@Nigel_Farage – “We are the Opposition”

Also, a couple of letters in today’s Telegraph, one from Nigel himself, highlight the rank hypocrisy of the Tory Party (who’s leader, the EU Viceroy in Downing Street, is proud to belong to its euro skeptic wing) on British foreign policy, human rights and the European Arrest Warrant….

Alien rule of law

SIR – William Hague (Comment, August 31) says that strong institutions and the rule of law “take a long time to build and must be constantly nurtured”.

Should he not, therefore, express concern that more than 1,000 British citizens have been sent abroad under the European Arrest Warrant?

He must also be aware of the extent to which British sovereignty was signed away in the Lisbon Treaty, how our rule of law, the great British tradition of habeas corpus, has gone and how, as EU citizens, we are now subject to European law, the Code Napoleon.

If this is what being an EU citizen means, I for one would rather be out of it.

Michael Gardner
Tadcaster, North Yorkshire

SIR – William Hague shows his keen sense of irony by saying that human rights are key to British foreign policy, one week after cutting the budget on human rights monitoring by £560,000.

“Foreign policy is domestic policy written large,” he suggests. Yes, but to a large extent, foreign policy is now written by the European Union, and Mr Hague supports the funding of the EU’s External Action Service in which 100 EU diplomats earn more each year than he does.

While the Government cheer-leads the closure of British embassies around the globe (accompanied by the opening of EU embassies in their place), and supports an EU voice at the UN to the detriment of British interests, Mr Hague cannot speak of defending a British foreign policy, nor a British domestic policy, while such a huge proportion of laws are made in Brussels and rubber-stamped by his Government.

Nigel Farage MEP (UKIP)
Brussels

Please click on the No To The EAW! link in the sidebar and join the campaign for Britain to opt out.

The funny side of domestic violence

This blog hasn’t laughed so much since the Lord Meddlesome of Fey Green Slime Incident.

Con-Dem partnerships can be tricky……

Coalition partners resort to violence.

Liberal-Democrat councillor Christine James has been charged with assault and will appear in Weymouth Magistrate’s Court on September 9^th.

Feeling are running high amongst the tribal ground force. Passions inflamed as agendas are compromised. Who did she assault?

Her alleged victim is believed to be her husband of 19 years and Conservative Borough council colleague, Ian James.

Mr James is a champion of the Weymouth and Portland Domestic Violence and Abuse Forum and sits on the Community Safety Partnership…..

At a borough council meeting earlier this month, Christine James said that campaigners from the Friends of Weymouth Refuge for battered partners had ‘proven that a refuge like this is both relevant and needed’.

Respectful tug of the forelock to the mighty Al Jahom.

The left has suddenly remembered England

There’s quite a sensible piece by Eddie Bone in the New Statesman today, or very nearly.  The basic premise is that Labour should devote a large part of its time in opposition to rediscovering itself in England, and reconnecting with the English political base that it lost through its badly drafted and deliberate policies of devolution and imposed multi-culturalism.

All fine and dandy, a welcome return to democratic principles, you may think, but as several comments below the piece expose, eradicating the loathing for England that is hard-wired into Labour’s orthodox Fabian DNA will be no easy task.  This is what the ersatz reformers are up against….

An ‘English Parliament’ would not work; it would simply return a perpetual Conservtive majority and that is not good for democracy.

Whats needed is a radical shake up of the Constitution. Greater powers to Regional Govts rather like the ‘lender’ in Germany, and a Federal Structure for the UK, to recognnise the uniqueness of Scotland wales NI and the English Regions.

Which raises two points….

First, while this blog recognises that the Conservative Party as currently constituted doesn’t represent English, or British, interests at all, but those of an unelected bureaucracy in Brussels, what is “bad for democracy” about a perpetual majority for any party if that’s what the people decide?

And second, it’s not hard to see what the commenter is thinking here. This “radical shake-up of the Constitution” would emasculate England still further, consigning even the idea of an English nation to the history books and devolving what little control of our own national destiny we have left to the socialist empire that has been the dream of the homogenisers since Robert Schumann first proposed the European Coal and Steel Community in 1950.

In reality Bone’s proposal holds no hope for those of us who wish to redress the manifest imbalances created by Labour’s cynical gerrymandering, and nobody should be taken in by it.

They chose to despise England and everything she stands for, so now they’ve suddenly remembered we exist, now they need us, they don’t get to represent us.

