Wandering star

(Yes, I know I've posted this image before)

Quote of the day

This one from Gandalf on the French NO:

Now we'll get a Chirac/Blair death-fight. Which is great, because nobody cares who wins...

This is worth a read too.

ICR and it's refusal to accept donations

I’ve finally received a response from the Director of Fundraising at the ICR on their refusal to accept a £30,000 donation to their charity from a member of the shooting sports. This arrived soon after I requested details from the organisation on how I could go about using the Freedom of Information Act to gather information I felt was necessary to clarify the charities position:

Thank you for your enquiry. We are happy to confirm that The Institute's decision not to accept the Spider's Appeal donation was based on solely on our concern that publicity could give rise to an enhanced risk to the security of our staff and The Institute. We wish to state definitively that The Institute has no position on shooting.

With regard to your supplementary questions, any decision of this type is based purely on the perceived risk to The Institute or its staff.

I have replied asking if they had received any specific threat and am contemplating where to go with this. My thoughts are along the lines that if they have received information on a specific threat then all is well and good. If there was no specific threat and the decision was based upon their perception of the current climate of fear over criminal animal rights thugs then their refusal to accept donations should logically extend to every industry that is in some way detrimental to animal wellfare (eg food industry).

I am also inclined to draw the conclusion that their declaration that they have no position on shooting is not compatible with their statement. To maintain the foundation of their refusal they must surely continue to refuse donations from shooting sportsmen and women for exactly the same reasons they site in the response above.

I am not yet satisfied with their response on this matter. I would like to know why they would not continue, if they have refused this particular donation, to refuse donations from shooters.

In court - the fox hunters commons invasion

Regarding the conviction of the pro hunters who invaded the floor of the house of commons, my feeling is that it was a fair judgement. However, I did find the following extraordinary:

Ex-Rural Affairs Minister Alun Michael gave evidence yesterday (Wednesday) and amazingly claimed that he did not know what the demonstration outside Parliament was about. A brief scan of the Hansard record of the debate, however, clearly shows that the Minister knew exactly what 15,000 people were protesting about in Parliament Square.

He's going to Canada you know

Gareth, who blogs furiously for the CEP blog, now has his own personal blog at Little Man in a Toque.

1952 Committee - new member

I would like to welcome Ian from An English Shooter's Blog to the 1952 Committee.

There was also one other membership request a few weeks back but I've lost the details. If it was you, then please re-apply and accept my apologies.

The people's NO campaign

Now linking to this on the left with the rest of my standards:

The people's NO campaign

Ask yourself...

...why would anyone say this?

"No institution of the European Union can criticise another institution".

That came from the European Commission President Barroso. Do they think we are not listening or is it that they think there's absolutely nothing we can do about their project regardless of what they say?

True story or fake?

This from Katrina is a giggle.

One man's goose is another man's made up excuse

You know, burglary is a serious problem. It costs people a great deal in money terms and also in other ways too. I'm sure all of you who have been burgled remember the feeling of having been violated. I'm sure the cost of burglary is very high indeed to the country in terms of higher insurance premiums, payouts, police time, court time, prison spaces, lost working hours. The list goes on I am sure.

Yet, somehow, regardless of these disadvantages to society of burglary the government has yet to enforce upon us the need to install burglar alarms and other such anti home invasion devices.

Yet the cost to UK society of identity theft seems to now be the predominant line of the government when trying to justify their ID card scheme.

Any port in a storm.

Here's muff in your eye

To make up for lack of recent blogging I bring you this remarkable bit of technology.

Reality meets face

You may remember this little diatribe by Katie Grant:

Where the English are unattractively soft, the Scots are endearingly tender. Where the English are yobbish and aggressive, the Scots are manly and tough. Where the English are insufferably arrogant, the Scots are grittily stubborn.

Well, via Freedom and Whisky we see that somehow Katie's world view has recently been subjected to some unfortunate and deplorable revision:

ON FRIDAY morning, I looked out into our small garden to find a certain amount of chaos. Pots had been smashed, the bench overturned and all manner of climbing greenery pulled off and scattered. Yobs had invaded, tempted, no doubt, by the piles of scaffolding irritatingly left outside our back wall by the firm constructing new flats opposite.

She reflects:

THIS trifling story is not nearly as exciting as recent ones concerning toddler vandals with spray guns or disrupted funeral processions. Having a plant pot or two broken is hardly the equivalent of being "happy-slapped". It does, however, illustrate that mistake of thinking that yobbery is confined to one section of society.

One section or one nationality Katie. Keep repeating that.

Goin' to get you after school

This, from England Expects, deserves to be put about a bit. It's the text from the letter sent to the five 'rebel' Tories who are doing exactly what they should be doing in Brussels (tabling resolutions that call people out on suspected abuse of their privileged positions):

This resolution could be very damaging to the Conservative Party in that it is also co-signed by individuals from groups and parties such as Sinn Fein who are alien to and hold views incompatible with our beliefs, and your signature on the resolution could indicate your support for these groups and parties.

