Fighting the babysnatchers - by Richard... Sunday, May 01, 2011

Fighting the babysnatchers - by Richard... Sunday, May 01, 2011

It is a disturbing thought that the greatest enemy is usually the enemy within. It is thus axiomatic that, without the active support of our political classes and civil servants, the writ of the European Union would not hold in this country. Their laws are our laws, enforced by our officials, their designated crimes tried in our courts by our judges, the penalties imposed and enforced by the British system.

To that extent, we have been taken over from within, but increasingly we have to concede that even without the EU, many of our systems of public administration have become seriously degraded.

Not least of those are our social services and their too-often partners in crime, the local police forces and the judiciary. Their increasingly bizarre behaviour brings it home to us that, even were we to achieve the miracle and extract ourselves from the EU, that would only be the start of the process needed to restore equity, sanity and justice to public administration.

Evidence of just how much of a mountain we have to climb (and how much the rot has spread) comes with the travails of the heavily pregnant Vicky Haigh. She has now been named by John Hemming MP, using parliamentary privilege, as the woman who Doncaster social services had attempted to jail for the "crime" of complaining about their actions to a meeting in the House of Commons.

So malign is the grip of the legal-police-social services triumvirate that they even sought to prevent details of Vicky's intended committal being reported by Christopher Booker, thus creating a situation where a free-born English woman can be jailed for an action which is not an offence, and the media is not allowed to report that she has been jailed, or the reason why.

With Hemming's action, Booker is now not only able to report her name, but now she has fled the country, he is able to report some additional detail.

Specifically, he can reveal that Vicky has been forewarned that the social services of another local authority, Nottinghamshire, has been planning to seize her baby when it is born in two weeks' time. Her new child is by a partner with whom she has lived happily for six years, as a loved stepmother to his three children. They were all much looking forward to the new addition to the family.

It is hard to imagine, writes Booker, the ordeals to which this prospective mother has been subjected in the final stages of her pregnancy, which, as he reported earlier (without being able to name her), included her being arrested and held for much of 65 hours in fetid police cells. Three times she had to be rushed to hospital because of complications with her pregnancy, but each time the police took her back to the cells. They finally released her, exhausted, three days after her arrest.

In escaping abroad to evade England's "family protection" system, Vicky is following the example of an increasing number of parents desperate to avoid their children being seized. Dozens have fled, often at great personal cost, to foreign jurisdictions such as Ireland, Sweden, Spain, Uganda or northern Cyprus (though councils have been known to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money trying to get the children back).

What Booker's research (alongside Hemming) has also found is the tendency of social workers increasingly to justify seizing newborn babies from parents on the grounds that the child might be "at risk of emotional abuse". This is an innuendo so vague that the charges can be made on the slimmest of evidence, yet judges seem keen to accept them. These grounds are now used in more than 50 percent of cases where children are taken into care.

Fortunately for Miss Haigh, as she prepares for her child's birth, she has many friends in the Irish racing world who have given her a warm welcome. She is a strong woman – a quality she may have inherited from her father, the footballer Jack Haigh, much respected in his day – and she is determined to fight for the right to have her family. We have not heard the end of this disturbing story, concludes Booker.

And never a truer word was written. There is much more to this case than Booker has been able to publish, and he will have to continue chipping away at the edges until the whole story is known and the abuse has ended. But, as with so much else these days, we have dysfunctional systems, causing real hardship and injustice, and no one in authority seems to be able - or willing - to sort them out.

Before we see the end of this, a lot more people are going to have to become angrier and more strident, and more people are going to have to come to grips with quite how badly our systems have decayed. Not until that happens will there be any progress, but the idea that we have secret courts ready to jail pregnant women should be a wake-up call. A system that can do that can do anything. No one is safe.

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A tale of three cities - by Richard... Saturday, April 30, 2011

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Craig Easdale wrote: "This was a great event, and the behaviour of everyone was good on the whole, up until the police arrived. I feel if the event was shut down more calmly a lot of drama could have been avoided and the police definitely didn't handle it as well as they could have".

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The ring of servitude - by Richard...

While the crowd in the Mall waved their plastic, printed-in-China flags, it is interesting to note that the royal weddlings acknowledged our real masters, flying their flag rather than that of the province in which they reside - on their illegal number plate. How interesting also that the "UK" under the ring was replaced by "♥U" ... was that addressed to the EU?

Iain Martin puts the tawdry ceremony in perspective. We have a supreme government which specialises in hollowing out the institutions of state, robbing them of power and meaning, but leaving the facade in place.

He goes a little off the rails, stating that: "What was originally a free trade organisation rapidly became an anti-democratic supra-national monster". It was always that, and never intended to be anything else. It is not and never has been a free trade organisation. The choice between that and a customs union was not accidental.

But, writes Martin, the most fervent Europhiles — such as Tony Blair — were very cunning. They realised that to make Britain more European they would have to dismantle steadily the traditional structures of government and erode this country's sense of its own distinctive institutions.

Yet so easily are we taken in by the fluff - and the ceremony without the deeper significance is fluff ... just theatre. But even though the mask slipped as the Mark of Cain embellished the royal plaything, the crowd still roared. They are being offered bread and circuses, while our nation is being stolen from us under our very eyes.

For the "colleagues" who watched yesterday's charade, they must feel it's as easy as stealing candy from babies, especially with our gushing media. You do wonder about those poor, lost souls though ... "royal couple with a common touch" says The Times, underneath its headline telling us that the weddlings have been "whisked away by helicopter". I mean to say, how boringly common is that?

