Archive 18
UkTabloid
The People's News Portal
Tuesday 14th April 2009
Gordon Brown's reaction to the scandal about vicious, lying emails composed and sent from No. 10 is wearily familiar.
He denies he has anything to do with them and projects himself as Mr Clean. Of course.
But his special adviser, Damian McBride, is forced out after sending emails defaming David Cameron and others to Labour blogger Derek Draper in the hope they'd be used to 'destabilise' the Tories.
Brown's spokesman says: 'Neither the Prime Minister, nor anybody else in Downing Street, had knowledge of these emails.'
Why should we believe him? Because he says so. Not good enough, I'm afraid.
The statement continues: 'It is the Prime Minister's view that there is no place in politics for the dissemination or publication of material of this kind, which is why it is right that Mr McBride and Mr Draper took the decision not to publish this material and regrettable that others are choosing to do so.'
Would McBride - a long-time Brown 'attack dog' - think this kind of stuff was appropriate if his master did not? Using a No. 10 computer to send it makes a nonsense of Brown's 'no one here knew' claim.
Brown knew McBride engaged in dirty tricks. That's one of the reasons he employed him. Both knew McBride would have to go if he were caught. Brown had to have deniability. There's no more to it than that.
Savour, though, the rich hypocrisy of Brown saying Messrs McBride and Draper 'took the decision not to publish this material and it's regrettable that others are choosing to do so'.
Picture the touching scene. Lowlifes McBride and Draper brooding over what to do with their smut. Then, tut-tutting like uptight clergymen, saying to each other: 'It's not right, this will never do.'
And how about it being 'regrettable' that others are choosing to publish? Regrettable for Brown, certainly. We might not otherwise have heard about the No. 10 lying machine.
Note how the Prime Minister seeks to transfer the odium onto the messenger. Isn't there anyone left in No. 10 who can tell him how contemptible this looks?
As for not sending out the smut on the Labour blog, what's more likely is that the snivelling conspirators hadn't got round to circulating their lies before someone in the latter's office - or in No. 10 - sent the ordure to another blogger, Guido Fawkes.
Some people will say:
'Politicians, they're all as bad as one another.'
Perhaps, but this blatant? We don't really expect the Prime Minister's staff to make up lies about political rivals and send them out by email for dissemination by one of the party's propagandists.
We distrust the motives of MPs and ministers - especially after reading about their expenses claims - but their advisers come from a far nastier sub-species, the political leeches who attach themselves to the powerful.
Blair's former mouthpiece Alastair Campbell - who, in his time, acted as if he were Deputy Prime Minister - is their hero, proving that if you get close enough to power, you can make big money and live well off it for the rest of your life.
When Dr Johnson was asked why he tolerated in his presence a particularly horrible character, he is said to have replied: 'I have need of such a man.'
All Prime Ministers - some more than others - have need of nasties to do their dirty work.
But Brown's reliance on the likes of McBride - and, earlier, Charlie Whelan - would be easier to take if he wasn't constantly boasting about 'doing the right thing', and making out - as a son of the manse - that he is always motivated by the highest ideals.
What McBride was doing from No. 10 insults the dignity of the office, apart from any other consideration.
Why did he consider it acceptable? Surely because he believed Brown approved of what he was doing unofficially. And, if he believed that, why should we think otherwise?
Diehards will argue that it's all a fuss about nothing - that Damian and Derek were merely trying to offset anti-Labour blogs.
But it's the effluent of a sick, cynical party, exhausted after 12 years in power.
We need to get rid of this Government for its own sake as well as the country's.
And it's an affront to all of us that people like McBride and Draper hold sway at its highest levels. News Source
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Gordon Brown promised to end the “spin” that characterised Tony Blair’s years at No 10.
But the email scandal is just the latest incident in 12 years of Labour “dark arts” shame.
So skilled at spin was Peter Mandelson, now Business Secretary Lord Mandelson, he was dubbed the Prince of Darkness.
Former journalist Alastair Campbell span for Mr Blair and was blamed for poisonous briefings both against the Tories and internal enemies, including Mr Brown. He left Downing Street after a row with the BBC over claims that intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was “sexed up” to make the case for war.
One of the most notorious spin blunders involved then minister Stephen Byers’s adviser Jo Moore who emailed colleagues after the Twin Towers attacks on September 11 2001 suggesting it was a good day to “bury” bad news.
When he was chancellor, Mr Brown’s team was also famed for briefings designed to undermine Mr Blair. His top PR man, Charlie Whelan, quit in early 1999 after pressure from ministers over alleged mischief-making.
Mr Brown’s current adviser Damian McBride had already been shifted to a backroom role amid unease from some MPs.
The names of rebel Labour MPs voicing interest in ousting Mr Brown were released while some ministers complained their careers were torpedoed by deliberate leaks designed to keep them in line. News Source
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One of Labour's pledges to help the sick get back to work lies in tatters.
In 2004 Gordon Brown promised to place employment advisors in GP surgeries, to reduce the rising incapacity benefit bill.
But five years on, only 20 practices in England and Wales have an advisor on site - and none is in those areas with the highest rates of claimants.
Even once the programme is fully rolled out, fewer than one in every 200 surgeries will have an employment advisor.
Ministers want GPs to help those on incapacity benefit back to work by providing more advice on employment they could manage despite their illness.
Doctors have been encouraged to stop writing sick notes - which focus on what a worker can't do - and replace them with 'fit notes' focusing on what they can do.
But GPs, many of whom know little about occupational health, have asked ministers for more help on this, which is how the Government came up with the idea of employment advisors.
Introducing his pre-budget report, Mr Brown said: 'We will build on successful experience by locating employment advisors in GP surgeries.'
Last year the Department for Work and Pensions said the scheme would be an 'essential catalyst for some people in moving them towards or into work'.
But little progress has been made in implementing the scheme, official figures show.
Even when it is rolled out, there will only be advisors in 40 surgeries.
At the moment, none is based in Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield - the cities with the highest levels of incapacity benefit claims.
Instead, many are based in relatively affluent areas such as towns in Somerset and Dorset.
Tory health spokesman Andrew Lansley said: 'These figures expose Gordon Brown's pledge to help cut unemployment by providing employment help in GP surgeries as being nothing more than gesture politics.
'The scheme could make a real difference in helping people back to work, but Gordon Brown has virtually nothing to show for his big promises.
'Depression and other mental health problems tend to increase in times of recession as people struggle to find work. Providing job advice at the GP is a great way of reaching people, but the Government's failure has meant that simply isn't happening.'
A spokesman for Work and Pensions minister James Purnell said there would be another 81 advisors available this year.
'Andrew Lansley famously claimed that the recession would be "good" for people, so we will take no lessons from him.'
The 2.6million incapacity benefit claimants, who receive up to £84.50 a week, are equal to 7 per cent of the working-age population. News Source
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Same in Sweden as in UK.. The censoring of Details, Names etc!
Four young men appeared in court on Thursday charged with involvement in a series of gang rapes in Södertälje in eastern Sweden.
A total of seven young men between the ages of 19 and 23 are being held in custody for the rapes.
The men are believed to belong to a network of several smaller groups who have systematically raped young women and girls in the town.
Six of them have been charged and four of them stood trial in Södertälje district court on Thursday for aggravated rape, among other charges, in one of the four cases.
The girls have said the men took turns raping them while the others held them down, newspaper Länstidningen Södertälje reports.
“We have good reason to believe that several more women have been raped and we implore them to contact us,” Kia Samrell, information office at the Södertälje police department, told TT.
The case began in February when a young women reported that she had been raped by four men in an apartment in Hovsjö. Due to DNA evidence and information from various witnesses, the attack was linked to three additional unsolved rape cases in Södertälje.
One of the cases involved a woman who at the beginning of February believed she was getting a ride home, but was instead taken to a camping site where she was raped by several men.
In March last year, another young women was forced into a car in Lina and raped by five men. In the fourth case, which occurred in November 2007, a 12-year-old girl was raped by three men in an attic in Ronna.
The individual suspects have not all been involved in each rape.
"The men belong to different overlapping constellations," said Samrell. News Source
Reader Submitted Link. Thank You.Dale
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And the Blanket torn off!
Fjordman has written on numerous occasions about the unprecedented rape wave that has swept Scandinavia, especially Norway and Sweden, during the last few years.
Most of the rapes are committed by Third World immigrants, many of them Muslims. But the authorities consistently downplay the problem — if they don’t ignore it entirely. It is seen as a cultural issue, and rather than expect the criminals to be arrested and imprisoned, young women are asked to accommodate themselves to the horrific new conditions. Their appearance and manner is “provocative” to a certain subset of immigrant males, so it’s necessary for the natives be understanding of the cultural differences that make the newcomers behave in such a pathological fashion.
Our Swedish correspondent Henrik W. has translated two new articles related to the Swedish rape wave. The first concerns a gang of immigrant rapists in Södertälje who were caught by the police. The second describes an unusual new crime-prevention strategy: rape-resistant panties.
Concerning the first article, Henrik W. says:
I’m submitting two Swedish articles that serve well to highlight one of the drastic changes in Swedish society in recent decades — the explosive increase in rapes, whose numbers have grown in lockstep with immigration numbers from North Africa and the Middle East.
First is a report about an organized rapists’ ring from Södertälje — a city which is second only to Malmö in terms of the proportion of immigrants among the inhabitants. It’s taken from LT (Länstidningen), the regional daily for Södertälje.
Here’s his translation from Länstidningen:
Police bust a rapists’ ring
SÖDERTÄLJE The police have busted a rapists’ ring specializing in raping young girls in Södertälje. Seven men have been arrested and the investigation is still growing. Several teenage girls have fallen victim to the gang during the last two years. As of today there are four known victims between the age of 13 and 16, but the police fear the number will increase. “I have charged six people in two separate cases of rape and rape of minors and I’m currently reviewing a third case which is still under police investigation,” says public prosecutor Marie-Louise Pettersson.
In addition, the police are now reviewing the many unresolved cases from last year to see if they have a connection with the rapists’ ring — LT has learned that at least one such case is considered to match. It concerns a rape last spring when a young woman was dragged into a car in Lina [a suburb]. According to sources within the investigation, the perpetrator belongs to the rapists’ ring.
It was when four of the gang members, 20 to 23 years of age, were arrested on February 23rd that everything started to unravel. In March two more men, 19 and 21 years of age, were apprehended and arrested. Last Sunday the seventh man was arrested on suspicion of aggravated rape of yet another teenage girl. All seven are members of the same association in Södertälje — and three of them are Swedish citizens.
LT has reported on the two first cases earlier, but then there was no indication of how systematically the gang had gone about their business. According to the police, association members and restaurant employees forwarded information about teenage girls they came into contact with during weekend nights to the members of the rapist gang. In some cases, the men stalked the girls on the street. The girls were lured to come to parties where they were plied with alcohol — parties that ended in multiple aggravated gang rapes.
The rapes, according to LT’s sources, were committed in a condemned building in Hovsjö [another Södertälje suburb] where the only furniture was a mattress. In other cases, the girls were dragged or lured into cars the men had borrowed or stolen and were then taken to the Eklundsnäs bath in Hovsjö, where the rapes were committed. The police have secured DNA and sperm samples in two cars. The girls have testified that the men took turns raping them while the other members of the rapists’ ring held them down.
The technical evidence is overwhelming, according to the police. “But that doesn’t stop them from denying everything,” says Marie-Louise Pettersson who will confront the first four men in the municipal court of Södertälje on Thursday. She has charged them with aggravated rape, carrying a minimum 4 year prison sentence. In addition, the men risk expulsion from Sweden.
Henrik W. adds these remarks:
There are some things of note in this press report — first off, it is absolutely unique in Swedish MSM reporting in that it explicitly mentions the fact that the men are not Swedes, by informing us not only that some of the rapists risk expulsion, but also by mentioning that a few are “Swedish citizens”, which is a MSM code phrase for immigrants — native Swedes are never referred to as Swedish citizens by the media.
Secondly, by mentioning the associations, it immediately becomes clear that these perpetrators are non-Swedes: in Södertälje, as in many other Swedish cities, taxpayers pay a very significant contribution to “immigrant associations” which work with “cultural issues, combating structural racism in Swedish society”, and provide a meeting place for immigrants. They also provide something to do during the day for the groups from the Middle East and North Africa, which are overwhelmingly unemployed and living off welfare.
All in all, perhaps in desperation, this is the clearest reporting on the identity of criminal perpetrators with a foreign background that I have ever seen in Swedish media.
As a counterpoint, here is an article from the Gothenburg daily GT (check out the image that goes with the article!):
The panties that will protect against rape
GOTHENBURG Here are the panties that will stop a rapist. Designer Marina Edvardsson has several friends who were victims of rapes, and felt she wanted to do something. “You have to start somewhere and I wanted to develop a self-defense item that was effective and user-friendly at the same time,” she says to crimenews.se.
The panties are designed to make rape more difficult — they are simply very difficult to remove. They bring medieval chastity belts to mind.
Experts are skeptical
But only a very small part of all rapes are so-called assault rapes. And even if several studies show it pays off when the assaulted woman fights back and makes things difficult for the assailant, experts question the value of the panties. “It’s dubious whether this invention will really prevent crime,” says Niklas Långström, sex crime researcher and head of the Center for Violence Prevention at Karolinska Institutet (The Stockholm Medical Institute) to crimenews.se.
Henrik W. offers this final comment:
This is more in line with normal Swedish media reporting on the issue — while experts question the efficacy of these panties, no reference at all is made to why rape figures are exploding in Sweden and what other preventive measures the Swedish society might contemplate to stem the raising tide of rape.
And Dymphna asked to add a few remarks:
Several things come to mind in reading these stories.
In Western culture, we see rape as deviant behavior and the rapist as having a deep characterological flaw. We “work with” rapists in therapy groups after they get out of prison. We particularly see serial rapists as the most deviant and degraded and push for life sentences for such men. Notice that Western rapists often kill their victims.
These immigrant rapes do not seem “pathological” in our Western sense. They do not violate the norms of the rapists’ cultures. Women, particularly those outside the community fold, exist to be used in whatever fashion the culture deems acceptable. In fact, the rapists’ behavior is encouraged by others in their cohort who give them information on random women who seem to be likely candidates for forced sexual intercourse.
In other words, these men know that they violate the law of their host country, but they do not see themselves as having done anything wrong. In fact, they are no doubt praised for their prowess. And if the politically correct multiculturalists take their own beliefs to their logical conclusion, they must support the behavior of these men because it is culturally okay where they come from.
Both Western rapists, who compulsively attack women, and immigrant rapists, who do it because they can, share a hatred of women. But we would call our Western rapist a psychopath if he fails to feel any remorse about his crime. I’m not sure that “diagnosis” can apply to immigrants whose world view is so out of alignment with the surrounding culture.
It would be a major error on the part of the justice system in Sweden if they applied Western standards to these men. I haven’t had enough time to consider what the appropriate response would be but business as usual isn’t going to resolve this problem. In fact it may worsen the situation.
As for the steel underwear, forget it. A woman wearing something like that is going to be severely hurt when the rapists get her to Ground Zero. Either they will cut her as they cut off those chastity belts, or they could kill her in a fit of rage. Surely women can see that? Or maybe their own Western prejudices about men blind them to the new reality.
Whatever. Those underpants are a sand-poundingly stupid idea. Someone stop that woman before she puts more girls and women at risk. And nothing is more dangerous than a false sense of safety.
The situation of living with a large immigrant population means that women must be vigilant in the future. The good old days are over. The Swedish men they so disdain wouldn’t engage in the rapists’ behavior and women know that. Evidently understanding the nature of the new guys in town must have a steep learning curve.
But how can they learn when the authorities are silent? No one is informing them of the risks and dangers of their old feminist “I can take care of myself” mentality. No you can’t, not against a whole group of men.
Time for the government to fork over some money for women’s community halls where they can learn what they’re up against. Otherwise, women will continue to be raped and the incidence of rape will continue to rise. You can safely bet that it’s already under-reported as it is. News Source
Reader Submitted Link. Thank You.Dale
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Back on this side of the pond:: And so it goes on
A Crazed sex attacker who attempted to rape four women in 72 hours is being hunted by police.
Three of the attacks took place in the early hours of the morning, as the pervert became more and more desperate.
On each occasion he was foiled by passers-by - but his demented behaviour has seriously worried police who fear he may strike again.
All the attacks happened in the King's Cross area.
Detective Inspector Glenn Lloyd, from the Met's Serious Crime Squad, said: "These were random attacks on lone females going home at night and the attacker's behaviour is very disturbing.
"He's very sexually overt, openly masturbating in what are busy streets after the attacks, and we have seen him on CCTV constantly going up to women and telling them they are pretty and harassing them.
"The attacks happened very close together and then suddenly stopped - so something seems to have triggered them. It may be that they are drug or alcohol induced or that the suspect has mental health issues and had not taken his medication, but the concern for us is that it could happen again."
The first incident occurred at around 12.15am last Tuesday, when a 24-year-old woman was grabbed from behind in Prince of Wales Passage, off Hampstead Road, Euston. Her attacker attempted to rape her but ran off when he was disturbed by a passer-by.
At 2.45am the same day an 18-year-old woman was grabbed in Pentonville Road, King's Cross, and dragged into Killick Street, but she escaped unharmed after a resident intervened.
Just 20 minutes later, the same man pounced on a 20-year-old woman in Bidborough Street, King's Cross. He tried to drag her into an alleyway but she managed to break free.
Detectives are also linking him with the attempted rape of a 16-year-old girl in Marylebone High Street on March 29.
DI Lloyd said: "On the night of the three attacks the suspect was wearing a very distinctive white hooded tracksuit. There was also a motif, or wording across the back of the jacket.
"As well as harassing women, he was also approaching men and asking them for money. His behaviour and clothing was so out of the ordinary there must be people out there who remember him."
He is described as black, around 5ft 7ins tall, stocky, with short dark hair. He may have spoken with an African accent.
Anyone with any information should call the incident room on 020 8358 0200 (020 7230 8666 out of hours) or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111. Police say the public should not approach the man if they see him but call 999. News Source
Reader Submitted Link. Thank You Dale
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Surrender to Sharia
Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari has sent a bill introducing Sharia law in the Swat region to parliament, amid controversy both at home and abroad.
The implementation of Islamic justice was agreed in February in return for an end to the Taleban insurgency.
It had been thought Mr Zardari would directly sign the bill into law.
On Friday the cleric mediating the deal, Sufi Mohammad, said he was leaving the region in protest at the failure to finalise the agreement.
Unhappy
The bill introducing Sharia courts in the troubled Malakand division, comprising six north-western districts including Swat, has been sent to parliament for consideration.
It is unclear whether there will be a vote on Monday.
The BBC's M Ilyas Khan in Islamabad says the step is apparently meant to develop national consensus on an issue which is highly controversial and over which many within the country and abroad have expressed reservations.
The secular ANP party, which governs North West Frontier Province and which negotiated the bill with Sufi Mohammad, is unhappy with Mr Zardari's decision to send the bill to parliament.
NWFP information minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain told the media the president had not discussed the change of tactics with the ANP.
A spokesman for the Taleban, Muslim Khan, told the Associated Press news agency that MPs who opposed the deal in parliament would be considered apostates.
Apostasy, or abandoning Islam, can in some areas mean the death penalty.
Sufi Mohammad had set up a peace camp in the main town of Mingora but on Friday said he was returning to his village in protest at the turn of events.
Swat is mostly under Taleban control. Thousands of people have fled and hundreds of schools have been destroyed since they began their insurgency there in 2007.
Sharia courts began operating last month and have been welcomed by many in the region as a quick and efficient means of justice.
However, there have also been reports of controversial punishments.
From the outset of the deal, the US feared it might "become a surrender" to militants. News Source
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A council has evicted an organic farmer from a mobile home on her land - despite allowing more than 50 gypsies to set up camp on her doorstep.
Tina Johnston, 42, has lived on the 30-acre plot since 2004 growing boxes of fruit and vegetables which she sells to the local community.
But despite paying council tax, the ecologist and her nine-year-old daughter Grace have been ordered to leave the site following years of planning feuds.
Tina was told her self-sufficient farm is on greenbelt land and that she has no right to sleep there.
But planning officials were accused of double standards after a 55-strong group of travellers were allowed to stay on an illegal site in Minety, less than 20 miles away.
The gypsies set up dozens of caravans at the picturesque site last year and applied for retrospective planning permission to stay.
Their application was turned down but they appealed the decision and the case went before a public inquiry - which ruled in their favour.
Tina and Grace have until tomorrow to leave their mobile home or face a £20,000 fine.
She will now be forced to sell her business to cover the £10,000 legal fees she has already spent fighting her case.
Tina said: 'I work 16 hours a day on the land, with organic vegetables which I sell in boxes, and beef cows, chickens and it's a really good self-sufficient farm.
'I'm a committed ecologist and was building this up to be a very green business - I even did some of the veg boxes with horse-drawn deliveries.
'I've paid council tax all the time I've been here, which is five years, but it just seems someone somewhere wants me out.
'My barrister told me that if I sold the land to gypsies, they would be allowed to live there.
'Maybe I should, and then ask the gypsies if I could move back in.'
She added: 'The only option for me is to pay up because I can't pay £10,000 costs.
'If I stuck it out and refused to move, I'd be given a £20,000 fine. I have no choice but to give up now - I'm so upset.'
Tina and Grace moved into the mobile home in 2004 in a bid to work the land and make a living from its crop.
At the outset, planning bosses at Wiltshire Council told her they had no problem with the mobile home, provided she slept elsewhere.
She has spent the last five years appealing against the decision without success, at a cost of around £10,000.
Tina won the backing of dozens of locals and her local parish council, and was popular among the community.
But last week, Wiltshire Council ruled that Tina and Grace had to leave their farm in Box, near Chippenham.
Last year a 55-strong group of gypsies were allowed to stay on their illegal site 30 minutes down the road in Minety.
A public inquiry ruled that to move the travellers would be a breach of human rights.
But MP for North Wiltshire, James Gray, yesterday branded the decision to evict Tina the real 'human rights tragedy'.
He said: 'Just a few miles away in the same district, gypsy families are allowed to do exactly what this lady wants to do - in fact, she has a better case becasue she is working the land she wants to live on.
'During the saga of the Minety gypsies, this was the case I raised as evidence that there was one rule for one group and another for the rest.
'This case is both peculiar and outrageous.
'I have no doubt that if she declared herself a Romany, she'd be allowed to stay there, but becasue she's admitted she has no such link, she is being forced out.
'The Minety gypsies, for instance, won in the end because they'd been there long enough for the ruling to be that their human rights would be affected by being forced to move.'
Tina now faces the prospect of having to sell her business and move into a 25ft horsebox on non-greenbelt land nearby.
MP James Gray added: 'Here is a farmer forced to live in a horse box while she sells her land and moves away. It beggars belief.'
A spokesman for Wiltshire Council said: 'The land in question is green belt land and as such has stringent planning policies attached to it.
Really? (Ed)
'Our countryside needs to be protected as a resource for future generations and there was no overriding reason why development should be allowed in this case.' News Source
Greenbelt protection:
Unless it's for the purpose of building homes when it suits them!
Need we go on.. and on.. and on? (Ed)
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Council chiefs have suspended 14 members of staff after they exchanged a number of Jewish jokes via email.
The 'offensive' jokes are believed to have been sent in flurry of exchanges between staff, including social workers.
When bosses uncovered the emails they immediately suspended the staff and launched a full investigation.
Union bosses have been left reeling by the number of staff members who are become embroiled in the controversy.
But sources say the jokes were racist and offensive and could lead to staff members being sacked from their jobs.
A senior source said: 'Exchanging jokes through work computers is not really a productive pastime for council workers but a bit of banter is tolerated.
'However these 'jokes' obviously breached the council's policy of inclusion and religious and racial tolerance.
'I would not be surprised if the authors of the worst jokes were shown the door. Local authorities have to come down hard on race or sex discrimination. By failing to do so they would be tacitly agreeing with the views set down in these jokes.'
The staff were suspended ahead of disciplinary proceedings, which will get underway tomorrow, and could be sacked if found guilty of gross misconduct.
And the investigation could involve even more workers as council officials try to get to the heart of the offending emails.
Some of the emails are believed to have contained anti-Semitic comments and the suspended staff are believed to include white and Asian employees working in the Adult Social Care and the Children and Young People departments at Lancashire County Council.
Earlier this year Richard Jones, the council’s head of Adult and Community Services, was selected to sit on a new social work Government task force.
The Social Work Taskforce was set up to undertake a comprehensive review of frontline social work practice across adults and children’s services.
It has been asked to identify any barriers social workers face in doing their jobs effectively and has been asked to make recommendations for improvements and long-term reform in social work.
In a letter sent to councillors, chief executive Ged Fitzgerald said the staff had been suspended for 'inappropriate email use'.
Mr Fitzgerald said: 'Investigations of this nature may result in disciplinary action or in some cases termination of employment. I am sure you will understand the need for us to adopt a stringent approach to this issue.'
Hazel Harding, leader of the Labour-controlled council, said: 'We have a code of conduct for anyone who uses our email systems and we take it very seriously.'
Les Parker, a Unite union representative, said: 'I have been here for 40-odd years and I have never seen anything like this number of people suspended in one go.
'Usually it’s one person or maybe two, never ever in the teens like this. For this to have happened it’s got to be serious.'
Another senior council source said: 'This could be just the start. What tends to happen is the more they start digging they tend to find other people.'
In February BT suspended 30 of its call centre staff after they were caught forwarding an email joke poking fun at the Irish.
The joke was circulated at the BT call centre in Leicester, which employs 340 people, and staff were suspended on full pay pending an investigation which is presently underway. News Source
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Not to mention a strain on the environment and resources in countries such as the UK who are absorbing far too many immigrants for the size of the country, which then results in building on Green belt land to provide accommodation for the increasing population! (Ed)
Sir David Attenborough said that a "frightening explosion in human numbers" was behind every threat to wildlife across the world.
The veteran broadcaster made his comments as he became patron of a group seeking to cut the growth in human population.
The Optimum Population Trust (OPT) believes Earth may not be able to support more than half its present numbers before the end of the century.
In a statement released on the organisation's website, Sir David, 82, said: "I've seen wildlife under mounting human pressure all over the world and it's not just from human economy or technology - behind every threat is the frightening explosion in human numbers.
"I've never seen a problem that wouldn't be easier to solve with fewer people, or harder, and ultimately impossible, with more. "That's why I support the OPT, and I wish the environmental NGOs would follow their lead, and spell out this central problem loud and clear."
The trust, which was founded in 1991, wants the UK population to decrease by not less than 0.25% a year and has launched a "Stop at Two" pledge to encourage couples to voluntarily limit the size of their families.
World population is projected to rise from 6.8 billion today to 9.1 billion in 2050, it says.
OPT chairman Roger Martin said he was "delighted" to welcome Sir David as patron and added: "All serious environmentalists know perfectly well that population growth, exploding in the 20th century, has been a key driver of every environmental problem."
In January, Sir David revealed he received hate mail from viewers for not crediting God in his nature programmes. News Source
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A charity worker was suspended after telling a colleague about his Christian beliefs against homosexuality, it has emerged today.
