Whether the Prime Minister's statement at the Labour Party conference that "any newcomer to Britain who is caught selling drugs or using guns will be thrown out" will apply to citizens of European Union member states.
I shall write to the noble Lord.
Why are the major bloggers not picking up on these things? Where are they? Tied up in Polly Toynbee and David Milliband.
Which compares with its 8% GDP share of the aggregate £31bn UK fiscal deficit, coming in at £2.5bn. So net net, a fully independent Scotland is £2.5bn pa worse off. Or approximately 2.4% of its £106bn pa GDP.
I hear from John Trenchard that a very special treat awaited King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia today.The army marching band (Coldstream Guards?) was playing the Darth Vadar Evil Empire "Imperial March" theme from Star Wars just as King Abdullah pulled up in his limo to greet the Queen.
What the fuck!!! Is this a jibe by the army (or rather HM Liz) at the Saudis?
As Wikipedia says "The theme...represents the totalitarian Galactic Empire as a whole, and Darth Vader specifically. More than other Star Wars themes, the March has attained an iconic status in the Western consciousness as a general "evil theme", and as such is used to portray power at public events".
And the winner is... David "Batshit" Miliband! He is a hideous, spoddy, speccy twat whose mouth writhes across his face like a separate living (and utterly evil) alien being. Not only that, but he worships at the altars of the evil fucking demons incarnate named Gore and Barroso whilst being, at the same time, utterly ignorant of the major portfolios that he has been the curator.
Finally, I think I’ve moved a bit politically, and my allegiance to the party has hardened, meaning that I am both less likely to criticise the government’s actions (particularly since Brown took over) and more likely to self-censor when I want to shout about how wrong they are. Hey ho.
Dear Wank-stains of the MSM and especially the BBC,
I think that it is lovely—now that NuLabour has given you permission—that you have finally had the balls to run major reports on immigration. However, could I point out that the only people "questioning whether or not the government has lost control of our borders" are stupid, ignorant fuckwits, much like yourselves.
Of course the government has not "lost control of our borders". It quite deliberately gave away control of our borders when it signed up to the EU.
So, I wonder if you'd mind getting a fucking grip, please?
Regards,
Your Humble Devil
Hell Towers
Brixton
"Immigration policy has been out of control for a decade and, if you can't count migration, you certainly can't control it."
As has been noted here before the only one of the four types of immigration that the UK really controls is family reunification. Intra EU movements cannot be stopped, asylum is ruled by UN agreements and extra EU economic migration is about to become subject to the new EU "blue cards".
So anyone who wants to seriously change the amount of immigration needs to state that we have to be outside the EU for this to happen. That would be the adult debate…we’d like to change this situation but we don’t actually have the power to do so. So how do we reclaim it?
I’m, as most will know, in favour of the free movement of labour, so I’m not actually advocating that we do change the immigration rules. Just pointing out that it’s all very well to talk about it, but if you don’t actually have the power to change it, then that’s all it is, talk.
So, here's an idea: let us make the monarch the guardian of the Constitution. The manrchy shall carry on as they are now—ambassadors and figureheads—but with this proviso: the monarch is required not to give Royal Assent to any law that contravenes those rights laid out in Magna Carta Libertatum and the Bill of Rights—and a modified Act of Settlement which will lay out the measures outlined below.
If the monarch should do so, they will trigger an immediate referendum after which, should they lose, the monarch will be dethroned and replaced with the next in line to the throne. At the same time, any Bills given Royal Assent in the current and previous Parliamentary session shall be declared null and void, must be re-presented and the whole saga gone through again.
That should provide adequate punishment for both monarch and Parliament for attempting to fuck over the people, and keep Parliament so tied up that they cannot do a fucking thing. And that can only be to the good.
This radical tradition, which failed within a republican movement that was itself to fail, has been claimed by the left. That's actually reasonable. But it's also a reasonable claim for libertarians to make. At least, it is if those libertarians mistrust power and the people who are attracted to it and so seek term limits, if they hold every person to be equal, if they hold that the state and the law must always be subservient to the liberties of the individual so that, for example, nobody should be held without trial.
It's a radical tradition that we need to claim as libertarians. And it derives, fundamentally, from opposition to the idea of a monarch. After all, if every person is equal there can be no monarch.
