EU Constitution/’Lisbon Treaty’ passes first UK Parliamentary hurdle

It seems that some 362 MPs are willing to betray both Parliament and the British Public.

It is now beyond any doubt and widely acknowledged, that the so called ‘Lisbon Treaty’ is effectively identical to the rejected European Constitution, there being ”no material difference” between the two..

In fact if the similarity of the ‘treaty’, to the constitution, were the climate debate then Gordon Brown and David Milliband would be the only ‘deniers’ left in a sea of consensus. Of course no one actually imagines they seriously imagine that it is not identical, that they are really deniers – but it does rhyme with deniers.

European Union (Amendment) Bill, New Labour’s cynical rubber stamping of the Constitution Lisbon Treaty has cleared it’s first hurdle and 362 MPs supported Mr Brown’s disingenuous line necessary to provide him and New Labour with the pathetic fig leaf to cover their reneging on the promise of a referendum that new labour were elected on.

A few New labour MPs have the decency, even honour, to resist, but one fears - far too few.

Sharia Law comes to the UK

Delhi born Dr/Shaikh Suhaib Hasan has set himself up in his own little Sharia court in a converted corner shop in Leyton, North East London.

At the moment this has all the legality of a TV show ‘court’ where participants are technically only bound in as far as they agree to be bound. Though it is perhaps much more than just that to a Moslem, embedded in largely exclusively Moslem community, who has no English.

Dr Hassan is the General Secretary of the Islamic Sharia Council and bills himself as a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain.

He is keen to share the benefits of Sharia Law, on an official and legal basis, with the rest of us. He is convinced it can turn the HK into a “haven of peace”.

In fact he, in a documentary, currently scheduled to be screened on Channel 4 next month, entitled ‘Divorce: Sharia Style’, Dr Hasan reveals ‘just where he is coming from’, as they say. He revealingly comments:

"Once, just only once, if an adulterer is stoned nobody is going to commit this crime at all.”

"We want to offer it [Sharia Law] to the British society. If they accept it, it is for their good and if they don't accept it they'll need more and more prisons."

I think the good Dr’s Freudian slip is showing here - As far as I am aware adultery is not a crime in the UK, there is certainly no penalty, apart from the possibility of divorce, for it.

I am sure he is correct in that the realistic prospect of being stoned to death would discourage it, against the law or not, that’ll do it for you most every time.

One wonders what else that the good Dr disproves of, that is not against the law we can consider stoning people to death for?

How the man can seriously suggest such a thing without realising it brands him as a fascist is beyond me.

The Muslim Council of Britain is usually held up by the ‘great and the good’, as an exemplar of ‘moderate’ Islamic opinion. This man is their Sharia spokesman.

If this is moderate it can only be so by comparison to something incomparably worse. If this is moderate maybe we need to redefine the meaning of ‘moderate’.

Oh! - Looks like we did already…

Quote of the day

" Politics must be the battle of the principles... the principle of liberty against the principle of force.”

Auberon Herbert

New Labour want to impose random breath tests

It seems New Labour now want to give the police powers to be able to breath test drivers on a whim and institute mass roadside checkpoints.

They appear to base this on their normal inability to understand the implications of their own skewed statistics combined with their tendency towards an authoritarian solution to anything they perceive as a ‘problem’.

It seems they are attempting to justify this with their Christmas Drink driving states. They show that the number of drink drivers stopped dropped despite a recorded increase in the number of tests (that police are measured on).

During the 1980s the number of people killed and seriously injured in drink-drive collisions in Great Britain fell from over 9000 (1,450 deaths, 7,970 serious injuries) to just less than 5,000 (760 deaths, 4,090 serious injuries).

Over the last decade or so, figures have fluctuated year on year, but overall there has been no particular trend up or down.

It is questionable if even massively increasing the number of breath tests will make a significant difference.

If the government actually wanted to reduce drink driving, as opposed to extending it's grip on the citizen, it might be better advised to reprise the hard hitting anti drink drive campaigns of the 80s and early 90s and helped make drink driving unacceptable. But this time include drugs in the message. From the figures it appears that actually worked quite effectively.

