The Sunday Quote

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''I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.'' - Voltaire (1694 -1778)


The above quote is inspired by the subject this week of - Geert Wilders the Dutch MP and his the treatment of him by this country – my country. Last weeks reaction by the Government makes me feel as if I am living in a foreign land. Is this reallythe UK from which he was turned away because 'we' do not like what he says? Is this the same country which so egregiously, for so long, permitted the hate-filled preaching of Abu Hamza, before finally doing something about it?

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Philip Johnston makes the point well in The Daily Telegraph, as do many many more right across the political spectrum. Johnston thinks that the refusal to admit the oddball Dutch MP to Britain yesterday "marks a further retreat from this country's traditions of free speech." He is quite correct; any right-thinking person would agree.

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Over and above the loathsome behaviour of our government, however, is the attitude of Her Majesty's "loyal opposition", the once great Conservative Party, which is reduced to this.

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Did we not hear so very recently from our MPs, a strident dissertation about the "privilege of freedom of speech", enjoyed by Members of Parliament, this being "in truth the privilege of their constituents."

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Well … Mr Wilders is an MP. Or does freedom of speech apply only to Conservative MPs and their constituents?

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For the avoidence of doubt any doubt, I do not agree with the views of Geer Wilders he is clearly bonkers, but the point is however, freedom of speech is a very basic right in any proper democracy.

Peter Troy
Sedgefield. County Durham

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Banking Regulation

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With news today that the Lloyds TSB/HBOS Banking group is in serious difficulty it is amazing that despite the acres of newsprint, it seems that many people still do no understand the nature of the crisis and its root causes.

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A key point this is not being recognised is that, while the financial system was globalising, so was the regulatory system – with the Basel Banking Regulation committee and other international bodies taking the helm.The net effect was that we in the UK were saddled with an inflexible, slow moving and wholly inadequate system of regulation and, as importantly, it was one over which no single – or any – nation had control. As was the global financial system out of control, so was the banking regulatory system.

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It is curious therefore, to see that the response of our government has been to in effect nationalise most of the UK banking system, with more to follow. The effect of that is to reassert national control. But there is no recognition that the other half of the equation – the regulatory system also needs to be nationalised.Thus, in effect, we are getting the worst of all possible worlds.

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While most of our Banks are being bought up by the government with public funds, the very regulatory system which allowed them to go to the brink of destruction – and even beyond – is being left almost completely untouched, its role wholly unrecognised as a primary cause of the banking problem which is particularly adversly effecting small businesses.

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In many ways, Gordon Brown is as much a passenger of events as are we all. That is the really terrifying thing – nobody is really in control. The mighty machine of global finance is falling apart and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it.

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Parliament is Cavalier about Democracy

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Charles Moore suggests in The Daily Telegraph that "Few people would fight for Parliament today," questioning whether anyone would "defend democracy in today's political climate."He is reviewing a book about the English Civil War – Cavaliers and Roundheads, and all that – adding his "take", writing that:

Because voters are so angry – rightly – about "sleaze", they have almost forgotten that those they elect must have "privileges". That is to say, they must have rights against the power of what is still sometimes called the Crown, but which means, in reality, the might of government and the power of "Europe".

Parliament has sacrificed these privileges, preferring material ones, and has therefore lost respect. If we had a civil war today, few would fight for it. That is fair enough comment, and if you move over to The Times you will see a graphic illustration of what has happened to parliament's power.

Way down the list, this is a nasty little story about how a drinks manufacturer, Sovio Wines, is appealing to the High Court against a Food Standards Agency (FSA) ban on its products. There is nothing wrong with the product – in fact it is extremely popular and has been welcomed by health campaigners as an excellent idea.

What the company has done is use a pioneering process in order to take high quality wines and to reduce their alcohol content to just eight percent without in any way altering the taste or texture of the wines. But the "mistake" it made was then to label its product wine, thereby falling foul of EU law which specifies a minimum of nine percent alcohol for a product to be thus labelled.

Enter the FSA which claims that, because a breach of EU law is involved, it has jurisdiction over its distribution, whence it moved in to ban its sale. In so doing, it has "paralysed" the company's business. Stocks worth tens of thousands of pounds, held at a bonded warehouse since the 2007 banning order, have been rendered undrinkable and therefore unmarketable because of the wine's short shelf-life.

