said of the EU and the Eurozone the better, but once again it is the English taxpayer who has to meet the bills which keep piling in.

In short it is not a crisis of capitalism. It is a crisis of the nation state. It is the refusal of the British ruling class to defend the national interest that is the problem.

It is also to be noted that some alleged racially insensitive comment by a white person is denounced loudly to the point of hysteria, yet apologising for and/or glossing over communist genocide is seen as acceptable. This is the morality of the British ruling class.

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

2012-01-16T14:35:00.002Z

'The fact is that a vast sum of money is going on a single upmarket project whose chief feature is its extravagant glamour. HS2 is gesture spending dressed up as growth. It is Concorde for slow learners.'

- Simon Jenkins

THE FRINGE EFFECT

2011-12-22T15:30:00.000Z

The recent Feltham and Heston by-election has again revealed the collapse of the Liberal Democrat vote. This time they did just fend off UKIP who came fourth, polling 5.49% to the Liberal Democrat vote of 5.87% - 1,276 votes to 1,364 votes. By comparison the BNP polled 540 [2.33%] and the English Democrats polled 322 [1.39%].

Although UKIP failed to beat the Liberal Democrats, once again UKIP has demonstrated that it is polling better than the other two right-of-centre fringe parties.

Until recently UKIP has failed to poll well in elections other than the EU elections with proportional representation. UKIP has failed to poll well in local elections and can usually be beaten, almost casually, by both the BNP and the English Democrats.

UKIP is now pondering whether or not to support the campaign for an English Parliament. That they are taking a long time to re-examine their stance shows that many, if not a majority, in the party are opposed to an English Parliament and shows the angst that UKIP have over diluting their current single issue message.

Even if they do embrace the English Parliament issue then this would not necessarily make UKIP English nationalists. It is possible to support the calls for an English Parliament on democratic and constitutional grounds only. True English nationalism goes beyond that and UKIP does have an ambiguous stance regarding immigration and political correctness, to put it mildly [e.g. see the English Rights Campaign items dated 4 May 2005 and 17 November 2006]. Adherence to political correctness and mass immigration is incompatible with English nationalism.

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

2011-12-22T15:27:00.002Z

‘Political unity, right or wrong, good or bad, is incompatible with national independence. The will to bring Britain into the Community is the will to give that independence up. Each one of us must take his own resolve. I can only say what is mine. I do not believe this nation, which has maintained and defended its independence for a thousand years, will now submit to see it merged or lost. Nor did I become a member of our sovereign parliament in order to consent to that sovereignty being abated or transferred. Come what may, I cannot and I will not.’

Enoch Powell

THE EU

2011-12-22T15:23:00.000Z

David Cameron’s refusal to agree to the proposals being dictated to him by our EU partners [as they are continually styled] has not stopped the movement towards fiscal union [ie the economic policies of all EU countries being dictated by Germany] nor has it saved the City from EU regulation, which the our EU partners intend to impose by Qualified Majority Voting in due course anyway.

It is to be noted that it was the interests of the City which finally provoked the British veto, not the interests of the other sectors of the economy [such as fishing], nor the preservation of our democracy and sovereignty.

While Nick Clegg and some other Liberal Democrats initially supported David Cameron’s stand, their rapid U-turn has discredited them. The reactions of some Liberal Democrats have verged on the hysterical in their craven pro-EU stance.

The Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation has been dismissive of the use of the veto and references to the national interest present it as something sordid. For a nationalized national broadcaster dependent on national monies from the ordinary people whose interests and values it holds in such contempt, this snooty approach is a wonder to behold. Perhaps the English people should no longer insult the BBC with their licence fee monies and allow the BBC to rely upon the EU for its funding?

Meanwhile, the case for the exit from the EU is not being properly put. The Tories, even some of the Eurosceptic ones, are keen to set out the supposed benefits of EU membership and how determined they are to remain in the EU. In particular they continue to assert that we have to be in the EU in order to have free trade with the EU. That is untrue.

One thing the veto does do is to increase the prospects of a referendum on the EU. Such would certainly be a way of parking the issue and allowing the public to decide rather than allowing the coalition government, which is divided on the matter, to pull itself apart.

Be there no doubt, the only way to safeguard our national interests is to leave the EU. So much power has already been conceded that we cannot solve our problems without leaving, as the determination of our EU partners to foist regulations and taxes onto the City via Qualified Majority Voting will prove.

Of more immediate concern is that David Cameron has been very eager to donate many tens of £billions to the IMF in full knowledge that those monies will be pumped into propping up the Euro. Even now, the Eurozone countries are plotting to get their hands on IMF money rather than use their own.

If we remain in the EU then:

1. We will continue to be ruled from the EU

2. We will continue to pay £15billion each year to the EU and will face the renewed attacks to completely abolish the rebate

3. We will face further demands to pay yet more £10billions to bail out the Euro

4. We will see the collapse in our fishing stocks and the decimation of our fishing fleet

5. We will be sucked into a new EU foreign and defence policy

6. We will be required to increase mass immigration to allow unlimited Turkish immigrants into this country with Turkish accession to the EU [NB the Tories are very keen for Turkey to join the EU]

7. Rules, regulations and general bureaucracy will continue to be imposed on us by Qualified Majority Voting

8. We will continue to be in a minority within the EU [as the present crisis has demonstrated]

9. We will witness the steady erosion of what little democracy and freedoms remain and the continued destruction of our national culture

10. WE WILL BE ABSORBED INTO A UNITED STATES OF EUROPE

If we leave the EU then:

1. We will be able to restrict our relationship with the EU to one of free trade only

2. We will escape from the Common Agricultural Policy and cut food prices

3. We will escape from the Common Fisheries Policy and be able to reclaim our territorial waters and fishing grounds – our fishing industry will boom, creating substantial employment

4. We will be able to stop paying £15billion each year to the EU

5. We will be able to repeal the bureaucracy that is strangling our economy

6. We will be able to properly re-establish border controls and end mass immigration

7. No more laws will be imposed on us from the EU, particularly we will be able to escape the so-called human rights nonsense

8. We will be able to manage our economy for the benefit of our nation, in particular, we will be able to move towards full employment by re-establishing a properly functioning national labour market

9. We will recover full control of our defence and foreign policy

10. WE WILL RECOVER FULL NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY

THE EU

2011-12-06T18:37:00.002Z

The Liberal Democrat/Tory coalition government has taken a supine approach to the Eurozone crisis. The Liberal Democrats are of course pro-EU and want a United States of Europe. The Tories are divided on the issue although the leadership, in particular David Cameron, is much more pro-EU than they would wish to admit.

In a recent speech, Nick Clegg said:

'No frontbencher in the coalition is talking about unilateral repatriation of powers from the European Union. Why? Because it simply is not possible - it does not work like that. We have to seek agreement with 26 other countries to get that repatriation. The idea that one can simply get on to the Brussels Eurostar, go over to Brussels and come back with a bag load of powers is simply not feasible.'

What Nick Clegg has pointed out is true. He is simply stating facts. What he is saying may not be palatable but that does not alter the accuracy of what he has said. In reality, there is no way that Britain can reclaim any significant powers from the EU, given the determination of the other EU countries to proceed with their integrationist project, and given the necessity for unanimity to achieve a treaty change.

The reality is that the only feasible policy is to leave the EU. There is no alternative. This fact particularly impacts upon the prospect of a referendum on the relationship with the EU. Presently, the suggested questions to be put to the electorate include a sort of middle option of renegotiating our membership with the EU and staying a part of it. This daydream might sound very nice and moderate, but it is a fraud.

There will be no renegotiated relationship for the reasons that Nick Clegg has set out. What would happen were the electorate to vote for this option and it was ostensibly pursued, is that the option would fail and the British ruling class would continue as before, with the result that we would continue to see our freedoms, rights and monies given away, and our country would continue to be absorbed into the EU superstate.

THE ONLY ALTERNATIVE IS TO LEAVE THE EU.

What is now needed is leadership to set out the merits of leaving the EU, and to disown any lure of a fraudulant fudge of a renegotiated EU membership that can never happen. We need the leadership to encourage the English to make a stand, something that Ian Smith pointed out was always very difficult [see the English Rights Campaign item dated the 15 April 2005].

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

2011-10-30T13:48:00.002Z

'Indeed the entire history of the relentless expansion of the EU's powers since we joined what was then the Common Market in 1973 has been a tale of brazen deceit, broken promises and disenfranchisement of the electorate by all three major political parties.

Remember Labour's 2005 manifesto pledge on the new European Constitution? "We will put it to the British people in a referendum." Nothing, surely, could have been more unequivocal. Yet when it came to signing the Lisbon Treaty, in which the new constitution was enshrined, Gordon Brown conveniently forgot about it. Or, rather, he fobbed off the public with the monstrous lie that Lisbon (referred to in official documents as "the Constitutional Treaty") was not, in fact, a European Constitution at all.

The Tories and Lib Dems were no better. Both promised explicitly to put the Constitution to a referendum. But as soon as they were in a position to do so, they smirked and said: "No point now. Lisbon's been signed."

Wherever Europe is concerned, there's always some snivelling shyster's excuse, some weasel-worded legalistic technicality seized on by the politicians to wriggle out of their commitment to give the public their say. (And these days, when all else fails, there's always that catch-all standby: "Sorry, old boy. The Coalition agreement won't allow it.")

So it is that, one by one, the ancient powers of Britain's once sovereign Parliament, paid for by the blood of our ancestors, slip away to Brussels - into the hands of unaccountable European Commision, where voters will never be able to touch them again ...

Meanwhile in the Continent's capitals, the Europhile political class pushes its ambitions ever further, enmeshing one nation after another in its anti-democratic web.'

- a recent Daily Mail editorial.

THE CULTURE OF CRIMINALITY

2011-08-21T13:42:00.002Z

The recent collapse in law and order, followed by its eventual reinstatement, is the direct and inevitable consequence of the culture of criminality which has been promoted by the British ruling class. In 2006, even David Cameron was speaking out in support of hoodies who had been barred from the Bluewater Shopping Centre; they had been banned because hoodies had been using their hoods to hide their identities while committing crimes [see the English Rights Campaign item dated the 16 July 2006].

More devastating is the judiciary's open promotion of promotion of serious criminality. Judges have grandstanded their so-called human rights credentials in order to keep immigrant murderers, rapists, drug-dealers etc. in this country and not deport them back to their own countries. This last week, one illegal immigrant drug-dealer, who has already been deported twice before and has been using fake identities and false passports, had his sentence lowered specifically in order to help him stay here and not be deported again. Furthermore, there is the constant stream of English taxpayers' monies being funnelled into organised crime via the immigration system. The majority of illegal immigrants enter this country with the assistance of organised crime [Tony Blair told the European Parliament that: 'It is estimated that 70% of illegal immigrants have their passage facilitated by organised crime groups'] and their ability to stay here, even when their illegal presence is exposed, merely provides a good living for organised crime and an incentive for further people smuggling. Scotland Yard has even employed terrorists [see the English Rights Campaign item dated the 18 December 2008].

Recently, Lambeth council spent scarce resources to celebrate the Brixton Riots of 1981 as being the 'Brixton Uprising':

'To mark the 30th anniversary of the 1981 Brixton Uprising there will be a special event held at Windrush Square and Brixton Tate library on Sunday 10th April, 2011. Starting at 12 noon in Windrush Square and then from 1pm inside Brixton Tate library, the event will hear first hand witness accounts from members of the public on the Uprising, performances from special guests including LINTON KWESI JOHNSON, moving images and sound clips from radio and news archives, photographic stills on display and an opportunity for the public to relate their own testimonies of the Uprising to be recorded and archived by the Black Cultural Archive.'

Linton Kwesi Johnson is a Jamaican ‘dub poet’, whose work contains graphic descriptions of alleged police brutality during the 1980s, including one entitled ‘Ingland is a Bich’. No doubt a revisionist history of the recent looting will portray the looters as oppressed freedom fighters.

The tolerance of open vote rigging has corrupted our democracy. The dishonesty of the constituency boundaries and the open constitutional fix of the devolution imposed on England against the English breeds contempt. The less said of the dishonesty and criminality of British politicians and their expenses the better.

Economically, we do not have an economic policy. We have a banking policy. Bankers, who have laid waste our economy, continue to live the millionaire lifestyle courtesy of the English taxpayers' monies used to bail them out. The banks are not lending to small businesses and have not passed on the low interest rates. The coalition is happy for the banks to profit from charging excessive interest rates and refuse to insist that the national interest, and the interests of ordinary people, come first.

The Tory/Liberal Democrat coalition government's priority is to dramatically expand the size of the overseas aid budget, despite overseas aid being used to make payments to the families of suicide bombers in Palestine and despite the disappearance of aid money into corrupt politicians bank accounts and property portfolios. The president of the Democratic Republic of Congo owns no less than 16 of the most luxurious flats and houses in Paris! Aid to Rwanda is to be increased by 57% despite the president's repression of political opponents and despite a UN report detailing the appalling war crimes committed by the Tutsi army.

The Tory/Liberal Democrat coalition government is not satisfied with lavishing English taxpayers' monies on British banks, but have likewise made substantial handouts to Irish banks and to bail out the Eurozone, even though we are not a member of it. Our economy is haemorrhaging more than £3billion a year as Polish immigrants send monies back to Poland. Immigrants are taking 3 in 4 of all new jobs, a trend that has increased under the Tory/Liberal Democrat coalition government.

Meanwhile, the hapless David Starkey has found himself a victim of the British Inquisition for have the temerity to refer to Enoch Powell and to suggest that 'a substantial section of chavs … have become black. A particularly sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion'. Starkey's contrasted this fashion with a more responsible attitude held by the majority. Needless to say, the British Inquisition has condemned Starkey as being racist.

As with the terror attacks, there will be some huffing and puffing from the British ruling class, nothing lasting will be done, and then it will be a return to business as usual. Ordinary people will continue to lose their jobs due to the policy of mass immigration; David Cameron has previously stated that he considers immigrants pouring into England to take jobs as 'a good thing' [see the English Rights Campaign item dated the 16 October 2006].

David Cameron has pronounced that we not only have a broken society, but that part of it is 'sick'. But what has caused this sick element? English society used to be settled and peaceful. It is the onslaught of political correctness that has caused the breakdown in our society. The riots and looting we have witnessed are the true face of political correctness, which David Cameron thinks is a good thing as it encourages politeness [see the English Rights Campaign item dated 15 November 2005].

It is the political correctness of the British ruling class that needs to be confronted and there are no signs of that happening. It is the British ruling class that is sick.

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

2011-08-12T14:20:00.001Z

'A perfect storm of multiculturalism meeds Lord of the Flies. It's all a long way from Blair's vision of "Cool Britannia".'

A blog comment on the recent riots.

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

2011-04-18T00:24:00.001Z

“I don't think anyone is suggesting that what we should be doing is pursuing fixed numerical targets on immigration. You've got to remember on immigration, lots of people come in and out of this country, not least through the European Union, who you can't just numerically control, so I don't think it's a numbers game ... It is not Government policy to pursue a fixed numerical target."

Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

2011-03-19T13:18:00.002Z

'Please continue to live well, I cannot be home for a while.'

One of the Japanese Fukushima nuclear plant workers who has volunteered to continue working at the plant despite the potentially fatal radiation levels.

BARNSLEY CENTRAL

2011-03-06T14:13:00.000Z

The result in the Barnsley Central by-election has shaken up politics and may prove to be a warning of coming events. The scale of the collapse in the Liberal Democrat vote; the fact that UKIP beat the Tories, coming second; and that the BNP beat the Liberal Democrats, coming fourth behind the Tories, indicates possible future trends. If the Liberal Democrat/Tory coalition suffers from the same mid-term slump usually experienced by governments then the right of centre fringe parties may achieve a breakthrough hitherto unknown in English politics. This effect may be more pronounced in the event of economic failure or other major political setbacks.

Of the 3 right-of-centre fringe parties standing in Barnsley Central, UKIP did best, coming second with 12.2% of the vote; the BNP came fourth with 6%; and the English Democrats came seventh with a respectable 2.2%. Of importance is the fact that both UKIP and the BNP stood in Barnsley Central in the 2010 general election, when the BNP achieved 8.9% and UKIP 4.7%. Barnsley was noted as being the BNP’s stronghold in Yorkshire and is where their support was highest. The English Democrats have never stood in Barnsley Central before and always faced an uphill task to establish themselves in competition with UKIP and the BNP in those circumstances. Nevertheless, the English Democrats’ vote was the second best they have ever achieved in a Westminster by-election [Haltemprice and Howden remains the best result when a vote of 7.2% and third place was achieved], and is better than has been obtained by UKIP in earlier Westminster by-elections [they achieved 0.8% in Ealing Southall or 1.9% in Sedgefield, for example]. Presently, UKIP is achieving better Westminster by-election results than the BNP.

Ideologically, there are noticeable differences between UKIP, the BNP and the English Democrats. UKIP is primarily an anti-EU, Thatcherite party – although it has adopted a more anti-Islam, anti-immigration stance in the last few years. Its stance on immigration remains equivocal and UKIP is concerned more about immigration from the EU than elsewhere. The BNP is perceived as an anti-immigration party, but its history and ideology is drawn from fascism. Its leadership are fascists, have a long history with fascism and many have spent much of their past denying the Holocaust, which seriously discredits the BNP and acts as a brake on their advance.

The English Democrats are firmly opposed to both mass immigration, multiculturalism and political correctness, but have positioned themselves as England’s equivalent of the SNP or Plaid Cymru. The English Democrats are therefore the only genuinely English nationalist party of the 3 contenders for the position of the fourth party in England. It remains to be seen whether the fourth party will be Thatcherite, fascist, or English nationalist.

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

2011-02-22T23:47:00.002Z

'The utopia of multiculturalism involves a bureaucratic class presiding over a nation divided into a variety of ethnic nationalities. That, of course, looks awfully like the old Soviet Union.'

Margaret Thatcher

It is, of course, a great pity that Margaret Thatcher did not put a stop to the multiculturalization of England, mass immigration and political correctness when she was in office.

Overseas Aid Gravy Train

2011-01-19T13:03:00.002Z

Below is an item from the Telegraph:

Where our overseas aid goes: salsa in Cambridge, coffee in Yorkshire
Money from Britain's overseas aid budget is being spent on hosting coffee mornings and salsa dancing in the UK to "raise awareness" of poverty abroad.
By Jasper Copping

The Department for International Development is spending £3 million over three years on a scheme called Global Community Links (GCL) which funds projects intended to educate the British public about impoverished nations, chiefly in Africa and Asia.

Trade unions, charities, schools and churches can apply for the money - but any organisation that receives it must agree to spend it all in Britain, and is specifically barred from sending any abroad.

The initiative is being funded even though the Conservatives attacked such UK-based "awareness" spending when they were in opposition and said it would end as soon as they came to power.

The revelation will raise further questions over why DfID was one of only two Whitehall departments, along with the Department of Health, to be spared cuts in its budget by the Coalition.

Critics suggested that the department should restrict its spending to projects in poor nations, and accused the Government of funding "propaganda".

Among the projects already offered funds under the current scheme are:

* A conference in Cambridge, planned for later this month, featuring an "Afro-Cuban dance gala".

The conference has been organised by the charity Cambridge to Africa as one series of events to highlight its link with a children's charity in Uganda, for which it has received a GCL grant of £8,015.

The events are expected to be attended by 600 people – a cost to the taxpayer of £13 a head.
As well as a performance by Leandro Charanga, a Cambridge-based salsa dancer who is originally from Cuba, the event, "Celebrating Diversity: Voices from Africa", also includes presentations from a Swiss freelance journalist and a Norwegian aid worker.

* Fairtrade coffee mornings to be held in Huddersfield by a group called the Young Ethical Pioneers, which has been awarded £9,460 to promote its link with tea and coffee producers in Kenya.

The organisers hope to attract "local celebrities" to promote the events – possibly from town's football or rugby league clubs.

* A video about a twinning project between a Yorkshire Dales village and a community in Mali.
The link was established part of a wider scheme to connect people living on the Greenwich Meridian in different parts of the world – although Burley in Wharfedale is more than 70 miles from the line, while Tereli, in Mali, is more than 200 miles from it.

The Yorkshire group has received £9,550 to make the video and to organise four conferences about their work.

* A DVD and a poster exhibition about epilepsy in Sierra Leone. A Reading-based community group, Education for Development, has been awarded £8,985 to create the publicity material, which will be seen by more than 4,500 people at conferences, in hospitals and online.

* A twinning project between people from Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Kenya to promote the British public's knowledge of climate change.

A grant of £10,000 to Team Kenya is being spent on workshops, a conference and other events in north-east England. The group's message will also be spread through a DVD and blogs.

* A week of activities later this year in Plymouth to celebrate a link with Ghana, including performances by musicians from the African country. Plymouth Ghana Link has also been handed £10,000 with the aim of "widening for the people of Plymouth their understanding and awareness of Ghana".

Funded activities include presentations and seminars, links between schools, a visit to Devon by a representative from a cocoa co-operative, and workshops in Plymouth about malaria.

As recently as January 7, DfID officials were using the website Twitter to encourage more groups to come forward to bid for the GCL money.

However, following inquiries from The Sunday Telegraph, Andrew Mitchell, the International Development Secretary, has announced that the scheme is to be reviewed and has asked the scheme's "managing agents" – organisations like the British Council and Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), which evaluate bids and hand out the money on behalf of DfID – to introduce an immediate halt to all new funding until the review has been completed.

In a letter to them, he wrote: "I ask that you consider refraining from awarding new grants under any existing programmes you are contracted to manage, until the review has ended and the conclusions are clear."

Grants awarded under the scheme can range in size from £1,000 to £10,000. The GCL scheme was launched in March last year, in the dying days of the Labour government.

In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Mitchell stressed that the scheme started before the 2010 election and said he was currently powerless to stop it.

"All of this is being done under a Labour government contract which I cannot rip up," he said.

"In the letter, you will see that I ask the managing agents to consider refraining.

"I can't force them to. But I am sending a very clear signal that if I could, I would stop it.

"Once I have the independent review then I will be able to consider what I can do to stop it."
Other DfID schemes which operated under Labour have already been scrapped by the new Government.

GCL was set up following criticism of a previous DfID initiative, the Development Awareness Fund (DAF), which funded projects including Brazilian dance classes in east London, a photographic scheme costing £180,000 to raise awareness of climate change and poverty in Brighton, and the teaching of "global citizenship" to two- and three-year-olds in Devon.

Yesterday the Conservative party disclosed new details of awareness spending under Labour, which totalled £34 million in eight years, including £9,618 for trade union project to "build solidarity along the banana supply chain" and £47,727 for a school drama in Derbyshire in which children dressed as slaves.

Sam Bowman, from the think tank the Adam Smith Institute, said the GCL programme was simply a "rebranding" of the DAF scheme.

"It is a huge waste. It is an outrageous use of money to provide propaganda for the government. Paying civil society groups to be your mouthpiece across the country on various issues weds those groups to the government and prevents them being independent and critical."

Currently £7.3 billion goes to fund DfID every year and the Coalition has pledged to increase spending on aid in order to meet a United Nations target of 0.7 per cent of national output by 2013.

Matthew Sinclair, director of the TaxPayers' Alliance which has also been critical of DfID spending, said: "Taxpayers will be disappointed that DfID is going looking for ways to spend their money through Twitter."

He added: "It is also disappointing that, while some wasteful 'awareness' spending in Britain has been scrapped, DfID is still spending taxpayers' money building the case for more development spending rather than actually focusing on helping the world's poorest people as it is supposed to.

"This is more evidence that the massive planned increases in international aid spending is a mistake. The department needs to show it can use the money it gets now responsibly first.

"The department should at least get the same treatment other high priority areas like science did – a cash freeze would save billions."

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

2011-01-13T22:44:00.000Z

'Don't Retreat, Reload.'

Sarah Palin

IMMIGRATION

2010-11-28T20:33:00.004Z

Below is an item from the Telegraph. The emphasis in italics is the English Rights Campaign emphasis and demonstrates the phoney nature of the Liberal Democrat/Tory coalition's concerns about, and supposed intention to end, mass immigration:

Immigration cap loophole sees massive surge

The Government's cap on immigration is being undermined by a surge in foreign workers who are exempt from new visa rules, official figures have shown.
Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron and Home Secretary Theresa May walk through Terminal 5 during a visit to UK Border Agency staff at Heathrow Airport Photo: RUEUTERS
By David Barrett, Home Affairs Correspondent 9:00PM GMT 27 Nov 2010

Home Office statistics reveal that the number of foreigners arriving on "intra company transfers" (ICTs), which do not count towards the cap total, rose sharply following the Coalition's announcement of an interim cap in mid-July.

There were 30 per cent more ICTs handed out in between July and September this year than in the same period last year.

Experts said the increase showed that companies were to continuing to import cheap labour despite the Government's clampdown, and warned that numbers would continue to rise even after a permanent cap on migrant numbers comes into force next April.

Peter Skyte, of the trade union Unite, said: "It is a massive loophole. Our prediction has always been that the immigration cap would be all smoke and mirrors."

The ICT scheme allows firms to bring non-EU nationals who are already on their payroll into the UK. It is widely used in the IT industry.

One Indian company alone, Tata Consultancy Services, sponsored 4,600 employees to come to Britain in 2008; another, Infosys Technologies Limited, sponsored 3,235 in the same year.

Theresa May, the Home Secretary, has said she will fulfil a Tory manifesto pledge by capping the "skilled worker" routes at 21,700 a year, but she agreed to exempt ICTs from the new restrictions following pressure from business leaders and Vince Cable, the Lib Dem Business Secretary.

In the third quarter of this year, as the Home Office was restricting other immigration routes, more than 8,000 foreigners came to work in the UK under ICTs - up from 6,000 in the same period last year.

If the current ICT rate is sustained, more than 32,000 immigrants would arrive under the route each year, meaning the true number of migrant workers would be about 54,000 a year when capped routes and ICTs are added together.

Mr Skyte said Unite feared there were significant loopholes in limits imposed on ICTs by the Home Secretary last week.

Under the terms of the permanent cap, ICT workers earning between £24,000 and £40,000 a year will only allowed to remain in Britain for 12 months.

Mr Skyte said: "We think companies will simply transfer lower-paid staff for 11 months and three weeks, for example, and then they will be sent home for a few weeks and re-apply under a new ICT.

"There doesn't seem to be anything in the rules to stop it.

"In other words, the number of people coming on ICTs could actually rise.

"The Home Office has also failed to take the chance to prevent companies counting allowances for things like accommodation as part of their gross pay, and it looks like some employers have sought to make as much use of the route as possible while current rules are in place.

"The Government's announcement has squandered a golden opportunity to tackle abuse and misuse of ICTs."

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the pressure group MigrationWatch, said: "There is clearly a build-up of ICT applications this year.

"While it is essential that staff who are seriously needed can get into Britain, this route will have to be watched very closely to avoid it becoming a loophole in the whole system of economic migration."

On the possibility of workers exploiting the 12-month ICT rule, he said: "We have yet to see the details of this scheme but if it allows people permitted to come for a year to go home for a few weeks and return then it will rapidly become absurd."

One British worker, who declined to be named but is employed in IT by a well-known bank, said: "Employers will find plenty of ways to abuse the system.

"Where I work now there are British workers being made redundant and at the same time ICTs are being brought in to replace them. The Government's measures have had no effect whatsoever."

Another IT worker said: "Sadly the IT business in this country is doomed, primarily because they have printed ICTs and other visas like confetti."

Damian Green, the immigration minister, said: "The new immigration limit clearly sets out which workers we will allow into the UK job market.

"It has been drawn up following extensive consultation with businesses and reflects their views. But our view is clear: we need employers to look first to those who are out of work and already live in this country.

"The limit will allow us to protect those businesses which are vital to our economy, allowing them to attract the best and the brightest, but more importantly it will bring immigration down to sustainable levels."

In the whole of last year there were 22,030 ICTs but in just the first nine months of this year the figure had already reached 22,520.

The quarterly total of ICTs has crept up incrementally since the beginning of last year, when there were 4,355 applications between January and March.

In comparison, in 1992 there were just 7,000 ICTs handed out during the whole year.

THE EU

2010-11-28T13:54:00.001Z

GET BRITAIN OUT OF EUROPE

Those on board the European gravy train have mounted one power grab after another
Thursday November 25,2010
By The Daily Express

THE Daily Express today becomes the first national newspaper to call for Britain to leave the European Union.

From this day forth our energies will be directed to furthering the cause of those who believe Britain is Better Off Out. The famous and symbolic Crusader who adorns our masthead will become the figurehead of the struggle to repatriate British sovereignty from a political project that has comprehensively failed.
After far too many years as the victims of Brussels larceny, bullying, over-regulation and all-round interference, the time has come for the British people to win back their country and restore legitimacy and accountability to their political process.
Following the debacle of the Lisbon Treaty – disgracefully imposed upon the public without the referendum they were promised by the three main political parties – many had expected matters European to take a lower profile in British politics.

But the opposite has been true as those on board the European gravy train have mounted one power grab after another.
At a time of austerity throughout Europe they have expanded their bloated budgets, pushing Britain’s disproportionate contributions even higher.
And despite not being part of the failing eurozone, British taxpayers have learned that under Brussels rules agreed to by Labour after it had lost the election they are liable to help bail out economies wrecked by the single currency.
A payment of up to £10billion for Ireland is apparently just the start, with speculators now starting to target the embattled economy of Portugal.

Despite unemployment across Europe averaging more than 10 per cent, Brussels continues to propose new job-destroying regulations and conspire to turn the whole EU into a zone of high taxation.
It is also seeking to take an ever more dominant role in border control issues, leaving its member states powerless to control migrant flows not only from other EU countries but from Asia and Africa too.
The European Court of Human Rights has continued to trample on British justice, preventing the deportation of terror suspects and demanding that convicted prisoners are given the vote.
Withdrawal from the EU should be accompanied by a withdrawal from the jurisdiction of this alien, pan-European tribunal so that matters of British justice are decided once again in British courts.
Ever since the British people were bounced into ratifying membership of the Common Market in 1975, after the political class had taken us in with no direct mandate, that institution has been stealing our rights to self-determination, remodelling itself in turn as the European Economic Community, the European Community and lately as the European Union.