David Booker, 44, was chatting about his faith with co-worker Fiona Vardy during a late shift at the hostel in Southampton, Hants on March 26.
He told her he was opposed to same-sex marriages and to homosexual clergy but denied being homophobic and said that he had homosexual friends.
The next evening, Mr Booker was suspended from his £19,000-a-year post as a hostel support worker with Society of St James where he has worked for the last four years.
His employers told him the action was taken for 'events that happened last night'.
On March 30 he received a formal suspension notice which alleged that he 'seriously breached' the charity's code of conduct 'by promoting your religious views which contained discriminatory comments regarding a person's sexual orientation...
'The action has been taken to safeguard both residents and staff" at the Southampton Street hostel.
Mr Booker, 44, a born-again Christian from Southampton, turned to the Christian Legal Centre (CLC) which instructed human rights lawyer Paul Diamond to represent him.
Andrea Minichiello Williams, barrister and director of CLC, said: 'Mr Booker has been suspended since March 27 for two weeks pending investigation.
'No date has been set for the investigation and disciplinary hearing.
'This case shows that in today's politically correct, increasingly secularised society, even consenting reasonable discussion on religion between two employees is being twisted by employers to discriminate and silence the Christian voice and freedom of expression.'
He said the charity English Churches House Group, which was recently taken over by Society of St James, was largely funded by churches throughout Hampshire whose followers would be 'shocked at the attitude and action taken by a Christian organisation towards a Christian employee'.
He added: 'The Archbishop of Canterbury, as patron, has confirmed the Church's teaching on marriage, same-sex relationships and homosexuality and that is in the public domain.
'We are interested to know whether his patronage is now under threat under the charity's Culture and Diversity Code of Conduct.' News Source
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by Dr Aidan Rankin
When I hear the word 'fascist', I do not think of the assorted pub bores or the few full-blooded bigots who are the stereotypical activists of the 'far right'.
Nor do I think of half-drunk, testosterone-driven skinheads in tight-fitting jeans or combat trousers, bawling out anti-immigrant slogans richly spiced with obscenity. Least of all do I think of the thousands of disgruntled Labour supporters, ordinary men and women in working class enclaves, who have given the British National Party its newfound electoral clout. None of these people are fascists, in any meaningful sense of the word. They are victims rather than aggressors - victims of failed liberal social experiments, heartless economic programmes and, above all perhaps, of betrayal by a Labour movement that was set up specifically to defend them.
The left, and many bien pensant liberals and Tories with them, would like us to visualise fascists as aggrieved, poorly educated working class whites - white males in particular, since they are a double negative for the Politically Correct. Such progressives (as they invariably call themselves) use accusations of racism and fascism as excuses to bully and oppress impoverished white communities and isolate them in racially based ghettos. For white liberals, anti-racism becomes a form of auto-racism, directed at members of their own race who are deemed to be socially inferior. It is, in other words, a new type of snobbery and social exclusion. Likewise, the true heirs to fascism are not skinheads, bigots, or BNP-voting former socialists. They are the BNP's sworn enemies, the 'anti-fascist' shock troops of the left, whose slogans of contrived defiance, melodramatic gesture politics and emotional blackmail reach far beyond the Marxist coteries where they originate.
At Burnley, where the BNP made its strongest local government gains this year, the paradox of anti-fascism was apparent in a demonstration by the Anti-Nazi League, images of which were widely disseminated in the press. Piously anti-racist and inclusive, the protesters were overwhelmingly white and middle-class. Proclaiming the virtues of tolerance, their eyes shone with the purity of hatred that is the prerogative of extremists the world over. In that almost archetypal left-wing demo, the chants and clenched fists of the scruffy young men, the screams and hot tears of the even scruffier women, the banners calling for political parties to be suppressed (in the name of tolerance, presumably) expressed something larger than a Lancastrian quirk. For anti-fascists base their campaigns on a sense of outrage that anyone, anywhere should dare to disagree with them. In their appeal to feeling over reason, force over argument, such activists resemble most those phantom Nazis they are claiming to 'fight'. This is why, in a stroke of post-modern irony, anti-fascism is the new fascism.
There is, in British - and especially English - political culture, a rich vein of sentimental radicalism, to which anti-fascist slogans appeal. It is from this section of politics and society that anti-fascist campaigners derive emotional (and, crucially, financial) support. Unlike working class communities, they do not see the violent, arrogant face of anti-fascism, any more than most of Germany's Mittelstand witnessed directly the violence of the Brownshirts. This strand of radical thought, ironically, has its origins in the imperial epoch, amongst a burgeoning middle class influenced strongly by evangelical Christianity, which believed that it had a duty to 'save' benighted natives. The missionary impulse usually placed concern for the Empire's subject peoples, and their material or spiritual well-being, well above concern for the indigenous working class. Typical of such philanthropists is Mrs Jellyby in Dickens's Bleak House, whose eyes 'had a curious habit of looking seeming to look a long way off, as if they could see nothing nearer than Africa'. Like many a modern liberal, Mrs Jellyby neglected those around her, including notoriously her own children. Her thoughts were directed instead towards the (fictitious) African possession of Borrioboola Gha and her idealistic plans for its 'development'.
The world of Non-Governmental Organisations is replete with Mrs or 'Ms' Jellybys. But in a post-colonial age, the phenomenon of immigration has brought their concerns closer to home. Today's Ms Jellyby is just as likely to work for the race relations unit of a local authority as for a Third World NGO. For 'ethnic minority communities' have become the new Borrioboola Gha. They are to be patronisingly helped and pitied, even given special rights, but their members are not to be treated as individuals and the reality of their cultures is to be ignored or scorned. As the white liberal person's burden, the black or brown skinned citizen is supported as long as he reads from a Politically Correct script and shows gratitude and obeisance to those pressure groups that 'care' about him. It is into this Jellyby Syndrome, a legacy of the missionary age, that anti-fascist groupings successfully tap. Guilt-ridden liberals confuse the violent cant of anti-fascism with humanitarian concern, much as the violent cant of fascism was once confused with appeals to tradition and order.
But the missionary impulse does not end with ethnic minorities. In anti-fascist campaigns, there are vestiges of earlier evangelical missions, aimed at the indigenous population, with a view to controlling and pacifying it. Working class communities are treated by anti-fascists, and their liberal apologists, as benighted white tribes to be civilised and subdued. The evangelical fervour present in anti-fascism accounts for the lachrymose quality of its activists, whose tearful appeals are often a prelude to acts of violence or demands for censorship.
This is a characteristic they share with fascists, who were the most emotional and least reasoning of political campaigners. Like evangelical temperance campaigners of a bygone age, anti-fascists appear to be trying to save working class people from themselves. Their particualrism, expressed through opposition to large-scale immigration, is labelled as 'racism' and treated as a new form of vice. Their patriotic gut instincts, and their wish to preserve the traditional character of their neighbourhoods, are dismissed as ignorant prejudices, from which white working class men and women must be emancipated just as their forebears were emancipated from drink.
Like evangelicals, anti-fascists seek to liberate by a combination of moral pressure and legal force. Anti-fascism is, however, a radical secular ideology that allows no possibility of repentance or absolution. The evangelical Protestants who joined temperance or anti-vice campaigns were often oppressive and insensitive, but their zeal was frequently held in check by a concern for individual souls. Anti-fascists, by contrast, have no such concerns. They seek to save communities, by changing their collective consciousness or forcing them to conform. Their ideology allows for no concern for individuals, except for attack or denunciation. This contempt for the individual, the white, male worker in particular, allows the anti-fascist to reconcile two contradictory demands - for civil disobedience (including violence) and for the massive extension of state power.
Anti-fascist propaganda makes frequent address to the history and mythology of the left, to which the movement volubly lays claim. Searchlight, anti-fascism's house journal, make frequent reference to the Spanish Civil War, carrying photographs of heroic resistance fighters and carrying interviews with stalwarts of the International Brigade, now elderly and impressive. Other photographs evoke the memory of 'The Battle of Cable Street' and similar events where in the 1930s when working class Jewish communities stood up to the Blackshirt followers of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. There is in these images an explicit and false assumption of continuity. It is false because in both the Spanish Civil War and Cable Street, a high level of working class self-organisation was involved, and with it a genuine aspiration towards a just society.
Searchlight, by contrast, bases most of its activities on accusation, smear and incitement to hatred - often class hatred directed at working class racists. This was not always so. Its founder, Maurice Ludmer, was a thoughtful ex-Communist Party member for whom the education of working class communities was important, and who believed in freedom and dignity for individuals of all backgrounds. Anti-fascist campaigners today, including Searchlight, refuse to concede to their opponents - especially working class opponents - any sense of human dignity. Working class racists are described routinely as scum or products of the sewer, in a curious echo of the Nazis' twisted denunciations of Jews and other 'enemies' of the Volk. Searchlight still, on occasion, carries intelligent, thoughtful commentaries, especially on events abroad, but in its refusal to compromise with or attempt to win over its opponents, it perpetuates conflicts of a social and racial character.
This latter attribute it shares with the Anti-Nazi League, which is far more explicit in its advocacy of violence and its hatred of the white working class. At one level, the ANL sets itself up as a secular missionary organisation for anti-fascism. At another, its overwhelmingly bourgeois or petty bourgeois activists set out to create an atmosphere of intimidation and violence when they descend on areas such as Burnley. Like a fascist movement, the ANL is explicitly committed to the abolition of free speech. Its activities make it the heir less of the Cable Street battlers and more of the BUF interlopers. Like the Blackshirts, ANL protesters assume the 'right' to descend on working class areas, threaten and harass their inhabitants, incite and engage in violence.
The Anti-Nazi League is linked intimately to the Socialist Workers Party, the best known and most aggressive far left faction in British politics since the demise of orthodox Communism. Unlike the Communist Party, the SWP is opposed to the parliamentary road to socialism and advocates violent revolution. The SWP worldview regards all existing political institutions as outgrowths of 'capitalism'. Neither capitalism itself, nor its institutions, can be 'patched up' or 'reformed'. The party's struggle, therefore, is as much against 'reformist ideas and leaders' as against the capitalist economy:
The state machine is a weapon of capitalist class rule and therefore must be smashed. The present parliament, army, police and judges cannot simply be taken over and used by the working class. There is, therefore, no parliamentary road to socialism.
This rhetoric of class warfare disguises a critique of parliamentary rule identical to that of the Italian Squadristi, Mussolini's foot soldiers who closed the Italian parliament and installed a fascist state. To Mussolini, parliamentary rule was so corrupt - and, indeed, 'bourgeois', that it could not be patched up. The fascist ideal of the Corporate State was based on representation by trade. This policy finds strong echoes in the SWP, which seeks to replace Parliament with a series of 'workers councils'. It also resembles the modern anti-fascist obsession with group rights, whereby racial minorities (and all 'oppressed communities') are represented collectively by activist pressure groups that claim to speak for them. Whilst resembling fascist politics, the SWP's position differs dramatically from that of Marx, who especially in his later years strongly favoured the parliamentary road. Even Lenin, who was always a pragmatist, believed in the use of any expedient institutions, including parliaments. In ultra-left groupuscles he saw only an 'infantile disorder'.
Another far left faction that has had a seminal influence on the anti-fascist movement is the International Marxist Group (IMG), whose luminaries included Tariq Ali. Long defunct now, the IMG played an important role in the student agitation and violent demonstrations of the late 1960s, many of which called to mind the behaviour of young Stormtroopers in the colleges of Weimar Germany. Crucially, the IMG rejected the white working class as hopelessly reactionary and saw the new revolutionary elite as students, ethnic minorities and feminist women. The ideology and tactics and ideology of anti-fascism today owe much to the IMG's profoundly anti-working class and anti-white prejudices.
These far left groups have based their politics on interpretations of Trotsky's 'permanent revolution', a purist doctrine of continual change akin to that of Mao's Cultural Revolution - and Hitler's Third Reich. To the Fuhrer, the Nazi 'revolutionary creative will' had 'no fixed aim, … no permanency, only eternal change'. On the left, anti-fascism has risen to prominence at precisely the time when socialism lacks permanency and continuity, whether as an ideal or a practical programme. In their strident emotionalism and ritualistic denunciation of opponents, anti-fascist campaigns act as a substitute for a coherent left-wing ideology. The same was true of fascist movements, which aimed to replace the left by appealing to more basic psychological impulses of fear, envy and hatred.
Anti-fascism shares with its alleged opposite a belief in the cleansing or redemptive power of violence. They share as well an obsessive preoccupation with race. Indeed it could be said that organisations like Searchlight and the ANL do more than even the BNP to keep racial awareness alive. Both fascism and anti-fascism are uncompromisingly modernist movements, concerned with narrow categorisation and so unsuited to a post-modern age of complexity and permutation. Searchlight, for example, was horrified when some Hindu and Sikh community workers refused to be classified alongside Muslims as 'Asians'. Here were ethnic minorities daring to defy the pressure group definitions. In reality, the violence and nihilism of anti-fascist activists are almost laughably remote from the conservatism of most ethnic minority populations.
It is easy, and tempting at times, to dismiss anti-fascism as a peripheral fringe interest, irrelevant to our lives and thoughts. However its crocodile-tear appeals are in some ways more effective than those of the more traditional far left. Anti-fascists claim to be opposing a political evil. In so doing, they evoke memories of that evil and the wrong done to millions of our fellow human beings. Many people of good will, therefore, fail to see that they are being manipulated. This is why ritual denunciations and balkanising 'group rights' are in danger of pervading public life. The subjectivist definition of a racist incident in the MacPherson Report - any incident that the victim or anyone else 'perceives' as racist - has all the totalitarian characteristics of anti-fascism, yet few dare to describe it as totalitarian for fear that they might be smeared as 'racist'. Likewise, the attempts of New Labour apparatchiks to unearth political 'information' about the Paddington rail crash survivors had all the furtive and perverse instincts of a Searchlight campaign. Such influences have touched conservative politics as well. In the interests of inclusiveness, the Tories tend increasingly towards reverse discrimination and group rights, forgetting that many black and Asian people want freedom from racial politics.
Anti-fascism, like its fascist precursor, is primarily anti-human and misanthropic. It despises its supposed constituents as much as its sworn enemies, and has a vested interest in promoting racial conflict. When we recognise that fascists and anti-fascists are as one, their rhetoric of hatred will lose its power. News Source
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NHS staff made 2,221 'avoidable' errors which left patients dead, injured or in severe pain, latest figures reveal.
Shortages of doctors and nurses are being blamed for a total of 4,000 blunders, with campaigners claiming cash-strapped hospitals are failing to prioritise patient safety.
Among the mistakes were surgeons operating on the wrong person or part of the body, doctors making wrong diagnoses and prescribing dangerous doses of medication or giving injections in the wrong place.
Some of the errors included:
- A breathing tube inserted in the windpipe of a seriously ill patient to became dislodged which triggered a fatal heart attack at Aintree University Hospital, Merseyside
- In another part of the same hospital, a chest drain inserted to relieve pressure on the lungs punctured the patient's heart
- A terminally ill patient died in a waiting room awaiting a diagnostic procedure at Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust
- A missed diagnosis of meningitis at East Kent Hospitals led to the death of a child
The latest figures detailing Serious Untoward Incidents (SUIs) were released in Freedom of Information requests sent to 172 NHS acute trusts.
Of the 97 that responded, most refused to give details and just listed fatal errors as 'unexplained deaths'.
But 2,221 of the 4,000 recorded SUIs were classified as causing severe harm or death.
It is thought almost one million patients a year are put at risk by blunders and near misses in NHS hospitals and other trusts. Continued
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A prison riot which saw 400 prisoners go on a rampage can be blamed on cost-cutting measures led by Jack Straw, The Prison Officers Association has claimed.
The chaos at HMP Ashwell, near Oakham, Rutland, Leicestershire, lasted 21 hours and caused an estimated £2million worth of damage.
More than 300 specially trained riot officers were drafted in from around the country and found themselves up against prisoners armed with chisels, Stanley knives and welding equipment.
The violence erupted after a drunken prisoner was found wandering the grounds.
Officers worked until late in the night to restore peace to the prison and a massive clean-up operation is underway today.
But the POA said the riot could have been avoided if it wasn't for cost-cutting measures which has led to overcrowding, under-staffing, and Category B prisoners being downgraded to Category C prematurely.
Colin Moses, national chair of the POA), called for a public inquiry.
He said: 'We lay the blame squarely at the door of Jack Straw.
'We want to meet with him to discuss categorisation matters and to stop the wrong prisoners being moved to Category C prisons.
'We foresaw this happening, we have been warning about this for up to two years but it has fallen on deaf ears.
'When a situation like yesterday's riot erupts it shows you that the wrong people are being put through to Category C prisons too early.
'It is happening right across the Prison Service - we have seen a rise in violence, bullying and intimidation.
'There are certainly Category B inmates in that prison, but they have been reclassified as Category C so that they can be moved out of an overcrowded prison and into HMP Ashwell.
'What they do is, to reduce overcrowding at the stroke of a pen, they move Category B prisoners to Category C prisons and reclassify them.
"We are not against reclassification where it is appropriate, but there has to be the correct checks. We believe that corners are being cut in the name of cost-cutting.'
Mr Moses said the POA was also keen to speak to Mr Straw about staffing levels at prisons, adding: 'There have been staff reductions at HMP Ashwell - which the Ministry of Justice will deny - and we believe further envisaged staff cuts will lead to future riots.
'There is an increasingly liberal approach, passed down from the Ministry of Justice, to allow prisoners more and more freedoms at the expense of control.
'They are disempowering prison officers. We believe staff are losing control of these prisons - we do not have the close supervision of prisoners that we need.'
Mr Moses said a number of officers had to lock themselves in a room away from the rioting prisoners at the height of yesterday's disturbance.
He said: 'We hope the Ministry of Justice starts to listen because the men and women working in these prisons are working in some of the most difficult conditions.' News Source
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Fifty lucrative positions for social workers are available - but not to jobseekers in Britain. Essex county council has begun advertising the £42,000 jobs in Australian and New Zealand newspapers.
Officials say they cannot find enough recruits here, despite unemployment having passed the two million mark.
As well as a final-salary pension scheme, potential candidates are being offered four months of free accommodation, a £3,500 relocation allowance and help to buy a car.
At present, around one in ten social work positions across the country are unfilled while 5,500 are filled by temporary staff.
Last month, an Ofsted report in in the wake of the Baby P scandal revealed that 40 of the 149 councils assessed by the watchdog provided inadequate or the bare minimum of children's services.
Critics said that bringing in foreign workers will not solve the problem.
Ruth Cartwright, of the British Association of Social Workers, said: 'What often happens is social workers come over here to get experience and then want to go back, only filling gaps in the short term.'
She added: 'As we are in a recession one would like to think there are enough social workers, or potential social workers, within Britain.'
A spokesman for Essex council said it was continuing efforts to attract British-based social workers, but added: 'The reality is that we simply cannot fill social work positions from within the UK.
'It is important to also emphasise that any social worker from Australia or New Zealand will be fully qualified, trained and experienced.
'We are not offering a backpacker's holiday.' News Source
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'His moral compass points to the cesspit’
The rotten heart of the Labour Government has been exposed in all its putrid corruption. It is now clear that Britain is ruled by a gang of vicious, sleazy opportunists who have no respect for either decency or democracy.
In its desperation to cling on to power, Gordon Brown’s regime has descended into the politics of the gutter, orchestrating a truly contemptible smear campaign against the Conservative Opposition. The full depths of Labour’s nastiness have been revealed in a series of leaked emails exchanged between Damian McBride, one of Downing Street’s key political henchmen, and notorious Labour activist Derek Draper, who runs a fanatically anti-Tory blog. McBride and Draper were plotting to “destabilise” top Conservatives by spreading vile, often libelous rumors.
McBride has resigned yet the polluted culture of Downing Street remains. Aneurin Bevan, the Labour Cabinet minister of the post-war era, sparked outrage by describing the Tories as “lower than vermin”. His words could certainly be applied today to Brown’s inner circle.
The secret offensive planned by Downing Street amounted to character assassination on an industrial scale, using gossip and innuendo against senior Tory MPs and their families.
And the fact that Draper initially told McBride such scurrilous inventions were “absolutely, totally brilliant” shows the venomous tribalism in his soul. Arrogant and duplicitous, he is just as unfit for public life as his co-conspirator. His unconvincing apologies are not enough. He must resign as Labour’s internet organiser.
The hypocrisy of Labour on this issue is breathtaking. The party boasts of its compassion and tolerance yet here we have two of its key figures excitedly planning to traduce the families of their opponents through a barrage of filthy lies.
What is just as nauseating is the fact that McBride, in his role as Gordon Brown’s special adviser, was a civil servant, so the taxpayer has been paying for him to indulge in this malevolent party political activity.
In an economic crisis when so many families are struggling with job losses, it is disgraceful that Downing Street devotes its time to this spiteful nonsense instead of trying to run the country properly.
Since the scandal broke on Friday, after the contents of the emails had come into the hands of free-spirited political blogger Paul Staines, who operates under the name Guido Fawkes, Labour’s spin doctors have been saying it was a minor freelance operation and had nothing to do with the Prime Minister.
On Saturday, Labour MP Stephen Pound condemned Guido Fawkes for bringing the material into the public realm, which is like pinning the blame for Watergate on the US journalists who exposed Richard Nixon.
Draper has painted himself and McBride as victims, whining that someone has hacked into their emails, ignoring the fact that McBride was a public servant who was using a No10 computer.
Labour’s spin cannot work because the public has learnt to recognise the cruel, degrading nature of Brown’s leadership.
The smear campaign is entirely in keeping with the bullying character of the Prime Minister, whose career has been built on deceit and oppression.
Draper said recently: “By your friends you should be judged,” and it tells us everything about Brown that his key strategist was McBride, a man known in Whitehall as “McPoison” because of his thuggish manner and capacity for abuse.
More than ever Brown resembles Nixon, who trumpeted the values of his religious upbringing as he strutted on the world stage while presiding over an institutionally dishonest administration that elevated smears and corruption into guiding principles of governance.
When he entered Downing Street in 2007, Brown boasted about his “moral compass” but the only direction in which it is now pointing is the cesspit.
The Prime Minister has tried to distance himself from McBride, claiming to be “furious” about the emails, but he appointed McBride knowing full well the aggressive personality of the man. And it was Brown who created the bunker mentality in Downing Street where loyalists seek to win his favour by resorting to dubious tactics against opponents.
Brown’s “morality” has always been a front. He is a paranoid blustering egotist who surrounds himself with mediocrities eager to do his bidding. McBride was one such creature. Another is Charlie Whelan, a foul-mouthed operator who used to be his chief aide and now does his dirty work in the trade union movement.
I t is telling that under Brown disgraced figures like Peter Mandelson and Draper flourish in the Labour movement once more, past offences conveniently forgotten.
This latest email scandal is just part of the pattern of Labour’s unethical approach to politics.
We can also see it in the determination of Government ministers to enrich themselves at taxpayers’ expense, or in the deepening corruption of party donations.
The same is true of Labour’s contempt for democracy and civil liberties or in the Government’s constant resorting to lies over everything from the war in Iraq to a referendum on the European constitution.
We are governed by one of the most sleazy, dishonest and incompetent administrations in British history. Every day Brown continues in power, the damage to our nation worsens. News Source
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It's all about harvesting votes!
The Conservative Party is urging its MPs and election candidates to make links with Britain’s biggest union in an effort to win votes from union members, The Times has learnt.
Richard Balfe, David Cameron’s envoy to the trade union movement, said that even though leaders of Unite had refused to hold talks with the party, Conservative politicians were being asked to approach their local Unite officials and members.
A Populus poll commissioned by the Conservative Party showed that 31 per cent of Unite members would vote Conservative at the next election, compared with 34 per cent who will support Labour. It revealed a sharp change in support for the parties since the last election, when 22 per cent said that they voted Conservative and 48 per cent said that they voted Labour.
The Tory overtures come amid rising tensions between many unions and the Government. Postal unions have criticised the Government’s attempt to sell off part of Royal Mail, Unite has accused ministers of failing to support the car industry and public sector unions have condemned planned pay increases.
Mr Balfe told The Times: “Many trade unionists are middle-class workers who the Conservative Party has to look to for votes. A lot of trade union members support the Conservative party. If you look at Prospect [the professional engineering and scientific union], probably the majority do.
“There is no plan in the Conservative party to repeal any of the trade union rights. If there were, Peter Mandelson could be relied on to do that for us. He is no more friendly to trade unions than any average Tory minister from the past. If you look at David Cameron’s policies on parental leave and family friendly issues we will probably be in the market for extending trade union rights in that area.”
Mr Balfe, a former Labour MEP and member of Unite, said that most unions had engaged in some dialogue with him but that Unite refused to do so. He attacked the union’s leadership, especially Derek Simpson, the newly elected joint general secretary of the Amicus half of Unite, and said that his re-election was “a bad day for Unite”.
Mr Balfe said: “If I were a Unite member in the banking industry, I’d be pretty furious that he is refusing to talk to the Conservative Party. Smaller banking unions are talking to us. Amicus members are not being represented because their general secretary chooses not to represent them.”
A Unite spokesman said: “Richard Balfe merely shows why the Tories aren’t worth talking to. He prefers personal abuse to serious policy proposals and he shows contempt for our members’ democratic decision in the recent election. Perhaps it is time he moved on to yet another political party.” News Source
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The social services team that failed Baby P ignored 60 other kids in danger of abuse AFTER the scandal broke, The Sun can reveal.
The children’s case notes were among nearly 1,000 that were stored away in a filing cabinet.
Staff at Haringey Council also failed to send frontline workers to the kids’ homes to check on them.
Horrified senior managers discovered the files and ordered an urgent review which found that 60 of the ignored cases involved children who were at “extreme risk”.
A whistleblower told The Sun: “Each of those 60 kids was a potential Baby P. They were living in situations where they were at real risk of harm.
“Yet they had not even had a visit — their cases were just binned in a filing cabinet. It absolutely beggars belief that this has happened.”
Three social workers at the heart of this scandal were on the SAME team who got the first anxious call about tortured tot Baby P, whose tragic death shook the nation.
Now disgraced staff Beverley Laws and Lydia Bartlett have been suspended and colleague Christine Montack — an agency worker not staff — has been sacked.
A highly-placed source at the North London council revealed: “When the Baby P scandal broke everyone started panicking that they might be missing signs of a child suffering abuse so they kept calling social services.
“But just when they were crying out for help, the council was removing all the dead wood which caused the Baby P catastrophe. The department was undergoing massive restructuring with old people going out and new people coming in.
“Hundreds of cases were simply logged on computer then filed away in a cabinet and ignored for six months. Then the new bosses took a look and were stunned. Buried in the chaos were the cases of 60 kids who desperately needed care.
“These kids could have been subjected to months of horrific abuse at the hands of sick perverts while social services dithered.
“We don’t know how they could go home at night in the knowledge they were ignoring these kids.”
Vulnerable
According to the source, 503 of the ignored cases were deemed to need no further action. The remainder are thought to be non-urgent.
Staff have been working round the clock and at weekends to look at all the cases and ensure social workers see any vulnerable children.
New Director of Children’s Services Peter Lewis, 54, who was drafted in to rescue the shambolic department left by ousted Sharon Shoesmith, 55, confirmed: “Disciplinary action has been taken against three employees.