I find these ostensibly libertarian defences of monarchy depressing. If we own ourselves we can't be subjects. If power comes from citizens it can't come from the crown. It's as simple as that.
What's more, having the power of a monarch exercised by Parliament means that Parliament has unlimited power, and that's irreconcilable with libertarianism, and also with classical Liberalism, really.
Monarchy and limited government cannot be combined, they are mutually exclusive.
Government needs to be limited by a constitution, not by the arbitrary whim of a strengthened monarchy.
DK, the fact that I am a subject is the reason why my freedom of speech has been curtailed, and is being reduced even further.
"All trick, no treat."
Back in 2001, I wondered out loud – and in print – if it would take "an environmental 9/11" to finally break the corporate brake that is holding up all action on global warming in America. Since then, New Orleans has drowned, the South-east has dried up so severely the city of Atlanta is nearly out of water, and the skies over California have been turned red by the worst wildfires since records began.
More than a thousand people have died, and more than $70bn worth of property has been destroyed. Seeing Americans huddled together in refugee camps is something that no longer shocks us on the nightly news. Yet still the political debate in the US remains stuck far short of the drastic cuts in carbon emissions we need now if we are to stop this Weather of Mass Destruction.
The science is clear: these apocalyptic weather-events are unlikely to be freak one-offs. While it's hard to link any single hurricane or vast fire to global warming, Katrina and California's wildfires fit into the wider warming pattern of increasingly freaky weather predicted by climatologists as the world gets warmer.
Professor Tim Flannery, Australia's most distinguished scientist and a leading expert on climate change said: "Americans might feel they're suffering from a whole lot of severe weather at the moment, but look globally and you see exactly the same thing around the world. Anywhere with a Mediterranean climate, such as Greece or Australia or California, is suffering extreme wildfires. Now, why is that happening? The climate is slowly shifting, so that the desert regions adjacent to those Mediterranean areas are starting to expand."
He's not alone. The prestigious journal Science recently published the results of a long study into wildfires – and they found that man-made global warming is driving their new ferocity. Professor Thomas Swetnam of the University of Arizona concluded: "Lots of people think climate change and the ecological responses are 50 to 100 years away. But it's not 50 to 100 years away – it's happening now in forest ecosystems through fire."
Florida State University’s COAPS (Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies) says that hurricane season 2007, which ends November 30th, is looking well below normal, in fact they are calling it "historic inactivity".
According to COAPS: "Unless a dramatic and perhaps historical flurry of activity occurs in the next 11 weeks (ACE is based on calendar year, not traditional June-November hurricane season), 2007 will rank as a historically inactive Tropical Cyclone year for the entire Northern Hemisphere. During the past 30 years, only 1977, 1981, and 1983 have had less activity to date (Jan-December). For the period of June 1–October 19, 2007, only 1977 experienced LESS tropical cyclone activity."
So does rising global temperature cause drought?
In the context of what appears to have been a one-degree Fahrenheit rise in mean global temperature since 1900, the observed relationship between temperature and precipitation in North America does not favor the hypothesis.
During the period 1900-2005, precipitation seems to have actually increased in areas above 30 degrees north latitude—including California and the rest of the U.S.—according to the most recent assessment from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
This does not mean, of course, that droughts haven't occurred in North America over the last 100 years, but it doesn't support a link between rising global temperature and increased drought.
In fact, one almost certain effect of global warming will be an increase in the evaporation rate of the oceans. Megatons more water is put into the sky as temperatures of the air and oceans rise. Presumably, much of this water will fall as rain somewhere, so it would probably be more logical to guess that warming would cause more rain rather than less.
...
In fact, just last week I posted drought maps that showed that while Southern California has had drought conditions over the last year...
...they have had absolutely average rainfall over the last five years and North America has been downright soggy:
The fires will speed up as global warming speeds up. If we hit three degrees centigrade of warming, most models predict the Amazon rainforest itself will dry out and burn up. The most important carbon skink on earth will turn to ash – ensuring the world warms even more.
What we arrive at is a sensitivity of about 1.2 degrees Celsius for a CO2 doubling (where the blue line crosses 560ppm). In other words, we can expect another 0.6ºC increase over the next century, about the same amount we experienced (and most of us failed to notice) over the last century.
