Archive 17
UkTabloid
The People's News Portal
Tuesday 24th March 2009
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Warning: Horrifying footage so not suitable for minors
Three teenage thugs have been caged after subjecting a man to a brutal beating in broad daylight - tackling him to the ground before repeatedly jumping on his head and kicking him.
Sheffield Crown Court was shown shocking CCTV footage of the vicious attack on Craig Rocket, who tried twice to stagger away before stumbling, dazed, to the ground.
Judge John Swanson called the footage "quite horrifying" - and said he had presided over murder cases in which far less violence had been used.
Mr Rocket was on his way home from an afternoon out with friends when trouble erupted outside the bus station in Rotherham town centre as he finished off a cigarette.
A gang of around five or six Asian youths started following him and threatening comments were made.
Mr Rocket became so worried he took out his mobile phone to pretend he was talking to a friend, and eventually ran off from the group in fear.
But Easem Rariq, aged 19, and Moseeb Zabear, 17, chased after him, along with another teenager, Howis Iqbal, also 17.
Rariq rugby-tackled Mr Rocket to ground before Zabear jumped on his head. Iqbal then joined in, repeatedly kicking Mr Rocket to his body.
Judge Swanson said the level of violence Mr Rocket endured was "almost unbelievable".
"I have seen a video of what happened which is quite horrifying," he told the court. "I have known murder cases where there was considerably less violence used than in this case."
In fact, miraculously, Mr Rocket escaped with only superficial injuries from the attack on September 20 last year.
Rariq, of Boswell Street, Rotherham; Zabear, of Clough Green, Masbrough; and Iqbal, of Shawsfield Road, Broom, Rotherham, all pleaded guilty to attempting to cause grievous bodily harm with intent.
They claimed Mr Rocket had been making racist remarks towards them but no evidence was put before the court.
They were each sentenced to two years in a young offenders institution.
Sam Andrews, defending Zabear, said he was remorseful about what he had done and added personal and professional references showed evidence of a man "in stark contrast" to the thug seen on the CCTV footage.
Dapinder Singh, for Rariq, and Nawaz Hussain, for Iqbal, both said their clients were also remorseful for their actions. News Source
See Also:
Gang walk free after racist rampage (Feb 2007)
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Government Funding Extremism and Evil
We should not be funding groups who are hostile to our way of life!
The Government will launch tomorrow a new counter-terrorism strategy, called Contest 2. For those who missed Contest 1, a brief explanation is in order. It has four strands: to protect, to pursue, to prepare and to prevent.
Which of these would you consider the most important? I would hazard a guess that most of us would suggest preventing a terrorist attack happening at all is the most crucial aspect of such a strategy. We should be ready, of course, to resist them; and we should track down those who perpetrate them. We should also protect people with straightforward security measures and with good intelligence. But, if we can stop them happening, that would be best.
So it was somewhat odd that when Gordon Brown outlined this updated approach in a newspaper article yesterday, the "prevent" bit seemed less prominent than one imagined it might be. There was talk about "murderous agents of hate" and of "core al-Qaeda" – spook-speak for the central command that is based in the lawless borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
"Terrorists remain intent on inflicting mass casualties without warning, including through suicide bombings," Mr Brown said. Tens of thousands of security guards and store managers have now apparently been "trained and equipped to deal with an incident and know what to watch for" (though this was news to my local shop manager when I went to get the papers yesterday). The strategy will also "address the longer-term causes – understanding what leads people to become radicalised, so we can stop the process". And that was about it for prevent.
There was not a single mention of the undeniable truth that the extremists who will actually carry out atrocities live among us and need to be confronted here and now. According to Mr Brown, "we are developing a strategy to tackle the terrorist threat by tackling the underlying causes, the extremist madrassas and the lawless spaces in which terrorists recruit or train". Not here, mind you, but in Pakistan. His only mention that this may have anything to do with British-based radical Islamism was a reference to "a violent extremist ideology based on a false reading of religion".
Is it not imperative, if we are to tackle this menace, that we should at least be honest about what is driving it? The Government is reluctant to call the threat Islamist and prefers to refer to it as "international terrorism". It clearly has an international dimension, but most of the 80 or so people convicted and jailed for terrorist offences in the past three years or so are British or have lived here – as, indeed, were the perpetrators of the July 7 atrocities in 2005.
The reason it is important to recognise the nature of the challenge is that only then can a proper strategy be devised for dealing with it. This entails something that Mr Brown was very vocal about when he first became Prime Minister, yet about which he has been more taciturn since: an unequivocal and enthusiastic espousal of British values of tolerance and liberal democracy.
A recent study carried out by the Policy Exchange think tank found that nearly £90 million of taxpayers' money was being spent on reactionary Muslim groups in the hope that by building them up they may somehow divert radicals from a violent path. The report found that the Government was "underwriting the very Islamist ideology which spawns an illiberal, intolerant and anti-Western world view".
It added: "Political and theological extremists, acting with the authority conferred by official recognition, are indoctrinating young people with an ideology of hostility to western valuese_SLps A new generation is being radicalised, sometimes with the very funds that are supposed to be countering radicalisation."
This is very worrying. There is not much point in "training 60,000 people", if that is what has happened, to spot a suicide bomber and evacuate people from a public area if we can't stop the radicalisation to begin with. There is also confusion in government about the aim of this approach. It should not simply be about trying to contain the problem but about unashamedly proselytising British values and insisting upon loyalty to them. We should not be funding Muslim organisations simply because they might stand up and denounce terrorism, though that is important. Those of us financing these programmes would also like the recipients to condemn the whole corpus of anti-Western doctrine upon which the radicals thrive.
Countering extremist propaganda is a proper use for public money, provided it goes to the right people. Yet there is growing evidence that it does not. There needs to be a far more aggressive and public challenge to those aspects of Islamic radicalism that are inimical to a liberal democracy: the idea that a pan-Islamic state or caliphate is an acceptable political aim; or that Sharia law should be allowed anywhere in this country; or that jihad should be supported around the world as matter of faith. It is about identifying and speaking up for shared values. Nobody pretends these are easy issues. But there is no point in the Government ducking them in the interests of "community harmony" if it simply ends up accommodating – and even funding – groups that are hostile to the basic tenets of our way of life. News Source
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Brown to betray victory and stab Falklanders in the back?
Brown will this week spark fears that the Falkland Islands could be handed back to Argentina by holding secret discussions about the future of the territory.
The Prime Minister is to have private one-to-one talks with Argentine president Cristina Kirchner – an implacable opponent of British rule over the South Atlantic archipelago – during a tour of South America.
Diplomatic sources say sovereignty is on their agenda.
Last night, veterans warned that any move to surrender the islands to Argentina would be an insult to the memory of the 255 British service personnel who died in the 1982 Falklands War after Argentina invaded.
David Lidington, Shadow Foreign Office Minister, said: “We want good relations with Argentina, but the Prime Minister must make it very clear that the democratic rights of the Falkland Islanders must come first.
“Gordon Brown should be urging Argentina to accept the reality of the Falkland Islands’ wishes and to normalise their relations with the people there.”
Mr Brown will meet Mrs Kirchner during a conference of Left-of-centre politicians in Chile towards the end of this week.
The meeting is understood to have been arranged by diplomats in an attempt to prevent a row over the Falklands flaring at the G20 Summit in London next month. She had planned to raise the subject then.
In a chilling coincidence, her visit, on April 2, falls on the 27th anniversary of the day when Argentina seized the Falklands.
Foreign Office insiders insist the Prime Minister will not enter into any negotiations on the future of the Falklands, although they will reluctantly allow the president to raise the issue.
But any discussion of the island’s future will cause deep misgivings among both veterans and islanders.
Retired Royal Navy petty officer Derek “Smokey” Cole, chief executive of the Falklands Veterans Foundation, said: “There should not be any discussion of the sovereignty. The Falklands should stay British, that’s what the veterans want and that’s what the
islanders want.”
Mr Cole, who served aboard HMS Intrepid during the 1982 conflict and took part in the troop landings, was visiting the Falklands yesterday to pay respects to Britain’s fallen heroes.
“We lost 255 of our comrades to keep the Falklands British, and that’s how they should stay,” he said. Any negotiations to hand the islands to Argen-tina would be an “insult” to their memory, he added.
Downing Street refused to confirm or deny that Mr Brown will hold formal bilateral talks with Mrs Kirchner who insists Argentina’s rights are “inalienable”.
“We will say more about his agenda later this week,” said a Number 10 spokesman. But sources at Argentina’s foreign affairs ministry confirmed to the respected Buenos Aires newspaper La Nacion that the meeting was taking place.
Sukey Cameron, the Falkland Island government’s representative in London, was relaxed about the meeting. She said: “The British Government’s line is firm and we have no reason to suspect the Prime Minister will differ from that line. She will raise it for her own domestic consumption." News Source
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The Lab-Lib-Con Pact make out to be
whiter than white but the reality is very different!
Labour Party Criminals
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SEX:
- Labour Councillor (Newton Aycliffe) Martin Locklyn - Convicted and jailed for 15 years for sexually abusing 3 14-year-old boys.
- Labour Councillor (North Lincolnshire) David Spooner - Convicted and jailed for 1 year for masturbating in front of 2 young boys.
- Labour Mayor (Westhoughton/Lancashire) Nicholas Green - Convicted and jailed for 10 years for 3 rapes and 13 counts of indecent assault against little girls between the age of 6 and 10. He raped one woman on her wedding day.
- Labour Mayor (Todmorden) John Winstanley - Convicted and jailed for rape and threats to kill. After raping and threatening to kill his terrified victim, Winstanley then ordered the woman to go on all fours before urinating on her.
- Prominent Labour Party activist Mark Tann (who has met Tony & Cherie at Party functions) recently got a 15-year sentence for raping a 4-year old girl on 2 separate occasions.
- Labour’s current Parliamentary Candidate (Reading East) Tony Page - Has 2 Convictions for Acts of Gross Indecency` in public toilets.
- Labour Mayor (Burnley) Peter Swainston - Convicted of sex offences in public toilet.
- Entire Labour Party conspired to conceal the activities of Labour Party activist and serial child-molester Mark Trotter, who died from AIDS before he could be convicted.
- Labour Councillor (North Yorkshire) Raymond Coats - Court appearance for indecently assaulting a woman.
- Labour MP (Rhonda Valley) Chris Bryant poses in his pants on the Internet to advertise himself for casual gay sex encounters. Describes himself as “Horny as buggery” and says, “I’d love a good long fuck”.
- Labour Councillor (Manchester), George Harding - Charged with indecent assault on a girl of 12.
- Labour MP Ron Davies was mugged by a Rasta on Clapham Common while cruising for gay sex. He was photographed again by the media recently, engaged in some `man-on-man` action in a field off a motorway. “I was only looking for badgers” he said.
- Labour Councillor (Durham), Derrick Payne - Arrested by Police following a sex attack.
- Labour MP, Joe Ashton - Caught up in a Police raid while frequenting a brothel. Tried to lie his way out of the scandal.
- Labour Councillor (Shropshire), Derek Woodvine - Arrested by Police in anti-porn operation.
- Labour Councillor (Basildon), Tony Wright - Forced to resign after being caught using his council computer to download porn.
- Labour MP (Sheffield), Clive Betts - Suspended from Parliament for 7 days after being caught forging immigration papers to extend the stay of his Brazilian rent-boy gay lover.
According to media reports, the names of 2 former Labour Cabinet Ministers said to be `Household names` appear on the `Operation Ore ` list of subscribers to hard-core child pornography. The same FBI investigation, which led to the arrest of rock star Pete Townshend. So who are they?
VIOLENCE:
- Labour Councillor (Kirkby, Merseyside) Charlie Preston - Convicted and jailed for 5 years in 1982 for assault and burglary. Preston broke into the home of a 64 year old man, and beat him up in his bed as he slept before robbing the house. The judge described the case as “As bad a matter of burglary as I can remember” Preston also holds the position on the Council of… `Deputy Cabinet Member for Youth, Citizenship, and Community Safety`.
- Labour Councillor ( Wales ) Denis Jones - Convicted and jailed for unlawful wounding after attacking a neighbour with a sledgehammer.
- Labour Councillor ( Wales ) Ken Brookman - Bit off a mans ear in a dispute over a seat on a train!
- Labour Councillor and former Mayor (Stockton), Keith Dobinson - Investigated by Police for alleged assault on an OAP, which left the old man of 79, hospitalised.
- Labour MP, Tommy Graham - Expelled from Party for his part in driving a person to suicide.
- Labour Councillors (Ilfracombe), Brian Cotton and Tony Cooper - Investigated by Police following serious allegations of Harassment.
CORRUPTION:
- Labour Councillor (Sandwell) Mohamed Niwaz convicted of illegally obtaining £20,000 in Housing Grants.
- Labour Councillors in Doncaster - 23 Convicted and 2 jailed for massive fraud, corruption and theft of public funds. Investigation also uncovered massive Labour Party corruption in neighbouring Rotherham .
- Labour Party Councillor ( Blackburn ), Mohammed Hussein - arrested together with 6 Labour activists on suspicion of Election rigging.
- Labour MP Mohammed Sawar ( Britain ’s first Asian MP - Glasgow) was the subject of a major News of the World investigation a few years ago into bribery and corruption. Despite this, the massive Asian population in his constituency keeps him safely in his seat.
- Labour MP (Leicester) and former Cabinet Minister, Keith Vaz - Investigated for fraud and corruption before quietly leaving his Europe Minister post with `health problems`. According to his former Secretary, Vaz does absolutely nothing in his constituency other than help local Pakistanis with their Immigration cases (which also helps to explain the `whites a minority` status of Leicester and the safe Labour seat of Mr Vaz)
- Labour Party Euro MP, David Martin is currently being investigated for an alleged expenses fraud involving `hundreds of thousands of pounds`.
- Labour Councillor (Glamorgan), Shaun Stringer - Forced to resign following Police investigation into financial corruption.
OTHER:
- Tony Blair recently appointed his close friend/crony and colleague of his wife - Ken Macdonald as the new Director of Public Prosecutions, despite the fact he has a drugs conviction.
- William Straw - Son of Labour Foreign Secretary, and former Home Secretary - Jack Straw, was cautioned by Police for drug dealing, amid a frantic Government attempt to cover up the matter and gag the media as to his identity. Jack Straw also has a brother who was convicted of a sex attack on a schoolgirl. Lovely family!