Therefore we must insist that you urgently remove your name from the list of signatories, in any event at the latest by 12 noon on Thursday 19th May. Failure to do this will result in very serious consequences for you.

This letter was co-signed by Philip Bradbourn, Conservative chief whip in Brussels and Timothy Kirkhope, Tory delegation leader. It's playground stuff isn't it? If you don't do as we say we're goin' to get you. Never mind that they are doing all us little people a service. And that smokescreen about 'aliens' is about as transparent as they come.

The toads are chirping.

Have at you!

Oh what fun

Posted by John at 02:05 PM | TrackBack

The EU constitution

The campaign has launched.

It's your duty, ni

Quote of the day

Eric the Unread commenting upon that Galloway chap and his performance in the US:

Could any visiting Americans please explain how the only remaining superpower in the world can produce such weak and ineffective politicians? It was like watching Godzilla savage lightly-armed Tellytubbies.

I'm no fan of Galloway but if I had come to the whole thing cold I would be by now.

Scottish ID system

Sweet:

GOVERNMENT ministers were heading last night for a split with their Labour counterparts in Scotland over the introduction of ID cards.

The Scottish Parliament rejected the idea of the cards after an SNP-inspired debate this year. Labour ministers at Holyrood have said, however, that while they will be introduced north of the border to access services reserved to Westminster, such as pensions and welfare benefits, they will not be needed for devolved policy areas such as health, education and transport.

That raises the prospect of a two-tier scheme operating in Britain with, for example, NHS patients in England having to use their cards while patients in Scotland will not be required to present them.

Looks like Hollyrood was worth every penny from where I'm sitting.

Dear blogosphere

Two of my close friends are actively working under contract within a government department helping them to implement their ID card scheme. What should I do? Best answers may well get implemented next time I am in their company and within a particular range (usually coloured red) on my drunkometer.

Comments open (please provide full identification details).

Phew, what I don't know about crime could fill a small country

Andy introduces me to a new definition I had not heard of before. It’s a humdinger and I thank him for correcting me on my obviously stale opinion on what I thought it meant. Apparently, and for some reason this passed me by, law-abiding means anybody who isn't working class committing a minor crime. I can now dodge that particular bullet with confidence.

What's in it for them?

News just in:

The Queen is expected to unveil plans to increase the Welsh assembly's law-making powers at the State Opening of Parliament on Tuesday.

Welsh Secretary Peter Hain said it would be a "bumper Queen's Speech for Wales" with an "unprecedented" number of bills.

This, presumably, is being done because it is seen as being good for Wales and, probably as a result, good for the UK.

Somehow, and for some reason, the same privileges for the English are not yet seen as advantageous. One has to wonder why? It's almost as if the policy makers see the UK parliament as the English parliament or, perhaps, they think that the English see the UK parliament as the English parliament. Both views are clearly corrupt and contemptible and, in truth, only a fool would think either of these scenarios are the case.

Enter the fool:

Can you adam and eve it?? The new minister for constitutional affairs [Harriet Harman] said "What anomalies?" in response to Jo Nadler's (the writer on the panel) point about our asymmetric system. I nearly smashed my TV screen in anger. Harriet Harman looks like another ignorant fool that's in charge of our constitution. I'm fuming!

Harriet being the fool not the fuming correspondent to the Campaign for an English Parliament.

The Scottish Parliament exists, presumable, because it is seen by our representatives in the United Kingdom as a good thing for Scotland and a good thing for the UK. The same can be said for the Welsh assembly. Why can the same thing not be said about an English Parliament? Are the English so devoid of problems as a nation that they don't need one? I would suggest not.

So, to the decision makers who would deny us this equal representation in the Kingdom: In the absence of any enlightened argument based on equality rather than administrative issues what is the real barrier to proper representation for the majority? I am beginning to suspect that the real question should be what advantages do they get from denying the English? What's in it for them?

Falling off the Internet

We’ve been experiencing some connectivity issues at home with our BT broadband package. Every now and again connectivity will vanish all together for a period ranging from a few minutes to a few hours. This is a relatively new problem. There are a number of reasons why this is a bad thing but the most acute is the difficulties this presents us with when trying to run a business from home.

Diagnostics show that the failure is in the PPP connection from our router/modem to the BT server. The internal wireless intranet continues to work fine. This, coupled with the fact that BT are currently performing major works to the whole of their network until August this year and the fact that their recorded support line continues to offer the advice that some customers in some unnamed areas may experience some connectivity issues, leads me to believe that they are culpable.