But, you are saying, global warming catastrophists get so much higher numbers. Yes they do, with warming as high as 9-10ºC in the next century. In fact, most global warming catastrophists believe the climate sensitivity is at least 3ºC per doubling, and many use estimates as high as 5ºC or 6ºC. Do these numbers make sense? Well, let's draw the same curve for a sensitivity of 3ºC, the low end of the catastrophists' estimates, this time in red:
To get a sensitivity of 3.0ºC, one has to assume that global warming due solely to man's CO2 (nothing else) would have to be 1.5ºC to date (where the red line intersects the current concentration of 380ppm). But no one, not the IPCC or anyone else, believes measured past warming has been anywhere near this high. So to believe the catastrophic man-made global warming case, you have to accept a sensitivity three or more times higher than historical empirical data would support.
As my libertarianism is enormously influenced by Founding Fathers and the American Revolution of 1776, my republicanism is derived from a central premise of those brave men, and that seminal event in history - namely the premise that "All men are created equal under God".
This kind of demolishes any idea of the "divine right of Kings" , and thus with it any sort of monarchy.
And yet, when I see Prince Charles meeting up with fascist Islamist thugs like King Abdullah of Saudi, I lurch back into my republicanism and wonder about DK's support of the monarchy.
Then again, I can understand that say 19th century England was quite a libertarian place, with a monarchy. But it also made use of 10 year old coal miners and appalling working conditions for about 80 per cent of the population. So, I'm not sure if we want to return to that.
The fastest Windows Vista notebook we've tested this year is a Mac. Try that again: The fastest Windows Vista notebook we've tested this year—or for that matter, ever—is a Mac.
The Conservative Muslim Forum, a body established by Michael Howard and supported by David Cameron to advise the Conservatives on Muslim issues, has articulated some of its policy demands. In summary: Iran has a right to nuclear weapons, the Party should cease its support for Israel, a compulsory history curriculum in schools should give ‘full recognition to the massive contribution that Islam has made to the development of Western civilisation’, and preachers who advocate a rejection of democracy and its institutions should not be denied entry into Britain. They even support al-Qaradawi’s message of ‘gay-hate’.
By giving Iran nuclear weapons, they facilitate President Ahmadinejad’s desire to ‘wipe Israel off the map’. By juxtaposing Iran and Israel, they suggest moral equivalence, yet one is a democratic nation which recognises the rights of minorities; the other is a barbarous totalitarian theocracy which executes women and children. By allowing them input into the history curriculum, they will be able to brainwash children with the ‘massive contribution’ Islam has made to Western civilisation, when in reality it could be summed up in a few lines (if not two words). By defending Iran, they give succour to Holocaust-deniers. And by advocating the admission of Muslim preachers who wish to destroy British democracy, they fuel the flames of the Islamist agenda and offer them the Conservative brand in support of a totalitarian Shari’a system. The rights and liberties of the British people are inalienable, and the Conservative Party above all parties should stand in their defence.
Freedom of speech doesn’t mean a right to speak
Israeli fuel sanctions against the Hamas-run Gaza Strip punish an entire population and are unacceptable, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said.
He spoke after Israel began reducing petrol and diesel supplies in line with its declaration last month that the Strip is a hostile entity.
Hamas seized control of the Strip in June from its Palestinian rivals Fatah.
The European Union also voiced concern at the Israeli cuts, calling them "collective punishment".
Rockets are fired by Palestinian militants from Gaza into Israel on an almost daily basis. Israel withdrew all its settlements from Gaza in 2005.
In a statement read out by a spokesperson, Mr Ban urged Palestinian militants to end indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israel, which he condemned.
But he also stated his belief that the "punitive measures taken by Israel... harm the well-being of the entire population of the Gaza Strip".
Benita Ferrero-Waldner, EU commissioner for external relations, said on a visit to Jerusalem she was "very concerned" about the Israeli move though she understood Israel's "distress" over rocket attacks.
"I think collective punishment is never a solution," she said.
Dear xxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx,
We're currently promoting the Worst EU Lobbying Awards of 2007 and thought you might be interested in giving it a mention in your blog! The aim of the awards is to raise awareness of the influence corporations have on the EU. Voting for the awards (which are presented at a ceremony on Dec 4 in Brussels) is currently open until 27 November.
The awards are organised by Corporate Europe Observatory, Friends of the Earth Europe, LobbyControl and Spinwatch, and expose deceptive, manipulative and unethical lobbying. This year is included a new "Worst Greenwash" category for the company whose advertising is most at odds with the real environmental impacts of its business activities.