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That narrative again - by Richard...

Fourteen riot vans were cruising the Stokes Croft area of Bristol last night – three of them Welsh, containing the finest thugs the principality can supply – the best part of a hundred police. Thus have community relations deteriorated, to the extent that the police only dare go into the area mob-handed, tooled up with sticks and riot gear.

All they are doing, of course, is picking at the sore – an army of occupation imposing their writ through violence and thuggery. The first riot was triggered by them, their intrusive, aggressive and ill-judged policing. The second riot was a protest against the police behaviour in the first. The main players, directly involved in the events say so, and even the Tesco spokesman agrees that it is not about the supermarket.

Yet, despite all this, the brain-dead media can't cope with the idea that, in one of Britain's major cities, we have a police force out of control. Instead of investigating and reporting the situation as it is, they continues to trivialise the events, labelling the disturbances as "Tesco riots".

Classic of the genre is the mind-rotting Sun newspaper, which parades its ignorance and prejudice with: "Cops' new battle with anti-Tesco mob" (above), publishing a series of lurid pictures and even more lurid prose that completely misses the point.

Different only in style rather than accuracy is The Daily Failygraph with its headline parading: "Two charged after police injured in Tesco riot". Continuing the meme, the strap tells us: "Two people have been charged by police after protests against the opening of a new Tesco store turned violent".

Then, in a classic example of why local newspapers are not worth buying, we have two offerings from the Bristol Evening Post. Having studied the videos of the event, read carefully the dozens of eye-witness reports and then pieced together a relatively, coherent narrative, it really is very clear that this was a spontaneous uprising against the police, and that upwards of a thousand or more people were involved. This was not a "small minority" of troublemakers – it was the larger part of the Stokes Croft community.

Yet, first in this piece and then this, the local newspaper attempts to project the falsehood that the disturbance was caused just by a minority, "nothing more than mindless thugs, intent on destroying property and inflicting serious injury".

Inevitably, the meme is picked up by the local MP, Stephen Williams, a Lib-Dim who displays the classic stupidity of the breed, condemned the violence in Cheltenham Road, and describing it as a "bad advert" for the city.

After spending several hours with the police yesterday, to get his indoctrination correct, and speaking to a carefully selected group of residents, the mighty mouth feels that legitimate, peaceful protests against Tesco had been spoilt by a minority determined to make trouble. "This has been hijacked by hard-left, extreme anarchists or anti-capitalists ... These people, I don't know what they are – self-indulgent vandals – probably in a few years' time they will be going on nice middle-class skiing holidays".

At least, when one is confronted with genuine "mindless thugs", there is some sort of remedy, but against "mindless MPs", there is little protection. "The police have to defend themselves, local people and property", the moron dribbles. "I hope it will end peacefully and we can move on".

Highlighting these falsehoods is very far from pedantry. When the media and MPs get it this wrong, we are in very grave danger from a police force which is already dangerously out of control and over which there seems little restraint.

We are now learning of a police operation in London where twenty squatters were arrested ahead of the royal wedding. Police sources said the raids were made as part of investigations into recent outbreaks of disorder in central London, including student and anarchist riots. "These arrests are part of ongoing proactive work to tackle suspected criminality," a Scotland Yard spokesman said.

This is perilously close to the fictional doctrine of having the police arrest us for what we might do, rather than what we have done. By the time this becomes established, the fears that we are lurching into a police state will have come true – by which time, or course, it will be too late.

What stands between us that that state are active, alert MPs and a robust, free media. Yet we no longer seem to have either. Instead, we are in the grip of the narrative. When that takes hold, we are in serious trouble.

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Another grand day - by Richard...

Marking our slow but inexorable transition from a free society, we have today the EU's herbal medicines directive coming into force. This is a measure that has been going through the systemfor ages. It has absolutely no legitimacy and exists only to reinforce the grip of big pharma on the market, excluding a small but important sector of competition – and choice.

I suppose it is significant that today is also the anniversary of Hitler's death (yesterday was the anniversary of his marriage to Eva Braun), marking the final stage of the long process of breaking free from the grip of the Nazi regime which had terrorised Europe.

And while no-one sensible would begin to suggest that we are in any way seeing the dark clouds of a new totalitarian state descend over Europe, it is germane to note the aspirations of a new enlightenment - Churchill's "sunlit uplands" – are eroded daily, as the combination of EU and domestic bureaucracy extends its grip.

We cannot say we are less free than we were in 1945. Britain then was, effectively, in the grip of a dictatorship – with laws more draconian in some ways than ever the Nazis imposed – and it was a long time before the process of liberalisation got under way.

Arguably, it was very far from complete before it was reversed, by our own bureaucrats and then by the torrent of laws coming from the "Common Market", that was to become our supreme government, the European Union.

In 1945, however, we were "free" in the sense that we were self-governing, albeit that we were so broke that the IMF called the shots before very long. But now we are broke again, and not free. We are no longer a self-governing nation. We see it in small things – many products we took for granted, we can no longer buy. Today, that list got longer.

Increasingly, it is not just the small things, and the intrusions daily become more apparent. Yesterday, though, we saw an orgy of celebration in the Mall, with a storm of Union Jacks, an increasingly empty symbol as our government moves to Brussels and ships of the Royal Navy already fly the ring of stars.

So, this is another grand day for us to celebrate, another in the long march towards the loss of our freedoms that our parents and grandparents fought to preserve. We can wave our Chinese-made plastic flags, but the freedom and the aspirations that they represent have long gone.

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