Upon a wafer-thin permission for economic cooperation has been built a blueprint for the United States of Europe.
Almost nothing the EU has proposed or enacted has benefited Britain – our trawler fleet has been devastated by the Common Fisheries Policy while our taxpayers have found themselves massively subsidising inefficient French and Polish farmers under the Common Agricultural Policy.
The European Exchange Rate Mechanism – the forerunner to the single currency – caused a deep recession in Britain that was only ended by the removal of Sterling from its deadening grip.
This newspaper has always been hostile to the dilution of national sovereignty that EU membership entailed, but it has also always acknowledged that economic arguments were key. So long as there was a case to be made that leaving the EU would risk jobs and investment in Britain there was a powerful brake on thoughts of leaving altogether.
But since the ERM disaster 20 years ago that economic case has utterly collapsed.
We were told that staying out of the eurozone would be a financial disaster yet it is now clear beyond doubt that the opposite was true.
Joining it would have been catastrophic, removing Britain’s ability to vary its interest and exchange rates to suit economic circumstances and plunging us into a depression. The past two decades of European integration have turned mainland Europe’s economies from some of the world’s industrial powerhouses into also-rans, stuck in the global slow lane.

DEBATE: SHOULD BRITAIN WITHDRAW FROM THE EU?
Only Germany has prospered in the euro – thanks to the single currency locking its neighbours into exchange rates at which they are unable to compete.
And now the price of belonging to the EU, in terms of surrendered sovereignty, is to be further raised with countries like Ireland effectively having their public spending and borrowing decisions made by the European Central Bank in Frankfurt rather than by their electorates.
While the EU has spread economic sclerosis through its member states the two richest countries in Europe have remained outside: Norway and Switzerland have stayed as the lynch-pins of the European Free Trade Area – able to import from and export to the EU freely without being subjected to its federalist ambitions.
Were Britain to break free of Brussels there is no doubt that such a happy status would be open to us.
A s a heavy net importer from the EU we are simply too important a market for the EU nations to risk cutting their ties with us.
Taking Britain out of the EU should not be seen as a move to “Little Englandism”. On the contrary, ours is a great trading nation with markets all over the world.
The time has come to develop our neglected trading links with the new global powerhouses such as China and India.
The creation of the EU is explained by the perfectly understandable desire to avoid further conflict on a continent that had been the scene of two world wars.
But Britain is a land apart: A precious stone set in the silver sea, as Shakespeare so evocatively put it; a realm with a glorious island story stretching back a thousand years, with links to every continent and a language taken up throughout the world.
Our political class bought into the European experiment after losing confidence in our nation and accepting the inevitability of decline.
They viewed Europe as a life raft and clambered on board. The British people never took that view.
Now it is Europe that is in decline and Britain that is being held back. It is time to break free.

JOIN OUR CRUSADE TO PULL BRITAIN OUT OF THE EU

Join our crusade to pull Britain out of the EU
Thursday November 25,2010
By Macer Hall, Political Editor

A HUGE groundswell of support was last night gathering behind the Daily Express crusade for Britain to quit the European Union.
Senior MPs, peers and campaign groups acclaimed this newspaper’s stand against the sprawling Brussels super-state as a turning point in the battle to win back Britain’s independence.
And Eurosceptic critics of UK membership said the growing financial crisis among the euro nations this week – threatening to cost British taxpayers billions of pounds – has overwhelmingly confirmed the case for British withdrawal.
Philip Davies, Conservative MP for Shipley and a founding member of the Better Off Out group of MPs and peers, led the praise for our crusade last night.
He said: “I think it’s fantastic that the Daily Express sees such a positive future for our country. Britain should be developing trade with China, India, South American and emerging countries in Africa rather than being part of an inward-looking, backward-looking protection racket designed to prop up inefficient European businesses and French farmers.

“As a nation built on trade, we should be ashamed to be members of the EU. It is a major breakthrough for a national newspaper to support the case for British withdrawal.
“The Daily Express and the rest of public opinion are way ahead of a lot of politicians.”
The spiralling cost of Britain’s EU membership – expected to exceed £6billion in net contributions alone next year – was last night being cited as a clear-cut reason for Britain to walk away from the discredited European club.

And the warning earlier this week that UK taxpayers may have to pour billions of pounds more into saving failing euro economies like Greece and Portugal after the Government’s decision to lend £7billion to debt-laden Ireland was understood to be hardening public opinion in favour of withdrawal.

DEBATE: SHOULD BRITAIN WITHDRAW FROM THE EU?
But opponents of European Union are also angry about the threat to Britain’s democracy by meddling Brussels bureaucracy.
Critics claim Britain’s Government has lost control of immigration due to freedom of movement laws for EU citizens.
And the country’s law and order – and basic common sense – are being undermined by the European Convention on Human Rights, which all EU states are obliged to sign up to.
Nigel Farage, Euro-MP and leader of the UK Independence Party, said: “I am delighted to support the Daily Express in its new crusade to liberate our country from the clutches of the European Union. It follows in a fine tradition in which your newspaper has fought for Britain’s liberty.
“I am convinced that the vast majority of ordinary men and women of this country will support your crusade. It will no doubt make the political establishment very uncomfortable. Good, so it should.”
Douglas Carswell, Tory MP for Clacton and a leading critic of the EU at Westminster, said: “There are millions of people across the country who will be right behind this crusade.
“This is a watershed. For the first time, a popular, mainstream newspaper has said we should get out of the EU. It is a significant moment.
“It shows that supporting British withdrawal from the EU is not the preserve of a minority sect but has become part of mainstream opinion. When my grandparents’ generation was locked into the EU, they were told it was about the economy.
“But our priority today should be trade with the world, not just the member states of the EU.”
Lord Stoddart of Swindon, an Independent Labour peer who began campaigning against the Common Market in 1962, also welcomed the Daily Express crusade.
“We should never have joined in the first place. It is extremely expensive, and becoming more expensive all the time,” he said.
“What we should be doing is rebuilding the Commonwealth and going out to build trade with emerging economies like China, India and Brazil. That is where the future for a good, independent country lies. We are, ratchet by ratchet, losing our sovereignty.
“Our Parliament loses power every time an agreement is made. The EU is an undemocratic and dangerous construct.”
Leading Eurosceptic campaign groups were last night swinging behind the Daily Express crusade.
James Pryor, chief executive of the EU Referendum Campaign, said: “When Britain is broke, can we really afford to send £48million a day to Brussels? Around 70 per cent of our laws are now made in Brussels and that is just not democratic.
“The financial crisis over the last 10 days has really woken people up to the scandal of the EU.”

EUROPEAN UNION: COSTS ARE FIVE TIMES THE BENEFITS

European Union: Worst of all is the cost of red tape
Thursday November 25,2010
By Daniel Hannan, Conservative Euro MP for South-East England

HERE’S a nasty coincidence. All the welfare cuts put together will save £7billion: precisely Britain’s share of the Irish bail-out.
In other words, every penny we save from these painful benefits reductions will go to prop up the euro.
That £7billion is in addition to the £14billion which we pay into the EU budget every year: a budget that keeps rising.

Britain’s share of the increase for next year – not our share of the budget, our share of the increase – will be £435million: enough to pay for 12,000 nurses, 15,000 police officers or 22,000 Army privates.
But our direct contributions are only part, and not the most important part, of the overall costs of the EU.
The Common Agricultural Policy hurts our farmers and costs every household an extra £1,200 a year in higher taxes and higher food bills. The Common Fisheries Policy has wiped out what ought to have been a great renewable resource off our coasts.
Worst of all is the cost of red tape. Here, I can do no better than to quote a survey by the most recent internal market commissioner, Gunter Verheugen. He found that the cost of regulation in the EU was 600billion euros a year. On the European Commission’s own figures, the advantages of the single market are worth only 120billion euros a year.
In other words, Eurocrats themselves admit that the costs of the EU outweigh the benefits by five to one.
What about commerce? We are often told that half of Britain’s trade is with the EU. True, but look at the balance of that trade. For most of the period of our membership, we have run a healthy surplus with the rest of the world but a deficit with Europe. Top of Form
Bottom of Form
Since the financial crisis hit, we have run a small overall deficit on the non-EU share of our trade, too. Even so, our deficit with the EU last year was £14.4billion, as against just £1.1billion for the rest of the world.
Those figures are the answer to those who say that, if we left, our exports would suffer.
The other members benefit far more from cross-Channel commerce than we do. In any negotiation, the customer generally has the last word over the salesman.
In any case, we don’t need to be part of the EU’s political structures to be part of the single market.
Norway and Switzerland both sell around twice as much per head to the EU as we do.
They participate fully in the freedoms of the European market but are outside the CAP and CFP, police their own borders, settle their own human rights issues, trade freely with non-EU countries, and make only token contributions to the EU budget.
Oh, and unlike EU members, they pass the majority of their own laws.
Norway and Switzerland are thriving as independent states. So could Britain.

Join the campaign at www.express.co.uk/web/europecrusade

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

2010-11-27T11:53:00.002Z

Front page of the Irish Daily Star, 24 November 2010, in response to the Irish government's agreement to ask for an EU bailout.

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

2010-09-30T17:42:00.001Z

‘How do you tell a communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.’

Ronald Reagan

THE EU

2010-09-22T21:27:00.003Z

Below is a recent item in the Wall Street Journal:

The Strange Death of Tory Euroskepticism

When David Cameron was leader of the opposition it was the widely accepted wisdom that he would, if he became Britain's prime minister, have the most terrible difficulties with the European Union.

His party, it was said, would be almost unmanageable on the issue. Remember that he encountered all manner of problems when he helped establish a new center-right grouping in the European parliament, breaking away from the EPP. Surely that was just a taster before the main course in government?

Relations with Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France were likely be fraught, as the Conservatives forced their leader to block initiatives coming from Brussels. Britain led by Mr. Cameron would be on a collision course with its neighbors. The resulting impact might destroy Mr. Cameron's carefully calibrated attempts to present himself as centrist, moderate and reasonable.

Absolutely none of this has happened. Why?

Almost unnoticed, his MPs have voted for a list of measures that would a few years ago have triggered full-scale Tory war. There was the expansion of justice and home affairs powers, involving the extension of the so-called European arrest warrant. The European External Action Service—or EU diplomatic service—was nodded through. New regulations for the City of London require the establishment of three pan-European supervisory bodies. This was accepted by the Treasury and if there were protests from the Conservative benches they didn't make much noise. A higher budget for the EU has also been approved.

Reuters

German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks with U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron at a G-8 meeting in Canada in June.

Ask senior Conservatives about all this and they point to the coalition with the Liberal Democrats, enthusiasts for integration. It necessitates compromise.

But that is the myth designed to make Lib Dem leader and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg feel good. Mr. Cameron had decided long before he failed to win an overall majority at the general election that he was not going to die in a ditch over Europe. He prepared accordingly, removing his commitment to a referendum on the Lisbon treaty on the grounds that it was too late and would look ridiculous.

Mr. Cameron also put in a lot of effort into wooing Ms. Merkel and Mr. Sarkozy ahead of the election, reassuring them that he would be a good member of the European leaders' club. This work has continued since he took office.

He is aided by having William Hague at the Foreign Office. One of the most enduring myths of public life in Britain is that of Hague as Euroskeptic. He was once so minded, when he lost the 2001 election heavily pledging to "Save the Pound". Since then he has kept the reputation while moving steadily onto mainstream establishment territory. As a fellow Conservative puts it: "William has a couple of years ahead of him doing an agreeable job, and then a lifetime of book signings and profitable speech-making afterwards. He's not going to do anything confrontational that puts all that at risk."

The prime minister is a relentlessly pragmatic sort and not particularly Euroskeptic. He liked to say in opposition: "Isn't it great that the Tory party hasn't had a row about Europe for ages?" Now he doesn't want any trouble that might destabilize his government and distract from its priority of eliminating the deficit by the next election.

Britons, more concerned post-crisis about the economy than Europe, don't seem particularly fussed either. They will tell pollsters that they are notionally sceptical of the EU and many of its works, yet recoil from leaders and parties that bang on about it. A campaign for a referendum on withdrawal began recently, but I wouldn't rate highly the chances of Mr. Cameron signing up.

What a tranquil scene. A subject on which Conservatives fought a civil war has faded into the background. If it is not the death of U.K. Tory Euroskepticism, it looks a lot like it.

ANGLOPHOBIA

2010-06-29T19:30:00.001Z

Further to the item dated the 23 June, below are two more letters from today’s Daily Mail:

The claim that there were no British troops in Kenya during 1949-50 (Letters) is mistaken.

I served in the Royal Engineers at Tsavo during the whole of 1949 and there was a string of Army camps stretching from Tsavo-Voi-Mackinnon Road-Mombasa. Mackinnon Road was destined to be a huge British Army base, and Tsavo and Voi were important in providing water filtration and a pipeline to Mack Road.

Most of the soldiers there were mainly involved in this project, but there were thousands of other British troops in Kenya at the time.

And:

The first British to enter Kenya were missionaries who succeeded in reducing inter-tribal fighting and disease, including smallpox, that had hitherto controlled the population.

The Mombasa-Uganda railway was built to counter the slave trade by improving access to the interior.

The introduction of white farmers was to improve food production and pay for the cost of the railway.

The first census in 1896 showed a population of 1.5million. By the time of Uhuru - independence - in 1963, the population had grown to 10.5million. At the turn of the century it was 23million and is now approaching 30million.

ANGLOPHOBIA

2010-06-23T21:54:00.001Z

President Obama has been criticised for his open hostility to BP, preferring to call it ‘British Petroleum’ even though that is no longer the company’s name and that it is a multinational company with a very large number of US shareholders. Obama has preferred to blame BP for the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico even though it was an American firm operating the oil rig involved.

This follows on from his return of a Churchill bust to Britain and, far more importantly, his lack of support for the Falkland Islanders who have recently been subjected to Argentine threats, yet again. The Falkland Islanders are of course of British descent.

It has been alleged that Obama is hostile to Britain due to purported mistreatment of his grandfather in Kenya. Mrs Obama gave an interview in the Daily Mail in which she made a number of allegations. A letter in the Daily Mail today made the following response:

Obama and the myths about British “brutality”

As a district officer/magistrate in Kenya in the Fifties, I must refute some of Mrs Obama’s wild accusations (Mail) and correct some inaccurate statements. No “large tracts of fertile land” were given to white settlers. All land was fairly purchased from the Crown and all of it was above the 6,000ft contour uninhabited by native Africans, hence the name White Highlands. No native African was ever dispossessed of their land, as proved by a 1934 Commission of Inquiry.

Mrs Obama says her husband was arrested and sentenced to two year’s imprisonment in 1949 and received daily beatings by British soldiers. There were no British soldiers in Kenya at the time. The first British soldiers to arrive in Kenya were the Lancashire Fusiliers, drafted into Kenya in 1952 soon after Mau Mau was proscribed in late 1951. Even if Mrs Obama has her dates wrong, I’m sure no member of this fine regiment would agree to enter a prison and inflict daily beatings on its inmates. Kamiti Prison wasn’t a “high-security” prison; it was Nairobi’s local jail, containing petty thieves and other criminals.

Though possible, it’s highly unlikely Mr Obama involved himself with Mau Mau, a purely Kikuyu-speaking organisation, as Mr Obama came from the Luo tribe, no friends of the Kikuyu. Their language was very different; they didn’t circumcise, as did the Kikuyu, and they came from the area close to Lake Victoria. The Kikuyu homeland virtually adjoined Nairobi, several hundred miles to the east.

Mau Mau had no aim of self-rule for Kenya. The Kikuyu tribe’s homeland was, unfortunately, hemmed in by the Aberdare Mountains to the west, Mt Kenya to the north, the Wakamba tribal lands to the east and Nairobi to the south and had no means of expansion for its burgeoning population. They cast envious eyes on the now well-developed, white-owned farms and wanted that land for themselves. They had no intention of sharing it with other native Africans. This is borne out by the fact that most non-Kikuyu speaking Africans joined forces with the British in putting down the organisation and even many Kikuyu were against Mau Mau. In the Lari Massacre, a large Mau Mau gang burned down the village of Lari because the villagers refused to take the Mau Mau oath. As for the “British never do anything for the common good”, how about all the hospitals and schools we established?

THE EU

2010-06-13T12:40:00.002Z

Below is a copy of an article by Daniel Hannan MEP in the Telegraph.

David Cameron doesn't want a row - but the EU won't give him any
option
If a levy on financial transactions is imposed, the one bit of our
economy with the locomotive power to pull us back to growth will be
disabled.

By Daniel Hannan
Published: 9:00PM BST 12 Jun 2010

Spoiling for a fight: the EU is targeting Britain's vital interests

The euro isn't finished yet. There is, as Adam Smith observed, a great deal of ruin in a nation, and the same is true of a currency. Monetary union was never meant to be about prosperity; rather, it was about political integration. Those who benefit most from such integration, namely the Brussels elites, won't give it up without a fight.

A fight, in this context, means trying to create what Herman Van Rompuy, the EU President, calls "European economic government". Rather than allowing peripheral states to leave the euro and devalue, Eurocrats aim to keep their dream alive through massive cash transfusions.

At a summit on Thursday, the European Commission will push for financial harmonisation, including the pre-vetting of national budgets, a ban on short-selling and the apparatus of fiscal federalism. David Cameron, who wants to focus on bringing down the deficit in Britain, would gladly do without the distraction of a Euro-row. But the EU is disinclined to give him that option.

After all, the survival of its entire belief system is at stake. If the euro collapses, European integration itself might unravel. In order to stave off this prospect, Eurocrats need a great deal of money – including British money. Last week, Van Rompuy admitted that, in the event of a Spanish bail-out, even the 750 billion euros already committed would not be enough, and the 16 eurozone members are reluctant to underwrite Madrid without British participation. London banks, they argue, would be among the worst hit by a Spanish default. Why should Continental taxpayers bail them out if British taxpayers stand aloof?

Until now, the travails of the euro have not been our concern – except in the indirect sense that we want our trading partners to be prosperous. But an entropic union is a dangerous neighbour and, as Brussels steps up its demands for economic integration, the euro's problems are becoming our problems.

The coalition has so far avoided arguments about the EU. I know that pundits keep trying to run stories about tensions between the Lib Dems and the supposedly Eurosceptic William Hague, but these stories depend on blocking out everything that the Foreign Secretary has been saying for the past three years.

"We should be committed to a stronger European voice in the world," he announced before the election. "It is the common will to act together that is decisive. European unity is lacking on so many issues." Last week, he and Nick Clegg travelled together to Berlin to reiterate that message.

Ministers are, quite rightly, focused on the domestic agenda. Neither coalition partner wants a Euro-squabble. The Lib Dems have quietly forgotten about their ambition to join the euro, the Tories have toned down their commitment to repatriate power, and both parties have dropped any talk of a referendum. The trouble is that the EU is in no mood to allow Britain the option of quietism. The measures being proposed by the European Commission directly threaten our prosperity and our independence.

First, there is the straightforward cost. There has been much anguished debate about the proposals to trim spending by £6.2 billion. In contrast, there has been barely a whimper about the £8 billion committed to the EU's bail-out fund by Alistair Darling in his outgoing act as chancellor.

At a time when every department is looking for savings, our net contribution to the EU budget is rising by 60 per cent. You don't have to be a Eurosceptic to ask why, when all 27 member states are making cuts, the EU is going in the opposite direction. Nor do you need to be a fiscal conservative to wonder whether our budget contributions might be better used: they are enough, for example, to give the entire country a two thirds reduction in council tax.

Then there is the issue of EU taxation. Both the Commission and the European Parliament want a levy on financial transactions – the overwhelming majority of which take place in London. Some of our competitors see, in this idea, a new Common Fisheries Policy – a mechanism whereby they could draw from a pot being disproportionately filled by Britain.

Most immediate are the plans for EU supervision of financial services. Already, the Commission has determined a set of rules that will be ruinous for investment fund managers. Now it plans something even more dangerous: the transfer of invigilatory power from national regulators to three new EU agencies dealing, respectively, with banking, securities and insurance and pensions. London would find itself administered by states which have negligible financial sectors of their own, and which, in some cases, regard "Anglo-Saxon capitalism" as immoral.

On all these issues, the coalition is more united than you might suppose. Lib Dem MEPs did their best to mitigate the impact of EU financial regulation. The trouble is that few other countries sympathise. Some resent Britain for refusing to join the euro; others envy the supremacy of the City of London; still others simply dislike free trade. Since most of the proposed measures can be imposed by qualified majority voting, there is little prospect of blocking them.

Make no mistake, though, about the magnitude of the danger. If these proposals go through, London will go the way of Bruges, Venice and Amsterdam: a once dominant financial entrepôt sidelined by more virile cities. The one bit of our economy with the locomotive power to pull us back to growth will be disabled.

We do, though, have one other option. We could behave as the French did when they were told to admit British beef, or as the Italians are currently doing over demands that they change their rules on media ownership. We could simply announce that financial services are a red-line issue for us, as agriculture is for France, and that we will not implement any directives damaging to the City. In a worst-case scenario, we might be fined: but the maximum notional fine is minuscule compared with the costs of compliance, and could simply be divided among the affected institutions and called a "fee".

True, this line of action would involve us in precisely the sort of spat with the EU that the coalition wanted to avoid. But the alternative is to jeopardise our recovery. It is Brussels, not Britain, that is provoking this fight.

Daniel Hannan is a Conservative MEP for South East England and writes every day at Telegraph Blogs

QUOTE OF THE MONTH [bonus]

2010-05-30T11:20:00.001Z

‘The Conservatives are the major party. And the Conservatives and the Liberals together have a majority in parliament. Labour and the Liberals don’t. They would therefore have to cobble together an alliance with an assortment of Scottish nationalists and people from Northern Ireland, all of whom would demand that the price of their support was that they would not get the same cuts imposed upon them as the English would. Now that would enrage the English, rightfully, even more than they would be enraged if the two losing parties decide to try and form a government.

So I think that however well meaning it is, it hasn’t been thought through and I think that from the point of view of the Labour Party, if we appear not to be accepting the decision of the electorate - we lost nearly a hundred seats, the biggest loss in our history apart from 1931 - and I think if we now decide that we’re just going to cock a snook at the electorate, or look that way, that the electorate will reap vengeance on us and we will suffer most grievously in the future.’

John Reid, being interviewed by ITN, speaking at the time about the attempt by Labour to cling onto office by forming a coalition of the losers.

The new Liberal/Tory coalition government has merely committed that they ‘will establish a commission to consider the “West Lothian Question”,’ and have positively committed themselves to the continuance of the Barnett Formula [which gives preferential subsidies to Scotland] in the short term at least.

It is not only the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland nationalists who demand that extra subsidies be paid by the English to their countries. The Liberal Democrats have always been dependent upon the Celtic fringes and are equally committed to the plundering of England. While the Tories are too decadent and gormless to stand up for the more conservative English, who are actually voting for them.

We need an English party to defend English interests.

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

2010-05-15T10:22:00.001Z

'Can you trust the Liberal Democrats? They are behaving like every harlot in history.'

David Blunkett

THE FRINGE EFFECT [again]

2010-05-09T15:49:00.001Z

Following the general election in 2005, the English Rights Campaign posted an item on the effect of the fringe parties on the Tory vote [see the English Rights Campaign item dated the 10 May 2005]. That item highlighted the haemorrhaging of support towards UKIP, BNP and the then fledgling English Democrats on the nationalist issues of the EU and immigration, with the West Lothian Question looming up.

That effect has continued in the May 2010 general election too. UKIP have been cited as helping to unseat the Eurosceptic David Heathcoat-Amory in Wells, Somerset where the Lib Dems won by 800 with UKIP polling 1,711 votes. Labour held Dudley North with a majority of only 649 votes while UKIP polled 3,267 votes. Labour ministers John Denham, Phil Woolas and Ed Balls have all managed to win with majorities smaller than the UKIP vote.

It has been alleged that up to 10 seats have been thus affected. This is a gross underestimate of the importance of the fringe effect and Labour’s success in rigging the election. In Yorkshire, some of the constituencies referred to previously have now been won by the Tories. Cleethorpes, Selby and Ainsty [as it now is], and Brigg and Goole all now have Tory MPs. Direct comparisons are of course complicated by boundary changes.

However, in other constituencies the Tories have lost sufficient support to prevent them from winning. For example, in the longstanding safe Labour constituency of Don Valley, Caroline Flint clung on by a reduced majority of only 3,595. UKIP, the BNP and the English Democrats polled 1,904, 2,112 and 1,756 respectively - a combined total of 13.3% of the vote. In the neighbouring Doncaster North constituency, the combined vote for these 3 parties was a total of 16.3%. In the new constituency of Penistone and Stocksbridge, Labour won by a majority of 3,049 while the UKIP/BNP/English Democrats combined vote was 4,635 - 10% of the vote. The high vote for UKIP/BNP/English Democrats is widespread. Even in Alan Johnson’s Hull West and Hessle constituency, the combined vote was 3,980 - 12.7% of the vote.

In England, the Tories have a majority of 62 seats. In Scotland and Wales, Labour have a majority of 23 and 12 seats respectively. The Tories failed to increase their Scottish MPs at all. They still have only one. Gordon Brown is still holed up in Downing Street as a result of the manner Labour have rigged the constitution, allowing devolved parliaments, funded by English subsidies, but still packing the House of Commons with Left Wing Scots and Welsh MPs. Despite the obvious consequences of this, the Tories continue to refuse to support an English Parliament to put the English on an equal footing with the Scots and Welsh. All David Cameron’s craven crawling to the Scots [see the English Rights Campaign item dated the 24 September 2006] have failed to produce any meaningful electoral support from Scotland for the Tories.

Meanwhile, Labour continues to maximise mass immigration and the attendant industrial production and issuing of new British passports to immigrants. Roughly 80% of ethnic minorities vote for a Left Wing party. In London Labour polled more than the Tories, who failed to win marginals such as Eltham, Hammersmith and Westminster North, where the swing from Labour to the Tories was only 1.82%, 0.48% and 0.61% respectively. The combined UKIP/BNP/English Democrats vote in Eltham was 2,973 votes and the Labour majority 1,663. The Tory London Mayor, Boris Johnson, is actually campaigning for an amnesty for illegal immigrants.

The Tories have only managed to increase their vote from 33% of the vote [the percentage they won in both the 2001 and 2005 general elections] to 36%. If they do now manage to cobble together a deal with the Lib Dems, and do succeed in trying to grapple with the necessary spending cuts, they will have to face the English electors from a low base of support and explain why they refuse to stop mass immigration and why they continue to support the rigged constitution that cost England so dearly.

AN ELECTION RIGGED

2010-05-08T14:21:00.002Z

Below is an item from the Adam Smith Institute website:

The West Lothian Question must be addressed
Written by Tom Clougherty
Saturday, 08 May 2010 07:00

The results of the general election have again highlighted the unfairness of our asymmetric devolution arrangements. In a sense, it didn’t matter much to Scotland who won the election – they have their own parliament and their own government, and pursue their own policies on many domestic issues. And yet they still got to send 59 members of parliament to Westminster, who will now spend most of their time voting on and debating legislation that only applies to England.

In such a tight election race, these Scottish MPs could easily have held the balance of power, and been able to wield enormous influence over policies that could never impact their constituents. That this hasn’t happened should be welcomed, but it shouldn’t distract us from the fact that there remains something fundamentally wrong with our constitutional set-up. If – as seems to be the case – political and electoral reform is going to be a major issue in coming months, devolution must be part of the discussion.

I’ve written many times before that the only solution to this ‘West Lothian question’ is for power to be devolved to England as it is to Scotland. The radical decentralizer in me likes the idea of Swiss-style localism, with power devolved to the English counties, but realistically an English Parliament is the more obvious solution.

What the ASI has recommended before is that the MPs representing English constituencies in the House of Commons be constituted as a separate English Parliament, which would elect its own first minister, and take over the Commons for several weeks each month to deal with English issues. Interestingly enough, if this English Parliament existed today, it would contain 298 Conservative MPs, 191 Labour, 43 Liberal Democrat, and 1 Green. That would add up to a Tory majority of 31, compared with being 19 short of a majority at the UK level.

This is not an argument about whether or not England should have a Conservative government. Rather, my point is that if Scotland can elect a parliament that represents their views, and if Wales and Northern Ireland can elect assemblies to do the same, why can’t England? It is a simple matter of fairness that ought to be on the agenda.

P.S. Britain’s geographic polarization – the Tories won 71 percent of the seats in the South, compared with less than 2 percent in Scotland – is a striking feature of the 2010 electoral map. To me, that mitigates in favour of genuine political decentralization, a theme I’ll be returning to in future posts.

UKDK

2009-12-31T14:39:00.000Z

2009 has been a watershed year in British politics. Recently, the Iraq war enquiry has revealed the sheer dishonesty of Labour’s rationale for joining the US invasion. This has united many in condemnation.

But more importantly, we have seen the true nature of the British ruling class; not only their willingness to sacrifice the national interest, and the interests of the English in particular, but also their outright financial dishonesty. It is little wonder that Britain continues to decline when we are governed by a bunch of crooks. The scale and depth of the sleaze has proved bewildering. From petty claims for household items, the flipping, to the flase claims for mortgage payments, our MPs have demonstrated their contempt for probity, their greed, and their unfitness to govern.

This sleaze does not only affect the House of Commons, but also the House of Lords. This chamber, which Labour pledged to reform, has simply been swamped with Tony’s cronies who have turned that once respected body into being another bunch of self-serving crooked politicians.