- Homosexual mass murderer; Dennis Nielsen, who strangled and dismembered 16 young men in the 1980`s, was also a highly active member of Labour fringe groups such as the Anti-Nazi League, and the SWP. That’s when he wasn’t busy boiling peoples heads in a pot, or masturbating over the corpses of his victims.
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Conservative Party Criminals
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SEX:
- Tory Party General election candidate, Michael Powell - Convicted and jailed for 3 years for downloading hardcore child porn.
- Tory Party Councillor (Wickbar/Bristol) Roger Talboys - Convicted and jailed for 6 years for multiple sex attacks on children.
- Tory Party Vice-Chairman of Welsh Conservatives, Andrew Baker - Received a banning order for stalking women.
- Tory Party MP (Billericay) Harvey Proctor - Stood trial for sex offences of a sado-masochistic nature against teenage boys, and was forced to resign.
- Tory Party Councillor ( Stratford-upon-Avon ) Christopher Pilkington - Convicted of downloading hardcore child porn on his PC. Placed on sex offenders register and forced to resign.
- Tory Party councillor ( Coventry ), Peter Stidworthy - Charged with indecent assault of a 15-year old boy.
- Tory Party Mayor ( North Tyneside ), Chris Morgan - Forced to resign after being arrested twice in 2 weeks, for indecent assault on a 15-year old girl, and for suspicion of downloading child porn.
- Tory Party MEP, Tom Spencer - Caught smuggling drugs and porn through customs.
- Tory Party councillor and former Mayor (Wrexham), Michael Morris - Convicted and put on probation for 2 years, for the indecent assault of another man, which was captured on CCTV.
- Tory Party Liaison Manager on the London Assembly, Douglas Campbell, who’s job includes running the Tory GLA website - Arrested for allegedly downloading child porn. He is currently suspended while the Police investigation continues.
VIOLENCE:
- Tory Party MP (Henley), Boris Johnson - Caught on tape plotting to have a man beaten up by a hired thug. The man was a journalist who had written an unsympathetic piece about Johnson’s close friend - Convicted fraudster, Darius Guppy.
- Tory Party Councillor (Folkestone - in Leader, Michael Howard’s constituency), Robert Richdale - 41 year history of crime, involving 30 convictions and 5 prison sentences. Richdales enormous criminal record, which covers 10 pages of A4 paper, includes convictions for assault, theft, causing death by dangerous driving, forgery, drugs offences, possession of an offensive weapon, and sex attacks against underage schoolgirls. The Tory Party election campaign literature described Richdale as “a family man” who had a “compassionate personality”
CORRUPTION:
- Tory Party councillor (Dudley), Abdul Quadus, who was also chairman of the Dudley Police Committee and a Tory Party spokesman on crime - Convicted and jailed for 6 months for passport fraud and assisting illegal immigration from his native country - Pakistan.
- Former Tory Party Cabinet Minister, Jonathan Aitken - Convicted and jailed for Perjury and Conspiracy to Pervert the Course of Justice.
- Former Tory Leader of Westminster Council, Dame Shirley Porter - Fled to Israel to evade justice after indulging in fraud, corruption and gerrymandering on a massive scale, and stealing millions of pounds from local taxpayers.
- Tory Party Councillor ( Margate ), Colin Kiddell - Forced to resign after Police investigation into his alleged theft and embezzlement of funds from the local `Dreamland` Amusement Park.
- Former Tory Party Chairman and London Mayoral Candidate, Jeffrey Archer - Convicted and jailed for Perjury and Conspiracy to Pervert the Course of Justice.
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Liberal Democrat Criminals
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SEX:
- Lib-Dem Council candidate (Tower Hamlets), Justin Sillman - Convicted and jailed for 2 years for sexual abuse of young boys.
- Lib-Dem Councillor and Mayoral Candidate ( Sheffield ), Francis Butler- Prosecuted for indecent assault of a young boy.
- Lib-Dem Councillor ( Stockport ) Neil Derbyshire - Sexually assaulted a 16-year old boy in a public toilet. He was caught with a plastic bag containing lubricant, plastic surgical gloves, a condom, and underpants.
- Lib-Dem Councillor ( Preston ), Bill Chadwick - Charged with: Making an indecent photograph of a child, Incitement to rape, Incitement to murder, Incitement to kidnap, and Incitement to torture. Chadwick’s gay lover - Alan Valentine, is also a Lib-Dem councillor.
VIOLENCE:
- Lib-Dem councillor (North Norfolk), Catherine Wilkins - Also a nurse until she was struck off the nursing register after being found guilty of mistreating patients and abusive behaviour.
- Lib-Dem Parliamentary candidate ( Burnley ), Paul Wright - Charged with drunken assault on his `lodger`. Wright sobbed like a baby during the court case, and the case is to be re-listed and heard again after the jury failed to reach a verdict.
- Lib-Dem Councillor ( Sheffield ) Trevor Morgan - Convicted and jailed for 9 months for unlawful wounding/dangerous driving. After attacking an elderly woman’s Golden retriever dog by throwing pepper in its face, he then seriously injured the dog’s owner - 57-year old Barbara Johnson, with his car as she tried to stop him escaping.
CORRUPTION:
- Lib-Dem Councillor (Peterborough), Michael Jackson - Prosecuted for 21 counts of Theft and False Accounting.
- 3 Lib-Dem Councillors convicted and jailed for Election Fraud in Hackney in 2001
- 12 Lib-Dem officials convicted of Election Fraud in Oldham in 2001.
- Julie Roberts - Convicted of 9 counts of benefit fraud in 2003. 2 weeks after the court case, she was elected as a Lib-Dem councillor in Leicester !
- Lib-Dem councillor (Portsmouth), Ray Race - Convicted and jailed for 4 months for election rigging, along with Lib-Dem colleague Michael Hayward. Race was arrested again in July 2003 for threatening a witness who helped to convict him.
- Lib-Dem councillor (Lambeth), Gabriel Fernandez - Forced to resign after being investigated for benefit fraud.
OTHER:
- Former Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe - Stood trail for conspiring to have his blackmailing gay lover murdered.
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Emmerdale actor Luke Tittensor today pleaded guilty to a brutal assault.
Tittensor, 19, who plays tearaway teenager Daz Eden in the soap, left his victim with a badly broken jaw, Bolton crown court was told.
The court heard the victim, a boy who was 16 at the time, was left in hospital for three days.
Mark Ford, prosecuting, said the boy needed complex facial reconstructive surgery that required a metal plate and screws to be inserted into his jaw.
No further details of the assault were revealed in court and the victim cannot be named for legal reasons.
Tittensor, of Rycroft Avenue, Heywood, near Rochdale, who has also appeared in Channel 4's Shameless, was facing a trial after he initially denied charges of causing grievous bodily harm and inflicting grievous bodily harm in February last year.
He admitted a single charge of inflicting GBH today before the trial was due to start. The case was adjourned for pre-sentence reports to be prepared.
Tittensor will be sentenced on April 29. He was granted unconditional bail.
Mr Ford said the plea was acceptable and said the victim was 'anxious about the prospect of giving evidence'.
He said: "His overriding concern was that the defendant accepted responsibility for what he did to him. He suffered a displaced fracture of the lower jaw."
Tittensor is best known for his role as Daz in Emmerdale. He joined the cast in 2003. He also shared the role of Carl Gallagher in the first series of Shameless with his twin brother, Elliott, before leaving to concentrate on his Emmerdale role. News Source
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Interest article over here on The Waterfront. In fact being pushed for time, I am just going to cut n paste it and highlight relevant parts of it. Here you go....
The deputy leader of the British National Party Simon Darby fears that BNP supporters at Swansea University would be “persecuted” if they revealed their political allegiances. The BNP’s deputy leader told The Waterfront that they probably did have supporters at the University, but that they fear that they would not be safe if they made their views heard.
“We probably have got people in Swansea University, no doubt about it,” said Darby. “If we did I wouldn’t tell you, the Socialist Workers would drive them out, probably with the help of the student newspaper.
“They would be persecuted.”
In response to whether there were BNP members in the local police force, the BNP’s West Wales Regional organiser Brian Mahoney told the South Wales Evening Post that the BNP do have “members everywhere” . This comes after a list of party members was leaked on the Internet revealing that there are 62 BNP members in Swansea, including a secondary school teacher.
The Socialist Workers’ Party student office said that they support the Students’ Union’s no platform policy.
“We don’t engage in debate with Nazis,” a source from the Party said. “We wouldn’t allow them to have a platform. “We would build a campaign around them, we hold the stance of no fascists on campus.”
SU president James Houston said that individual supporters who revealed themselves as BNP supporters might have an argument on their hands with fellow students but nothing more sinister than that.
“The Students’ Union has a no platform policy much like the National Union of Students,” he said. “But we almost don’t need a no platform policy because if any BNP activists wanted to do anything on campus, they would be clamped down quickly by the police because they are a massive risk factor for riots.
“Particularly in Swansea, it’s a strange place for them to claim they have numbers here because it’s a multicultural diverse university. “Last week in Fulton House you had three stalls: the Islamic Society, the Christian Union and the LGBT, three very different organisations but there is also an awful lot of respect.
“I think if you said to someone in your lecture ‘I’m a BNP supporter’, you would have an argument on your hands but I don’t think you would be necessarily driven out.” News Source
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A Top minister has performed a dramatic U-turn after being caught pocketing £60,000 of taxpayers’ cash.
Employment Minister Tony McNulty admitted he felt “discomfort” at trousering a second-home allowance – for his parents’ pad.
The red-faced politician announced he had stopped claiming the handout and bizarrely likened himself to a Nazi war criminal.
Mr McNulty lives with his wife, chief schools inspector Christine Gilbert, in a posh house just three miles from Westminster.
Yet he was claiming up to £14,000 a year in expenses for a second lavish home in Harrow, where his parents live.
The minister claimed “it’s all within the rules” when he was first asked about the scandal surrounding his £1.2million homes.
But he later accepted it was odd, comparing himself to Nazi war criminals – who claimed at the 1945 Nuremberg
trials they were just “obeying orders”.
Mr McNulty – who with his wife has an annual income of £300,000 – said: “It’s not against the rules – though I suppose you might say that is the Nuremberg defence.”
But the MP for Harrow later declared he had halted the allowance, which he had claimed since becoming an MP in 1997.
He also said the 133 MPs living within 60 miles of Westminster should have the cash stopped.
Mr McNulty said: “I have always felt some discomfort in claiming the money, to be frank. I decided that it’s simply time that I stopped.”
But the politician insisted he had broken no rules and would not be paying back the £60,000.
However, another MP, who did not want to be named, slammed Mr McNulty’s claims that other politicians were pocketing more.
He said: “Just because Tony McNulty has been rumbled does not give him the right to lecture those of us who need the money.” News Source
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A former fire chief who made indecent images of children has received an estimated £500,000 pension pay-out.
Frank Sheehan was arrested on November 18 and resigned from his position as Chief Fire Officer for West Midlands Fire Service the day afterwards.
The 55-year-old accepted a formal caution last month and was placed on the sex offenders' register for two years after the Crown Prosecution Service deemed it was 'not in the public interest' to charge him.
But Mr Sheehan, who lives with his wife and teenage daughter in Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham, faced no disciplinary action and is thought to have secured a £500,000 lump sum followed by £6,000-a-month in pension payments.
The news has angered members of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU).
Chris Downes of the union's West Midlands branch said: 'People are really angry.
Our members are just confused as to why he wasn't prosecuted in the first place, and why the brigade didn't investigate.
'The FBU in the Midlands - and outside the Midlands - are angry that there wasn't an investigation.'
A spokesman for West Midlands Fire Service would neither confirm nor deny the figures, saying: 'It is not appropriate for West Midlands Fire Service to comment on the specific details of any individual employee or former employee's pay or pension arrangements.
'However, we can state that these matters were dealt with in accordance with appropriate procedures and the national regulations regarding firefighter pensions, after the organisation sought legal advice.'
Mr Sheehan, who joined the service as a firefighter in 1975 and was promoted to chief officer in 2003, today refused to comment.
He was awarded a CBE in June last year in the Queen's Birthday Honours for services to local government.
Mr Sheehan's permanent replacement was announced last week as Vij Randeinya, who had been Acting Chief Fire Officer since his resignation. News Source
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Sedgley fire station has been earmarked for closure, it emerged today, confirming fears it would be scrapped.
West Midlands Fire Service said it is proposing to remove the engine from the station.
But it added emergency cover would not be jeopardised. The station has been shut since June 2007 when all eight members of the retained crew were sacked. Seven were later reinstated and have been retraining. It is unclear whether they will be offered jobs elsewhere.
Rumour has been rife the facility would never re-open. But until today bosses have refused to say whether its future is under threat.
They say evidence shows that fire engines from surrounding stations, particularly Dudley which is less than two miles away, can be in attendance within the Sedgley station area quicker than its own part-time crew.
Chief fire officer Frank Sheehan said: “Removing the fire engine from Sedgley will not have an adverse impact on emergency cover.” News Source
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Professor Peter Rankilor, a respected climate change scientist, has been jailed for ten years for sexually abusing two young girls.
The 66 year-old, who is a multi-millionaire, was arrested after a woman went to police to report he had molested her in the 1980s when she was a child. Police investigating the academic, who has written four books and 120 papers, discovered he had also abused another young girl.
Rankilor, from Macclesfield, Cheshire, was found guilty of 24 serious sexual offences against children after a trial at Minshull Street Crown Court, Manchester in January.
He was jailed for 10 years on Friday. Judge Mushtaq Khokhar told him: "You robbed these girls of their innocence at a very early age. As far as the two victims are concerned, it is clear to me that both of them have been damaged because of the sexual abuse."
He added: "You're someone who has had a distinguished career. You have health problems and at your age any term in prison is going to be difficult for you.
"But you must realise that the matters of the offences and the number of them the only possible sentence I can impose is a custodial one."
Rankilor became one of the world's leading experts in geosynthetics after combining academic work with a career as a consulting engineer and geologist.
His academic qualifications included a Bachelor's degree in geology from Nottingham University, a Master's in Mining and Subsidence and a Doctorate in Civil Engineering from Salford University.