The company's chairman Tony Dann thus notes that: "The Government is urging the drinks industry to provide a wider range of lower alcohol products, consumers want to drink them and yet the FSA is seemingly trying to kill a product that everyone wants".The problem, of course, is that the government – in Whitehall – is no longer in charge, and neither is Parliament. This is a law made in Brussels, untouched by parliament because it is an EU Regulation, which contradicts British government policy. It is being enforced by an Agency – not a Quango – paid for by us, which is not answerable to Ministers or parliament. It is acting solely and exclusively in defence of EU law.

Now look at Melanie Phillips. She writes in respect of the financial crisis:

Ultimately, however, such re-arrangement of the political furniture is unlikely to make much difference. For the public are terminally disenchanted with the entire political scene. Totally bemused by the financial meltdown, they perceive that no politician appears to have a clue either. MPs themselves hardly exude any more confidence in themselves. With their woeful attendance records, long holidays and shorter hours, and with ministers making announcements anywhere but in the Commons chamber, there is a palpable sense that power has moved elsewhere.
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By diverse and several means, parliament has rendered itself impotent, irrelevant to the government of this country, toothless, self-obsessed and venal. Would we fight for it? Of course not. We would be happier driving the tumbrels.
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The only mistake Charles Moore makes is in confusing parliament with democracy. We have not had true democracy in this country for some time. The proof is in incidents like the one affecting Sovio Wines. We would fight for democracy, but not for the people who gave it away.

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Press Accountability

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An interesting item in The Independent opens up a hornet's nest on the issue of press accountability and, more generally, on the performance of the media.

For those who hold – as we do – that an effective and well-founded media is an essential prerequisite of a functioning democracy, the report which spawned the piece, from the Media Standards Trust, is an important contribution to an ongoing debate.The report itself can be found here, with a summary/press release here, the essence of which is retailed by The Independent report.

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This tells us that financial pressure and the introduction of fast-paced new technology could combine to increase the risk of press intrusion and inaccuracy. This is backed by a survey carried out by YouGov which finds that few people (7 percent) trust newspapers to behave responsibly and three-quarters (75 percent) believe papers frequently publish stories which they know are not true.

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The Media Standards Trust uses this as a platform to argue for a "more accountable press" calling for urgent reform of the industry's existing self-regulation system, the Press Complaints Commission, describing it as "insufficiently effective" and "largely unaccountable". "Without urgent reform, self-regulation of the press will become increasingly ineffective at protecting the public or promoting good journalism," the Trust concludes.

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One can entirely sympathise with the Trust's views on the adequacy of the PCC, experience with it over the Qana affair being less than happy, leading us to conclude – as with other matters – that it is a toothless and largely useless body.

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However, we cannot help but feel that the Trust's emphasis on more or better regulation is somewhat misplaced, as the PCC and the other issues it focuses on are – in our view – only the smaller part of the problem.As we pointed out in an earlier post, the bigger problem is not so much what the newspapers publish, but what they do not. Much of the distortion in the media comes from its inability – or unwillingness – to carry out its basic function of reporting the news. And no amount of regulation is going to change that.

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Further, another pressing problem is the competence of many journalists, whose knowledge of their subject and their ability to carry our basic research and fact-checking is extremely suspect. We saw a classic example of that recently, where the media got hold of completely the wrong end of the stick and, as a result, gave a completely wrong account of an important story.

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However, the Trust's report concludes that, "Public trust in the press has fallen below the level necessary for it to perform its proper role in a democratic society,” then adding that: "Until the system is reformed there is little chance of trust being raised.”The response of PCC chairman Sir Christopher Meyer illustrates that we have an uphill battle. Even to the relatively mild criticism offered, he reacts by saying the report is "careless and shoddy", and then pours out defensive bureaucratese, which demonstrates that he is not even past the starting gate when it comes to understanding that there is a problem.

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At this point, of course, we could offer the view that the "new media" will overcome the shortcomings of the "dead tree media", except that there is no sign of this happening. The blogs and other web-based output is as much part of the problem as the old media.

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Where we go from here, therefore, is anyone's guess, but it is interesting to see that a body which this blogger didn't even know existed is taking on a debate which needs to happen and needs to be resolved.