Mind the gap

A fine and rigorously argued post by John Ward over at The Slog challenges the latest incarnation of left wing Utopian orthdoxy, The Spirit Level.

Going back over a hundred years before the CIA was ever imagined, Jeremy Bentham proposed – without the benefit of any data – exactly that truthful empiricism of balance: ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’, he felt, should be the aim of every society. Not only was Bentham a brilliant, instinctive observer of social anthropology before it was an ology, he was also a man blessed with a complete absence of bollocks in his thinking.

Sadly, the same can’t be said for Nick Cohen. For his assumption in the Guardian/Observer piece is that, by definition, the Tories don’t want ‘more’ equality.

I wonder: is he mad? Cameron has had to work day and night for four years to explain away his background. The current Labour Party’s MPs are more middle class and Oxbridge than the Coalition’s.

Actually, Cohen’s a bright bloke and he isn’t mad: it’s just his job (and his preference) to keep on insisting that all Tories are evil and greedy…..unlike Mandelson, Prescott, Byers, Blair, and Hoon.

The Guardian’s Salvation Army will never accept that the differences between Labour and Tory policy on equality are ones of strategy and definition, not objective.

Quite, although the only question this blog would ask, and which John hasn’t addressed (at least in this post) is which is more desirable and more practical, a society where all social strata of are better off but the gap remains the same, or failed attempt after failed attempt to pursue a theoretical egalitarian Utopia, which always, but always, has the net result of leaving everyone worse off, and invariably only succeeds in replacing one imbalance with another?

For a more detailed (and thoroughly enjoyable) critique of The Spirit Level, try this.

Scrap the meaningless terms Left and Right and reclaim the honourable title ‘reactionary’

It being Saturday, and Kevin Pietersen looking like he’s back in the groove, there will be only be light blogging today unless something happens to provoke this blog’s ire in the next few hours.

So here’s an excellent piece from Gerald Warner.

That blasted horse has gone and bolted again….let’s lock the stable door

Remember those heady days….ooh….about a month ago when the Coalition came up with a cracking wheeze to make us feel that they actually represent us and that our vote means something? Remember the ‘Programme for Government’?

Well, with what some might think is indecent haste (surely they can’t have prepared the answers before launching the programme), they’ve answered our questions, so in the interest of spreading the joy around a bit let’s take a closer look at this revolutionary exercise in open government. Dear reader, I give you the Coalition’s Response to public comments on the Coalition Government’s approach to Europe….

We understand that so many of you feel jaded and sceptical about the EU. Speaking about the EU in Parliament, the Foreign Secretary said he knows there is “a profound disconnection between the British people and what has been done in their name by British Governments”.

Correct. We want a referendum on our continued membership.

We want to deal with this.

Excellent! Here’s an idea; why don’t we have a referendum on our continued membership or the repeal of 1972 European Communities Act?

That is why we have said we will not agree to any further transfer of sovereignty or powers from the UK to the EU during this Parliament. We are committed to ensuring that the British people have their say on any future proposed transfers of powers to the EU. So we are introducing a law to ensure that any future EU Treaty that transfers competences or areas of power from the UK to the EU will be subject to a referendum.

Further transfer of sovereignty? Setting aside for a moment the fact that Parliament, in ratifying the European Constitution Lisbon Treaty, replaced a millennium of Anglo-Saxon Common Law with the Code Napoleon at a stroke,  What sovereignty would that be, and at precisely what point did EU opt-outs cease to be “cosmetic”?

As a result of our EU membership British firms can sell their products and services in the 27 countries which make up the Single Market. That’s 500 million potential customers.

So all trade with the EU would automatically end if we withdrew?  That seems a pretty bold assumption to make given that our balance of trade within the EU is negative.

Doing things through the EU helps in other ways  too: from the laws that protect our birds as they migrate between the British Isles and Africa,  to working with other EU countries to get our collective voice heard in world affairs.

Ah yes, the birds, high minded stuff. What do you suppose Deborah Dark and Michael Turner think about the birds?

The Coalition Government wants to listen to what you have to say on this issue and, where there’s room for improvement, act on it.

Ripper! Have I mentioned a referendum yet?

The ratification of Lisbon was no less than an act of High Treason. Our right to a referendum must be upheld by Parliament and then we should decide what to do with the perpetrators. Mealy-mouthed platitudes on a website are no substitute for democracy.

Brits 2, Czechs 0