On the political front, all the major parties have dishonoured their election pledges to hold a referendum on the EU Constitution/Lisbon Treaty. All of them are happy to hand over our sovereignty and freedoms to EU tyranny. Labour have given incredible sums of taxpayers’ monies to a bunch of arrogant, greedy bankers who in turn have used it to maintain if not increase their bonuses without a moment’s hesitation or any contrition. The country has been virtually bankrupted by this. Meanwhile, the new preening Supreme Court has conferred legal immunity on the bankers relating to their usury penalty charges.

Political correctness has continued to rampage and mass immigration has continued unrestrained, although it has now been revealed that Labour always intended to promote mass immigration, not for the supposed economic reasons, but with the intention of multiculturalizing England. Colonization has always been a way that a ruling class has sought to subjugate an unwilling people, and it is no different now in England than anywhere else before. This is vote rigging at its most dangerous and repugnant. To sacrifice the interests of the ordinary English people, and to deliberately push them out of their jobs and replace them with immigrants, is completely immoral.

Despite the depravity of the government executive, there is no check on it. In the Czech Republic, the president, despite having few powers, did avoid signing the Lisbon Treaty for quite some time and extracted new concessions too. Britain was in the ridiculous position of having to hope that the Czech president could hold out long enough for a general election in Britain to bring in a new government which might hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. It was not to be. But what of the British head of state? The Queen had happily signed the treaty already and the House of Lords was uninterested in holding Labour to its manifesto commitments even in so far as it was able to.

Even when the sleaze allegations were at their worst, there was no question of parliament being dissolved and a general election being called - which is what should have happened. The Queen had no compunction or will to insist on probity among our politicians, and their lordships were too busy with their own snouts in the trough to object.

That we are now holding another gentlemanly enquiry into the Iraq war demonstrates the difference between Britain and the USA, where heads did quickly roll after the failure to locate the alleged weapons of mass destruction. This all highlights the inadequacy of the British constitution. Instead of throwing out these crooked politicians, with all the pomposity that the British establishment can muster, we had to sit and watch the ridiculous spectacle of the Queen, in all her finery, deliver the speech for the next parliamentary session surrounded by crooks who are the product of a rigged election, to which she did not object, and who intend to rig the oncoming election as best they can in the same manner [eg see the English Rights Campaign items dated 13 March 2006 and 15 October 2005].

In the looming general election the people have the opportunity to sweep these crooks out of office. We, the ordinary people, must not hesitate to do so. We need a new constitution to ensure a democratic renewal and to address the inadequacies of the present one. It is out country and we need to take it back.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

2009-12-24T14:28:00.000Z

The English Rights Campaign would wish all English nationalists and patriots a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

2009-12-03T23:35:00.001Z

'This is a silent coup d'etat. Our national wealth is being transferred to the banking sector. It is deeply worrying'

Dr Ros Altmann, a former Downing Street adviser, speaking recently.

THE EU

2009-04-07T22:24:00.001Z

The European Union has poisoned the Celtic Tiger
April 7, 2009 by sjohnson
Filed under National News

FOR THE past twenty years, the Irish Republic has been regarded by many as the Golden Boy of the European Union.

They were the ultimate “good Europeans”, joining the Euro, converting road signs into kilometres, reducing taxes on profits extracted from its people by foreign multinationals and opening its borders to cheap imported labour.

Brussels beamed benignly on the “Celtic Tiger Economy”, lavishing huge handouts, financed by British and German taxpayers, on massive road and other public works projects - motorways joining nowhere to nowhere else but adorned with huge “built with EU Regional Aid Funds” signs, etc.

Immigrants flooded in, not just from Eastern Europe but from Nigeria, Somalia and other parts of the Third World,raising ethnic minorities from under 1% to over 12% of the population. Ireland was bearing the brunt of Europhile globalisation, with soaring drug abuse, rising divorce rates and an increase in crime.

Across once tranquil and lovely coastlines, the vulgar garishly painted holiday homes of Dublin property developers, financial speculators and derivatives traders sprouted like malignant mushrooms. An ancient rich culture and way of life was swamped by Hollywood Coca-colonisation, making Ireland just like everywhere else in the Americanised West, only wetter.

But now the Euro-binge is over and Ireland is waking up to the shattering hangover.

Unemployment has risen to over 12%, the highest for generations. Household debt has reached twice the country’s Gross National Product making it the highest in the developed world. The property sector, which at its peak accounted for 25% of the national economy as opposed to only 10% even in Britain, has collapsed. House prices have fallen by a third in a year.

Foreign multinationals induced to come with tax cuts are deserting like rats leaving a sinking ship. Computer giant Dell is shutting its Raheen laptop plant, near Limerick, because the Poles have made them a better offer. Ten thousand people have been thrown on the dole and the Irish national GDP shrunk by 4% in one hit. Waterford porcelain, which bought up the once proud Potteries name of Wedgwood, has gone bust itself and Poland is now recruiting plumbers and building workers from Ireland!

The country’s third largest bank, Anglo-Irish, which lent an amount equivalent to twice the Irish National debt, has been nationalised. In desperation to halt any further run on their banks the Irish Government unconditionally guaranteed all savers’ deposits in Irish banks. Despite the fact that meeting this guarantee would take two and a half times the total annual output of Ireland!

But it is Ireland’s membership of the Eurozone which is the worst thing about the disaster now hitting Ireland. Because being in the Eurozone means the Irish Government is powerless to do anything effective as the economy collapses around it.

So thoroughly globalised is the Irish economy that it is dependent on selling abroad four-fifths of what it produces. But the strong Euro is pricing those goods out of their markets.

The answer would be to devalue the currency as Britain has done, by a third against the Euro and the dollar in six months. But they can’t, because it’s not their currency and they have no control over it. Nor can the Irish Government, unlike ours, bring down interest rates. Or even print money.

Germany and France run the Eurozone for their own good, regardless of the pain they inflict on Ireland or any of the other lesser Eurozone members.

All the Irish Government can do is make matters worse by cutting public spending and wages and raising taxes, desperately trying to plug a €20 billion hole in the public purse.

Unemployment in estates around Dublin and other larger Irish towns is soaring past 70% and shops are being reduced to selling single cigarettes and teabags.

120,000 people marched through Dublin recently demanding action and the reversing of public sector wage cuts of 10%. But in Ireland, so far the only prominent European country without a significant genuinely nationalist party, there is no-one willing to take the action needed.

Ireland needs to get out of the Euro and out of the European Union. It needs to provide Irish jobs for Irish workers in an economy run by Irish people for Irish people.

But for the moment that can’t happen. It can only stand and watch the other collapsing economies like those of Italy, Greece, Portugal, Spain and the Eastern European members, bring the Eurozone to its knees.

In the meantime, the agony of Ireland is a lesson in what befalls the victims of global free marketeering. If Britain can learn from it and help Ireland recover, then their suffering will not entirely have been in vain.

This article by Steve Johnson appears in the April issue of Freedom which will be on sale this weekend.

THE EU

2009-04-01T17:03:00.002Z

You cannot get much dopier than this:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1166136/I-read-EU-constitution-admits-Europe-Minister-Caroline-Flint.html#

'I have never read the EU constitution', admits Europe Minister Caroline Flint

By Ian Drury
Last updated at 4:24 PM on 31st March 2009

Caroline Flint: Not read the EU treaty

The Government minister responsible for the revived EU constitution made an astonishing gaffe by admitting she had never read it.

Europe Minister Caroline Flint admitted she had only been 'briefed' on parts of a document that surrenders a raft of British powers to Brussels.

Labour has refused to give British voters a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty on the grounds that it is 'substantially' different to the dumped constitution.

But during a Commons debate, Ms Flint confessed she had not read all of the despised charter.

Critics said it was an 'extraordinary admission' to make.

Mark Francois, the Tory Europe spokesman, said: ''It is not every day that someone will admit they haven’t read the most important document for their job.

'Her astonishing admission does leave some questions. How does she know if the Treaty is good for Britain if she hasn’t read it?

'If she had taken the time to read the whole Treaty, as I have, she might then know it means a major transfer of power from Britain to the EU.

'The right thing to do would be to let the British people have the chance to read it and decide for themselves.'

Lorraine Mullally, director of the anti-EU think-tank Open Europe, said: 'This is an unbelievable admission. It is extremely worrying that the minister responsible for promoting the treaty in this country has no idea what it actually says.

'Perhaps this explains why she is against giving the British people the vote on it they were promised – she simply has no idea how important it is.'

She branded Ms Flint a 'hypocrite' for telling Irish voters who threw out the treaty that they had 'misunderstood' it, despite never reading it herself.

Asked by MPs if she had read the elements of the treaty that related to defence, Ms Flint replied: 'I have read some of it but not all of it.'

After an astonished response from politicians, she added: 'I have been briefed on some of it.'

The Government has refused to honour an election pledge to hold a ballot by claiming the treaty - the biggest transfer of sovereign powers to Brussels - was different to the constitution, rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005.

Ministers said they had protected their crucial 'red lines' covering policing and courts, human and social rights, foreign policy and taxes.

Gordon Brown smiles as he signs the Lisbon Treaty

Long read: Gordon Brown smiles as he signs the Lisbon Treaty last year

But their claims were blown out of the water by the Labour-dominated European Scrutiny Select Committee, which carried out a line-by-line study of the documents.

Only four countries have not yet fully ratified the Lisbon Treaty: the Czech Republic, Ireland, Germany and Poland.

Britain rubber-stamped the power-grab by a vote in Parliament, despite more than 90 per cent of people questioned wanting a referendum.

Ireland is holding a second referendum in October after a 'no' vote last year.

The future of the controversial constitution was thrown into further doubt following the collapse of the pro-Brussels Czech government.

It is almost certain to delay Czech ratification of the revived Lisbon Treaty, which can come into force only after it has been approved by all 27 European Union member states.

The Lisbon Treaty treaty comprises of nearly 300 pages, but it is written in complex legal language.

THE LOONY LEFT

2009-03-31T21:52:00.000Z

Of 44 Church of England bishops, only 5 thought that the church bells should be rung to celebrate St George’s Day.

The bishops had been written to by Libby Alexander who believed that church attendances were falling due to ‘the lack of assertiveness or confidence emanating from the top’ and the ‘strangulations of political correctness’. Less than half the bishops replied and those who did were either unenthusiastic or hostile. Some claimed that there could be a backlash from other religious groups.

Mrs Alexander wrote:

‘What an uplifting, wondrous sound it would be if bells rang out to remind the country that Christianity exists and that churches are there to welcome.’

The Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, the Rt Rev John Packer, said: ‘I am not sure assertiveness is a Christian value’. The Bishop of Portsmouth, the Rt Rev Dr Peter Foster, said: ‘There would be dangers in putting on “public displays” of confidence.’

Assertiveness is definitely not a Church of England value.

THE EU

2009-03-27T19:02:00.001Z

For those who have not actually seen the YouTube sensation of Dan Hannan telling Gordon Brown the facts of life in the EU parliament, the link is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mc9TVlzdEsc

THE LOONY LEFT

2009-03-24T22:32:00.000Z

Despite the economic crisis and the unemployment caused by Labour’s economic policy, Labour remain determined to continue promoting political correctness and the deculturalisation of England regardless.

The Department for Local Government has spent money from its Faith Communities Capacity Building Fund to donate £25,000 to the British Humanist Association [BHA], which is aggressively campaigning against religion - especially Christianity. The BHA has further received £35,000 of funding from the so-called Equality and Human Rights Commission to promote secularism. The president of the BHA is the Labour stalwart, Polly Toynbee.

The BHA has been responsible for advising Local Authorities that: ‘Religious pictures on the walls may seem inoffensive to those of the religion in question but can create a hostile or offensive environment for others.’

The BHA has been pleased that funding helped activists within the City of London Police to rename ‘prayer rooms’ as ‘quiet rooms’. So-called equality officers have been advised to promote ‘humanists and non-religious people’.

A spokesman for the Department for Local Government said that its funding of the BHA was part of a ‘broader strategy to build cohesion’.

THE BRITISH INQUISITION

2009-03-22T13:21:00.002Z

Further to the item posted earlier today, it would seem that Mr Kumarasiri was wrong. Having a brown skin does not protect someone from the British Inquisition:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/nottinghamshire/7956570.stm
Page last updated at 12:53 GMT, Saturday, 21 March 2009
Foreign ban postmaster leaves job

Mr Kumarasiri said he could not serve people if he did not understand them.

A postmaster from Nottingham who refused to serve customers who could not speak English has left his job.

Sri-Lankan born Deva Kumarasiri, who worked at the sub office on Sneinton Boulevard, made the national news after announcing his policy.

He had claimed non-English speakers frustrated other customers and made it difficult to do his job properly.

But managers at the Post Office said the service was for all and they were concerned about the impact on trade.

There were also reports that Polish migrants had been boycotting the branch.

I suspect people in this country would be offended by what this man was doing
John Heppell MP

Abida Raja, whose family runs the branch, said they had to take action. He said: "It was my brother's decision because obviously he was very upset by those comments, because we're losing customers because of it.

"He had to do something about it, because obviously we don't feel that way about anyone else, we don't discriminate against any customer coming in, because obviously the customers keep the business going."

Mr Kumarasami's policy had also been criticised by the Racial Equality Council and MP for Nottingham East, John Heppell.

Mr Heppell said: "This was a little bit strange. What do you do with tourists?

"If I was abroad and if someone refused to sell me a stamp because my French or German was not good enough, I think I would have every right to be offended and I suspect people in this country would be offended by what this man was doing."

Mr Kumarasiri had told the BBC he had turned away about six customers who had wasted his time and annoyed other customers by not being able to understand English.

He had said: "I am part of a service but how can I serve them if I don't understand what they are asking for?

"When I came to England I obeyed the British way of life, I got into the British way of life.

"That is what I ask everyone else to do - respect the country where you are working and living."

http://www.inthenews.co.uk/printerfriendly.aspx?itemid=1282105
InTheNews.co.uk
Foreign language ban postmaster removed
Saturday, 21 Mar 2009 12:02

Mr Kumarasiri is now working at a different post office in the area.

A postmaster working in Nottingham who refused to serve customers who couldn't speak English has been removed by the store's owner.

Sri-Lankan born Deva Kumarasiri's decision to turn away customers from a post office in Sneinton Boulevard for their failure to integrate into British society by not speaking English made the national newspapers earlier this week.

Mr Kumarasiri stated that it was difficult to serve customers who spoke in foreign languages.

Speaking to the BBC Nottingham East MP John Heppell said the postmaster's decision would cause difficulties to tourists.

"If I was abroad and if someone refused to sell me a stamp because my French or German was not good enough, I think I would have every right to be offended and I suspect people in this country would be offended by what this man was doing," he added.

Local newspaper the Nottingham Evening Post reports that Mr Kumarasiri was now working at a different post office but was determined to maintain his stand on customers speaking English.

It reports Mr Kumarasiri as saying: "I will continue with my policy and try to do what is best for the people of Nottingham."

© 2009 www.InTheNews.co.uk .

QUOTE OF THE MONTH [bonus]

2009-03-22T13:13:00.001Z

‘I had to say something, because too many people are afraid to. The person who’s born here can’t do anything or he’ll be accused of being racist. You can only complain here if you’ve got brown skin.

And the white man, what does he do? Nothing. He has to keep it under his clothes, or his hat, or whatever we say, until it builds up and up like a balloon, until one day it’ll explode and we’ll have riots and hatred and I don’t want that. I just want people to be proud to be ‘British.’

Deva Kumarasiri, a Sri-Lankan-born postmaster who is refusing to serve customers who do not speak in English.

Local Muslims are now circulating a petition demanding that Mr Kumarasiri is sacked.

BRITISH JOBS FOR BRITISH WORKERS

2009-03-21T13:06:00.002Z

Below is an article which exposes how committed Labour are to the promotion of mass immigration, despite knowing that British people are being put out of work because of it:

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/90163/Firms-told-how-to-employ-foreigners

FIRMS TOLD HOW TO EMPLOY FOREIGNERS

ANGRY: Tory Chris Grayling

Friday March 20,2009
By Mark Reynolds

TAXPAYERS are footing the bill for a string of seminars teaching British companies how to legally recruit more foreign workers – as the number of unemployed in the UK rockets past two million.

Under an initiative branded “absurd” by critics, the Government is running a number of “free lessons” to encourage firms to legally employ non-EU workers.

Yesterday the Home Office defended the taxpayer-funded seminars, which allow bosses to quiz experts on how to legally bring in extra foreign labour.

On the same day the Royal Bank of Scotland confirmed some 2,700 jobs, more than two per cent of its workforce, are to be axed.

Costing a total of £20,000, the classes proclaim to show how employers can tap into potential resources that offer “new solutions to the labour and skills shortages being experienced in the UK today.”

The series of seminars – already held in East Lancashire, Liverpool, Dorset and next month to be staged in London – are being hosted by the UK Border Agency, part of the Home Office, and the British Chamber of Commerce.
ì
“The focus must be on up-skilling British workers and not employing foreign workers."
î

Last night furious critics attacked the move, calling on companies to look to the rising number of skilled and professional British workers who are seeking jobs.

Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said: “Of course Britain should not bring down the protectionist barriers in a recession, but this will deal a further blow to Gordon Brown’s credibility in the eyes of many people after his boasts about ‘British Jobs for British Workers’.”

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of Migrationwatch, added: “This is an absurd use of Government money.

“The focus must be on up-skilling British workers and not employing foreign workers.

“With unemployment rising weekly it is inexcusable that British workers shouldn’t have a first crack at jobs as they come available.”

But a British Chamber of Commerce said: “The BCC is involved in these programmes to ensure businesses do not fall foul of the law by employing illegal migrants.”

A Home Office spokesman added: “We have always said that we would run our immigration system for the benefit of the UK, and that is why we introduced a flexible points system which allows the Government to control the numbers of people coming to the UK from outside Europe, ensuring that they have the skills this country needs.

“We are working with businesses to help them understand these tighter controls.”

IMMIGRATION

2009-03-18T15:51:00.002Z

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1162782/English-second-language-seven-school-pupils.html
English is a second language for one in seven school pupils

By James Chapman
Last updated at 3:03 AM on 18th March 2009* Comments (0)

The high number of pupils who do not speak English as a first language can make classroom teaching difficult

One in seven primary school pupils does not speak English as a first language.

The number who normally speak a foreign language rose last year to 565,888 - 14.3 per cent of the total.

In some areas, English is a foreign language to more than 70 per cent of four to 11-year-olds, putting enormous pressure on teaching staff. And there are ten schools without a single pupil who has English as a first language, new figures show.

Teachers say large concentrations of children with a poor grasp of English can lead to some schools being unfairly condemned by inspectors.

Parliamentary questions have revealed that in 2004, 452,388 primary school children spoke English as a second language. By last year this figure had increased by 113,500, a rise of almost exactly 25 per cent.

In secondary schools, the proportion of pupils who do not have English as their native language has increased from 8.8 per cent in 2004 to 10.6 per cent last year.

The soaring figures reflect the fact that immigration into the UK is now five times higher than when Labour came to power in 1997. Net immigration has increased from 48,000 that year to 237,000 in 2007.

Shadow immigration minister Damian Green said the figures suggest that almost a million primary and secondary pupils now speak English as a second language.

He said: 'These shocking figures illustrate how difficult life is for many teachers because of the Government's long-term failure to control immigration.

'They show why we badly need an annual limit on immigration.

'Australia has a limit which it has just reduced because of the recession - Britain should be able to do the same thing.

'The number of pupils with English as a second language makes life difficult for teachers, parents and pupils.

'Whether or not they can speak English, everyone suffers when it's more difficult for teachers in the classroom.

'This is also a huge pressure on local authorities trying to cope with uncontrolled immigration.'

Conservative MP Damian Green: 'Everyone suffers when it's more difficult for teachers in the classroom'

Mick Brookes, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: 'Where you have a child or a group of children with no English at all admitted to a school, the school needs to create some facility for translation, just in terms of the quality of their education .

'Children may well come with languages which are not commonly dealt with in this country.

'We are now hearing head teachers complaining that they and their schools are being unfairly judged because they have a large number of children with English as a second language.

'Schools are bending over backwards to accommodate these children and then Ofsted comes in and gives them a kicking for poor overall standards.

'But as well as being a challenge to schools, there are real success stories.

'In my own experience, a child came from Estonia with very broken English and two years later she was winning the school spelling competition.'

More and more local authorities are now insisting they need more money to help cater for the dozens of languages spoken in some schools.

In the London borough of Tower Hamlets, only 23 per cent of pupils speak English as their first language.

At one school, Nelson Primary in East London, three-quarters of pupils are not native English speakers and some 56 different languages are spoken.

Headmaster Tim Benson said his teachers have to use many more hand gestures than usual, as well as drawing pictures.

Teaching assistants fluent in particular languages are brought in to help small groups of children through their lessons.

Schools Minister Jim Knight acknowledges there can be problems with high numbers of students whose English is not up to scratch.

Despite his problems, Mr Benson says schools in areas like his are better equipped than many trying to deal with newer immigrant populations.

Schools in shire counties 'really struggle' and desperately need more cash, he warned.

'In places like Lincolnshire and Suffolk this is all new to them and the mindset is not there to provide for these children. They haven't got the staff and they haven't got the funding.'

Schools minister Jim Knight has admitted that 'undoubtedly there can be problems' for schools with large numbers of non-English speakers.

Communities Secretary Hazel Blears will tomorrow call for an 'honest debate' about the pressures that migration can put on local public services.

She will announce that anyone from outside the EU applying for a student or work visa will be required to pay a special tax levied on migrants.

The cash produced by this will go to local authorities who are currently struggling to cope with the impact of immigration on their schools, GP surgeries and other public services.

Ministers hope the tax will raise £70million over the next two years.

Miss Blears is expected to say: 'This fund will pay for the public services in the areas where migration has the biggest impact on our local communities'

The Children's Department said last night: 'The language of instruction in English schools is and always has been English.

'We have listened to concerns of headteachers and are increasing funding in the ethnic minority achievement grant to £206million by 2010, to bring students weak in English up to speed.

'We also equip schools to offer effective English teaching for new arrivals, with a comprehensive support package.'

IMMIGRATION

2009-03-17T23:09:00.005Z

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/4992172/Seven-million-immigrants-cant-be-good-for-Britain.html

Seven million immigrants can't be good for Britain

The Government has not considered how to fit enough new arrivals to create a city the size of London into the already over-crowded South East, says Alasdair Palmer.

By Alasdair Palmer
Last Updated: 6:22PM GMT 14 Mar 2009

The UN predicted last week that the population of Britain would rise to 72 million by 2050. Actually, the increase will probably happen faster than that. According to the Government's own figures, Britain's population will reach 71 million not in 40 years, but in just over 20: its forecast is that we will get there in 2031, because it thinks the number of immigrants who will arrive here is going to be higher than
the UN's prediction.

The rise will be almost entirely the result of immigration. If there were to be no immigration at all into Britain, the population would hover around its present figure of 61 million. But the Government predicts that net migration into Britain (that is, the total of those coming in minus the total number of people emigrating) will be around 190,000 a year for the foreseeable future.

The consequential population increase, which may be as high as 10 million, is enormously significant. It represents adding a city bigger than London (the population of which is now about seven and a half million). England, with a population density of 395 people per square kilometre, is already the most crowded country in Europe: we are packed more densely than the Dutch in Holland. There are nearly three times as many of us squashed into every square kilometre here as there are in every square kilometre of France.

Most of the new immigrants will gravitate towards the South East, because that's where the jobs and the money are. Suppose seven million migrants end up in the South: the existing infrastructure will have to be drastically overhauled. Already, there are acute shortages of housing, of school places and of doctors. Seven million extra people will mean several million more cars driving on roads which are already permanently congested. The provision even of such basics as water will have to be completely rethought.

Has the Government a plan for dealing with any of this? It has not. It has not seriously considered what needs to be done to supply an extra seven million people with the necessities of modern life, still less contemplated the impact it will have on the environment. The Government's only response has been to dismantle planning restrictions in order to allow private companies to build houses on every available piece of land, including public green spaces such as parks.

And yet the increase in population will be entirely the result of Labour's policy of encouraging immigration at historically unprecedented levels. In 1997, Labour abolished the "Primary Purpose Rule", which required immigrants to show that "marriage was not entered into primarily to obtain admission to the UK". Immigration by spouses increased by 50 per cent as a consequence, so that more than 40,000 arrived last year. Labour has also trebled the number of work permits granted since 1997: nearly 140,000 were issued in 2008, compared with around 47,000 in 1997. Whether deliberately or not, Labour also lost control of the asylum system after 1998, so that between 1999 and 2000 asylum seekers were, at over 80,000 a year, the
largest category of immigrants to the UK.

The number of asylum seekers has now dropped to not much more than 20,000 a year. But net immigration is going to remain extremely high, in spite of the economic recession, for the simple reason that life in the UK is a hell of a lot better than it is in most developing countries. Relative stability, freedom from arbitrary violence and predatory government are as important as free education, medical care and benefits for your family if you are out of work. It makes life here far better than anything that could be reasonably expected in most developing countries. That is why the number of people who will do everything they can to ensure that they can immigrate to this country will remain very high.

Should we turn them away? There is a moral case for high levels of immigration, based on the view that we have an obligation to share our wealth with the less well-off, wherever they come from. That, however, is not the case for mass immigration that Labour has put to the electorate, perhaps because it is aware that not many people are persuaded by it. Labour's argument has been couched entirely in terms of economic self-interest – and that case is almost totally spurious.

Were either main party to propose bringing back serious and effective restrictions on immigration, they would gain significant electoral support, and not just from the white working class. Some of the strongest supporters of reducing immigration are recent immigrants, for they suffer most from the competition of newer arrivals who are willing to work for even less in even harsher conditions. The consensus among the bien pensants that immigration is an unalloyed benefit has been so strong for so long that it will take a great deal of political courage from either Labour or the Conservatives to oppose it. But does anyone seriously think that squashing in an extra seven million people over the next 20 years is going to make this country a better place in which to live?

THE LOONY LEFT

2009-03-16T22:52:00.001Z

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/4995787/Euro-chiefs-ban-Miss-and-Mrs.html

Euro chiefs ban 'Miss' and 'Mrs'
The European Parliament has banned the terms 'Miss' and 'Mrs' in case they offend female MEPs.

By Simon Johnson
Last Updated: 3:06PM GMT 15 Mar 2009

The politically correct rules also mean a ban on Continental titles, such as Madame and Mademoiselle, Frau and Fraulein and Senora and Senorita.

Guidance issued in a new 'Gender-Neutral Language' pamphlet instead orders politicians to address female members by their full name only.

Officials have also ordered that 'sportsmen' be called 'athletes', 'statesmen' be referred to as 'political leaders' and even that 'synthetic' or 'artificial' be used instead of 'man-made'.

The guidance lists banned terms for describing professions, including fireman, air hostess, headmaster, policeman, salesman, manageress, cinema usherette and male nurse.

However MEPs are still allowed to refer to 'midwives' as there is no accepted male version of the job description.

The booklet also admits that "no gender-neutral term has been successfully proposed" to replace 'waiter' and 'waitress', allowing parliamentarians to use these words in a restaurant or café.

It has been circulated by Harold Romer, the parliament's secretary general, to the 785 MEPs working in Brussels and Strasbourg.

Struan Stevenson, a Scottish Conservative MEP described the guidelines as "political correctness gone mad."

He said: "We have seen the EU institutions try to ban the bagpipes and dictate the shape of bananas, but now they see determined to tell us which words we are entitled to use in our own language."

Philip Bradbourn, another Conservative MEP, vowed to ignore the booklet, which he described as a "waste of taxpayers' money" and called on Mr Romer to reveal its cost.

He added: "I will have no part of it. I will continue to use my own language and expressions, which I have used all my life, and will not be instructed by this institution or anyone else in these matters."

Seven years ago, an attempt to amend noise laws came close to effectively outlawing bagpipes.

However, a number of bizarre EU rules remain in place, including a directive stating that every pair of rubber boots must be supplied with a user's manual in 12 languages.

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

2009-03-15T22:45:00.001Z

‘A Grecian philosopher, who visited Constantinople soon after the death of Theodosius, published his liberal opinions concerning the duties of kings and the state of the Roman republic. Synesius observes and deplores the fatal abuse which the imprudent bounty of the late emperor had introduced into military service. The citizens and subjects had purchased an exemption from the indispensable duty of defending their country, which was supported by the arms of barbarian mercenaries. The fugitives of Scythia were permitted to disgrace the illustrious dignities of the empire; their ferocious youth, who disdained the salutary restraint of laws, were more anxious to acquire the riches than to imitate the arts of a people the object of their contempt and hatred; and the power of the Goths was the stone of Tantalus, perpetually suspended over the peace and safety of the devoted state. The measures which Synesius recommends are the dictates of a bold and generous patriot. He exhorts the emperor to revive the courage of his subjects by the example of manly virtue; to banish luxury from the court and from the camp; to substitute, in the place of the barbarian mercenaries, an army of men interested in the defence of their laws and of their property; to force, in such a moment of public danger, the mechanic from his shop and the philosopher from his school; to rouse the indolent citizen from his dream of pleasure; and to arm, for the protection of agriculture, the hands of the laborious husbandman. At the head of such troops, who might deserve the name and would display the spirit of Romans, he animates the son of Theodosius to encounter a race of barbarians who were destitute of any real courage; and never to lay down arms till he had chased them far away into the solitudes of Scythia, or had reduced them to the state of ignominious servitude which the Lacedaemonians formerly imposed on the captive Helots. The court of Arcadius indulged the zeal, applauded the eloquence, and neglected the advice of Synesius. Perhaps the philosopher, who addresses the emperor of the East in the language of reason and virtue which he might have used to a Spartan king, had not condescended to form a practicable scheme, consistent with the temper and circumstances of a degenerate age. Perhaps the pride of the ministers, whose business was seldom interrupted by reflection, might reject, as wild and visionary, every proposal which exceeded the measure of their capacity, and deviated from the forms and precedents of office. While the oration of Synesius and the downfall of the barbarians were the topics of popular conversation, an edict was published at Constantinople which declared the promotion of Alaric to the rank of master-general of the Eastern Illyricum. The Roman provincials, and the allies who had respected the faith of the treaties, were justly indignant that the ruin of Greece and Epirus should be so liberally rewarded. The Gothic conqueror was received as a lawful magistrate in the cities which he had so lately besieged. The fathers whose sons he had massacred, the husbands whose wives he had violated, were subject to his authority; and the success of his rebellion encouraged the ambition of every leader of the foreign mercenaries. The use to which Alaric applied his new command distinguishes the firm and judicious character of his policy. He issued his orders to the four magazines and manufacturers of offensive and defensive arms, Margus, Ratiaria, Naissus, and Thessalonica, to provide his troops with an extraordinary supply of shields, helmets, swords, and spears; the unhappy provincials were compelled to forge the instruments of their own destruction; and the barbarians removed the only defect which had sometimes disappointed the efforts of their courage. The birth of Alaric, the glory of his past exploits, and the confidence in his future designs, insensibly united the body of the nation under his victorious standards; and, with the unanimous consent of the barbarian chieftains, the master-general of Illyricum was elevated, according to ancient custom, on a shield, and solemnly proclaimed king of the Visigoths. Armed with this double power, seated on the verge of the two empires, he alternatively sold his deceitful promises to the courts of Arcadius and Honorius, till he declared and executed his resolution of invading the dominions of the West. The provinces of Europe which belonged to the Eastern emperor were already exhausted, those of Asia were inaccessible, and the strength of Constantinople had resisted his attack. But he was tempted by the fame, the beauty, the wealth of Italy, which he had twice visited; and he secretly aspired to plant the Gothic standard on the walls of Rome, and to enrich his army with the accumulated spoils of three hundred triumphs.’

Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Honorius and Arcadius were the two Roman Emperors, the empire being divided between east and west.

The English are not the first people to be betrayed by their leaders.

There have been documentaries which liked to portray Alaric and the Visigoths as misunderstood asylum seekers. That is bunkum. They were bloodthirsty barbarians who sought to plunder and destroy the Roman Empire. Alaric did proceed to plunder Rome and the Visigoth rampage through Italy and southern France, combined with the other barbarian invasions, did ultimately destroy the Western Roman Empire.

The eastern half of the Roman Empire, known as the Byzantine Empire, survived another thousand years until the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks.

RACE WAR POLITICS

2009-03-14T16:12:00.001Z

The controversy surrounding the small band of Islamist extremists who demonstrated at the homecoming parade in Luton of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Anglian Regiment continues.

When the soldiers, who had returned from Iraq, marched through Luton, a small mob of Islamist protesters, from Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jamaah [ASWJ], shouted abuse and waved placards saying: ‘Anglian soldiers: Butchers of Basra’ and ‘Anglian soldiers: cowards, killers, extremists’.

This was a disgraceful episode intended to denigrate our soldiers and stir up hatred. However, as a video of the event has shown, the protesters came off the worst. Members of the general public reacted very angrily and confronted the protesters, shouting ‘scum’ and ‘no surrender to the Taliban’.

The police formed two lines between the general public and the protesters to keep them apart, before hustling the protesters away. It is believed that PC Plod have not charged the protesters, although one member of the general public was issued with a fixed penalty notice and another has been charged. Nathan Draper said:

‘A 6ft 5in copper jumped on me and chucked me to the ground. He broke my glasses. I was held in the police station for ten hours and I still have the cuff marks. I’m being charged with racially aggravated harassment but it was them who were shouting racist things.’

One of the protesters, a teacher and leader of the Luton branch of the now banned al-Muhajiroun, Sayful Islam, said:

‘The anger has been rising. The parade was the final insult. They have killed, maimed, and raped thousands of innocent people. They can’t come here and parade where there is such a Muslim community.’

It has been revealed that one of the protesters, Jalal Ahmed, is a baggage handler at Luton airport. His airside pass has now been revoked and he will be subject to a full investigation by his employer, Menzies Aviation. Most of the protesters are believed to be on benefits.

Subsequently, Anjem Choudary, who has close links to ASWJ, described the parade as ‘vile’ and the soldiers ‘terrorists’ on the website Islam For The UK. Mr Choudary was interviewed by Kirsty Walk on Newsnight, in which he claimed that far from welcoming the soldiers home, ‘people should be indicted for war crimes’ and that he was ‘representing the Islamic viewpoint’. He claimed that Britain should not have soldiers in Iraq is it was ‘not your land’.

Kirsty Walk put it to him:

‘It is clear that you are not happy with life in Britain, with the way things are in Britain. I think you have actually even said you would like the flag of Allah flying above 10 Downing Street. You believe in Sharia Law and so forth. You are free to leave Britain, if you don’t like what happens here. Leave, you are a free man.’

Mr Choudary replied that what he was doing was ‘within the framework of freedom and democracy’ and that people ‘are calling for an alternative to the British way of life’.

It emerged that all homecoming parades would now be targeted by the Islamists.

Mr Choudary has been interviewed by Kirsty Walk before [see the English Rights Campaign item dated 23 August 2005], when he claimed that his British passport was nothing more than a travel document. There is an alternative to Mr Choudary and his ilk deciding that they might leave, and that is that the decision is taken for them and their travel documents are withdrawn.

RACE WAR POLITICS

2009-03-13T16:54:00.001Z

The English Rights Campaign item dated the 2 March 2009 consisted of the reaction of the Steadfast Trust and Tony Linsell to the next census and the exclusion of a question relating to the English as an ethnic group. The Office for National Statistics [ONS] had backtracked from a previous understanding that there would be a tick-box for the ethnic English.

The Steadfast Trust correspondent complains that the ONS now intends to remove the ethnic English tick box and instead only include English as an option under National Identity. The correspondent complains that:

‘A person’s “National Identity” has no actual meaning in law and carries no legal status. In effect someone can record their Ethnicity as Pakistani and their National Identity as English.’

The Steadfast Trust are concerned with equality under the various race relations legislation for the ethnic English and believe that they need the ethnic English data to enable this and to give the ethnic English status under that legislation:

‘Simply having a “place name” English identity (rather than the benefits of an “ethnic identity”) is not tolerable as it leaves the Ethnic English open to discrimination. In effect the Ethnic English have a non-identity. Discrimination against the Ethnic English is a growing problem and this can’t be combated if those who are so discriminated aren’t identified in law. For instance if the Ethnic English are under-represented in employment and feel that this is down to discrimination against them because of their ethnicity it would be quite possible for an employer to point to a fellow worker who might be Hungarian, or Irish or Afro-Caribbean and say they are not being discriminatory as all these people could be identified as English.’

Tony Linsell points out that the National Identity question is to replace the previous census question: ‘What is your country of birth?’. Tony Linsell highlights the attempt by the British state to corrupt the meaning of language:

‘In addition to the state sponsored British identity with its British history, culture and institutions, there is an inclusive and very thin state sponsored Englishness – ‘whatever your ethnicity you can be English if you want to be.’ An essential part of this systematic campaign is to suggest that England is a nation. Progressives play with words by changing their meaning so as to suit their interests. If they can get people to believe that England is a nation they will get away with the idea that national identity is determined by where you live. In other words, if you live in England you are English.’

Instead of an ethnic English tick box, we are to be reduced to settling for a white British tick box. Beth Moon of the ONS revealed that the reason for the removal of the proposed ethnic English tick-box was to encourage ethnic minorities to describe themselves as English: ‘We don’t want only White people to call themselves English’.

Such a statement is pure race war politics. The next census will be corrupted by anti-English racial hatred. Tony Linsell writes that Beth Moon also alleged that there was too little room on the form for an ethnic English tick-box:

‘Beth Moon also mentioned that the extent of the census form has to be limited and that it cannot include all the questions various groups would like included. There was obviously too little space to put in an English tick-box but enough room to put in a tick-boxes for Irish and for Gypsy or Irish Traveller. In any other country such obvious manipulation would be thought scandalous and insulting. Can you imagine an Irish census form that had an English tick-box but not an Irish tick-box? Only the half-witted English would allow such a thing.

I asked the meeting Chairman, Peter Benton, why, in view of the alleged shortage of space on the form, could room be found for an Irish tick-box and another for Gypsy and Irish Traveller. He replied, “They are discriminated against.” The clear racist implication, indeed the logic of this, is that the English discriminate against others but are not discriminated against.’

The lesson from this is that we cannot expect the British state to act fairly or be anything other than politically correct. The British state is anti-English. The corruption of the meaning of language, the control of language and all forms of media, and the imposition of a politically correct view on the population is political correctness in its purest form.

However, Tony Linsell has raised some interesting issues, which need further examination. As a grammatical fact, England is a country - not a nation. We should reject any attempt to impose grammatical nonsense upon us. It is the English who are a nation.

The English Democrats manifesto deals with the issue of Englishness and the people of England. The relevant part of the manifesto, written by Tony Linsell himself some years ago, states [italics are as in the manifesto]:

----------

England and Multi-culturalism
It is a fact that during the past forty years people of many different cultures have come to live in England. Our country is in that sense a multi-cultural society.
However, multi-culturalism is an ideology which suggests that a mix of many cultures in one society is desirable and that it is the duty of government to actively encourage cultural diversity within the state. Further, it suggests that all cultures should be treated as equal. A logical extension of this is that all languages, histories and law codes should be treated equally. This is clearly impossible in a unified country. All ethnic groups should be free to promote their own culture and identity but the public culture of England should be that of the indigenous English. This position is consistent with the rights of indigenous nations everywhere.

The English
It is common for those who assert their English identity to be challenged in a way that would be considered insulting if directed elsewhere. So as to avoid misunderstanding, and to meet the demands of those who are hostile to any assertion of Englishness, we have set out below what we mean by the English.
The English can be defined in the same way that other nations are defined. To be English is to be part of a community. We English share a communal history, language and culture. We have a communal identity and memory. We share a we sentiment; a sense of belonging. These things cannot be presented as items on a checklist. Our community, like others, has no easily defined boundaries but we exist and we have the will to continue to exist.

The People of England
The people of England are all those UK citizens who live in England. In electoral terms, the people of England are all those UK citizens who are on the electoral roll of an English constituency. The people of England therefore includes the people of many nations, all of whom share a common UK citizenship.

----------

The English Democrats manifesto clearly recognises that the ethnic English are a nation. That, for the English, ethnic and national identity are one and the same. This is a fact and not a matter of debate. The English were a self-governing nation until the formation of Britain. We remain a nation within Britain. The existence of ethnic minorities in England does not preclude we English from our culture, our history and our nationhood. Immigrants become British - not English. They acquire British passports. Those from the immigrant communities tend to refer to themselves as British-Asians, British-Pakistanis, or Black British etc. Very few refer to themselves as English and those who do may well do so as they have English blood in their veins.

If anyone in England was English, then any culture in England would be English. Such an ideological construct might suit the muliticulturalists, but it would make complete nonsense of historical fact and our understanding of society. Nor are the immigrant communities making such absurd inventions. It is only the politically correct who are doing so.

The English Rights Campaign item dated the 21 July 2005 examines the issue of nationhood and nationality, listing 6 matters for consideration. Those matters remain highly relevant as is the English Rights Campaign item dated the 28 September 2005. To deem immigrants as English is to propagate a lie.

Tony Linsell and Steadfast are concerned with English ethnicity in order to represent English interests within the race relations legislation. That may have some merits, and one needs to use all weapons to hand, but it is doomed to failure. The British state will not treat the English fairly and our very existence is a threat to its hegemony, especially if we demand our rights following the devolution of power to Scotland and Wales. The British state will resist with all its means the demands for equality for the English within the union, and likewise demands for equality with other ethnic groups.

Immigrants may have their ethnicity, but that does not make those ethnic groups a nation. Black British may include those from the Caribbean, various African countries or even the USA, for example. They may have shared racial identity or ethnicity, but not a shared national identity although they may acquire British citizenship. The English do have a shared national identity in addition to their ethnicity and in addition to their British citizenship.

Moreover, the English founded England. We are England’s Staatsvolk [responsible for England’s formation, its institutions and culture]. Immigrants have their own countries in addition to their right of abode in Britain, be it citizenship or other residency status. The English do not and have nowhere else to go. The various North American natives, such as the Inuit in Canada, have special homelands where they can enjoy their culture and autonomy. Nunavut is the homeland of 25,000 Inuit. Are we English to be denied our own homeland despite our far greater sense of nationhood, history and advanced national status? Are an indigenous national minority such as the Inuit entitled to more rights than a indigenous national majority such as the English, who in turn are a very small ethnic minority globally and also in the EU?

To treat the English as nothing more than an ethnicity would be to assume that we are as disparate as all the other ethnic minorities. That is not the case. To treat us as being nothing more than an ethnicity and as being no different from an immigrant ethnic minority would be subversive and pure race war politics.

It takes more than tick-boxes on a census form to forge nationhood. The several centuries of the British Empire did not make the various peoples of that empire members of the British nation despite their status as British subjects. They ultimately demanded independence and were prepared to fight and kill for it. Even the Americans rebelled. Likewise, the several centuries of other empires [eg Ottoman, Russian, or the Holy Roman Empire] failed to make the various peoples of those empires one nation. The Austro-Hungarian Empire failed to make even the Austrians and Hungarians one nation.

All Labour’s blather about Britishness is merely a con to allow them to rig elections and loot England for the benefit of Scotland and Wales, and allow Labour politicians to lord it over the English. It is spin to cover up the fact that Gordon Brown is not accountable to those over whom he governs. Gordon Brown is afforded far greater international status as prime minister of Britain than he would ever be afforded as prime minister of Scotland, drowning in all its banking debts.

So how should we English react to the English-haters at the ONS? We should not accept the attempted politically correct corruption of the meaning of language. We should stick to our own understanding, based on history and fact, of our own identity and nationhood. And we should unequivocally condemn the ONS’s attempt to encourage immigrants to lie in filling in the census forms.

SPIV ECONOMICS

2009-03-13T00:23:00.000Z

The £260billion guarantee for the Lloyds Banking Group has been announced and the news received with a certain nonchalance. The cost and frequency of the bailouts has almost become commonplace.

However, the shareholders in Lloyds are rightly angry that their investments have been diminished by the bungled merger with and bailout of HBOS. It has been estimated that every taxpayer will need to pay an extra £806 per year to keep the scale of government borrowing under control. When families start having to find roughly £1,600 [if both husband and wife are working], simply to stem the increase in government borrowing, and especially if the guarantees that Labour have been so willing to give to the bankers are called in and push the borrowing up still further, then the anger will turn to a hatred of those issuing these guarantees - Labour.

Despite the insolvency of the banks, news of the extravagance of the bankers’ pay continues. Larry Fish, who retired from RBS in May, is being paid £1.6million each year. His pension pot was increased by £2million to £19million in 2008; Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension pot was increased by £8.3million; and Gordon Pell’s pension pot was topped up by £1.4million. This is despite the tens of billions RBS lost. It has further been revealed that RBS provides a £1.6million home free of charge to its chairman.

RBS is now set to use £807million of the taxpayers’ money used to bail it out to shore up its pension scheme, which is now in a £1.99billion deficit. The RBS pension is extremely generous. Most staff make no contributions and can retire at 60 on two thirds of final salary.

At Northern Rock, Adam Applegarth received a golden goodbye of a year’s salary of £760,000 and a pension top up of £109,000; Andy Kulpers received a golden goodbye of £708,000; Bryan Sanderson, the former chairman, received a severance package of £340,000 [£85,000 per month for the 4 months he worked for the bank]; and Ann Godbehere claimed £173,000 in expenses for commuting from her home in Switzerland and pocketed £786,000 for only 10 months work. This is despite the bank going bust and having to be bailed out by the taxpayer. 400 junior managers are expected to be paid up to 10% of their salary.

Despite the debacle at Lloyds Bank, whose shares have fallen from 614p in early 2007 to roughly 42p now, Eric Daniels, the chief executive, receives £1million per year, is believed to have ‘non-dom’ status and receives an annual allowance of £25,000 for his ‘tax and financial planning’. His pension pot is worth £2.8million.

Back in the real world, it has been revealed that those remaining defined benefit pension schemes have a combined deficit of £219billion. The Pension Protection Fund, which was set up to bail out insolvent pension schemes, produced figures showing that the decline in value in equities was responsible for the black hole.

Meanwhile, the banks are not passing on the base rate cuts. The latest cut in base rates resulted in a mortgage rate cut of only 0.1% from the Alliance and Leicester, which has now been taken over by the Spanish Santander. Average bank savings rates have been slashed to a paltry 0.17% for an instant access account, while customers who are overdrawn on the current accounts face being charged a 18.62% interest rate. This is outrageous bank profiteering.

The ordinary English taxpayer is being taken to the cleaners.

THE CULTURE OF CRIMINALITY

2009-03-11T23:09:00.001Z

A recent study by the London School of Economics [LSE] has estimated that there may be between 524,000 and 947,000 illegal immigrants in Britain. The LSE report had been commissioned by the Tory London mayor, Boris Johnson, who has been promoting an amnesty for illegal immigrants. Mr Johnson said:

‘If people are going to be here and we’ve chronically failed to kick them out, it’s morally right that they should contribute in their taxes to the rest of society.’

The experience from other countries demonstrate that amnesties merely encourage an escalation in illegal immigration. Italy had an amnesty in 1988, allowing 119,000 illegal immigrants to settle. Another amnesty in 2002 resulted in no less than 700,000 being allowed to settle. Likewise, Spain had an amnesty in 1985, allowing 44,000 to settle and this increased to 700,000 in an amnesty in 2005.

Labour has been quietly introducing amnesties. In December 2008 it was revealed that more than 50,000 so-called asylum seekers, who should have been deported, would be allowed to stay, because their cases had not been concluded or their files had been lost. Officials were granting permission to stay at a rate of 40% of the outstanding files, which was expected to lead to as many as 180,000 being given amnesties.

The only surprise in the LSE figure is that it was not higher, although the amnesties being given by Labour will hide the true number of genuinely illegal immigrants. A previous estimate by the Home Office produced a figure of between 310,000 and 570,000. Yet this estimate was clearly far too low for the reasons set out in the English Rights Campaign items dated the 26 May 2006 and 22 November 2005. In actual fact the true figure then was in excess of 1million.

Organized crime grows rich from illegal immigration. Those who are promoting amnesties should hang their heads in shame for condoning criminality. There is nothing moral about promoting illegal immigration. It is highly immoral.

Illegal immigrants should be deported.

BRITISH JOBS FOR BRITISH WORKERS

2009-03-10T23:27:00.001Z

Lord Mandelson has claimed that East European immigration had not had ‘an adverse effect on the employment of British nationals’. He further said:

‘I think it’s important to note that the nationals coming here from the original eight new accession countries are helping to fill gaps in our labour market our British nationals are either not available to fill or are unwilling to fill.

There are jobs available for British nationals despite the circulation of workers that has resulted from EU enlargement.’

Paul Kenny of the GMB union commented:

‘Peter Mandelson is given to making sweeping statements about the UK labour market and how it operates. Unfortunately, most of his statements turn out to be sweeping with no foundation in fact.’

The real point here is that Labour have abolished the British labour market. In a properly functioning labour market a shortage of workers would lead to an increase in wages in order to attract more workers. Likewise a surplus of workers would tend to depress wages. Under Labour, Britain has been flooded with immigrants from across the globe and this huge surge in low skilled workers is pushing down wages. Further skilled and unskilled immigration from the EU countries is further pushing down wages.

If firms can hire cheaper workers from abroad, or fill perceived shortages with immigrants, then the normal market corrective mechanism does not operate. Rising unemployment and falling living standards are the direct and inevitable result of Labour policy.

THE NEED FOR AN ENGLISH PARLIAMENT

2009-03-09T21:53:00.002Z

Speaking at the recent Scottish Labour conference in Dundee, Gordon Brown let slip a couple of matters that shed light on Labour’s economic policy.

As has been alleged already, Mr Brown is pumping the line that the banking crisis is all a global problem requiring a global solution:

‘I believe there is an emerging consensus that where capital flows are global we cannot just have national supervision, but need global supervision too.’

Mr Brown set out four areas to be covered by his new global financial policy:

The regulation of tax havens
International principles to end the ‘short-term bonus culture’
The monitoring of the whole financial system
A global framework for international financial supervision

Mr Brown asserted that:

‘You solve a global problem not by separatist solutions but by us all working together.’

Mr Brown then continued to give an example of the benefits of us all working together:

‘Let us remember that, when Scottish banks collapsed, the whole of the UK came together to stand by our banking system to prevent the banks from total collapse. With an investment bigger than the Scottish administration’s entire budget and giving guarantees that no country the size of Scotland could ever have been able to give.’

This is disingenuous. From where in the UK did all the money come from for the bail out of the Scottish banks? Scotland, by Mr Brown’s own admission could not afford it. Northern Ireland is scarcely able to underwrite such largesse, and ditto Wales.

It is England where the money has come from. And when all the hundreds of £billions were being showered onto the Scottish banks, who was supposed to be representing English interests? The reality is that no one did. England was simply looted, and Mr Brown is determined to loot England even more. He continued by saying that he would uphold the findings of the Calman Commission on Scottish devolution - whatever they might be - and further alleged that:

‘People know that what scars Scotland is not its border but its poverty.’

In fact Scotland is one of the wealthier regions of the UK. This kind of greedy, self-centred whinging by Labour’s McMafia is unjustified and uncalled for.

Mr Brown is trying to shift responsibility for the governance of British banking onto some global institution. He is trying to dodge the issue. It does not require a global supervision to stop greedy bankers in the UK helping themselves to English taxpayers’ money, nor to stop Labour ministers using English taxpayers’ money to lavish extortionate pensions upon incompetent banking fat cats.

We do not need Mr Brown and Labour grandstanding as global leaders. Their bombast does not absolve them from their squandering of English taxpayers’ money bailing out a banking cartel and the ruination of the economy for a generation to come.

We need an English parliament to represent English interests.

THE BRITISH INQUISITION

2009-03-09T02:35:00.000Z

There have been calls for the resignation of Phil Woolas, Labour’s immigration minister, after he attacked the Office of National Statistics [ONS] for publishing statistics regarding immigration.

Labour ministers were described as ‘fizziing’ with anger when the ONS revealed that the number of foreign workers increased by 175,000 to 2.4million last year, when the number of British workers fell by 234,000. The ONS has also published statistics which show that foreign-born people make up one in nine of the UK population. Mr Woolas had complained in a letter that the statistics had been published by the ONS ‘with no ministerial involvement and indeed despite my objections.’ He further stated:

‘What’s worse is that the press release highlighted the one in nine figure as the main finding. So the Government gets the blame by some for whipping up anti-foreign sentiment when it is the independent ONS who are playing politics.

The justification from the ONS who had, our of schedule, highlighted the figure two weeks earlier because it was “topical” is, at best, naïve or, at worst, sinister.’

When challenged about his statements, Mr Woolas said:

‘The ONS need to be aware that they are entering shark-infested waters. It’s not the role of the ONS to dictate the debate.’

Labour’s policy of reducing the English into being a minority in England must involve the displacement of English workers. This is the direct and inevitable consequence of Labour policy.

The ONS has published statistics revealing the consequence of Labour policy. The truth is politically incorrect, and it is that to which Mr Woolas objects. He would rather the truth be suppressed.

THE EU

2009-03-08T13:55:00.003Z

http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/12702/-Bill-Jamieson-Social-meltdown.5049797.jp
Bill Jamieson: Social meltdown threatens Europe
Published Date: 08 March 2009

PLUNGING stock markets, collapsing banks, soaring unemployment: I cannot recall a period in more than 30 years in journalism when the flow of business and financial news has been as unrelentingly bleak as it is now.

We have entered a Dante's Inferno of economics. From America to Japan, Germany to Brazil, Ireland to Taiwan, the falls in industrial output, financial prices and confidence have been beyond the scale of anything we have seen since the Great Depression. This was the comparison that even a few months ago many recoiled from making for fear of hyperbole. Now it is frighteningly real, with markets in the midst of an epochal destruction of wealth.

From America last Friday came news that unemployment soared by 651,000 last month to 8.1%. It is the 14th consecutive month it has risen, and to the highest in 25 years. The latest losses bring the total from the start of the recession in December 2007 to 4.4 million – with 2.6 million of that coming in the last four months. On Wall Street the mood is black, with share prices being driven to fresh 12-year lows.

But it is not the United States – dire though the mood now is on Wall Street and Main Street – that concerns me most. The UK and mainland Europe look altogether more worrying. I do not think that in Britain we have yet grasped the depth and magnitude of the economic crisis that is unfolding and its implications for government spending and debt. And in continental Europe the signs of deepening recession are
everywhere evident.

A global slump in demand has battered the export-driven economies of France and Germany. Debt de-leveraging has struck at the heart of consumer credit-driven countries such as the UK, Ireland and Spain. Looking east, the crisis looks even more acute, with mounting worries over Western European bank exposure to countries such as Rumania, Hungary and the Ukraine.

The astonishing falls in industrial output portend serious social problems by themselves. Germany and France suffered output falls of 14% and 14.8% respectively between October and December, while Italy has suffered an 18% drop from recent peaks. But combined with severe corrections in highly geared housing markets and budget deficits rising at alarming speed, the EU finds itself in a deeper crisis than recent cosy – and ineffective – summit meetings have portrayed.

Problems in heartland EU economies are being compounded first by growing signs of stress elsewhere in the Eurozone and second by the growing possibility of a financial failure in some of the countries of the former Soviet Union. It is Europe that has the potential to turn the world's flickering lights into a black-out.

First, some facts and figures. Eurostat confirmed last week that Euro zone GDP plunged by 1.5% quarter-on-quarter in the final three months of 2008 – the third successive quarter of contraction.

The decline was widespread across the Eurozone. The most eye-watering was in Germany, the Eurozone's biggest economy, where GDP plummeted 2.1% quarter on quarter – the sharpest drop since unification in 1990.

Italy dived 1.8%, France 1.2%, and the Netherlands 1.9%. Germany's private sector shrank last month at its fastest rate in more than a decade while engineering orders posted their biggest decline in 50 years. The Ifo Institute's business climate index fell last month to its lowest level since re-unification and last month German firms applied to the authorities to put a staggering 700,000 workers on short time.

Europe's steel market is suffering its worst collapse in decades with EU output tumbling almost 46% year on year in January. Nor is the outlook any better in the services sector. It plumbed new lows last month with the services sector Purchasing Managers Index plunging at a record rate. Economists now expect Euro area GDP to decline by around 3% in 2009 and to be only flat overall in 2010.

In several countries – Spain, Greece and Ireland in particular – a collapse in the public finances now looms. In Spain, unemployment has now climbed to 3.3 million or 14.5% of the workforce. Ireland's budget deficit has already reached 9.5% of GDP, the highest in the Eurozone. Unemployment is at a 12-year high of 10.4% and is forecast to hit 12.3% this year.

Last week EU leaders meeting in Brussels for an emergency summit briskly slapped down pleas of help from Eastern Europe. And later last week came an extraordinary statement from Joaquin Almunia, the European Commissioner for Monetary Affairs, that the Eurozone has a way of bailing out its members if they face a crisis. Although no bail-out possibility existed under European Union laws, there was a solution that would avoid members having to seek help from the International Monetary Fund.

And what form might this solution take? "This solution exists", he insisted, "don't fear this for a moment. But by definition these things should not be explained in public."

That may be some comfort to those of a Brussels mindset. But to anyone in the real world this is to take public policy back to the medieval era. How is confidence in the European single currency to rest on a Baldrick-like cunning, secret plan? Has the cause of ever closer union come to this – a plan so sensitive it cannot be revealed in public?

If the stresses and strains within the Eurozone are worrying enough, consider what lies to the East. Hopes over the past decade of a linear rise in living standards and prosperity led to a surge in foreign currency borrowing. But these massive loans now look increasingly shaky as many former Soviet Union (FSU) currencies have plunged.

Latvia, whose economy is set to contract by 12% this year, and whose credit rating has been downgraded by Standard & Poor's to junk, is already in receipt of IMF aid. Another IMF support recipient is Hungary, burdened with a larger debt-to-GDP ratio than almost any other new EU member. A third is Ukraine whose GDP is set to contract by 10% this year. "No end in sight to political and economic chaos" was the crisp summation of The Economist.

Some countries such as Slovakia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Poland are holding up relatively well. But across the FSU some $400bn (£283bn) of short-term debt falls due for renewal or roll-over this year. The fear is that failure in one area could spark disaster elsewhere. Another is that there might be a stampede for the exits by foreign investors and particularly banks.

This appalling picture suggests that there is a risk over the next 12 to 18 months of serious political and social unrest in some of the countries to the east. The sense of anger and grievance is likely to be more keenly felt in those EU economies where populations have grown accustomed to standards of living that are relatively high compared with many countries in the FSU. One evident area of concern would be countries with a high and rising levels of youth unemployment.

For if, as the signs now suggest, we are in for a long, slow protracted recovery – one stretching out for five to seven years – the ingredients for explosive frustration are there.

That is why these astonishing falls in industrial output portend serious social problems well beyond anything Europe has experienced since the end of the war.

THE EU

2009-03-07T13:26:00.003Z

Below is an article from the Telegraph:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/simonheffer/4934431/Its-the-Europhiles-versus-reality-and-reality-is-going-to-win.html

It's the Europhiles versus reality, and reality is going to win
Milton Friedman was right to predict that the euro might not survive a recession, notes Simon Heffer.

Simon Heffer
Last Updated: 7:20AM GMT 04 Mar 2009

During the current crisis we have several times heard invoked the wisdom of Milton Friedman about the unfeasibility of the euro as a currency surviving a recession. In an interview not long before his death three years ago, Friedman said: "The euro is going to be a big source of problems, not a source of help. The euro has no precedent. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a monetary union, putting out a fiat currency, composed of independent states. There have been unions based on gold or silver, but not on fiat money – money tempted to inflate – put out by politically independent entities."