He was a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Institute of Mining and Metallurgy and the Geological Society of London.
Rankilor had also been the Managing Director of a consulting geotechnical practice for over 30 years and at the same time been a Visiting Professor at Bolton University.
During his career he lectured for the Institution of Civil Engineers on its postgraduate training courses, which included Climate Change and its effects on Civil Engineering. He also travelled extensively across the world as part of studies into climate change.
He abused the two girls in 1980 in the Altrincham area of Greater Manchester and was finally arrested in October 2006.
Anthony Longworth, prosecuting, said: "The trial took place in January this year and he was convicted of all matters. The majority of the verdicts were unanimous ."
"The crown understands that he is a man of substantial needs and a multi-millionaire when his victims are living in more straightened circumstances."
In mitigation, Peter Rawling said: "Clearly this is a sad case for all concerned and any sentence will be of a considerable length."
"You honour will know that Mr Rankilor is 66 years of age and he has correspondents from a doctor saying he is of ill health."
After the case Detective Constable Paul Hatton, from Greater Manchester Police, said: "Rankilor has left his victims scarred for life by the systematic abuse he subjected them to.
"Not content with having taken advantage of their trust in childhood, he has now forced them to relive the abuse by refusing to admit to his crimes and putting them through this trial.
"I just hope the result gives them some sense that justice has now been done." News Source
Funny how those who agree with government on climate change are the rich and those scientists who disagree suddenly find themselves having their grants terminated, jobs lost and persecuted! Think about it.. it's not rocket science! (Ed)
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The only problem with a project to prove that Arctic ice is disappearing is the fact that it is actually getting thicker.
What a wonderful parable of our time has been the expedition to the North Pole led by the explorer Pen Hadow. With two companions, he is measuring the thickness of the ice to show how fast it is “declining”. His expedition is one of a series of events designed to “raise awareness of the dangers of climate change” before December’s conference in Copenhagen, where the warmists hope to get a new treaty imposing much more drastic cuts on CO2 emissions.
With perfect timing, the setting out from Britain of the “Global Warming Three” last month was hampered by “an unusually heavy snowfall”. When they were airlifted to the start of their trek by a twin-engine Otter (one hopes a whole forest has been planted to offset its “carbon footprint”), they were startled to find how cold it was. The BBC dutifully reported how, in temperatures of minus 40 degrees, they were “battered by wind, bitten by frost and bruised by falls on the ice”.
Thanks to the ice constantly shifting, it was “disheartening”, reported Hadow, to find that “when you’ve slogged for a day”, you can wake up next morning to find you have “drifted back to where you started’’. Last week, down to their last scraps of food, they were only saved in the nick of time by the faithful Otter. They were disconcerted to see one of those polar bears, threatened with extinction by global warming, wandering around, doubtless eyeing them for its dinner.
But at least one of the intrepid trio was able to send a birthday message to his mum, via the BBC, and they were able to talk by telephone to “some of the world’s most influential climate change leaders”, including Development Secretary Douglas Alexander in front of 300 people at “a conference on world poverty”.
The idea is that the expedition should take regular radar fixes on the ice thickness, to be fed into a computer model in California run by Professor Wieslaw Maslowski, whose team, according to the BBC, “is well known for producing results that show much faster ice-loss than other modelling teams”. The professor predicts that summer ice could be completely gone as early as next year. It took the Watts Up With That? science blog to point out that there is little point in measuring ice thickness unless you do it several years running, and that, anyway, Arctic ice is being constantly monitored by US Army buoys. The latest reading given by a typical sensor shows that since last March the ice has thickened by “at least half a metre”.
“In most fields of science,” comments WUWT drily, “that is considered an 'increase’ rather than a 'decline’.”
An unhealthy moral climate - Marxism at it's best
A London employment tribunal has ruled that Tim Nicholson, right, was wrongly dismissed as a property firm’s “head of sustainability” because of his fervent commitment to “climate change”. Mr Nicholson had fallen out with his colleagues over his attempts to reduce the company’s “carbon footprint”. The tribunal chairman David Neath found the company guilty of discriminating against Mr Nicholson under the 2006 Equality (Religion and Belief) Regulations, because his faith in global warming was a “philosophical belief”. Recalling how “eco-psychologists’’ at the University of the West of England are pressing for “climate denial” to be classified as a form of “mental disorder”, one doubts whether the same legal protection would be given to those who fail to share Mr Nicholson’s “philosophical belief”. News Source
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Red Dwarf star Danny John-Jules launched an incredible rant against “racist” Britain saying: “I don’t trust white guys”.
The 48-year-old actor is set to return as The Cat in the cult show when new episodes of the sci-fi comedy are broadcast next month.
But unlike his laidback character, John- Jules lost his cool and unleashed a bitter tirade about prejudice in the UK.
His rant came as it was revealed he had a conviction for assaulting two binmen quashed on appeal.
John-Jules was given 120 hours’ community service and ordered to pay £350 costs lastNovember after attacking two men for not emptying his recycling bin.
But he was acquitted of both charges at Harrow Crown Court on March 5.
Speaking to the Daily Star Sunday, he raged about his treatment over the affair, claiming he was the victim of discrimination.
And when asked if he felt Britain was racist, he fumed: “What do you think? Just look at Stephen Lawrence.
“Go and read the story about the millionaire black footballer who was bullied and arrested for looking in jewellery window. I was left to rot. Greg Dyke has even admitted the BBC is institutionally racist.”
He added: “What would you think if I said I don’t trust white guys?
“Show me one story about a black person that doesn’t involve rape, sodomy or murder.
“Show me one positive story about a black actor.”
His diatribe didn’t end there and John- Jules even directed his fury at race supremo Trevor Phillips, something that could land him bosses.
Phillips, the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, along with Red Dwarf producer Charles Armitage, runs a consultancy advising firms on race relations.
Earlier this year Phillips claimed that institutional racism was an outmoded phrase and Britain was the least racist country in Europe.
But John-Jules slammed the views of his boss’ friend, saying they didn’t represent black people.
"Nobody listens to Trevor Phillips." he said. "The black community doesn’t listen to Trevor Phillips. Only white people listen to Trevor Phillips.”
A three-part special of Red Dwarf will be shown on the Freeview channel Dave next month.
The original cast, including Coronation Street star Craig Charles, Danny, Chris Barrie and Robert Llewellyn will be joined by actress Sophie Winkleman, the fiancée of Lord Frederick Windsor – the son of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent.
The show is set onboard a space mining ship which has had most of its crew killed by a radiation leak.
It was a huge hit among British sciencefiction fans when the adventures originally ran for eight series on BBC2 between 1988 and 1999. News Source
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A man has admitted stealing from a car and a purse belonging to Moira Jones on the night she was attacked and killed.
Mohammed Umar Karim, 22, told the jury his brother Mohammed Abubakar Karim found a purse and car keys on a street near Glasgow's Queen's Park on 29 May.
He admitted trying to use her debit and credit cards, but said he did not know who they belonged to until days later.
Marek Harcar, 33, who is on trial, has lodged defences blaming the brothers and another man for Ms Jones' murder.
The High Court in Glasgow heard the brothers had been dropped off near their home in Queen's Drive just after midnight and found the purse and car keys.
Mohammed Umar Karim said his 21-year-old brother took the cards from the purse and he told the court that the door of Ms Jones' Toyota had opened when he pressed the button on the keys.
Mr Karim said they had unsuccessfully tried to get money from a cash machine with her bank card before returning to Queen's Drive to look through the car "for properties to sell".
He threw the key away and tried to use the credit cards to order computers on the internet, the court heard.
Mr Karim said the pair went to the police three nights later, when they learned of the murder.
Paul McBride QC, defending, asked the witness how his blood came to be found in Ms Jones' jeep.
He replied: "No idea, mate." He later said it may have happened at work.
The trial was also told that screaming was heard coming from a park where the 40-year-old's body was found.
Witness Kathleen McIlwaine told the court she heard a scream as she was getting ready for bed in her flat, which overlooked the park, at about 2330 BST on 28 May.
The biomedical scientist said: "This was not a joyful scream. It was one scream and then it was cut off. It really disturbed me.
"I could not see anything.
"I took it to be female. It was a very high-pitched scream."
Couple Margaret Boyd and Frederick Graham told how they had been walking near the park around the same time that evening when they also heard a scream.
Mr Graham, a taxi driver, added: "I actually said: 'If we wake up in the morning and someone has been murdered, then we have just heard it'."
Miss Boyd, a pub manageress, described the noise as "a girly scream" and thought it was youths carrying on in the park.
The trial also heard from park rangers who discovered Ms Jones' half-naked body on the morning of 29 May.
Mr Harcar is alleged to have abducted Ms Jones, who was originally from Staffordshire, and forced her to enter the park on 28 or 29 May 2008.
Special defences
It is claimed that he forced her across the park against her will before he repeatedly punched, kicked and stamped on her head and body.
He is then said to have repeatedly struck Ms Jones on the ground, forcibly removed her clothes, compressed her neck, pinned her to the ground and raped her.
Mr Harcar is also alleged to have murdered the businesswoman and stolen from her.
He is then accused of attempting to defeat the ends of justice by fleeing to the Czech Republic and Slovakia between 1 and 18 June last year.
He denies all charges and has lodged special defences of incrimination and alibi.
The trial, before Lord Bracadale, continues. News Source
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A mother claims she was given a £100 parking ticket after stopping her car on the pavement to resuscitate her disabled son.
Penny Batkin, 40, said that Richmond Council had refused to back down over the fine, despite receiving a letter of explanation backed by her GP.
She says she was taking her son Freddie, four, to the Shooting Star children's hospice in Hampton when he began gasping for breath and turning blue in the back seat of her car.
Mrs Batkin, from Hampton Wick, south-west London, was not aware she had been spotted by traffic wardens who were patrolling the area in a CCTV camera car.
She said: 'I was so furious when I got the letter. I could hear him gasping in the back seat.
'My immediate reaction was to pull over and deal with him.
'I had to release him from the rear passenger seat and resuscitate him.
'I was away from the busy traffic on a wide pavement and would not have restricted anyone walking past.'
In a response to her letter, Richmond Council's appeals officer quoted a section of the Highway Code. It related to parking on the pavement and the official insisted it had been unnecessary to park there.
Mrs Batkin added: 'I hadn't parked. I had stopped to deal with an emergency situation.'
A spokesman for Richmond Council said they had decided to cancel the parking ticket after reviewing the case.
He said: 'It seems that although the issues raised in the original appeal letter received from Ms Batkin explained the medical problems affecting her son the appeals officer had not fully appreciated the true sense of urgency.
'We have now reviewed the matter further and have decided to cancel the Penalty Charge Notice.
' We apologise for any inconvenience or distress caused to Mrs Batkin.' News Source
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They already track innocent citizens' movements with CCTV, are in cahoots with police over speed cameras, and have been using powers supposed to tackle terrorism to put tails on people suspected of minor 'crimes'.
Now local authorities are putting spy planes in the air to snoop on homeowners who are wasting too much energy.
The data is being used to create colour-coded maps which will enable council officers to identify offenders and pay them a visit to educate them about the harm to the environment and measures they can take.
A scheme is already underway in Broadland District Council in Norfolk, which has spent £30,000 hiring a plane with a thermal imaging camera.
It said the exercise has been so successful other local authorities are planning to follow suit.
But critics have warned the crackdown was another example of local authorities extending their charter to poke their noses into every aspect of people's lives.
Broadland, which covers towns including Aylsham, Reepham and Acle, hired the plane from a Leicestershire-based company for five days at the end of January.
The aircraft took images of homes and businesses, with those losing the most heat showing up as red, while better insulated properties appear blue.
The council's head of environmental services, Andy Jarvis, said the original plan was to target businesses but it was realised the scope could be extended to include residental properties.
'The project we put together was for a plane to go up on various nights flying strips of the district and taking pictures,' he said.
'Through those images, a thermal image photograph can be created in which you can pick out individual properties which are losing a lot of heat.
'We do a lot on domestic energy conservation already and realised it would be useful to see if any of the homes which were particularly hot were properties where people had not insulated their lofts.
'We were also able to look at very cold properties and think we might have picked up people on low incomes who are not heating their homes because they cannot afford to.'
More than half the UK's carbon dioxide emissions come from the domestic sector, which includes property and transport.
Almost 60 per cent of a household's heat is lost through uninsulated walls, lofts and windows, costing the average home £380 a year.
Insultation is estimated to reduce each home's carbon emissions by around two tonnes annually.
The first city in the UK to make a heat-loss map was Aberdeen, while the first local authority in England was Haringey Council, in London - although environmental groups at that time said they viewed the practice as a 'gimmick' of little real value.
The TaxPayers' Alliance has added concerns about the issue of privacy.
Chief executive Matthew Elliott said: 'People are sick and tired of being heckled and spied on by local government and this council has shown an utter disregard for the man on the street.'
He added: 'We're in a recession and you would have thought this council had better ways to spend £30,000.
'Taxpayers are already footing the bill for innumerable advertising campaigns at a time when families are struggling to make ends meet.'
But Conservative-led Broadlands insisted the heat-loss map would allow officers to pinpoint offenders and point out how to get help and grants to improve insulation to cut carbon emissions.
Council leader Simon Woodbridge said the project would 'effectively pay for itself within a few weeks in terms of the amounts of money we can help people to save'.
Lib Dem group leader Stuart Beadle added: 'Cameras are in place all over today and we have to accept them. So long as the right guidelines are in place and it will bring benefits, I think the scheme is a good thing.'
Britain now has more than four million CCTV cameras - a fifth of those in use around the world - and around 8,000 speed cameras.
Almost 500 local authorities have been using anti-terrorism powers brought in under the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to launch a string of bizarre investigations.
These have included checks on dog fouling, putting bins out on the wrong day and people trying to cheat school catchment area rules. News Source
Monday 23rd March 2009
A new detention centre for illegal immigrants near Calais has received planning permission and is near construction, it emerged today.
A government document obtained by the Sunday Telegraph shows that Britain is funding half of the cost of the £470,000 centre in the French port, where migrants have been sleeping rough as they try to smuggle themselves into the UK.
There was confusion over the centre after the plans were first revealed by immigration minister Phil Woolas last week, with his French counterpart Eric Besson publicly vowing that there would be "no new Sangatte" camp in Calais.
