I think we knew this - by Richard... Monday, October 31, 2011

I think we knew this - by Richard... Monday, October 31, 2011

Now the telly is doing the story, the MSM gets interested, confirming the introspective nature of the animal. A bailiff at Rossendales, a debt collection firm that works for almost 150 councils, repeatedly broke the guidelines covering bailiffs, goes the story – thus missing the key issue. This is not a matter of "guidelines". The bailiffs are breaking the law - the headline should read "illegal practices".

John Boast, senior bailiff, for Rossendales, we are told, broke several "guidelines", while supposedly "training" an undercover reporter. Although bailiffs are not supposed to approach people at anti-social times, Mr Boast said that he often visited houses at night and on Sundays.

If a debtor is not at home, the bailiff leaves a letter with the time and date of the visit. Debtors are charged £24.50 for the first visit and £18 for the second and are supposed to be given the opportunity of clearing the debt immediately. "If you' re delivering a letter early, you don' t knock", said Mr Boast.

And that is the "phantom visit fraud" which Booker covered over a month ago, and which we first reported on 9 September. Yet the weak as ditch water report on covert filming in ITV1's Exposure: Bailiffs, which airs tonight, only says that the details, "raise concern about regulation". That is the MSM for you.

Meanwhile, Bradford Council, having carried out a "level 2" complaint investigation, have decided that I "have provided insufficient evidence to indicate any impropriety from either the Council or indeed its agent Jacobs", and are refusing to take any further action.

Not only that, their Customer Relations Officer, Mr Mushtaq Ahmed tells me: "I found no evidence of impropriety in the bailiff’s dealings with you. I have therefore not upheld your complaint". He is so "confident" that "the Councils actions caused you no injustice" that he is refusing to entertain any further correspondence.

"You are now questioning the Councils impartiality", he sniffs, then declaring that "there is no further merit in the Council continuing to correspond with you regarding this matter. Please consider this as the Councils final response".

West Yorkshire Police, however, do not appear to have finished with the matter. Further irregularities have been found – which Bradford still chooses to ignore – and a police inspector has been allocated to the case. Had the media been on the ball, it would have been following the same line. But, as we have found to our cost, the MSM doesn't do serious news any more.

If you want real news and analysis on such matters, go to the blogs.

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The road to war - by Richard...

In his latest article, Ambrose makes the points that we all could have made, but chooses the analogy of a couple locked in a loveless marriage. Then he, Autonomous Mind, Zerohedge and The Daily Mail - twice - make the point about the increasing propensity to violence.

We are then reminded of Merkel's warning that euro failure threatens a thousand plagues. "No one should think that another half-century of peace and prosperity is assured," she said. But she has the matter backwards, Ambrose says. "The euro itself has become an engine of destruction and cross-border rancour. Europe will not be happy again until this misguided experiment is shut down".

The tragedy, though, is that Merkel – knowing only the propaganda version of European Union history - does not realise that the experiment had failed before it had even started. The birth of what is now the EU is put in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War but, as we know, the intellectual genesis – at the hands of Jean Monnet and Arthur Salter – was established in the 1920s, in the aftermath of the First World War.

As a construct intended to prevent a European War, it was therefore, intended to prevent the Second World War. It failed the moment Hitler came to power yet, despite that failure, in the post-Hitlerian wreckage of Europe, Monnet dusted off the same plans and applied them to preventing a war that was never going to happen.

Thus do we have Merkel trapped in a false paradigm, desperately trying to hold together a construct in the hope of averting a war that it could never have stopped – and did not. And not only was it irrelevant to that task, it is now the very source of instability that the Frau so desperately seeks to avoid , making her efforts hopelessly counter-productive.

We should learn our history, they say, for fear of repeating it. But when history becomes propaganda and we learn the wrong history, the repeat comes upon us without us appreciating it for what it is. Sadly, then as now, that "repeat" is the road to war – albeit of peoples rather than armies. That much will be different, not that that is any consolation.

The gospel according to St Huhne - by Richard... Sunday, October 30, 2011

At each stage, Huhne and his co-authors write, the opponents of the euro have forecast disasters which have in fact never happened and which always looked most unlikely … the Euro-sceptics constantly underestimated the competence of the Europeans and their ability to organise things properly.

If we join the euro, they wrote, "we shall over time achieve higher living standards . This is because we shall be full members of a huge single market, which can achieve the economies of scale and competitive excellence that a single currency has made possible in the US. From our greater wealth we shall be able to pay for the better hospitals, schools, houses and railways that we all aspire to".

"If we want the standard of hospitals, schools and railways that exists on the Continent, we have to join the euro. Otherwise we risk growing more slowly than the rest of Europe, which is precisely what happened when we refused to join the Common Market after the Second World War".

And this is the man to whom we should listen on energy?