It is what lies below the surface of this observation that is putting not just the euro, but the entire confection of the European Union, under such intense pressure. Any recession would bring into play tensions between idealism and nationalism: the desire by those who pilot the European project to maintain the confection for as long as possible and as intact as possible, that it might come out on the other side of this economic horror bloodied but unbowed; and the inevitable identification of hundreds of millions who stand outside the fantasy world of the political class with their own nation state, their own nationals and their own national interest. Without a degree of coercion beyond what even this undemocratic, Sovietised swindle has attempted in the recent past, the national interest will in the end prevail.

There have been auguries of this for some months, while we have waited for the breakdown of the condition of denial in which Europe's political class finds itself. We recall last September's banking summit, at which the Germans decided to go freelance to shore up their own banking system, not least because it appeared that theirs was in far better shape than that of almost any other European country. Then about a month ago one of the most pro-European newspapers in the EU, Le Figaro, carried an article by one of its economics experts that for the first time took the paper's readership into its confidence about the gravity of the situation: it admitted that a country could drop out of the euro.

Last week Jean-Claude Trichet, head of the European Central Bank (ECB), said much the same; and Joschka Fischer, the former German foreign minister, followed that with a hint of Germany's unwillingness to continue to bankroll the more economically delinquent nations of the 27 and implying, for good measure, that Franco-German relations had probably not been so bad as this since Monty and Eisenhower chased the Wehrmacht over the Rhine in 1944.

The truth is that Europe has never had so dire a crisis since the Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957. Sauve qui peut is the watchword. President Sarkozy has entered a familiarly Gaullist phase, ignoring EU competition policy and pushing through a €6 billion support for the French car industry; other manufacturers, notably in eastern Europe, have protested to no avail.

Mr Sarkozy's assertion that he is not a protectionist is purely rhetorical. When a German minister says that "now is not the time" to let workers from the EU's former eastern bloc countries have full immigration rights in Germany, he is saying the same thing. Gordon Brown may not be able to ensure British jobs for British workers, but the Germans are determined to keep their jobs for German ones.

This bending of the rules – or rather this wholesale disregard of them – is the surest sign of a currency, and quite possibly an empire, in terminal decline. Mr Trichet went to Dublin last Friday to try to calm the Irish, whose own crisis brought 100,000 protesters on to the city's streets 10 days ago. He said the usual stuff about Ireland's being able to come out "well placed" to take economic opportunities after the slump. He was less able to square the political point about how Brian Cowen, the Irish prime minister, will win an election if he swallows the medicine the ECB is forcing down his throat: spending cuts, public sector wage cuts and eye-watering tax rises to bring Ireland's deficit down to the levels demanded of a member of the eurozone.

But the dishonesty with which all this is being addressed is breathtaking. Joaquin Almunia, the EU's economy commissioner, has initiated "disciplinary action" against France, Spain, Malta, Greece, Latvia and Ireland for breaking the fiscal rules by running excessive deficits. The offenders could be fined. It would be pointless. Both Greece and Portugal have been fined in recent years and have never paid a penny.

There have already been riots in Greece. The government in Latvia has been thrown out, and the Latvian people are now aware that whatever replaces it will have no scope to pursue anything other than an even more unpleasant economic policy. The danger of civil disorder is already spooking Mr Sarkozy, whose intelligence services have told him that it is not just the banlieues that are at risk of going up in smoke. Imposition of the strict rules on these six countries could lead to revolutions in some of them, Ireland not excluded. How would any fines be paid? With a loan from the Germans? Forget it.

Tomorrow the ECB is meeting to discuss the interest rate, and it is predicted that it will be cut from two to 1.5 per cent. That would make little odds in countries that, like Latvia, have literally run out of money. The IMF is trying to build up a special new fund to bail out countries in distress. It may soon become apparent that this attempt at a currency for disparate nations is about to disappear under the weight of reality – nationalist reality – and the big boys are going to have to come in and sort some nations out. For some countries there will be only three means of staying in the euro. One is to impose the discipline, and risk rioting and the fall of governments. The second is to persuade the ECB to bend the rules to such an extent that the illusion of the euro's strength (it is still, as I write, at an incomprehensible 90p against sterling) is forcibly broken and the speculators have their own field day with it, at last. The third is to get the lender of last resort – the Germans – to bail out countries in trouble.

The Germans have, quite commendably, refused already to do that. When Ferenc Gyurcsany, the Hungarian prime minister, asked them for a €190 billion handout last weekend to prevent a new economic Iron Curtain from going up across the continent, Angela Merkel told him to get lost. She has the German people and, more to the point, German business behind her: why should they pay for the unregenerate behaviour of others? Why should they worry about the collapse of the zloty and the forint? Why should it bother them that Latvia's debt now has junk rating, or that the Irish are almost broke? If Mrs Merkel wants to stay in power, and German workers wish to keep the fruits of their own labours, they must harden their hearts.

As for the rest of Europe, it must choose either to devalue and end the pretence of economic strength, or persist and risk the breakdown of individual governments. Either way, it is never glad confident morning again for the EU and its bastard currency. Milton was right.

BRITISH JOBS FOR BRITISH WORKERS

2009-03-06T00:09:00.000Z

Figures from the Department for Work and Pensions reveal that in the 6 month period to September 2008, 10,680 National Insurance numbers were issued to immigrants in Newham, where the 2012 Olympic site is based. This is three times the actual number of jobs currently available on the site.

A third of these immigrants were from Eastern Europe, although India accounted for the largest group, [almost 1,800].

It has previously been revealed that only 63% of those currently working on the site are British [see the English Rights Campaign item dated 16 February 2009].

RACE WAR POLITICS

2009-03-04T23:29:00.000Z

James Purnell, the Work and Pensions Secretary, has announced in a speech to Labour’s Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic annual general meeting in Leicester plans for the so-called Equalities and Human Rights Commission to assess how unemployment is affecting ethnic minorities, women, the disabled and older workers, and to recommend what actions the government should take.

Mr Purnell pointed out that in previous recessions unemployment has risen faster amongst ethnic minorities:

‘In the past, too many were left behind in bad times. Ethnic minority workers suffered the most in the Tory recessions. Employment levels amongst ethnic minority workers fell by 10 percentage points in the 1990s recession - much worse than the rest of the country.

Just think of the waste of human potential. Whole communities were abandoned, families where no one then worked for generations.’

Mr Purnell said that Trevor Phillips had agreed to assess whether any groups were being disproportionately affected by the recession:

‘When we identify particular problems, we will know we need to adapt our policies to make sure no one is left behind this time.’

Since when the so-called Equalities and Human Rights Commission, or the communist Trevor Phillips, has been qualified to set economic policy is unexplained. Once again, Labour are trying to portray certain favoured groups as victims.

This is yet another example of anti-English discrimination in England.

SPIV ECONOMICS

2009-03-04T00:36:00.000Z

Figures from the Office of National Statistics [ONS] have recently revealed that once the liabilities of the two nationalised banks, RBS and HBOS/Lloyds, are added into the government accounts, then the national debt stands at a frightening £2trillion - or £33,000 for every man, woman and child in Britain.

Government borrowing is expected to reach £87billion this year - 47.8% of national income, which is well above Gordon Brown’s now abandoned 40% ceiling.

Meanwhile, Labour are making a big noise about the pensions and bonuses that the bankers have been helping themselves to. If Labour was sincere in its opposition to such bonuses and pensions, one wonders why they approved them.

Northern Rock, which lost £1.4billion in 2008, is to introduce a new bonus scheme to reflect its new role to increase mortgage lending. The chief executive, Gary Hoffman, said:

‘Pay for performance is not a bad thing. Someone who goes the extra mile is likely to deserve more.’

Meanwhile, it was revealed that HSBC gave £32.4million in bonuses to its five highest paid bankers last year, despite a 60% fall in profits and despite taking taxpayers’ cash from Bank of England in a swap for long-term mortgage loans. HSBC is now trying to raise £13billion from its shareholders to strengthen its balance sheet.

But Labour has focused attention on the greedy, yet hapless, Sir Fred Goodwin who made special arrangements to secure an early retirement pension of £693,000 per year. This is despite the fact that as chief executive of RBS he presided over a loss of £24.1billion last year. This is the biggest loss in British corporate history. The 50-year-old Sir Fred’s pension pot has been especially doubled from £8million to £16million to ensure that he would receive a pension of £13,000 a week for the rest of his life. Given that RBS is insolvent, this is taxpayers’ money that Sir Fred is being lavished with.

Sir Fred also has other pensions worth £37,000 per year from previous employment.

Sir Fred has responded by pointing out that the Treasury minister, Lord Myners, had been specifically told of the arrangement and had agreed to it in October last year. This makes it a binding contract which Labour will not be able to renege on despite all their grandstanding. Despite calls for his resignation, Lord Myners, a close ally of Mr Brown, shows no signs of any contrition for his actions.

Setting aside the anger that Sir Fred’s special pension arrangements provoke, the real story of the day was the scale of the RBS loss and that Labour were using taxpayers’ money to insure up to £325billion of potential future losses at that bank. This is in addition to another £25.5billion direct cash injection, which follows a previous cash injection of £20billion.

Meanwhile, Peter Cummings, 53, who was in charge of HBOS corporate lending division where losses have reached £6.7billion, has been awarded a pay-off of £600,000 and an expected pension of £400,000 per year.

Losses at HBOS totalled £10,8billion and need to be set against the profit of £807million of its new partner Lloyds, which is now in talks with the government for its own bad debt insurance scheme. It is expected that the taxpayer will need to insure up to £250billion of bad debts of the new Lloyds Banking Group. The Lloyds share price continues to plummet.

The danger posed to the taxpayer and the economy by all these insurance guarantees with which Labour is bailing out the bankers is potential awesome [see the English Rights Campaign item dated the 20 February 2009].

Labour are now getting ready to print money and give that to the banks too.

RACE WAR POLITICS

2009-03-02T21:35:00.002Z

Below is an item from the Steadfast Trust concerning the issue of next census form and English ethnicity:

The ONS and the 2011 Census

Submitted by: Steadfast Trust correspondent, 8th Jan 09

The next census will be taken in 2011. Prior to a ‘Main Census’, a ‘Test Census’ is taken in order to asses the proposed format of the eventual main survey; the test census taken in 2007 had a tick box for people to record both their “National Identity” and “Ethnicity” as English. A person’s “National Identity” has no actual meaning in law and carries no legal status. In effect someone can record their Ethnicity as Pakistani and their National Identity as English. The important and relevant question in the census therefore concerns a person’s ethnicity. As explained in the article which follows, ethnicity gives “legal rights, benefits and privileges that are enjoyed by racial and ethnic groups” – there are no equivalent rights for one’s National Identity.

The Steadfast Trust attended the ONS (Office for National Statistics) road-shows which were set up to allow feedback on the proposed census. Despite not having a single objection from anyone present to the inclusion of the English Ethnicity tick box, for some reason the ONS decided that the 2011 main census would not carry that tick box and would instead only include the “National Identity” question. The English would in effect be included as and grouped under ‘White British’.

The census form is important as it is a means of gathering statistical information about the different groups that appear on it. It is also important because other ethnic monitoring forms, such as those you might fill out at work take their lead from this national census. If you are not on the census form it is unlikely that you will be on any other monitoring form. If you aren’t on any of these monitoring forms then you and your community are statistically invisible and as far as the Steadfast Trust is concerned it makes it all but impossible to gather statistical information on the main beneficiaries of our charity – the English! A charity whose beneficiaries are identified on the census and other monitoring forms are not disadvantaged in this way.

Simply having a “place name” English identity (rather than the benefits of an “ethnic identity”) is not tolerable as it leaves the Ethnic English open to discrimination. In effect the Ethnic English have a non-identity. Discrimination against the Ethnic English is a growing problem and this can’t be combated if those who are so discriminated aren’t identified in law. For instance if the Ethnic English are under-represented in employment and feel that this is down to discrimination against them because of their ethnicity it would be quite possible for an employer to point to a fellow worker who might be Hungarian, or Irish or Afro-Caribbean and say they are not being discriminatory as all these people could be identified as English. In other words, a person of any ethnicity could be identified as English if they so wish but still maintain protection under the law for their actual ethnicity – save for the Ethnic English themselves who are granted only a worthless National Identity! This inequality and lack of protection could apply to discrimination in employment, housing, health or education (and more).

Neither is it appropriate to be placed as ‘White British’. In England (or throughout Britain) the English have as much right to be properly recognised as everyone else. It could also raise problems in a devolved United Kingdom when, for instance, specific funding to counter under performance in education is awarded by the Welsh Assembly or the Scottish Parliament. White British does not specifically identify the English (even though the vast majority of White British statistically are English). Where the English suffer disproportionably to others who may be labelled as ‘White British’ – their lack of identification makes it near impossible to rectify this imbalance and discrimination; this is not a problem for any of the other groups that appear on the census form.

The article which follows first appeared in the latest edition of the Steadfast journal (- Steadfast is an independent pressure group and is not connected to the Steadfast Trust). We would urge you all to read Steadfast and especially the latest edition. There is also a petition that you can sign Here to register your protest at the omission of the English from the census form.

ONS & Institutional racism - Tony Linsell

In 2006 a press release from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggested that the 2011 census would provide a tick-box for those who wanted to record their identity as English. On the surface this seemed to be just what we wanted but on closer inspection it became apparent that the old ethnic identity question was to remain the same as in 2001 (front page Q.8) but a new question was to be introduced asking, ‘How would you describe your national identity?’ (front page Q.15) This new question is to replace the straightforward 2001 Census question, ‘What is your country of birth?’

National Identity?
It is believed that the national identity question was introduced under pressure from the Commission for Racial Equality and the political establishment who are eager to promote an inclusive English identity. In a nutshell, the new English national identity belongs to anyone who is a UK resident and wants to call themselves English. For example, members of the Bangladeshi community can record their ethnicity as Bangladeshi, and their national identity as English on the grounds that they live in England. Thus English national identity is little more than a place name identity. It is not an identity that gives the legal rights, benefits and privileges that are enjoyed by racial and ethnic groups.

Does it matter?
One of the very many consequences that flow from official non-recognition of the ethnic-English is that the formation of charities for the English is discouraged and the people who attempt to form them are treated by the Charity Commission as racists. In reality it is the Charity Commission that is hideously racist and discriminatory. One of the practical consequences of such institutionalised racism is that it prevents the registration of charities that specifically serve the needs and interests of the ethnic-English. Another consequence is that English communal organisations do not receive any form of state funding. This is in stark contrast with the many thousands of ethnic-specific charities and other communal organisations which annually share many millions of pounds of state funding. So, yes, it does matter.

Ethnic English
On behalf of Steadfast I wrote to the then Census Director, Ian Cope, and pointed out that the 2006 ONS press release was misleading because ‘national identity’ is not the same as ‘ethnic identity’. The proposed census form will leave the ethnic English statistically invisible.

Until the ethnic English have the same statistical information available to them as is available to other ethnic groups, our community will be hindered in its attempts to challenge and end the institutionalised and other forms of racism perpetuated against it. The immediate and most obvious form of institutionalised discrimination is the failure of the British state (UK) and its institutions and bodies to recognise the existence of the ethnic English and to collect information that will help that group fight the discrimination it is subject to on a daily basis.

Extract from a letter to Ian Cope,
Director Census England & Wales, 9th March 2006

Following long and detailed correspondence with Ian Cope we were relieved to see the proposed 2007 Test Census, which included an ethnic-English tick-box. (see front page Q.13)

Consultation
It was made clear to ONS in 2006 that on the matter of ethnicity and identity we wanted to be consulted in the same way that other ethnic groups are consulted. I went to an ONS Census road-show meeting in London 2006. Following that there were no invitations of any kind until 2008 when we were asked to complete a general survey form, which we did, and were given the opportunity to attend another census road show in November, which I did. The census roadshows are not consultation exercises; they are an opportunity for ONS to tell an audience what is being done and why it can’t be done differently.

Too good to be true
On my journey to the meeting I recalled snippets of various conversations over the past two years where there had been discussion of the 2011 census. The general belief amongst English Community activists was that the British ruling elite would not allow an ethnic-English tick-box to appear on the census form or on ethnic monitoring forms. The reason for this being that the British state is intent on promoting in England an inclusive British identity and an inclusive place-based English identity. Both are of course concocted but the education system and the broadcasting media relentlessly promote them. In view of this it was to be expected that there would be behind the scenes moves to get the English tick-box removed from the census form.

In addition to the state sponsored British identity with its British history, culture and institutions, there is an inclusive and very thin state sponsored Englishness – ‘whatever your ethnicity you can be English if you want to be.’ An essential part of this systematic campaign is to suggest that England is a nation. Progressives play with words by changing their meaning so as to suit their interests. If they can get people to believe that England is a nation they will get away with the idea that national identity is determined by where you live. In other words, if you live in England you are English. (see page 46)

It is a clever strategy but an obvious one to those who give any serious thought to the matter. But the great unwashed are easy to manipulate; they will tick an English tick-box on the census form and think they have registered something more significant than a ‘place identity’.

No Surprise
It was therefore no surprise to learn at the census roadshow meeting that the ethnic-English tick-box has been removed from the proposed census form, which is included in the White Paper presented to parliament in November 2008. The ONS has in effect gone back to giving us a White-British tick-box which does not make it possible for us to register our ethnicity. We are, as before, merged with Scots, Welsh, Northern Irish, and other White people who regard themselves as British. (see front page Q16) In one respect it is worse than having the 2001 British tick-box because with that many people wrote in English under Other. The new tick-box labelling deters such deviancy.

Political? What us?!
Beth Moon, of the ONS, revealed in her presentation that the National Identity question had been introduced so that members of ethnic minorities could describe themselves as English – “We don’t want only White people to call themselves English.”

These sentiments conflict with other claims made on the day that ONS is non-political and concerned only with collecting and presenting statistics. Why in that case is the ONS making it its business to engage in social engineering – such aims and objectives are surely outside the official powers of ONS.

The job of the ONS is to act as an impartial observer and gatherer of statistics. It should not be a willing participant in the shaping of perceptions. It should not contrive to prevent members of probably the largest ethnic group in England from registering their ethnicity and thereby being denied the same rights, benefits and privileges that are so freely given to other ethnic groups.

Not enough room
Beth Moon also mentioned that the extent of the census form has to be limited and that it cannot include all the questions various groups would like included. There was obviously too little space to put in an English tick-box but enough room to put in a tick-boxes for Irish and for Gypsy or Irish Traveller. In any other country such obvious manipulation would be thought scandalous and insulting. Can you imagine an Irish census form that had an English tick-box but not an Irish tick-box? Only the half-witted English would allow such a thing.

I asked the meeting Chairman, Peter Benton, why, in view of the alleged shortage of space on the form, could room be found for an Irish tick-box and another for Gypsy and Irish Traveller. He replied, “They are discriminated against.” The clear racist implication, indeed the logic of this, is that the English discriminate against others but are not discriminated against. I pointed out that, for a start, the English suffer from massive institutionalised discrimination that hinders them in forming ethnic-specific charities and gaining state funding. The English are greatly under-represented in Law and Medical schools. This is not because there are not enough well-qualified English applicants but because the schools discriminate against them. I could have mentioned the training scheme run by the Environment Agency which invited applications from all ethnic groups, including Irish, Scottish and Welsh, but refused applications from the ethnic English. There are the English working class children who suffer from as many, if not more, social and educational disadvantages as any other ethnic group but they do not have the communal organisations to help them overcome their problems because institutions of the state such as the Charity Commission deny their existence. To assert an ethnic-English identity is to invite all sorts of challenges that are not directed at other ethnic groups.

When I complained to Peter Benton that the removal of the English tick-box greatly hindered us in detecting and challenging anti-English discrimination he replied that the new census form produced “a rich statistical environment from which more information than ever before will be gathered”. He said that the ethnic-English can be detected by cross-referencing the answers in Questions 15 and 16. Those who tick the first boxes in each question are ethnic-English.

One of the problems with this argument is that the instructions in Question 15 ask the respondent to tick all boxes that apply. It is therefore probable that many English people will tick both the English and British tick-boxes. Likewise, many of those who believe their ethnicity is British will tick both boxes. Even if the ONS cross-references each individual form they will not be able to accurately determine how many people are ethnic-English.

The big question is, will the ONS do the cross referencing for us and present the census data in a way that separately identifies, as best they can, the ethnic-English, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish and British? Or, will they simply lump all those ethnicities together under White-British? So, for example, will we be able to easily see the links between housing, education, health, etc. and the ethnic-English?

“The rich statistical environment” will make it difficult to clearly identify the ethnic English and the discrimination from which they suffer. If the instructions in Question 15 asked for just one box to be ticked, it would greatly improve the accuracy of a cross reference. The simple inclusion of an English tick-box would solve the problem and indicate a willingness to rectify past shortcomings.

Discrimination
At the Census roadshow I felt that had I been Black or Asian, or had been speaking for an Asian or Black ethnic group, my concerns would have been received more seriously and not treated in the dismissive way they were. ONS clearly has no intention to gather statistics helpful to the ethnic English – for us, the so-called consultation process has been a sham. But not it seems for Gypsies and Irish Travellers. The only consultation we have been involved in is when we forced it upon them. Other ethnic groups were invited to attend various meetings and treated with respect but we had to battle to make our views known. Ian Cope, who dealt with us fairly and with consideration, seemed to accept the validity of our case and an English tick-box was included on the 2007 Test Census. It was then decided to remove the tick-box but nobody thought it worthwhile to tell us or seek our view. Perhaps this is connected with the appointment in October 2007 of Glen Watson as the Director of the Census for England and Wales.

Institutionalised Racism
It is a classic symptom of individual and institutionalised racism that the guilty do not recognise or acknowledge that they are racist. This was clearly shown to the satisfaction of the state in the Stephen Lawrence inquiry. The English are subject to a particularly virulent form of institutionalised racism which deems that they discriminate but are not discriminated against. Surely it is the task of those responsible for the census to put aside their preconceptions and provide a neutral service that allows the statistics speak for themselves.

Repent!
The underlying factor in anti-English discrimination throughout the British state is the failure of the ONS to gather the statistics that would identify discrimination. It is because we are not on census forms that we do not appear on so-called ethnic monitoring forms. It is due to the failings of the ONS that the ethnic-English are statistically invisible. It is due to the ONS that officially we do not exist and do not have the communal organisations or the funding or the statistics to identify, prove and challenge discrimination. It should be a priority of ONS to rectify that situation.

The struggle goes on
This matter is not finished. If the institutions of the British state will not treat us fairly and with respect we will have to turn to campaign action. There were people, like Len W, who refused to fill in the 2001 census form because they thought it unfair and insulting that there was no English tick-box. I suspect there will be a very much larger number of people who will tell the ONS what to do with their 2011 census form.

IMMIGRATION

2009-03-01T01:26:00.000Z

The full impact of Labour’s policy of mass immigration was revealed by the Office for National Statistics this week. The Labour Force Survey showed that in the middle of last year there were 6,486,000 people in Britain who had been born abroad - and more than 6 million of these were in England. These figures are increasing at a rate of 300,000 per year.

The number of East Europeans in Britain has increased by between 400,000 and 500,000 over the past four years, and the number from outside Europe has increased by 700,000. One in nine of those living in the UK have been born abroad.

However, these figures record the children of those born abroad as British, rather than as immigrants, and the figures do not include those immigrants living in hotels, boarding houses, hostels, caravan sites, or students living in halls of residence. Needless to say, nor do the figures include illegal immigration.

The foreign born population has increased by an average of 313,000 per year since 2004. Home Office figures showed that the number of immigrants being given the right to settle in the UK permanently has trebled under Labour. 145,965 foreign nationals were granted the right to settle in Britain last year, compared with 58,725 in 1997.

Labour remain determined to reduce the English into being a minority in England - regardless of the consequences on jobs, taxation or social stability.

THE LOONY LEFT

2009-02-28T01:10:00.001Z

Apparently it is Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender History Month. This has given rise to a reworking of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

Pupils aged 14 to 16 at Leystonstone School staged a play called Romeo and Julian, a gay version of Shakespeare’s play. In addition to the obvious changes, two of the original characters, Mercutio and Benvolio, were reimagined as women. It would seem that drama teacher, Jo Letson, had re-written the play to challenge ‘homophobia and homophobic bullying’.

Harriet Harman responded to a demand by Philip Davies for a parliamentary debate on political correctness by saying:

‘I seem to remember that in Shakespearean times, boys would play girls and girls would play boys and the whole point was trying to work out which was which. There is going to be a debate next Thursday about new equality legislation so we can ensure everybody in this country is treated with fairness, respect and not subject to prejudice and discrimination - and indeed cheap shots from you.’

Professor Stanley Wells, chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, said:

‘This seems to be another way for pupils and teachers to see meaning in the plays. It is a legitimate exercise to find meanings for modern audiences in the myths and legends of the past - especially if it helps people to understand each other.’

Headmaster, Luke Burton, has described the pupils’ efforts as ‘inspirational’. A school spokesman said:

'The play is just one example of the varied and creative ways schools are tackling issues of prejudice and bullying.’

It is nauseating that the Loony Left pick on children and seek to exploit supposed oppressed minorities for their own ends. They seek to caricature society as prejudiced whereas they are enlightened. In fact, it is they who are prejudiced and the bullies, and they seek to encourage if not impose a hatred of society.

THE LOONY LEFT

2009-02-27T00:49:00.002Z

The article below speaks for itself:

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/public/story_page/014-50228-068-03-11-902-20090223STO50152-2009-09-03-2009/default_en.htm
How has the EU improved gender equality in the past 30 years?
Women’s rights/Equal opportunities - 24-02-2009 - 13:34

Gender equality: where do we stand?

In the last 30 years the European Union has striven to seek gender equality in all aspects of its work. As a result many tangible changes over equal working conditions, discrimination and violence. To date campaigns have been varied and included the help of NGOs and charities.

EP legislation: Equality at work

Since the 1970s the EU has used legislative powers to push for equal pay. MEPs amended equal pay legislation in 1999 and have reviewed it every 2 years from 2002.

In 2006 the number of female managers in the European Union was 32.6%. There was also a rise in the number of women MEPs from 19% in 1979 to 31% in 2009. However, there is still a pay gap. Women in Europe earn on average 15% less than their male counterparts.

Condemning violence against women

It is estimated that around a quarter of all women in Europe have experienced physical acts of violence at least once in their adult lives. The "Daphne Programme", launched in 1997, aims to fund and support projects charged with eradicating violence against women. The programme also supports schemes aimed at safeguarding young people.

The Parliament unites against forced prostitution

In 2006 before the football World Cup, the committee on gender rights and female equality (FEMM) launched the campaign, "Red Card to Forced Prostitution". The scheme has been reused at other sporting events such as the Euro 2008 football championship.

The Chair of Parliament's Women's Rights Committee Anna Záborská (EPP-ED) said, "this so-called 'Red Card to Forced Prostitution' campaign was a great success because it contributed positively towards reducing trafficking and forced prostitution during the championship games."

Creating greater visibility of equality issues

In 2006 the European Institute for Gender Equality was created in Vilnius to promote gender equality, fight against discrimination and analyse and disseminate data on gender equality.

As well as the measures mentioned above, the Parliament also draws attention to specific issues with its own initiative reports from Members which can become valuable tools for raising awareness.

Future issues at the Parliament

* 5 March: There will be a seminar on the position of women and
the European elections.
* Two pieces of legislation being considered: on Maternity and
self-employed workers (Vote in committee April, vote in plenary May)

REF. : 20090223STO50152

HOOD ROBIN

2009-02-26T00:15:00.000Z

It has now been revealed that many bank executives who have been thwarted in their demands for their bonuses, are now demanding huge wage increases instead. The Royal Bank of Scotland has already increased salaries by no less than 10%!

Shaun Springer, a leading Ciy head-hunter has predicted that basic wages could double over the next few years as bonuses are withdrawn. Someone who had been earning £150,000 with a bonus of ten times that amount might instead have a basic salary of £300,000 and a bonus of two or three times that amount.

Inflation is virtually zero at the moment, and those in the real economy who have lost their jobs because of the bankers will not be receiving any salary at all - never mind an increase.

THE WAR ON TERROR

2009-02-26T00:13:00.000Z

A variety of so-called human rights lawyers and activists have had a busy time welcoming the admission of Binyam Mohamed into Britain. This Ethiopian Islamist has made allegations that Britain was complicit in his alleged torture while being held at several locations around the world before being moved to Guantanamo Bay.

The taxpayer has had to pay an estimated £250,000 bill for flying this Ethiopian Islamist to Britain in a private plane and security arrangements. No doubt a claim for damages against Britain will soon follow, as has been the case with other supposed British residents released from Guantanamo Bay.

Quite apart from the money-grubbing claims of these extremists and all their lawyers, the attempt to portray the extremists and terrorists as victims, and the British as aggressors must be rejected out of hand.

Binyam Mohamed should not have been jetted into Britain. He is not British and has no right to be here. He was arrested in Pakistan on suspicion of plotting to explode a dirty bomb. He was using a false British passport. He was then detained by the USA.

We should stop apologising and send him back to Ethiopia or Afghanistan if her prefers. He can take all his lawyers with him.

HOOD ROBIN

2009-02-24T22:52:00.002Z

Below is an article from the Independent:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/dominic-lawson/dominic-lawson-a-sorry-tale-of-scottish-shame-ndash-and-english-tolerance-1623819.html

Dominic Lawson: A sorry tale of Scottish shame – and English tolerance

Gargantuan folly has occurred North of the Border. And who is paying the costs?

Sometimes I wonder if hubris is a Gaelic word, rather than ancient Greek. It seems only yesterday that all of Scotland was in uproar over the takeover of HBOS by Lloyds TSB.

The leader of the Scottish National Party, Alex Salmond, sought to find ways to block the deal, in an attempt to avoid the humiliating capture by an English firm of a Scottish institution whose incorporation predated the Act of Union. The former bosses of the Royal Bank of Scotland and the Bank of Scotland attempted to mount a counter-bid, claiming that the English were getting the business on the cheap, with the connivance of the Government in London. Their argument looked ridiculous then – and now it looks positively insane.

