Why not? - by Richard... Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Why not? - by Richard... Wednesday, November 17, 2010

"Perhaps now Dr Richard North can do a screen grab of your header to this article, so he can show you congratulating him on congratulating you. And then you can do a screen grab of the resulting EUReferendum page, and so on, ad infinitum, until you both dissolve in a miasma of self-congratulatory cross-references..." says one of Cranmer's commenters.

Why not? It's only what the MSM does every day! Over to you, your Grace. It's like one of those mirror tricks.

COMMENT THREAD

Print ready

Totally at odds with reality - by Richard...

The media have conveyed an image "totally at odds" with Ireland's reality writes Marc Coleman, tucked into an obscure corner of the BBC website. This is no great credit to the BBC – as a volume consumer of news and comment, it is bound occasionally to get things right, if only by accident which it hastily remedies with its usual diet of received wisdom.

Coleman, however, seems to tell it like it is, saying that the situation is by no means as bad in Ireland as is being made out. This is something Jim Greenhalf picked up recently when he went to Dublin – which suggests that the "colleagues" have nefarious reasons of their own for hyping a scare, none of them in the interests of the Irish.

And undoubtedly they have. Would one even begin to take van Rompuy at face value? If he shook your hand, you would be best advised to count your fingers afterwards.

So it is that the Irish are rightly suspecting a stitch-up, under pressure to accept a series of measures so damaging and so blatantly discriminatory that even Euroslime Cowan is having difficulty accepting them, much less selling them to his countrymen.

That, actually makes Ambrose more right than wrong. It isn't Ireland that is in big trouble so much as the euro and its institutions. But with Rompuy trying to dump on the Irish, one can only suspect the colleagues' motives and intentions.

This is very much the vase with the EU's growingbudget crisis which has largely been submerged by the froth about William and his bride to be.

As an incidental note, railing against the disproportionate coverage on this pair is not simply, or at all, being grouchy. There are important things happening in the world, of great importance to us, which need reporting. If we left it to the children on the editorial staff of The Daily Telegraph, we'd have spent the whole day cooing about little willie.

The point about the EU budget, of course, is that it is pointing up a tension between the Council and the Commission which we have seen building since the Lisbon Treaty, and which is far too subtle and complex for most media reporters to understand – those who mainly insist on calling the European Council a "summit".

There is really no limit to how thick these people are, which is why they need the protection of full-time jobs in newspapers. They would not survive five minutes out on their own, without their pals looking after them.

The British papers will, of course, try to "put a union jack on it", in the belief that their readers are largely as thick as they are (and, of course, many are), and in so doing will try to project Euroslime Dave as having more than a walk-on part.

But there is a lot more to this than meets the eye, with tensions and dynamics that are being missed in the welter of crap and "bread and circuses" tosh that passes for our modern media. Some of what is happening will gradually emerge, but at the moment so many people are running interference that it is difficult to ascertain the direction of travel.

There is a general theme, of course – the one that says that, as always, we are going to get stuffed, but the way things are moving, I do sense that the colleagues are losing control. All we can do is seek to help them on their way, and then stab them as they fall.

COMMENT THREAD

Print ready

Cranmer is right - by Richard...

His Grace takes to task that unmitigated buffoon Benedict Brogan who heaps praise on the granddaddy of the euroslimes, John Major, for keeping us out of the euro.

For sure, Major secured the opt-out at Maastricht, but this was no great heroic feat – merely one a grotesque little man needed to do to ensure his survival. His treachery in forcing the treaty through effectively destroyed the Conservative Party, and had he forced through the euro at the same time it would have destroyed him and his government. As it was, it was a close-run thing.

Thus, as Cranmer reminds us, it was not that unpleasant little tyke who did it. The political classes would have been only too keen to join, but Sir James Goldsmith, in setting up the Referendum party in 1996, forced both the Conservatives and Tony Blair's Noo Labour into agreeing a referendum before committing us to the single currency. That stopped us from joining.

Of course, Sir James would have got nowhere without the thousands of volunteer helpers – like myself – who put months of work and thousands of pounds of their own money into the campaign. When I opened up shop in Swadlincote as a candidate for Derbyshire South against Edwina Currie, within days I had a team of twenty of so around me. And, of all the elections I have ever fought, never have I had such a dedicated, professional and hard-working team as that.

Needless to say, standing up for our principles brought us all kinds of shit from the bien pensants of the likes of Ben Brogan, the same sort who are now wisely remarking how "lucky" we are that we never joined the euro. And, as we now retain our long-held convictions that the EU is the spawn of the Devil and we need to get out, we still take all kinds of shit, the same kind of shit from bien pensants like Ben Brogan – the bed-blocker extraordinaire of political journalism.

The difference between then and now, though, is that now I have a blog – which, as you would expect, the likes of Ben Brogan and his little claque of cloggers studiously ignore because it says nasty things about them.

Interestingly, Blogger now offers page statistics to its bloggers (whether you ask for them or not) and it insists that EU Ref is getting 350,000 (or better) page views a month. Without Brogan and his vapid little mates in the clogosphere linking to us, therefore, we are doing about four million page impressions a year, access which "they" can't and don't control.

Add the more restrained and mellifluous voices such as Cranmer and we have a considerable reach, all the more influential because – unlike that idiot Brogan – we actually know what we're talking about (still more reason for them to ignore us).