“We are working together with all the agencies dealing with children, including the police, local health services and schools, to manage the current position.”
A council spokesman said: “When this came to light, we took immediate action to deal with these cases. We are dealing with new referrals as they come in.”
At her home in East London, Christine Montack claimed she wasn’t involved with Baby P. She said: “I did not work there very long. There were not enough social workers to cope with the work.”
Claude Knights, of child protection charity Kidscape, said: “For these people at the sharp end of social work to bury their heads in the sand like this is unbelievable.
“How much more warning about the perils of ignoring children did these people need than the tragic case of Baby P?”
Baby P died in 2007, aged 17 months, after social services allowed him to stay with his abusive mum, stepdad and their lodger.
They are awaiting sentence. News Source
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Dozens of MPs have been raking in extra income from renting out properties while claiming expenses for running a second home.
Around 65 MPs have together claimed almost £6million on their second homes since 2001 - despite owning a third property.
The claims are entirely within Commons rules, but they will fuel the public perception that MPs are living lavish lifestyles courtesy of the taxpayer.
Some MPs own more than one property. Tory MP James Clappison, who owns 22 rented houses - and a cricket ground - in East Yorkshire, has claimed £97,892 in second home expenses. Continued
Monday 13th April 2009
Despite rising unemployment and a 22 percent poverty level, the government has seen fit to spend a further £70 million on its “Race Gestapo” police, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC).
The cost of the Government’s anti-discrimination watchdog has grown by £22.5 million in a year to £70 million, with salaries for its staff soaring by an inflation-defying twenty five percent.
Staff received an average increase of around £9,000, taking their average salary to £45,920. In 2008/09 — its first full year of operation — it was given a £70 million budget.
The EHRC was created when the Equal Opportunities Commission, the Commission for Racial Equality and the Disability Rights Commission were merged in October 2007. Even though the Tories are now bleating about the cost of the EHRC, the reality is that they fully supported the creation of the CRE, and its first director was a Conservative MP, David Lane.
The budget for those three groups in the last year of their existence was £47.5 million. The commission has 514 workers, with projected staff costs for 2008/9 of £23 million.
The EHRC has become little more than an anti-white lobbying body, with its head, Trevor Philips, continuously refusing to comment on a “black children only” school programme which specifically discriminated against white kids despite receiving direct funding from the government.
The EHRC has also been criticised for having a disproportionate number of non-indigenous personnel on its staff, again raising the question of whether or not the organisation is really promoting genuine equality, or simply lobbying for minority groups. News Source
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The survey's shocking figures that show exactly how much MPs earn compared to an average constituent
The full list of MPs pay and allowances by multiple of average constituent's pay compiled by the Adam Smith Institute.
Nothing demonstrates more clearly the gulf between MPs and the real world of their constituents than the difference between their feather-bedded pay and conditions and ours.
For the rest of us to pocket the amount that the average MP claims in expenses, we would have to earn £228,215 before tax and national insurance.
None of us has a hope of getting past our bosses the sort of tax-free perks that MPs claim – never mind getting them past HM Revenue & Customs.
To calculate what MPs really get, we start with their salary, which – like you and me – they pay tax on. Then we add what taxpayers contribute to the MPs’ gold-plated pension scheme – 26.8 per cent of salaries. Pensions expert Ros Altman has called it ‘the most generous pension just about anywhere in the world’.
Then we add the expenses that MPs claim for things such as buying their second homes – and furnishing them in style from the infamous ‘John Lewis list’ – as well as their travel between those homes and Westminster and to and from constituency offices.
This figure includes what MPs claim in salaries for their staff and researchers, who are often family members and involved mostly in political campaigning. Then we work out what MPs would have to earn to take home that amount if – like you and me – they had to pay 40 per cent tax and one per cent National Insurance on the income.
This all shows that to live like an MP, the rest of us would have to be earning hundreds of thousands a year. News Source
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More than 23,000 expenses protests delivered to No 10 Gordon Brown was under huge pressure this weekend to reform lavish Commons allowances after more than 23,000 Mail on Sunday readers demanded urgent action.
This Daily Mail launched its Stop The MPs’ Gravy Train petition last month, following a string of revelations about how they have been using expenses loopholes for personal benefit.
In the past fortnight, 23,485 concerned readers returned petition coupons, sent emails and text messages or signed our petition online to voice their dissatisfaction with the system and call for radical change.
These messages were delivered directly to 10 Downing Street to show the Prime Minister how strongly our readers feel about the issue. And last night, No10 officials insisted that Mr Brown shared their concerns.
The controversy over MPs’ pay intensified this weekend with the shocking findings of a survey by the Adam Smith Institute, a free-market think-tank, illustrating the true value of MPs’ salaries, index-linked pensions and tax-free expenses.
Analysis by tax expert Richard Teather of Bournemouth University shows that an MP’s nominal Parliamentary salary of £64,766 nowhere near reflects their huge package of benefits.
As The Mail on Sunday revealed last week, MPs have voted to make their benefits exempt from tax.
To pocket the same salary, buy the same gold-plated pension and receive the same string of perks as the average MP, an ordinary taxpayer would have to earn a salary of £319,165 – about 18 times the pay of the average voter.
Mr Teather’s findings have been set out in three tables to show how MPs are benefiting and those who are benefiting the most. Here, we show the 20 highest-earning MPs in each of the three categories. You can see the whole list at www.mailonsunday.co.uk/mps.
Welsh Secretary Paul Murphy tops Table 1, which shows the true value of MPs’ pay and perks compared with the average wage of their constituents. The figure for expenses has been adjusted upwards to reflect the tax that would be payable if treated as salary.
To get the equivalent to the wages, pension rights and perks of Mr Murphy, his constituents in Torfaen, South Wales, would have to earn £423,932 before tax and national insurance – 28.1 times their average pay.
Table 2 shows the 20 MPs with the highest real value of Commons expenses alone, with the figures again reflecting the sum that would need to be earned by an ordinary taxpayer.
To pocket the average claimed by MPs would require a salary of £228,215 before tax and national insurance.
Labour Health Minister Ann Keen, MP for Brentford and Isleworth, topped this table with a claim worth £283,569 if she had had to pay tax.
Table 3 shows the 20 MPs with the highest total real value of pay, pension and perks packages, with Mr Brown at the top, due to his having the largest salary of £194,250.
To collect the same cash, an ordinary taxpayer would have to earn £435,353.
The Mail on Sunday’s petition calls for an inquiry into MPs’ expenses to report within three months and for rules to be enforced rigorously with sanctions for those who break them.
This newspaper’s exclusive reports about MPs’ controversial second-home allowances have rocked Westminster.
In February, we revealed that Home Secretary Jacqui Smith had claimed at least £116,000 after telling Commons authorities that her sister’s London home, where Ms Smith rents a room, was her main residence.
We then exposed Employment Minister Tony McNulty for claiming £60,000 of second-home allowances on a house occupied by his elderly parents.
The two revelations forced Mr Brown to order Sir Christopher Kelly, the chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, to conduct a review of MPs’ expenses. However, more embarrassments were to follow.
It emerged that Ms Smith’s husband Richard Timney had charged the cost of viewing two pornographic films to her Commons expenses. The spotlight then fell on Labour MP Harry Cohen’s £310,000 claim for a holiday home.
And Derek Snowdon of Scunthorpe wrote: ‘I am 74 and have never known a more corrupt and out-of-touch Government.’
Last night a Downing Street spokesman said: ‘The Mail on Sunday’s petition reflects a widely held view that the system needs to change. This is the Prime Minister’s own view.’ News Source
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Transport Secretary Geoff Hoon paid his wife nearly £70,000 of taxpayers’ money in rent on his constituency office after transferring ownership of the building from his name to hers.
Mr Hoon paid his wife Elaine out of the allowance MPs receive to cover the cost of office accommodation away from Westminster.
But the couple had to scrap the lucrative arrangement when new rules banned MPs from using the allowance, called the Incidental Expenses Provision, to benefit family members.
At that point, Mrs Hoon sold the property to a local businesswoman for £38,000 – £14,000 more than her husband had paid for it.
The affair is a further embarrassment for Mr Hoon after The Mail on Sunday revealed last week that, while Defence Secretary during the Iraq War, he claimed expenses on his constituency house and rented out his London home while living in a luxurious grace-and-favour apartment in Whitehall.
Mr Hoon had previously denied ever owning the constituency office in a row of terrace houses in the centre of Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire.
On May 9, 1998, he told a News Of The World reporter: ‘My wife owns that building and always has done.’ Last night, however, he admitted he had bought the freehold and later transferred it to his wife, using her maiden name on Land Registry documents.
Former barrister Mr Hoon bought the run-down house in 1990. When he became an MP in 1992, he refurbished it and turned it into his office.
A year later, he transferred the freehold to his wife using her maiden name Dumelow on Land Registry forms.
Receipts show he paid her £500 a month rent, which rose to £750 in 1998, though similar properties nearby were said to be available for half the rate.
He told the Commons fees office of the rent rise with a note saying: ‘Please increase the following monthly payments from my office cost allowance. Miss E A Dumelow to £750.’
But the Hoons had to end the set-up after Labour MP Henry McLeish was censured by the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner for failing to declare income from sub-letting his constituency office in Glenrothes, Fife.
Rules to end abuse of the Incidental Expenses Provision were issued in 2003. Mrs Hoon then sold the building to Jane Woolrich, founder of a lingerie firm. She now rents it to Mr Hoon, who still uses it as his constituency office.
His spokesman said: ‘The property was rebuilt, renovated and refurbished as a Parliamentary constituency office.
‘The cost of these necessary works exceeded the original purchase price. The money for these works was advanced by Mr Hoon’s wife, hence the change in ownership. Elaine Dumelow has always maintained her maiden name throughout her married life for professional and personal purposes.
‘Consistent with Parliamentary rules then obtaining, an agreed commercial rent was charged in respect of the premises from approximately 1994.’ News Source
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Millionaire Tory MP Greg Barker has claimed second home allowances totalling £43,400 and insisted the house where his estranged wife lives is his main residence – even though he left her for a gay lover two years ago.
The Shadow Environment Minister, a close confidant of David Cameron, ended his 14-year marriage to his wife Celeste in October 2006 when he told her about the affair.
But Mr Barker, who is said to be worth £7million and represents Bexhill and Battle in Sussex, has claimed housing allowance of £21,700 on a London property each year since.
Father-of-three Mr Barker, 43, provoked a scandal when it was revealed that he had grown close to flamboyant interior designer William Banks-Blaney, 34.
That relationship eventually ended and Mr Barker began a relationship with 23-year-old Greek public-relations executive George Prassas, who lives in Fulham, West London.
Mr Barker insists that despite the demise of his marriage, the ten-bedroom marital home in Peasmarsh, near Rye, Sussex, has always been his main abode.
He said: ‘My wife and I are divorcing but we get on very well and share the family home. There is more than enough room for us both to live here.
‘My name is on the council tax and I pay the mortgage. Up until a month ago, I was renting a flat in London and I claimed my allowance for the extra expense of doing so.’
The family home, bought for £1.4million in 2002, has been up for sale for two years at £2.45million.
A family friend said that Mrs Barker needs money from the sale to start a new life. Mr Barker is renovating a house he bought in Notting Hill, West London, 18 months ago for £1.8million.
He says it is still uninhabitable. News Source
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Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is “appalled” by Gordon Brown’s handling of the economy, according to one of her closest allies.
Lord Lamont revealed that Baroness Thatcher believes Britain is in economic crisis because the Labour leader has spent beyond the country’s means.
In an interview with political current affairs magazine Holyrood, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer says the Iron Lady views the recession gripping the country as a rerun of events in 1976, when James Callaghan’s Labour government had to ask the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a bailout.
Her fears echo those of present Tory leader David Cameron, who earlier this year warned Britain could need rescuing by the IMF if Brown continued with his free-spending financial recovery plan.
Baroness Thatcher, who was feted by Brown at Downing Street just 18 months ago after he criticised her earlier in his career, rarely speaks publicly now.
But Lord Lamont said: “I can tell you exactly how she feels. She is appalled by the current situation, very concerned about it indeed.
“I spoke to her very recently and her attitude is: ‘This is how it always ends with Labour.’”
Another close friend of Thatcher told a newspaper: “It’s an absolutely accurate description of every Labour government since the war.” News Source
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Tony Blair has always tried to present himself as a visionary leader when he talks about his twin passions: politics and religion.
But judging from his entry in the VIP visitors’ guest book at the British Embassy in Washington during a recent trip to the US, his role as a Middle East peace envoy may have led to a mid-life identity crisis.
His signature is there but where guests are invited to state their ‘home’ Mr Blair wrote ‘Jerusalem’.
The former Primer Minister does not own anything that could be described as a home in the Middle East.
He is said to spend an average of one week a month at the American Colony hotel in Jerusalem, despite local officials insisting that his visits are less frequent.
Indeed, The Mail on Sunday can disclose that he faces growing criticism from senior figures at the United Nations for not spending enough time on his role as head of the Quartet, the foursome of the US, Russia, the EU and the UN tasked with building peace in the Middle East.
They say they are unhappy about the time Mr Blair devotes to the lucrative international lecture circuit and to lobbying to become the first permanent president of the EU.
The position will be created if Ireland votes ‘yes’ to the Lisbon Treaty this autumn.
Mr Blair’s signature was left in the embassy guest book on January 14 when he was collecting the presidential medal of freedom from George Bush.
The bizarre entry will also increase speculation about Mr Blair’s domestic arrangements. Asked during an interview in January how often he manages to see
Cherie and his eight-year-old son, Leo, he replied: ‘Not nearly as much as I should.’
The Blairs have two homes in the UK, a £3.6million townhouse in London’s Connaught Square and a Buckinghamshire mansion bought last year for £4million.
A spokesman for Tony Blair would not say why he had written ‘Jerusalem’.
He said: ‘Mr Blair’s role in the Middle East continues to take up the largest proportion of his time. On the EU presidency, there is no campaign and no campaign team. The job doesn’t even exist yet. Mr Blair is fully focused on his role in the Middle East.’ News Source
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Easter is evil, proclaimed Muslim preacher of hate Anjem Choudary last night as he plumbed new depths by delivering his vile attack on the holiest Christian festival of the year.
The message was posted on Choudary’s website Islam4UK, which is a group inspired by exiled cleric Omar Bakri that wants the “flag of Allah” to fly over Downing Street. An article on the site claimed that Easter was merely a “pagan festival” and “nothing to do with Jesus”.
Firebrand cleric Choudary, who led the insults against a parade of British soldiers in Luton last month, denied writing the article, but when asked if he believed Easter was evil, he said yesterday: “I think that anything that’s non-Islamic is evil, I do believe that, yes. To attribute a son to God is anathema to Islam and I do believe that it’s an insult to God.”
When it was suggested that Christians might be offended, he said: “It’s not insulting to disagree with people’s beliefs. I’m not saying that Christians are evil.”
He said Christians should “accept the final message of Mohammed and come back to the true monotheistic faith”.
He added: “Christianity, like all religions that are not Islamic, is misguided. Anything outside Islam is not good and you have good and you have evil, don’t you?
“Jesus was a messenger of Allah and he will return one day and show the deviations and misconceptions of Christianity.
Easter is not in fact part of Christianity in the first place – it has been invented, it’s a pagan festival.”
His rant came as he backed a decision by Muslim-led Tower Hamlets Council in east London to allow extremist Anwar al-Awlaki, who has links to Al Qaeda, to broadcast a series of video messages last night to a conference at the Brady arts centre, Whitechapel, which is publicly owned.
Muslim students stood guard on the steps and banned all cameras and recording equipment. They refused entry to the public, saying the entire building had been reserved for Islamic students. News Source
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Charity worker David Booker has been suspended after a "calm and friendly discussion" about religion with a colleague.
Mr Booker says he was on the night shift with a female member of staff at the hostel where they worked when they had a wide-ranging chat in which he voiced his opposition to same-sex marriages and to homosexual clergy.
Mr Booker, who vehemently denies being homophobic and who says he has homosexual friends, says that within 24 hours he was suspended from his £19,000 a year job as a hostel support worker.
In a letter from the charity, Mr Booker was informed that he has been suspended from his job on full pay for two weeks pending an investigation into claims of "gross misconduct".
The letter added that he had been accused of breaking his code of conduct by "promoting your religious views which contained discriminatory comments regarding a person's sexual orientation... The action has been taken to safeguard both residents and staff at Southampton Street [the hostel where he worked]."
Mr Booker has worked for the Society of St James in Southampton for nearly four years.
The charity looks after people who are homeless, particularly those with mental health and drug-related problems. It employs 170 staff and has existed for 36 years. Mr Booker works in a hostel for 26 "vulnerable clients".
Mr Booker, 44, a born-again Christian, said: "I was working nights with a colleague of mine and somehow we got on to the subject of Christianity – and then our discussion moved on to homosexuality in the church. I can't remember if I was the instigator [of the subjects] – or she was.
"The conversation moved on to my views on homosexuality. I am not a bigot. I am not homophobic. I have gay friends.
"But I did say that I didn't agree with same-sex marriages, I didn't believe pastors or vicars should marry same-sex partners and I didn't agree with practising homosexuals being a pastor or a vicar.
"At one point, as we were talking, I asked her if I was offending her or boring her and she replied: 'No, Dave, carry on.' After our discussion, she was friendly towards me. She made me cups of tea. There was no problem at all."
Mr Booker, 44, says the next evening, a colleague told him he had "bad news" – he was being suspended.
"I was shocked and angry," Mr Booker added.
"You always feel a colleague will support you and is on your side. I feel as if I have been stabbed in the back. I just wish my colleague had come to me [with her concerns]. Can I not have a private conversation with a colleague about my personal beliefs without getting suspended?"
Trevor Pickup, chief executive of the Society of St James, which does not have a religious affiliation, confirmed that Mr Booker had been suspended but he refused to detail the allegations against him.
"I can't discuss this issue because we are still in the process of conducting our investigation. In common with any internal investigation, this is a confidential matter," he said.
Mr Booker, who lives in Southampton, said that he had become a born-again Christian in 2000 after going through a difficult phase when he separated from his wife, had financial problems and was drinking too much. He has since remarried and has a stepson.
The suspended worker faces a disciplinary hearing this week and will then decide what legal action, if any, to take: "I do not want to lose my job. I want to be reinstated immediately – exonerated over what I have done."
Mr Booker's case has been taken up by Christian Legal Centre, which seeks to promote religious freedom and, particularly, to protect Christians and Christianity.
The centre, in turn, has instructed Paul Diamond, the leading religious rights barrister.
It is understood that Mr Diamond is considering a legal claim either for discrimination – that Mr Booker has been singled out for disproportionate punishment – or harassment – that Mr Booker has been subjected to a "hostile work environment" against Christian values.
Mr Booker's advisers say that anyone should be able to have a private conversation about modern-day issues with colleagues and friends. They also question whether religious leaders are now safe in their jobs if they air controversial opinions publicly.
Last year, for example, a leading bishop brought the issue of same-sex relationships to the fore by launching an attack on the Church of England's liberal approach to homosexuality.
The Right Rev Michael Scott-Joynt, the Bishop of Winchester, warned that the Church's integrity has been "gravely undermined" by its acceptance of homosexual relationships.
The case involving Mr Booker comes two months after Caroline Petrie, 45, a nurse from Somerset, was suspended for offering to pray for an elderly patient's recovery from illness.
Mrs Petrie, also a Christian, was later reinstated by her employers, the North Somerset Primary Care Trust.
Two weeks ago, it also emerged that Duke Amachree, 53, who works for Wandsworth Council in London, was been suspended for allegedly encouraging a terminally-ill woman to turn to God after she told him her doctors could do nothing more for her. News Source
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Commons speaker Michael Martin is under fire over his lavish lifestyle after it emerged that he spent £8,000 of taxpayers money on a trip to Dubai.
Mr Martin and his wife Mary flew business class to the United Arab Emirates last week as parliament started its Easter recess.
The couple and their entourage were entertained by senior members of the UAE royal family at a string of luxurious palaces in the Gulf state.
The bill for trips, including flights and accommodation in a five-star hotel, is estimated to have cost around £8,000.
Mr Martin's globe-trotting is set to further fuel public anger over the lavish lifestyles enjoyed by MPs at a time when ordinary families are being forced to tighten their belts.
It is the latest in a long line of controversies to have hit the Speaker and will further enrage critics who believe he should stand down early.
In total, Mr Martin has racked up a bill of nearly £150,000 in foreign travel in the last three years.
Mr Martin, who earns £141,866-a-year as an MP and Speaker, and his wife Mary have flown to scores of exotic locations around the world - mainly travelling first or business class.
Over the past six years, Mr and Mrs Martin have enjoyed 16 trips to destinations including Hawaii, the Bahamas, New York and Rome, travelling more than 105,000 miles.
In all but one of the trips, the entire party travelled by first or business class to the exotic destinations, where they ran up bills running into thousands of pounds.
Mrs Martin, who has no official status as the spouse of the Speaker, travelled on 10 out of the 11 visits.
On last Monday's trip to Dubai, Mr Martin met his UAE counterpart Abdul Aziz Abdullah Al-Ghurair, speaker of the Federal National Council, who visited the House of Commons in January.
They then held talks with the President of the UAE, Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan. On Wednesday, they met Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai.
Mr Martin was joined by two officials on the trip, who flew standard class.
The Speaker's office defended the visit, insisting it was an official tour to foster links between the UK and UAE parliaments, and had been authorised by the Commons authorities.
But details of the visit drew criticism that the Speaker should have been trying to repair damage from a slew of scandals over MPs' expenses, rather than running up more costs.
Tory MP Douglas Carswell said: "I have nothing against Michael Martin personally, but I think he should have spent the recess trying to clean up Westminster, not racking up an ever higher bill for the taxpayer.
"Westminster stinks, and part of the rot is MPs and their expenses, and if you had a Speaker who was up to the job of being Speaker, he would have called time on this nonsense."
Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: 'This is an absolute disgrace. Why on earth should taxpayers fund the Martins' first class jet-setting and jollies when they are struggling to make ends meet?
'His behaviour displays a total detachment from reality and what is appropriate for someone in public office. These trips have no discernible benefit to taxpayers, and the Martins should pay this money back.'
But a spokeswoman for Mr Martin said: 'This was an official visit. The speaker of the Federal National Council visited the Commons in January, and invited the Speaker to make a return visit.
'This was authorised by the Commons authorities. Because it was an official visit, it was paid for in the normal way, out of the Speaker's budget.'
It also emerged that Mr Martin rented out his London flat while claiming expenses on his constituency home and living in a grace-and-favour apartment in Westminster.
Mr Martin moved into the luxurious Speaker's House inside the Palace of Westminster eight years ago.But he continues to make annual claims of up to £17,166 on his second home allowance.
The Speaker says that he donates any profit from renting out his 'small' London flat to charity and that all his expense claims are within the rules. News Source
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Gordon Brown's Downing Street is beginning to resemble a paler version of the White House of Richard Nixon.
If that sounds far-fetched, then consider the events of the past 48 hours. Because, while I am not suggesting that Smeargate is on the same scale as Watergate, the parallels are there.
Both men seem to delight in employing people who know only one form of defence and that’s attack – personal, professional and with more than a passing nod to the ‘dark arts’ of image manipulation.
Nixon revelled in trying to get newspaper editors to fire journalists he disapproved of.
Brown, or at least the ‘inept Mafioso tactics’ employed by some of his New Labour operatives, has been blamed for the departure of New Statesman political editor Martin Bright.
Not sufficiently ‘on message’, it was Bright who pointed the finger at Brown’s regime, claiming first-hand experience of the peculiarly forceful pressure these operatives can bring to bear. Nixon appointed henchman such as John Ehrlichman, whose job it was to protect the reputation of the President.
Writ large in this weekend’s revelations is the uncomfortable fact that our Prime Minister uses the likes of his former spin doctor Charlie Whelan and Damian McBride to bully and smear his opponents.
I’ve been around politics long enough to know that sometimes political workers overstep the boundary of what is acceptable political banter and discourse. The difference is that McBride was a civil servant, not a party operative.
The initial attempt by Downing Street to portray the whole incident as a ‘juvenile prank’, giving the impression that McBride was some sort of junior researcher operating on a freelance basis, was laughable.
Before his resignation, he was one of the Prime Minister’s closest allies, sitting in the Downing Street bunker next to Tom Watson, the Minister who looks after internet strategy and ‘digital government’.
This is the same Tom Watson who wrote on his blog last Friday, in a spectacularly ill-timed post, that one of the books that has most influenced him over the past two years was called Mudslingers: The 25 Dirtiest Political Campaigns Of All Time. Clearly he is making a bid to be included in the next edition.
Questions remain about Watson’s role in this scandal. I understand that all McBride’s emails to Derek Draper were copied to Watson. He is the Minister for the Civil Service.
Did it not occur to him that his friend and colleague was abusing his position as a civil servant? What action did Watson take? Did he tell him to stop it? Far from it – he encouraged it, because he thought it was what his boss, Gordon Brown, wanted.
Political leaders must set the parameters within which their staff must work. They must make clear what is acceptable and what is not.
Four years ago, when I was chief-of-staff to David Davis during his Tory leadership campaign, it was made clear to everyone that smearing our opponents was totally unacceptable.
But in Brown’s New Labour, smearing
is no longer the exception – it has become the norm
The signal sent out to any dissident has been as clear and ominous: mess with us and we will mess with you.
What’s so Nixonian is that once you’re on the ‘enemies’ list you are never off it. When the focus of the Government should be on running the country, it seems increasingly diverted towards running down the reputation of perceived dissenters.
I know how these people work because I have been a victim of their covert operations. McBride ordered his attack puppy bloggers, who include Derek Draper, to smear me as a racist after I tried to explain Carol Thatcher’s use of the word ‘golliwog’ in a BBC green room.
He did the same with Guido Fawkes, who found himself tainted as ‘homophobic’.
Those allegations are mild compared to what his emails allege about various Tories.
Last November, I wrote on my blog that Labour was preparing to launch a cyber-war against their opponents.
Little did I know that on the same day Draper registered a website called Redrag.co.uk which was designed to be the vehicle for him to promulgate Labour’s unique brand of political sewage – much of which was to be supplied by McBride and Charlie Whelan.
In this internet age it is a wonder they thought they could get away with it. Responsible bloggers (and yes, we exist) were bound to call them to account in a way that traditional political journalists would find difficult.
Blogs like that of Guido Fawkes have opened up the corridors of power and shone a light on some very murky dealings indeed.
The tragedy is that ordinary voters probably think political smears like this are the norm across the political spectrum.
I truly believe that they are not. But when such insidious tactics are exposed, they and their perpetrators need to be dealt with by those who purport to want a ‘different kind of politics’.
McBride has fallen on his sword. Several Labour MPs I know are now pushing for Draper to be disowned. They believe it is the only way for the sewer that runs through No 10 to be cleansed. News Source
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The emails from Damian McBride to Derek Draper contained a series of detailed smears about Conservative figures, including leader David Cameron and Shadow Chancellor George Osborne.