So, after taking a call from an irate Mrs. England Project this morning, and after going through the usual list of things to try, I could only suggest the un-suggestible. Phoning support.

I know, I know, what a fool I am.

Anyhow, Mrs. England Project was on the phone for an hour before she managed to get through to a human being. The person she managed to talk to had difficulty understanding the problem because (honest truth) he was French. He had some significant holes in his understanding and expression of concepts structured around and conveyed in the verbal form of the English language. His eventual advice was that our router was not supported by BT and that we should hit the “access with a sharp object only” reset button. Our router? A BT Voyager 2100.

My good lady, being good, refused to hit the reset button and as a consequence she was 100% responsible for preventing the loss of our network’s port forwarding information, IP allocation settings and network encryption method and key. Stupid she ain’t.

After slamming the phone down it transpired that connectivity had returned all by itself. Oddly enough this is a remarkably similar scenario and outcome as to that suggested by the BT service line recorded message, leaving us none the wiser about how likely and at what rate such future outages might occur.

This rant was brought to you via a different provider.

Down the river

Blair seems to think that he’ll have enough EU support to keep the UK’s working time opt out.

That is exactly the point.

Our elected parliament wants one thing, our EU project leaders want another and who do we have to turn to? What a joke.

You know, every time a UK politician harps on about Lords reform and how necessary it is to have an elected Lords chamber I wonder why their vision stops at the door of their parliamentary building in Westminster. How many EU parliamentarians are elected by us? Certainly not enough to legitimise the power that Brussels wields over the UK. Sure, the others may well be elected by their own “constituents” but they are from constituencies that have absolutely nothing to do with us in the UK. For that argument to hold any water we would have to have exactly the same rights, privileges, centrally set and administered taxation regimes, laws etc as all the other constituencies in the EU. Oh! Wait a minute!

The political classes and what they have and are doing to this country and union of ours disgusts me. They have lied, cheated, misrepresented and hushed up nearly every aspect of their glorious project for decades.

ICR and it's refusal to accept donations

Some time back I blogged this particular story:

A cancer charity has rejected a £30,000 donation over animal welfare concerns.

Barry Atkinson carried out a record 148 days beating - or flushing out birds - at grouse, partridge and pheasant shoots.

The 61-year-old, who lives near Newark in Nottinghamshire, said he was appalled the donation had been rejected by the Institute of Cancer Research.

In trying to get to the bottom of this disgraceful behaviour by the charity I have sent a number of emails to Philip Black ( Director of Fund raising) which he has either ignored or responded to with standard emails (many other shooters have received the exact same rubbish responses).

I have grown tired of being ignored by this man in this important matter and have, today, mailed the Information Officer at the ICR asking how I might follow up my line of questioning using the Freedom of Information Act.

Shame on them

Inspired by this news:

A senior European Commissioner marked VE Day yesterday by accusing Eurosceptics of risking a return to the Holocaust by clinging to "nationalistic pride".

As Richard says:

How dare these second-rate crooks invoke the death of millions in the support of their cause. Never more have this etiolated bunch demonstrated just how foul their "project" is and what vile bodies they really are.

Chaos, you know, it's not all bad

Stephen thanks God that we don’t have proportional representation. I’m not convinced about the arguments for or against quite yet but I do fail to see the acuteness of the problem that Stephen has with it:

Thank God we don’t have PR – a result like this would have led to chaos.

Chaos perhaps, but only in terms of the machinery of the state. The rest of us would have just carried on doing what we do regardless completely unaware of what all the fuss is about. More to the point, those pesky kids of the mystery machine that is Westminster would have been left less able to meddle in our lives.

So, I take on board what he says but can’t help feeling it actually helps the argument for PR.

And a hunting they went

This is excellent news:

Vote OK put people in the following 29 constituencies where anti-hunting MPs were defeated by pro-hunting or neutral candidates – Braintree, Weston-super-Mare, Monmouth, Lancaster & Wyre, Kettering, Northampton South, Welwyn Hatfield, Shipley, Milton Keynes North East, Hornchurch, Hammersmith & Fulham, Forest of Dean, Wellingborough, Newbury, Rugby & Kenilworth, Harwich, Peterborough, Shrewsbury & Atcham, Scarborough & Whitby, Preseli Pembrokeshire, Putney, Hemel Hempstead, The Wrekin, Croydon Central, Wimbledon, St Albans, Gravesham, Reading East, and Enfield Southgate.

Untold story

Richard provides this analysis of the effect UKIP and Veritas had on the Tory chances in this general election.

In all, this translates to 16 seats which would have been lost to Labour and nine to the Lib-Dems, potentially reducing Blair’s overall majority to 25 – an entirely unworkable majority.

Let's hope they get the message.

Engwho?