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Orwellian Britain

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When one looks around you at the state of our economy, consider the falling standards in our education system, think back to the money poured into unreformed public services that has wasted or even weigh up the consequences of the approaching energy gap time bomb, one could be forgiven for wondering if our dear Government is capable of doing anything well.

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But the fact is there are some things this Government does well. There are some things this Government does very well indeed. The problem is nearly all of them concern measures that are designed to restrict our individual freedoms, infringe our civil liberties, invade our privacy and ever more closely monitor all our activities.

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The latest example of the United Kingdom's transformation into a surveillance state is reported upon in The Sunday Times, as it is confirmed that:

The Government is building a secret database to track and hold the international travel records of all 60m Britons.
The intelligence centre will soon store names, addresses, telephone numbers, seat reservations, travel itineraries and credit card details for all 250m passenger movements in and out of the UK each year all (wrongly) in the name our safety; supposed ant-terrorist measures.

The population of the United Kingdom is supposed to enjoy the right to go about its lawful business unmolested by the state. However the Government is clearly now determined to turn that inviolable protection on its head and do all it can to molest innocent and law abiding people - but to do so remotely, using technology so as to give people the illusion that they still enjoy privacy. It is a concerted assault on two of the principles of a free society - individual freedom and limited government.

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This burgeoning surveillance state is utterly determined to log every place we go, the services we use, the money we earn, the people we associate with and even how we spend our leisure time. It is turning our legal status of innocence until proven guilty on its head.

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As the House of Lords Constitution Committee made clear just last week, this country's traditions of privacy and democracy are under threat from pervasive and routine electronic spying and the mass collection of personal information.

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The people of the United Kingdom are now in danger of being considered guilty unless excluded by the bewildering array of overt and covert technological surveillance methods; Orwell's state as predicted in his classic satire '1984' has truly arrived.

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The Sunday Quote

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Those who are too clever to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are not so clever. ~ Plato (424-348 BC)
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Global Warming Snow

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With huge amounts of snow this week and more on its way, the climate change industry is moving into high gear to defend it's turf. It gets a hearing in the Telegraph which runs a story headed, "Snow is consistent with global warming, say scientists".

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Britain, it tells us, may be in the grip of the coldest winter for 30 years but the current cold snap does not mean that climate change is going into reverse. In fact, the surprise with which we have greeted the extreme conditions only reinforces how our climate has changed over the years, how amazing.

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Confronted with this speciousness, most people have difficulty suppressing the sniggers, except that these people are deadly serious. There is no way they are going to let go of the gravy train and admit reality.

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Thus we get one Dr Myles Allen, head of the Climate Dynamics group at Department of Physics, University of Oxford, leading the charge. "If it wasn't for global warming this cold snap would happen much more regularly. What is interesting is that we are now surprised by this kind of weather. I doubt we would have been in the 1950s because it was much more common.” "As for snowfall …" Well, Dr Allen has an answer for that. It "could actually increase in the short term because of global warming. We have all heard the expression 'too cold to snow' and we have always expected precipitation to increase." Thus, "All the indicators still suggest that we are warming up in line with predictions."

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So there you have it from the horse's mouth. If it is hot, its global warming, if it's wet, its global warming, and if it's cold, it's global warming, if it snows, it's definitely global warming.

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With Britain being so unprepared for the current round of global warming though, we hear from David Frost, director-general of the British Chambers of Commerce. "I wonder," he says, "whether we have become a bit too complacent or we are being a bit too bowled over by the constant talk of global warming and the fact that temperatures are always going to rise, and therefore when something like this does happen we are caught very much on the hop."Mr Frost adds that, "We should be perhaps planning on the basis that there is more freak weather about and we shouldn't just buckle to it. There should be more planning going into it."

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He has a point. on that last issue. Our political masters need to ask themselves how many times the nation has been brought to a halt by the magnificent heatwaves we've all been enjoying recently, and how that compares with the estimated loss of £3 billion to the economy brought about by this very modest layer of the white stuff.

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The Booker Column

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Christopher Booker is having great fun today in his column. He draws the parallel between the religious fervour of the warmists and the Darwinians, noting how both camps share the common traits of blind faith in their beliefs and their fanatical intolerance of anyone who dares question their dogma. One might also add the euro-fanatics whose enthusiasm for the "project" has quasi-religious aspects, and who also display the same fanatical intolerance of the warmists and Darwinians.