As the full horror of HBOS's balance sheet gradually emerges, like the beast from 20,000 fathoms, the proper fury is entirely that of the Lloyds TSB shareholders, who now realise that the deal could end up forcing their own – hitherto perfectly sound and well-managed bank – into nationalisation. Gordon Brown took a lot of credit for the rushed merger – it would never have gone ahead if he had not personally guaranteed Lloyds TSB's chairman, Sir Victor Blank, that he would prevent the competition authorities from blocking the deal, as they assuredly would have done in normal circumstances. Now the more cynical among Lloyds TSB shareholders see the deal as a cunning way for a Scottish Prime Minister to get largely English private investors to pay the costs of more gargantuan financial folly from North of the Border.

Gordon Brown can protest in vain that he – and indeed his equally Scottish Chancellor, Alistair Darling – was denounced as "a traitor" by the Scottish Nationalists when he pushed the deal through. It is now his sorry fate to be despised by English and Scots alike. Note, by the way, that there was no such uproar in Scotland when the Westminster Government took a majority stake in RBS, thus saving the other of Edinburgh's banking behemoths from immediate liquidation.

Since over half of the Scottish economy is bankrolled directly by Westminster – amounting to a gigantic subsidy by English taxpayers – this arrangement could be seen as entirely normal, exciting neither outrage nor gratitude. It certainly helps to explain why Alex Salmond, himself a former chief economist of RBS, made no fuss about that particular bail-out. I think we can rule out embarrassment as a factor, although given that Mr Salmond declared a year ago, "The Scottish banks are among the most stable in the world", it would have been the natural human emotion in such circumstances.

Not the least of the ironies of the Caledonian debacle is that it was the takeover of the National Westminster Bank by RBS a decade ago which lies behind so much of what subsequently unfolded. RBS had in fact to fight a bitter battle with the Bank of Scotland for the control of NatWest. Both Scottish banks were much smaller than the English financial institution they wanted to buy, and both were openly dismissive of the fuddy-duddy "Captain Mainwaring" London management of NatWest who did not understand the modern style of banking, which believed in a much more 'dynamic' use of capital.

In the end Sir Fred Goodwin of RBS made a more convincing example of ruthlessly aggressive Scottish management – hence his nickname of Fred the Shred – and he took control of NatWest. The deal, in terms of its ability to generate maximum income from a relatively narrow capital base, was the model for the later disastrous bid for ABN Amro, which as we now know, was the final hubristic act resulting in Sir Fred's – and Edinburgh's – nemesis.

I say Edinburgh, because it was Scotland's financial establishment which backed Sir Fred Goodwin to the bitter end. None more so than the once cautious and reliable Standard Life, which, when questions were raised by some London-based investing institutions about the sanity of taking over the deeply troubled ABN Amro, put its entire corporate publicity machine behind Sir Fred. This – which may be no coincidence – is the same Standard Life which this week has reimbursed £100m to policy-holders whose pensions it had invested in so called "cash deposits" (supposedly the safest of all investments) which actually turned out to include toxic mortgage-backed securities.

You might think I am exaggerating the element of specifically Scottish swagger in all of this; I offer as partial evidence the fact that at RBS's annual shareholders meeting in 2007, the directors took their seats to the pumped-in sound of the theme music from Braveheart. By the time of the last annual general meeting, this nationalistic tub-thumping was suddenly omitted – just as well, since some of the disillusioned investors had begun to challenge the board over its tradition of being dominated by Scots: Sir Tom McKillop, RBS's chairman, mounted what was described by a reporter at that AGM as "a heroic defence". Very Braveheart, although some tax-payers might now be wishing that Sir Tom had been given the same treatment that William Wallace endured at the hands of the vengeful English, rather than allowed to resign without a scratch on his body.

The same people might have imagined that Sir Tom would receive the parliamentary equivalent of ceremonial disembowelment when last week he faced the inquisitors of the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee. The tone, however, was set at the outset when the Committee's chairman, John McFall, looked warmly at McKillop and asked him for a straight answer to his first question, in the following way: "Sir Tom, a straight answer – you come from Irvine!" McKillop answered happily: "Dreghorn actually, but near enough!" I can't have been the only Englishman watching this live on television to feel a spasm of profound irritation at this cosy moment of Scottish bonding.

Or perhaps I was: one of the more interesting aspects of this whole affair is that there has been no public anger directly addressing the fact that it precisely the two Scottish banks which taxpayers have had to prop up at a cost to date of £35bn. It is not Scottish bankers who are being subjected to abuse on all sides, but all bankers, regardless of whether they have required the taxpayers' support to remain in business.

Perhaps it is simply because Royal Bank of Scotland had some time ago rebranded itself as RBS and the Bank of Scotland as HBOS. These new corporate identities were achingly fashionable – following British Airways' adoption of "BA" and British Petroleum's renaming itself "BP" – and in dire circumstances their meaninglessness conveys a suddenly most useful obscurity. Or perhaps it is because the English – which is to their credit – have no particular animus against the Scots, and certainly nothing approaching the almost pathological suspicion which a very large number of Scots have of the English.

Imagine, for example, what might have been the case if the banks which had needed to be bailed out with the taxpayers' billions were not those run by Scots of fiercely meritocratic mien, but London-based concerns dominated by boards consisting entirely of pin-striped English ex-public schoolboys. I wonder if Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and John McFall – or indeed the British public as a whole – would have been quite as understanding.

BRITISH JOBS FOR BRITISH WORKERS

2009-02-23T21:23:00.000Z

Figures from the Office for National Statistics [ONS] reveal that immigrant workers now comprise 13% of the workforce, occupying 3.8million jobs. This is an increase from 2million jobs, 7.5% of the workforce, when Labour came to power in 1997. Two thirds of these immigrant workers are from outside the EU. Non EU workers now account for 9% of the workforce, up from 5.3% when Labour took office.

Labour prefer to focus on British nationals in work, which includes those immigrants who have been given British citizenship. Giving immigrants British passports does not address the problem.

Figures from Migrationwatch UK reveal that there are 1,172,000 immigrants from the EU working in Britain, but only 287,600 British workers working elsewhere in the EU, including 52,000 who are working in Ireland, which has always had a close relationship with Britain.

These figures show that British people, predominantly the English, are being pushed out of work by Labour’s policy of mass immigration. Membership of the EU and the immigration that entails, likewise, by allowing mass immigration into Britain, is pushing British people out of work.

English people being pushed out of work is the direct and inevitable consequence of Labour’s policy to reduce the English into being a minority in England.

RACE WAR POLITICS

2009-02-22T14:32:00.001Z

A report by Civitas, entitled Music, Chess and Other Sins, has revealed that many of Britain’s 166 Islamic schools are promoting fundamentalism and a rejection, if not hatred, of Western values. Some had website links to sites promoting jihad. Many of the sites were closed down just before the report was published.

Most of the schools are private, although an increasing number are seeking state funding. The Madani Girl’s School in London stated on its website:

‘Our children are exposed to a culture that is in opposition with almost everything Islam stands for. If we oppose the lifestyle of the West then it does not seem sensible that the teachers and the system which represents that lifestyle should educate our children.’

Other websites condemned Harry Potter books, playing chess or cricket and listening to Western music.

Meanwhile, secondary schools have been encouraged to set an exercise for children as young as 11 to imagine the 7/7 bombings in London from the terrorists’ point of view. This is as part of citizenship lessons introduced by Labour, who have now said that the exercises would be withdrawn.

Schools in West Yorkshire, Birmingham, Sandwell and Lancashire are already using the exercises for pupils.

A suggested group exercise requires schoolchildren to ‘prepare a brief presentation on the 7/7 bombings from the perspective of the bombers’ and are asked to summarize the ‘reasons … for the actions of the London bombers’.

Chris McGovern, director of the History Curriculum Association said:

‘In my view, this is extremely dangerous. Asking pupils to empathize with terrorists may lead to sympathy, and sympathy begins to lead to justification. You begin to glamorise it - it’s disastrous.

This shows how out of touch the education establishment is with the rest of society.’

Sail Suleman, Calderdale’s hate crime co-ordinator [apparently there is such a thing] and author of the advice pack for the exercises, said:

‘Why do young people go out and do what the bombers did? Was it pressure from individuals they were hanging out with? Hopefully, we’ll encourage pupils to stay away from those individuals.’

How Muslim children are educated in their own private schools is, within reason, their business. There is no reason for the state to fund such extremist schools, however. Muslims are entitled to maintain their own culture, as the English might wish to maintain their’s in their own ex-pat communities around the world - and in England. The problem is when the Muslim minority becomes extremist, and the sheer weight of numbers. It is the violence and intolerance of the extremism, and the scale of immigration that is the problem. Coupled with the multiculturalization of England that encourages the minority to demand the abolition of any concept of the English national culture.

This is compounded when the state itself is promoting a rejection of Western values, both in the crass exercises now being used across England and in political correctness. Schoolchildren do not need to speculate as to why the 7/7 terrorists committed their atrocities. They told us why [see the English Rights Campaign item dated 28 September 2005].

IMMIGRATION

2009-02-21T15:13:00.000Z

David Cameron has made comments to the effect that he wishes to see mass immigration reduced to the levels seen in the 1980s and 1990s. He has claimed that immigration was not an issue then.

With due respect, it was an issue although the government was ignoring it. Britain had changed from being an emigration country into being an immigration country, immigration was on a firmly upward trend with a rapidly rising number of so-called asylum seekers, and political correctness was steadily spreading throughout the state sector and the media.

Mr Cameron has averred that he wishes to see immigration restricted to 50,000. He is unclear whether he is talking about the gross immigration figure or the net immigration figure [there is a major difference]. Net immigration was at around 50,000 per year in the 1990s. When Enoch Powell made his Birmingham speech in 1968, he was complaining about an gross immigration level of 50,000 per year from the New Commonwealth [see the English Rights Campaign item dated the 22 November 2005].

England is overcrowded. We do not need nor want mass immigration. Mass immigration must be brought to a complete end. That is the policy of the English Democrats.

QUOTE OF THE MONTH [bonus]

2009-02-20T16:56:00.000Z

‘Every time a customer of RBS defaults, the taxpayer picks up the bill.

If the assets of our state-owned banks fall in value by just 1 per cent that wipes a horrific £20billion off their net worth - costing the taxpayer £20billion, or a figure not far off the size of the defence budget.

If these bank assets fall in value by 5 per cent then the taxpayer loses £100billion - the equivalent of what it costs to fund the NHS in an ordinary year.

If they fall in value by 25 per cent- a possibility that should not be ruled out - then the taxpayer loses £500billion and we are all utterly bankrupt. That is the shattering truth or our parlous situation.’

Peter Oborne, writing in today’s Daily Mail.

THE LOONY LEFT

2009-02-18T20:45:00.000Z

In what is described as a drive for sex equality in sport, Tessa Jowell has written to sports chiefs to lobby them to pressure the International Olympics Committee [IOC] to open all sports categories to both sexes. The aim is to introduce events such as all-male synchronized swimming and all-male rhythmic gymnastics, as well as female wrestling and boxing, at the London 2012 Olympics.

The IOC has the power to decide whether there will be any changes. Hopefully, Tessa Jowell’s zealotry will be rejected.

A report by the Office of National Statistics [ONS] reveals that women in their 20s earn as much as men. It is only when women have children that a pay gap emerges. This is because many women choose to stop work, or work part-time or change to less demanding jobs. Miss Conn of the ONS said:

‘There is a very small gender pay gap for those aged 18 to 21. It is non-existent for those aged 22 to 29 years.’

On average, women have their first baby at 30.

However, a spokesman for the so-called Equality and Human Rights Commission said:

‘One of the major causes of the pay gap, beyond the concern about women and men who are paid different rates for the same job, is the fact that they choose low-skill part-time jobs after they have children. We want to know if that is a genuine choice or a Hobson’s choice based on the limited opportunities available to women to work more flexibly.’

Despite the facts, the so-called Equalities and Human Rights Commission, which is clearly on an exercise of social engineering, merely repeats the doctrine that women are victims. In the economic slump we are now in, most ordinary people are more concerned to keep their jobs and to maintain their standard of living, rather than politically correct dogma.

It is too easy to scoff or shrug off this type of boring nonsense. But we cannot afford such malicious tripe, nor the politically correct quangos that promote it. The so-called Equalities and Human Rights Commission should be closed down. That is the policy of the English Democrats.

THE BRITISH INQUISITION

2009-02-17T23:02:00.000Z

Last week witnessed the insidious extent of the British Inquisition. There was the anti-English banning of the St George’s Day parade by the Labour Sandwell council. They explained that they were allocating an increase in funding to support a Party in the Park instead. They alleged that the parade would have created an ‘unhealthy atmosphere’ and ‘tribal excitement’. In other words, the parade had been dropped as it might attract those with political views that Labour might disagree with.

It was also announced that Prince Harry is to be sent on an army diversity course, as a result of comments he made in a video he made [see English Rights Campaign item dated 6 February 2009]. Philip Davies MP said:

‘This is a complete waste of time and money. A huge industry has mushroomed to cash in on diversity and equality.’

A more vindictive example of the British Inquisition was the news that a school receptionist faces the sack following her daughter discussing heaven and hell to a classmate. Jennie Cain’s daughter, Jasmine, had been told off by a teacher and had come home in tears. The teacher had said that Jasmine ‘couldn’t talk about Jesus‘. Mrs Cain, who works at the school, sent a private email to 10 Christian friends asking them to pray for the families and the school:

‘I asked them to please pray for us, please pray for Jasmine, please pray for the school and pray for the church.’

A copy of this email found its way to the headmaster and Mrs Cain is now being investigated for professional misconduct.

The British Inquisition’s determination to suppress the truth was demonstrated by the news that Labour had tried to bully and discredit the Office for National Statistics [ONS] with a whispering campaign after it had released data revealing the surge in the number of non-British born people working here. The ONS’s report showed that the number of foreign workers had increased by 214,000 to 3.8million in the year to December. At the same time, the number of British born workers in work fell by 278,000 to 25.6million. Labour MPs had accused the ONS of trying to embarrass Gordon Brown over his pledge of ‘British jobs for British workers’.

As the general election draws ever closer, then the level of persecution and smears are likely to increase.

SPIV ECONOMICS

2009-02-16T18:19:00.002Z

These are trying times for Labour, as their economic policy unravels along with the banks. Gordon Brown has been very adept at trying to avoid responsibility. Even so, the appointment of Sir David Walker to investigate the bank bonuses and report at the end of this year has demonstrated Labour’s determination to cover-up.

Sir David, who was nicknamed Mr Whitewash following his involvement in two previous enquiries, has been adept at pocketing bonuses himself as chairman of Morgan Stanley International. Vince Cable MP said:

‘Instead of dealing decisively with the problem, as President Obama, the Swiss and others have done, the Government is clearly playing for time in order to avoid doing anything to upset the bankers.’

The Treasury is citing human rights as a reason for not preventing the bank bonuses. A Treasury source said:

‘It wouldn’t stand up in the European Court of Human Rights. We can’t come along and say we’re legislating to override someone’s employment rights.’

This comes at a time when unemployment is nudging 2million and is expected to reach 3million by 2010, and when the Bank of England is forecasting that the economy will shrink by as much as 6%. This fall is at a time when the value of sterling has fallen sharply, which should help output as exports are cheaper and imported goods more expensive.

The evidence to the Treasury select committee by the bankers Lord Stevenson, Andy Hornby, Sir Fred Goodwin and Sir Tom McKillop led to the exposure of the sacking of Paul Moore, because he had advised that HBOS had exposed itself to too much risk with its aggressive expansion. He had been sacked by the then chief executive of HBOS, Sir James Crosby, who subsequently was appointed as deputy chairman of the Financial Services Authority [which is now lining up substantial pay and bonus increases for its employees] which is supposed to oversee the banks. Sir James has now resigned.

It was revealed that the acting chairman of UK Financial Investments Ltd, Glen Moreno, has been involved in a tax avoidance scheme involving a bank in Liechtenstein. He too has been jettisoned as Labour belatedly tries to distance itself from their banking chums.

It is now revealed that the Lloyds chief executive, Eric Daniels, who had told the Treasury select committee that his £1million a year salary was modest, and who said he would not be taking a bonus for 2008, is in line for a pay and bonus package of up to £7million in 2009. He did not tell the Treasury select committee that HBOS, with which Lloyds is merging, is about to announce a loss of a staggering £10billion. This merger was, to quote one disgruntled Lloyds shareholder, ‘cooked up at a cocktail party’, at which Mr Brown personally brokered the merger in a discussion with Sir Victor Blank, the Lloyds Bank chairman. Sir Victor has been acting as a Downing Street ‘business ambassador. The Lloyds share price has now fallen rapidly. It has now been forecast that Lloyds will need more taxpayers’ money and may well be fully nationalized.

Labour are shovelling taxpayers’ money at a useless bunch of greedy bankers who have not only wrecked their own banks, but the entire British economy too. And they do not give a damn other than their own personal embarrassment.

In the real economy, Labour have just announced that a £7.5billion contract for new trains is to go to a consortium involving the Japanese, in preference to a British company. Presumably, this is to show that Labour are committed to globalization and not nasty protectionism. Labour’s claims as to the number of jobs either created or safeguarded have been met with derision. 30% of the value of the contract will be spent overseas and the first 70 trains will be built entirely in Japan. This can only be at the expense of British jobs.

A third of the workers employed at the Olympic site in London are immigrants. Only 63% are British and 8% are Irish. Some jobs offering salaries of up to £65,000 are being advertised abroad. Recently it was revealed that 136 illegal immigrants were working on the site.

Just before Christmas, BAE Systems warned that it was in danger of having to close its Land Systems business, which is Britain’s only remaining tank maker. This follows a decision to cancel a £16billion order for armoured vehicles. Obviously such a closure would mean that we would be dependent upon foreign tanks to equip the army, and the order cancellation is against the backdrop of casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq due to the army still having to rely on Land Rovers rather than armoured vehicles. Then there is the matter of the much promised aircraft carriers [see the English Rights Campaign item dated the 16 December 2008].

None of this is consistent with the spin that Labour is resorting to Keynesian policies to try and get the economy moving again. That would have involved tax cuts or extra public expenditure to put people into jobs and pump demand into the economy. All Labour are doing is using taxpayers’ money to bail out the current banking cartel. This is not due to a global downturn, it is due to Labour’s economic policy.

Mr Brown commented recently that the British economy was being held back by foreign banks not lending here and further reiterated his commitment to globalization:

‘Protectionism protects nobody. This is a time not just for individual, national measures to deal with the global financial crisis. This is the time for the world to come together as one.’

Mr Brown went on to condemn the retreat of foreign banks to their own national markets and away from international banking:

‘This financial mercantilism - which is foreign banks retreating to their home base - will, if we do nothing, lead to a new form of protectionism. Indeed, a de-globalisation which would lead to a reduction in trade and cross-border business activity, which would be followed by the old trade protectionism of the past.’

This is hogwash. Mr Brown is trying to demonise protectionism as a means of frightening people away from reality. The reality is that export markets are always more risky for a variety of factors [eg a different culture and language, increased costs of transportation, local preference for local products, movements in exchange rate, unstable local governments, etc]. In a recession firms have to retrench to their home markets. This is a natural process.

In a recent press conference, Mr Brown let slip the truth:

‘A principal reason for this is the reduced availability of credit across the economy because of the retrenchment of many overseas banks back to their home markets and the withdrawal of non-banking financial institutions from funding. This is a major loss of lending capacity, happening in all economies and happening in ours. So even as UK banks might seek to meet their commitments to existing customers, overall credit availability in the economy remains inadequate to support growth and recovery. To put this into perspective, over half of new corporate loans in Britain and 40% of new mortgages over the last decade came from foreign banks and non-bank institutions.’

This was confirmed by the chancellor, Alistair Darling, who told the House of Commons:

‘Over the last ten years, lending by foreign banks and non-bank institutions accounted for over half of new corporate loans and 45% of new mortgages here.’

Mr Darling also said:

‘We must not give way to financial protectionism - which could be every bit as damaging now as it was to trade in the 1930s.’

A further problem is that British banks have been relying on the international money markets for their funding. They have not been lending to the home market, nor relying on locally funded savings and deposits for their funding. 80% of the lending of major British banks, including RBS, HSBC and Barlcays, has been overseas. Only 20% of their balance sheets are made up of traditional loans to British households and firms. Some of the worst debts the banks have are these overseas mortgages and commercial lending, including the US sub-prime mortgages. The Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, on whose yacht Lord Mandelson and George Osborne had their afternoon cocktails off Corfu last summer, obtained a £2.8billion loan from a consortium of banks including RBS.

The taxpayer is now having to bail out the banks for these defaulting foreign loans. But the central issue is that the British banks cannot fund the domestic market and have relied on foreign sources to fund themselves. The growth of the British economy has been dependent upon foreign funds rather than domestic savings.

One of the major acts for which Mr Brown is directly responsible is the collapse in the pension funds due to the £5billion per year tax raid he made on them when he became chancellor in 1997. This act depressed the source of funding for British banks and the British economy. This has had a cumulative effect as had the unregulated scale of bonus payments [see the English Rights Campaign item dated 16 October 2008 and 20 January 2009]. The fact is that Mr Brown is directly responsible for the financial collapse with which we are now confronted. He is directly responsible for the slump.

He has not embarked on a Keynesian economics to get us out of this slump. He is not reflating the real economy, he is simply bailing out the current banking cartel. This is spiv economics.

THE BRITISH INQUISITION

2009-02-16T01:46:00.002Z

Below is a copy of an English Democrats press release:

St. George's Day Parade is Banned!

Yesterday various newspapers reported the story of this latest attack on any expression of Englishness;
e.g. The Daily Star's report was:-

ST GEORGE’S DAY IS 'RACIST'

13th February 2009
By Ross Kaniuk
The Daily Star
_________________________
FURY erupted yesterday after it was revealed a family charity event to celebrate the life of St George is set to be banned.

Councillor Yvonne Davies claimed the parade created an “unhealthy atmosphere” and inspired young boys to be racist.

She wrote: “It is not only the parade which is the problem, but the tribal excitement it creates.”

Sandwell Council in West Bromwich, West Mids, voted to withdraw its financial support and leave organisers with the “impossible” task of raising £10,000 to cover costs.

But organiser Trevor Collins, of the Stone Cross Saint George Association, said: “To suggest the parade is racist is ridiculous and offensive.

“When you see the kids, everyone out having fun, it is a beautiful sight. Everyone is welcome.

“The council’s decision means we have to foot the bills for insurance and security. We have got to come up with £10,000 in two months, which seems impossible.”

The parade, involving 15,000 people, on April 23 is backed by the Royal British Legion and attended by ex-servicemen.

Organisers said one of the aims of the event, held since 1998, is to reclaim the Saint George Cross from right-wingers and make it a source of pride.

John Midgley, of the Campaign Against Political Correctness, said: “It is an outrageous decision.

“There is nothing racist about celebrating the day of the patron saint of England.”

The local Labour Councillor,( http://cmis.sandwell.gov.uk/CMISWebPublic/Member.aspx?personID=235 ) , Ms Yvonne Davies, reportedly said, in an email copied in to her Labour Colleagues, that:- " ...the parade .... creates a very unhealthy atmosphere .... - particularly amongst young males and I'm afraid I would support its demise for that reason..... It is not only the parade which is problem, but the 'tribal' excitement it creates in its wake." Classic, Official, Nu-Labour, blatant, anti-English racism?
Does it make your blood boil? It does mine!

The Race Relations Act 1976 provides remedies against Direct Discrimination, Indirect Discrimination, Harassment and Victimisation. If critical remarks are made violating your dignity, or are intimidating, hostile and offensive and are intended to make you feel uncomfortable, in asserting your Englishness, then they would be classic instances of “Harassment” as defined in Section 3A of the RRA.

If this local authority does not offer at least the same assistance to the parade as it has offered to other racial/national/ethnic groups, as defined under the RRA, then claims can be brought of Direct and/or Indirect Discrimination pursuant to Sections 1(1) (a) and 1A of the RRA.

It seems that the local authority and its councillors are ignoring the fact that Englishness has been (repeatedly) held by the courts to be a protected category under the RRA? (Ealing LBC – v – The Race Relations Board HL/PO/JU/4/3/1205 and BBC Scotland – v – Souster CofS 019/18(16)99. )

The courts have also provided guideline figures for the level of damages. In claims in the higher category, each instance should attract an award of over £25,000 for "hurt feelings"!

What can we all do? We urgently need a fighting fund to challenge this case and all others like it! If every member of our FB Cause spends just £1.50 by telephoning 0907 706 7060 then we will easily have the funds needed! So please call 0907 706 7060 as often as you can afford!

Also you can:-

1. Complain to Sandwell District Council - http://www.laws.sandwell.gov.uk/ccm/navigation/contact-the-council/customer-services/complaints/

2. Complain about Ms Davies and her colleagues to the Standards Board for Councillors - http://www.standardsboard.gov.uk/Makingacomplaint/

3. Sue her, her colleagues and the Council. To do so either needs a) money; or b) legal costs insurance cover (eg in your household contents insurance); or c) qualifying for Legal Aid (if you think you do ring the Legal Services Commission for a list of solicitors who are "contracted".

Also, if we haven't already had them in full retreat by then, we can all congregate at Stone Cross on the Day http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/group.php?gid=92803615073 and peacefully demonstrate our support for St George and England!

Robin Tilbrook

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Robin-Tilbrook-Chairman-English-Democrats/33932349564

P.S. Whatever else you do please telephone 0907 706 7060 at least once!

FREE SPEECH

2009-02-14T13:55:00.002Z

Below is a recent article from the Telegraph:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/philipjohnston/4604985/Whatever-happened-to-free-speech.html
Whatever happened to free speech?
Britain was once renowned around the world for defending people's right to speak out. Not any more, says Philip Johnston.

Philip Johnston
Last Updated: 8:21PM GMT 12 Feb 2009

Comments 359 | Comment on this article

Geert Wilders: Dutch politician Geert Wilders lands at Heathrow despite ban over anti-Islam views
Geert Wilders is an anti-Islamist who regards the Koran as inherently inflammatory Photo: EPA

The refusal to admit the oddball Dutch MP Geert Wilders to Britain yesterday marks a further retreat from this country's traditions of free speech. It stands in stark contrast to what happened exactly 20 years ago tomorrow, when Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie for insulting the Prophet Mohammed in his book The Satanic Verses.

In retrospect, that was a turning point in the country's history of free speech, an event that appeared to demonstrate indomitability, yet turned out to be a defeat. An unambiguous stand was taken on Rushdie's behalf by the government of the day, which denounced the threat to his life and broke off diplomatic relations with Iran. Sir Geoffrey Howe, then foreign secretary, told the Commons: "This action is taken in plain defence of the right within the law of freedom of speech and the right within the law of freedom of protest."

Despite mass book burnings, protests around the world, including in Bolton and Bradford, and threats of violence, the work continued to be published and sold. How could it be otherwise? This was Britain, after all, the citadel of free speech. We would not be brow beaten into denying the rights of one of our citizens, or anyone else for that matter, from having their say, however controversial or offensive their opinion might be.

Sadly, the past two decades have seen a pusillanimous flight into cowering capitulation. We seem to have forgotten what free speech entails, how hard it was fought for and how important it is to defend. It is the value with which this country is most associated throughout the world. It is why Britain has been home, over the centuries, to so many political dissidents who would have been persecuted elsewhere, and why those who live in autocracies that brook no criticism tune into the BBC World Service.

They see this as a place able to accommodate opinions that are obviously crazy, offensive or even seditious, a country where a view can be held and expressed, provided – and this has always been true – that it does not foment violence.

Geert Wilders is an anti-Islamist who regards the Koran as inherently inflammatory and believes he is justified in saying so. He has made a 17-minute film, Fitna – an Arabic word meaning test of faith – setting out this thesis and was invited to show it at a private screening in the House of Lords. The film can be seen on the internet, so there is no question of stopping its dissemination. It contains some unpleasant images of bomb explosions, of captured hostages facing death and of chanting mobs interlaced with passages from the Koran.

Wilders claims that these verses from the holy book of Islam are being used today to incite modern Muslims to behave violently and anti-democratically. You may think he is wrong to say this; you may agree with him; you might, like the lords who invited him to Britain, think it is something worthy of discussion, given the obvious problems caused around the world by radical Islamism and the violence perpetrated in the name of the religion. It is hard, in a free country, to understand why it is a view that must be suppressed.

What, then, possessed the Home Office to ban Wilders – an unprecedented action against a democratically-elected politician from a European state, who is entitled to free movement within the EU? By any measure, it was an extraordinary decision; yet it was not even raised in parliament, the supposed guardian of our freedoms, though some MPs have commented on the ban, largely to support it.

Were Wilders a terrorist preaching violence against particular groups, it could be understood on public order grounds. The order issued by Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, read: "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."

Yet what possible threat to public security is posed by a Dutch MP showing a film, in private, to a smattering of peers on a Thursday afternoon in February? Of itself, the film does not call for violence against Muslims; indeed, it suggests that Islam is a cause of violence, a view with which you are entitled to agree or feel strongly about, but not to prohibit.

The reason for the ban appears to have been the possibility of protests by some Muslim organisations against Wilders's visit. In other words, his freedom to express a view and the liberty of peers to hear it in an institution supposedly devoted to free speech, were set aside in the face of intimidation – the opposite of what happened in the Rushdie case, even if that author was forced into hiding.

What is particularly insidious is the application of double standards. One of those most opposed to Wilders's visit is the Muslim peer Lord Ahmed, though he denies allegations that he warned parliamentary authorities that 10,000 demonstrators would take to the streets. Yet two years ago, Lord Ahmed invited Mahmoud Abu Rideh, a Palestinian previously detained on suspicion of fundraising for groups linked to al-Qaeda, to Westminster to meet him. When he was criticised for doing so, he said it was his parliamentary duty to hear Rideh's complaints. He does not appear to see any contradiction with the position he now adopts against his fellow peers.