McBride’s first email, timed at 6.30pm on Tuesday January 13, set out his master plan for using the Red Rag website to destabilise the Conservatives in the run-up to the next General Election by spreading malicious and unfounded gossip – predominantly of a sexual nature.
Gordon Brown’s aide said the stories should be deployed in sequence to maximise their impact, and ‘timing and technology’ – such as links to apparently corroborating sites – should be used to make the allegations appear more credible.
In his first email, which was copied to Charlie Whelan, the combative spin doctor who worked for Mr Brown during the early years of his time as Chancellor, McBride wrote: ‘Gents, a few ideas I have been working on for Red Rag. For ease, I’ve written them all below as I’d write them for the site.’
Mr McBride started by suggesting that the site circulated a story about a gay Tory MP who was ‘routinely using his position in the House of Commons to offer free publicity’ to a large High Street company for which his boyfriend worked.
McBride says the story should claim that the Tory MP ‘has never once declared his close personal relationship’ with the store executive and lists a series of occasions on which the MP appears to have used Commons facilities to promote the company, praised the firm in Commons debates and put down Parliamentary motions that could be favourable to it.
He then turns his attention to Mr Cameron, floating the idea – based on the Tory leader’s admission in an interview that, when he was a student, he once attended a clinic for sexually transmitted diseases at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford – that Mr Cameron should publish his ‘full financial and medical records’.
There is no suggestion that Mr Cameron had treatment of any kind at the clinic.
McBride says to Draper that it would boost the slur if he inserted a picture into the story of Dr Christian Jessen, the presenter of the Channel 4 programme Embarrassing Bodies.
There is no evidence that the two men ever knew each other.
Under the heading of George’s Photo Album, McBride offers the idea of falsely hinting at the existence of embarrassing photographs of George Osborne from his university days.
He writes: ‘Embarrassing photos have followed George Osborne around throughout his career: Posing in his Bullingdon Club uniform at Oxford, lying on the carpet at home in his permed mullet playing Monopoly with his fellow viscounts and standing in an...embrace with a prostitute at a party in London.
‘But he knows that the most embarrassing photos from his past have yet to emerge.’
He suggests spreading rumors that pictures exist of Osborne ‘posing in a bra, knickers and suspenders’ and ‘with his face blacked up’, adding: ‘He wouldn’t be the first student to do some cross-dressing at university. But...why would a student in the late 1980s black up his face for the amusement of friends in their private college rooms?
‘This in the era when young Tories wore “Hang Mandela” T-shirts.’
McBride then goes on to suggest spreading slurs about the health of Mr Osborne’s wife Frances in the wake of the ‘Yachtgate’ story last summer, which described how the Shadow Chancellor had held discussions with the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska during a party on a yacht.
The slurs appear to be based on nothing more than reports that Mrs Osborne had appeared ‘sullen’ at several parties, and are entirely groundless.
At 6.50pm on Tuesday January 13: Draper replies to McBride: ‘Absolutely totally brilliant Damian. I’ll think about timing and sort out the technology this week so we can go as soon as possible.’
Later that month, in a second email to Draper, McBride offers ‘a couple more thoughts on stories’, which involve taking ‘poetic licence’ over pictures of George Osborne – seemingly something of an obsession for McBride – and unfounded claims about Mid-Bedfordshire Tory MP Nadine Dorries.
McBride says he wants to ‘put the fear of God into Osborne’.
He explained his rationale for spreading the smears on the internet site as: ‘When you read a kiss-and-tell story in the paper, you’re only ever reading what the paper have (sic) negotiated to buy. There’s always other stuff which the paper can’t print...so lots of good material.’
Last night, after reading the content of the emails, the Conservatives stepped up their pressure on Mr Brown.
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said: ‘The detail of these emails that is now emerging is shocking and completely unacceptable.
‘These are blatant lies cooked up in Downing Street by one of the Prime Minister’s key advisers. Mr Brown hasn’t even had the decency to apologise. His statement this afternoon was unacceptable.
‘This is an exceptionally serious matter and he needs to explain immediately what happened and how such defamatory comments came to be issued from Downing Street.’ News Source
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If any of the main parties were complacent about the BNP in Manchester, they won't be after last night.
Labour held on to the seat, left vacant by the sad death of Bill Risby. The BNP - standing for the first time - came second.
The full results:
- Rita Tavernor (Lab) 1353
- Derek Adams (BNP) 815
- Timothy Hartley (LD) 696
- Phil Donohue (Con) 558
- Karl Wardlaw (Green) 74
What happened here? Well, let's take a look at the recent electoral history of the seat:
Labour's vote continued its steady decline - not altogether surprising at this stage in an electoral cycle. The Green vote went down, too - with the Liberal Democrats probably the main beneficiaries.
More interesting still is the collapse in the Tory vote - in a ward they have previously targeted vigorously, and at a time when they are riding high in the national polls.
One might assume, then, that the Tories have gone to the BNP. This doesn't generally happen, however. Most BNP voters tend to be disillusioned members of the white working classes who typically vote Labour for self-interested or historic family reasons.
So it is also possible the 'core' Labour vote stood up well, or even increased, while large numbers of ex-Labour voters decamped to the BNP. It may be that the Lib Dems were the main beneficiaries of the Tory losses. That would certainly fit with campaiging patterns in the ward - it was Labour who were pulling out all the stops.
A by-election is important to the people of the ward. But the real issue here is the European elections this summer. The BNP have put their leader, Nick Griffin, top of their list in the north west. (Seats are allocated regionally and the voting is by proportional representation, for those who don't know.)
To win a seat, the BNP will need around eight per cent of the vote across the north west - a region which already includes party strongholds like Stoke. In the past, the mainstream parties have tended to ignore the BNP - deny them the oxygen of publicity, the argument has gone, and they will suffocate. It is not their policies which attract people's attention - and votes - but rather the entirely disproportionate coverage they get. Continued
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Never have we witnessed such crime, such selfishness, Materialism and such Anarchy until Labour gained power!
The Labour Party.. world leaders in political Grooming and Social Engineering of a society!
A Violent crime is committed by a schoolchild every 15 minutes, grim new statistics reveal.
Muggings by youngsters under the age of 16 have doubled over the past year to 55,000. Even more worrying than the rise in numbers is that the type of crime has changed.
What used to be classed as petty crime, such as minor robbery, now carries the risk of serious injury and even death because the carrying of knives is now almost obligatory in certain communities.
And some of the worst crimes often mimic the most violent computer games and films so freely available in Britain today.
Figures from the Youth Justice Board, a supervisory body for England and Wales, show that the number of children convicted of violent crime has risen by 20 per cent in three years, with young men carrying out the majority of the more serious crimes.
Richard Piggin, from the campaign Beatbullying, says that peer pressure can be the trigger which pushes an attack from a case of bullying into something more horrific.
He said: “It’s like grooming of anti-social behaviour, with older children especially encouraging them to do more and more awful things to another child. It’s a bit like an initiation and when you add to that the culture of knives as a day-to-day weapon, you are into very dangerous territory indeed.”
In the week when two boys of 10 and 11 appeared in court to be charged with the attempted murder of two boys aged nine and 11, the Sunday Express took a snapshot of what is happening in youth courts all around Britain.
In Sheffield, 15 miles from Doncaster, South Yorkshire, where the attempted murder is alleged to have happened, the case of a boy accused of going into the city with a knife is put back.
In another court a black teenager admits assault in a city park. In London, smeared across an interior wall of the city’s busiest youth court,
Thames in east London, are three words that sum up the gang mentality of its daily stream of visitors: “Soldiers of Hackney”. News Source
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Classroom discipline may have reached an all-time low, according to shocking new statistics.
The number of children being sent to special schools for violent or disruptive pupils has more than doubled – and in some areas quadrupled – in the past 10 years.
The figures also reveal that more children than ever are bringing weapons to school.
Shadow Children’s Secretary Michael Gove, who uncovered the data, said: “Problems with discipline have got worse and ministers have not done enough to support teachers in the classroom.
“We need to give teachers more powers to keep order so they can nip bad behaviour in the bud.” The law prevents teachers from intervening in playground fights and stops them using force to defend themselves or other pupils.
Police are called to violent incidents at schools 40 times a day.
Figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that police officers responded to more than 7,300 such calls in the last academic year.
The true total could be more than 10,000 because a third of police forces did not supply data.
Figures from the Association of Teachers and Lecturers showed a rise in exclusions for violence. The latest statistics revealed that more than 1,000 children aged five and under were suspended for attacking a classmate. The total number of suspensions for assault rose by 2,720 to 65,390.
Air guns, ball-bearing guns, replica firearms and knives have all been discovered during searches of school bags.
Teachers are concerned that very young children are being bullied into joining gangs and forced to carry weapons as they are less likely to be detected or face charges.
And they have also reported children as young as eight having to be suspended after being caught carrying knives or even brandishing them at fellow pupils. News Source
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Schools are recruiting nightclub bouncers, prison officers and ex- soldiers to stand in for absent teachers.
Classroom supervisors with military or law enforcement backgrounds are being hired instead of supply teachers to administer 'crowd control'.
One secondary school in North London employed two permanent teacher stand-ins through an agency for professional doormen, the National Union of Teachers annual conference heard.
They were chosen as they were 'stern and loud', said Andrew Baisley, a delegate from North London.
The bouncers were checked for criminal records but given no training. Within weeks, one was dismissed after breaching disciplinary codes.
Job adverts for cover teachers increasingly appeal for applicants with a forces background or police training, the delegates heard.
A recruitment agency operating in the West Midlands area is advertising for 'hard core' classroom supervisors who can 'control the kids in schools'.
The market for supply teachers is rapidly shrinking as schools take on cheaper stand-ins who can keep order while pupils work on preprepared assignments.
Instead of using supply teachers, which can cost £200 a day, equivalent to nearly £40,000-a-year, schools increasingly employ cover supervisors who are often paid less than £20,000, it was claimed.
Delegates at the conference in Cardiff condemned the growing trend for schools to use 'cover supervisors' instead of supply staff when regular teachers call in sick or go on maternity or paternity leave. Provided they pass security checks, the supervisors need no teaching qualifications.
But the NUT said the supervisors provided 'education on the cheap' and in some cases were standing in for absent teachers for periods of up to six weeks. Mr Baisley, a maths teacher at Haverstock School in Camden, North London said some schools appeared to believe a tough demeanor was the only attribute necessary to be a cover supervisor.
'I know of bouncers being employed specifically because they are bouncers to cover lessons,' he said.
'The idea is that it's about crowd control and childminding, that if you are stern and loud that's what's necessary to do the job.
'The problem is we need someone who's trained with children, to be able to interact with children.'
He refused to name the school which had hired two bouncers but said they had little or no training in dealing with children or school policies.
Growing numbers of job adverts for cover supervisors are appealing for applicants with a military, security or law enforcement background.
One advert posted by a recruitment agency in the West Midlands said: 'You might be an ex-Marine, police officer, bouncer, policeman, fireman, sportsman or actor. Whichever it is we need someone who thinks they can get involved in a school environment and control the kids in schools.'
The use of cover supervisors is soaring after new teachers' contracts introduced five years ago put limits on the number of hours they should cover for absent colleagues. It also granted them one day a fortnight away from pupils for marking and preparation.
Conference delegates voted to begin a campaign for classes to be taken by properly qualified teachers.
Schools Minister Sarah McCarthy-Fry said: 'Our guidance is clear that cover supervision should only be used as a short-term solution, to provide continuity when the regular teacher is unavailable.'
Schools should isolate disruptive pupils in 'withdrawal rooms' to prevent them wrecking lessons for other children, according to the Government's behaviour tsar.
Sir Alan Steer, a retired head teacher, will urge schools to consider removing unruly pupils from lessons and allowing them to calm down in separate rooms in a report being published later this week. News Source
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Babies could be routinely vaccinated against hepatitis B under controversial plans being discussed by Government experts.
Cases of the disease, a blood infection which is often transmitted sexually, are said to be spiralling in Britain.
An influential committee on vaccination is considering adding it to a combination jab given to babies at eight weeks.
This would create a six-in-one vaccine which would also immunise against diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, polio and Hib disease – a form of pneumonia.
But campaigners are concerned about the ‘over-vaccination’ of children and fear any complications caused by adding hepatitis B to the jab would be difficult to spot.
By the age of four, a child will have received 32 vaccines, some in multishot jabs including the MMR against measles, mumps and rubella.
The driving force behind the change is concern that infected immigrants are contributing to a rising tide of hepatitis B.
The virus is commonly spread by unprotected sex and needle sharing among drug addicts, and is 100 times more infectious than HIV. The disease can lead to liver cirrhosis and liver cancer.
Because it can be spread by only a tiny amount of blood through cuts and grazes, it is thought children in playgroups could be particularly vulnerable to catching it.
But GP Dr Richard Halvorsen, director of the Babyjabs single vaccines clinic, said he was opposed to the vaccination move.
He said: ‘The children at most risk are born to mothers carrying the virus and they are already given immunisation at birth.’
He said a 2004 study found adults immunised against hepatitis B were three times more likely to develop multiple sclerosis in the three years after vaccination. Continued
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Detectives believe more than 30 people were involved in an alleged Al Qaeda plot to bring carnage to the centre of Manchester. Senior officers say 11 suspects they are questioning were at the heart of a terror cell as it prepared for a huge Easter holiday bombing campaign.
However, they believe other “key players” are still at large – and could provide the key to the group’s bomb making capabilities.
Police were yesterday given more time to interrogate the 11 suspects – all Pakistanis except one UK national – who remain in custody after an 18-year-old suspect was handed over to immigration officials.
The men were arrested in Liverpool, Manchester and Clitheroe, Lancs, in an operation sparked by Scotland Yard Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick’s blunder last Wednesday.
The anti-terror supremo was photographed carrying highly classified documents with the text clearly showing details of the planned raids as he went to brief Gordon Brown.
Senior detectives realise there is growing public concern that after such high-profile arrests, no bomb-making equipment has been found.
They admit they are facing a race against time to uncover the other members of the network as they continue to interrogate the men arrested during the raids.
Last night a senior police source said: “These people are known as second and third-tier players. They are on the periphery, but we can’t be sure how much they know or if they are capable of carrying out the attack.
“We haven’t found any explosives and we don’t know if these other men know where they are.”
The suspects came to the attention of intelligence sources after the arrest and questioning of four terror suspects arrested in Pakistan three months ago. That led to a watch on their emails and phone calls.
It is understood a list containing the names of at least 36 potential terrorists living in the UK has been handed to British intelligence from their counterparts in Pakistan.
Sources said police had arrested a 22-year-old man suspected of being the ringleader in Cheetham Hill, Manchester. Two other men were arrested at a nearby internet cafe.
At least two of the arrested men had worked on a self-employed basis for Cargo2Go, a delivery company based at Manchester Airport.
It is understood they used their own vans to deliver packages around the country.
The police source added: “Some of the suspects had a level of access to airports that would heighten our concerns, but as yet we haven’t found any evidence that they have used that to their advantage.”
Two other suspects were seized while working as security guards at a Homebase DIY store in Clitheroe.
As detectives continue their hunt, it can also be revealed that the processing of highly sensitive visas in Pakistan has been farmed out to a private commercial company.
Although there is a huge risk of suicide bombers and Al Qaeda supporters coming to Britain from Pakistan our High Commission in the capital Islamabad outsources the vital administration of visas to a company called Gerry’s International.
After being informed of the astonishing situation, the Tories immediately called on Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to make sure all the work was done by High Commission staff only.
“This is highly sensitive work and clearly should not be outsourced,” said Tory MP Patrick Mercer, chairman of a Home Affairs sub committee on terrorism. “The Government has to wake up to the fact that the system is a mess and needs tougher procedures with greater scrutiny.”
Nobody at the company or the High Commission was available to comment yesterday.
The demand comes after it was revealed that one of the suspects seized over the alleged terror plot to bomb Manchester got into the country from Pakistan with the wrong documents.
Damian Green, the Shadow Immigration Minister, said: “Ministers for years have failed to crackdown effectively on bogus colleges and courses. Their recent efforts have been too little too late.
“This another symptom of the wider failure of the Government’s immigration policy.” News Source
Sunday 12th April 2009
UK Asylum: Sunctury for the Worlds Criminals
The Royal Navy, once the scourge of brigands on the high seas, has been told by the Foreign Office not to detain pirates because doing so may breach their human rights.
Warships patrolling pirate-infested waters, such as those off Somalia, have been warned that there is also a risk that captured pirates could claim asylum in Britain.
The Foreign Office has advised that pirates sent back to Somalia could have their human rights breached because, under Islamic law, they face beheading for murder or having a hand chopped off for theft.
In 2005 there were almost 40 attacks by pirates and 16 vessels were hijacked and held for ransom. Employing high-tech weaponry, they kill, steal and hold ships’ crews to ransom. This year alone pirates killed three people near the Philippines.
Last week French commandos seized a Somali pirate gang that had held a luxury yacht with 22 French citizens on board. The hijackers were paid off by the boat’s owner and then a French helicopter carrier dispatched 50 commandos to seize the hijackers and the ransom money on dry land.
Britain is part of a coalition force that patrols piracy stricken areas and the guidance has troubled navy officers who believe they should have more freedom to intervene.
The guidance was sharply criticised by Julian Brazier MP, the Conservative shipping spokesman, who said: “These people commit horrendous offences. The solution is not to turn a blind eye but to turn them over to the local authorities. The convention on human rights quite rightly doesn’t cover the high seas. It’s a pathetic indictment of what our legal system has come to.”
A Foreign Office spokesman said: “There are issues about human rights and what might happen in these circumstances. The main thing is to ensure any incident is resolved peacefully.”
The guidance is the latest blow to the robust image of the navy. Last year 15 of its sailors were taken prisoner by the Iranians and publicly humiliated.
In the 19th century, British warships largely eradicated piracy when they policed the oceans. The death penalty for piracy on the high seas remained on the statute books until 1998. Modern piracy ranges from maritime mugging to stealing from merchant ships with the crew held at gunpoint. News Source
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A cardboard cooker which uses the sun's energy to boil water has won a global competition for the best innovation to tackle climate change. The "Kyoto box" (See video here) aims to save lives in poor countries by allowing people to boil unclean water without having to cut down trees or gather sticks for firewood. The design, which costs five euros to make, also hopes to cut the number of people suffering from respiratory problems associated with smoke inhalation.
Its creator Kenyan-based Jon Bohmer believes it could halve the need for firewood, saving two tons of carbon for each family that uses it per year. He won $75,000 (£51,000) in the FT Climate Change Challenge backed by the FT, HP and Forum for the Future, to develop his idea. Continued
Without deliberately bursting their bubble, this type of device is nothing new and has been used for as long as I remember. Better known as 'Solar cooker' it has been used by bush crafter's, and those into preparedness alike so therefore it's nothing new.
Search google for 'Solar cooker' or read about it here on Wikipedia. Also see The Expanding World of Solar Box Cookers So who is the creator again? You can't invent something that's already been invented? surely! (Ed)
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Police chiefs blasted Britain’s immigration shambles last night as they revealed a terror suspect was allowed in with dodgy visa papers.
The Pakistani was stopped by immigration officers at Manchester airport. But incredibly he was allowed to walk free — and simply told to report back at a future date. Days later the unnamed suspect was arrested as anti-terror cops swooped on an internet café in Manchester.
A senior police source told The Sun: “It was a shambles, but absolutely typical of immigration in this country — we see this sort of thing all the time.
“This man’s documents were all over the place when he landed. He was allowed to proceed on the basis that he had to come back at a later date and show them correct documents.
“He was never going to do that. He was effectively free to do whatever he wanted.” Eleven of the 12 suspects seized this week are Pakistanis who entered Britain on student visas.
One of them has today been released into the custody of the UK Borders Agency.
Cops were today given longer to question the rest of the terror suspects.
The source added: “Most of them hadn’t been near a college, yet somehow they got visas.”
The revelation is a major embarrassment for Immigration Minister Phil Woolas, who yesterday insisted Britain’s security processes were world-class.
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said: “We desperately need proper policing of our borders but despite all the promises from this Government, it simply is not happening.”
Police probing the alleged terror plot discovered the immigration blunder as officers faced a race against time to find a suspected bomb factory.
Detectives fear an al-Qaeda cell has gathered enough materials to cause devastation in Manchester, but they have been unable to locate key components despite hunts in Liverpool, Manchester and Clitheroe, Lancs.
They were searching a second flat in Liverpool yesterday as they continued to quiz suspects including alleged ringleader Abid Naseer, 22, Hamza Shenwari, Sultan Sher and Abdul Wahab Khan.
It was claimed last night that Shenwari, nabbed driving on the M602, and another suspect worked on a self-employed basis for delivery firm Cargo2Go, who are based at Manchester airport.
On their website, the firm says many of their drivers go on a half-day course which involves “a briefing about threats such as terrorism”.
Director David Hough said last night: “We’re trying to get to the bottom of who these men are.”
It also emerged that another unnamed suspect was threatened with deportation after immigration officials found he was working as a security guard instead of studying — but he was allowed to stay.
Two security guards seized in Clitheroe were named locally as Johnus Khan and Umar Farooq.
Photos found at an address indicated targets for an alleged bomb attack included the Arndale and Trafford shopping centres, the Birdcage nightclub and St Ann’s Square in Manchester.
Intelligence indicated a plot to strike over Easter. Bungling anti-terror chief Bob Quick then unwittingly revealed in public a secret document showing details of planned raids.
His gaffe forced cops to swoop immediately. Mr Quick later resigned as Assistant Commissioner with the Met Police. Two suspects were arrested in Pakistan yesterday, security sources said.
They are suspected of using coded emails to pass orders from al-Qaeda chiefs to plotters in the Manchester area. Terror chiefs are said to have ordered an Easter strike as part of a renewed assault on Britain.
An intelligence source said: “There is evidence that al-Qaeda are re-focusing their sights on the UK. The threat has never gone away but it has been stepped up in recent months.”
Pakistan’s High Commissioner to the UK yesterday claimed Britain carried out insufficient checks on foreign students.
Wajid Shamsul Hasan said Pakistani authorities could help with checks on applicants — but were not allowed to.
Mr Woolas insisted there was no guarantee that extra visa checks would stop terrorists getting in. News Source
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A Senior judge has savaged the Government because he keeps bumping into illegal immigrants he has sent for deportation.
Judge Peter Jacobs told of his anger and frustration after repeatedly recommending foreign criminals be returned home at the end of their sentences – only to walk past them in the street months later.
His attack was backed by politicians and campaigners and piled more pressure on beleaguered Home Secretary Jacqui Smith.
Judge Jacobs spoke out at Norwich Crown Court as he jailed a West African woman for 10 months for possession of a false passport and entering Britain without leave seven years ago.
After sentencing Liberian-born Jessica White, 22, the judge spoke of his frustration at coming across criminals in Norwich city centre who should have been deported time and time again.
He said: “The reality is that the Home Office is better than it was but it does not keep a proper take on these things.
“I and my brother judges recommend people for deportation and then we walk along King Street or London Street and see them a few months later.”
The judge added: “In this case we will have to wait and see.” The court heard that White, who admitted the offences, was arrested after a fracas at her home in Attleborough, Norfolk.
Police searched the property and found a Belgian passport with her details. A British immigration official later confirmed that the passport was a fake.
Robert Warner, prosecuting, said: “She said the passport was brought to her and said she didn’t know if it was good or bad. She didn’t pay for it.” The court heard that White had been working for the past three years in a local poultry factory.
Last night campaigners welcomed the judge’s remarks. They have accused the Government of operating a “haphazard and chaotic” system in dealing with foreign criminals.
Critics have complained that only a fraction of illegal immigrants in Britain’s jails are deported each year – and many of those return under new false identities. Sir Andrew Green, chairman of pressure group MigrationWatch UK, said:
“This judge is absolutely right. The resources available for removal are far too thinly spread. The Government is not even removing criminal offenders and is making very little impression on illegal immigration.”
Shadow Immigration Minister Damian Green said: “The Government won’t listen to anyone else.
“Let’s hope they will at least listen to this serious criticism from a judge with great experience in this area. “For years the deportation of criminals has been a weak spot in immigration policy.”
Last night the Home Office defended its record. A spokeswoman said: “We will not tolerate those who come here and break the law and last year we removed a record number of foreign prisoners. This year we will remove more. Continued
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Phil Woolas, the Immigration Minister, has rejected claims that Britain was failing to co-operate with Pakistani authorities on checking applicants for student visas in Britain.
He was reacting to an assertion by the Pakistani High Commissioner in London that the British authorities would not allow Pakistan to help to carry out background checks on applicants for student visas.
The number of Pakistanis given visas to study in Britain has more than doubled in the past seven years. In 2001, 4,860 visas were issued to Pakistanis wanting to study in Britain, a figure that rose to 10,600 in 2007.
A Downing Street spokesman said that Gordon Brown had spoken to President Zardari of Pakistan on Wednesday evening after the arrests in the North West. “They agreed that the UK and Pakistan share a serious threat from terrorism and violent extremism, and committed to work together,” the spokesman said.
Earlier the High Commissioner had said that Britain was not doing enough. “It is at your end you have to do something more,” Wajid Shamsul Hasan said. Asked if there was a problem with the British system for student visas, he replied: “Yes. If they allow us to make inquiries first, if they ask us to scrutinise those people who are seeking visas we can help them. But the thing is they have their own regime — the regime that vets these people.”
Mr Woolas rejected the claim. “It’s naive to think that we don’t check. We do work very closely with the Pakistan authorities, indeed we’ve been criticised for doing so,” he told The World at One on BBC Radio 4.
“We do have these systems of checking these people to the best of our ability and we are acknowledged as being one of the best in the world.” News Source
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Police moved to reassure Liverpool’s Muslim community yesterday after the anti-terror arrests.
At a public meeting in Toxteth, residents raised concerns about possible retaliation against Muslims living in the city.
But police said there had been no evidence of any problems so far, and urged people to immediately report any crimes that could be a sign of a backlash against Muslims.
Ahmed Saif, of the Al-Ghazali Multi-cultural Centre, a community centre based on Earle Road, where one of the arrests took place, was one of several community group representatives and local councillors to attend the meeting.
He said: “Our big concern is that associations will be made between Muslims and these kinds of actions.
“We don’t yet know the nature of the act and who was behind it or their background or nationality.
“Such actions have no religious aspect whatsoever, and we don’t want the Muslim community to suffer.”
Chief Superintendent Steve Ashley, who chaired the meeting at the Pakistan Youth and Community Centre, said he could not confirm the nationality of those arrested, but said they “were not Liverpool-born and bred”. In response to concerns about possible retaliation, he said: “There is no evidence of any problem at all. We will not tolerate any sort of racist behaviour.”
He urged residents to report signs of such actions earlier rather than later.
“People must report any criminal offence – no matter how important you think it is – as it could signal to us that there’s a problem.”
Flanked by city council leader, Cllr Warren Bradley and Liverpool Riverside MP, Louise Ellman, Chief Supt Ashley told residents to contact him directly with their concerns or to get in touch with their local councillors.
Ms Ellman, who also urged residents to come to her if they were concerned, said that Wednesday’s events were a “big shock to everyone living here”.
But she praised police for keeping local people informed. News Source
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More than a third of knife offences are punished with nothing more than a caution or a fine of as little as £5.