Easily digestible and accessible information can be found:
Main public site (for information and voting)
Press release
if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me.
Kind regards, Oliver
Oliver Shykles
Researcher/Campaigner
Corporate Europe Observatory
www.corporateeurope.org
De Wittenstraat 25
1052 AK Amsterdam
oshykles@corporateeurope.orgThe options would range from full withdrawal, which would probably mean negotiating 26 new treaties with our ex-partners, to some semi-detached relationship with the EU itself.
Being Norway or Switzerland might prove of great benefit to the UK. But becoming Switzerland or Norway would be painful and a long-drawn-out process.
Your humble Devil contemplates Mark Wallace's left shoulder, whilst Daddy DK sports his trademark fedora. The photo was taken by Simon Richards of The Freedom Association.There was a fair amount of loud cheering, booing, shouting (some appropriate some less so) and heckling, though none so loud as Devil’s Kitchen, who yelled across the crowd to somebody who was heckling Bob Spink for being a Conservative (clearly assuming that he was Ted Heath in disguise): “Shut up you tw*t!” It worked.
One commenter [on Prodicus's site] says that he went around looking for bloggers and found none. To my certain knowledge (and Devil’s Kitchen will support me) there were several present. It’s just that we do not carry notices on our chests that say “Blogger”. How on earth was the anonymous commenter going to find any bloggers?
A great anecdote from a speech by Gerald Howarth MP [Conservative] to the Young Britons' Foundation dinner. He was waiting in line to be received by the Duke of Edinburgh at a defence related event and was rather surprised when the Duke looked him up and down and said to him "What does your party stand for nowadays then?" Unabashed Gerald looked the Duke in the eye and said: "For the defence of the Kingdom, sir". The Duke of Edinburgh, looking doubtful, hit straight back with a single word. "Bollocks".
Sir Teddy Taylor was there [at the Referendum Rally].
He told me the Conservative party has decided - 'has decided' - not to hold a referendum post facto if they are returned to power.
I asked him if he was certain beyond any doubt and he said yes.
There is a danger, though, that voters will think that my party is getting in its surrender in advance, preparing now for a sell-out in government. After all, as I have pointed out before, parties traditionally make sceptical noises in opposition, but become pro-Brussels in power, and the Tories have what the police call “previous” on Europe.
Scrounger Alison Goulding rakes in thousands of pounds a year of your hard-earned cash - but she still wants MORE.
And she's even praying for one of her EIGHT children to be diagnosed with a serious medical condition so she can carry on freeloading.
Alison - who is five months pregnant - reckons she's been left struggling on the breadline by uncaring benefits chiefs.
Yet her family pocket more than £20,000 a year in handouts, even though none of them has done a day's work this century. They pay NOTHING for their three-bed house, which boasts a new ultra-modern kitchen.
The home is littered with state-of-the-art goodies including FIVE tellies - including a £1,000 widescreen - a hi-fi, Sky TV, two Play-Station 2s and four DVD players.
And their huge garden boasts a full-size trampoline, two sets of swings and FIVE mountain bikes.
But Alison, 38, insists she hasn't got enough to get by.
Shameless Alison revealed she is jubilant she is pregnant again - despite complaining about the overcrowding at home.
And she insisted it was her "duty" to have child No 9.
She said: "I love giving birth - it's always so quick for me.
"People say I should stop breeding but it's not their business.
Alison also blasted her local Broxtowe Borough Council.
She said: "My sister has nine kids and the council gave her two houses knocked into one.
"Then shemoved to Cornwall and the new council bought a private house for them.
"I don't know why they can't do that here."
Alison also hinted she was losing out to immigrants.
She said: "There were these lovely four-bed houses round the corner but an Asian family got one.
"I'm not racist but...
... I think we should look after our own first."
Ian added: "We're definitely not racist - I've got a distant cousin who's black."
The couple are now considering taking the council to the European Court of Human Rights.
Alison said: "We only want what's fair."
And Alison defended claiming so many handouts by saying: "Even if we could work, we'd be worse off because you have to pay for childcare and rent.
"We just try to make sure we get enough benefits to get by."
If we get the indigenous population that can work into work with more stick and less carrot, then it will mean a less fluid job market for immigrants because it will no longer be economically attractive for them to come to Britain.