Our current system seems to have served us well over the decades, but New Labour never heard of leaving anything that works alone - and by their actions one could be forgiven for assuming they are embarked of a long term plan to undermine public trust in the police in an attempt to turn them into an occup

Quote of the day

" Law is often but the tyrant's will - and always so when it violates the right of an individual."

Thomas Jefferson

EU threat to Britons right to trial

I had always been under the impression that, in Britain, an accused person should have their day in court to defend themselves - That we don’t hold trials and convict people in their absence.

I know it is inconvenient and spoils government figures - rather like that old fashioned, un-dynamic, not new or forward looking, idea of ‘innocent until proven guilty’. Rather than the reverse, so beloved of many other (no doubt dynamic and forward thinking) European nations, or the right to remain silent.

So it is a little disturbing to find that there is a meeting of EU Justice ministers planned for next week, where the Attorney General is apparently planning to do a ‘Gordon Brown’ and rubber stamp measures that could change all that boring old fashioned stuff about having your day in court.

Patricia Scotland QC (Baroness Scotland of Asthal, Attorney General) is planning to rubber stamp the extradition of British nationals, who have been convicted in absentia, for imprisonment in European jails.

Also included is a planned hand-over of "a wide range of personal data". Won’t that be so much more effective once the government imposes it’s ID card system on us and they have even more personal data to give away?

So imagine for a moment you have had a fortnights holiday in Spain. Unbeknown to you, you are somehow implicated in an offence. They can’t find you when they get round to wanting to speak to you and you are back in the UK. They can’t immediately trace you. You get convicted in your absence…

The first thing you know is when you are arrested for extradition to start your sentence in a Spanish jail.

Any sane citizen should be concerned that Government ministers are continuing with their bad habit of blithely signing away yet more British rights.

Shadow Home Secretary, David Davis said: "Now there is a real risk that British citizens will be abandoned to face European punishments without trial,"

Quote of the day

” A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.”

Thomas Jefferson

New Labour, New Threat - to Independant Schools

It seems that New Labour would like to be seen as heroically championing the downtrodden poor by forcing the wicked Independant Schools to provide places for poor people, to stop them being run as "exclusive clubs".

Hold on – Rewind! Many of the Independant schools were once Direct Grant Grammar Schools, providing places to anyone who merited them, those who could not afford to go were subsidised by the local authorities.

It was actually old Labour that put a stop to that on ideological grounds by abolishing direct grant schools. God forbid anyone might aspire to anything other than mediocrity under Labour.

The Conservatives later brought in the assisted places scheme to allow poorer pupils to attend them. Abolishing that scheme was one of New Labour’s top priorities on assuming office. God forbid anyone… etc. … under New Labour.

In an effort to ensure poorer pupils could still attend them the Independant Schools developed a scheme of sponsored bursaries. Clearly Independant schools do not particularly want to be exclusive. They actually want to be able to take in children who cant afford to pay the fees - that in many cases the schools were forced to charge by Labour, or go out of business.

It would in fact appear to be Labour and it’s FascistLite successor, New Labour, that have deliberately and consistently, over decades, excluded children from poorer homes from these schools.

But why have New Labour got a particular bee in their bonnet about it now, with all their talk of removing charitable status and unannounced inspections It might be more honest to provide their inspectors with natty leather uniforms and insignias. ;-) and complaints the poor are missing out?

Well clearly New Labour have actually engineered the ‘poor missing out bit themselves’, presumably largely for fossilised ideological reasons. One would like to hope it was unintended. But why now?

Well New Labour’s problem is the fact that they are incapable of providing an educational system fit for purpose, as they say. No one rational could seriously believe that state education is actually even adequate. It is failing pupils of all abilities and backgrounds.

The existence of the Independant Schools (Like Grammar Schools) and the desperation of parents who can only afford them by sacrificing virtually everything else is an indictment on the State and the state educational system - Not because of what they are but what the state schools are not.

