This is getting grotesque. Now the Lisbon-embracing prime minister has appointed Leon Brittan, a former European Commissioner, to be his trade adviser. Brittan is one of the Tory heavies who worked to isolate Thatcher on the issue of the ERM and the single currency. Later he worked to undermine William Hague's resistance to further European integration when he was leader of the party. And he was Nick Clegg's boss at the commission when the Lib Dem leader was doing his ten years in Brussels, known for these purposes as Manchuria, where the candidates come from. It makes you wonder what kind of reward Cameron would give to someone who had actually taken a knife and slid it through a Conservative leader's ribs. The more traitorous a Tory is surrendering British sovereignty to the EU, the more he prospers under the Cameron Tories. So how does one explain Hague prospering under Cameron? Easy. He has repudiated his former attitudes on the EU. Now he wants to be 'positive' and 'constructive.' For which read, 'is now willing to roll over in public and wag his tail for Cathy Ashton and the rest.' He is so glowing with his new-found religion of Euro-loving that he doesn't even realise what an insult Brittan's appointment is to him. Though I have to admit I hadn't been paying much attention to the Australian elections, or the candidates, until the Australian write R.J. Stove sent an email to me about the elections (I've got 27 countries and an economic and monetary union that's a con to watch, and that's enough). But Rob's email mentioned that around 1983 Miss Gillard was 'in the thick of a move (eventually defeated) to bring about a sister-city relationship between Melbourne and Leningrad.' And before my eyes flashed The Way We Were 30 and 40 years ago. Yes, Miss Gillard left Britain for Oz in 1966 at the age of just five, but she seems to have been infected with the whole of the mid-1960s leftie ideology before she got on the boat. Rob Stove has a piece about her in the September issue of the American conservative magazine Chronicles with more nuggets than just the Leningrad-link. He writes: 'Miss Gillard was from the beginning the apparatchik's apparatchik. There is no evidence that she has read a serious book in her life. She began her career in a hard-left campus organisation, the Australian Union of Students, of which she eventually became leader. (Its achievements included declaring 1983 the "International Year of the Lesbian.")' 'From those heady days she has retained her enthusiasm for Emily's List and suchlike pro-abort rackets, not to mention a gratingly pseudo-proletarian speaking voice that can almost strip paint.' 'Today, Miss Gillard glories in her atheism (she was raised as a Baptist) and her concubinage. (Her live-in boyfriend, Tim Mathieson, has been unofficially known, ever since the prime minister's swearing-in ceremony, as the "First Dude.") And on it goes. Miss Gillard of course wants to end the link between the Crown and Australia, and make Oz a republic. Amazing. The woman somehow manages to keep her brain back in the British student bedsitters of the 1960s, though she was never there. If he were, for example, an Iranian convicted of murder in an English court, he would stand a good chance of avoiding extradition on the grounds that if he were sent home he could face imprisonment and torture. How good a chance? The Mail's news report today says one foreign criminal a day is winning the right to stay in Britain. Foreign murderers and rapists are using the EU-inspired Human Rights Act to claim the right to go on living in the United Kingdom despite their crimes. Yet according to another news report today, in two weeks' time, Tappin, a 63-year old county golf captain and retired businessman, faces an extradition hearing which may end in him being bundled onto a an aeroplane and sent to prison in the United States even before he has been convicted of any crime. This, despite the fact that the American 'justice system' is now capable of cruelty and injustice that must, by any British standard, be a violation of Tappin's rights. I'll get to that in a moment. But first, what has happened is that the Kent grandfather was caught up in a sting set up by US customs officials. The sting was meant to trap criminals shipping arms to Iran. Yet all Tappin appears to have been doing is trying to make a deal to ship batteries to the Netherlands. The US authorities need produce no evidence of any alleged crime by Tappin at the extradition hearing. Because of the unbalanced deal done between Britain and America on extradition, the hearing is likely to be nothing but a rubber-stamping exercise. Only the Home Secretary, Teresa May, can block the extradition. Yet given the roll-over attitude of the Tories in this coalition Government, one can reckon she is unlikely to do so. So here is what awaits the Kent grandfather in America: a justice system which no longer seeks truth, and prosecutors who are untroubled by wrongful convictions. Those are not my words, those are from Paul Craig Roberts, former assistant secretary of the US Treasury under President Reagan and a former senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution of the prestigious Stanford University in California, and now a noted conservative writer and commentator. Roberts