last resort
Friday 13 April 2012
 And there I was writing in a piece earlier today that, in safeguarding our rights and liberties in general, we rely especially on two institutions – our courts and parliament. With the failure of the executive – and most notably the SS apologist, Tim Loughton, masquerading as the children's minister – we rely here also on those two institutions, both of which have again failed. That leaves as a long-stop the media and, mostly through the perseverance of Booker, it is at last catching up.
The way the Wail is handling the issue, though,is something of an indictment of the Sunday Telegraph, which has consigned Booker to his usual ghetto, giving the "stolen kids" story no exposure in the rest of the paper. And now the Wail waltzes in and steals the story from under its nose.
Booker's current effort takes its lead from the news yesterday, on the front page of the Wail andelsewhere. Bit by no means all the papers are getting the point. The Independent had it that "the foster care network faces being overwhelmed as attempts by social workers to protect children from abusive or neglectful families saw the number of care applications pass the 10,000 mark". Care proceedings, this paper said, "have been on the increase in Britain for the past five years, since the death of 17-month-old Peter Connelly, known as "Baby P", led to widespread anger over whether social workers were acting quickly enough to protect vulnerable children". And there we have it. What was quite obviously a gross over-reaction by the media at the time has since driven a massive over-reaction by the foster care "industry". This has now become a business on a phenomenal scale, siphoning the best part of £3.4 billion a year from the public purse, and getting more expensive by the day. This colossal expenditure alone should be ringing the alarm bells, and when the money is being used to spread distress and misery as well, it is time this issue was seriously explored. Sadly, with the courts and parliament failing us once again, the last resort is the Daily Wail. That is how bad it has become. Richard North 13/04/2012 |
A whiff of panic
Friday 13 April 2012
 To hold the line (or plug the hole – whichever you prefer) europhiliac Bruce Anderson has been recruited, pitching in to tell us that UKIP doesn't matter, as long as "Cameron delivers economic competence and strong leadership". That's rather like suggesting that Herod might have gone down in history as a compassionate king, had he been kind to the first born. Thus we see betrayed an untoward belief in the merits of porcine aviation, combined with a strong whiff of panic as the local elections loom closer.
A while ago, we remarked that it took a certain amount of political genius to lose a general election against one of the most unpopular governments in history. When the local election results come in, we may find that Cameron's rare genius has not deserted him.
Richard North 13/04/2012 |
A layer too far
Friday 13 April 2012
 Your Freedom and Ours takes on the idiot Sue Cameron over the issue of elected mayors. The point our Helen makes is that these new mayors have very little power, which makes them just another layer of government on top of an already cumbersome system.And you know that there has to be something in her complaint when she and The Guardian agree, the latter referring to the great mayoral delusion. What the imposition of the system, it says, "really highlights is the modern establishment's talent for messing with things for the sake of it, with no sense of history, experience, or even clarity about what exactly they want". The worst of it, here in Bradford, is that with the political establishment united in opposition to the idea, the electorate may vote "yes" in the forthcoming referendum – one of ten throughout the country – simply because the politicians don't want it. One can sympathise with, and admire, the sentiment, but that – as the election of Galloway shows – is a very poor basis for a decision with long-term financial implications which will end up costing millions. This, by any measure, is a layer too far, making an already poor system even worse. Richard North 13/04/2012 |
Repression Я us
Friday 13 April 2012
Raedwald this morning picks up on the column by Simon Jenkins, commenting on Monday's BBC Panorama programme.