Figures from the police national computer show that there were 27,644 offences involving the possession of a knife or offensive weapon resulting in a caution or sentence in England and Wales last year.
Only 19 per cent of the total - led to a custodial sentence.
Another 8,368 offences involving weapons were punished with a caution, meaning the offender has no permanent criminal record. According to the Home Office, cautions should be "used to deal quickly and simply with those who commit less serious crimes."
A total of 1,337 crimes involving knives and other weapons resulted in fines, although doubts have been raised about what deterrent fines offer.
Official figures disclosed last year showed that adults caught with a knife have been fined as little as £20, with fines for children as low as £5. The average fine given to adults was £153, and £57 for under-16s.
Other crimes involving knives resulted in discharges and suspended sentences
The police national computer figures is considered the most up-to-date record of criminal justice statistics for England and Wales. The 2008 figures were obtained by the Conservatives following questions in parliament.
Dominic Grieve, the Conservative Shadow Justice Secretary, said the figures were more evidence that Labour has failed to deliver on promises to deter the use of knives and other weapons.
Mr Grieve said: "Labour's promises to get tough on knife crime have been exposed as a sham when one in three knife offenders are just given a slap on the wrist.
"If we are to crack down on knife crime we must send a clear message that carrying a knife will not be tolerated."
The Daily Telegraph revealed earlier this year that four in 10 serious criminals are being let off with a caution. In some police force areas more than half of offenders who could expect to face a crown court were instead given a caution, which means they do not have a criminal record.
Responding to Mr Grieve, the Ministry of Justice highlighted separate crime figures compiled by its own officials and published last month. The ministry said its figures show that the proportion of all possession offences resulting in custodial sentence has risen, and that sentences are getting longer.
The department also said that more offenders are being sent to jail, fewer cautions are being issued and that there is "more use of tougher community sentences".
The Government and the police last year launched the £5 million, Tackling Knives Action Programme to address the use of weapons in major English cities.
Last month, the scheme was extended for another year, with an extended focus on gang-related and serious youth violence, targeting 13- to 24 year-olds. Two new police forces, Hampshire and Kent, also joined the programme. News Source
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One of Gordon Brown's most senior aides resigned tonight over emails discussing possible smear stories about Tory ministers.
Damian McBride had sent a series of emails containing lurid allegations about the private lives of David Cameron, George Osborne and other Conservative MPs.
Downing Street announced tonight the adviser had resigned and said it was Mr Brown's view that there was 'no place in politics for the dissemination or publication of material of this kind'.
Ex-Home Secretary Charles Clarke had earlier today demanded that Mr McBride be sacked for the emails which Downing Street earlier described as 'juvenile and inappropriate'.
Mr Clarke said: 'Damian McBride has no place in 10 Downing Street'.
'His actions bring shame to the Labour party and he should be dismissed immediately.'
The emails were sent in January from a supposedly secure Number 10 account by special adviser Mr McBride.
However, in a development which will alarm security chiefs, they have since fallen into the hands of Paul Staines, one of Britain’s most controversial political bloggers, who writes under the name 'Guido Fawkes'.
The emails had been sent originally to Derek Draper, a close friend of Lord Mandelson, who also runs an influential political blog.
Posting on the LabourList website, Mr Draper admitted the emails had been "a bit juvenile and inappropriate and some were in bad taste".
But he insisted: 'Behind the hyped-up headlines the story is pretty simple. I've wondered for ages why the right wing have a near monopoly on websites that feature tittle tattle and teasing of their political opponents.
'But I felt strongly that such gossip wasn't suitable for LabourList and kicked around the idea of setting up another blog, Red Rag, where such stories might be published.
'I mentioned this idea to a few friends asking if they knew of any good gossip that was doing the rounds.
'Some of them said they weren't interested, but one of them, who works in Downing Street, responded by sending back some details of stories that were being gossiped about in Westminster.
'In truth these were a bit juvenile and inappropriate and some were in bad taste though I have to admit some were also brilliant and rather funny.'
If they were obtained by someone hacking into the Number 10 computer system or into Mr Draper’s computer, the police will almost certainly be called in to investigate.
But as Downing Street hurriedly distanced Gordon Brown from the affair a spokesman insisted: 'We are not aware of any security breach in the No 10 system.'
He added: 'Neither the Prime Minister nor anybody else in Downing Street, except the author, knew anything about any of these private emails.
'The author of these emails has apologised for their juvenile and inappropriate nature and for the embarrassment caused.
'All staff will be reminded of the appropriate use of Number 10 resources.'
One Sunday newspaper is understood to be preparing to publish full embarrassing details of the email exchanges, although a source close to the Downing Street official and Mr Draper himself played down their content. Continued
Update:
Damian McBride has now resigned
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Are the BNP really Racist, criminal and bigoted?
or is it just the Perception portrayed in the Media because the Lab-Lib-Con Marxists Smear them as so?
Personally we believe the reasons to smear the party are for the following reasons:
1, The Lab Lib and Con's have enough to cope with regards to outwitting each other for governmental power. Having another mainstream party would simply give them a massive migraine and even if they weren't in power it would mean less and the reduction of the number of councillors they have elected at local levels as well as Meps in the European Level.
2. Having a Nationalist mainstream party would hamper their global agenda. Afterall how can you move towards a single world government if a party exists that wants to preserve the traditions and sovereignty of their country? with such a party operating how can they then dissolve that country into that massive corrupt and fascist lump of mould they call the EU?
3. If the BNP are continually thought of as racist then the other mainstream parties mainly Labour can secure votes from the minority communities and (Imported votes from) migrants. This of course comes at a price to the residents of the host country but at no price to the parties who are desperately seeking to join the gravy train once they are in power, as they are already among the elite and finance and money matters isn't a problem compared to the rest of us in the real world! (Ed)
Example of smearing follows from GA site by johnofgwent
It seems it's not only New Labour and their harder left former bedfellows now chucked out of the party in the interests of electoral presentability who are running round scared of the British National Party. Have a look at what this site had to say for itself the other week.
Claiming to give "Comprehensive Coverage of Britain's Conservative Party" the author of the artiicle above really ought to be given honorary membership of the BNP for services rendered because what they have written is manna from heaven.
Under a headline "Tory MP's mull anti-BNP tactics" the author, Tim Montgomerie has this to say :-
Up until now the Tory strategy - strongly advocated by Eric Pickles and accepted by David Cameron - has been to work around the BNP. It's where I've been, too. The idea is to deny the BNP the 'oxygen of publicity' and work harder than them when it comes to pavement politics.
Some Tory MPs are beginning to worry that that strategy may no longer be tenable. One MP told ConservativeHome: 'The BNP activists are not like they were. They don't wear bomber jackets. They don't have number one shaved heads. They don't have tattooes. They look smart. They smile. They are talking about housing and jobs, not race. They aren't fitting the caricature and voters are confused.'
At a meeting of Conservative Peers earlier this week the rise of the BNP was evident from a number of regional presentations made by party campaigners.
CCHQ isn't currently moving from its 'no oxygen' tactic but Tory MPs are mulling alternative options. There is a particular concern to find messages that stop normally Conservative voters from supporting the BNP in June's European elections. Three stand out at present:
- 1. Connect the BNP with criminality. This was what The Sun did a few years ago - highlighting the criminal connections of many BNP candidates. 'Voters won't vote for a criminal party,' the Tory MP told me.
- 2. Connect the BNP with falling house prices. This was the tactic pursued vigorously two years ago by certain Conservatives.
- 3. Connect the BNP with Left-wing, socialist policies. This is a strategy set out by Charles Walker MP.
Laugh, I nearly wet myself. I won't even bother googling the links to take them down, any amateur could find the details for themselves. But to take their three points and chuck each a one line rebuttal:-
- I think the Liars Buggers And Thieves site does a fairly reasonable job of showing people where the true criminals are in our political system right now. Enough Said.
- Please please can I have a tory come round here and tell me the BNP are responsible for the value of my house falling off a cliff. It will make such a change from Gordon telling me "It's The Global Economy, Stupid"
- And as for connecting the BNP to left wing, socialist policies, well, they're havin a larf.
But it's nice to see the Tories are really well prepared to fight their corner over the European Elections !
EDIT: I don't like changing things after people have started to comment, unless its to correct a factual error or the like, but this image deserves it. Taken from The Political Compass website it shows the drift of the three main parties over time. It speaks for itself really but observe how today's (well last year's actually) LABOUR party is more right wing than the Tories under Edward Heath's One Nation Conservatism ....
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The cost of the Government's anti-discrimination watchdog has ballooned by £22.5million in a year to an eye-watering £70million.
Salaries for bureaucrats at the Equality and Human Rights Commission have also soared by an inflation-defying 25 per cent.
Staff received an average increase of around £9,000, taking their average salary to £45,920.
The soaring costs to taxpayers of the Government quango were revealed by research from the Conservatives.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission was formed by merging the Equal Opportunities Commission, the Commission for Racial Equality and the Disability Rights Commission in October 2007.
In 2008-09 - its first full year of operation - it was given a £70million budget. The total budget for the three groups it replaced for their last full year in existence was £47.5million.
Figures obtained by the Tories also reveal that nearly £ 2million was spent on consultancy fees in preparation for the merger.
'This is truly shocking,' said Tory communities spokesman Paul Goodman.
'These figures reveal how Labour's bloated quangos are simply failing to use taxpayers' money efficiently, especially at these difficult times.'
He added: 'How is it possible that you can bring three separate organisations together and yet have a higher wage bill than before?' News Source
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Anger was growing last night after it was revealed that an Islamic extremist linked to Al Qaeda and the September 11 hijackers is to address a UK conference by video.
Muslim cleric Sheikh Anwar al-Awlaki has been banned from the United States after he was accused of using taped lectures to encourage terrorist attacks.
But the preacher of hate has been given the go-ahead to speak to an audience of hundreds at the three-day event in east London which is being held at a taxpayer-funded venue starting today.
Tower Hamlets council granted permission for the pre-recorded video message to be broadcast despite admitting it “obviously had some concerns”.
Last night the council released a statement saying the decision had been made after consultations with police and Home Office officials.
But politicians accused Home Secretary Jacqui Smith of failing to take action to crack down on extremists.
American-born al-Awlaki has been banned from returning to the US following accusations he acted as a spiritual adviser to three of the 9/11 terrorists.
He now lives in the Yemen where he served 16 months in jail, during which he claims he was interrogated by the FBI.
The US Department of Homeland Security describes al-Awlaki as an “Al Qaeda supporter” who uses the internet to encourage terror attacks and urge Muslims worldwide to take up jihad.
Last night Shadow Security Minister Pauline Neville-Jones called for the meeting to be banned.
She called al-Awlaki “one of the most prominent English-language supporters of violent jihad”.
But Tower Hamlets said it had found “no grounds” to prohibit the event, at the Brady arts centre in Whitechapel.
A spokesman said: “We sought advice from the Home Office.
“These enquiries did not present us with grounds to prohibit playing of the message.”
Those attending are required to register online and pay a fee up to £70 which goes towards “promoting Islam”. News Source
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As we said before.. Immigration means population growth which in turn means more resources are needed! Immigration places a massive strain on our resources as well as on the infrastructure of our society!
Population Growth at these levels in Britain is just not sustainable!
The UK will go into "ecological debt", having used up all the natural resources the country can provide for the year, on Easter Sunday, research revealed.
Calculations from the New Economics Foundation (NEF) revealed that because of rising consumption of products such as food and energy from abroad, we start "living off" the rest of the world just a third of the way through the year.
And because our total consumption is growing and putting increased pressure on ecosystems, the day the UK effectively starts living outside its means is creeping earlier each year.
In 1961, it was July 9 and by 1981 it was May 14. This year it falls on April 12 - Easter Sunday. The calculation is based on the UK's ecological footprint - the amount of natural resources it has compared to the amount it consumes and the amount of waste, such as greenhouse gases, it produces.
The levels of consumption and waste are far outstripping what the country can naturally sustain, a pattern that is mirrored on a global level.
The think-tank warned that the UK is becoming increasingly reliant on imports at a time when economic instability, climate change, competition for resources and growing consumption elsewhere in the world means the chances of the rest of the world providing for us is lessening.
According to a new edition of Andrew Simms' book Ecological Debt, countries such as the UK are running up huge environmental debts through the amount of fossil fuels we burn to power our homes and lives, the goods we buy and the waste we create.
As a result international problems such as climate change will not be solved without changes in the UK.
Mr Simms said: "Uncontrolled growth of financial debt is currently laying waste to large parts of the global economy. An explosion of ecological debt looks set to do the same to a biosphere friendly to human civilisation.
A Department of Energy and Climate Change spokeswoman said: "The reality is we live in a globally interconnected world.
As a planet, we must live within our environmental means and it's wrong to look at the UK in isolation... We're leading the way in committing to reduce our carbon dependency by 80%, but what's important is to get all countries committed to change in parallel. This is why we're looking for a global deal in Copenhagen this December." News Source
They say 'we must live within our environmental means' yet they continue to harp on about a global economy. (Ed)
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The European Union’s Court of Human Rights (also known as the Strasbourg court) is busy usurping British law and needs to be stopped, one of this country’s most senior judges has warned.
The EU court now “considers itself as the equivalent of the Supreme Court of the United States, laying down a federal law of Europe,” Lord Hoffmann, the second most senior Lord of Appeal, said in a recent speech to the Judicial Studies Board.
Lord Hoffman warned that the Strasbourg court is now overruling senior British courts in areas which, he says, human rights are at best secondary issues.
In his address, Lord Hoffmann gave examples of the Strasbourg court being “unable to resist the temptation to aggrandise its jurisdiction.”
Interference on issues such as the right to silence, the use of hearsay evidence in court and even night flights at Heathrow Airport — “which sounds about as far from human rights as you could get” — showed the “basic flaw” in the system, Lord Hoffman argued.
“I regard all three of these cases, and many others which I could mention if there was time, as examples of what Bentham called ‘teaching grandmothers to suck eggs’.”
Furthermore, the court “lacks constitutional legitimacy,” he said, with its judges elected by a committee chaired by a Latvian politician and whose British representatives were “a Labour politician with a trade union background and no legal qualifications and a Conservative politician who was called to the Bar in 1972 but so far as I know has never practised.”
“We remain an independent nation with its own legal system, evolved over centuries of constitutional struggle and pragmatic change,” he said.
“I do not suggest belief that the United Kingdom’s legal system is perfect, but I do argue that detailed decisions about how it could be improved should be made in London, either by our democratic institutions or by judicial bodies which, like the Supreme Court of the United States, are integral with our own society and respected as such.”
* The Strasbourg court does not form part of the machinery of the EU, but the European Court of Justice (ECJ) does. The legal identity of the EU itself will be fully recognised if the Lisbon Treaty is eventually ratified and implemented.
The ECJ will then in effect be the supreme court of the European Union and will most likely replace the Strasbourg court.
Only the rejection of the Lisbon Treaty - and a vote for the BNP - will prevent British law being made subservient to foreign nations and incompetent legal entities. Let the British people not say that they were never warned. News Source
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Anyone smell a Rat?
Gordon Brown could be forced to call a referendum on the new European "constitution" if faced with a large protest vote in the forthcoming European elections, the Conservatives believe.
In an interview with today's Daily Telegraph, William Hague, the shadow Foreign Secretary, says that Britain urgently needs to renegotiate its relationship with Europe. It will be a priority for the Conservatives if elected.
He is particularly angered at suggestions that Tony Blair is being lined up to become the first full-time EU president.
Mr Hague and David Cameron are planning to make the failure of the Government to call a referendum a key campaigning point in the run-up to June's European elections. The shadow Foreign Secretary today calls on Britons to use the elections to cast a "protest vote".
However, it represents a risky strategy for the Conservatives which could open a rift within the shadow Cabinet over European policy in the run-up to the general election.
Mr Hague says that he expects Ken Clarke, the shadow Business Secretary who is a passionate supporter of the EU, to vote against the Lisbon Treaty in any referendum.
He also indicates that the Conservatives are likely to attempt to scrap the Treaty - possibly by calling a retrospective referendum - if they are elected.
The Prime Minister has faced intense public criticism after reneging on a Labour manifesto commitment to call a referendum on a European constitution. The Daily Telegraph has campaigned for a referendum.
Labour claim that there is no need to ballot voters on the renegotiated constitution - known as the Lisbon Treaty - although it is virtually identical to the original agreement.
In the run-up to the last European elections in 2004, Mr Blair was forced to offer a referendum in the face of widespread public concern.
Mr Hague now believes that the Government could be forced into a similar climbdown. The Irish are preparing to hold another referendum on the Treaty in the autumn.
"It's not too late to stop the Lisbon Treaty," Mr Hague said. "I think it's time to ring the alarm bell, it's time to alert people to the fact that this denial of democracy is not far away unless we do something.
And the opportunity to do something is in the European elections, which are only two months away now."
"It's possible to make Gordon Brown change his mind. If you remember in 2004, in the run-up to the European elections that is when Tony Blair did his famous u-turn on the referendum.
"He [Mr Brown] doesn't want to have a referendum, he doesn't like having elections about anything. But I think it's a Government of such spectacular u-turns you can't rule anything out."
The shadow Foreign Secretary reveals that other European leaders have discussed with him the possibility of Mr Blair becoming the first president of the EU. "Our point about this is that this would be unacceptable to the majority of people in Britain," he said. "It would be a double denial of democracy because we would have a former Prime Minister returning to a position of influence and power over British affairs without any electoral mandate of any kind.
"If a figure like Tony Blair assumed the presidency of the EU, it would be Tony Blair who went off to visit the White House claiming to represent all the people of Europe including Britain once again. Just when people thought they were free of that, that would be back, And they wouldn't be able to do anything about it."
The shadow Foreign Secretary, who is also Mr Cameron's deputy, insists that he is not concerned about campaigning against further European integration. The issue has previously proved highly damaging for the Conservatives as splits within the party emerged.
Ken Clarke, before returning to the shadow cabinet, earlier this year said that calls for a referendum were "absurd". However, Mr Hague today makes it clear that Mr Clarke will now be expected to block the Lisbon Treaty.
When asked if Mr Clarke would have to vote "no" in any referendum, Mr Hague said: "I wouldn't expect any member of the shadow Cabinet to oppose the party's policy...to reject the treaty. Ken has joined the shadow Cabinet in full knowledge of our policy on this."
Mr Hague signals that, if the Conservatives are elected, he plans to spend the first few months in office renegotiating Britain's relationship with Europe. He is not concerned about being isolated at a time when Barack Obama is making extensive efforts to improve relations between America and the EU.
"We are committed to restore national control to social and employment law," he said. "It is something we feel very strongly about, it is something that will be reflected in our manifesto but clearly it is also something that has to be negotiated.
"The EU should be concentrated on adapting to globalisation and global competitiveness, not building more powerful centralised institutions in Brussels," he said.
The former Conservative leader refuses to reveal exactly what he plans to do if the Lisbon Treaty is ratified and he becomes Foreign Secretary.
However, he makes it clear the Conservatives would consider calling a referendum retrospectively - which could dominate the party's early months in office if they are elected.
"We will address that if we come to that point," he said. "We would face a treaty that lacks democratic legitimacy and we wouldn't let matters rest there...You can still get a referendum on Lisbon. If that happens we don't have to worry about what we do if it is ratified."
Mr Hague's call to tackle further European integration will delight many Conservative activists. The shadow Foreign Secretary is one of Mr Cameron's closest frontbench colleagues and friends say he is relishing the prospect of becoming Foreign Secretary.
He is already beginning to "run down" his outside interests which have proved a source of controversy. If the Conservatives are elected, it is thought he may only serve for one Parliamentary term and he will therefore be keen to make rapid progress on the delicate task of extricating Britain from legally-binding European commitments. News Source
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Dozens of teenagers marauded down Whiteladies Road, stealing goods from the Esso garage on Blackboy Hill before continuing down the road, causing cars to swerve and pedestrians to hide in restaurants.
The large group are believed to have spent Saturday evening at travelling theme park Funderworld on the Downs.
After leaving the funfair when it closed at 9pm, the children first went to the Esso garage a few hundred yards from the fair's exit.
Filling the small store for less than three minutes, they helped themselves to anything they could get their hands on while garage staff looked on helplessly before phoning the police.
The group then continued on their way, running into the road, shouting and swearing.
Eyewitness Rebecca Martin, 27, a doctor from Richmond Dale, was on her way to dinner with a friend when she saw the youngsters coming down the street "like a herd of stampeding wildebeest".
She said: "We saw two cars having to swerve. There could have been a really nasty accident.
"I had never seen anything like it. We felt quite intimidated.
"All of them seemed to have things, there was no way you could stand in their way. There were so many of them. It was absolute chaos.
"It would have been quite a spectacle if it wasn't so scary. It almost looked like a rampage.
"I was really embarrassed because I had my friend with me who's not from Bristol. I had to say to her that this thing doesn't normally happen around here and that these people were certainly not from around here either."
Geraldine Fucci, owner of Renato's Numero Uno restaurant, also saw what happened.
She said: "They were shouting and spitting. All the customers saw them and heard them.
"The funfair tends to attract a rough crowd from a different area of Bristol and it always seems to bring trouble."
Five youngsters went into Threshers to try to buy cider, but the sale was refused by assistant manager Pavel Josifek because none of the group had identification.
Mr Josifek, 36, said: "They were all very rude to me. I was quite scared because they were being quite aggressive and swearing at me.
"When they left the shop they continued shouting from outside. I was expecting them to come back but fortunately they didn't."
Mike Chubb from Funderworld said: "There's always a minority of idiots who like to cause trouble. We cannot be responsible for things that happen outside Funderworld."
Avon and Somerset police are appealing for information from anyone who saw the hooded youths, who were all black and aged between 13 and 16, enter the Esso garage soon after 9pm on Saturday evening.
Anybody with info should call Redland police station on 0845 456 7000. News Source
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Patients will be at risk if the Government implements plans to stop doctors working more than 48 hours a week, the president of the Royal College of Surgeons has warned.
"Patient safety will be reduced, so it follows that patients are more likely to die," said John Black, a former general surgeon at Worcestershire Royal Hospital.
The vast majority of doctors think the European Working Time Directive, due to be introduced on August 1, is dangerous, he said.
"In our case it is dangerous because it is likely to lead to a reduction in the level of cover, and also because it means there will be more handovers.
"Every handover is potential to make a mistake. Small details matter, such as whether someone's test results are due back soon, and can make the difference between a patient living or dying."
Mr Black said the College believed a 65 hour maximum, work and on call, allowed the present hospital structure to stay open and provided safe care by sufficient doctors, with fewer handovers.
"There are ways of getting around the directive within European rules, and the Government should be working towards that," he said.
"In Germany there was a class opt-out in at least one state for surgeons. Our Government needs to work out a way that this should not apply to us."
Meanwhile the Guardian reported that around 80% of doctors believe patient safety would be jeopardised if NHS workers are ordered to comply with the directive.
Researchers from Sheffield University's school of medicine found 70-80% of consultants and similar percentages of junior doctors believed safe patient care was undeliverable in a 48 hour week, the newspaper reported. News Source
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Anti-terrorist police chiefs have joined in the condemnation of immigration policies developed by successive Tory and Labour governments, describing them as a “shambles” and linking them directly to the increase in Islamist terror.
The reaction was provoked by the news that one of the twelve Muslims arrested last week on suspicion of planning a major terrorist act was allowed to enter Britain even after his visa papers were questioned at Manchester airport.
The Pakistani was stopped by immigration officers at the airport but was allowed to walk free, only being told to report back at his own initiative at a future date.
Days later the Muslim was arrested as anti-terrorist police swooped on an internet café in Manchester. A senior police source told a newspaper that: “It was a shambles, but absolutely typical of immigration in this country - we see this sort of thing all the time.
“This man’s documents were all over the place when he landed. He was allowed to proceed on the basis that he had to come back at a later date and show them correct documents. He was never going to do that. He was effectively free to do whatever he wanted.”
The officer was also critical of the student visa scam, which was used by eleven of the twelve Muslims arrested to enter Britain. “Most of them hadn’t been near a college, yet somehow they got visas,” the policeman was quoted as saying.
* It also emerged that another unnamed suspect was threatened with deportation after immigration officials found he was working as a security guard instead of studying - but he was allowed to stay. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has already admitted that “two-thirds of the terror plots investigated in Britain originated from Pakistan.”
To make matters worse, Pakistan’s High Commissioner to the UK has also claimed that Britain carried out insufficient checks on foreign students.
Mr Wajid Shamsul Hasan said Pakistani authorities could help with checks on applicants - but were not allowed to.
Detectives searching for more members of the al-Qaeda cell arrested in Merseyside have expressed concerns that they have been unable to locate key components despite hunts in Liverpool, Manchester and Clitheroe. The suspects have been named as Abid Naseer, Hamza Shenwari, Sultan Sher, Abdul Wahab Khan, Johnus Khan and Umar Farooq.
Photos found at an address indicated targets for an alleged bomb attack included the Arndale and Trafford shopping centres, the Birdcage nightclub and St Ann’s Square in Manchester. News Source
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Under the open doors immigration policies pursued by successive Tory and labour regimes, Britain has become the dumping ground for the world’s excess population who have come to scrounge off the British taxpayer.
Latest in the long line of handout seekers are at least 20,000 Somalis who have left Holland for Britain over the past five years - saying that the Dutch system was “frustrating” because it allegedly kept them “trapped in welfare dependency.”
According to reports, Somali Muslim families are moving en masse to Leicester and Birmingham from the industrial cities of Tilburg and Rotterdam. Adan Igeh Hussein, of the Somali European Forum, was quoted as explaining the exodus in this way: he said Somalis felt “bullied by a forced assimilation policy, which orders them to live apart in scattered housing.
“It’s not that the British are more friendly than the Dutch, it is just that they let us stay as we are. Somalis can integrate without losing their cultural identity,” he said.
Adan Hassan, the Somali owner of a Tilburg internet cafe, said Holland’s image had always been an illusion. “We’ve been here for 12 or 15 years. The government gives us housing; it spends a lot of money, but it’s still been a failure. After one year in Britain, everybody is very happy.” Half of Tilburg’s 3,000 Somalis have already left, mostly crowding together on a few streets in Leicester.
Denmark has also seen an exodus of Somalis, with up to 4,000 leaving for Britain from Aarhus over two years. A Danish study found that migrants were shocked by Britain’s poor housing and dirty streets, but still clung to an “idyllic” vision of English freedom “even after arriving.” Academic studies estimate that there are now 70,000 to 100,000 Somalis in
Britain. Officially the figure is 20,000. Meanwhile, the French government reports that invaders trying to reach Britain by stowing away on lorries in Calais have doubled in number in the past year. More than 2,000 a month are now trying to smuggle themselves over the Channel, their figures show. French ministers are said to be considering bringing in the army to beef up port security in response to the growing pressure.
The number of illegal immigrants trying their luck has risen to 6,031 in the first three months of this year. This compares with 2,919 caught by port security services trying to gain access to trucks queuing for ferries between January and March last year.
The disclosure of the rapidly climbing numbers brought warnings that the developing crisis is reminiscent of “the worst days of Sangatte.” A Red Cross refugee centre at the village just outside Calais was shut down in 2002 amid a row over its role as a magnet for would-be illegal immigrants.