has made a detailed study of how federal prosecutions work in America. His conclusion is that due process is dead. America has become an unjust country, and that's why white-collar convictions are so numerous and so quick. Roberts points out that 90 to 95 percent of federal criminal cases now end in plea bargains, something the British system of law will not tolerate. However, American prosecutors love plea bargains. If they can get the accused to agree to plead guilty to two or three charges in exchange for five or six other charges being dropped, then none of the prosecution evidence need ever be tested in court. The poisonous side-effect of that is this: if evidence is unlikely ever to be tested in court, police work can be careless. A prosecutor can get a conviction without ever having to convince a jury that the evidence makes the charges stand up. And a prosecutor's career depends on conviction rate. But how do federal prosecutors convince an accused man to plead guilty without a trial? By horrific coercion, by mental torture: by freezing the accused man's personal and business assets, by piling up ill-defined accusations of conspiracy, by criminalising what ought to be mere civil infractions. Finally, federal prosecutors can force even an innocent man to plead guilty by adding so many charges that any attempt at a defence would leave the accused bankrupted by legal fees. Some innocent men would rather do jail than fight a torrent of ill-defined charges in court and leave their wives and children homeless. Yet the Home Secretary is willing to make any British subject submit to this unjust system. Meanwhile foreign killers, rapists and armed robbers are safe in this country because they can shelter under the EU-inspired Human Rights Law. This could be yet another moment of national British humiliation. Brussels has made its move in the dead days of August, of course, in the hope it would pass unnoticed. But some of us have noticed. And the British had better take notice. The European Commission has decided to fire up the powers of taxation given to the EU by the Lisbon Treaty. Thanks to David Cameron's refusal to fight the transfer of sovereignty the treaty makes, the British people can now be subject to taxation direct from Brussels, with the Commons -- indeed, with the Chancellor -- having no control over the tax at all. Today Janusz Lewandowski, the commissioner in charge of the EU's £116bn budget, announced he intends to press for a new EU tax. The euro-elite want to be able to get their hands on your money without having to ask your Government even for a perfunctory agreement. All this talk about belt-tightening around Europe is making the euro-elite edgy: they have their luxurious pay and pensions and travel allowances, and all their empire-building to protect, after all. Britain and every other member state is going through terrible budget turmoil, with spending cuts and citizens furious about increases in taxation -- yet now Brussels is getting ready to activate Art 311 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (part of the Lisbon bundle -- the euro-elite don't want to make it easy for you to find it). It says, 'The Union shall provide itself with the means necessary to attain its objectives and carry through its policies.' The 'means.' That means money. Your money. Taken away by an unelected single party government (the commission) enabled by politicians over whom the British voters have no political control (the council). The British will have to pay the tax these people demand, but can never vote them out. The commission wants to start with a tax on all bank transactions, or perhaps air travel. It doesn't really matter which. Their point now is to establish the power of Brussels to tax the populations of the countries of the EU without any control by national parliaments. Once that power is in place, the taxes can be ratcheted up. There you have it, people forced to pay taxes by people they did not vote into office, and whom they cannot vote out of office, and over whom they have no control. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Paul Revere, a lot a determined men on board a tea ship in Boston Harbour, a lot of other brave men at a green in Lexington, and plenty other men with much to lose, all decided long ago they would not tolerate such a thing. They could not tolerate taxation without representation. Question: will the British tolerate it? Or will they let themselves be humiliated in a way that even the small ragtag population of 13 British colonies would not allow in 1776?
19 August 2010 2:18 PM
Political treason prospers,
though none dare call it treason
Australia: The Way We Were
Running through the ideological history of Julia Gillard, who may or may not still be Australian prime minister after Saturday's elections, is like an archaeological dig into Britain's political past. Scary: Gillard is a glimpse of what Britain's politics perhaps would be today if Thatcher hadn't derailed the train.
16 August 2010 9:12 AM
No 'human rights' for an Englishman
Christopher Tappin's first mistake is, of course, that he is an English businessman and not a foreign criminal.
09 August 2010 8:03 PM
EU taxation without representation: but has Britain got what it takes to fight?
Sunday, 22 August 2010
Posts