It is thought that Mr Besson wanted to allay domestic concerns about the recreation of the Red Cross camp which housed up to 1,500 migrants at a time at the turn of the century and was closed in 2002.
The new centre will be on a much smaller scale, containing a number of police cells to hold immigrants until they can be deported. It will be similar to the detention suite at Heathrow Airport and will replace a temporary structure now in place at the port.
Today's letter from Brodie Clark, head of Border Force at the Home Office to Francis Etienne, director of migration at the Migration Ministry in France says: "I am very pleased to be able to confirm, on behalf of the UK Border Agency our contribution to fund 50% of the 500,000 euros cost estimated by the Calais Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCCI) which will enable work to start.
'I believe that planning permission has been granted and that a building contractor has been chosen through a tendering process run by the CCCI, whom we believe had previously made an offer for funding this facility.
'We look forward to having a purpose-built facility that provides a safe, secure and appropriate method of holding clandestines for short periods.'
Over the past decade, Calais has become a magnet for would-be migrants from Africa and Asia hoping to get into the UK.
Hundreds spend lengthy periods living rough in and around the town, making repeated attempts to smuggle themselves onto trucks using the Channel Tunnel or boarding cross-Channel ferries.
It is hoped that the new facility will enable the authorities to remove those who are found to be in France illegally and return them to their home countries.
A senior Labour insider told the Sunday Telegraph: 'We have to have a process to return these people to their own country rather than just releasing them into the French countryside and this building is the first part of that process.' News Source
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Detention Centre Update
Gaffe prone minister Phil Woolas faces further embarrassment following his disastrous claim that a 'new' Anglo-French detention centre for illegal immigrants would be built at Calais.
Mr Woolas endured a humiliating snub when French ministers poured scorn on his claims that the two countries were close to agreement on building a new detention facility to deter thousands of illegal immigrants from trying to reach Britain.
But the row has descended into farce as it emerged that plans will indeed go ahead - for a modest block of around half a dozen temporary holding cells, which will simply replace an existing prefabricated building inside Calais docks.
Far from being a major new facility, local authority sources in Calais said 'nothing would change' when the prefab cells were replaced.
Britain has indeed agreed to pay half the costs - as Mr Woolas outlined last week - but the total bill of around £450,000 is no more than the cost of an ordinary family home in Calais.
The gaffe-prone immigration minister caught his own officials unprepared with his off-the-cuff announcement last Tuesday, suggesting that the new Anglo-French facility would represent a major step forward in tackling the flow of illegal immigrants from across the Channel from northern France.
He told reporters: 'We want to increase the profile of deportations because we have to get the message back to Afghanistan and Iraq that Britain is not the Promised Land.
'We are in a 24-hour-a-day war with the traffickers.'
He suggested the facility would hold significant numbers of illegal immigrants who would then be deported on special charter flights to their homelands, as a tough new deterrent.
But within hours his French opposite number Eric Besson poured cold water on Mr Woolas' claims, saying there was 'no question' of a new detention facility being built.
Details have emerged of the reality of the plans, adding to Mr Woolas's embarrassment.
A letter from a senior Home Office official to the French Immigration Ministry confirmed that Britain would pay 50 per cent of the building costs - which amount to just 500,000 Euros, or £470,000, with Britain paying around £235,000 - and that a building contractor has been chosen.
It adds: 'We look forward to having a purpose-built facility that provides a safe, secure and appropriate method of holding clandestines for short periods.'
Sources at Calais Town Council laughed off suggestions that the building would be a mass ‘deterrent’ prison from where migrants would be deported straight home.
An insider said: 'It will be made up of around half-a-dozen cells where migrants can immediately be taken when caught inside the port perimeter.
‘At the moment they’re placed in police cells which are getting a bit old. That’s why better facilities are needed.
‘After spending a few hours in the cells, the migrants are taken to proper detention centres in the Calais region where they are processed before usually being released. In this respect, nothing will change.’
There are already three larger detention centres around Calais with around 100 beds each where illegal immigrants caught in the area are held for a few days and processed.
A French immigration service spokesman said yesterday: ‘These detention centres are perfectly adequate for the numbers involved.’
However French policy is to return illegal immigrants who do not want to claim asylum in France to the last safe country they passed through.
But as most of those caught around Calais claim to have arrived from Belgium - an hour's drive up the coast - there is no point driving them there simply to return, and so they are commonly released in Calais itself.
A UK Border Agency spokesperson said: 'There are ongoing discussions at official level about what form of facility could be built within Calais port.' News Source
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Soaring population will force millions to flee water shortages in search of refuge - and, according to new figures, Britain will be one of the world's 'lifeboats'. On the eve of a major population conference, Science Editor Robin McKie asks: could the UK cope?
Britain will become one of the world's major destinations for immigrants as the world heats up and populations continue to soar. Statistics from the United Nations show that, on average, every year more than 174,000 people will be added to the numbers in the UK and that this trend will continue for the next four decades.
By then, only the United States and Canada will be receiving more overseas settlers, says the UN. This increase in British numbers is likely to put considerable strain on the country's transport, energy and housing, experts warned last week.
"The US and Canada will be taking in more people than us every year by 2050 but they are huge countries," said demographer Professor Tom Dyson of the London School of Economics. "Britain, by contrast, is a small nation. We will feel the impact of all these people. There will be no getting out of it. Simply controlling our carbon dioxide emissions will become harder and harder as more and more people arrive on our shores. In addition, housing, water supplies and transport will be strained and will need greatly increased investment."
However, other experts say such increases could also produce benefits for the nation, bringing in immigrants who could provide a vital supply of young workers. These demographers point out that, by 2050, more than a third of the UK population will be aged 60 or over. By then there will be a desperate need for bus drivers, care-workers and others to keep the country running and immigrants could fill this gap.
In addition, there is the issue of humanitarian responsibility. Britain is likely to be one of the few nations to survive the worst effects of climate change while other nations, particularly those in the developing world, have their farmland and fishing grounds destroyed. It could be argued that the UK has a moral duty to provide shelter for as many refugees as our shores can support.
But deciding what numbers the country might support is a highly controversial issue and will be the focus of a conference on sustainable populations which will be held this week in London. Organised by the Optimum Population Trust, the meeting will hear that the United Nation expects that by 2050 the world will be inhabited by around 9.2 billion people, compared to its current level of 6.8 billion. Every day, the equivalent of the population of a large city is added to the numbers of humans, a rise that is now straining the planet's resources to breaking point.
At the same time, Britain's population will rise from its current level of 61 million to 72 million by 2050. The nation will then be the most populous in the European Union, outstripping Germany, whose population will slump from 82 million to 71 million people as its immigration figures plummet.
The idea that Britain could one day support such numbers has been questioned by Aubrey Manning, emeritus professor of natural history at Edinburgh University. "There are far too many people living in Britain already," he said. "Once our population passed the 20 million level around 1850, it became too numerous. That is the figure at which we could no longer sustain our population from our own resources. We are now three times over the limit and heading for more. We have long passed the line of sustainability. As for the planet, its maximum sustainable population is no more than 3 billion, I would say."
The rise in population indicates that the country is set for some considerable overcrowding. Britain's land area is only two-thirds that of Germany, yet it will soon support the same number of citizens. "This population rise, brought about by rising immigration, will strain our infrastructures - our housing and water supplies - and bring very little advantage to the nation," said Dyson, who will address the conference. "Nor do I think these extra people will be able to help in looking after our older people."
But these points were disputed by Tim Finch, head of immigration for the Institute of Public Policy Research. "A healthy economy sucks in young, educated people and that is what has happened to this country over the past couple of decades. These young immigrants have helped keep the country running as our population has started to get older and they will become more important as the decades go past and that ageing intensifies. The immigration system picks out the best and the brightest of immigrants and they will be of great service to Britain. That is just a fact."
The problem is that discussions of population numbers in the past have been associated with talk of eugenics and with attempts at controlling ethnic populations. As a result, there is little discussion today of the subject or its impact on the environment, a point stressed by James Lovelock, the distinguished environmental scientist. "The subject has become a taboo, a matter of political correctness," he said last week. "And that is dangerous, for the numbers of humans on Earth are going to be crucial to our survival."
Manning added: "We have stopped worrying about population because other issues - acid rain, climate change and others - have occupied our attention and because past fears of global food shortages were proved unfounded. But the subject will not go away. Our planet is now dangerously overpopulated."
Another conference speaker, Chris Rapley, director of the Science Museum, in London, agreed. "We desperately need to bring down our emissions of greenhouse gases but the truth is we will never get the contribution of each individual down to zero. Only the lack of the individual can bring it to zero, and that is an issue for population control which we need to talk about openly and urgently."
Rapley will tell delegates that the Earth's population is now rising at a rate of around 80 million a year. "That is roughly the same as the number of unwanted pregnancies across the world," he said. "If we can prevent unwanted pregnancies, we can halt this spiral in our numbers."
To do that, contraception will have to become universally available - and political and religious opposition to birth control removed. If that happened, the world's population could be stabilised to around 8 billion by 2050, added Rapley.
But many climatologists believe that by then life on the planet will already have become dangerously unpleasant. Temperature rises will have started to have devastating impacts on farmland, water supplies and sea levels. Humans - increasing both in numbers and dependence on food from devastated landscapes - will then come under increased pressure. The end result will be apocalyptic, said Lovelock. By the end of the century, the world's population will suffer calamitous declines until numbers are reduced to around 1 billion or less. "By 2100, pestilence, war and famine will have dealt with the majority of humans," he said.
One of the few places to survive the worst impacts will be Britain. "Our climate will be one of the least affected by global warming," added Lovelock. "As a result, everyone will want to live here. We will become one of the world's lifeboats. The trouble, of course, will be that, even if we wanted to, we will not be able to pick up everyone. There will be some hard decisions to make."
Many experts predict that disaster will strike long before 2050. Last week, the government's chief scientific adviser, Professor John Beddington, said the planet faced "a perfect storm" of food, energy and water shortages which could strike in less than 20 years. In a speech to the Sustainable Development Commission conference in London, Beddington said that one in three people were already facing water shortages and that by 2030 world water demand would increase by more than 30%; energy demands would increase by 50%. "There are dramatic problems out there, particularly with water and food, but energy also, and they are all intimately connected."
In the long run, however, humanity should benefit, said Lovelock. "If you look at our species over the past million years, there have been a number of major climatic events, some devastating. Between the Ice Ages, sea levels rose by 120 metres and tracts of land were flooded. Yet that period covers the time that early humans emerged and evolved into Homo sapiens
"Often our numbers were brought to catastrophically low levels by climate change and numbers were reduced to only a couple of thousand on a couple of occasions. Every time things got bad, our numbers plummeted and we improved as a species. That is certainly going to happen again over the next 100 years." News Source
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There can be little doubt that, had he been alive today, Sir Winston Churchill would have been in the British National Party.
This British icon’s views on immigration and Islam prove the point, whatever his grandson, Nicholas Soames, might have to say about the BNP leader Nick Griffin posing for a photograph with a Churchill image.
Consider the following quote on Islam, written by Churchill in his book The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan (first edition, Vol. II, pages 248-50, London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899).
“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries!
Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy.
“The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity.
“The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
“Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities — but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.
“Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.”
Sir Winston’s comments on immigration would also disqualify him from membership of today’s Conservative Party. During a cabinet meeting in early February 1953, he remarked that he had considered blocking all immigration to Britain because he feared a growing “coloured population” was posing a threat to Britain’s social stability.
Churchill, then 79, told Cabinet colleagues that he did not “want a parti-coloured UK.” At a Cabinet meeting on February 3, 1954, the prime minister told colleagues: “Problems will arise if many coloured people settle here. Are we to saddle ourselves with colour problems in UK?”
Churchill said immigrants were attracted to Britain by the welfare state and he said: “Public opinion in UK won’t tolerate it once it gets beyond certain limits.”
If Churchill were to make either of these speeches to a Conservative Party meeting today, he would be expelled - and hence he would be in the BNP. News Source
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Too close to the Truth? Indeed!
There can be little doubt that, had he been alive today, Sir Winston Churchill would have been in the British National Party.
This British icon’s views on immigration and Islam prove the point, whatever his grandson, Nicholas Soames, might have to say about the BNP leader Nick Griffin posing for a photograph with a Churchill image.
Consider the following quote on Islam, written by Churchill in his book The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan (first edition, Vol. II, pages 248-50, London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899).
“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy.
“The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity.
“The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
“Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities — but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.
“Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.”
Sir Winston’s comments on immigration would also disqualify him from membership of today’s Conservative Party. During a cabinet meeting in early February 1953, he remarked that he had considered blocking all immigration to Britain because he feared a growing “coloured population” was posing a threat to Britain’s social stability.
Churchill, then 79, told Cabinet colleagues that he did not “want a parti-coloured UK.” At a Cabinet meeting on February 3, 1954, the prime minister told colleagues: “Problems will arise if many coloured people settle here. Are we to saddle ourselves with colour problems in UK?”
Churchill said immigrants were attracted to Britain by the welfare state and he said: “Public opinion in UK won’t tolerate it once it gets beyond certain limits.”
If Churchill were to make either of these speeches to a Conservative Party meeting today, he would be expelled - and hence he would be in the BNP. News Source
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This anonymous office building on a business park near Heathrow Airport is where the Government has begun monitoring millions of British holidaymakers using its controversial new 'terrorist detector' database.
The top-secret computer system - tied into the airlines' ticketing network - makes judgments about travel habits and passengers' friends and family to decide if they are a security risk.
Like something from a science-fiction film, the Home Office has designed it to spot a 'criminal' or terrorist before they have done anything wrong.
The building's address is, some might say sinisterly, called Status Park 4.
But the intrusiveness of the system at the heart of Government's so-called 'e-Borders' scheme has provoked such fury among civil liberties campaigners that some consider it akin to a modern-day Stasi headquarters.
All the information passengers give to travel agents, including home addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, passport details and the names of family members, is shared with an unknown number of Government agencies for 'analysis' and stored for up to ten years.
But even as the 'profiling' system goes live, its reliability is being called into question.
An internal Home Office document obtained by The Mail on Sunday reveals that during testing one 'potential suspect' turned out to be an airline passenger with a spinal injury flying into Britain with his nurse.