At times of deep depression, which is increasingly common, we need to remind ourselves that we are having an impact. The moronic tendency is not having it all its own way. As long as there are Cranmers in this world to correct fools like Brogan (did I say the man's an idiot?) then things aren't all bad. We still have to suffer the fools, but we no longer have to suffer them in silence.

COMMENT THREAD

Print ready

The league of thick - by Richard...

You know, we really have missed a trick on this, taking the warmists seriously instead of exposing them for what they are – not Plane Stupid but just plain stupid ... thick as two short planks.

The latest evidence of stupidity comes from crap newspaper The Guardian and a dim little bird calledSuzanne Rosier. In breathless style, she tells us: "Evidence that the global climate is changing is now unequivocal ... ".

WOW! GOSH! I'M STUNNED.

In all of time, the one constant thing about the climate is that it is always changing. And these stupid people have not only just discovered that but think it is important enough to put it in a newspaper as news. The climate is a-changing! Doh!

In the league of "thick", that will take some beating – not that they will have any great trouble beating it, because they are really that thick. But why we take them at all seriously is one of those modern-day puzzles.

COMMENT THREAD

Print ready

A lack of proportion - by Richard...

One expected front-page headline and some inside stories – but the first 12-pages devoted to this single issue out of 16 pages in all tells you precisely what is wrong with The Daily Telegraph.

Not only do the editorial staff have a distorted world view, they are so isolated from the real world that they believe theirs is the only view, and thus are completely untroubled by the idea that they should impose it on us, their readers.

As a result – and as so often – we end up with tomorrow's garbage today, consigned to the bin largely unread, while we turn to the internet for news on what is actually going on.

There is only so much we take of this. And while for some it is an easy decision, ceasing to buy a daily newspaper is to break a habit of a lifetime. That does not come easy. Also, to an extent, one is – or used to be – in part defined by the newspaper one reads.

Time though is fast approaching for a parting of the ways. We managed to junk The Sunday Timesas a newspaper not worth reading and, despite my forebodings, have not missed it one little bit.The Daily Telegraph looks to be following in its wake.

COMMENT THREAD

Print ready

A crisis a day - by Richard...

Instinct tells me that, whatever is going to happen next, it's going to be nothing like any of the pundits predict. Having been bitten more than once, one tends to steer clear of the pundits and the experts – especially the experts who are usually the last to know what is going on and invariably get it wrong.

The trouble is that there is an awful lot of grandstanding going on, an amount of deliberate disinformation, some game playing and a great deal of idle speculation, all on the back of incomplete information.

We are too used to the death-defying scenarios where, as in the great adventure serials of old like Dick Barton, we see the heroes facing certain death, only for the script-writers to inject the immortal phrase: "with one bound, they were free".

Needless to say, a "don't know" doesn't sell newspapers, and simple, straightforward analysis is thin on the ground. Van Rompuy may be warning of a "survival crisis" while others are givingmixed messages but the truth is we don't know. We do not have the first idea what is going to happen next. We can hope, and we all have our hopes, but if I was to make an informed guess about the outcome of this current crisis, it is that we are looking at yet another anti-climax, and nothing much will then happen until the next crisis.

COMMENT THREAD

Print ready

Collopse is nigh! - by Richard... Tuesday, November 16, 2010

UPDATE: "The entire European Project is now at risk of disintegration, with strategic and economic consequences that are very hard to predict," says Ambrose - writing under the title: "The horrible truth starts to dawn on Europe's leaders". He talks freely of a "proto-Fascist organization", and Austrian corporals.

The Guardian, meanwhile, is retailing a tale of woe from Herman Van Rompuy, described as "president of the EU". He is warning that the EU faces a "survival crisis", with the risk of contagion spreading from Ireland across the continent.

In other words, we are getting the usual crap, via a crappy newspaper, which tells us very little, other than the Euroslime are having a hard time of it at the moment. This could be just another "drama queen" act – which the "colleagues" are so good at doing. But if it is for real, we do wish they'd get a move on - this ham actor death scene is getting a tad repetitive. If the euro is going to die, then better it is done quickly before we all die of boredom - or cynicism.

On the other hand, Reuters is warning of dire things should the IMF/EU impose a bail-out. Ireland's public sector workers face the risk of further wage cuts and redundancies and its "sacrosanct" low rate of corporation tax could be raised, says the agency.

Then we start to get into interesting times as a million or so Paddies rip Dublin apart. London cannot be far behind, which will leave Euroslime Dave, with his ideas on "happiness" rather stranded. He would be better off, methinks, calculating a POI (Pissed Off Index), which probably increases every time he opens his mouth.

However, the thought that the EU is that little bit closer to collopse is certainly enough to counter the normal feeling of revulsion engendered by contemplating The Boy, and might even bring to the bring to the fore a glimmer of a smile. Whether we need to put the champagne on ice yet is moot, but we can always be persuaded to consider it.

COMMENT THREAD

Print ready

Lightweight fools - by Richard...

The award-winning Dellers is having a pop at Phil Jones – at the most appropriate level. One should not take these fools seriously, and that has possibly been the sceptics' mistake all along.

None of these people are serious scientists, none of them are worth a pile of chickens' droppings and, in fact, chicken manure is more useful. Arguing with them is to afford them a degree of gravitas they have neither earned nor deserve. Dellers shows them up to be the lightweight fools that they are.