EU President & Foreign Minister

No, not him, Tony Blair didn't get the job. Nope, some bloke from Belgium called Herman van Rompuy got the job, the Belgian Prime Minister. Yep, I'm sure you've heard of him, a household name. The Foreign Minister is Baroness Catherine Ashton from the UK, so well known that our Prime Minister could even remember her name.









“Europe’s nations should be guided towards the super-state without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation.”

Jean Monnet, Founder of the European Movement,
3rd April 1952.

Personally, I don't remember voting for either of these two, in fact Baroness Ashton has not been elected to any position in the UK, she has been appointed to her position, so she has no mandate. So the EU federalist super state moves ever closer, as more and more powers are absorbed into the EU from national governments. This is the first result of the Lisbon Treaty, the next stage will be EU embassies followed by an EU army. The UK is likely to lose its permanent seat on the UN security council which will be replaced by an EU representative.

Our foreign policy will be set by the EU, no doubt we will be railroaded into joining the Euro in the next few years and then our financial policy will be set by the European Central Bank. All of these policies will be set by unelected unaccountable EU representatives. Taxes will be set by the EU, they are pushing for EU wide road tax that will be pay as you drive. This will mean a black box in your car to monitor your distance and location for charging purposes, but you can guarantee that it'll be used by our government to monitor your movements and whereabouts as well.

On the EU army front, the EU has already previously called for the UK's nuclear submarines to be assimilated into the EU force. You can also guarantee that France & Germany (they are the driving force of the EU) also have an eye on the city of London's financial market and would want to have that integrated into an EU stock exchange.

All of this from a corrupt organisation that for the last 14 years have not had their annual accounts signed off by their auditors. We have had mission creep from the EU for a number of years now, but with the Lisbon Treaty this will accelerate at quite a pace. Neither of the two main parties Labour or Tory seem interested in stopping the EU spread of powers and the man in the street either doesn't know or doesn't care what is happening.

One day Joe Public will wake up and think, where did Great Britain go to. On the plus side he'll be able to buy a ticket to go into the tourist attraction that is the House of Commons & House of Lords that used to be home to the Mother of all Parliaments and birth place of democracy, exit via the gift shop for that souvenir (with made in the EU sticker on each gift).

RIP UK/GB

Thought crimes and stopping the blogs

So we now enter into the realms of thought crime or pre-crime as the 2002 film Minority Report calls it. I'm all for prosecuting criminals, but there seems to be something wrong about sending people to prison for a bad thought. I'm sure most of you have all had bad thoughts about someone at some stage in your life, maybe even wanted to kill them, for brief second. You may even have said it to them in a middle of a row or even typed something out on the Internet.

Does that mean you're going to do it, probably not, we all issue threats in life, some in the heat of the moment we may mean, but for most of us that is all it is, a few words, nothing more. For the UK, that maybe changing, now our thoughts or words, may make us criminals. We recently had the case of Mrs.Roberts who found out that her husband was using to chat rooms to communicate with schoolgirls or so he thought, until he found out that his wife was posing as one and shopped him to the police. Now I don't for one minute condone what Mr.Roberts was doing, dirty old men trying to chat up young girls is not right but he didn't actually do anything other than communicate with his wife (albeit not knowing it was his wife). I wish next time some
chav kids were hanging around my car threatening to damage it, I could call plod out and he'd arrest them for thought crimes instead of telling me that there is nothing they can do until they actually do cause damage.

It's a slippery slope when we go down this route, where do you draw the line on when you can be done for thinking about a crime and when not? Last week week (12th Nov) we had more thought crime legislation introduced.

Coroners and Justice Bill 2008-09
http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2008-09/coronersandjustice.html

• Extends the law proscribing possession of child pornography to
include NON-PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGES.

(excerpt from the draft Bill) -
(7) References to an image of 'a person' include references to an
image of an IMAGINARY person.
(8) References to an image of 'a child' include references to an
image of an IMAGINARY child.

Penalties (extract) -
(b) on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for a term not
exceeding 3 YEARS or a fine, or both.

This new law - that of criminalising people for committing imaginary
offences against imaginary children - comes on top of previous new
laws outlawing 'extreme pornography'.

You might just be struggling to get your head around exactly what that is. Well (think: Japanese comics), check Manga Comics Wiki

There are I think a few South Park episodes which will need to be
pulled? Think Stupid Spoiled Whore Video Playset episode with Paris
Hilton... Or the various anal probe episodes including the episode
entitled "The Death of Eric Cartman"

On top of all that, UK MPs are wanting to regulate blogs, because they don't like us reporting uncensored what they're up to. It just shows you how out of touch that MPs are if they think that you can regulate blogs, many of which are located overseas and out of reach of UK jurisdiction.

Baroness Buscombe, the new chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, has ambitions for her organisation that go beyond the traditional newspaper companies.