Via Stuart we see that the Tories won the popular vote in England:

ENGLISH ONLY update
8,014,418 conservative
7,978,582 labour
5,140,532 liberal

That seems to be the deal doesn't it? The majority of the English did not want to be governed by the party that has won the UK general election. These are people from a nation that has no parliament of its own. These are people that have to pay taxes to run a state they didn't want.

Now, of course, the argument we hear again and again is well, that's the system we have - why add another level of political machinery to it? It only complicates things. You're only bleating.

Well, the figures speak for themselves. That is exactly why the English need proper democratic representation in the form of a parliament and an executive. Say what you will; when a nation is governed by people who do not have the popular vote it is deeply disappointing. When that nation also does not have proper parliamentary representation it is deeply, deeply disturbing.

Can you hear the drums? Download the soundtrack.

It's the little things

I awoke this morning to just another groundhog day. Make tea, coffee and hot chocolate. Brush teeth. Shower. Iron shirt (yes, I am a modern man). Then I remembered that there was an election on and that most of the results should be in by now. Meh.

I was disappointed in the total lack of excitement. Should I finish ironing the shirt before moving the 6 feet needed to turn the TV on or not? I decided that my ’63 bikini beach babe tour shirt demanded my undivided attention.

When I finally got round to looking up the scores I was content with most of what I saw at first. The big news of the day is the dramatic drop in the Labour majority which is a good thing for everybody, hard core Labour supporters (conservative or not) included. “Good for democracy” I thought. But then one has to consider this in the context of the number of people who voted Labour against the number who didn’t. Some figure around 36% of the vote for a government is not good for democracy. So it’s 1-1 with no extra time to play.

The Tories made some progress this time round a fact for which I have mixed feelings. They helped reduce the Labour vote and for that they deserve thanks. However, they need to change to a party of small government with a rather more aggressive outlook towards EU integration before I can joyfully support them again. Their progress in this election will not encourage them down that path and that is the biggest feeling of loss that I have this morning.

UKIP who? Did they win a seat? I’ve not been able to find out yet but I somehow doubt it. The hope that I have is that they did cost the Tory party two or three seats and that the Tory party noticed. At least that would be something.

I think the biggest story for me that has yet to be fully answered is what affect the aggressive campaigning of the fox hunters has had on rural Labour seats. Drake over at The Edge of England’s Sword notes:

…here's a piece of wonderful news: Peter Bradley, PPS to Countryside Minister Alun Michael and a man who was unafraid to dismiss the Countryside Alliance as 'the last hurrah of the feudal system' when they pointed out how much of his seat was rural, just lost The Wrekin.

That does fill me with joy. A last hurrah that just so happened to slap that particular fool onto his arse. I will drink to that and any other similar victory.

This is what the Telegraph had to say about Bradley earlier this year:

Until last autumn Mr Bradley was the largely unknown Labour MP for The Wrekin, a small constituency in the heart of Shropshire. Then, as parliamentary private secretary to Alun Michael, the rural affairs minister, Mr Bradley propelled himself into the spotlight when he wrote a controversial article in The Telegraph about hunting. He said: "We ought at last to own up to it: the struggle over the Bill was not just about animal welfare and personal freedom, it was class war."

This is what Mr. Bradley’s web site has to say at the time of going to press:

Welcome to my website! I want my constituents – and anyone else who's interested – to know what I am doing, in Westminster, in The Wrekin and elsewhere.

This is what TheyWorkForYou.com have to say about Bradley this very morning:

Former Labour MP for Wrekin, The

It’s the little things, you know.

On your bike

The bicycle has won some kind of BBC award for being the nations favorite invention. Coincidentally enough a whole bunch of these things will be travelling about a bit on something called a Tour of Britain. Missing from the tour is a team identifiably from England. Missing from the official web site is a good reason for England's exclusion.

The beautiful people

When the BBC says "Voters go to the Polls" take a look at who they actually mean.

Hello, yes

I'm still here. Many thanks to the kind people who have mailed their concern and a special thanks to reader Andrew (no Blair’s thought police tried but I sent them away) and Athelstan from the Cross of St. George blog who came round to see if everything was ok. How he got past the heavily armed attack dogs I have no idea.

I've been on a break from blogging during the election season because I've been suffering from a peculiar illness which I've dubbed political toxicity. The symptoms are a feeling of utter frustration, ranting fits, frothing at the mouth and a tendency to take up every pastime or bad habit that the political elite and their self interested minority pressure groups have said is bad for me out of sheer bloody mindedness. Man what a ride.

So today is election day and all the pundits I have been trying to ignore are saying it’s to be another Labour landslide of one degree or another. That’s another five years of the bull in the china shop. Sure the electorate might be feeling comfortable now but eventually old Mr. and Mrs. Consequence are going to come round for a visit and the electorate are going to have to serve tea out of an EU approved plastic cup. The shame.

See you on the other side.