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In My View

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At the centre of the industrial action by some 300 staff at the Lindsey oil refinery near Immingham on the east coast is an important national issue. This is not because the site on East field Road is the third largest refinery in the country but because it raises a key issue of the consequences our membership of the European Union.

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The essence of the matter is summed up by shop steward Garry Scales who was reported in a national newspaper as saying: "We are angry that workers have been taken on from outside the UK when people here are out of work."

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After many years of ignoring the details of our membership of the all embracing European Union and pretending that the vast waves of intrusive legislation was not really happening, it is now leaping up and biting politicians, trade union leaders, business people and the public at large and most do not know what to make of it. Clearly our politician do not understand the issue and are alienating themselves further with their crassly out of touch comments.

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For example, Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary – and former union leader – has been talking about the need for "fresh directives" in order to make it clear that British workers cannot be undercut on their own turf. Trade Union leaders are calling for "a new EU directive "to overturn two '' European Court '' cases; they are clearly failing to understand that all the European Court of Justice (ECJ) was doing was clarifying that which has been in the Treaty of Rome since 1957.

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What is actually needed is not so much a new EU directive as a new EU treaty – which of course can not happen within five years at least. Our politicians are in effect thrashing around looking for a way out of an intractable problem, that being the complexity and intrusive EU but not admitting, if indeed they understand, that the problem lies deep within the ethos of the EU.

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It is quite depressing watching the former MP for Hartlepool and one time EU Commissioner and now Secretary of State for Business Lord (Peter) Mandelson squirming, trying to explain to us that its "alright chaps" – you can go and get jobs in Italy adding that us that there is "no problem" with EU rules as Total Petroleum – owners of the Lindsey oil refinery – have provided "full reassurance" and dispelled the "perception" that Britons had been discriminated against. Paul Kenny, leader of the vast Trade Union the GMB was less than impressed, spitting with rage, declaring that, "For Mandelson to come out with the Norman Tebbit line to get on your bike and go to Brussels is outrageous.” Well fine, in my view Mandleson's let them eat cake attitude is less than helpful and surely misses the essential point but so to does Mr Kenny by not attacking the long standing Europeanization of our country.

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Our much beleaguered Prime Minister isn't having an easy time of it either making himself yet more unpopular with his fatuous slogan, "British jobs for British workers," he is now telling these ardent jobseekers, looking for rapidly vanishing stock of British jobs, that these "wildcat strikes" are "not defensible". They were "not the right thing to do". Well what is the right thing to do Prime Minister, turn our back on the interference of the EU perhaps?
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The Lib-Dems have been warning that challenging EU labour laws would be a "huge, self-defeating step too far", as they desperately seek to prevent their much loved EU gurgling down the plug hole as British workers finally get wise to the joys of being so 'European'.

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William Hague added to the tension this week by wanting it both ways. The Conservatives "strongly support" the free movement of Labour within the EU; oh dear perhaps he should have said something about Labour isn’t working.

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The fundamental point is that when the UK joined the then Common Market back in 1973, our political masters at the time accepted on our behalf the right of nationals of any other member state automatically to live and work in Britain. However, at that time there were only eight other member states, all of them prosperous and unlikely to trigger large migration to the UK from what is now the European Union with a population from 26 other member states to look for jobs.

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When, union organiser Bernard McAuley addressed workers in Lindey last week he clambered on to a flatbed truck to tell them that it was "wrong to ship in workers from the continent when north Lincolnshire had plenty of unemployed builders who could do the job." He did not say that is what the EU is all about... British workers do not have any rights (of their own any more); they have no more rights than the itinerant Latvian who is wants to drop in for a job.That, actually, is the real issue issue and one that our politicians do not tell us. If a nation is to mean anything, it means being able to control access and our government (accountable to us) to decide who can come in and work, and who cannot. It is not the principle of whether foreign workers should come in and take jobs. It is that our government in the UK has no control over the matter; we are now ruled by the EU, mostly from Brussels.

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The realities and the consequences of the huge amounts of EU regulations and directives that are integrated automatically into UK law are well known to the army of UK small business owners, which is why delegates from the Federation of Small Businesses have twice voted to demand the UK leave the European Union. Perhaps now is the time for the British public to have their say.

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.The posting above was published on 4/02/08 in The Journal

A North of England Newspaper

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