Sunday, January 18

Painful Reading

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Mr Booker's column today makes painful reading. It is the final chapter in the destruction of our once-proud and profitable industry, torn apart by the combined depredations of the EU's Common Fisheries Policy and the wilful zealotary of our own loathsome officials, permitted by the acquiescence of our politicians and the stupidity and malign myopia of the media. This is a policy which, as Booker observes, has 82-year old Doreen Hicks weeping in the dock after being given a criminal record, fines and costs of £3,500, on threat of imprisonment, just because she was named as a part-owner of her family's fishing boat.
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The Sunday Quote

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''The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth."

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
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The EU - Bad for our Health Service

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Another example of the malign capability of The EU comes in The Sunday Telegraph today, which headlines a story, "New EU working laws will be disaster for NHS". This is the Working Time Directive , Dr North has already pointed out the effect this will have on the British retained fire service. This is much worse.
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According to one of Britain's top surgeons, the changes required by the directive to hospital working hours - coming into force this summer – will be "disastrous" for patient care and result in "major service failure".
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This quote is from John Black, president of the Royal College of Surgeons. He makes no bones about it (to coin a phrase). The new rules are "an impending disaster" which will "devastate" medical training because no surgeon will be able to work a shift long enough to gain proper experience. The multiple handovers of staff needed to comply with the rules will mean that patients do not see the same doctor for more than a few hours. There could be "dangerous" lapses in patient care, especially at night. "With nobody able to work more than 48 hours a week from August, the effects on patient care in the NHS are potentially disastrous," Mr Black says.
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He goes on, retailing a litany of woes which all point to the fact that going to hospital will be that much more dangerous than it is already. People are going to die, unnecessarily, sometimes horribly. And the EU will be to blame.
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Black is meeting Alan Johnson, the health secretary, in February to propose a "speciality opt-out" and an upper limit on surgeons' hours of 65 to 70 hours a week. "I have no doubt we will be told that it is impossible to alter or bypass the European law. I do not believe this," he says. "All manner of EC law must have been bent or ignored in nationalising a bank in 24 hours. The government can do it if it has the political will."
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But what is terrifying is the Orwellian response from Department of Health. Instead of acknowledging a very serious problem, it offers the anodyne statement that, "A few hospitals have implemented the maximum 48 hour week across all rotas. We are monitoring the situation as some smaller specialities and isolated hospitals may find meeting the deadline more challenging."
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Never must it be admitted that the EU is tearing our nation apart, much less that it is going to kill people. No, the bureaucrats merely "monitor the situation" and, in due course will find nothing wrong at all. Such is how we are now governed.
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Sunday, January 11

The Sunday Quote

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'' If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two imposters just the same,

If you can walk with crowds and keep your vertue,

Or walk with Kings, nor lose the common touch,

If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run,

Yours is the earth and everthing that's in it, ................''

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
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Better off out (or at least a loosening)

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Opinion Polls which confirm the general public antipathy towards the European Union (EU) are always good news, one such appears in The Sunday Telegraph today, carried out by YouGov, commissioned by the Tax Payers Alliance and Global Vision.
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Headlined, "Loosen Britain's ties with European Union, say two-thirds of voters", it tells us that almost two-thirds of voters want "a significant loosening" of Britain's ties with the EU including "an end to the supremacy of the European Court of Justice. ECJ)" (One wonders, incidentally, whether all those polled know the difference between the ECJ and the Court of Human Rights - a lot of journalists do not and confusion is very common.)
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As to the detail of the poll, 16 percent of voters want Britain to withdraw from the EU, while 48 percent want a "much looser relationship." Added together this makes 64 percent in favour of weakening Britain's ties with the EU. By contrast, just 22 percent favour full membership including the Lisbon Treaty. Additionally, 64 percent oppose the euro, while only 24 percent support membership. However, the choice between outright withdrawal and "looser ties" is false and indeed impossible.
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Membership of the EU is not an à la carte option where you can pick and choose from existing treaties and reject those bits you don't like, while keeping the others. In particular, in respect of the supremacy of the ECJ, that is so fundamental to the very essence of the EU that rejecting its dominance would amount to a rejection of the EU in its entirety. You can imagine, say, if you accepted traffic laws, but rejected the authority of any court to fine you for speeding, what would happen, which is why the EU would never allow the authority of its "supreme court" to be challenged.
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One can see the tactical advantage, though, of posing the "looser ties" question, but it would make much more sense in a future poll to have another question. This one should pose to the "looser ties" bods the scenario that no changes can be made to existing treaties and, therefore, their original choice is not an option. In that scenario, what is the preference: in or out?