The programme, says Jenkins, substantiated an extraordinary allegation that suggested how far the war on terror has descended into legal abyss. The claim was that MI6 "rolled the pitch" for Tony Blair's bizarre 2004 hug-in with Libya's Colonel Gaddafi by apparently arranging for the CIA to kidnap Gaddafi's opponent in exile, Abdel Hakim Belhaj. He was seized in Bangkok, where he and his wife were en route to Britain. It has been suggested they were "rendered" via the British colony of Diego Garcia to Tajoura jail in Tripoli. Belhaj spent six years, and his wife four and a half months, at the tender mercies of Gaddafi's security boss, Moussa Koussa. Belhaj's pregnant wife was taped like a mummy on a stretcher, and he was systematically tortured. What is especially chilling, though – in a jaw-dropping piece – is Jenkins's account of the role of the court of appeal in London, "mesmerised by the war on terror". It has declared that the war on terror embraces "acts by insurgents against the armed forces of a state anywhere in the world which sought to influence a government and were made for political purposes". Under legislation, terrorism included not just acts of violence but any threat made for "the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause". These threats might include nothing more than a "serious risk to public health and safety" or "seriously to disrupt an electronic system". What worries Jenkins is that under this "catch-all lexicography", dissidents and insurgents under any regime were not excluded. There is nothing that would exempt those engaged in attacks on the military during the course of insurgency from the definition of terrorism. It was hard luck all Kurds, Kosovans, Benghazians, Tibetans and Iranian exiles – and today's Syrian rebels. They are all terrorists. By this doctrine, every student agitator is a terrorist, every internet hacker, cafeteria dissident, freedom fighter and insurgent leader. The war on terror, Jenkins concludes, is corrupting all it touches, while parliament meekly passes each twist of the ratchet of repression. And there is the story of our times. In safeguarding our rights and liberties in general, we rely especially on two institutions – our courts and parliament. When neither function to challenge the executive, and keep it in check, it is time to worry. Richard North 13/04/2012 |
Smell the fear
Friday 13 April 2012
 With remarkable speed, they have dredged up another former UKIP "head of research", who is evidently thoroughly disenchanted with Master Farage and who is prepared to dish the dirt on the man and his party. Farage does rather seem to have a problem with his research heads, and this one – a certain Abhijit Pandya – is sharing his wisdom with us as to "Why no decent Tory should vote Ukip". Having spent a year advising Nigel Farage's UKIP, he says, what he found convinced him that the "anti-EU firebrands are not a serious alternative to the Conservatives". To be fair, one should say that Cameron's Tories are not a serious alternative to the Conservatives either, and in the absence of anything that approximates a Conservative Party, many people think that UKIP is about as near as they will get, for the time being. Mr Pandya clearly feels differently. UKIP MEPs, he claims, are obsessed with infantile stunts. These include wondering (sic) around Brussels, at the taxpayer's expense, singing "there is a hole in my bucket". Entertaining as it is watching Mr Farage doing this, and giving bombastic speeches in the European Parliament, adds Pandya, it does nothing to curb the powers of the EU. However, while one might share some of Mr Pandya's reservations about Farage, one should also note that "Panders", as he was known, is a rather odd cove himself. Having, in the 2010 contest for a leader of UKIP, emerged as a prominent supporter of Farage, he was rewarded, or so we are told, by being made Head of Research. He later praised Farage as "the Churchill of our times", a piece he has now quietly erased from his own blog and the Failygraph has deleted from its comments when I posted it there. This is what he actually wrote: His orations in the European Parliament are extraordinary, not just for their energy and vitality, but because he is like David facing Goliath in a cesspit of snakes where everyone is against him. People forget that UKIP is the only political party in that Parliament that is opposed to their nation's continuing membership, and hated with a vulgar passion by the other political factions therein.Now, after being forced out of his post as head of research, he is now, through the good offices of the Failygraph accusing his former party of being more interested in "ranting and raving" and of "screaming demagoguery" – all of which is probably true. What is also probably true is that, as head of research for an anti-EU party, "Panders" is not very good at his job. There we have him on his Wail blog in March of this year, offering reasons as to "why the European Parliament should be abolished". And, bang in the middle of the piece, we have "Panders" telling us that "it makes a return to the free trade customs union impracticable, by ensuring that the EU's law-making is done at extraordinary speed, and without veto". This, in turn, we are told, "makes it difficult for nation-states to know which regulations to repeal if they were to leave the EU. This undermines the democratic opportunity at the national level to argue for a free-trade system and a common-custom union (the position prior to the creation of the single-market)". Not least, there is here the obvious failure to understand what a "customs union" is, and his creation of a bizarrely mythical creature "the free trade customs union". If this tosh measures his grasp of the EU (and there is plenty more), UKIP is better off without Mr Pandya. The fact that he has been head of research may in part explain UKIP's lacklustre performance. That the Failygraph now gives this tawdry man a platform from which to attack the party, however, is highly revealing. More usually, the newspaper treats Farage as lightweight political fluff, or ignores him and UKIP altogether. That it should be launching into the attack suggests that they are seriously worried. Add that to Timmy's extravaganza behind the paywall and the comments in The Tory Boy Blog, and a pungent aroma assails the nostrils. It is the smell of fear. Richard North 13/04/2012 |
No known limit
Thursday 12 April 2012
Completing an analysis of the last of a triumvirate of moronic pieces from the Fourth Estate, we now have an offering from Iain Martin, one of Britain's leading political commentators, who informs us that the rise of UKIP "is a nightmare for David Cameron".