After all, immigrant labour, as important as it is, only occurs when the market conditions exist to encourage it. Brown has created a job economy reliant on it because he has actively encouraged large sections of the 'born here' population to sit on their backsides, or in the case of the young think they're too good to stack shelves in supermarkets.
We don't have an immigration problem in Britain. We have a benefit system problem. Tackling the cause not the sympton is the way forward.
That's clearly barmy. But more fundamentally, it's barmy to have a welfare system that incentivises people like Alison to stay off work copulating and eating Pop Tarts.
And what life chances will any of her nine kids have? I think we know the answer- at best, they will become the welfare dependents and porch builders of the future; at worst, they will end up inside.
Let's take it as read that there is no magic bullet. But the current welfare system for people of working age is a social and fiscal disaster.
So what to do?
As a minimum, we should abandon the arbitrary and wildly unrealistic definition of poverty as 60% of median income, and revert to the traditional 50%. Nobody would starve at that level and it would hugely increase the relative attractiveness of paid employment. What's more, it would save taxpayers about £50bn pa, or £2 grand pa per British household (see this blog- £50bn equals abolishing Inheritance Tax and slashing 13 pence off the standard rate of Income Tax).
In addition, Frank Field's four key welfare reforms (blogged here) are all worth persuing:
- welfare benefits to be time limited, as under Clinton's reforms in the US
- authority over welfare spending to be localised- closer to the coal face (again cf US)
- incapacity benefit to be decided by local officials, not doctors, but current recipients to retain benefit for a year after finding paid work
- immigration to be tightly controlled so more jobs can go to current welfare recipients already here
Painless? In the short-term, no. But nobody has come up with a real world alternative. And unless we implement a radical programme along these lines we'll find ourselves dealing with more and more Alisons.
And her kids.
All the way to eternity.
The sun appears to have entered a period of low activity. This has created much interest among sceptics as it may lead to a period of falling global temperatures.
There has been a certain amount of anecdotal evidence in support of this theory, with early snows in the Alps and unusual migratory patterns among birds, apparently all organised by big oil. An abundant acorn harvest in the US is also said to indicate a harsh winter ahead.
An iceberg was alleged to have been seen off the coast of South Africa.
Last year, hurricane forecasters predicted a bumper season powered by the horrors of global warming. They were disappointed. In 2007 they tried again, and once more Gaia has failed to go off in a huff. The 2007 is set to be one of the least active seasons for years.
The stripbark pine story continues apace. To recap, the reconstructions of past climate involve using tree ring widths as a proxy for temperature. Most of the alleged increase in twentieth century temperatures in these reconstructions has been traced to stripbark pines - trees where a strip of bark has been removed. These are thought to be unreliable because of a possible CO2 fertilisation effect - ie increased ring widths are due to carbon dioxide rather than temperature. Now, blogger Steve McIntyre has discovered huge discrepancies in the ring widths within the same tree. Essentially the tree compensates for bark stripping by putting on growth on the opposite side of the tree - a confounding effect which seems to have gone unnoticed. It appears though that climate researchers have gone out of their way to use these most unreliable of trees though. We wonder why.
Biofuels are in the news. The Adam Smith Institute Blog notes that it takes 1700 kgs of water to produce a gallon of biodiesel. The UN calls biofuels a crime against humanity. Politicians continue promoting them anyway.
More evidence has appeared supporting a non-anthropogenic basis for recent climate change. The Earth has become more reflective ("higher albedo") in recent years suggesting that the recent falls in temperature measured by satellites may be due to cloud cover. The interesting thing about this effect is that it is much stronger than that of greenhouse gases, again suggesting that man's impact on climate is small.
And lastly, Tim Worstall noted an important fact about recent economic history. The world's economy appears to be following the IPCC's A1 scenario in which everyone is much richer than now, rather than the A2 scenario which assumes lower growth. This latter was the scenario chosen for the Stern report, which can now be consigned to the dustbin of history.
There's a parallel here with policy towards obesity. Self-ownership says individuals have a right to become lard-buckets. Utilitarianism - the costs to the NHS and the ugliness of our streets - requires that they be constrained from doing so.
Your humble Devil was thoroughly amused by Neil Ferguson's fall from grace, and is very pleased to have found the time to outline Fergus...