Britain was eventually forced to accept many of its residents as asylum seekers in return for a French decision to shut the Sangatte site. In the 14 months before the hostel closed a single ferry line, P&O, a spokesman said they had found 6,800 stowaways in the backs of lorries. This meant that around 500 a month had succeeded in penetrating security.
The latest figures were made public by Calais port security chief Herve Couret, who told regional paper Nord Littoral that three out of four migrants arrested were caught trying to break into or board lorries.
A further 1,501 were caught on video surveillance trying to jump fences, he said. Mr Couret said: “It’s very serious. But this is not the most worrying thing. I am really angry about the rise of another phenomenon — 1,304 unauthorised people were caught in 231 refrigerated lorries. These people are getting sick in the lorries.” News Source
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A police officer is critically ill in hospital after suffering "life-threatening head injuries" while tackling burglary suspects.
Three people - a 26-year-old man, 19-year-old man and a 21-year-old woman - were arrested at the scene in east London. Police were called in the early hours of Saturday to reports of an aggravated burglary in Dagenham. The suspects escaped the scene in a silver Chrysler, which failed to stop for officers in an armed response vehicle in Stratford town centre. Police followed the vehicle in the direction of Leytonstone High Road and a male suspect ran off when it stopped briefly.
Shortly afterwards, the Chrysler was pulled over in Ashlin Road, Newham. It was then that an officer in his thirties left the armed response vehicle and sustained serious head injuries. It is not yet clear how the officer - a member of the Met Police's CO19 firearms unit - was injured. However, a Scotland Yard spokesman said he had not been shot or stabbed. He was rushed by ambulance to an East London hospital, where his condition was described as critical.
Two other officers, both Newham borough police constables, sustained minor injuries as the Chrysler rammed a BMW police car in a bid to leave the scene. Three people in the Chrysler were arrested and taken to east London police stations where they remain in custody. Detective Chief Inspector Mick Broster said: "We're investigating a serious incident that has left a police officer with life-threatening injuries. News Source
Sunday Roundup: Highlights of the News this week
Don't want hear? Don't want to see? Don't want to speak out?
It's time time you did and loudly at the polling booth!
Eight gipsy families were celebrating last night after moving into £150,000 bungalows in a £2million gated community. One grinned: “It’s great the drives are already nicely tarmaced.” But their arrival caused fury among people living on the surrounding council estate, who claim the travellers have been given preferential treatment. The gipsies were handed new three-bedroom homes in Hackney, East London, after being forced to abandon their caravans on the 2012 Olympics site a mile away.
And so Bob Quick, the Yard's Assistant Commissioner for anti-terrrorism, resigns - admittedly to a well-padded pension. Yes, he had made a very serious, if very human, error. And of course, had form: he was the officer at the centre of the brouhaha over the arrest of Damian Green, the Tories' immigration spokesman. The reason that Mr Quick had to go, said the Metropolitan Police Authority, was that he had lost 'credibility'. Fair enough. But what about the credibility of his boss, Jacqui Smith, who is responsible for law and order in Britain?
You could have been forgiven for thinking that the woman being interviewed on Radio 4's Today programme the other morning was a little housewife trying to explain how she had muddled up her grocery money. Simpering was the word that came to mind as Home Secretary Jacqui Smith began her 'poor little me' tour of the TV and radio stations, trying to dismiss her outrageous expenses scam as a minor misdemeanour. 'I made a bad mistake and I'm very, very sowwy,' she repeated, all Tammy Wynette's Stand-By-Your-Man, complete with a Jonathan Ross lisp.
The number of migrants caught trying to sneak into Britain on ferries has more than doubled in the past year, French border officials revealed. Statistics show a 106 per cent jump in the number of economic immigrants and asylum seekers trying to breach security at the ferry port in Calais.
How typical of Tony Blair. He's been a Roman Catholic for only 20 minutes, yet he's already lecturing the Pope on how to 'modernise' the founding Church of Christendom, so as to make its doctrines more congenial to Anthony Charles Lynton Blair. I honestly think the poor man has gone mad. He really does seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that he's God.
As if charities weren't politicised enough already the Government is proposing to make the situation worse. It is handing over £700,000 for them to use for publicity campaigns lobbying politicians. Perhaps the Government hope that by handing over this money they may get a more helpful political tone from such campaigns. In any event charities with any sense will reject this poisoned chalice.
Having steadfastly refused to ask a white actor to "black up" for decades, the National Theatre has taken the concept of "colour-blind casting" a stage further. "Colour-blind casting seems to work only one way," complains a white actor who has made several appearances at the National. "Not only can we not play black characters, now we're not even allowed to play whites."
Labour is facing its biggest threat from the BNP, Harriet Harman admits today, as the party gears up to prevent the far right group from winning its first seats in nationwide elections this June for the European Parliament. In an interview with The Independent Ms Harman, the Leader of the Commons, who is heading Labour's election effort in in her role as the party's chairman and deputy leader, said Labour was launching its biggest-ever campaign targeting the BNP.
Labour is mobilising at local level wherever there is a sign of heavy BNP activity. National funding has been provided for "Stop the BNP" leaflets, and Labour uses a different slogan – "fairness not fear" – rather than its national theme of "winning the fight for Britain's future". It is also linking up with anti-fascist groups such as Searchlight and sending anti-BNP battlebuses into areas targeted by the group. However, Labour leaders have rejected calls from many of their own MPs to launch a full-frontal national attack on the BNP, fearing that would merely play into the party's hands by giving it "the oxygen of publicity". [...] Some Labour MPs fear the party will pay a price for neglecting white working-class voters.
A judge has condemned the Government's record on deporting illegal immigrants, claiming he has repeatedly recommended criminals be deported - only to walk past them in the street months later. Commenting on Judge Jacobs' comments, a Home Office spokeswoman said: 'We will not tolerate those that come here and break the law and last year we removed a record number of foreign prisoners. This year we will remove more.
'Any non-EEA foreign national sentenced to 12 months or more is now automatically be considered for deportation, regardless of whether or not a judge has made a recommendation for deportation.' She added: 'We have immigration teams working alongside the Prison Service to ensure that those that come here and break the rules are removed as quickly as possible. 'About one in five foreign prisoners are removed direct from prison and deported 180 days before their release date.'
The scandalous exploitation of Britain's lax student visas rules by a suspected Al Qaeda cell erupted into a huge diplomatic row today between Gordon Brown and Pakistan. The Prime Minister declared that Pakistan 'has to do more to root out terrorist elements in its country' in the wake of the revelation that 11 of the 12 suspects had travelled to Britain from the country. But at least 10 of the 12 were allowed to enter by the Home Office after successfully applying for student visas.
Only two weeks ago, immigration minister Phil Woolas declared: 'Abuse of the student visa has been the biggest abuse of the system, the major loophole in Britain's border controls.' Such recognition was long overdue - but, alarmingly, it appears to have come far too late. Yesterday it emerged that ten of the 12 terror suspects seized are believed to have arrived from Pakistan on perfectly legal student visas rubber-stamped by the Home Office.
The remorseless decline of Britain as an independent, morally self-confident nation continues to accelerate. Democracy is crumbling and we live in a land without either justice or sovereignty. Two of the most malign forces in our collapse have been the growing power of Europe’s unelected bureaucrats and the increasing reluctance of the State to punish offenders. The surrender by our politicians to Brussels means we no longer control our destiny.
A councillor is facing political ruin after he pleaded guilty to 11 counts of fraud. Cllr Vijay Shah, Wembley Central ward, changed his plea to guilty at St Albans Crown Court on Wednesday following the 11 charges of financial fraud. Cllr Shah, 45, of Clayton Avenue, Wembley, who initially refuted the allegations, was arrested in March 2008 on suspicion of fraud by abuse of position in relation to a company in Hertfordshire.
A paedophile councillor admitted a string of child pornography charges - two-and-a-half years after being arrested. David Charles, 60, from Cranham, pleaded guilty to 16 counts of possessing vile images of youngsters, Snaresbrook Crown Court heard. Charles, a councillor in the St Andrew's ward in Hornchurch, quit the Conservative Party following his arrest at home by officers from the Havering child abuse investigation team in June 2006. Since then he has been an independent councillor.
Three sons of the firebrand Islamic preacher Abu Hamza could face jail after yesterday admitting taking part in a £1million stolen car fraud. Hamza Kamel, 22, Mohamed Mostafa, 27, and their 28-year-old step brother Mohssin Ghailam used the cash to fund a 'party lifestyle'. One of the co-accused also admitted possession of cocaine with intent to supply.
Mahatma Gandhi once said: "Hypocrisy and distortion are passing currents under the name of religion." Tony Blair, take note. First he declared that the Pope was wrong on homosexuality, then he had the temerity to suggest that the Roman Catholic church reorganise in the same way as the Labour Party did. So, cardinals, there you have it. Forget your Papal encyclicals: all you need is a red rose, some pledge cards, and a few soundbites to restore your church to its rightful place at the centre of the moral order.
There is a very real possibility that Gordon Brown will cut and run and call a General Election for 4th June — the very same day as the European and County Council Elections, according to the British National Party’s election officer Eddy Butler. “With unemployment likely to rocket over the coming year, Labour strategists are believed to be weighing the prospects of going early to minimise their losses.
Ten MP's who act as anti-sleaze watchdogs claimed £4million in expenses. An investigation found members of the all-party Committee on Standards and Privileges have drawn £4,047,325 since joining in July 2005. This is on top of the MP’s salary of £64,000. Three committee members claimed the full £23,083 “second home” allowance last year. A fourth pocketed just £1,000 short of the ceiling.
There's an interesting blog which I've only just come across written by the new Head of Media at the EU Commission's office in London. It gives a revealing insight into the frankly arrogant view of the media often taken by the EU institutions. It turns out that the reason the EU gets a bad press, as far as the EU's press officers are concerned, is not that it is a costly, unaccountable, corruption-ridden, wasteful and anti-democratic monstrosity after all. Oh no, it is because journalists are too busy, ill-informed and prejudiced to give it a fair hearing.
The appalling care given to the elderly by council home helps has been exposed in an undercover investigation. Secret filming revealed a string of shocking incidents including an elderly woman left lying in her own excrement for 24 hours after helpers forgot about her. Another woman was badly bruised after being hit in the face twice with a hoist, while an elderly man was denied a shower or bath for six months and fed a diet of cold spaghetti, sandwiches and Quavers crisps.
Labour's school reforms have destroyed English as a subject and denied children the chance to read books, according to a teachers' leader. Pupils are encouraged to study short extracts of novels to pass exams at the expense of a more comprehensive appreciation of literature, it was claimed.
MPs rely on our inertia to continue to line their pockets. When pension companies start hacking back the pensions of their own employees, you can be sure that the whole system is in serious trouble. The United Kingdom's edifice of retirement funding, built on the sands of irresponsible Micawberism, is falling apart.
Shocking video footage of a man being shoved to the ground by a police officer just moments before he died during the G20 protests has been released. Ian Tomlinson, a newspaper vendor, is seen walking through a throng of police officers with his hands in his pockets when one officer - seemingly unprovoked - lunges at him from behind. The 47-year-old is then shown falling heavily to the floor. He remonstrates with the officers before being helped to his feet by passers-by. But just moments after the assault, Mr Tomlinson suffered a heart attack and died.
One in every four burglars caught by police is escaping with a 'slap on the wrist', it emerged last night. Critics said the Government should begin handing out stiffer sentences to deter housebreakers, rather than giving families B&Q vouchers to buy cut-price window locks. Home Secretary Jacqui 'Sink plug' Smith said she wanted to encourage householders to better protect their property to prevent a recession crime wave taking hold. Smith revealed on Monday that every family would be offered a 10 per cent discount voucher to buy security devices.
Eastern European migrants travelling to Britain will face restrictions for the next two years to prevent a surge in unemployment benefit claims during the economic downturn. Immigration Minister Phil Woolas will today announce that Poles and other Eastern bloc job-seekers will have to sign the Worker Registration Scheme until 2011. It will prevent any newcomers from claiming out-of-.work benefits until they have been employed and paying tax in Britain for 12 months. Mr Woolas will say: 'Migration only works if it benefits the British people, and we are determined to make sure that is what happens.'
But it dosen't benefit British People at all, it puts a strain on the infrastructure and all our resources!! Then, it's the British people that suffer the consequences whilst being told to be tolerant, tolerant for going without, tolerant by sliding down housing lists, tolerant for having to wait longer on NHS lists, tolerant at surgeries and tolerant when our kids education suffer assuming you can get them a place at your local school! So a big NO. immigration does not benefit this country at all. It costs the taxpayer and raises council taxes too! Not to mention the freebies they get at taxpayers expense! The government then passes the buck for their own failings. We are fed up to the back teeth with all the LIES! (Ed)
Significant tax cuts for millions of pensioners with savings who are the 'innocent victims' of the recession have been ruled out by Alistair Darling. The Chancellor is preparing to offer only limited help to savers in this month's Budget despite pressure from the Conservatives and campaigners for a massive package of assistance. He has dismissed the idea of scrapping basic-rate income tax on savings income, Treasury sources said today.
Ethnic minorities could receive extra help during the recession following Government fears they will be hardest hit as the economy deteriorates. Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell announced a controversial drive to ensure ethnic minority workers are not 'left behind'. He warned that employment levels amongst ethnic minorities fell by ten percentage points in the 1990s recession, more than other groups.
Brown has been accused of being in "full retreat" over his recession-fighting strategy amid signs that any further fiscal stimulus measures would be severely limited by worsening economic conditions. The Prime Minister indicated the need for further cash injections to help kickstart growth had to be set against the need to balance the books in future years. The Tories claimed that Mr Brown's remarks were the latest indication that their opposition to borrowing Britain's way out of the downturn had been proved correct.
The richest member of the cabinet is claiming every penny of his taxpayer-funded second home expenses - despite having use of a luxurious grace and favour castle. The Northern Ireland Secretary Shaun Woodward, who is married to the supermarket heiress Camilla Sainsbury, claimed the maximum £23,083 under the controversial additional cost allowance. Mr Woodwood, who owns a string of luxury properties around the world, has access to Hillsborough Castle, the 18th-century mansion built by the 1st Marquis of Downshire, which is worth £88 million. It costs up to £5 million a year to run and has an annual entertainment budget of nearly £250,000.
Backbench MPs spent more than £1.4million on “fact-finding” visits to exotic destinations, documents revealed yesterday. Spectacular locations for the “inquiries” by House of Commons select committees included Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Shanghai, New York, Sydney and Barcelona. Accommodation in five-star hotels, first-class flights and a daily cash allowance for “extras” are all provided from Treasury funds.
A former mayor has been jailed for 12 months after stealing nearly £60,000 to help pay off her online poker. Jayne Armstrong-Yeomans, 49, resorted to robbing from a social club, where she ran the bar, after becoming addicted to online poker and racking up gambling debts of more than £60,000. The former Labour party councillor, who was mayor of Carlisle from 1993 until 1994, wept at the city's Crown Court, where she was sentenced to 12 months for theft.
Four men accused of taking part in the 1994 Rwandan genocide won their High Court battle against extradition from Britain today. Two judges ruled that there was 'a real risk they would suffer a flagrant denial of justice' if returned to Rwanda to face trial. Vincent Bajinya, who had changed his name to Brown, Celestin Ugirashebuja, Emmanuel Nteziryayo and Charles Munyaneza were arrested in London, Essex, Manchester and Bedford.
A leading Church of England bishop who is to resign after 15 years in the post said he has no regrets about controversial statements he has made. The Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, said his decision to resign was a spiritual one. The Church's first non-white diocesan bishop is set to retire in September. Last year, he received death threats after saying some areas of the UK had become no-go areas for non-Muslims because of Islamic extremism.
A new twist in the tale of Tony Blair’s Iraq dossier has exposed the blatant double standard that the government applies to disclosing ‘confidential’ information. Freedom of information (FOI) requests and court papers showing UK complicity in torture will be blocked. But when publication serves a minister’s purpose of scoring a political point –– no problem.
Gordon Brown was dragged into the Westminster expenses row last night after questions were raised about his claims for more than £100,000 in second-home allowances despite having two grace-and-favour properties. House of Commons figures show that Mr Brown has claimed a total of £116,234 in the Additional Cost Allowance for running a second home since 2001, when details of MPs’ expenses started being published.
Greedy MPs have secretly slapped a five per cent limit on price rises in the taxpayer-subsidised bars, restaurants and cafeterias of Westminster, it emerged last night. As a result, they will escape the crippling price hikes of up to 18 per cent faced by the public in supermarkets and other stores across the country. Taxpayers will be forced to pay an extra £5million a year to bankroll the exclusive food and drink.
Commons Speaker Michael Martin was embroiled in a new expenses row last night over a string of jaunts to exotic destinations that cost taxpayers nearly £150,000.Documents released under Freedom of Information laws showed that the 63-year-old Glasgow North East MP and his wife Mary visited Hawaii, the Bahamas, New York and Rome. On every trip except one Mr Martin travelled first class or business class and clocked up more than 105,000 miles in 16 trips.
The inquiry into reforming the system of MPs' pay and expenses is to be televised, the BBC has learned. The Committee on Standards in Public Life will let the cameras in when it takes evidence in June and July. Chairman Sir Christopher Kelly intends to complete his review before the end of the year.
One in four older people feel their quality of life has deteriorated in the last year, a report reveals today. Loneliness and depression are major problems while the care system is on the brink of collapse, it warns. In addition, the economic crisis is making it harder for pensioners to make ends meet, with many cutting back on essentials such as heating. Nearly 2.5million people aged 65 and over said they felt their lives were getting worse, 400,000 more than a year ago, according to the newly-formed charity Age Concern and Help the Aged.
Older people's lives are getting worse and they suffer greater discrimination than ever, according to a new report. The economic crisis is impacting on their ability to make ends meet and pay for basic amenities like heating, it said. Around one in four (24%) people aged 65 and over said their quality of life had got worse in the last 12 months while another 66% said it had not improved at all. The poll of 1,000 people forms the basis of a report from the newly-formed charity, Age Concern and Help the Aged.
James Clappison owns 22 houses which he rents out yet has pocketed £97,892 in Commons allowances intended to pay for a second home. Labour MP Ian Gibson blasted: "Some folk have so much money they simply don't need a foot up from taxpayers." Mr Clappison, the MP for Hertsmere, Herts, claimed the cash for seven years. He has not broken Parliamentary rules. More than 130 MPs are believed to rent out at least one property and Margaret Beckett is the latest Cabinet name highlighted.
Britain will soon be worse off than when Labour ministers had to go cap in hand to the IMF in 1976, a Government-owned bank warned last night. And the Royal Bank of Scotland predicted it would take a decade for the UK’s finances to recover from the ravages of the recession and the huge cost of Gordon Brown’s bank bail-outs and stimulus packages. Analysts at the RBS – now 68 per cent owned by the Treasury – said the country’s annual budget deficit would reach 11 per cent of the total economy by next year. That compares with just seven per cent when Britain neared bankruptcy in the mid-1970s and had to beg for an international loan.
As long as there is Terror the elite will make money out of it, create draconian laws and oppress the people of this land! That is why they encourage it as this short article demonstrates. It’s a sure sign the inmates are running the asylum when terror suspects are paid £60 a week jobseekers’ allowance out of our hard-earned taxes. As a script for a TV sitcom it would be rejected as a ludicrous fantasy. But this is reality – Britain under a Labour Government whose boasts of tough action are a smokescreen for incompetence and naivety.
Up to 10,000 highly-skilled migrants are in line for millions of pounds in compensation from the taxpayer because they were made to wait an extra year before they were allowed to settle in Britain for good. The foreign nationals had originally been told they would have to live in Britain for four years before being given leave to remain permanently - in recognition of their superior qualifications - but the Home Office later decided to extend this to five years to bring them in line with other immigrants.
The EU’s “Common Fisheries Policy” was brought into being after Conservative Party leader Edward Heath took this country into the EEC in 1973 and gave away Britain’s fishing waters in 1973. This policy has now been brought to its logical conclusion with the “Proceeds of Crime Act” now being used to jail fishermen who even accidentally exceed their “EU quotas.” Two respected fishermen from Northern Ireland, Charlie McBride and his son Charles, have been jailed in Walton Prison, Liverpool, for their crime of trying to make a living.
BNP activists in the South East have launched what can only be described as a ‘killer’ anti-Conservative Party leaflet, aimed at persuading doubting voters who are thinking of voting Tory to change their minds. What exactly are the Conservatives conserving? Do they care about Your Country? Or are they exactly like Labour? The leaflet is available in PDF format here.
Because they were never serious in their campaign and the only sole motive is to prevent the BNP making headway! This is too, why Ukip was formed in the first place however the public have seen through them! Members of the European Parliament elected under a new left-wing anti-EU platform will not go to Brussels but campaign in Britain instead, organisers confirmed this week.
An eco-minded resident was told to cut her recycling or pay £90 when she bought extra bins for her rubbish. Helen Butcher, 67, was warned to cut the amount of green waste she puts outside her house because it takes too much time for binmen to empty the brown wheelie bins. Campaigners said the draconian penalties were merely an excuse for town hall bullies to squeeze more cash out of hard-pressed families.
A nuclear recycling plant has incurred costs of more than £1.2 billion and is still not working properly, it has emerged. The mixed-oxide (Mox) plant at Sellafield, which was approved by the Government despite concerns over its cost, was supposed to produce 120 tons of fuel a year and return a profit of £200 million in its lifetime. However, figures released to Parliament by the Government show that it has produced just 6.3 tons of fuel in seven years and racked up £626 million of operating costs. It also cost £637 million in construction and commission costs.
Unemployment in the UK will reach 3.2m by 2010 as the recession deepens, the British Chambers of Commerce has warned. In its latest quarterly survey of 6,500 firms, the BCC said that manufacturers are being hit hardest by the downturn as help from a weak pound is offset by slumping demand. The UK economy will shrink by more than 3pc in 2009, it added.
One in every four criminals spared jail by being put in a privately-run bail hostel reoffends or has to be sent back to prison, it emerged yesterday. The revelations will reignite the controversy over the use of the hostels which are placed in residential streets with little or no consultation.
An 11-year-old boy known only as Abdullah has been dubbed the world's youngest terrorist after he was arrested wearing a suicide vest. The boy, who is originally from Peshawar in Pakistan, has become Afghanistan's youngest terror suspect. He is being held at one of the country's top security prisons, operated by Kabul's Intelligence Service. He is said to have chosen a Kalashnikov as a weapon because he found a pistol's trigger too difficult to pull. He is an orphan and his voice has not yet broken.
Brown Borrows to save Britain but still money finds itself abroad. Who is paying for this? You are of course! Britain is to announce £100 million of funding for an ambitious scheme to rebuild southern Africa's infrastructure. The North-South Corridor is an attempt to create a network stretching from South Africa in the south to the Democratic Republic of Congo and Tanzania in the north, with spurs running off to ports on the Atlantic and Indian oceans.
Former Labour Cabinet minister Paul Boateng is returning from his post as Britain's High Commissioner in South Africa amid claims his domestic staff were bullied by his wife, it emerged last night. Boateng was the first Black High Commissioner and his appointment was seen as a breakthrough in the diplomatic service after he gave up his role as Chief Secretary to the Treasury when Tony Blair asked him in 2005. The hugely-sensitive allegations against his 52-year-old wife Janet, involve staff who work at his official residences in Cape Town and Pretoria.
A controversial Jersey politician who claimed officials on the island covered up child abuse has been arrested at his home. Whistle-blower Stuart Syvret was arrested at 9.10am on Monday in the parish of Grouville in connection with an alleged breach of data protection law, according to sources. The 43-year-old senator remains in custody helping police with their inquiries.
Britain needs to find £39 billion more than planned if it is to meet its goal of a balanced budget by the 2015/16 tax year, the Institute for Fiscal Studies said on today. The sum amounts to a further £1,250 in higher taxes or lower spending per family, and involves roughly twice the fiscal tightening Chancellor Alistair Darling pencilled into his November pre-budget report.
The Inland Revenue's telephone service is a 'massive mess' with mistakes ignored and letters binned, according to a whistleblower. Staff are told to ignore errors in people's records to save time and ensure call targets are met, the woman has told ITV's Tonight programme. Queries sent in by post often disappear or are thrown in the bin, without being looked at by revenue staff, it is also claimed.
Job seekers have been asked to take part in an 'humiliating' Easter egg hunt - to win prizes to help them get back into work. JobCentre bosses have invited more than 150 unemployed people to search for 35 chocolate eggs containing prizes such as job application forms. The eggs contain prizes including an application form to become a security guard, a payment for a licence to work on building sites and vouchers to buy job interview clothes from Burton or Dorothy Perkins.
Housing minister Margaret Beckett has today become the latest Cabinet minister to be embroiled in the 'three homes' loophole row. Chancellor Alistair Darling, Transport Secretary Geoff Hoon and Mrs Beckett have all been accused of pocketing cash from renting out London flats, while living in grace-and-favour homes and claiming expenses on a third home. They face calls to pay back money earned for their second homes. All three have denied breaching Commons rules.
The scandal of MPs’ expenses widened across the Cabinet last night after a senior minister admitted using taxpayer funds to run three homes. Transport Secretary Geoff Hoon insisted no Commons rules were broken while he lived rent-free in a grace-and-favour apartment, claimed allowances for his constituency property and rented out his London house. But critics described the taxpayer funding for two homes for some ministers “barmy”.
Jacqui Smith admitted to feeling “mortified” over her adult film scandal yesterday as it emerged she also claimed for the cost of a barbecue. In her first interview since the row over claims for the two films viewed by her husband, the Home Secretary said the Westminster allowances system needed a total overhaul. She said: “I was angry and mortified that I had done it, that we had done it.
More than £8million of taxpayers' money was spent on pay-offs for health bosses in a shake-up of the NHS in a single county, it was revealed today. The total could have paid for 1,091 heart bypasses, or 1,097 hip replacements, or 1,137 knee replacements, or 7,765 varicose vein procedures. Around 120 senior managers took the pay-offs when seven primary care trusts in Hampshire were merged into one. One manager took as much as £130,000 to leave the NHS.
Free houses, no tax and homes purchased on the backs of ordinary taxpayers: this is how the parasitic Tory, Labour and Lib-Dem members of parliament sneer at the public as they literally steal millions from their voters. The latest example of this morally corrupt gang is Labour MP Geoff Hoon. It turns out that he has claimed expenses on his constituency house and rented out his London home — while living in a third palatial grace-and-favour apartment in Whitehall.
Foreigners carried out one in six rapes in Britain last year, police figures have revealed. And migrant workers, illegal immigrants and even tourists were responsible for up to a third of all sex attacks in some areas. In Greater London, the worst area affected, foreigners were charged in connection with one in three rapes, statistics obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show. Other areas with large immigration populations – Cambridgeshire, Merseyside, Hertfordshire, Avon and Somerset – also recorded high numbers of non-UK citizens charged with sex attacks. Police blame the influx of eastern Europeans into Britain following EU enlargement in 2004 for compounding the problem and have called for tougher border controls.