'Suspect' requests likely to cause innocent holidaymakers to get 'red flags' as potential terrorists include ordering a vegetarian meal, asking for an over-wing seat and travelling with a foreign-born husband or wife.
The system will also 'red flag' passengers buying a one-way ticket and making a last-minute reservation and those with a history of booking tickets and not showing up for the flights.
A previous history of travel to the Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan or Iran will also trigger an alarm, as will those with a record of sponsoring an immigrant from any of these countries.
Starting during the Easter holiday rush, millions of people will be checked by the new National Border Targeting Centre (NBTC).
By the end of the year the NBTC, which is recruiting 250 staff, will have been relocated to another office near Manchester Airport and will be analysing the movements of 120million UK travellers.
Initially it will target airlines but will be expanded to check passengers on ferries and trains, including some journeys within the UK.
At the heart of the system is a highly classified computer algorithm designed to pick out people to be searched, questioned by security staff or barred from flying.
An internal Home Office Border and Immigration Agency document explains how Britain's new system will work.
Written by Tim Rymer, head of the Joint Border Operations Centre, the forerunner to the new NBTC, it explains how it will use 'Passenger Name Record' (PNR) information given when travellers buy a ticket.
The document, written in March last year after a trial examining 30million passengers, reveals: 'PNR is checked against profiles of behavioural patterns which indicate risk activity. Continued
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The shocking extent of the failures at an NHS hospital where hundreds of patients died unnecessarily can be disclosed today.
Senior managers at Stafford Hospital were told repeatedly that the standard of care they were delivering was not good enough but each time the warnings were ignored.
The disclosures follow the publication last week of a damning report by the NHS regulator, the Healthcare Commission, that found that hundreds of patients died at the hospital because of the “appalling” treatment they received.
Today, The Sunday Telegraph can disclose that executives at Stafford Hospital were warned as early as 2002 by the commission’s predecessor that it had problems with the standard of its emergency care services and that it was not adequately staffed. However, they failed to act on the warnings.
In 2006, a former government adviser warned the hospital about the standards of hygiene in A&E. Again, the warning was ignored.
It was only when alerts were issued over the high mortality rate at the hospital that alarm bells rang.
At that stage an investigation by the Healthcare Commission began, resulting in the publication of last week’s report and the suspension on full pay of Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust’s chief executive, Martin Yeates, and the resignation of its chairman, Toni Brisby.
The Sunday Telegraph launches a campaign today for a series of measures to ensure that the crisis in Staffordshire is never repeated in the NHS. The Heal Our Hospitals campaign demands the establishment of an independent inquiry into the regulation and supervision of NHS hospitals.
This has been endorsed by the Patients Association and the Cure the NHS campaign group, which worked to expose the crisis at Stafford Hospital. The two groups today launch a petition demanding an inquiry.
Richard Branson, the vice-president of the Patients Association, said: “The most important thing is that patients are happy and safe. I’ve signed the petition because I think patients need to have confidence that they will be. Inquiries are not about laying blame, they are about finding answers to important questions.”
This newspaper is also calling for:
- A review of hospital targets to ensure that they work to improve quality of care.
- Nurses to focus on patient care — not form-filling — as their central duty.
- Routine publication of comprehensive death rates for hospitals.
- Patients to be given a stronger voice in the running of hospitals.
- Assurance that senior hospital staff will not be rewarded for failure.
In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph yesterday, the chairman of the Healthcare Commission condemned the board at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust and bosses at the strategic health authority for failing to act.
Sir Ian Kennedy said it was clear that serious problems at the hospital were evident as far back as 2002, yet no action was taken by managers.
Sir Ian said board members and managers who had not already left should “examine their consciences”.
“Anybody who had any responsibility for leadership and management must ask how they allowed this place to get into the state where patients were dying,” he said.
Terry Deighton, an expert in risk assessment who carried out the inspection of A&E in February 2006 that led to another warning for Stafford Hospital, described the conditions as “absolutely disgusting”. He found blood encrusted on seats, puddles of urine on the lavatory floors and doctors and nurses washing their hands in sinks encrusted with grime.
Mr Deighton’s report said standards of cleanliness risked placing patients in danger of infection but Mr Yeates insisted that Stafford Hospital was “very clean” and refused to meet Mr Deighton for over a year.
The commission has also criticised standards of care at Birmingham Children’s Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (BCH) after it struggled to meet rising demands.
The commission is also investigating allegations that West London Mental Health Trust did not do enough to prevent patients harming themselves and other people.
The disclosures have led to concern about standards of care in the NHS and calls for a change in the target-driven culture that many emergency care specialists believe is distorting clinical priorities within A&E departments.
The Sunday Telegraph’s campaign has received the backing of health experts and practitioners.
Claire Rayner, the president of the Patients Association, said: “The target culture has led to a dreadful waste of professional time and extra layers of management.”
John Heyworth, the president of the College of Emergency Medicine, said: “The lack of doctors and nurses identified in Stafford is a dramatic example of what can happen when the focus on care in departments is lifted.”
Dr Peter Carter, the chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing, said: “Many of the catastrophic failings identified at the Mid Staffordshire trust could have been avoided if there were simply enough nurses to care for patients.”
The Conservatives will set out their own plan to put patient safety first this week. It includes giving patients power to hold failing hospitals to account, an end to the target culture and tougher inspections to root out failure. Andrew Lansley, the shadow health secretary, said: “I welcome The Sunday Telegraph’s campaign. We need to make sure that patients are listened to and give responsibility to doctors and nurses.”
A survey for Channel 4’s Dispatches programme to be broadcast tomorrow indicates that many nurses believe that the lives of patients were being placed in danger by a lack of training, staff shortages and long hours. It also indicates that more than a third (37 per cent) think that patient care in the NHS has become worse in the past five years. Mr Yeates refused to comment but his replacement, Eric Morton, said: “Care standards fell below those that our patients had a right to expect of their hospital and we regret this. We would like to offer our very sincere apology.
“We would like to reassure the local community that our focus is, and will remain, on providing high-quality, efficient and safe health care for the people of Staffordshire.
“We have put in place effective governance structures to address the key issues.”
The Department of Health responded to the launch of The Sunday Telegraph campaign by insisting that the problems in Mid Staffordshire were down to “a complete failure of management” at a local level, which had been revealed through a “meticulous” inquiry by the Healthcare Commission.
A spokesman said the system of regulation and management would be reviewed; trusts were expected to monitor mortality rates, and there was no secrecy over the figures; and the system of targets set minimum standards which patients would expect. News Source
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Sixty thousand British civilians are being trained by the Home Office to spot terrorists, Gordon Brown has revealed.
Huge numbers of staff on rail networks, at shops, public buildings and major sports venues have been picked out by MI5 and the police for the special training - teaching them to watch for 'suspicious behaviour' and respond swiftly to an atrocity.
The ambitious scheme was announced as the Home Secretary prepared to publish what she claimed would be the Government's most detailed counter-terrorism strategy document to date.
The plans are likely to spark questions over the effectiveness of such a huge army of amateur and lightly-trained 'terrorist watchers', including concerns that they will swamp the police and security service and inflame community relations with spurious alerts singling out law-abiding British Muslims.
The Home Office would not provide any details of their training on security grounds, but said it centred on increased vigilance and improved response to terrorist attacks, including evacuation and crowd control procedures. Officials said MI5 had helped draw up the training course.
Gordon Brown, writing in a Sunday newspaper said: 'Tens of thousands of men and women throughout Britain - from security guards to store managers - have now been trained and equipped to deal with an incident and know what to watch for as people go about their daily business in crowded places such as stations, airports, shopping centres and sports grounds.'
He said the public 'should be under no illusion' that 'the biggest security threat to our country and other countries is the murderous agents of hate that work under the banner of Al Qaeda.' Home Office insiders acknowledged that many of the 60,000 staff undergoing the training should already be trained to look for signs of security threats as part of their everyday work. Continued
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Angry Muslims want the patriot who banned non-English speaking customers sacked – even though he has been blitzed with fan mail.
Deva Kumarasiri, 40, who came to England 18 years ago, says immigrants should take pride in the UK. The Sri Lankan’s stance captured the hearts of the nation and earned him the Daily Star’s first-ever Great Brit Award. The post office worker has received scores of letters and emails from people backing his courage in speaking out.
But yesterday Muslims living near his post office in Nottingham launched a campaign to get him kicked out.
Local mosque chairman Aurangzeb Khan said a petition was circulating among Muslim residents calling for Buddhist Deva to be fired. He said: “There has been concern that people can be denied post office services because they can’t speak English.
“There is a strong feeling among some local people that this is wrong.
“A single employee should not have the right to make that decision, especially if he is an employee of what is a public facility.”
The controversial ban was a talking point among Muslims attending prayers yesterday in an area of Nottingham with a large Pakistani community.
One worshipper said: “There is a lot of anger about this. “We understand his point but it can take years to learn English. “A lot of people think he is wrong and want him gone.”
Deva said he had also been suspended from the Lib-Dem group of his local council. The dad-of-two, who is considering standing as an MP, said he would instead represent his own party Britishness Forever.
He said: “I don’t expect everyone to agree with me but most people seem to. “I’ve had so many letters, cards, phone calls and emails of support – it has been really quite touching. “Some have moved me to tears.”
Deva, who has run the post office for six months, said his bosses had met to discuss his ban but had decided not to censure him. News Source
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The Indie reports:
The Government has severed relations with the country’s leading Muslim organisation, saying a senior member is a supporter of Hamas, the Palestinian military organisation.
A letter leaked to The Independent on Sunday shows that the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Hazel Blears, wrote to the Muslim Council of Britain, calling for Dr Daud Abdullah to resign.
She alleges he was one of 90 Muslim leaders from around the world who signed a public declaration of support for Hamas, the elected government of the Gaza strip in Israel, and military action against Israel.
A spokeswoman for the department said: “We are concerned that the statement calls for direct support for acts of violence in the Middle East and beyond. We are also aware that a senior member of the MCB may have been a signatory to this statement. If it is proven that the individual concerned had been a signatory, we would expect the MCB to ask him to resign and to confirm its opposition to acts of violent extremism.”
MCB’s response:
The MCB is appalled by the high handed and condescending action of the Secretary of State, Hazel Blears.
In response to recent media reports (IoS, 22nd March) about the Gaza Declaration in Istanbul, the Muslim Council of Britain wishes to make clear that it no way supports the targeting or killing of British soldiers anywhere in the world. This is the agreed position of all MCB Office Bearers without exception including the MCB’s Central Working Committee.
As an independent community organisation, the MCB is committed to faithfully representing the views of all our affiliates. As such we reaffirm the right under international law of the Palestinian people to resist the ongoing illegal and brutal occupation of their land.
The MCB shall be officially responding to the letter from Hazel Blears shortly.
There are two things to note:
1. Whether or not the MCB’s institutional position is to oppose attacks on British servicemen and women, it is crystal clear that Daud Abdullah signed a declaration that supported attacks on navies enforcing the Gaza ceasefire. He signed the statement, shortly after Britain had offered to contribute to such a response. The document also transparently threatened terrorism against countries and individuals who ’standing with’ Israel and in opposition to Hamas:
The obligation of the Islamic Nation to regard everyone standing with the Zionist entity, whether countries, institutions or individuals, as providing a substantial contribution to the crimes and brutality of this entity; the position towards him is the same as towards this usurping entity.
Daud Abdullah may have thought that nobody would know about his support of terrorist politics. After all, he was a long way from home, and the document was in Arabic.
He was wrong.
The one thing Daud Abdullah can not do is to deny that this is what he believes.He signed the declaration.
The MCB, as an institution, cannot disassociate itself from Daud Abdullah, or condemn his words. That silence speaks volumes.
2. The MCB supports Hamas: an openly genocidal anti-semitic movement.
When it says:
“We reaffirm the right under international law of the Palestinian people to resist the ongoing illegal and brutal occupation of their land.”
what it means is:
“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.” (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).
The MCB is a coalition of organisations, the majority of them connected to Islamist politics, the biggest bloc connected to the failed South Asian fascist party, Jamaat-e-Islami and to Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood. So, as they point out, this is what they believe.
Isn’t it time for the MCB to drop its attempts to partner with the Government, and for the Government to cut the MCB loose for good? Like oil and water, pro-terrorist politics and democracy will never mix. The best those who attempt such a synthesis can hope for is an emulsion.
Like a spoilt hollandaise sauce, that emulsion has now separated. News Source
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Was six stab wounds justified assuming Bunglawala is telling the whole truth?
An influential Muslim who advises the Government on combating terrorism will not face charges, despite stabbing a man at his home.
Prosecutors have decided that Inayat Bunglawala acted in self-defence when a drunk turned up at his £300,000 house in Luton, Bedfordshire, in the early hours of the morning.
After a scuffle, the 25-year-old man was left bleeding from six knife wounds to his back, requiring emergency surgery that confined him to hospital for four days.
But the Crown Prosecution Service has accepted Mr Bunglawala’s version of events and has dropped the case – to the immense anger of the injured man and his family.
The man, who has asked to not be named, has no history of violent behaviour but admits he was drunk and that he has no recollection of the incident.
Mr Bunglawala, a prominent member of the Muslim Council Of Great Britain, says he was defending the home where he lives with his wife Tahmina and three young children from an intruder who smashed a window, attempted to kick in the door and – when confronted – tried to throttle him.
The man Mr Bunglawala stabbed used to live in the house and says that he arrived there following an evening of drinking in a local nightclub.
A friend put him into a taxi, paid the driver, and gave his drinking companion’s former address – unaware that he had moved out more than a year earlier.
Exactly what happened next is the crux of the case, but at 2.10am police arrived at the house.
They found the 25-year-old nearby, bleeding profusely, and arrested him on suspicion of burglary.
Later that day, December 13 last year, they also arrested Mr Bunglawala in connection with the stabbing.
He was later bailed and told friends: ‘I naturally believed that the intruder had violent intentions towards me and my family.’
The stabbed man said: ‘I was drunk. I remember the nightclub and the next thing I knew I woke up in hospital, bleeding profusely.
‘I had been stabbed six times. One of the stab wounds was an inch or so from my spleen and damage there could well have killed me.’
Two of his wounds were deep – one to the shoulder and another to his left side.