"She wants to examine the possibility that the PCC's role should be extended to cover the blogosphere, which is becoming an increasing source of breaking news and boasts some of the media's highest-profile commentators, such as the political bloggers Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes. Do readers of such sites, and people mentioned on them, deserve the same rights of redress that the PCC offers in respect of newspapers and their sites?"

"Some of the bloggers are now creating their own ecosystems which are quite sophisticated," Baroness Buscombe told me. "Is the reader of those blogs assuming that it's news, and is [the blogosphere] the new newspapers? It's a very interesting area and quite challenging."

Yes Baroness, they work because you can't poke your nose in, so go find yourself something else to do.

Original article

Government continues to infringe on our civil liberties

It seems the attack on our civil liberties gathers pace especially to combat new technology. The first is ACTA Internet Chapter, which is in essence a copyright infringement directive but you can bet that like all laws it will be abused, much law the UK RIPA (a law to give the State extra powers to snoop on people suspected of being a terrorist) which councils use to spy on members of the public for reasons that are nothing to do terrorism.

The main concern is for bloggers. Don't think that this is a US thing, the EU is in on it as well. So start complaining about the government on you blog and you may find that all of a sudden those pictures you've had on it for ages or the video clip suddenly belong to someone and you've breached copyright.

ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn’t infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet — and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living — if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.

That the whole world must adopt US-style “notice-and-takedown” rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused — again, without evidence or trial — of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.

More info here

And here

The second article refers to pre-pay mobile phones. This refers to Spain but you can guarantee it will be coming to the UK sometime soon either directly or via an EU diktat. Pre-pay mobile give you an anonymity unlike contract phones which are always registered to the owner and can be very by the contract and pay method. So if you have a contract phone, you can be tracked by you phone signal, as every mobile phone has a unique identifier, a bit like a car registration number. At the moment the technology, it only pinpoints to about 500 yards accuracy, but as technology improves that'll come down to next to nothing.

So, at any given time, when your mobile is switched on, your exact position will be known. Of course that didn't matter if you had a pre-pay, that is until now, if you're in Spain. If you've got a pre-pay phone and you have registered  it, it was switched off today by the service provider. This has been done in the name of terrorism but you can bet that it'll be abused (incorporated into government systems) at a later date.

Read the full article from The Register

The first comment in the comment section is quite funny. What happens if the terrorist brings in his own phone from abroad?

Lastly, we're all being databased if we're deemed to be of interest to the police/government, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), runs a central database which lists thousands of so-called domestic extremists. It filters intelligence supplied by police forces across England and Wales, which routinely deploy surveillance teams at protests, rallies and public meetings. The NPOIU contains detailed files on individual protesters who are searchable by name.

Vehicles associated with protesters are being tracked via a nationwide system of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras. One man, who has no criminal record, was stopped more than 25 times in less than three years after a "protest" marker was placed against his car after he attended a small protest against duck and pheasant shooting. ANPR "interceptor teams" are being deployed on roads leading to protests to monitor attendance. So, you don't have to do too much to get on their database, be careful if you go to protest about the closure of local services, you could be classified as a domestic extremeist.

Original article here

So, one day they'll be able to link all of these and others together. It might not happen any time soon, but it will happen eventually and some of the freedoms that we took for granted will have disappeared, it's going to be a very controlled monitored society.

The Dark Sith Lord Returns

So, as widely predicted, now that the Lisbon Constitution Treaty has been ratified, the move to ditch Brown has begun. Miliband is off to the EU to be Foreign Secretary and Mandelson is to resign his peerage so that he can contest his safe seat and then be elected leader of the Labour party. Proof if ever that politics is all about lining your pockets or helping your career and has very little to do with serving those that elected them in the first place, the public.

Original article here

Guido also breaks with news this morning.

"Guido has been told that three weeks ago Margaret Thatcher wrote a personal plea to her great admirer Václav Klaus, to stand firm, in the hope of strengthening his resolve. It was to be delivered by William Hague. It still rests on his desk."

Link

Cameron fudges - Dan Hannan resigns front bench

So there we go, there's Dave's 'cast-iron guarantee' replaced by some other not so cast iron promises. Fool me once Dave, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. Good luck to you, I think you're going to need it, but meanwhile I'm switching to UKIP.

With the mainstream parties at the moment it's a choice of Nu or Blu Labour and I don't like either. If the mainstream parties keep kowtowing to the EU, we won't have a government, parliament as we know it in 10 years time. Westminster will be a tourist attraction, "come see the world's oldest democracy, the mother of parliaments, RIP 2009".

I don't want that, which is why I'll shall be abandoning the mainstream parties for the first time and voting for a party that still wants to do something about it. I feel that the anger about this is much stronger that Cameron believes or cares and there will be shock as to the reaction.

Dan Hannan has already resigned the front bench and as I predicted yesterday, I suspect that he will defect to UKIP shortly as his views will not be compatible with Cameron's.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100015753/we-must-have-a-referendum-and-not-just-on-the-eu/

Roger Helmer MEP is also standing stand from the front bench today (5th).