Faced with that stark choice, some "looser ties" advocates would fall by the wayside, unable to countenance the idea of letting go of nanny, but the likelihood is that we would see a much higher proportion than 16 percent who now say they want to leave.

Even then, 16 percent could be electorally significant. Potentially, those who want to leave – despite the massive tide of propaganda that says we can't or shouldn't – could be influenced to vote for a party that promised our departure, that 16 percent is well over twice the margin between the two main parties. Arguably, the party that made the promise could win the next election.
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The problem actually is that, for many years , the political classes and businesses organisations have fudged it, holding out the false hope of "reform", keeping alive the myth that the EU can be changed into a more acceptable form of construct or that lobbying can have an effect. It can't, and the EU makes this very clear – "take it or leave it" is its ethos. Buy the whole EU package or nothing.
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Only insignificant concessions can be found as 'lobbying' success stories which perpetuate the myth that the EU is other than a rigid machine producing a frighteningly fixed agenda. Soviet style licenesed dissidents are permitted with in the EU system and to those that properly understand the ways of the EU, the so called lobbyists prostitute their principles when caught up in the vast egos of the eurocrats. On the subject of elections, the poll also asks about voting intentions for the election to the European Parliament in June this year. It puts the Tories at 35 percent, Labour on 29, Lib-Dims at 15, and UKIP on seven. The Greens get five percent, BNP four, and the Nationalists also four. These figures are pretty meaningless though since they don't give the "don't knows" and the "don't cares", which probably exceed in number those who would vote for any specific party.
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All this is borne out by another result, which finds that some 45 percent of voters believe none of the three main political parties adequately reflects their views "on Britain's future relations with the EU." We also get 59 percent wanting UK Ministers to disregard the EU's VAT rules if they feel a further cut in VAT is necessary, which is an interesting idea but would result in the UK being fined in the ECJ if they took that action.
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The UK's small businesses community - which now counts for 55 per cent of the UK's GDP - has constantly been skeptical of EU membership.

Back in 2001 a resolution proposed by Peter Troy (editor of this Blog) and seconded by Colin Stratton now head of the recruitment division of the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) was presented to many hundreds of delegates and passed by a majority of over two to one at that years Federation's Annual Conference, in it has to be said the face of considerable objection from the FSB's establishment. Despite that resolution seven years ago and a previous successful motion in 1995 ahead of vast EU regulation (particularly anti-entrepreneurial employment law) that was about to impact on the UKs business community the FSB Board failed, amazingly, to adopt a withdrawal policy from the EU.

What is now clear is that the people of the United Kingdom do not want to live with the constraints and vast cost that comes with membership of the EU. The price of the combined direct and indirect expenses of EU membership is now very much in the public's mind. The propaganda fondly promoted by government agencies and moronically repeated chant like by business agencies has lost acceptance by true business practitioners. The vast wrath of regulations and directives is bad enough, the financial cost is now huge. In 2008 the EU costs Britain £55.775 billion. Set out in the latest Bruges Group research document where the full financial burden to Britain has now been calculated.

The conclusion is clear in 2008 there has been dramatic increase in the financial costs of the EU as well as a continuing erosion of our national sovereignty a process that started in 1973. Clearly the people of the United Kingdom (if not the managers of the nation's business representitive organsistions) are now accepting that membership of the EU is at a cost they cannot afford.

One hopes that Her Majesty's Subjects in ''our dear Channel Islands'' (Churchill's broadcast May 1945) will wake up to the gradual occupation that is marching up their path and into their business and domestic front doors, but that is a piece (or perhaps a campaign) for an other day.
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The Cost of EU Membership

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The price of the combined direct and indirect expenses of EU membership in 2008 costs Britain £55.775 billion. Set out in the latest Bruges Group research by Gerard Batten, the full financial burden to Britain has now been calculated. They show a dramatic increase in the costs of the EU A price Britain cannot afford. Click here to read the full analysis online
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Sunday, January 4

Independent Spirit

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Since this is the first post of the New Year the Editor and his cat (Hector) wish all our readers best wishes for 2009.
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While most of the UK slowly gets back to work and the reality of the economic downturn impacts (as our political masters like to say) feelings in The Republic of Ireland are running some what high.
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The arrogance of the EU is starting to rile the quiet independent spirit of the Irish. A cartoonist has managed to put into picture form the anger rising in Irish hearts against the unreasonableness of the EU. A picture is worth a thousand words. Ireland we recomend should adopt the new powerful cartoon as the banner of the movement to keep its freedom from bossy eurocrats. The masterpiece is posted on The Tap Blog
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The Sunday Quote

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Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
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