Terror suspects under house arrest are claiming up to £60.50 a week in Jobseeker’s Allowance. In the latest example of soft-touch Britain, 22 out of 23 extremists who applied for the state benefit received it. Yet none of them is available for work. Severe restrictions are placed on their movement because they are deemed a risk to national security. The taxpayer-funded handouts last night sparked outrage among politicians and campaign groups who said it was yet another reminder of why extremists hellbent on destroying Western civilisation make a beeline for Britain.
Interview with Mohamed Sab'awi - a young sociologist from the catholic university in Lille, Algerian by birth French by naturalization. "Our peaceful invasion of European has not yet been completed. We intend to act in all countries simultaneously. Because you give us more and more space, it would be foolish of us not to take advantage of this… We will be your Trojan horse. You've become hostages to the very human rights which you are claiming. For example, if you were to speak to me in Algeria or in Saudi Arabia, as I speak to you now, you'd be most likely arrested on the spot.
Muslim worshippers at about 200 old mosques in Mecca have been praying in the wrong direction for decades because the mosques were not built correctly, a Saudi newspaper said on Sunday. The mosques were not built precisely based on the qibla, the official alignment with the holy Kaaba shrine at the centre of Mecca's Al-Haram mosque, according to the report in the Saudi Gazette.
The head of a British-based charity that funded a Bangladesh Islamic school where weapons and explosives were found has been held by police. Briton Faisal Mustafa - who runs the London-based Green Crescent charity - was held for questioning along with an aide, said a spokesman for the Rapid Action Battalion, a special anti-crime force.
Britain is far deeper in recession than the government expected, and the country is unlikely to return to economic growth until the end of the year. Speaking to The Sunday Times, finance minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling said that he would be forced to revise his economic forecasts lower when he presents Britain's annual budget on April 22.
Thousands who lost their job in the recession are being forced to pay for Government services which help them back to work. Dozens of telephone helplines operated by the Department for Work and Pensions charge callers up to 40p a minute. One of them is the Jobseeker Direct line, the main JobCentre service which helps people find vacancies and apply for jobs.
Lie detector tests have long been regarded as the technological equivalent of crystal ball gazing or fortune telling. Instead of crossing palms with silver, you criss-cross the body with sensors and believe the results at your peril. The polygraph, however, is now emerging from the shadows of such daytime TV trash as The Jeremy Kyle Show, where it is trumpeted into ugly domestic squabbles as “the all-important lie detector test”.
£32 million — that is how much British taxpayers might have to cough up for what is billed as “the biggest illegal immigrant detention centre in all of Europe” which the Government is considering building in rural England at Bullingdon, near Bicester, Oxfordshire. The Tory controlled Cherwell District Council approved the building of the centre last Thursday, showing that both Labour and Conservative parties are one and the same when it comes to betraying Britain.
A Government-funded charity was at the centre of a row last night after a magazine it publishes for children appeared to depict Christians as Islamaphobes who regard Muslims as terrorists. In a cartoon strip, a boy wearing a large cross around his neck is shown telling a friend that a smiling Muslim girl in a veil looks like a terrorist. He later confronts her and shouts: ‘Hey, whatever your name is, what are you hiding under your turban?’ She replies that the garment is called a hijab and it is part of her religion, ‘like that cross you wear’.
Plants and trees are growing faster because of rising carbon dioxide levels, potentially buying Earth more time to address global warming, according to scientists. The phenomenon has been discovered in a variety of flora, ranging from tropical rainforests to British sugar beet crops. It means they are soaking up at least some of the billions of tons of CO2 released into the atmosphere by humans that would otherwise be accelerating the rate of climate change. Plants survive by extracting CO2 from the air and using sunlight to convert it into proteins and sugars.
Fishermen have been ruined and sent to jail thanks to a ruthless war waged by the marine agency. We now know where the EU's Common Fisheries Policy, brought into being after Edward Heath gave away Britain's fishing waters in 1973, has ended up. The answer is in Walton Prison, Liverpool, a notoriously tough jail where two respected fishermen from Northern Ireland, Charlie McBride and his son Charles, are currently incarcerated.
Britain is suffering because we have been too willing to forget what made us who we are, writes Michael Nazir-Ali. I have resigned as Bishop of Rochester after nearly 15 years. During that time, I have watched the nation drift further and further away from its Christian moorings.
Government lawyers have ordered police to abandon an investigation into alleged corruption involving senior Customs officials. The inquiry – which has cost the taxpayer at least £5.5million – examined Customs officers’ handling of a fraud probe in which millions of pounds worth of alcohol was smuggled into Britain without duty being paid. The fraud is estimated to have cost the taxman £1.25billion. However, the cases fell apart when it was revealed that the officers had encouraged the offences in a sting operation.
The Cabinet Minister who sent Britain's Armed Forces into the Iraq war claimed expenses on his constituency house and rented out his London home - while living throughout the conflict in a palatial grace-and-favour apartment in Whitehall. Former Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, now Transport Secretary in Gordon Brown's Government, lived rent-free for three-and-a-half years in Admiralty House, London, once occupied by Winston Churchill.
MPs are avoiding stamp duty of more than £10,000 on second and third homes by claiming it back on their parliamentary expenses. They are claiming it in addition to furnishings and mortgage interest payments for homes they are allowed to keep after leaving parliament. The exemption from one of Labour’s most unpopular taxes is revealed in more than 1m receipts for MPs’ claims due to be published this summer. Details of the perk will further inflame public anger over MPs’ funding of private homes at public expense. David Cameron, the Conservative leader, indicated this weekend that he will give up the second home allowance if he becomes prime minister.
Rudi VIis, the north London MP who is stepping down at the next election, has used his parliamentary expenses to help buy a £520,000 home for his retirement near the Suffolk coast. Vis, 68, has taken out a mortgage on his London home to pay for the country property. Interest payments on the loan are funded out of his parliamentary expenses. “The rules are questionable,” Vis said this weekend. “But this is well within the rules and I would have been advised if it wasn’t.”
Peers are booking private dining rooms at the House of Lords on behalf of business clients or their own companies, it can be revealed. Senior members of the second chamber including Lord Foulkes, the former Scottish Secretary, and Lord Baker, the former Home Secretary, are among those who have used parliamentary facilities to wine and dine colleagues or clients.
NHS hospitals that fail to meet even the most basic healthcare standards are being “rewarded”, it emerged last night. The Government had promised that only the best hospitals would be granted prestigious foundation trust status, giving them the freedom to run their own affairs and for senior managers to award themselves huge pay rises. Yet 22 hospitals have been given the grading in the past three years despite racking up a string of serious failings.
Patients will be banned from having their intimate health records deleted from the controversial new NHS national medical database. The NHS is now uploading millions of people’s medical histories on to its Summary Care Record (SCR) system. Within two years, GP surgeries, hospitals, pharmacies, ambulancemen and other NHS officials across the country will have instant access to everyone’s health records.
Seven MPs have been condemned for going on a £70,000 trip to New Zealand to investigate binge-drinking – with some of them staying on beyond the trip’s official end to enjoy a taxpayer-subsidised holiday. The members of the Commons Health Committee flew business-class 11,000 miles to Auckland to find out how New Zealand’s health service copes with people who drink too much. Five Labour MPs, one Liberal Democrat and an Independent spent up to five nights in upmarket hotels.
A married backbench MP couple are making £571,939.41 a year from the taxpayer in salaries and expenses. Peter Robinson, 60, and his wife Iris, 59, are paid six salaries between them because they have seats at both Westminster and the Northern Ireland Assembly, where Mr Robinson is First Minister. In addition, four relatives of the couple are paid up to £150,000 in salaries out of their allowances. They both claim the controversial second homes allowance, despite living together in east Belfast. Last year they claimed a total of £40,342 on their £490,000 home.
World Bank President and Bilderberg elitist Robert Zoellick openly admitted the plan to eliminate national sovereignty and impose a global government during a speech on the eve of the G20 summit. Speaking about the agenda to increase not just funding but power for international organizations on the back of the financial crisis, Zoellick stated, “If leaders are serious about creating new global responsibilities or governance, let them start by modernising multilateralism to empower the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank Group to monitor national policies.” In other words, give global institutions the power to regulate national policy as part of the creation of global government.
The foreign prisoner scandal which continues to plague Britain and costs taxpayers at least £400 million per year, is the direct result of lax border controls as implemented by successive Tory and Labour regimes. Figures published by the Home Office show there are now in excess of 12,000 foreign prisoners in British jails, making up over sixteen percent of the entire jail population. There are even two prisons set aside just for foreign prisoners — Bullwood Hall in Wales and Canterbury prison in England.
A senior British judge has made a stinging attack on the European Court of Human Rights, accusing it of seeking to create a "federal law of Europe". Lord Hoffmann, the second most senior Law Lord, accused the Court of going beyond its jurisdiction and imposing "uniform rules" on states. He said rulings that had gone against domestic decisions were "teaching grandmothers to suck eggs".
Britain's banks were last night accused of ripping off the very people who have bailed them out to the tune of billions of pounds. Taxpayers are being charged up to 21 per cent interest for some personal loans. Among those charging customers prohibitive rates for amounts as low as £2,000 are Lloyds TSB, Yorkshire Bank, Clydesdale Bank and Royal Bank of Scotland owned NatWest.
Britain will send up to 1,000 more troops to Afghanistan after Barack Obama warned yesterday that al-Qaeda had Europe in its sights. The US President demanded more forces to flush out terrorists using safe havens to launch attacks on Western targets. He told Nato leaders it was in everyone’s interest to bring democracy to the Afghan badlands.
Alistair Darling warned Gordon Brown not to 'oversell' his G20 summit deal yesterday as he admitted it would not stop unemployment spiralling. The Chancellor said there would be no 'overnight fix' to the recession as questions grew about the fine print of the $1trillion rescue package agreed by world leaders in London on Thursday. Close inspection suggested much of the money Mr Brown said would be injected into the global economy involved re-announcements and half-done deals.
IT was once described as a “chocolate box” village whose residents felt blessed to live in such a picture-perfect place. Their children all went to the local school, where they received an excellent education and where parents joined together for harvest festivals and Christmas concerts. But within the past six years — since the arrival of hundreds of gypsies in the area — Crays Hill Primary School near Billericay in Essex has seen its reputation plummet.
Police should avoid walking through the centre of Croydon on their own because of the threat of being attacked, the Metropolitan Police Federation warned this week. The call came after figures obtained by the Advertiser showed the number of assaults on police officers has risen dramatically over the past two years.
The foreign prisoner scandal which continues to plague Britain and costs taxpayers at least £400 million per year, is the direct result of lax border controls as implemented by successive Tory and Labour regimes. Figures published by the Home Office show there are now in excess of 12,000 foreign prisoners in British jails, making up over sixteen percent of the entire jail population. There are even two prisons set aside just for foreign prisoners — Bullwood Hall in Wales and Canterbury prison in England.
This ground-breaking event will be televised and broadcast LIVE on this website. Questions may be submitted to our panellists on the day via the website, or at the event itself as part of the live studio audience. Questions TimeLive Internet BroadcastThe British National Party will be Broadcasting it's own LIVE Question Time on their Website
Should have taught them a LESSON and let them go under!! Britain's banks were last night accused of ripping off the very people who have bailed them out to the tune of billions of pounds. Taxpayers are being charged up to 21 per cent interest for some personal loans. Among those charging customers prohibitive rates for amounts as low as £2,000 are Lloyds TSB, Yorkshire Bank, Clydesdale Bank and Royal Bank of Scotland-owned NatWest.
Pakistani Taliban militant leader Baituallah Mehsud today claimed responsibility for the gun attack on a U.S. immigration centre which left 13 people dead and four in a critical condition. U.S. officials were not immediately available for comment about Mehsud's claim, but Pakistani security analysts dismissed it as a publicity stunt.
Britain will send up to 1,000 more troops to Afghanistan after Barack Obama warned yesterday that al-Qaeda had Europe in its sights. The US President demanded more forces to flush out terrorists using safe havens to launch attacks on Western targets. He told Nato leaders it was in everyone’s interest to bring democracy to the Afghan badlands.
Alistair Darling warned Gordon Brown not to 'oversell' his G20 summit deal yesterday as he admitted it would not stop unemployment spiralling. The Chancellor said there would be no 'overnight fix' to the recession as questions grew about the fine print of the $1trillion rescue package agreed by world leaders in London on Thursday.
IT was once described as a “chocolate box” village whose residents felt blessed to live in such a picture-perfect place. Their children all went to the local school, where they received an excellent education and where parents joined together for harvest festivals and Christmas concerts. But within the past six years — since the arrival of hundreds of gypsies in the area — Crays Hill Primary School near Billericay in Essex has seen its reputation plummet.
Police should avoid walking through the centre of Croydon on their own because of the threat of being attacked, the Metropolitan Police Federation warned this week. The call came after figures obtained by the Advertiser showed the number of assaults on police officers has risen dramatically over the past two years.
Some hard-up families are facing the prospect of malnutrition due to the recession and soaring food prices, a charity has warned. Save the Children said inadequate benefit payments combined with massive price hikes for staple foods like rice and sausages mean some families could not afford decent food. The warning comes as figures from The Grocer magazine show food prices have risen by nearly a fifth over the past year. Save the Children's Colette Marshall told the BBC: "We are facing a crisis. "Benefits simply haven't been enough and with rising food costs this means that families cannot afford to give their children proper decent food.
Saturday 11th April 2009
Eight gipsy families were celebrating last night after moving into £150,000 bungalows in a £2million gated community.
One grinned: “It’s great the drives are already nicely tarmaced.”
But their arrival caused fury among people living on the surrounding council estate, who claim the travellers have been given preferential treatment.
The gipsies were handed new three-bedroom homes in Hackney, East London, after being forced to abandon their caravans on the 2012 Olympics site a mile away.
As they moved in, they were spotted unloading TVs and fittings from smart vehicles including a Mercedes and 4x4s.
Proud mothers flung open patio doors on to turfed gardens.
But one resident on the surrounding Millfields estate said: “It is completely over the top. I’ve lived here for 30 years and never missed a day’s rent. But I can’t even get my kitchen fixed.”
Another Millfields tenant said: “When I found out what these homes will have — a fitted kitchen with fridges and ovens — I broke down in tears.”
Mum-of-four Catherine Ryan, 46, who lives in a housing association terrace opposite, said: “Giving them such nice big houses in such a poor area is going to stir up a lot of resentment.”
A spokesman for the travellers said: “We were turfed off our old site and split up as a family group, so we deserved something in return.”
The LDA said the gipsies had been on the Olympic site for 13 years and the new community was “the best way to deal with it”. News Source
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An interesting headline in the Daily Star today to greet voters on their way to vote in today's Moston by-election in Manchester. Despite there being an undoubted security cock-up behind this headline you have to at least respect Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick for falling on his sword so swiftly.
Notice how one of the locations where arrests and searches have taken place is the sleepy Lancashire town of Clitheroe.
A place where the BNP had fought tooth and nail to stop the establishment of a most unwanted mosque.
Now it would seem, the liberals and the treacherous politicians and clergymen can fully appreciate the fruits of their labour.
Focusing on some London-related news there is much talk today about Mayor Boris Johnson scrapping the orgy of anti-white racism also known as the Rise Festival.
The Guardian amongst other outlets speculates that this is a political decision on behalf of the Mayor but in fact it is constitutional. Think about it, how can Greater London Assembly money be utilised to vilify and abuse a political party that has elected representation on the London Assembly? The left just cannot accept that times have changed.
Meanwhile I think you will like this little piece which is particularly relevant to myself as during a tour of the London Olympic site recently our coach was strategically halted and this obscenity proudly pointed out to us:
Recruiting sergeants for the BNP
Why the hell did the London Development Authority house eight gypsy families in a £2 million gated community in sight of one of the capital's most deprived council estates?
It's part of the LDA's plan to clear land for the London Olympics in 2012. The gypsies had occupied a site a mile away for over a decade, the council wanted rid of them to build - well, we don't know, a beach volleyball court, perhaps...
and offered each family a £150k 3-bedroom bungalow to clear off.
The gypsies were also given £4500 each for the inconvenience of having to live with other gypsies for a year while their new residences were prepared, plus an £8500 relocation bonus.
Each home comes complete with fitted kitchen, fridge and oven. The gated site has its own warden, a rarity in Hackney.
The Sun reports the bafflement of settled residents as they watched their new neighbours unpacking their belongings from traditional gypsy vehicles (a Mercedes and several SUV 4x4s).
One local said that she paid her rent to the council every week for thirty years but has been unable to get the authority to fix her kitchen.
Another said "giving them such nice big houses in such a poor area is going to stir up a lot of resentment."
You're not joking. Meanwhile New Labour and its media elite wonder why extremist groups like the British National Party are enjoying improved poll standings in parts of Britain. News Source
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And so Bob Quick, the Yard's Assistant Commissioner for anti-terrrorism, resigns - admittedly to a well-padded pension.
Yes, he had made a very serious, if very human, error. And of course, had form: he was the officer at the centre of the brouhaha over the arrest of Damian Green, the Tories' immigration spokesman.
The reason that Mr Quick had to go, said the Metropolitan Police Authority, was that he had lost 'credibility'.
Fair enough. But what about the credibility of his boss, Jacqui Smith, who is responsible for law and order in Britain?
She has blatantly committed fraud with her expenses. Lied about the use of her sister's home as her main residence. And still has the brass neck to insist that she had observed both the letter and the 'spirit' of the parliamentary rules.
Bob Quick's resignation was an arguably unavoidable move by a hard-working, if incompetent, policeman.
The fact that Miss Smith can't see she has done any wrong, and clearly doesn't dream of resigning, provides a fascinating, if disturbing, insight into just how far the political class has become removed from the values of the people it represents. News Source
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Ease up.. Jacqui only ever made one mistake as an MP
Like the other sleazebags with their noses in the trough she got caught!
You could have been forgiven for thinking that the woman being interviewed on Radio 4's Today programme the other morning was a little housewife trying to explain how she had muddled up her grocery money.
Simpering was the word that came to mind as Home Secretary Jacqui Smith began her 'poor little me' tour of the TV and radio stations, trying to dismiss her outrageous expenses scam as a minor misdemeanour.
'I made a bad mistake and I'm very, very sowwy,' she repeated, all Tammy Wynette's Stand-By-Your-Man, complete with a Jonathan Ross lisp.
Let us remind ourselves of what the apology is about. This is a woman who is paid £142,000 a year as a Minister of the Crown, yet has the temerity to claim tens of thousands in addition to cover the costs of running her 'second home' in her Redditch constituency while fatuously claiming a room in her sister's South London terrace house is her main residence.
She has demanded that taxpayers stump up for everything from a £2.50 toothbrush holder to a £104.56 patio heater and even the £10 spent by her husband to watch porn movies, while protesting that she is abiding both by the letter and spirit of Commons regulations on allowances.
I'm surprised she didn't charge us for her contraception.
And now, worst of all, she has resorted to the most pathetic, hypocritical and insincere defence of all. She says people are getting at her because she is a woman.
Ms Smith is one of New Labour's much-vaunted Blair Babes, a former teacher who has been promoted, I would suggest, to the one of the greatest offices of state because she is female.
Now she's suddenly playing her
poor little woman card to get out of trouble.
Appearing later on TV on Wednesday Ms Smith had clearly had a massive makeover. Her hair was freshly styled, she was wearing more make-up than Joan Collins and the look was almost soft and feminine - far from her normal slightly austere image.
But then Jacqui Smith was always a mess of contradictions.
She fights for women's freedoms yet denies the public their right to liberty by forcing 42 days detention without trial through the Commons, only for it to be thrown out by the Lords.
She seeks to make it easier to close down lap-dancing clubs and brothels, yet her husband watches porn movies in their home and claims them on the taxpayer.
This, after all, is the Home Secretary who lectures us on global warming, yet not only has a grotesquely energy-wasteful patio heater but expects us the taxpayers to foot the bill for its Size 12 carbon footprint.
Playing the little woman card is bad enough, but on Wednesday she repeatedly tried to stir up the class war.
She justified the lavish expenses by arguing that folk like her 'didn't already have a second home' - a puerile dig at the Tories.
Again and again she claimed her conscience was clear, that she had made only one mistake and could look her constituents in the eye.
The one consolation they can take is that, with a majority of less than 2,000 and facing almost certain defeat at the next election, she won't be looking any constituents in the eye for much longer. News Source
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The number of migrants caught trying to sneak into Britain on ferries has more than doubled in the past year, French border officials revealed.
Statistics show a 106 per cent jump in the number of economic immigrants and asylum seekers trying to breach security at the ferry port in Calais.
French immigration minister Eric Besson is even said to be considering sending in the army to cope with the rocketing numbers congregating at the port.
The numbers, reported in local paper Nord Littoral, reveal that more than 6,000 migrants have been turned over to French police between January and March 2009.
That figure compares with just under 3,000 in the same period last year - with the overwhelming majority discovered in the back of lorries heading to the UK.
Herve Couret, safety chief for the port, told the paper: 'Between January 1st and March 31 2009, 6,031 non-authorised personnel were handed over to port security forces.
'Between January 1 and March 31 2008, we handed over 2,919 of them,'
He revealed 75 per cent of them were hidden in the back of lorries, a figure which has also doubled since the same period last year A further 1,501 were caught on video surveillance trying to jump fences, he added.
'It's very serious - but this is not the most worrying thing,' he said. 'I am really angry about the rise of another phenomenon - 1,304 unauthorised people were caught in 231 refrigerated lorries. 'These people are getting sick in the lorries. This is quite new - people smugglers don't have any feeling.'
Channel Tunnel bosses also reported a 50 per cent rise in migrants from last year, again trying to sneak on lorries boarding the Eurotunnel freight trains.
Despite 11 miles of barbed wire security fences, officials for Eurotunnel said they are now apprehending around 5,000 migrants every year.
The increase is so alarming that Eurotunnel boss Jacques Gounon said he would welcome the army if they were sent in to guard the 700 hectare site.
He said: 'We are ready to welcome them on the site and to provide shelter for them. 'We are not frontier guards and we need to reinforce surveillance measures on the edge of the site.' News Source
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How typical of Tony Blair. He's been a Roman Catholic for only 20 minutes, yet he's already lecturing the Pope on how to 'modernise' the founding Church of Christendom, so as to make its doctrines more congenial to Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.
I honestly think the poor man has gone mad. He really does seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that he's God.
In an interview with the gay magazine Attitude, the former Prime Minister rebukes Benedict XVI for his 'entrenched' views on homosexuality, telling him that he must recognise how the world is changing and adapt accordingly.
Now, if you ask me, it's rather the point of a Church's moral teachings that they're bedded-in and resistant to the shifting breezes of public opinion and fashion. But, of course, 'entrenched' has always been a boo-word in Mr Blair's vocabulary. In his philosophy, any idea or institution that has stood the test of more than a couple of years must self-evidently need digging up and pulling to bits.
But I must let him explain himself in his own, hilarious, words, which must surely consign parodists to the dole queues for ever.
'Look,' he says, 'there are many good and great things the Catholic Church does, and there are many fantastic things this Pope stands for. But I think what is interesting is that if you went into any Catholic Church, particularly a well-attended one, on any Sunday here and did a poll of the congregation, you'd be surprised at how liberal-minded people were.'
Gee, Tony. How swell of you to say that the Church founded by St Peter, on the orders of God, does 'many good and great things'. And won't the Pope be flattered to hear that you think he stands for 'many fantastic things'?
But leave aside Mr Blair's monstrous impertinence and his flesh-creeping, folksy language. What emerges with ringing clarity from his interview is that he sees the Roman Catholic Church, to which he converted two years ago, in precisely the same way as he saw the Labour Party when he joined it. He regards it as an institution to be moulded in his own image, to spread the doctrines of Blairism to the four corners of the Earth.
Before I go an inch further, I should declare an interest: I, too, am a Roman Catholic - though an extremely bad one, and by birth rather than choice. I confess to feeling a little possessive about my Church (which is almost certainly a deadly sin) - and that's probably why it enrages me to hear Mr Blair treating it like some glorified political party, to be given the red-rose treatment and infused with his own moral relativism.
As far as I'm aware, this is a man who has never had any very firm opinions about either politics or religion - and still less anything that could be described as a principle. Indeed, it's one of the most remarkable things about him, and a large part of the secret of his success, that at no time during his leadership of the Labour Party would he have looked in the slightest bit out of place on the Conservative or LibDem benches.
Don't ask me why he chose to join Labour, rather than one of the other parties. Perhaps it was at Cherie's bidding, or because he calculated that Labour's time was coming and this was the party that would offer him his best hope of government office. All I can say is that it certainly wasn't because he was a Socialist, committed to anything remotely resembling a Labour principle.
In fact, as we all know, one of his first and most triumphant acts as leader was to rid the party of Clause IV of its constitution, which contained the guiding commitment of its founders to work towards the 'common ownership of the means of production and exchange'. He saw that statement of principle merely as an obstacle to his coming to power. Once it was out of the way, Labour became a blank slate on which he could write whatever he fancied. Today, he seems to be adopting precisely the same approach to his religion.
'Surely he's changed his ways? No? Silly me'
In my naive way, I foolishly imagined that this man who had voted in favour of abortion, introduced civil partnerships, scattered free condoms around our schools, lowered the age of homosexual consent to 16 and embarked on a bloody and unjust war (against the passionate urging of Pope John Paul II) . .. I imagined that this most amoral of politicians must have undergone a Damascene conversion before he was admitted to my Church. Surely, he'd resolved to change his ways, or we wouldn't have let him in.
Silly me. It's abundantly clear from his interview with Attitude that the only ways he wants to change are those of the Church itself, just as he changed the ways of Labour.
If you think I'm overstating my case, listen to his own inimitable words: 'I sometimes say that organised religions face the same dilemma as political parties when faced with changed circumstances. You can either hold your core vote, basically, you know, say: "Look, let's not break out, because if we break out we might lose what we've got, and at least what we've got, we've got, so let's keep it." Or you say: "Let's accept that the world is changing, and let us work out how we can lead that change, and actually reach out."'
What seriously puzzles me about Mr Blair, whom I've always thought an intelligent man, is where he's got hold of this idiotic notion that the Roman Catholic Church is a democracy, with a 'core vote', whose teachings can be changed by polling the congregation on a Sunday morning.
Yes, I'm quite sure he's right when he suggests that huge numbers of us are liberal-minded about homosexuality, just as vast numbers guiltily ignore the Vatican's strictures against contraception (not to mention the ban on masturbation, which the catechism ranks equally with fornication, pornography and sodomy as 'sins gravely contrary to chastity').
But only a man with the overweening arrogance of Mr Blair would expect the Church to reverse the teaching of two millennia because it doesn't happen to chime with the zeitgeist or the modernising views of one A.C.L. Blair (preposterously described by Attitude magazine as 'probably the most prominent pro-gay religious figure in the world'. 'Religious figure?' Do stop it. You'll only encourage him.)
'He won't rest until he's ground every last, ancient rock of certainty into dust'
You'd think that, as Mr Blair surveys the trail of destruction he's left behind him after his ten years of 'modernising' Britain - the vandalism of the Union, the politicisation of the civil service and judiciary, the corruption of the Lords and Commons into assemblies of powerless petty thieves, the ruin of the economy - he might have tired of this modernising lark.