Had a foreign parliamentarian who disliked Christians and considered the Bible to be inflammatory planned a visit to Britain, does anyone imagine he would have been prevented from doing so? No, and neither should he have been. This must work for everyone.

The arrest and possible prosecution of Rowan Laxton, a Foreign Office diplomat, for railing at the Israeli invasion of Gaza from his exercise bike in the gym, is the latest example of an equally sinister development – the denunciation of opinions expressed in private, as with Carol Thatcher's "golliwog" comments. Free speech is about understanding that some people hold a different view from you, whether you like it or not. When we start to alert the "authorities" to thought crimes we really are one step away from the dystopian world that Orwell invented as a warning, not a prophecy.

The Government that has treated our liberties in such a cavalier way is having none of this, of course. David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, said the film made by Wilders was "full of hate" and therefore fell foul of British laws, though he admitted that he had not seen it and therefore could not judge. But, in any case, is he right? Is it against the law?

People have always been free under the criminal law to speak their minds, provided they did not, in doing so, incite others to commit violence or infringe public order. Rabble-rousers trying to whip up the mob have never been the beneficiaries of this latitude: there is, in other words, a difference between license and liberty. However, it is necessary to demonstrate that the words complained of are likely to stir up hatred and public disorder, not merely to complain that they are unpleasant or objectionable to some. Imams have been allowed to continue preaching in mosques when it could be argued that they have overstepped this mark, as when they have called for the death of homosexuals or Jews.

Wilders is no advertisement for free speech. After all, he wants the Koran to be banned. But that is not the point. It is what this affair says about us, not him, that matters. Is Britain now adopting a position where people who support suicide bombers and jihad are able to make known their opinions without legal challenge, whereas those who oppose them cannot?

The very people who in 1989 were demanding the murder of Salman Rushdie for writing a book are today leading the charge against a Dutch MP for making a film. The fundamental difference is that 20 years ago, the government supported free speech; today, it has cravenly surrendered. It is simply not good enough to say that Wilders should not be heard because he might provoke a backlash from those who do not like him or his views. That is not upholding the law. That is appeasement.

IMMIGRATION

2009-02-14T01:40:00.000Z

At a time when the media is filled with those who can do little but prattle about climate change and of the need for sustainable development, it was announced this week that at least 16 new developments have been given the go-ahead to build houses and offices on flood plains. In every case, the local authorities ignored objections from the environment agency.

Paul Leinster, chief executive of the Environment Agency, said:

‘There are already millions of people at risk from flooding and this number is set to rise due to the impacts of climate change.’

At least 2million homes are on flood plains already. England is overcrowded and the pressure of the population increase, the primary driving force of which is immigration, is forcing people to live on flood plains.

Labour’s immigration policy to increase the population to 70million by 2031 [see the English Rights Campaign item dated 11 February 2009 ] can only make matters much worse.

THE BRITISH INQUISITION

2009-02-12T23:34:00.001Z

A foster mother with an unblemished record, who has looked after more than 80 children has been struck off the register, because a Muslim girl in her care converted to Christianity. The mother was a practising Christian herself and the social workers had not objected to her attendance at church.

The Muslim girl had been baptised when she was 16 years old. Social workers accused the mother of failing in her duty to preserve the girl’s religion and said that she should have tried to stop the conversion.

The mother has lost her only source of income and has been forced to move to a one bedroom flat. The mother said:

‘I did initially try to discourage her. I offered her alternatives. I offered to find places for her to practise her own religion. I offered to take her to friends and family. But she said to me from the word go, “I am interested and I want to come”. She sort of burst in.’

The mother’s lawyer said:

‘There is no doubt that the event that provoked the council was the decision by the girl to be baptised. This girl was 16 and has the right to make this choice, so for the council to react in this way is totally disproportionate.’

The multiculturalization of England demands that immigrants do not adopt English culture The multiculturalists are prepared to persecute people, deny foster children the opportunity to be raised by a successful foster mother, and deny a 16 year old the right to decide her own religious convictions, to that end.

BRITISH JOBS FOR BRITISH WORKERS

2009-02-11T23:12:00.002Z

The recent prominence in the news given to the issue of British jobs for British workers ignores the longstanding nature of the problem.

Labour’s policy of mass immigration, from both the EU and elsewhere, has led to the gradual replacement of British workers who are having to compete with those from other countries with far lower standards of living [see the English Rights Campaign item dated the 16 December 2006].

A report from Migrationwatch UK before Christmas revealed that most of the 1.34million jobs created since 2001 had gone to foreigners. Over the same period, the number of British born people in work fell by 62,000. Eastern Europeans had taken 469,000 of the new jobs.

This debate is coming against the backdrop of many politicians and pressure groups, including Tories, who are demanding that illegal immigrants be given an amnesty to enable them to work legally. Boris Johnson has pronounced that there would be ’hugely increased’ tax revenues if illegal immigrants were granted citizenship.

Sir Andrew Green of Migrationwatch UK said that such an amnesty would cost at least £500million per year. Even Labour balked at the suggestion. Phil Woolas, the immigration minister, said:

‘I have always thought that Boris was a bit of a nincompoop and these proposals are naïve in the extreme.’

Nevertheless, Labour has been introducing amnesties in practice. Failed asylum claimants and those whose claims were never even decided are being given permission to stay, in an attempt to clear the backlog of asylum applications. The approval rate is 40% and up to 180,000 are expected to be granted permission to stay. Furthermore, Linda Costelloe Baker, who monitors government visa refusals, told the Commons Home Affairs Committee that around 15% of short term visas issued by British embassies were issued in error. This is being exploited by organized crime and illegal immigrants. With 2million visas issued each year, this means that 300,000 illegal immigrants are being allowed into Britain every year.

Net immigration in 2007 was 237,000 according to the Office of National Statistics. 577,000 immigrants entered Britain. This is the second largest total after 2006. In the decade since Labour came to office in 1997, the number of immigrants increased by 2.5million.

The OECD has urged the government to employ more immigrants in the public sector. Martine Durand said, ‘immigrants are the most vulnerable in times of economic crisis’. The OECD pointed out that immigrants would be unlikely to return home as their home countries would also be suffering from the economic downturn.

Sir Andrew Green wrote:

‘Australia starts with an annual limit to immigration and uses the points system - based on age and qualifications - to select successful candidates within that limit.

The British system does not limit the numbers of immigrants and is not intended to. It is certainly not tough - as the Government claims. It allows tens of thousands of migrants to come here “on spec” looking for work.’

Labour has only reduced the number of work permits to non EU nationals by only 14,000. Labour are letting in even more Bulgarian and Romanian workers. Under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme, the permits issued will be increased from 16,500 to 21,250.

The whole concept of allowing in immigrants to fill alleged job vacancies where there are skills shortages, or where it is alleged that there are recruitment difficulties, is nonsense. If there is a shortage, then the price [the wage rate] increases to attract more workers. We have a large reservoir of unemployed and the number registered unemployed is expected to reach 3million by Christmas, with incapacity benefit hiding yet more millions of hidden unemployed.

The population is expected to reach 70million far sooner than originally thought. Such a figure is now expected to be obtained in 2031, according to the House of Commons library. The points system is being used to legitimize mass immigration and not end it.

To make matters worse, Labour is aggressively pursuing political correctness. Harriet Harmen, the so-called Equalities Minister, has proposed new equality laws that will allow companies to discriminate against Englishmen in favour of women and blacks.

The increase in unemployment is the direct and inevitable result of government policy.

THE WAR ON TERROR

2009-02-10T16:53:00.001Z

President Obama’s commitment to close Guantanamo Bay has met with almost universal acclaim. What to do with the remaining inmates has excited the usual people, with some even trying to get some of the Islamist inmates into Britain.

One such inmate is Binyam Mohammed, who is described as being a British resident. This Ethiopian came to Britain as a so-called asylum seeker in 1994 when he was 16. His asylum claim was turned down, although he was granted exceptional leave to remain in 2000 [there‘s a surprise]. He converted to Islam and worshipped at a mosque attended by radical Muslims.

In 2001, he went to Afghanistan. He claims that he had been using drugs and went to Afghanistan to kick the habit and to find out more about the Taliban. The US authorities claim that he joined Al Qaeda and was trained to build and detonate a radioactive ‘dirty bomb’.

He was arrested in Pakistan at Karachi airport by Pakistani authorities who regarded him as a terrorist. He had tried to board a flight to London using a false British passport [as one does].

He claims that since his arrest he has been moved around several countries and has been subjected to torture, details of which he recorded in a diary that, presumably, those detaining him were happy for him to keep as he was moved to various locations. Naturally, a host of human rights lawyers are involving themselves and are trying to get him into Britain.

Whatever the merits of his claims of being tortured, what has this to do with us? Let this Ethiopian be returned to Ethiopia, or Afghanistan if he prefers.

There has been a brouhaha over a US request that 25 lines be edited out of court papers relating to this matter, which has provoked criticism of Britain adopting a craven attitude to the USA. The Telegraph reported on the 7 February:

‘Despite the criticism of the government's stance, intelligence sources have revealed that there was a second, legitimate, reason for doing as the US government asked in restricting the material published: MI5 is more dependent than ever on the CIA for help in monitoring the 2,000 terrorist suspects in the UK.

The CIA is now running a large network of its own informers in the British Pakistani community. Their information has helped thwart terrorist attacks in the UK and locate senior al-Qaeda operatives abroad.

The US has stepped up intelligence gathering in the UK to such an extent over the last 18 months that one in four CIA operations designed to prevent a repeat of the 9/11 attacks on the US homeland is now conducted against targets in the UK.’

HOOD ROBIN

2009-02-09T20:44:00.002Z

It is now apparent that the banks are lining up about £4billion in bonuses for themselves. This is following the £1trillion cost of the bank bailout [see the English Rights Campaign entry dated the 20 January 2009].

The USA and many other European countries are imposing restrictions on bank remuneration. France has a set of new rules expected to come into force in 2 weeks and the USA has capped top executive pay at $500,000 for all banks in receipt of taxpayers’ money. Not so Britain - not even on those banks which are effectively nationalized. Instead, Labour are trying to kick the issue into the long grass by announcing the setting up of an enquiry.

The banks are talking about the need to attract the best people, and that bonuses might be a part of employment contracts. That is irrelevant. They cannot pay the bonuses if they do not have the money. In fact, they are insolvent. They have the money because Labour has given them large amounts of taxpayers’ money.

Using taxpayers’ money to award bankers bonuses is unacceptable.

Labour simply do not understand as they are a part of the problem, and a part of the spiv culture. Bankers are regarded as being above the law and not subject to the same economic rules as ordinary plebs. They do not get their hands dirty for a living. Access to the high life and taxpayers’ money is a right as they are so important.

Labour are of a similar mentality. They have awarded peerages to their donors. They are used to hobnobbing at international conferences, the EU or on oligarch’s yachts off Corfu. Awarding themselves and their supporters cushy jobs on quangos - with the attendant inflation proofed pension.

Just today, it has been revealed that Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary no less, has been pocketing £116,000 of taxpayers’ money for a second home when she was in fact lodging with her sister.

The British ruling class is taking the ordinary taxpayer to the cleaners.

BRITISH JOBS FOR BRITISH WORKERS

2009-02-09T01:25:00.001Z

Below is a copy of an article from today's Telegraph:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/4560267/Foreign-worker-row-reignited-by-claims-of-Polish-men-given-jobs-barred-to-Brits.html

Foreign worker row reignited by claims of Polish men given jobs barred
to Brits

A new foreign workers scandal has erupted after it emerged another house boat is being moored in Britain to provide accomodation for staff from abroad who are accused of taking local jobs.

The converted barge is being brought into Kent where a new gas-fired plant is being built at the E.ON power station on the Isle of Grain.

Furious local workers say the increasing majority of jobs are being given to Polish, Lithuanian and Portuguese men, who they say will be housed on the boat.

Police are preparing for potential trouble at the site on Wednesday when trade union Unite is due to stage a demonstration there.

It follows the problems elsewhere in the country last week when 700 workers went on strike at the Lindsey oil refinery near Grimsby, after contractors brought in non-British labour and housed some of them on a converted prison ship.

Some of the Italian workers living on that ship claimed they could not leave it without being attacked by angry locals.

A further 3,000 Britons walked out in sympathy at 14 refineries and power stations.

French engineering firm Alstom, who have been at the centre of the row over foreign labour, are the lead contractor on the Kent power station, which involves 15 sub-contractors including Polish companies Remak and ZRE.

Alstom insist they have given British firms and workers a fair opportunity to bid for the contracts and employ mainly British people.

But the unions and local people dispute that.

A spokesman for Unite said: "We know of at least two sub-contractors who are not allowing UK workers to apply for jobs at Grain Power
Station.

"We're not saying foreign workers are taking all of the jobs but there is clear evidence that UK-based labour are being blocked from even trying to get work there. That is why we are staging our demonstration."

Kyle Upton, 20, a labourer who has lived on the Isle of Grain all his life, said: "I was earning really good money with an American steel company on another project involving gas tanks but that finished so I decided to try and get a job at the power station.

"I contacted Alstom about work and was told there was none available, the positions were all taken.

"But then I found out some Polish labourers who had been working with me on the American project had been given jobs at the power station."

A spokeswoman for Alstom vigorously defended the claims.

She said during the peak of the 30-month construction phase of the gas-fired power station up to 2,000 people will be working there, and she said two thirds of them will be British.

She said: "We do not and will not discriminate against British workers. We are employing UK sub-contractors and non-UK sub contractors on site at present employing both UK and non-UK labour.

"Today we have around 15 sub contractors working at Grain, the overwhelming majority are British, only two being non-UK companies.

"We always give British firms and workers an equal chance to bid for work on the project."

Asked if she knew about Unite's claims that the two Polish sub-contractors were not allowing UK workers to apply for jobs, she added: "I am not aware of that."

Meanwhile, Alstom has applied to Medway Council for planning permission to moor an accomodation barge at Damhead Creek, near Grain Power Station, between now and November 2010.

Alstom's spokeswoman said: "This is not only to house foreign workers, this is a contingency plan to provide accomodation for anyone of the workers who may need it.

"The Isle of Grain is a remote and isolated location so accomodation is clearly an issue."

The boat will house up to 200 workers but she did not specify when it will be moored there.

THE BRITISH INQUISITION

2009-02-06T01:10:00.000Z

The British Inquisition is determinedly rumbling along and becoming more extreme [as all such witch-hunts do].

Recently, there was the furore over some remarks made by Prince Harry in a video he had shot in March 2006, in which he referred to one of his army colleagues as ‘our little Paki friend’ and subsequently referred to another camouflaged soldier as looking like a ‘raghead’.

So what? This is the army and not the girl guides. But, apparently, these remarks were deemed by the race zealots to be racist and so Prince Harry has been denounced.

But who published the remarks? Prince Harry did not. No, it was a Sunday newspaper which paid a large sum to obtain copies of the 3-year-old video which it promptly published. That allowed for much of the press and media to indulge themselves in the anti-racist self-righteousness.

Had they been really bothered about not causing offence, then they would not have paid large sums of money to publish material that they professed to be racist.

Now Carol Thatcher has fallen foul of the race zealots. In a BBC green room with Adrian Chiles and Jo Brand, Carol Thatcher apparently used the term ‘gollywog’ in reference to a tennis player - comparing his hair to that of a gollywog figure which used to appear on the side of Robertson’s jam jars.

Reportedly, Jo Brand was angry and walked off in disgust and Adrian Chiles was reportedly ‘outraged’ and ‘upset’, although, reportedly, Carol Thatcher’s version is that no one said a word about the comment. Whatever the truth, the remark was reported to executive producer Tessa Finch. After failing to produce a sufficiently grovelling apology, Carol Thatcher has been fired.

Where Carol Thatcher has been naïve, is that she ever thought that she could talk so freely and use politically incorrect language to someone like Jo Brand, who is hard Left. We now know a little more about Adrian Chiles.

Shami Chakrabarti said on tonight’s Question Time that we had now learned that such a term as ‘gollywog’ or ‘Paki’ is racist, . That is the point, in that the politically correct have successfully imposed their view on everyone else. Such terms are racist because the politically correct tell us they are racist and an alternative view is not permissible.

The common feature of the case of Carol Thatcher and Prince Harry, is that they had made private comments which were then published by others and denounced. We are in the era when private comments are only permissible if they are politically correct. Even the Tories agree with this, as Theresa May demonstrated tonight on Question Time, and Dave Cameron denounced Prince Harry’s remarks as ‘completely unacceptable’.

Writing at the time of the Prince Harry episode, Andrew Alexander wrote:

‘It is hard to see why anyone in his right mind would want to be monarch of a country bursting with such pious, pompous, prudish, sanctimonious, semi-hysterical, self-righteous, mealy-mouthed, whining prigs.’

Exactly.

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

2009-02-04T18:25:00.001Z

‘Lord Mandelson, speaking now from his ivory tower, is suggesting that those currently striking in response to Brown’s broken promise of “British jobs for British workers” should hop on a plane and look for work on the other side of Europe.

Lord Mandelson is, of course, right to point out that it is not just foreign workers who find jobs here; many British workers have found jobs on the Continent. Most don’t come with the perks enjoyed by Mandelson and his friends, the Kinnocks, who are now extremely rich socialists, but I am told there are jobs in Poland for British plumbers - as long as they are willing to work like Poles for Polish wages.

Working in Europe was all very well for Mandelson. He took a ticket to Brussels, got rich, stacked up a pension most people can only dream about and made friends with plenty of jet-setters with luxury villas and yachts into the bargain.

But to suggest that the unemployed should leave their families behind to hop on a budget flight to work thousands of miles away is daft.’

Norman Tebbit, writing in the Daily Mail.

BRITISH JOBS FOR BRITISH WORKERS

2009-02-02T01:48:00.003Z

Below is a copy of an article from today's Sun:

Kavanagh
Why foreign worker row will erupt into a headache for GordBy TREVOR KAVANAGH Published: Today

THE only surprise in the row over Grimsby’s foreign workers is that it took so long to erupt.

When jobs are scarce, why should skilled Brits stand idle while hundreds of Italians are imported.

For years we have been told what we can and cannot do by unaccountable Brussels directives.

Now in hard times, we are no longer prepared to put up with the lunatic attempt to turn the EU into an artificial nation state.

Europe’s overweening power, and the Government’s refusal to act, are turning migrant labour into a toxic new factor in this slump.

Gordon Brown casually handed strikers their slogan when he promised “British jobs for British workers”.

“Deputy PM” Peter Mandelson fears unemployment — here and in Europe — could unravel the EU.

Yet Mandy fuelled the blaze by telling strikers if they don’t like Italians taking our jobs, they should go to Italy and take theirs!

He should understand that this clash over foreign workers is just the first puff of smoke from the volcano.

This small island was never going to cope long-term with three million uninvited, sometimes unwelcome and often illegal, guests in seven short years.

Nor, as times get tougher, will we quietly accept the Government’s prediction of ten million more.

The strikes at oil, gas and chemical plants are only the start.

There are plenty more foreign-only deals waiting to explode, not least the £12billion Olympics where thousands of non-UK workers are being hired.

Brits of all backgrounds, including established migrants, have been simmering over immigration for a decade.

They were treated with contempt as Labour recklessly opened the door to countless newcomers.

Yes, the vast majority are decent, law-abiding workers, grateful for our hospitality.

But there is an ugly side to immigration we are not supposed to talk about...

Freeloading on the welfare state, jumping housing queues and mopping up health and welfare provision for which they have paid no tax.

Immigrants feature disproportionately in criminal violence.

Organised gangs from Africa, Albania and Asia run ruthless drug and vice rings. And ministers do absolutely nothing about it.

Labour champions equality but ignores its own natural supporters — hard-working tradesmen priced out by EU rivals.

Labour vigilantly imposes Health & Safety fascism yet turns a blind eye to migrants exploited as slave labour.

Unions hail the minimum wage as their greatest triumph while workers compete with foreign rivals who work all hours for what they see as a king’s ransom.

Labour decided long ago that all immigration is good.

If it raises tax revenue, the more the merrier.

All minorities, even those with no link to this country, take priority over the established population.

Inner cities are colonised by entire communities who live, pray, dress and speak as if they still lived in tribal villages.

Shockingly, there are 300 schools where English is not the first language.

Labour is obsessed with its diversity agenda, yet it sits mute as women in ghettos are kept ignorant, forced into marriage or, in some cases, murdered for refusing.

Any attempt to raise matters like this is denounced as “racism”.

Labour effectively silenced Tories with this ugly smear. Now they are being forced on the back foot because the same charges are being levelled from their own side.

Trevor Phillips, black chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, has spoken bravely about his party’s mistakes on race.

Threat

Past and present immigration ministers have talked about action, while at the same time waving in 150,000 workers a year.

Dagenham MP Jon Cruddas warns Labour MPs risk a dangerous threat from an increasingly strident BNP.

But it is Birkenhead rebel Frank Field who speaks up for the whole country.

“Stakes could not be higher,” he warns. “The men and women on these picket lines are not just fighting for their jobs, they are asserting their national identity.

“Anger should be directed at this Government.”

Couldn’t put it better myself.

GORDON BROWN concedes he might have put the economy at risk when he removed the Bank of England as City watchdog in 1997.

But he seems bewildered that greedy bankers took advantage of this loophole, plunging Britain into the worst slump in the Western world.

Will he go a little further and admit that on the day after Labour came to power, he and Tony Blair were told in a blazing face-to-face row with Bank governor Eddie George that this was precisely the risk they were taking?

LEICESTER DEMO

2009-01-26T16:31:00.001Z

Please find below a notice for a demo in Leicester:

Leicester is the City in England predicted to be the first to have a minority of Indigenous English in the near future.
This is non other than ethnic clearing.
This is a National Demo calling on the ethnically English from all over England to come and show support for the English in Leicester.

It is also a Demo for us to state that WE ARE THE ENGLISH, not British!
and we have wishes, needs and sensitivities just like any other ethnic group.

A message to all English woken up enough to care....
LEICESTER'S ENGLISH NEED YOU NOW!

This Demo will be at Leicester's City Centre, Clock Tower - 1pm on Saturday the 28th of March 2009.
_______________________________________________

THIS DEMO IS NOT CONNECTED TO ANY POLITICAL PARTY.

Please do not bring Union Jacks - WE ARE THE ENGLISH -NOT BRITISH!
Feel free to bring the Cross of St George - the flag of England & the White Dragon Flag of the English, which has become the symbol of the Indigenous English.
You can buy White Dragon flags from here http://www.whitedragonflagofengland.com

This is to be a good natured, law abiding Demo not aimed at any other ethnic group BUT is aimed at the authorities.

WE ARE THE ENGLISH! AND LEICESTER NEEDS US NOW!
PLEASE SHOW YOUR SUPPORT AND COME ALONG.

PLEASE FORWARD TO AS MANY ENGLISH AS POSSIBLE

facebook group
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/event.php?eid=57870188746

HOOD ROBIN

2009-01-20T17:29:00.004Z

Labour’s commitment to bankers has reached a new scale of largess with English taxpayers’ money, verging on madness.

In a free market economy, if a company fails then it is either restructured, or taken over, or closed down. Labour are intent to keep the insolvent banks intact whatever the cost may be. They are quite open about this.

A failure of a bank might call into question the confidence in the banking system, and there is therefore some need for government intervention for the wider economic interest, which is why the banks should have been properly regulated. But that need only go so far as protecting the savings held by depositors. Rather than restrict themselves to that, Labour are trying to overcome the damage caused to the economy by the banks’ hording of cash by throwing so many £100billions at them that they will have so much money that they might start to lend some of it again. Yet the policy is not working.

In assessing the scale of the bank bailouts it needs to be remembered that the City pocketed £17billion last year in bonuses! With this level of reckless greed it is little wonder that the banks are insolvent. It is to be noted that Lloyds Bank has continued paying bonuses after receiving its first tranche of taxpayers’ money. Now it wants more.

Some of the measures announced make sense. The £50billion that the Bank of England might lend direct to large companies is good in that it by-passes the banks. The alteration of the terms of the Northern Rock bailout is sensible. If the main competition that the banks face is from a nationalized bank which is refusing mortgages and is withdrawing funds from the mortgage market then it makes it far easier for them to do likewise.

But to continue to pour good money after bad by offering the banks a blank cheque to underwrite their bad debts is irresponsible. The total cost, excluding that of the Northern Rock nationalization, is now edging towards £1trillion. It is predicted that even this will not be enough.

One needs to understand the logic. The government either prints money [a favourite socialist method of paying for things - although it is called quantitative easing in polite society] in which case savers will lose out in the following inflation, or uses taxpayers’ money, which the taxpayer must pay for, in order to give that money to the banks who in turn lend it back to the taxpayer and charge interest on it.

Oh wow! We can hardly wait.

Ordinary people are very unlikely to borrow money they cannot afford, and increasing living standards by borrowing more is a short term remedy. In the long term living standards are decreased as the borrowed money has to be repaid with interest. Taking out a mortgage is necessary to buy a house which, hopefully, will increase in value in the long term and provides somewhere to live in any case.

Firms borrow money to fund investment. Retained profits are their primary source for this. The do not borrow just for the sake of it. Returns on the investment should repay the initial cost and interest, leaving a profit.

If Labour decided to increase demand in the economy, then why were not these sums given to the private and business sector in the form of tax cuts - or else increase government spending on capital projects. That would have been the Keynesian approach. The Keynesian approach would not be to give even more huge sums of money to those who are insolvent and are hording cash.

Furthermore, Keynes was trying to solve unemployment which is not what Labour are doing. They are simply bailing out the banks in the hope that somehow, with all the printed money and taxpayers’ money circulating about in the banking system that it will eventually circulate out into the wider economy. They have not even demanded that the banks end their lavish bonus payments. Gordon Brown sees nothing wrong in taxpayers’ money being used to fund this [see the English Rights Campaign entry dated 21 October 2008].

This is not Keynesian economics, nor crass Keynesian economics [see the English Rights Campaign entry dated 12 December 2008]. This is spiv economics.

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

2009-01-19T22:03:00.000Z

‘Three final considerations remain. The first concerns the general tendency for leading industrial countries to find themselves obliged, as other, low-wage areas begin to compete with them, to shift the weight of their operations within the international division of labour, away from industry first to commerce and ultimately to finance. The Dutch in their golden age, and before them possibly the Italian cities, might furnish earlier examples of this sequence. Might it then have been correct, even if not chosen deliberately but by a kind of unconscious collective drive, to neglect the declining manufacturing sector in favour of the sectors of the future, commerce and finance? Voices were not lacking, then as well as among those who are presiding over the far more devastating period of decline of British manufacturing in the 1980s, to claim just such a prospect.

However, the argument remains just as unconvincing in the context of the Victorian and Edwardian as in that of the second Elizabethan age. First, it is clear that the favours extended by the Government to the financial/commercial sector were not due to the recognition of the new, but to the survival of the old. The City, as we have seen, had gained its initial foothold in the centres of power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and had kept it ever since, not so much by the economic significance of its contribution, but by the kind of social, familial and political links and by the snobbery with which the British ruling elite traditionally recruited itself. Next, a successful high-wage economy might well sustain itself by a shrinking manufacturing base and a growing tertiary sector, but only if the manufacturing sector which survives, remains technically up-to-date and able to sustain the high incomes consistent with the incomes realized in the financial sector and with the expectations of an advanced country.

It cannot be achieved by the kind of governmental neglect of industry characteristic for our period. Furthermore, such modest attention as was claimed by and granted to industry by the British Government, tended to be given to the old staples. The new high-tech, growing industries on which future development should have rested were, as noted above, treated with particular lack of understanding and helpfulness.

Thirdly, the argument for a major switch to the services neglects the enormous social costs of transferring half the British population from its north-western, formerly industrial base, to a new geographical and occupational environment. At least one generation would remain immobile among the kind of dereliction which is visible in northern Britain today, even if the following generation might possibly be willing and able to move. And lastly, the argument overestimates the employment possibilities of the tertiary sector, even if we make the totally unrealistic assumption that Britain, having failed to modernize her industries, retained a world monopoly of invisible exports. It might, conceivably, be a solution for a small country like Singapore or Switzerland, though even that is doubtful; it is certainly not conceivable for the 50 millions who have to be maintained in the British Isles.’

Sidney Pollard, Professor of Economic History, writing in 1989 about the British economy 1870-1914.

MYTHS

2008-12-29T16:37:00.002Z

Another myth that has been advanced during the credit crunch, is that the 1930s slump was exacerbated by, if not a caused by, protectionism - something which we are now told we must avoid at all costs.

It might be true to not regard protectionism as a solution to the present economic crisis, but it was not a causal factor of the 1930s slump. In reality, trade between different countries from different social, economic and political systems has always tended to be regulated to some extent and this has involved tariffs.

What did happen in the 1930s, is that Britain was forced, due to a variety of factors [the exit from the Gold Standard, the collapse in industry and the attendant unemployment, the devaluation of the currency and competitive devaluations], to abandon its simplistic theoretical laissez-faire free trade policy, and introduce tariffs to protect its industry from unfair competition [the damage done to British industry by returning to the Gold Standard was substantial - see the English Rights Campaign item dated the 18 December 2008].

This abandonment was long overdue and the reluctance to respond to the gravity of the threat posed to our industries by foreign protectionist measures was a major factor in the decline of British power. For example, in 1904 the average tariffs on industrial goods imported from Britain were: 25% in Germany, 34% in France, 73% in the USA and 131% in Russia. The British tariff on manufactured imports was zero.

It was impossible for British industry to compete successfully on such a basis and it is little wonder that our rivals and competitors not only caught up with us, but overtook us economically and then militarily.

The introduction of a more protectionist stance by Britain in the 1930s led to a fivefold increase in the output of machine tools, and a boom in chemicals, steel, aerospace and many other industries. Without this re-industrialization, Britain would have fared even worse against the Nazis in the Second World War than we did. Fighting wars is dependent on industrial production - not City speculation.