Surgeons at Luton and Dunstable Hospital had to open his abdomen to check for damage to internal organs.
When The Mail on Sunday first approached Mr Bunglawala about the incident, he instructed leading media lawyers Carter-Ruck, whose solicitors typically cost about £400 an hour.
On Friday, the firm sent a letter to this newspaper claiming that the ‘so-called “victim”’ had attempted to unlawfully break into Mr Bunglawala’s home.
They said Mr Bunglawala called the police when he became aware that the man had got into a porch area and was kicking the front door, breaking a window in the process.
The lawyers say their client then got a knife in an attempt to scare off the man.
When he came out of the house, the drunk man ran at Mr Bunglawala, forcing him to the floor and trying to throttle him.
With the man on top of him, Mr Bunglawala apparently inflicted the stab wounds.
Last week, the Crown Prosecution Service said Mr Bunglawala had no case to answer.
A spokesman added: ‘Mr Bunglawala was clearly faced with an extremely frightening situation when confronted by a heavily intoxicated, confused and incoherent assailant who later remembered nothing of the incident.
‘Mr Bunglawala had good reason to fear, not only for his own safety but for that of his wife and children.
‘In the circumstances, we have insufficient evidence to show that Mr Bunglawala’s actions were other than reasonable self-defence.’
Mr Bunglawala is now said to be considering bringing charges against the man.
However, the parents of the 25-year-old, a heating engineer and a local government employee, said they were ‘sickened’ by the CPS’s decision not to prosecute.
His mother said: ‘Mr Bunglawala has been treated very lightly by the police and the CPS. My son is embarrassed that he was so drunk.’
Mr Bunglawala, a former civil servant with Revenue & Customs, was appointed to a Home Office taskforce tackling radicalisation in Britain after the July 7 London bombings in 2005.
He now runs an Islamic website. News Source
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The wife of Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe has been granted diplomatic immunity over an alleged attack on a British photographer who took pictures of her shopping for designer clothes while her home country descended into financial chaos and starvation.
Grace Mugabe, 44, faced a possible wounding charge after being accused of repeatedly punching Richard Jones while outside an upmarket Hong Kong department store in January. The diamond ring she was wearing was said to have caused several cuts to his face.
The alleged incident happened while Mrs Mugabe and her entourage were on a £63,000 five-star Asian tour, reportedly paid for with US dollars withdrawn by her husband from Harare’s central bank at a time of chronic poverty, a cholera outbreak and hyperinflation in Zimbabwe.
Two witnesses gave statements and police concluded there was sufficient evidence to prosecute, sources close to the investigation said.
But Hong Kong’s Department of Justice said last night: ‘Grace Mugabe is not liable to arrest or detention and enjoys immunity from criminal prosecution.’
The department declined to say if Mrs Mugabe had requested immunity or whether it was granted automatically.
Mrs Mugabe, who married the 85-year-old Zimbabwean president in 1996 after his first wife died, flew home before Mr Jones reported the incident and was not interviewed by police.
Welshman Mr Jones, 42, who works for The Mail on Sunday, said yesterday: ‘I’m disappointed. It’s appalling this woman can behave like that without being held to account.’
He claimed Mrs Mugabe had acted like a ‘mad woman’, hitting him at least ten times in the face and head.
International law expert Simon Young, of the University of Hong Kong, said Mrs Mugabe was entitled to diplomatic immunity – recognised by the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations – but could still face arrest if her husband were forced out of power.
And invoking the protection could yet cause a headache for the Mugabes as protocol dictates that those using it should stay away from the territory in question.
The Mugabes have a daughter at university in Hong Kong and are said to have bought a £6million house there. News Source
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One of Gordon Brown’s leading green advisers, is to warn that Britain must drastically reduce its population if it is to build a sustainable society.
Porritt’s call will come at this week’s annual conference of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), of which he is patron.
The trust will release research suggesting UK population must be cut to 30m if the country wants to feed itself sustainably.
Porritt said: “Population growth, plus economic growth, is putting the world under terrible pressure.
“Each person in Britain has far more impact on the environment than those in developing countries so cutting our population is one way to reduce that impact.”
Population growth is one of the most politically sensitive environmental problems. The issues it raises, including religion, culture and immigration policy, have proved too toxic for most green groups.
However, Porritt is winning scientific backing. Professor Chris Rapley, director of the Science Museum, will use the OPT conference, to be held at the Royal Statistical Society, to warn that population growth could help derail attempts to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Rapley, who formerly ran the British Antarctic Survey, said humanity was emitting the equivalent of 50 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year.
“We have to cut this by 80%, and population growth is going to make that much harder,” he said.
Such views on population have split the green movement. George Monbiot, a prominent writer on green issues, has criticised population campaigners, arguing that “relentless” economic growth is a greater threat.
Many experts believe that, since Europeans and Americans have such a lopsided impact on the environment, the world would benefit more from reducing their populations than by making cuts in developing countries.
This is part of the thinking behind the OPT’s call for Britain to cut population to 30m — roughly what it was in late Victorian times.
Britain’s population is expected to grow from 61m now to 71m by 2031. Some politicians support a reduction.
Phil Woolas, the immigration minister, said: “You can’t have sustainability with an increase in population.”
The Tory leader, David Cameron, has also suggested Britain needs a “coherent strategy” on population growth.
Despite these comments, however, government and Conservative spokesmen this weekend both distanced themselves from any population policy. ” News Source
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Just a “handful” of frontline police have the protective hoods needed to rescue civilians from a deadly dirty bomb attack by Islamic terrorists on London.
The Metropolitan Police has admitted its team to deal with a chemical or biological attack by terrorists is tiny.
By contrast, Scotland has enough masks, which protect against a chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) attack, for all officers.
The revelation comes just 11 days before the G20 summit of world leaders in the capital’s Docklands, when Londoners will face a massive £10million security operation to deal with a terror threat said to be at the “severe end of severe”.
All police leave has been cancelled for the first two days of next month as US President Barack Obama and other world leaders converge on the Abu Dhabi-owned ExCeL conference centre in East London.
Attention will centre on securing the City of London and Canary Wharf from environmental and anarchist groups.
Bankers have been advised by their bosses to “dress down” on April 1, the first day of protests.
The fear of a terror attack elsewhere in the capital is causing serious concern.
Security chiefs are particularly worried about Mumbai-style assaults on luxury hotels by Muslim fanatics but their nightmare scenario is a dirty bomb similar to the sarin nerve agent attack on the Tokyo underground in 1995.
Till last year, the Met had been planning to order a massive batch of the EH20 CBRN hoods, which are packed into small vacuum canisters and give rescuers up to 20 minutes protection.
But the Met then decided that instead of equipping every officer with the hoods it would concentrate on creating highly mobile specialist teams equipped with full protective suits within its Territorial Support Group.
A spokesman said the force would rather have specialists than “any Tom, Dick or Harry” officer.
This means that faced with a chemical attack, ordinary officers would have to forget their hero instincts and flee. But security experts fear the sight of police running away from a major incident could spark mass panic.
Superintendent Alan King, who oversees the force’s CBRN work, said the hoods have been issued to “just a handful of people”.
In the latest issue of the CBRNe World magazine he explained: “The actual number of responders is not getting bigger and we are rationalising the assets we have to ensure the right people are trained and are in the right place.”
MPs are also concerned that while all ambulances have been equipped with the canisters, paramedics might not have adequate police back up.
Last night Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said: “God forbid that we should ever face a threat of this kind but we really do have to make sure our emergency services have access to the equipment they need.”
Peter Smythe, chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, added: “Not enough of us have been trained, not enough of us have the equipment, and not enough of us are even aware of them.”
However, security expert Gwyn Winfield said Scotland Yard wanted to avoid a “false sense of security” among ordinary police.
He said: “There was a real concern that the average copper could actually compromise the capability of the rescue mission. There were some doubts about the capability of the masks and it was felt better to get the proper specialists in there.”
The hoods were developed at the police’s CBRN training centre at a Ministry of Defence base in Hampshire and manufactured in Wiltshire by Avon Rubber, which has just gained safety approval for a contract in the US, after landing a major deal with the Department for Homeland Security.
A spokeswoman for the company said it was talking to the UK Government about ways of selling the hoods, which would likely cost about £100, directly to the public.
During a Commons debate last year, Tory Michael Ancram accused the Government of “washing its hands” of how many hoods should be ordered.
He said: “The Government owe it to the people to ensure that the services of law and order and the rescue services are all properly equipped to respond in a co-ordinated manner to such situations. Failure to do so could be culpable.”
A Home Office spokesman said that the numbers of hoods was a matter for individual police forces. News Source
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The only problem with a project to prove that Arctic ice is disappearing is the fact that it is actually getting thicker!
What a wonderful parable of our time has been the expedition to the North Pole led by the explorer Pen Hadow. With two companions, he is measuring the thickness of the ice to show how fast it is “declining”. His expedition is one of a series of events designed to “raise awareness of the dangers of climate change” before December’s conference in Copenhagen, where the warmists hope to get a new treaty imposing much more drastic cuts on CO2 emissions.
Hadow’s Catlin Arctic Project has top-level backing from the likes of the BBC, the WWF (it could “make a lasting difference to policy-relevant science”) and Prince Charles (“for the sake of our children and grandchildren, I pray that we will heed the results of the Catlin Arctic Survey and I can only commend this remarkably important project”).
With perfect timing, the setting out from Britain of the “Global Warming Three” last month was hampered by “an unusually heavy snowfall”. When they were airlifted to the start of their trek by a twin-engine Otter (one hopes a whole forest has been planted to offset its “carbon footprint”), they were startled to find how cold it was. The BBC dutifully reported how, in temperatures of minus 40 degrees, they were “battered by wind, bitten by frost and bruised by falls on the ice”.
Thanks to the ice constantly shifting, it was “disheartening”, reported Hadow, to find that “when you’ve slogged for a day”, you can wake up next morning to find you have “drifted back to where you started’’. Last week, down to their last scraps of food, they were only saved in the nick of time by the faithful Otter. They were disconcerted to see one of those polar bears, threatened with extinction by global warming, wandering around, doubtless eyeing them for its dinner.
But at least one of the intrepid trio was able to send a birthday message to his mum, via the BBC, and they were able to talk by telephone to “some of the world’s most influential climate change leaders”, including Development Secretary Douglas Alexander in front of 300 people at “a conference on world poverty”.
The idea is that the expedition should take regular radar fixes on the ice thickness, to be fed into a computer model in California run by Professor Wieslaw Maslowski, whose team, according to the BBC, “is well known for producing results that show much faster ice-loss than other modelling teams”. The professor predicts that summer ice could be completely gone as early as next year. It took the Watts Up With That? science blog to point out that there is little point in measuring ice thickness unless you do it several years running, and that, anyway, Arctic ice is being constantly monitored by US Army buoys. The latest reading given by a typical sensor shows that since last March the ice has thickened by “at least half a metre”.
“In most fields of science,” comments WUWT drily, “that is considered an 'increase’ rather than a 'decline’.”
An unhealthy moral climate
A London employment tribunal has ruled that Tim Nicholson, right, was wrongly dismissed as a property firm’s “head of sustainability” because of his fervent commitment to “climate change”. Mr Nicholson had fallen out with his colleagues over his attempts to reduce the company’s “carbon footprint”. The tribunal chairman David Neath found the company guilty of discriminating against Mr Nicholson under the 2006 Equality (Religion and Belief) Regulations, because his faith in global warming was a “philosophical belief”. Recalling how “eco-psychologists’’ at the University of the West of England are pressing for “climate denial” to be classified as a form of “mental disorder”, one doubts whether the same legal protection would be given to those who fail to share Mr Nicholson’s “philosophical belief”. News Source
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Big Brother-style databases of DNA records and personal details of millions of Britons held by the Government must be scrapped, a report says.
The study of almost 50 largescale public sector computer systems highlights what it claims are serious breaches of human rights and data protection laws.
It warns that Britain is becoming a 'database state' because politicians are scared to step in to halt the spread of costly and flawed projects.
Academics at Cambridge University, commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, singled out the DNA database and the Contact- Point index of all children in the UK among the 11 worst examples.
But they also found serious problems with 29 other data systems which they claimed were wasting billions of pounds a year and putting children at risk, as well as eroding privacy.
Co-author Professor Ross Anderson, of Cambridge University, said: 'Britain's database state has become a financial, ethical and administrative disaster which is penalising some of the most vulnerable members of our society.'
The findings will add to mounting concerns over the spread of 'Big Brother' surveillance powers, particularly following a spate of high-profile losses of personal data by Government departments.
The report warns that politicians and civil servants increasingly avoid trying to sort out such a 'career-threatening and toxic' issue.
Despite the Government spending £16billion a year on computer systems only one project in three is successful, researchers claim.
The study proposes clearly-defined 'proportionate and necessary' legal rules to allow access.
Researchers focused on the 46 largest public sector databases, but said there are thousands in operation across the public sector.
They highlighted examples where sharing data across Government could seriously harm vulnerable people, such as the ONSET profiling system used to predict which children are at risk of committing crimes based on their backgrounds.
The system may lead police to treat youngsters as suspects no matter how they behave, it is claimed.
Eleven databases were classed code 'red' – meaning they should be scrapped or urgently redesigned – including the DNA crimefighting database, which holds genetic profiles of more than four million people, many of whom have never been charged with a crime.
LibDem home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said many of the databases are 'quite simply illegal'. News Source
Sunday 22nd March 2009
The boss of Stafford Hospital, where appalling treatment may have killed hundreds of patients, sent a ‘callous and arrogant’ letter to the grieving family of one victim.
Chief executive Martin Yeates told the parents of 20-year-old John Moore-Robinson it was time to ‘move on’.
Mr Moore- Robinson died because doctors at the hospital failed to discover he had ruptured his spleen in a cycling accident.
They sent him home with painkillers – and he bled to death.
A year later, an inquest told the hospital to improve its standard of care. But it was another nine months before Mr Yeates wrote to the family.
He told them: ‘I hope that the way the matters have been resolved speedily will go some way to help and your family feel that it’s time to put the matter behind you and move on.
‘Please accept my apologies and regret for the death of your son.’
Mr Yeates is suspended on full pay – £15,000 a month – after a damning report from the Healthcare Commission found that his NHS Trust board prioritised Government targets over basic patient care.
