UKIP@Large Episode 1

This was released when I was on holiday and unable to share it ...

John Redwood abandons his principles

John Redwood has joined the ranks of Tories who profess to be eurosceptic but have come out in support their party's pro-EU policy of reforming the EU, not leaving it.

Redwood joins the likes of William Hague, Roger Helmer and Dan Hannan in selling the Tory con of repatriating powers from the EU - something that simply isn't possible to do - to convince eurosceptics that there's still a chance of the Tories rediscovering their eurosceptic roots.

You can read John Redwood abandoning his principles here and my comment is as follows:

I disagree, first, with the suggestion that polling shows the electorate is not about to elect a UKIP MP. The last couple of by-elections UKIP has contested have shown a massive increase in support for the party and UKIP have finished ahead of the Conservatives.

Secondly, your idea that we should renegotiate is all well and good but it can never happen. The EU is on a one-way street, it’s not possible to repatriate powers from Brussels. Any superficial repatriation of power will require a much bigger handover of power to secure it. Taking back any power from the EU requires the unanimous agreement of all EU member states and that will never happen because they’re all lead by eurofederalists.

Thirdly (and most importantly), there will never be a meaningful change for the better in our relationship with the EU because your leader is raging europhile himself. He supports ever-closer union, he supports the continued loss of sovereignty to the EU, he supports the massive bailouts we can’t afford to keep the euro afloat, he supports the continued £77bn annual financial cost of EU membership and he abhors the idea of democracy. Maybe if you could purge the Conervative leadership of europhiles I could just about believe that there was an outside chance that the Conservatives might possibly make a vague effort to at least stem the tide of lost sovereignty to the EU but with this bunch of europhile traitors, there’s more chance of Greece getting a AAA credit rating by Christmas than there is of the Conservatives becoming even vaguely eurosceptic.

You’re not naive John so I can only assume that you’ve decided to follow Dan Hannan’s lead and try and con the electorate to prop up your party.

Redwood has replied to a number of comments defending the Tories and talking down UKIP but not mine ...

Desperate ECB president fails to inspire

The president of the EU Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, is desperate for the most recent Greek bailout package to be approved, saying the implementation of the agreement to bail out Greece was "of essence".

Trichet was upbeat about the future of the EUro and the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, Jean-Claude Juncker (who is chair of the EUrozone finance ministers), is confident that all the countries demanding collateral for their loans won't scupper the deal.

Nigel Farage was at the meeting and posted this comment to Facebook:

Trichet's speech did not inspire. Even in a room full of EU staffers it was met with silence. Do they know the game is up?

If Trichet can't even motivate a room full of rabid EUrophiles and EU/ECB employees then that doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

The EU said back in June that there is no Plan B where Greece is concerned, I hope for their sakes they were bluffing!

Peterborough LibLabCon taking councillor allowances

Prospective LibLabCon councillors in Peterborough are being told to give part of their allowances to their parties to help pay for campaigning if they get elected.

Labour are telling candidates they will have to donate 10% of their allowances to their local Labour Party if they are elected, the Tories expect their candidates to give a minimum of £300 per year if elected and the Lib Dems advise their candidates (it's not compulsory but the application form asks if they will so it's obvious which candidates won't be selected) to donate unspecified amounts.

The Peterborough branch of UKIP doesn't ask candidates to agree to donate part of their allowances and its Chairman, Robin Talbot, told Peterborough Today that if councillors don't need all their allowances then they could take less and council tax could be cut.

Iceland - doing what Moron Brown *should* have done.

I read in today's Mail On Sunday that Iceland maybe about to repay the money to their UK savers that was 'lost' when their banks collapsed.

Iceland set to pay back British debt 'in months' following massive sale of retail stakes
www.dailymail.co.uk

How are they doing this? Are the Icelandic taxpayers going to be fleeced by their government to pay back this money? After all that is how UK banks 'paid back' their debts - Gordon Brown gave them a blank cheque that UK taxpayers will be working for years and years to pay off.

Gordon Brown not only make the UK taxpayer refund these gamblers losses - but also made us pay out as if they had WON their gamble !!

No, the people of Iceland are not so stupid as to follow Moron Browns example. Their government were actually very keen to do so, but the Icelandic people refused point blank. Threats of doom were ignored, and their government were powerless to force them to pay.

Now the Icelandic government are doing what Moron Brown should have done -- they are selling off some of the failed banks assets and using the money to pay back the UK investors. So who loses? The banks *shareholders* (bondholders) the people who undertook the gamble and *LOST*.