But no, it seems he won't rest until he's ground every last, ancient rock of certainty into dust. Well, I predict that he'll find Rome rather less pliable than the Labour Party. But we shall see.
On this of all days, however, I must be charitable. So before I close, and as a service to Mr Blair's immortal soul, let me disabuse him of another strange notion he expresses in his interview.
'Actually,' he says, 'what people often forget about, for example, Jesus or, indeed, the Prophet Mohammed, is that their whole raison d'etre was to change the way that people thought traditionally.' Oh, dear. I'm afraid he's confusing them with himself again.
I know too little about Islam to pronounce on the Prophet. But I'm absolutely sure that it wasn't Our Lord's raison d'etre to 'change the way that people thought traditionally'.
Unless I've seriously misunderstood the teachings of our Church, His raison d'etre was to lay down his life for our sins, on the first Good Friday, and so to offer all mankind the chance of redemption.
Today, as I wrestle as usual with my doubts, I'll do my very best to say a prayer for poor, deluded Tony Blair. Well, no one said that this Catholicism business was meant to be easy. News Source
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As if charities weren't politicised enough already the Government is proposing to make the situation worse.
It is handing over £700,000 for them to use for publicity campaigns lobbying politicians. Perhaps the Government hope that by handing over this money they may get a more helpful political tone from such campaigns. In any event charities with any sense will reject this poisoned chalice.
When we give money to charities we are entitled to expect the money will go on practical help relevant to the concern of the chosen charity. We expect them to get on with the job - not ask the Government to do it for them.
We don't expect charities to use their funds schmoozing politicians or sitting down with creative types from advertising agencies and PR firms to spend vast sums on glitzy campaigns.
Given the recession, charities need all the goodwill they can get. A hugely important source of funds for the sector is the money people donate in wills. Far more is quietly donated in this way than in the more high profile efforts - £1.9bn every year. That is 30 times the sum raised by Comic Relief.
But the money left in wills fell by £66 million in the last three months of last year. Big further falls are predicted with the fall in house prices and shares.
So charities are becoming ever more aggressive in seeking to maintain their budgets. There’s a growing presence on the streets of so called ‘Chuggers,’ the charity muggers with clipboards who accost passers by, seeking to sign them up to a standing order. A sizeable chunk of any money you give goes to them in commission.
Often charities spends such a lot on administration that when their advertising spend is included only a minority of the money they are given goes on good works.
The NSPCC is one of those offenders. While it spends a fortune on advertising, often without any clear meaning, only a minority of its funds goes where it should - helping the victims.
At least the NSPCC's new chief executive, Andrew Flanagan, has accepted that its £250 million Full Stop campaign has not been the success that was hoped for and that greater priority should go to helping vulnerable children in future.
That is welcome. But other charities seem to going in the wrong direction, ever more bedazzled by the media than by the mundane work of actually helping people.
Often some of the things charities campaign for are at odds with their own stated aims. The Save the Children Fund has attacked Madonna for attempting to adopt a child from Malawi. They have also started giving money to children in Britain in what is generally seen as a gimmick.
The RSPB was founded in 1889 to prevent the ‘wanton destruction of birds.’ Yet they have now decided to support a windfarm building programme on the grounds that global warming is so serious that a few birds must be shredded for the greater good.
Christian Aid are among the worst offenders. They complain of ‘continued use of controversial economic policy conditions, such as trade liberalisation and privatisation’ in developing countries. Perhaps they prefer state ownership of land as the model for Christian harmony and feeding the hungry?
Their campaign for collectivism and protectionism is a formula for famine. They have also taken an interest in Middle East politics which is predictably one-sided, piling the blame onto Israel.
Jill Kirby, Director of the Centre for Policy Studies, feels the Charity Commission needs to tighten the rules. ‘From 1999 on, guidance offered by the commission to charities about their scope for campaigning has been increasingly generous,’ she says.
Its present guidelines, published last year, explicitly encourage charities to speak out, and express concern that the voluntary sector may have been held back from campaigning through fear of losing charitable status.
Because they 'command high levels of public trust and confidence,’ charities are 'uniquely placed' to campaign. Perhaps the commission should ask itself if the high levels of trust enjoyed by charities can be maintained in the face of increasing political activism.
In the mean time we should be setting our own stricter rules. We should keep on giving but make sure the money is not wasted. No more than 10 per cent should be going on administration - with nothing at all on lobbying, PR and political advertising.
Please go on giving - but ask some tough questions first. News Source
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Having steadfastly refused to ask a white actor to "black up" for decades, the National Theatre has taken the concept of "colour-blind casting" a stage further.
In its latest play, Death and the King's Horseman, by the Nobel Prize-winning playwright Wole Soyinka, black actors, including Lucian Msamati, "white up" to play stereotypical British colonials.
"Colour-blind casting seems to work only one way," complains a white actor who has made several appearances at the National.
"Not only can we not play black characters, now we're not even allowed to play whites."
Rufus Norris, the play's white director, insisted on an all-black cast. He has black actors playing the white rulers as caricatures who talk in clipped Noel Coward-style voices in the play, which is set in colonial Nigeria in 1943.
"He wanted it to be a reflection of genuine Nigerian tradition," says a spokesman for the National, who admits that the cast is, however, made up mainly of black British actors.
"The whole idea of ethnic casting is ridiculous and patronising," says Ronald Harwood, the Oscar-winning screenwriter and playwright, whose plays Collaboration and Taking Sides open in the West End next month.
"Take it to its logical conclusion and only a Jew could play Shylock and only a Scotsman Macbeth."
The National spokesman is keen to point out that white actors play non-white characters in its controversial play England People Very Nice. Significantly, perhaps, none of those roles involves the actors actually blacking up. News Source
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Labour is facing its biggest threat from the BNP, Harriet Harman admits today, as the party gears up to prevent the far right group from winning its first seats in nationwide elections this June for the European Parliament.
In an interview with The Independent Ms Harman, the Leader of the Commons, who is heading Labour's election effort in in her role as the party's chairman and deputy leader, said Labour was launching its biggest-ever campaign targeting the BNP.
"It is a worry," she said. "Certainly they are a bigger threat than they have been before."
Labour fears the BNP could land two or three seats in the European elections, which are fought under a proportional representation (PR) system based on huge regional constituencies. Labour believes the BNP threat is greatest in the North West, where its leader, Mr Nick Griffin, is a candidate; Yorkshire and the Humber and the East and West Midlands.
Labour is mobilising at local level wherever there is a sign of heavy BNP activity. National funding has been provided for "Stop the BNP" leaflets, and Labour uses a different slogan – "fairness not fear" – rather than its national theme of "winning the fight for Britain's future". It is also linking up with anti-fascist groups such as Searchlight and sending anti-BNP battlebuses into areas targeted by the group.
However, Labour leaders have rejected calls from many of their own MPs to launch a full-frontal national attack on the BNP, fearing that would merely play into the party's hands by giving it "the oxygen of publicity". [...]
[...] Some Labour MPs fear the party will pay a price for neglecting white working-class voters. Ms Harman is more diplomatic. "It is very important for the party to be active, to say to people we are on your doorstep, on the phone, on your side," she said. "The party is focused on the BNP in this election in a way it hasn't been previously. But the solution is not just mobilising young people or mobilising in a particular region."
All parties play down expectations ahead of such elections, in the hope they can claim on the night. they have performed better than expected. Labour officials insist they have reason to fear a "double whammy" this year: an anti-government protest vote due to the recession and a turnout which could easily drop to around 30 per cent. [...]
[...] Because of the recession, Ms Harman conceded that the June polls would be "challenging" for the Government, and acknowledged that it needed to explain how Gordon Brown's strong leadership at last week's G20 summit would help them in their daily lives.
Admitting people were "apprehensive" about the economy, she said: "People understand the argument Gordon is making about the need to take action. They have worries about how it will affect the future of public services. They have seen the investment going in, and know the Tories would cut it."
Ms Harman told Labour MPs at a private meeting that the June elections would be a "dry run" for the general election. In public, she played that down, knowing commentators will be eager to say heavy Labour losses in June mean the party cannot win a general election. She pointed out that Labour has done poorly in local and European contests before, only to win the following general election. "It is an opportunity to get our message across," she said."But it is a very different kettle of fish because of the turnout issue." She admitted Labour's budget would be tight – even though the party's treasurer, Jack Dromey, is her husband. "We are mobilising human resources," she said.
The BNP had raised £170,000 towards its £220,000 target for its campaign fund for the European elections. "This will be the day the people of this country say, 'that's it ... enough is enough!' and will vote for the British National Party in their millions," it said.
Election facts
- Elections take place on 4 June for the European Parliament and county councils.
- In the last European elections in 2004, the Tories won 27 seats and 27 per cent of the vote; Labour 19 seats (23 per cent); the UK Independence Party (Ukip) 12 seats (16 per cent) and the Liberal Democrats 12 seats (15 per cent).
- Ukip's fortunes have declined since. Labour and the Tories suspect most voters who switch from Ukip will go to the Tories, although Labour fears some could back the BNP.
- Some 2,300 council seats in 34 English local authorities will be contested – on 27 county councils and seven in all-purpose "unitary" authorities.
- There are no local elections in Scotland or Wales this year.
- The Tories, traditionally strong in the counties, are defending about 1,200 seats. Labour, which is defending about 490 seats, fears it will lose about half and lose control of all its four counties – Staffordshire, Lancashire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. The Liberal Democrats are defending about 500 seats.
Experts say the Tories need to win more than 40 per cent of the national vote to show David Cameron is on track to win the general election. News Source
Reader Submitted Link. Thank You Welshie
Sunday May 3rd 2009
Questions Time Live Internet Broadcast
The British National Party will be Broadcasting it's own LIVE Question Time on their Website
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The British National Party poses its biggest electoral threat yet as anger over job cuts and immigration grows, Harriet Harman warned yesterday.
She raised the alarm as the BNP snatched a surprise second place in a council by-election in one of its main target areas for the forthcoming polls for the European Parliament.
The BNP is almost certain to win two or three seats, which are fought under a proportional representation system based on huge regional constituencies.
And Labour Party chairman and deputy leader Miss Harman admitted: 'It is a worry. Certainly they are a bigger threat than they have been before.'
She delivered her warning after a campaign visit to the North West, one of the areas where the BNP is strongest and where its leader, Nick Griffin, is hopeful of becoming an MEP.
The BNP also has a strong presence in Yorkshire and the Humber and the East and West Midlands.
She said Labour's challenge was to persuade its supporters to vote even in supposedly safe seats. Under the complex PR formula for European elections, the BNP could land seats by winning between only nine and 12 per cent of the vote.
'The electoral system makes it more of a challenge for us,' she told The Independent newspaper. 'We are telling people every vote counts, to come out and vote or else they will let the BNP in.'
Proof of the threat in the North West came this week when the BNP came from nowhere to poll more than 23 per cent for a seat on Manchester City Council. Although Labour held the Moston ward, the Tories slumped to fourth place in what was their third best prospect of winning a seat on the authority.
Miss Harman attempted to paint the BNP as good campaigners but poor representatives. 'There is a pattern of them getting elected, [and] not delivering what they said they would," she said, while accepting that the recession would make the elections 'challenging' for Labour.
An admission: Old Labour MPs fear the party will pay the price for neglecting white working-class voters.
Greater concern, however, comes from the collapse in support for the UK Independence Party since the last elections five years ago.
In 2004, the anti-Brussels party won 12 seats with 16 per cent of the vote. Its supporters are now expected to switch either to the Tories or BNP, which has raised £170,000 towards its £220,000 target for its campaign fund for the European elections.
All parties play down expectations ahead of elections, but Labour officials insist they have reason to fear a 'double whammy' of an anti-government protest vote due to the recession and a turnout which could easily drop to around 30 per cent.
Miss Harman told Labour MPs at a private meeting that the campaign for the June polls would be a 'dry run' for the General Election. News Source
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A judge has condemned the Government's record on deporting illegal immigrants, claiming he has repeatedly recommended criminals be deported - only to walk past them in the street months later.
Judge Peter Jacobs said the Home Office still had much to do when it came to removing foreign criminals from the UK.
He said he was frustrated and angry after repeatedly recommending immigrants for deportation - only to spot them in the centre of Norwich months later.
Judge Jacobs spoke out as he jailed a West African woman who had lived and worked illegally in Norfolk for seven years.
He sentenced Jessica White, 22, for 10 months and ordered for her to be deported when she is released.
Judge Jacobs said 'I and my brother judges recommend people for deportation and then we walk along King Street or London Street and see them a few months later.'
'In this case we will have to wait and see.' [...]
[...] Commenting on Judge Jacobs' comments, a Home Office spokeswoman said: 'We will not tolerate those that come here and break the law and last year we removed a record number of foreign prisoners. This year we will remove more.
'Any non-EEA foreign national sentenced to 12 months or more is now automatically be considered for deportation, regardless of whether or not a judge has made a recommendation for deportation.'
She added: 'We have immigration teams working alongside the Prison Service to ensure that those that come here and break the rules are removed as quickly as possible.
'About one in five foreign prisoners are removed direct from prison and deported 180 days before their release date.' News Source
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Ignorance is Bliss..Government Passing the Buck as Usual
The scandalous exploitation of Britain's lax student visas rules by a suspected Al Qaeda cell erupted into a huge diplomatic row today between Gordon Brown and Pakistan.
The Prime Minister declared that Pakistan 'has to do more to root out terrorist elements in its country' in the wake of the revelation that 11 of the 12 suspects had travelled to Britain from the country.
But at least 10 of the 12 were allowed to enter by the Home Office after successfully applying for student visas.
As security forces in Britain carried out a desperate search for the terrorist bomb factory, Pakistan's High Commissioner to the United Kingdom said it was the UK that was guilty of not doing enough to carry out security checks on foreign students.
Wajid Shamsul Hasan said Pakistani authorities could help carry out background checks on student visa applicants but were not allowed to.
He said: 'It is at your end you have to do something more. Every day we are raiding people, we are arresting people, we are arresting suspects wherever we find them.'
The row will leave Mr Brown red-faced amid increasing concerns the Government has ignored repeated warnings about the dangers of both the student visa rules and bogus colleges.
Government figures showed 42,292 student visas were issued to Pakistani students between April 2004 and April 2008.
At the same time, it appears a supposed 2007 crackdown on bogus colleges - which charge foreign students thousands of pounds for fake academic courses - failed to detect the suspects seized this week in the North-West of England.
Only one is understood to have been studying at a reputable institution. Officials also believe they lied about their financial resources to evade a Home Office test of their ability to pay for their studies.
Immigration Minister Phil Woolas insisted today that foreign national students were checked against watchlists of criminals and suspects from other countries.
'It's naive to think that we don't check, we do work very closely with the Pakistan authorities, indeed we've been criticised for doing so,' he said - only a week after he said student visas were 'the major loophole in Britain's border controls'.
He told BBC Radio 4's PM programme today that there were 285 million people coming in and out of the country every year, including nearly 400,000 issued with student visas.
'We do have these systems of checking these people to the best of our ability and we are acknowledged in international police circles as being one of the best in the world,' he went on.
Mr Woolas said he had no detail of the arrests from this week but 'the fact of the matter' was that the individuals had been identified.
'But the serious point that the opposition parties and other commentators must address is that if they continue to oppose our electronic borders system, then not only will there be loopholes, there will be a gaping chasm and we would not be able to protect the public.' News Source
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Only two weeks ago, immigration minister Phil Woolas declared: 'Abuse of the student visa has been the biggest abuse of the system, the major loophole in Britain's border controls.'
Such recognition was long overdue - but, alarmingly, it appears to have come far too late.
Yesterday it emerged that ten of the 12 terror suspects seized are believed to have arrived from Pakistan on perfectly legal student visas rubber-stamped by the Home Office.
With an astonishing 10,000 such visas handed out every year in Pakistan which has been called 'the terrorism capital of the world' who knows how many sleeper cells have made their way to the UK?
The problems with the student visa system are numerous - not least the fact that it struggles to cope with the enormous pressures placed upon it.
The excellence of the UK's universities and colleges means that youngsters from across the globe wish to be educated here.
British embassies receive thousands of applications every day.
They are under pressure to hit Whitehall targets for efficiency, so they must make their decisions very quickly.
The claims are rubber-stamped at the rate of 980 a day, or 358,000 a year.
This means that those determined
to abuse the system have seized the opportunity.
Applications have flooded in from countries such as Pakistan, with potential students sometimes claiming bogus qualifications from colleges in their homeland to bolster their academic records.
In many cases, officials were, quite simply, overwhelmed and let them through.
Of course, these students needed 'places of learning' to attend in Britain. The result? An estimated 2,000 'bogus' colleges - often little more than flats above a shop - have sprung up.
The fake foreign students secured a place at these colleges, in return for a few thousand pounds, and in they came - often never to return to their homeland again.
Figures from 2006 showed 98 per cent of applications for extension of leave to remain in Britain were granted and only 2 per cent were rejected.
Other 'students' didn't bother with the legal route, and simply stayed even though their permission to remain had expired.
Last year, a leaked memo revealed immigration staff were highly unlikely to attempt to track them down.
The Government has repeatedly promised to crack down on this abuse. Another blitz has been promised by Mr Woolas, who is now making any establishment that wishes to import students sign up to a Home Office sponsorship scheme.
What is so chilling about this week's developments is that it appears the laxity of student visas is no longer seen as an immigration ruse - it is a route into the UK for terror.
It is not yet clear precisely when the ten suspects picked up this week arrived, but all the signs point to the last one or two years.
This means they will have undergone a series of supposedly tough immigration checks introduced since 2007.
So how did the Government fail to spot the warning signs? Officials will be frantically searching for the answers.
Mr Woolas is quite right to say that the student visa system was a mess - but what precisely will the damage to Britain prove to be? News Source
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The remorseless decline of Britain as an independent, morally self-confident nation continues to accelerate.
Democracy is crumbling and
we live in a land without either justice or sovereignty.
Two of the most malign forces in our collapse have been the growing power of Europe’s unelected bureaucrats and the increasing reluctance of the State to punish offenders. The surrender by our politicians to Brussels means we no longer control our destiny.
The governance of our country and even our laws are decided by a continental elite unaccountable to the British electorate. In the same enfeebled manner our politicians have lost the courage to fight criminality, with the result that hardened offenders know they have little to fear from the courts or police.
These two destructive forces came together this week in the Government’s outrageous proposal to give prisoners the vote.
Since the Forfeiture Act of 1870 all inmates have been excluded from participation in the ballot on the grounds that a voting ban is part of their punishment.
Almost 140 years of British tradition and common sense
have been overthrown by a combination of Brussels diktat and socialist ideology.
Under pressure from the European Court of Human Rights Labour has announced all convicts serving less than four years, including thousands of rapists, killers and serial burglars, should be given the right to vote.
This makes a mockery of our democratic integrity and basic concept of justice. It is absurd that our laws are being constantly rewritten by unelected foreign officials without the British public having any say. We are now treated like the oppressed people of an imperial colony, forced to submit to the rule of alien governors who, wallowing in Left-wing ideology, imagine themselves more “enlightened” than the natives.
If this proposal were to be put before the British public it would rightly be thrown out immediately.
Law-abiding, taxpaying citizens understand far better than the preening, selfstyled “liberal” judges of the European Court or cowardly Labour politicians that effective punishment must involve the deprivation of liberty.
The right to vote is one of the basic freedoms in a democracy.
By their actions criminals forfeit that right and should only be allowed to regain it once they have paid their dues to society by serving their time. Participation in elections requires a spirit of civic responsibility.
By definition serious offenders have demonstrated no such responsibility so it would be an absurdity to treat them the same as other voters when they are inside.
It is telling that the campaign to give prisoners the vote was led by ex-convict John Hirst, who killed his landlady with an axe in 1979 and was given a 15-year sentence for manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, though he ended up serving 25 years because of other violent offences committed inside prison.
Before his release in 2004 Hirst had taken his case to the European Court, claiming his human rights had been infringed by the withdrawal of his right to vote. The court eventually found in his favour, leading to the Government’s
announcement.
With his gruesome record
Hirst is hardly an inspiring moral symbol.
And we can be sure that the Government’s move will result only in a clamour for yet more prisoners’ rights. This is not the end but only the beginning. Ministers said only convicts serving less than four years will be given the vote but it is inevitable that the franchise will soon be extended to cover all inmates, including monsters such as Rosemary West and Peter Sutcliffe.
We will then have the bizarre situation of politicians courting the convicts’ vote, trying to canvass the opinions of inmates or even making promises about sentences.
In some constituencies, such as the Isle of Wight where there are more than 1,500 inmates, the size of the prisoners’ vote could prove crucial in certain contests. A ratchet effect will be seen throughout our prisons as a result of this measure, leading to a host of other concessions. The so-called “right to family life” will inevitably mean convicts wanting to become fathers will be able to claim state-funded IVF treatment for partners.
Indeed, the European Court ruled in one sickening recent case that convicted killer Kirk Dickson should be paid damages because he had been prevented by his incarceration from fathering a child through IVF with his wife. In the same way there will be pressure for convicts to be given welfare handouts, more generous privileges, longer home visits and shorter sentences.
The prison regime is already far too soft. The concept of punishment has been so drastically watered down as to be almost meaningless. Convicts have televisions, games consoles, telephones and choice of menus, while drugs are widely available. In some places staff are almost treated as subservient.
Glyn Travis, assistant general secretary of the Prison Officers Association, said last year: “Prison is no longer a deterrent. It is merely an occupational hazard for serious criminals.”
There’s no greater indictment of the laxity of our prisons than the case of Ali Majilat, a Romanian who raped a woman so he could go to jail, having heard about the “easy and comfortable conditions” from his brother Dominic, who is also serving a sentence for rape.
The award of the vote to prisoners will further weaken discipline in jails. Once again the rights of the public have been sacrificed to uphold the rights of society’s enemies. News Source
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A teenager who shot a teacher in the face with a pellet gun has been given a 15-day suspension as punishment.
The female English teacher was hit after she approached the 15-year-old in the school corridor.
The local authority said the pellet gun was not fired maliciously and the teacher, named as Miss Atkins, was not seriously hurt by the pellet.
That is irrelevant! What was he doing with a weapon on the premises? (Ed)
But she is said to be so distressed she is leaving the school this summer.
The short-term suspension has caused uproar among parents at Beal High School in Ilford, Essex. Many are furious the pupil, understood to be the son of a teaching assistant, will be allowed to return after the Easter holidays.
The incident happened as the teacher approached a small group of pupils who had gathered in a corridor between lessons.
One of them was holding a pellet gun. Miss Atkins approached them to see what they were doing. A scuffle ensued and the gun went off - hitting her between the eyes.
A 14-year-old pupil who was in a classroom next to the shooting said: 'Someone came running into our lesson and said this teacher was shot. He said a group of pupils were playing with a toy gun, and were aiming for someone else, but it hit the teacher in the face.
'The teacher was very upset, she cried and cried.'
The Year 10 pupil will return to school after Easter. His classmates who helped conceal the pellet gun were given brief suspensions and have already returned to school.
Meanwhile Miss Atkins, who returned to work days later, is 'extremely upset' by the incident on March 17. She only started teaching at the comprehensive in September, but has told the school she will leave this summer and already has another job lined up.
One parent, who did not want to be named, said: 'It was very lucky the teacher was not badly hurt. The lad should have been expelled - not just suspended.'
Iqbal Pnag, 44, who has two children at Beal High School, said: 'It is surprising that he is being allowed to return to school. To suspend him for three weeks is nothing. He shouldn't be allowed to come back.'
Last night John Bangs, head of education at the National Union of Teachers, said any children who use physical violence against teachers should be expelled.
He said: 'There have to be very clear lines over which children must not tread. Violence on teachers should lead in the vast majority of cases to exclusion.
'That message is very important, not only to the child involved, but for other children at the school.'
Last night Redbridge Council defended the actions taken by the school over the 'isolated incident'.
A spokesman said: 'This was not a malicious act, however the behaviour was wrong and potentially dangerous.
'The school took the matter extremely seriously and carried out a thorough investigation immediately which involved talking to a number of pupils involved and some parents.
'The pupils involved have since expressed remorse for their actions and apologised to the teacher concerned. All of the pupils involved have received or will be receiving fixed term exclusions and one pupil was excluded from the school for 15 days.'
The Met Police said they were aware of the incident, but did not attend the school when it happened. News Source
Friday 10th April 2009
Two Midland MPs have been named as among the worst elected representatives in the country who have failed to show up for large numbers of Commons committees.
Sion Simon, the Labour MP for Erdington, managed to get to just 29.7 per cent of meetings of the treasury committee. Although he became the Government’s Further Education Minister in October, figures released by Parliament show he attended only 11 of 37 meetings in the 12 months to November 2008.
Shrewsbury’s Tory MP Daniel Kawczynski is listed as present at just 12.5 per cent of the justice committee and 31.3 per cent of the international development committee. He has claimed the figures are wrong.
At least 60 of 220 members on the most powerful committees examining public spending and services have missed at least half of all meetings in the last year.
The figure has sparked concern among select committee chairmen that MPs are shirking responsibilities and failing to properly hold government to account.
Phil Willis, chairman of the Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee, said: “I think it is the job of members to attend.”
Commons committees are cross-party groups responsible for scrutinising public expenditure and policies. They are made up of mainly back-bench MPs. Mr Simon said: ‘‘It is a ridiculous non-story. It’s like saying every MP should be in the Chamber for every debate.
Select committees do not work like that. They are just one of a range of tools MPs can use. There is no reason whatsoever to priorities select committee meetings above the other work of an MP.
“I pick my meetings and was an active and effective member of the committee. I work for the people of Erdington and the Labour Government; not the Treasury Select Committee.’’
Mr Kawczynski did not respond to calls to his office but told The Times the figure for his attendance at the international development committee was wrong and that he had not attended the justice committee because the two clashed.
Meanwhile, Birmingham MP Gisela Stuart defended foreign trips by Commons committee members to sunny climes which have cost taxpayers £1.3 million in the last year alone.
Committee members have jetted off to California, Bali, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands on overseas “fact-finding” trips.
One MP went on 11 foreign visits last year. The Taxpayer’s Alliance has said the amount of money lavished on foreign trips seemed “excessive and frivolous”.
Edgbaston MP Mrs Stuart’s foreign affairs committee spent £231,023 last year on foreign trips, including the Caribbean holiday island of Bermuda.
But the back-bench Labour MP said her visit to the Falkland Islands as part of the committee’s work last May was modest and involved little luxury.
“We flew most of the way by military plane and stayed in fairly basic bed and breakfast accommodation,” she said. “It was far from lavish or excessive.
“The trip to Bermuda led to the suspension of the government in the Turks and Caicos Islands because of corruption.
“These trips cost a lot of money but if you were to ask me whether the trips provided good value, then the answer would be yes.”
Other trips included a £48,000 junket to South Africa by the justice committee to look at the role of the prison officer abroad.
Matthew Elliott, of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, said: “Every parliamentary trip should be scrutinised to see if it is really worthwhile.” News Source
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A councillor is facing political ruin after he pleaded guilty to 11 counts of fraud.
Cllr Vijay Shah, Wembley Central ward, changed his plea to guilty at St Albans Crown Court on Wednesday following the 11 charges of financial fraud.
Cllr Shah, 45, of Clayto