An inquiry has been launched into his role in the scandal. Last night, Frank and Janet Robinson, both 57, branded his words ‘ despicable’ and ‘insulting’. Continued
The postmaster who banned customers who can't speak English from his branch today faced calls for him to be sacked from angry local Muslims.
Sri Lankan-born Deva Kumarasiri introduced the ban this week because he believes all immigrants in Britain should learn the language and take pride in the new homeland. Mr Kumarasiri, who runs Sneinton Boulevard Post Office in inner-city Nottingham, moved here 18 years ago and says everyone should embrace British culture.
But the chairman of the local Mosque confirmed that a petition was circulating among Muslim residents calling for Mr Kumarasiri to go. Aurangzeb Kahn said: 'There has been concern that people can be denied Post Office services because they can't speak English.
Kahn confirmed that local Muslims have started a petition calling for Mr Kumarasiri's dismissal but stressed the move had no connection with his Mosque, He added that the Mosque wanted to investigate the issue moire fully before making any further comment. Continued
See Also: Foreign ban postmaster leaves job
Fury erupted last night after exiled preacher of hate Omar Bakri Mohammed was allowed to address a public meeting and warn of fresh terror attacks on Britain.
The fundamentalist cleric came out of hiding to issue a chilling warning that Britain should prepare for a September 11-style atrocity.
Speaking from his bolthole in Lebanon, Bakri, who was kicked out of Britain four years ago, gave his support to fanatics who abused brave British soldiers in a vile attack during their homecoming parade in Luton last week.
Addressing a meeting held at an east London hotel by telephone, he said British troops had declared war on Islam and must suffer the consequences – along with innocent civilians. “You want to declare war against us, we will declare Islam against you,” he said. “It is time for you to wake up before it is too late.
“If you put pressure on Muslims and push them underground, people will come and rise and retaliate against you.
“The 7/7 bombers were just ordinary Muslims in the community. It shows how your evil policies have pushed them. Enough is enough.”
Despite the highly incendiary nature of the remarks, Scotland Yard last night refused to take any action against the organisers of the meeting.
A spokesman said: “A formal complaint will have to be made before an investigation could be considered.”
Conservative MP Patrick Mercer, the chairman of the Commons counter terrorism sub committee, said it was time the Government acted to stop such activities taking place.
“Surely those who accept and broadcast these telephone calls are guilty of the crime of incitement. The Government must stop soft- pedalling with this and stamp the laws of the country on them.
“It is also worth noting that if you tried to get away with this sort of thing in Northern Ireland you would not be able to because the Parades Commission would stop it under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.”
Former Conservative Home Secretary Ann Widdecombe said: “These people should be prosecuted for incitement. It is quite disgraceful. If I was to hold a meeting like this and make these kinds of comments about members of the Muslim community I would be prosecuted.
“The Government has failed to acts on these matters
for a very long time and I am afraid
that the law has now become quite toothless.”
During yesterday’s meeting Bakri attacked British soldiers, saying: “Those who return as a ‘hero’ are killers and murderers in the eyes of Muslims around the world.
“Soldiers are flying all the way to Afghanistan to commit atrocities and killing and murders, regardless if they are men, women or children.
“Whenever you try to speak about it you are told to shut up and go back to your own country.
“The moment you start arresting us because we are Muslim you are digging a hole and it is going to be a big hole. Be careful, you are attacking our brothers and sisters.”
Bakri’s rant was broadcast on loudspeakers to ringleaders of the shameful protest at the welcome home march in Luton for the 2nd Battalion Royal Anglian Regiment.
The extremists, including Bakri’s right-hand man Anjem Choudary, who wants Britain to be governed by Sharia law, urged Muslims to continue to insult British soldiers and attack “evil” democracy – no matter what the consequences.
At the meeting, Bakri spurred on Ishtiaq Alamgir, who spearheaded the hate-filled demonstration, to compare British soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan with the terrorists who carried out the 7/7 and 9/11 atrocities.
Alamgir, 29, said: “People say the soldiers were just doing their job, but the same could be said of the 7/7 attacks because they were following the orders of Sheikh Osama Bin Laden. We will continue regardless of how many people get upset or offended. The truth must prevail.
“We must keep calling for the truth until it is established or we are killed. If we do not have the right channels to express the anger, we are going to face a situation where Muslims take action like 7/7 or 9/11.”
Defending the protest, jobless Alamgir, who claims £220 a fortnight in benefits from the country he despises, said: “We came to honour the 600,000 who have died in Iraq, and those who have been suffering because of the actions of the British soldiers. Those British soldiers have blood on their hands.”
Philip Davies, Conservative MP for Shipley, last night accused the authorities of “pussyfooting around”. And Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said: “This kind of thing is simply unacceptable.” News Source
More than 1600 police officers with criminal convictions are allowed to continue working in the police force!
Standards in the police force have fallen to such a low that more than 1600 police officers with criminal convictions for gun crimes, benefit fraud and violent attacks are being allowed to stay in the force!
And many of the crimes took place while the officers were on duty, supposedly protecting the public! The Association of Chief Police Officers confirmed that officers convicted of serious crimes while serving could remain in their post.
Unlike members of the public who break the law, they are protected by Government rules called Police and Misconduct Regulations which set down a range of alternatives to dismissal such as a reprimand, fine or reduction in rank.
The revelations came to light after MP Chris Huhne was approached by a woman sacked from her job as a civilian worker at Hampshire Police after being cautioned for a minor crime.
Mr Huhne said: "It is deeply unfair that police staff are being fired for minor offences, while police officers convicted of more serious offences are allowed to keep their jobs.
A police spokesman said: 'Hampshire Constabulary adheres to national standards for the discipline procedures for both police staff and police officers. The Home Office sets procedures to be followed for officers with criminal convictions. Police criminals
However the uselessness of these "procedures" can be demonstrated by the increasing numbers of police officers being found guilty of more and more serious offences who are still not sacked or who are re-instated on appeal.
Like Detective Sergeant Darren Case and Detective Constable Adam Suett, sacked for gross negligence in the murder of Peter Woodhams, but after they appealed a senior Metropolitan Assistant Commissioner ruled the punishments were "too severe" and the officers were reinstated!
And the fact that Peter Woodhams was dead because of their gross negligence was a minor matter of no concern at all to a police force becoming increasingly criminalised every day!
And in the case of Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent person gunned down by "accident", Cressida Dick even got a promotion but all the family got was an apology - and a corpse! News Source
Meanwhile
A serving police officer named in a leaked list of British National Party (BNP) members has been sacked.
Pc Steve Bettley, of Merseyside Police, was included in the list of the far right party's entire membership register which was leaked on an internet blog.
The officer, who was briefly the driver for chief constable Bernard Hogan Howe, has been suspended from duty since the list became public last November.
A Merseyside Police spokeswoman said: "A Merseyside Police misconduct panel has dismissed Constable Steve Bettley after concluding he had knowingly been a member of the British National Party from March 2007 and up to March 2008."
The spokeswoman added: "In determining their findings, the panel confirmed there was no evidence that Pc Bettley had ever displayed any racist views or discriminatory behaviour in the workplace.
"The panel determined that Pc Bettley's membership of the BNP is a clear breach of lawful orders and police regulations as the party's views are incompatible with the duties and values of the Police Service."
A ban on serving police officers joining the BNP was introduced by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) in 2004.
Merseyside Police Federation, which represented Pc Bettley at the misconduct hearings, said he accepted his name was on the BNP list but he denied being a member of the party.
He said he was enrolled in the party by a family member without his knowledge and he planned to appeal against the dismissal.
A spokesman for Merseyside Police Federation said: "We are disappointed with the finding and sanction of the misconduct panel and do not believe that there is any evidence presented to the panel which would indicate that he was knowingly a member of the BNP." News Source
Lets take a closer look at this:
Police officers can not join the BNP a party that wants to cut down Immigration and opt out of the corrupt EU. But.. In sensitive areas..
Home Office staff are free to be members of the Islamic extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, it was revealed yesterday. Those working in the department responsible for immigration and homeland security do not even have to declare membership of the fanatical organisation, the Government admitted. Continued
Up to eight police officers and civilian staff are suspected of links to extremist groups including Al Qaeda. Some are even believed to have attended terror training camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan. Their names feature on a secret list of alleged radicals said to be working in the Metropolitan and other forces.
A Home Office official exposed as a leading member of an Islamic extremist group will keep his £40,000 job In the wake of the July 7 bombings.
The vile Muslim extremists behind the sick protests against Our Boys at a homecoming parade want Lord Mandelson stoned to death — for being GAY.
Hate preacher Anjem Choudary yesterday set out how he would deal with the Business Secretary if Britain was ruled under Sharia law.
At a bizarre press conference he called in London, he said Lord Mandelson would be RE-EDUCATED about the “evils” of homosexuality.
But the minister would be EXECUTED if he confessed to a male liaison. It can happen. But if you go on to fulfil your desire, there is a punishment to follow.
"Some people are attracted to donkeys but that does not mean it is right.”
Placards
The lawyer’s group, Ahlus Sunnah wal Jamaah, was behind sick protests at the homecoming parade of British heroes in Luton last week.
The fundamentalist sect, which aims to turn Britain into a Sharia state, held placards calling troops “murderers”.
But he clammed up when quizzed about the £277 a week he and his wife receive in jobless and housing benefits.
Banned hate preacher Omar Bakri, 50, joined the conference by speakerphone, burbling from his bolthole in the Lebanon about Muslim arrests and warning Britain should “be careful”.
LONE grandad Mike Crowther, 66, staged a protest in Luton yesterday denouncing the extremists. News Source
An ex-convent girl, married to a teacher, this respectable career woman joined her secret lover - a retired Army officer - in a brutal sex ring abusing young children. Here, we reveal the making of two middle-class monsters ...
School governor and former Army major Archibald Wood was looking forward to another day as a "pillar of the community" when the police knocked on his door at 7am on Friday, November 3, 2006.
Still wearing his blue towelling dressing gown and with his wife Abina anxiously hovering in the background, the retired 59-year-old looked strangely unsurprised to see officers on the doorstep of his splendid, double-fronted cottage in the pretty Devon town of Tavistock.
Perhaps he already knew why they were there, especially when they said wanted to talk to him about "Jack" - the name he used in the paedophile chatroom he liked to frequent, when he wasn't busy at school governor meetings or with his voluntary work.
In June 2005, this same "Jack" travelled 170 miles from Devon to a house in Fleet, Hampshire, with a female accomplice called "Liz" to meet fellow chatroom paedophile Steven Horton and a 12-year-old girl and 13-year-old boy Horton was offering on the internetfor sexual abuse by strangers.
There, they subjected the two children to a sexual ordeal lasting several hours.
The policeman who arrested Wood at home, Acting DS Dave Shipley, says: "Wood showed no emotion, no shock, no outrage - as you might expect from an innocent man - nothing, except a certain arrogance."
"Liz", the woman who had accompanied him on their depraved mission to abuse the children, was, in fact, a close family friend of Archibald Wood.
Her real name was Monica McCanch, 55, the ex-wife of a grammar school teacher, and a former clinical trials manager for a pharmaceutical firm from Kent.
She was also, it emerges, sexually involved with Wood.
McCanch was arrested at Terminal 3 of Heathrow Airport on November 29, 2006, after voluntarily returning to Britain from Jamaica, where she had moved - after being made redundant - to pursue her dream of setting up an "eco" hotel in Montego Bay.
Last week, the sordid behaviour of this outwardly respectable pair - as well as the depraved actions of Steven Horton, was laid bare following their conviction for a string of offences.
His face masked, he lies in wait as freight lorries approach the ferry terminal at Calais.
Crawling along at 5mph, they are easy targets for the man known as the Doorman to Britain.
He dashes out of the bushes and tries to wrench open the lorries' rear doors. Usually they are locked but every now and again he gets lucky.
And when he does, a crowd of immigrants are waiting to pile into the unsuspecting truck driver's vehicle, hoping that at last they've found a way to sneak into Britain.
The Doorman was plying his trade on Thursday night, when he was seen trying at least four trucks before he found a Dutch lorry with its back door open and summoned his 'clients'.
Each one has paid around £500 for help in getting across the Channel.
After around ten illegal immigrants scrambled inside, the Doorman - wearing a grey tracksuit with red trim and a scarf to cover his face - vanished back into the bushes by the side of the road.
The 20-ton articulated lorry then trundled along what has become known to drivers as Diesel Alley towards the freight terminal with its human cargo.
An onlooker, who did not want to be named, said: 'The Doorman lies by the side of the road just waiting. As soon as a lorry slows down he's off like a shot and tries to open the back door.
'More often than not he is not successful, but sometimes he picks the right lorry and gets as many as he can inside.
'He then runs into the undergrowth by the side of the road and calls his boss to send more people to him.'
If pulled over by British immigration officers for a spot check, the driver could be handed a £2,000 fine for each migrant on board. He will then have to prove to the officials that he did not accept a bribe or act in collusion with the migrants - or face a further £10,000 fine.
But there is a good chance the lorry will not be checked, and the stowaways will get to Britain.
Trucker Mervyn Osgood said: 'They don't check every single lorry - maybe one out of three. If we're found with migrants on board we simply have to grin and bear it, take the fine and contest it later. We're the ones who are treated like criminals.'
One asylum seeker said the Doorman was his last hope. The Eritrean national, who said he had tried to get into the UK several times, said: 'He is known to fix things and he has helped many people get into Britain. He knows the lorries to try and when to try.'
Fear of the people-smuggling gangs - who are quick to use violence against any threat to their trade - means few of the migrants living around Calais will speak about them.
The Doorman is believed to be East European, possibly Albanian.
Most of the gangs operating around Calais are led by East Europeans, Afghans or Iraqis, and vicious turf wars regularly break out between them.
Only last week riot police had to break up running battles between the gangs, many of whom were wielding knives, as well as makeshift weapons such as metal poles.
There are around 2,000 refugees living rough in Calais.
The Home Office claims the number caught sneaking into Britain from Calais fell from 10,000 five years ago to 1,500 last year. News Source
With schools struggling to teach increasing numbers of foreign children, and reports suggesting the population of Britain will be 70 million by 2028, Alasdair Palmer explains why we are facing an immigration crisis
English is not the first language of more than half a million pupils in Britain's primary schools. The language spoken at home by 567,888 children aged between four and 11 could be any one of the hundreds of foreign languages now used by migrants from across the globe who have settled in this country.