They lose their stake and get *NO* winnings - that is what happens when you back a loser in the normal world - it is only the UK's (and EU's) mad politicians that think when rich people lose a bet they should be paid out anyway. Not only paid out, but paid out from innocent taxpayers money - the poorest taxpayer paying out winnings on a bet that was not only lost, but the taxpayer was never any part of!

We - the UK taxpayer - owe the people of Iceland a huge debt, as they are *proof* that Browns solution was not the only choice. Not only that, but that Browns solution was the *worst* choice.

First blogged at http://free-english-people.blogspot.com/2011/08/iceland-doing-what-moron-brown-should.html

Gold or €uro - where would you put your money?

With all the talk about the imminent collapse of the €uro, there's one important piece of €uro-trivia that the media seems to have forgotten.

When the great saviour of the human race, Gordon Brown, sold all our gold reserves having announced it in advance and depressing the gold price to a fraction of its real value, he ploughed the proceeds into €uro!

So not only did he lose the taxpayer £7bn with the gold sell-off, he then invested the money in a failing currency that was doomed from inception.  Way to go Gordo!

Cameron says no EU referendum

Cast Iron Dave's political private secretary has told a Conservative member from Oxford who was threatening to resign over his broken Cast Iron Guarantee™ to hold a referendum on the EU Constitution/Lisbon Treaty that there will not be a referendum on membership of the EU.

The letter says that we should celebrate the EU's "useful work" in equipping us for global competitiveness, global warming and global poverty.  What it doesn't say is that before we joined the EU, we were part of the largest trading block the world has ever seen - the Commonwealth - and that EU economic policy has produced the vanity project that is the mortally wounded €uro.  It also doesn't say that through EU regulations and the stupidity of the British government, what's left of our industry is being legislated out of existence by environmental laws based the global warming climate change global climate disruption myths perpetuated by corrupt "scientists" who are motivated by greed making millions from the scam.  It also fails to mention that thanks to the Common Agricultural Policy - which costs one third of all the money the EU extorts from the taxpayer - is the biggest cause of poverty in Africa.

The letter goes on to say that we don't need a referendum on membership of the EU because we already had one in 1975 and that was a resounding "yes" and because most people, apparently, don't want to say yes or no.

The referendum in 1975 - which nobody currently under the age of 53 was able to vote in - was on the UK joining the Common Market (or so the proles were told), not a political union with an EU government that can make laws that supercede our own.  Most people voted yes because they were conned by Ted Heath, the biggest traitor since Lord Haw Haw.  In a referendum today most people would vote to leave the EU, there is no doubt about that.  But if there is doubt in the minds of Cast Iron Dave and the europhiles he has surrounded himself with in the Conservative & _٨^European Unionist Party then all they have to do is ask the electorate what they want in a referendum!

If Cameron says there is no way we will be having a referendum on EU membership, why bother setting up the ePetitions website?  The outcome of the debate on EU membership that will come from the EU referendum petition getting 100,000 signatures is obviously going to be irrelevant.

Petition the British government (not that it'll make much difference!)

The British government's ePetitions site has gone live today and failed spectacularly.  Even this late in the day it's still crashing more often than not as it's not been scaled adequately for the feeding frenzy that was inevitable for its launch.  Should have hosted it in a cloud with some other online services that have an annual peak later on in the year and used the latent capacity.

Sorry, should have posted a geek alert.

I've signed a few petitions tonight.  Obviously I think they're all important in one way or another otherwise I wouldn't have signed them but these are my top three so please sign them too!

• Britain wants referendum to leave EU
  The Daily Express is crusading to end Britain’s membership of the European Union. We want the Government to arrange for an orderly withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the EU either by means of an enabling referendum or directly so that the British people are once again placed in charge of their own political destiny. We would like this matter debated in parliament.
• Creation of an English Parliament
  That England be given within the framework of devolution the same national political institutions as Scotland, including the creation of a Parliament, the office of First Minister, of a Government and a dedicated civil service for all of a united England. At present, England has no purely English national political institutions and thereby suffers from unfair treatment within the UK. The creation or revival of a English Parliament will answer the question 'Who speaks for England?' and should ensure that the interests of all the people of England are given higher priority and greater care. As John Bright famously said: 'England is the Mother of all Parliaments'. It is well time that England regained her own Parliament.
• Reinstate the hereditary peers
  A petition for the reinstatement of the hereditary peers to the house of lords, whos right to sit and vote in the upper chamber was abolished under the house of lords act 1999.