If the state system were any use parents would not be so desperate for their children to attend them in such numbers - If the state system were any use New Labour Government ministers would not ensure their own children attended them in such numbers…

Independant Schools wouldn’t matter much at all if the State provided what these schools provide - a decent education.

The State would have out competed them, it is effectively an educational cartel all on it's own and they would have withered to a niche market. That they exist at all, despite New-Labour’s Herculean efforts to the contrary, is testament to New Labour’s utter incapability.

Imagine if BTs competitors got the sort of stick that the Independant Schools come in for. There would be an outcry.

So there is one answer. They attack the Independant Schools because they show up what can be done and just how bad the state system is. Otherwise the State could argue that it was not possible to provide and education to that standard in this modern age and people couldn’t point to these schools and put the lie to it.

But there is another reason. New Labour are desperate to distract from the continuous chain of PR disasters resulting from their apparently endemic incompetence and dishonesty (some of the currently prominent in that string being Northern Rock and Peter Hain), that is providing a metaphorical tower of political ash and pumice in the sky over them - like some latter day political Pompeii.

Gordon Brown has been firing off a few contentious salvos of late, such as his plan to harvest organs without actual permission.

This is primarily to distract the citizens and to persuade the more gullible that New Labour actually give a damn about providing the opportunity for the poor to actually benefit themselves - instead of remaining state clients from cradle to organ harvest - and we know that is not so.

UK PM says Hain’s fate is out of his hands

Permier Gordon Brown has said of Work and Pensions and Welsh Secretary Peter Hain’s ‘poor administration ’ of the donations for his deputy leadership bid "He took his eye off the ball and he has apologised. The matter must rest with the authorities, who will look at these matters,"

Now Shadow Chancellor George Osborne is being counter attacked with a claim he did not declare £487,000 of donations.

As soon as you look at the details of the attack on Osborne it is quite clearly what amounts to a bogus attack. The money was in fact declared in good time when it was donated to the Conservative Party. George Osbourne just didn’t declare that he had received it from the party a second time in the Register of Members' Interests, apparently after checking with the party weather he should or not and being advised by their experts that he didn’t need to. There is a clear paper trail, so why the fuss.

Presumably as a cynical, but partly successful, red herring to take heat off Hain.

Now, regarding Hain, I must admit, at first sight, it did look like a cock up rather than anything more sinister.

That is until you look at the donors. One of them was an organisation called the Progressive Policies Forum (PPF) that appears to have channelled more than £50,000 to Mr Hain.

It was created 3 months after Hain announced he was running for New Labour’s deputy leadership as a limited company. The sole director is a solicitor and it has never filed any accounts with companies House. A key figure in Hain’s campaign, John Underwood, a former Labour communications director, is thought to be strongly associated with the PPF.

So we have a limited company that appears to have done nothing and have no reason for existence, except as a proxy to funnel money to Peter Hain.

Where did this cash the PPF ‘donated’ actually originate? Apparently from people like Rumanian born diamond dealer, Willie Nagel. Coincidentally it seems he had previously been approached by Underwood for cash - but had said he would not contribute unless it was kept private.

Then there was Isaac Kaye, ex South African, now with Irish citizenship, an ex supporter of South Africa's Afrikaner-led National Party, who’s company has been raided by the police.

This begins to look rather familiar. In fact it looks a lot like another try at the same trick of concealing the identities of the real donors.

One that resulted in the New Labour donations scandle that Gordon brown admitted had been illegal. That was over a ‘laundered’ donation from David Abrahams and forced the resignation of New Labour's General Secretary, Peter Watt.

New Labour set these rules up. Why set them up in the first place only to try to circumvent them. Were the rules ill thought out? They made their bed now they lie in it ;-)

So it is clearly not a case of just being a bit late in declaring his donations. He still has John Underwood to throw to the wolves if need be, but if It was illegal enough for Abrahams to take the bullet then it should be illegal enough for Hain to do likewise.