The piece is a classic example of MSM arrogance, with Martin posing the question: "How much damage can UKIP do to the Tories?" In the context, it comes over as if no-one but the leading Martin had every thought about this, leaving the boy then to tells us mere mortals, soooo judiciously, that he is to "tempted to conclude that Conservatives should now be very worried indeed". Then, just to show how clever he is, Martin gets a professor to volunteer the counterpoint, leaving the gay scribe's brilliance to shine through as he gravely informs us – wait for it – that "there is widespread discontent with the major parties, including amongst the kind of Tory-leaning voters Cameron needs to get back onside". That's the thing about the MSM. They blunder around in their bubble, totally oblivious to the real world. And then, when a dose of reality breaks through and smashes them in the chops, they spit out the blood and take possession of the idea, as if they had personally discovered it. Outside in the real world, however, we've been discussing the "UKIP effect" for years. It is that which heavily damaged the Tories in the 2005 election and probably cost them the election in 2010. But the likes of the Gay Martin never venture out into the real world, so they never find out these things. And then, believing themselves to be the only ones who know anything, they come up with their brilliant stuff years after everyone else, and then call themselves "leading" political commentators. That's why, if course, the Galloway result hit them between the eyes. They really are "hollow men", thin air occupying the space where grey matter should be. The proof of that pudding is in the eating. No one but an airhead could suggest that the Conservative leadership got any mileage in the 2010 election out of playing the eurosceptic card, saying that "Cameron was determined to govern as a robust opponent of further EU integration". Martin does though. Yet this was the election where Cameron broke his promise on the Lisbon referendum, which drove voters into the arms of UKIP. But so far from reality is Martin that he then asks the question as to whether playing the eurosceptic card will this time be believable - the inference being that it was, the last time it was played. Thus, the real question, I suppose, is just how far out of touch can the Fourth Estate actually get? But then, on past performance, there is probably no known limit. Richard North 12/04/2012 |
Spreading limited powers thinner
Thursday 12 April 2012
 There is an exceptionally stupid piece by Sue Cameron in the Failygraph today, asserting that the cities are "taking power from Whitehall". This refers to the city mayors that the system is creating, but the egregious Sue has so badly misread the situation that her thesis is barely worth entertaining. But then, when you see the quality of her sources, this is not surprising. She cites professor Tony Travers of the LSE who tells us that we are seeing in this new mayoral system "the building blocks of English devolution". In fact, what we are seeing is another layer of professional politicians, their powers defined (and circumscribed) by parliament, with vanishingly small powers and next to no control over the councils over which they apparently preside. However, the essential failure of this dim woman, in running with the "devolution" meme, is that she does not understand that any transfers of power that have taken place have occurred between sets of politicians.
As always, the people are out of the loop. We are simply being given the "opportunity" to pay more to spread a limited set of powers thinner. There is no way that having yet another highly-paid politician in the loop, each with their entourages paid from the public purse, confer any more (or any) power to the people.
Yet, the plague of parasites doth grow. On 3 May, our rulers have most graciously reached down and awarded us a referendum to decide on whether Bradford, amongst other cities, should have a mayor. This is explored by the local newspaper, recording that the MP in the city in favour of the move is Galloway. For myself, I will be voting against. Not only do I not want what Tory MP Philip Davies says is, " another layer of bureaucracy", I don't even want the existing layers. In fact, living in a sizeable urban village to the south of Bradford, I don't even want to be in Bradford MDC. A local authority area of 500,000 inhabitant, larger than some countries in the EU, is not local government and is not democratic. Getting a mayor to reside at the pinnacle of a crooked system is hardly going to make it better – and it most certainly is not devolution in any meaningful sense. |
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