The reasons why we should have a referendum on membership of the EU are obvious.  We've given away our sovereignty, our wealth and our resources to the EU.  The sooner we're out of it the better.

The reasons for an English Parliament are similarly obvious.  It is a travesty that English still doesn't have a government of its own and a national insult.  England is the last colony of the British Empire, we need to throw off the British yoke and start running our own country for our own benefit.

Reinstating the hereditary peers is something I've written about several times.  I have always believed it was a regressive step to abolish hereditary peers and the fact the the House of Lords is now full to bursting with politically appointed peers as reward for donations and services rendered backs that belief up.  Only hereditary peers can give us the randomness and independence of though that is needed in government.

If any of these petitions reach 100,000 signatures then it will be debated in the House of Commons.  100,000 sounds like a lot but the road pricing petition started by Peter Roberts on the old Downing Street petitions website got almost a million signatures and according to the bods that ran that service, the petition did actually get well over 1m signatures but the site couldn't cope with the demand and they weren't all counted.  100,000 signatures is a lot for a petition but it's not a number that can be dismissed easily.

Of course a debate doesn't mean a change of policy and one MP (I forget who it was and where I read it) said that MPs should "lead on policy" not listen to what the people want.  One thing's for sure - if they don't already want to change policy a 100,000 signature online petition certainly isn't going to make them!

Italy in pre-bailout talks with the EU, Cyprus could be next?

The Italian government has had talks with the EU about rising bond prices and the possibility it might not be able to finance itself out of recession.

Emperor Barroso has once again attacked the international credit rating agencies - Standard & Poor, Filch and Moody's - for not covering up the risk of lending money to eurozone countries.

The higher the risk of full or partial default on bonds, the lower the credit rating a country will get.  The lower the credit rating, the higher interest rate investors will expect on bonds.  The higher the interest rate, the more it costs the country issuing them to get some (relatively) short term cash.

Italian and Spanish 10 year bonds are attracting yields of just over 6% which is on the line between affordability and unsustainability.  Much higher and it's going to become too expensive to borrow on the bond markets and they're going to have to go cap in hand to ... well that's the problem, there isn't enough money to bail out either Italy or Spain, let alone both of them.

Italy's national debt (not including the hidden extras like pension liabilities and PFI) is 120% of GDP and corruption is rife at all levels of society - if Silvio Berlusconi didn't have immunity from prosecution as president, he would be in prison now for fraud and corruption.  Large parts of Italy are under the control of the Mafia who steal billions of euro of public money.  S&P, Moody's and Filch are damn right to consider Italy a risk to investors - they don't have enough money to pay their bills and what money they do raise through taxation is pillaged mercilessly by the Mafia.

And I wouldn't normally link to the communist rag, the Guardian, but they are leading with the story that Cyprus is now top of the list of contenders for the next bailout.  A few billion for Cyprus will take even more money out of the theoretical bailout fund making a bailout of Italy or Spain even more improbable.

Turkey joining the EU would be a disaster

The British government's Home Affairs Select Committee has expressed concerns about extending EU membership to Turkey.

Turkey has a population of 75 million and a per capita GDP of £7,500.  With EU membership comes the right to live and work in any EU member state.  When Poland joined the EU in 2004 they had a per capita GDP of almost £8,000 and around 455,000 Poles came to the UK and registered for National Insurance numbers in the first three years of EU membership according to a joint report by the Home Office, DWP, HMRC and DCLG which has mysteriously disappeared from the Home Office website but lives on at Scribd.

That figure doesn't include those who came to work here "under the radar" (ie. not registering for tax) or the spouses, children and other dependants of those that did register.  The real figure is almost certainly in excess of half a million, or around 1% of the UK's population at the time.  Of those 455,000 Polish immigrants, 7,680 claimed benefits in the first three years despite having contributed nothing or next to nothing to the social security system.

And that's just Polish immigrants, there were 9 other poor eastern European countries who joined in 2004 and the figures for Poland are less than 70% of the total number of immigrants from the 2004 ascension countries.  It was unsustainable mass immigration which we have yet to recover from but it will pale in comparison to Turkey.  Poland had a population of 38m in 2004, Turkey has a population of 75m and it's growing at about 1.16m per year whilst the entire EU is only seeing around 1.3m growth per year.  You don't have to be Carol Vorderman to work out that Turkey would have the fastest growing population in the EU and in a few decades would be outbreeding the non-Turkish population of the EU.