Today, those industries which are facing competition from the Far East, where they are free to exploit Western technology without any accompanying Western labour costs and other regulations, should be able to expect a more supportive government and would be more successful if they did not face unfair competition. On leaving the EU, our fishing industry would boom as we retook control of our own territorial waters.

A more pragmatic approach is needed and should be welcomed.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

2008-12-24T15:12:00.000Z

Despite some determined campaigning, English nationalism has failed to make a significant breakthrough this last year, although the third place position [only 44 votes behind of the Greens who were second] in the Haltemprice and Howden Westminster by-election does demonstrate the potential.

Meanwhile, Labour’s various anti-English policies continue apace. We are witnessing the attempted destruction of a nation.

Sometime in the next 18 months, Labour will have to face the electorate in a general election. For certain, Labour will face the electorate in the EU elections in June, with a proportional representation counting system.

It is crucial that English nationalism does achieve electoral success, not only in the June elections, but also the general election, whenever it comes.

For those who have supported this blog and its campaign, and to English nationalists everywhere, the English Rights Campaign would wish a very Happy Christmas and a successful New Year.

IMMIGRATION

2008-12-24T15:11:00.000Z

The extent of the judiciary’s determination to promote mass immigration, including illegal immigration, knows no bounds. The latest example being the marriage by proxy of a Polish immigrant to a Brazilian at a ceremony where neither attended. The 15 minute ceremony took place in Brazil, with friends and a lawyer in attendance.

Although marriage by proxy is illegal in Britain, it is legal in Brazil. Therefore Judge David Allen pronounced that the marriage was therefore valid under English law and that because the Brazilian is married to a Pole, then under EU law he is entitled to British residency.

The potential for abuse and exploitation by organized crime rackets does not take much imagination. Sir Andrew Green of MigrationWatch said:

‘This is a ludicrous outcome. It drives a coach and horses through the government’s efforts to prevent sham marriages. Those who succeed by this bizarre route can obtain a meal ticket for life at the British taxpayer’s expense.’

THE WAR ON TERROR

2008-12-23T13:54:00.000Z

Cambridgeshire County Council has used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act [RIPA], one piece of Labour’s anti-terrorist legislation, to spy on 5 paperboys suspected of not having the correct paperwork. The council has a by-law requiring paperboys to have work permits.

Council officials spied on the paperboys and produced surveillance evidence to secure a conviction.

Local councils have become quite adept at exploiting anti-terror legislation to harass ordinary people. Poole Council used RIPA to investigate parents suspected of not abiding by school catchment area rules. Other councils have used covert techniques to investigate dog fouling and litter louts.

ETHNIC CLEANSING

2008-12-22T20:44:00.000Z

Labour has announced that they intend to change the law in order to encourage anti-English discrimination. In future companies will be allowed to discriminate in favour of black and women candidates and against Englishmen.

Harriet Harman has said that ‘positive action’ is necessary to ensure that the workforce proportionally represents the population as a whole.

The proposals are supported by the TUC, the so-called Equalities and Human Rights Commission, and the CBI. That the establishment toadies at the CBI support such pernicious measures should come as no surprise. It is an organization which is usually in support of misguided government policies - such as the ERM, the single currency and the EU - but this time they have excelled themselves by being a party to the promotion of race zealotry.

Labour also said that they intend that more government contracts would be awarded to firms with a politically correct record on equality. Public organizations will be required not to discriminate on grounds of ‘sexual orientation, gender reassignment, age and religion or belief’. They will be required to report on pay inequalities and the Equality and Human Rights Commission will be carrying out a series of enquiries into pay.

This anti-English discrimination, in England, needs to be put into context. It was reported by the Office for National Statistics in the summer that the scale of immigration is such that in 2005 only 64% of babies born in England and Wales were recorded as being ‘White British’. Sir Andrew Green, the chairman of MigrationWatch, said:

‘This is a measure of the extent to which uncontrolled immigration is changing the nature of our society against the wishes of a very large majority. Immigration is now expected to account for 70% of our population increase in the next 25 years. This means we will have to build a city the size of Birmingham every three or four years to sustain the newcomers.’

If mass immigration continues, as the greater proportion of non-English children mature and enter the jobs market, then the anti-English discrimination will force out increasing numbers of Englishmen in pursuit of racial engineering. Labour is not only prepared to allow the continuance of mass immigration irrespective of the harm done to the fabric of our society, but are also prepared to displace the indigenous English population to that end.

QUOTE OF THE MONTH [bonus]

2008-12-18T18:31:00.000Z

‘In Britain the interests of industry and the interests of finance have never been as closely intertwined as they are in France, Germany, were in the United States. As the decline of British manufacturing became evident, the competitive strength of foreign industry weakened somewhat the enthusiasm for free trade previously displayed by British manufacturers, but British financiers were still doing well out of financing the trade of the world. When, at the turn of the century, Joseph Chamberlain tried to rally the manufacturing interest in the Conservative Party behind the cause of protection for domestic industry, in the hope of launching a manufacturing revival, he was bitterly opposed by the financial interests. He and the manufacturers were decisively defeated.

The full extent of the victory for finance was to be demonstrated much later, in 1925, after the First World War had finally destroyed the edifice of British economic superiority. During the war normal free financial relations had been suspended, which had been the basis of the international monetary system guided from London. At the end of the war the City, in the interests of sound finance and the restoration of its position as an international centre, pressed the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, to return to the gold standard, even though this would mean raising the value of the pound against the dollar and damaging the competitiveness of the export industries. Again the victory was won by finance, in the person of Montague Norman, Governor of the Bank of England; and the gold standard was restored.

In a bitter polemical pamphlet entitled The Economic Consequences of Mr Winston Churchill, Keynes argued that this decision would lead to disaster. He was right. The export industries - coal, shipbuilding, textiles - virtually collapsed. In 1926 there was a General Strike. Britain’s slump was well under way five years before the depression was to engulf the rest of the world.’

Lord Eatwell, writing in 1982.

The failure of Joseph Chamberlain’s campaign was referred to in the English Rights Campaign item, dated the 12 March 2005.

THE WAR ON TERROR

2008-12-18T00:25:00.002Z

Below is an item from yesterday's The Times. It seems that Scotland Yard, in its eagerness to be politically correct, is now employing and funding terrorists:

December 16, 2008

Sack Mohamed Ali Harrath, Scotland Yard urged
Richard Kerbaj and Dominic Kennedy

Scotland Yard has been urged by the former intelligence chief Baroness Neville-Jones to sack one of its anti-terrorism advisers after The Times discovered that he is wanted by Interpol and authorities in his native Tunisia because of his links to an alleged terror organisation.

The Metropolitan Police admitted last night that it had pumped money – estimated to be tens of thousands of pounds – into an annual interfaith forum hosted by the adviser, Mohamed Ali Harrath, for the past four years.

Lady Neville-Jones, who chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee and is a former governor of the BBC, demanded answers yesterday from Scotland Yard, the Home Office and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, about the extraordinary state of affairs surrounding Mr Harrath, who advises the Met’s Muslim Contact Unit on how to combat extremism. He also runs a Muslim television channel.

“Unless and until the Interpol red notice is removed it seems quite wrong that Mohamed Ali Harrath should be employed as an adviser,” Lady Neville-Jones, the Shadow Security Minister, said. “The Government must answer some very serious questions about its border control and vet-ting systems. Both the Home Office and Metropolitan Police have access to Interpol’s information. Did the Home Office access this information before allowing Mohamed Ali Harrath to enter, and did the Metropolitan Police check it before allowing him to work for them? If not, why not?

“If they did access Interpol’s data, how could the Home Office let in and the Met employ an individual with a red notice for alleged links to a suspected terrorist organisation? The FCO must be aware that the Tunisian Government, an ally in the fight against terrorism, has asked for the extradition of this man.”

Mr Harrath has admitted setting up the Tunisian Islamic Front (FIT) which, according to the Tunisian Government, advocated the establishment of “an Islamic state by means of armed revolutionary violence”.

In evidence before Britain’s Special Immigration Appeals Commission in 2003, an MI5 witness accused the FIT of terrorism activities in France.

Mr Harrath denies this, saying that his movement was wrongly blamed by the French courts. He described the FIT as a “nonviolent political party founded in 1986”, and said he has been persecuted and tortured by the Tunisian authorities because of his opposition to what he and other critics deride as a “one-party state”.

Scotland Yard refused to be drawn on The Times’s revelations about Mr Harrath. It emerged, however, that the Met has been providing funding for an annual Muslim gathering, Global Peace and Unity, hosted by Mr Harrath’s Islam Channel.

The event was addressed this year by leading politicians, including Sha-hid Malik, the Justice Minister, Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, and Dominic Grieve, the Shadow Home Secretary. Scotland Yard was unable to provide exact details about the funds, beyond saying that it had been £10,000 on one occasion.

The Islam Channel was rebuked by Ofcom, the media regulator, for showing a biased film about Jerusalem that gave only the Muslim viewpoint. Ofcom found last year that the channel had broken its broadcasting code by twice showing the documentary Jerusalem: A Promise of Heaven, which argued that Muslims had been deprived of ownership of the holy city.

The documentary earned some notoriety after being discovered in a suitcase found in the home of Saajid Badat, a Muslim, of Gloucester, who pleaded guilty in 2005 to plotting to destroy an aircraft with a shoe bomb. At the time police said that he had agreed to blow up a passenger aircraft from Europe to the US and was prepared to kill himself and hundreds of innocent people. When the channel was summoned before Ofcom, it argued that a complaint about the documentary was itself “partial” as it came from a “Jewish organisation”.

Ofcom stated: “The Islam Channel failed to ensure that this major matter of political controversy was treated with due impartiality.” It decided it was not a sufficiently serious breach to warrant a statutory sanction. However, at the same time , Ofcom did fine the channel £30,000 over a separate complaint of breaking election impartiality rules by letting candidates for the Respect party present programmes.

It gave the channel a broadcasting licence after deciding that Mr Harrath was a fit and proper person.

MYTHS

2008-12-16T22:39:00.001Z

The credit crunch and the reaction to it has given rise to two myths. The first one relates to the issue of Keynesianism.

Keynes wrote his book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, in response to the unemployment in the 1930s. He was not interested in all forms of unemployment, but was primarily concerned with understanding as to why the unemployment of the 1930s was persistent when classical economists believed that the market would self-correct and so re-employ the unemployed.

Keynes took particular issue with Says Law, which held that supply would never exceed demand. Keynes regarded Says Law as wrong as unemployment was an excess of supply [of labour] over demand [the number of jobs available].

Keynes believed that full employment was not necessarily a natural state of affairs and that it was the role of government to intervene in the economy to ensure a level of output consistent with full employment. Keynes believed that output was determined by effective demand, consisting of consumer demand and investment; and that the level of investment was more volatile than consumption and had a disproportionate effect on employment.

One of the problems identified by Keynes, was a situation in which interest rates would not fall sufficiently and that there could be a situation where people and institutions were hording cash [liquidity preference] - thereby reducing demand. Keynes believed that one of the reasons for the 1930s slump was that interest rates did not fall far enough and that liquidity preference was high.

Keynes believed that the government needed to intervene to force down interest rates and/or increase effective demand either by tax cuts, or by increasing government spending on capital projects.

Labour’s reaction to the credit crunch, in which the banks are keeping up interest rates and are openly hording cash, is to spend tens of £billions reflating the insolvent banks, and pumping hundreds of £billions into the banks via the Bank of England. Meanwhile the government has made a 2.5% cut in VAT and has postponed the building of two aircraft carriers.

If Labour thought that the banks would very nicely lend money again given all the money they have received, then they have been proved wrong. If Labour thought that people would be tempted into spending money they do not have by a piffling 2.5% cut in VAT, then they have been proved wrong. Quite what relevance encouraging consumers to buy DVD players or televisions and suchlike, built in China and the Far East, has to cutting unemployment in Britain is not explained. Although Gordon Brown seems to think that he can persuade foreign governments to increase their own government spending and thus, presumably create jobs for British exporters.

With respect, this is not Keynesianism and Keynes is most unlikely to have advocated such naïve nonsense. He was trying to understand and solve the continuing unemployment of the 1930s, whereas Labour’s current policies are simply increasing unemployment.

The numbers of people seeking work are dependent on a number of factors, not all of which are economic. The size of the workforce is influenced by the birth rate several decades earlier, itself determined by non-economic factors, and also by immigration. Labour’s immigration policy pointedly refused to take account of the impact on the economy and is determined by their determination to reduce the English into being a minority in England and by their desire to support the creation of an EU suprastate.

The size of the workforce is also determined by retirement and the ability to retire on a pension. Labour have destroyed the private pension system, which in turn reduces the amount saved and thus the level of investment.

Labour are now promising to reclassify many of those currently on incapacity benefit as being unemployed. This might save money and remove the hidden unemployment created in the 1980s and 90s - but it does not create jobs.

It should be remembered that Keynes was writing in the 1930s and that the world has changed. For example, Keynes believed that an increase in inflation would be a means of reducing wages as he thought that the unions would not realize that the money income was being eroded. In fact, the unions were more alert than he presumed.

Also, in the 1930s, Britain was a major industrial power and increases in demand would result in increases in demand for British goods within Britain. Today, Britain is de-industrializing, as a result of government policy, and the import penetration of the home market means that much of an increase in demand will benefit foreign producers and suck in more imports. Also, there was no mass immigration in the 1930s.

The Tories seem to think that the problem is that Labour have been insufficiently generous to the bankers and that more £billions should be given to them. Labour now seem to be taking a similar view. Quite why showering hundreds of £billions on the banks, who will promptly horde that money, is a solution to the credit crunch is unexplained. The banks should be by-passed and should have been left to stew in their own juice. In the age of the internet, it is not necessary to have a nationwide branch network in order to lend money to ordinary people.

It is Labour’s rejection of the nation state that is the reason for their failed economic policy. They refuse to promote the national economy and local industry. Labour prefers super casinos. Mr Brown prefers to grandstand as saving the world’s banking system, rather than concentrate on running the home economy. Labour are determined to promote mass immigration and increase the numbers of those seeking work, which can only force down wages and living standards, and increase unemployment. Their disdain for the defence of the realm, means that they are happy to stall the building of desperately needed aircraft carriers regardless of the impact on jobs.

Labour are the problem, not the solution.

THE LOONY LEFT

2008-12-14T14:16:00.001Z

It is not only the success of their football team, or their commitment to yachting for the unemployed [see the English Rights Campaign item dated the 2 December 2008] that has put Hull on the map. Not to be outdone by the Loony Left at the University of Manchester [see the English Rights Campaign item dated the 4 October 2008], the Kingswood College of Arts, despite the credit crunch and the fact that the building is due to be demolished in 4 years, has spent £100,000 to have classical music piped into the school lavatories [this is not a spoof].

The secondary school was ranked as ‘inadequate’ in a recent Ofsted report. Only 13% of the pupils gained five A* to C GCSE grades this summer. Hull’s educational standards have been either the worst or among the worst in the country for many years.

Tony Hammond, the school’s director of resources, said:

‘Four years in the life of a secondary school student is a long time and we feel strongly the students who are here now deserve the best facilities and one of those is the toilets.’

The money came from the council’s capital budget for school buildings. The Liberal Democrat leader of Hull City Council said:

‘I think many parents of children who go to this college will think spending that sort of money is a bit bonkers. And I must admit I have some sympathy with that view.’

If that is the council’s view, one wonders why the money was spent? The luxury loos also include the school’s logo built into the floor, touch sensor flushes and all-in-one hand wash-and-dry units. The school has claimed that the piped music is necessary to protect pupils’ privacy.

CRASS KEYNESIANISM

2008-12-12T01:06:00.005Z

Below is a copy of an article from today's Guardian:

Brown's VAT cut just crass Keynesianism, say Germans
• Britain accused of 'tossing around' billions of pounds
• Criticism clouds summit on EU stimulus package
* Nicholas Watt, Ashley Seager, Larry Elliott
* The Guardian, Thursday December 11 2008

Germany tore into Gordon Brown's £12.5bn cut in VAT last night, describing the move as "crass Keynesianism" that would raise Britain's national debt to levels that would take a generation to pay off.

In a blow to the prime minister, on the eve of today's EU summit in Brussels where a Europe fiscal stimulus plan will be discussed, the German finance minister accused Britain of "tossing around billions" after years of lecturing the EU on the dangers of deficit spending.

Peer Steinbrück, the SPD finance minister, made clear Berlin's resistance to a fiscal stimulus when he mocked "our British friends" for cutting VAT.

He told Newsweek: "We have no idea how much of that stores will pass on to customers. Are you really going to buy a DVD player because it now costs £39.10 instead of £39.90? All this will do is raise Britain's debt to a level that will take a whole generation to work off." His comments came on the eve of a fresh meeting between the Treasury and Britain's high street banks in which Alistair Darling will urge lenders to pass on cuts in interest rates and increase credit flows.

David Cameron, who last night seized on the Steinbrück attack as vindication of the opposition's critique of the government's fiscal rescue package, yesterday tabled his own proposals for a draft parliamentary bill that would create a government guarantee for up to 10% of all business loans in Britain, worth £50bn.

Steinbrück, a key figure in Labour's German sister party, made clear that Berlin is still smarting from a decade of lectures by Brown as chancellor to fellow EU finance ministers.

He said: "The same people who would never touch deficit spending are now tossing around billions. The switch from decades of supply-side politics all the way to a crass Keynesianism is breathtaking. When I ask about the origins of the crisis, economists I respect tell me it is the credit-financed growth of recent years and decades. Isn't this the same mistake everyone is suddenly making again, under all the public pressure?"

Berlin's intervention shows it is still smarting after Brown invited Nicolas Sarkozy and José Manuel Barroso, the European commission's president, to London on Monday to discuss plans for an EU-wide €200bn fiscal stimulus plan.

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor who is wary of costly fiscal stimulus plans, did not attend the London meeting.

The Tories' national loan guarantee scheme will add to pressure on the government to announce fresh measures to boost bank lending. Figures from the Bank of England yesterday showed that mortgage rates have come down by far less than official bank rate in the past two months and that unsecured loans and overdrafts are more expensive than they were before the start of the credit crunch 18 months ago.

In the Commons, Cameron told Brown: "This recapitalisation scheme is not working. It needs to change if the banks are to start lending again. The prime minister keeps saying that everyone in the world has copied it, but no one has copied the details. He is lending to the banks at 12% and expecting them to lend out at 6%."

The government said the Conservatives would have to make £14bn of provisions against companies failing during the recession and said the measures announced in the pre-budget report were targeted, effective and costed.

Darling will next week announce changes to the terms of the credit guarantee scheme for banks in an attempt to ensure that the benefits of taxpayer support are passed on to lenders.

"I'm prepared to do more to free up lending," he told the Treasury select committee yesterday.

According to Bank of England data, the average interest rate on a standard variable rate mortgage stood at 6.39% in November, compared with a bank rate of 3%.

The spread of 3.39 percentage points was the widest since records began in 1995 because while bank rate came down by 1.5 points, the SVR mortgage fell by 0.52 points. New tracker rates came down in November after rising sharply in October. Over the two months combined, new tracker rates fell 0.28 percentage points - a small fraction of the two point drop in bank rate.

Michael Saunders, UK economist at Citi, said: "It is even worse for unsecured loans. Between July 2007 [just before the financial crisis erupted] and up to and including November 2008, the Bank of England cut rates by 2.75 percentage points.

"But over that period average interest rates for household overdrafts rose 3.11 percentage points, average credit card rates rose 0.83 points, the average interest rate of a £10,000 personal loan rose 1.84 percentage points and the average rate on a £5,000 personal loan rose 3.15 points. "All these unsecured personal interest rates are now the highest for several years.

RACE WAR POLITICS

2008-12-11T22:59:00.001Z

Valleys Race Equality Council has issued a leaflet advising that the term ‘British’ is to be avoided. The leaflet’s advice has been accepted by the Caerphilly Council in South Wales.

The leaflet states that:

‘The idea of “British” implies a false sense of unity - many Scots, Welsh and Irish resist being called British and the land denoted by the term contains a wide variety of cultures, languages and religions.’

The leaflet continues to say that the term ‘half-caste’ implies that ‘a person is not whole and so should be avoided’. The term ‘negro’ is described as having ‘racist overtones and is linked with the slave trade’.

Less than 1% of Caerphilly’s 170,000 population are from an ethnic minority.

David Davies, the Tory MP for Monmouth, has condemned the leaflet as ‘political correctness gone mad’ and has further said:

‘Organizations like this are using public money to propagate their own narrow nationalistic ideas. Perhaps they should be replaced by a single body that promotes Britishness and encourages everyone in this country, whether black, Asian or white to unite and stand together under the British flag.’

The motive for the leaflet is not nationalism, but communism. As is plain from the leaflet’s contents, it is striving to achieve disunity and anti-Englishness.

There is nothing wrong in encouraging people to unite under the British flag, but many immigrants do not see themselves as British and what matters is that they are able to integrate into the host community. That is dependent upon the numbers of immigrants involved, which is far too high, and on the difference between the immigrants and the host community.

As a point of fact, the Scots, Welsh, Irish and English are British.

The quango should be closed and not replaced or repackaged. There are more deserving ways of spending taxpayers’ money and we certainly should not be wasting such monies on quangos like this in a deep recession.

VOTE RIGGING

2008-12-09T12:55:00.002Z

A Populus opinion poll for the Times today highlights the danger posed to the Tories by their failure to tackle Labour's vote rigging activities.

Despite the economic downturn, Labour still has a lead on its handling of the economy, with 40% trusting Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling to fight the recession. This demonstrates the Tory weakness to offer a viable alternative to 12 years of Labour's spendthrift policies with English taxpayers' money.

More importantly, the poll shows that the Tories have an overall lead among voters with 39% support, compared with Labour on 35% and the Lib Dems on 17%. On these figures, then Labour could well win the next general election.

In a Boundary Commission report entitled Guide to the New Electoral Boundaries [see the English Rights Campaign item dated the 13 March 2006], the commission pointed out that:

'Even on the new boundaries if both of the main parties were on the same percentage of vote - for example 35% - then Labour would have 87 seats more than the Conservatives.'

This is an appalling and completely unacceptable state of affairs.

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

2008-12-05T00:45:00.000Z

‘Such a separation within the upper levels of British capitalism helps explain the aloofness of the twentieth-century City from the needs of British industry. This aloofness can be traced back to the eighteen-seventies, when so much of the social pattern of modern Britain was being fixed. The year 1878, which saw the failure of the City of Glasgow Bank, was, W.P. Kennedy has argued, a watershed for British banking’s relation to industry: “A point had been reached where the entire system had either to be reorganized to withstand the greater risks of steadily enlarging industrial requirements or the system had to withdraw from long term industrial involvement. The system withdrew. After 1878, no longer would banks become willingly involved in the long term financing of industry”. The capital markets became “deeply biased away from favouring most home industrial projects”. Consequently, the development of industry was handicapped and a vicious circle of declining relative profitability was created that continued through the twentieth century. Insufficient long-term investment hobbled productivity growth, which in turn made such investment ever less attractive, and so on in a downward spiral. Particularly hurt were the new electrical equipment and automobile industries, two of the industries of the “second industrial revolution”.

Why did British bankers take that turn away from industry? Domestic industry may already have become less profitable than other opportunities afforded by a rapidly developing world economy. Yet there seems more to it than this. That financial watershed paralleled the wider cultural watershed: As Kennedy observed about capital markets, “Institutions successfully created in Britain to ensure the stability necessary to early industrialization were distinctly less appropriate for the problems of sustaining subsequent development”. The stability had been achieved; now what was becoming necessary was a radical overhaul of institutions (and values) to actively foster continued development. Instead, stability remained the overriding end; confronted with the choice between safety and maximum growth, the financial system (like the social system as a whole) opted for safety. This pullback from industrial involvement was made more likely by the social separation that already existed between the worlds of finance and industry, and the contemporaneous entrenchment of anti-industrial sentiments in the financial and professional classes.’

And:

‘British businessmen in the twentieth century came to accept a dual orientation - what one business school professor called “the British mission - to combine business with humanity”. As Sir George Schuster, a director of the Westminster Bank and of several other firms, hopefully asked in 1947, “Can we, the nation of shop-keepers and money-makers, show the world how to put money-making in its right subsidiary place in the scale of values, without ceasing to perform well all the varied - and vital - functions which underlie the process of money-making?”

These aspirations of gentility imparted a particular tone to business behaviour in Britain. But its consequences were not the same throughout the business world; finance was not hampered as industry was. The milieu of finance, as we have seen, was not all that different from the traditional world of the aristocracy. It was already wealthy and socially established in the mid-nineteenth century, when the cultural counterrevolution was gaining momentum. It was “clean” - well removed from the actual processes of production. It involved the extraction of wealth by associating with people of one’s own class in fashionable surroundings, not by dealing with things and with the working and lower-middle classes, in perhaps grimy and ugly and certainly unfashionable locations. The life of finance was readily reconcilable with the gentry ideal, could recruit the best talent, and could call forth its energies without apologetics or the deliberation of a collective inferiority complex. There was no haemorrhage of ability out of finance: Families like the Barings, or the Barclays, the Smiths, and the Rothschilds remained active over generations, becoming indistinguishable from the old aristocracy. The inhibitions on economic enterprise that this ideal still enforced even on those in the City - resulting in the high value placed on amateurism, for instance - were counterbalanced by the great political power they wielded. Through its integration into the elite, the City could call upon government much more effectively than could industry to favour and support its interests. Further, the City did not depend upon the prosperity of the domestic economy. It was increasingly bound up more with foreign economies than with its own, and could flourish with them while British industry languished. The City, in short, offered a way (more difficult in industry) to be a gentleman and still get rich. Given all these advantages, it is not surprising that finance prospered while industry struggled.’

Martin J Wiener [writer and historian]

HOOD ROBIN

2008-12-03T22:26:00.000Z

It was announced last week that Labour are to nationalise the Royal Bank of Scotland, taking a 58% shareholding. This is following the failure of RBS to raise £15billion by selling new shares, which the government will now buy itself.

In addition, the government is buying £5billion of preference shares, bringing the total cost to £20billion. This is the same amount as Labour’s giveaway package announced recently for the whole country.

Labour is showering huge sums on the banks in the hope that they might extend credit to the wider economy, which they are not prepared to do. The Labour policy is a very costly failure.

Labour - Putting Bankers First

English Democrats - Putting England First

THE NHS

2008-12-02T18:39:00.002Z

At a time of the rationing of drugs in the NHS and when many are losing their jobs as a result of the credit crunch, Hull’s primary care trust, NHS Hull, has decided to launch a new scheme to provide training for young unemployed people.

Not minded to take any notice of the local plebs, who have been quite vocal in their disapproval, in a unanimous vote of the 12 board members, NHS Hull has decided to spend no less that £500,000 on buying a yacht to send 150 young people yachting each year for the next 3 years. This will involve a 14 week course, 2 weeks of which will be at sea.

One Hull, a local quango, is helping to fund the scheme out of the Government’s Working Neighbourhood Fund with a donation totalling a further £1.3million. The scheme is to be run by a new not-for-profit charitable trust.

Hull City Council leader, Carl Minns, who is also chairman of One Hull, had previously admitted that:

‘From what I have seen of the business case, I think it’s got a lot of holes in it. To give one example, the exit strategy goes from something being funded with a lot of public sector money to one with a new organisation having to generate almost £500,000 straight away.’

Mr Minns had also previously stated that he thought there were better ways of providing ‘quality apprenticeships’ and that it was ‘not for him’ to comment on NHS Hull’s decision to buy the yacht.

Initially, NHS Hull was expected to spend £400,000 on the 72ft yacht, but it was then decided that another £100,000 was needed to bring it up to spec. NHS Hull chief executive, Chris Long, said:

‘If you are buying an ocean-going yacht you are not necessarily buying an ocean-going yacht which is equipped for training.’

IMMIGRATION

2008-12-01T22:53:00.002Z

Below is a copy of an article from today's Daily Express, in which Sir Gulam Noon once again [see the English Rights Campaign entry dated the 6 September 2005] shows a more common sense attitude to immigration than most politicians - including the Tories:

SIR GULAM: WE NEED A 10-YEAR BAN ON MIGRANTS

Monday December 1,2008
By Alison Little, Deputy Political Editor

BRITAIN should shut its borders to all immigrants for up to 10 years to prevent racial unrest, a top Indian-born businessmen said yesterday.

High-profile Labour donor Sir Gulam Noon, known as the “curry king” because of his multi-million-pound ready meals empire, said a ban was needed to stop racist groups exploiting tensions.

“I strongly feel that whoever are the immigrants here, we’d better give them jobs and give them dignity to live here before we import some more,” Sir Gulam told BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show.

“I do not want a situation whereby a party like the BNP says, ‘Listen, all your jobs are being taken away by immigrants’. We have to be extremely careful.

“Some sort of a ban should be there,” said Sir Gulam, who last week survived the terrorist attack on the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai by barricading himself into his suite.

Sir Gulam, 72, who came to the UK in 1966 with just £50 in his pocket, is understood to have said: “We should wait for five or 10 years, until all the newcomers have been properly integrated and assimilated into the country.

“Until then we should just shut the door. We can only accommodate so many. There is always a danger that for the sake of political correctness, or a party’s political advantage, we find ourselves filling up the country with too many immigrants who will disturb the balance and upset the people – particularly the young people – of the host community.”

He also warned: “You can’t just put hundreds of thousands of people on this small island. There is a limit.”

He believes that immigrants must learn English and schoolgirls should not wear veils. The moderate Muslim also called on Britain to be tougher on extremists, saying it was a “soft target because we are mollycoddling these people”, who then saw it as a sign of weakness. His message to extremists was: “If you don’t like this country, get out.”

A Home Office spokesman said in response to Sir Gulam’s comments: “People understand that migration can bring benefits but they also rightly demand that we have robust systems in place to control those coming here.

“Our new points-based immigration system is about getting only the right people and no more.

“It is a powerful set of controls, which allows us to raise and lower the bar depending on the needs of the labour market and the country as a whole. We will use those levers.”