Now let's talk about the elephants in the room: Islam and the Kurds.  Turkey is a secular country (it has no state religion) and it jealously guards that status.  The burka is banned in public places and religious political parties are banned.  But 96% of the population are practising muslims and there is a lot more freedom for pro-Sharia muslims to preach their medieval ways in the EU than there is in Turkey.  Logistically we can't cope with an influx of Turkish migrants because we don't have enough money, jobs or houses for them.  Socially we can't cope with an influx of Turkish migrants because 96% of them are muslims.

Before you start righteously hammering away on your keyboard, I will openly admit to being an Islamophobe ...

Phobia

A persistent, irrational fear of a specific object, activity, or situation (from the Greek Φόβος/Phóbos, the personification of terror in Greek mythology).

Actually, I'm not a true Islamophobe because it's not an irrational fear, it's entirely rational. My grandchildren will see an Islamic caliphate in Europe unless something changes drastically.  The persistent use of Islamophobia as a derogatory term for anyone even vaguely critical of Islam is incorrect. What the intolerant anti-anti-Islamists mean when they call someone an Islamophobe is that they are a Misislamist which is the correct term for someone with a hatred of Islam.

Enough of the lesson in linguistics (actually, isn't there a certain irony in debating the use of Greek words when talking about Turkey? Sorry, my inner geek is taking over again).  What about the Kurds?  The big black mark on Turkey's human rights and democracy record is their treatment of Turkish Kurds.  Yes, I know the PKK is listed as a terrorist organisation but the response to the PKK's fight for Kurdish independence in Turkey has been a collective punishment against all Kurds by way of ethnically cleansing some areas of Kurds and the persecution of public figures who speak Kurdish or promote Kurdish culture.

So where will Turkish Kurds go if they want to escape oppression in Turkey?  Iraq has an even worse reputation when it comes to Kurds and half the country is still a war zone.  Syria is on the brink of civil war and Iran is run by Islamic fundamentalists.  They won't get a very warm reception in Armenia because they're Turkish and Georgia is under constant threat of attack by Russia.  So where are they going to go when Turkey joins the EU?  Straight over Turkey's western frontier and on to countries with an existing Turkish population and a social security system to support them.  Countries such as the UK, the Netherlands and Germany.

It doesn't take a genius to know that Turkey joining the EU while we are still members would be an absolute disaster which is presumably why the Home Affairs Select Committee has decided that on balance it would be a good thing if Turkey joined, a view shared by Cast Iron Dave.

Cameron and Osbourne in favour of single economic government

George Osbourne and Cast Iron Dave have both publicly stated their belief that the EU should move towards greater economic integration to protect the euro and that a single eurozone economy is in our national interest.

I think we have to accept that greater eurozone integration is necessary to make the single currency work and that is very much in our national interest
- George Osbourne

[The eurozone will have to move] towards much more single economic government
- David Cameron

The single currency can't work when it is the currency for many different economies that are linked by only a common unit and interest rate. The German government controls the German economy, the French government controls the French economy, the Greek government ... well, technically the Greek government controls the Greek economy but in reality they're administering it to a set of rules drawn up by the EU Central Bank.

How do you ensure those economies are being run in a way that is compatible with each others' economic policies and objectives and working to a common goal? The simple answer is that you can't unless you have a single economic area with a common treasury and finance minister and control of that single economy - including taxation - sitting with that finance minister.

The problem is, what's good for Germany and France isn't good for Italy and Greece and vice versa. The German economy is too strong but as the biggest economy in the EU (and the one contributing most to the bailout funds) they have to protect it. If Germany pulled out of the euro it would become worthless. That means interest rates are kept at a level that suits Germany but which damages weaker economies like Greece and Portugal.

To level the economies of every member of the eurozone would require massive capital investment - we're talking more money that the EU has got, probably more money than there is in the world. The only option to level the eurozone economies is to drag down the strong economies which isn't an option - no government (apart from the British government, possibly) is going to deliberately sabotage their economy to protect the euro. In short, the euro is doomed to failure. The recession has shown how weak the euro is as a concept, not just as a currency.

It is incredibly naive to think that tighter economic integration and the ultimate aim of a single economic area under EU central control will exclude non-members of the eurozone.  The UK will be required to integrate with the eurozone to a certain extent and through the traditional gold-plating of EU legislation, the UK will become even tighter integrated than the EU requires.

The only safe position to take on the euro and tighter economic integration with the EU is to be well away from it.  Well away from the euro, well away from the financially illiterate eurocrats, well away from the bankrupt eurozone countries and well away from the EU.