No one should be surprised by the statistic, because it is a straightforward consequence of the enormous amount of migration into Britain over the past decade: the more foreigners who come here to live, the more of their children will be educated in British schools – and the more our schools will have to deal with pupils whose first language is not English or who do not speak it at all.
Nevertheless, practically everyone was surprised by the statistic, even though the Government has stated that around 190,000 migrants arrive in Britain every year and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has said that Britain's population will increase, as a result of migration, by seven million over the next 20 years. We've been told often enough that we're going through a period of immigration on a scale unprecedented in our history, but the facts do not seem to have sunk in.
Part of the explanation for that may be the extent to which Government ministers can seem determined to sow confusion about what those facts are. Last week, for instance, Phil Woolas, the Immigration Minister, insisted at a hearing of the Commons Committee on Home Affairs that the ONS predictions were wrong: the number of migrants would diminish in the near future.
It is not clear what basis he had for making that claim. He certainly did not provide any evidence for it – which may explain why there is almost no expert in the field who agrees with him. It is now more or less universally recognised that the net inflow of people to Britain (the number who arrive, minus the number who leave) every year is 190,000, and there is no reason to think that figure will diminish in the near future unless the Government takes drastic action.
It means that the population of Britain will be 70 million by 2028. Frank Field and Nicholas Soames, two MPs from the Cross-Party Group on Balanced Migration, are unequivocal about the seriousness of the situation, even if Mr Woolas is not. "We are," they say, "facing a population crisis."
WHY IS IMMIGRATION INTO BRITAIN SO HIGH?
The reason why people from developing countries want to live here is obvious: life is better here than in the impoverished countries from which they came. But that is true of all the developed economies of Europe. All are much better places in which to live than the nations of Africa, for instance, or the Indian subcontinent.
So what explains why so many immigrants target Britain, and why there are such queues at the Sangatte centre in France to get across the Channel to England?
Word has got out that Britain is more hospitable to immigrants than other European countries – which it is. The legacy of empire means we are more used to receiving them and are more willing to integrate them. One of the great virtues of the British people is their tolerance. Our society is much less closed to outsiders than most countries of continental Europe. It is easier to get a job here – less restrictive employment legislation means it is easier to fire people, so employers are more willing to hire migrants they can pay less in the first place. British employers are less suspicious of foreigners than their counterparts in countries such as Italy or France.
Add the fact that it is easier for immigrants who arrive here to claim benefits, get council housing and access health and education services for themselves and their children and it becomes clear why Britain is a target for migrants.
WHAT IS THE IMPACT OF ASYLUM?
Understandably, many migrants are desperate and will use any means they can to ensure they can settle here. From 1997 to 2002, it seemed that claiming asylum – claiming that you are a refugee fleeing persecution – was the most effective way of gaining the right to settle here. In 2002, 84,000 people claimed asylum. Add their dependents and the number was more than 100,000. The majority had their claims rejected, but very few of them were deported: most were allowed to stay, even if they were not given an officially recognised right to do so.
Since then, the Government has taken steps to tighten up the asylum system, and last year fewer than 22,000 people claimed asylum in Britain. But the proportion of asylum-seekers who are deported after their claim is rejected remains tiny, so asylum-seekers remain a significant source of migrants.
WHAT ARE THE ELECTORAL ADVANTAGES OF IMMIGRATION FOR LABOUR?
The migrants' desire to get into Britain is only half the story of why so many are here.
The other half is the explanation of why the Government decided to let so many migrants into Britain.
Thank You, Thank You and Thank You ! Confirmation of what we have been saying for years!
Immigration is Imported votes for Labour! Labour are too gutless to participate in a democratic election fairly and without fraud. Fraud because it is fraud on a massive scale.
Labour are too afraid of the democratic participation, they will import foreigners to keep them in power!
As well you know the native population has suffered dramatically through reduced resources because of Immigration or through the dreaded council tax to support the vast influx of imported potential labour voters at your expense!
Now you know why Labour create a smokescreen of lies to give the impression they are tackling Immigration where in fact they are doing the opposite.
They are purposely flooding the UK with more Immigrants to settle down until it will get to a point where foreigners outnumber native Britons in key electoral areas thus foreign votes will outnumber those of native Britons! You have been Warned! (Ed)
For the past 12 years, Labour has been convinced that allowing high levels of immigration should be a policy priority, and it has taken steps to ensure that it is relatively easy for migrants to get permanent, legally recognised residence here. Why has Labour done that?
In 1997, Tony Blair and his Cabinet had several reasons for wishing to increase the number of immigrants into Britain. One was that they perceived an electoral advantage. The outcome of elections in an increasing number of constituencies was, and is, dictated in large part by the votes from relatively recent immigrants. People who have moved here from, say, the Indian subcontinent understandably hated the rules that prevented their families joining them in Britain.
The most onerous of those rules was known as "the primary purpose rule", which was imposed by the Conservatives in 1993. It required that someone wishing to follow his or her spouse into Britain to prove that "the marriage was not entered into primarily to obtain admission to the UK". Proving a negative, as the rule obliged the candidate to do, was extremely difficult, and large numbers of spouses were refused entry into Britain as a result.
Labour abolished that rule soon after the election in 1997. The move was extremely popular in immigrant communities, because it made it far easier for families to move here. Immigration by spouses into Britain has increased by 50 per cent since the primary purpose rule was abolished. More than 40,000 people were granted citizenship here on the basis of marriage in 2008 alone.
WHAT ARE THE ECONOMIC EFFECTS OF IMMIGRATION?
Equally important – indeed, perhaps more important – in persuading Labour to adopt a much more relaxed immigration policy was the belief among many ministers and advisers that Britain's economy would flourish if only there were to be large-scale immigration here. When he was Home Secretary, David Blunkett said there was "no natural limit" to the number of migrants that Britain could absorb. And his successor, Charles Clarke, was also frank about his desire for "more immigrants".
Government reports and press releases trumpeted the miraculous economic benefits of immigration: high levels of immigration would boost prosperity very significantly by increasing Britain's gross domestic product (the measure of how much the country produces every year); it would ensure an end to labour and skills shortages; it would enable the NHS and other public services to grow at a faster rate by using cheaper immigrant labour; and it would help Britain to avoid the "pensions time-bomb" created by an ageing population by adding a whole new tier of youthful and energetic workers.
That is why Labour drastically increased the number of work permits it issued to migrants wishing to come to Britain. In 1997, 40,000 work permits were issued. More than 130,000, or over three times as many, were issued in 2008.
The consensus that migration offers large economic benefits to Britain has proved to be wrong on every point.
A committee of the House of Lords, made up of economists and ex-finance ministers, published a definitive investigation into the issue almost exactly one year ago, on April 1 2008. The report, The Economic Impact of Migration, stated bluntly that "overall GDP, which the Government has persistently emphasised, is an irrelevant and misleading criterion for assessing the economic impacts of immigration on the UK. The total size of an economy is not an index of prosperity. The focus of analysis should be on the effects of immigration on income per head of the resident population. Both theory and the available empirical evidence indicate that these are small."
The additional income generated by immigrants is not much bigger – and may in fact be smaller – than the number of people they have added to the UK's population, so they do not increase prosperity to any significant degree.
The Lords' report went through the other claims made for the economic benefits for immigration and dismantled them one by one. "Immigration is unlikely to be an effective tool for reducing labour and skill shortages," the report stated, providing copious evidence for its claim. It stressed that immigrants, although they performed an important role within public services such as the NHS, were not in fact necessary to the functioning of those services: native British labour could have, and still could, perform the same role.
The report pointed out that immigration cannot defuse "the pensions time-bomb", since immigrants themselves grow old and need pensions.
And it concluded that there was "no evidence for the argument made by the Government that immigration generates significant economic benefits for the existing UK population".
In fact, there is some evidence that immigration means that the least-educated portion of the workforce is less well-off, since immigration provides a competing supply of labour prepared to do the least pleasant and worst-paid jobs for even less money.
WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER EFFECTS OF IMMIGRATION?
Labour ministers seem to have given very little thought to other, non-economic consequences of large-scale immigration: the pressure on schools, the NHS and other public services.
The increased pressure on housing, particularly council housing, has been an enormous source of resentment for native-born Britons who thought they were in line for a council house, only to be bypassed in favour of recent immigrants, because the officials allocating council houses decided that those immigrants had greater needs: they had more children.
There hasn't been an in-depth study of the effect of immigration on council housing, but the effect on the availability of council houses to native, working-class Britons has certainly been perceived by that group to be dire.
WHAT ARE THE SOCIAL EFFECTS OF IMMIGRATION?
These are very hard to assess because they are hard to measure. But one result familiar from research into communities in the US that have experienced a sudden influx of large numbers of immigrants has been a diminution of trust. Immigrant communities tend not to mix, either with other immigrants or with residents of the host country. The result is a mosaic of tightly knit groups that do not integrate with each other and do not trust each other. The idea that the nation is a community based on reciprocal obligation suffers.
The texture of communities changes. Some people like those changes. Others do not. The changes are not confined to the appearance of ethnic restaurants or men and women who wear different clothes. An influx of people who are fundamentalist about their religion, for example, can mean that some of them do not accept ideas that mainstream Britain takes for granted: the primacy of secular over divine law; the equality of women with men; and the importance of the freedom to change your religion without persecution. How to ensure that immigrants adopt "British values" is a problem the Government has thought long and hard about – but has not solved.
WHAT SHOULD BE DONE NEXT?
The Government appears to be in the process of recognising that a continued influx of migrants at the rate of 190,000 every year for the indefinite future is not going to be beneficial to Britain. Ministers have introduced a points system for the granting of work permits.
The trouble with that system is that it will only reduce the number of migrants by 5 per cent a year – and if the Government wants to stop Britain's population from reaching 70 million in the next 20 years, it will have to reduce the number of migrants by 75 per cent.
What could be done? Parliament's Cross-Party Group on Balanced Migration suggests that economic migration should be clearly separated from settlement. At the moment, after five years of working in Britain, you have the right to settle here permanently. The Cross-Party Group recommends abolishing that right, which would have a significant impact on numbers.
Three other policies that would have an effect would be: re-introducing some version of the primary purpose rule to diminish the number of spouses coming to Britain; increasing the number of failed asylum-seekers that are deported; and increasing the checks and controls on our borders.
None of these policies will be easy to implement, and all of them will have some very harsh consequences for would-be migrants to Britain, their spouses and their children. But the party that adopts them will gain electoral support: the evidence is that the British people are extremely concerned about the present levels of immigration and want to see them drastically reduced. News Source
Disclaimer: This article has been duplicated in its entirety to serve as public information (Ed)
Do Remember! Whatever Labour and the Tories promise you or appear to be doing would be short lived as it's all about elections and once in power things would revert back to how they were!
Don't be fooled yet again!
Only a Nationalist Government has the Solutions!
Another Labour Minister has been caught out in an expenses scandal after effectively admitting he had been wrong to claim £60,000 of taxpayers’ money for a property which is his parents’ main home – not his.
Employment Minister Tony McNulty performed a dramatic U-turn and announced he had stopped claiming the controversial MPs’ second-home allowance after being challenged by The Mail on Sunday.
Even more astonishingly, he said that 132 MPs who, like him, live within 60 miles of Westminster should be banned from getting the £24,000-a-year handout.
Mr McNulty and his wife, chief schools inspector Christine Gilbert, have a combined annual income of a third of a million pounds and between them own two London homes worth £1.2million.
They live together in a house she owns just three miles from Westminster. Yet he has been claiming up to £14,000 a year in parliamentary expenses to help pay for the second house in Harrow where his parents live, 11 miles from the Commons.
The MP has been able to obtain the money because the house he owns is in his Harrow constituency and so qualifies him for the second-home allowance. Initially, when Mr McNulty was approached by this newspaper on Friday he pointed out: ‘It is all within the rules.’
But later, he changed his tune. When it was put to him, ‘Do you accept it all looks very odd?’, he replied: ‘I do.’
He then compared his own unconvincing defence with that made by Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials, who said they were ‘only obeying orders’.
‘It’s not against the rules – though I suppose you might say that is the Nuremberg defence,’ he observed.
He then suddenly announced that he had decided to stop claiming the allowance, which he has benefited from ever since becoming an MP in 1997.
He said he had ‘reflected’ on the issue and stopped claiming the grant, officially called the Additional Costs Allowance (ACA), in January.
Asked if he had informed anyone in authority of his decision, either at the Commons or in the Labour Party, he replied: ‘No, no one.’
The only person he had told was his wife, he said. He was adamant that it was not a spur-of-the-moment decision forced on him by this newspaper’s investigation.
As if to emphasise how much he regretted his actions, Mr McNulty, who is also Minister for London and tipped to run against Boris Johnson for London Mayor in 2012, made an impromptu call for a major purge of MPs’ expenses.
He said those who live within 60 miles of the capital should be forced to commute every day like any other worker, and lose their second-home allowance. Currently 157 MPs live within that radius. Twenty-six Inner London MPs already cannot claim the ACA – worth up to £24,000 a year – and of the remaining 132, 105 do claim.
McNulty’s proposal could save taxpayers about £2million a year.
Mr McNulty said: ‘There are senior Shadow frontbench figures who live five miles further away from Westminster than me who claim the lot . . .’ before quickly adding: ‘. . . and that is entirely appropriate.’
His plan received a mixed response from Labour MPs who would be affected. Crawley MP Laura Moffatt said: ‘It doesn’t affect me because I don’t have a second home.’ Asked how she squared that with her claim of £61,457 between 2002?03 and 2006/07, she hung up.
Dagenham Labour MP Jon Cruddas was more positive. ‘This idea should be kicked around, it’s a discussion which should be had.’
Asked if he would be happy to sacrifice the £103,117 he claimed between 2002 and 2007, he said: ‘If that is the agreed view of Parliament.’
But one MP who asked not to be named, said: ‘Just because Tony McNulty has been rumbled does not give him the right to lecture those of us who need the money.’
It is the latest in a series of rows over MPs’ expenses. Earlier this year, The Mail on Sunday revealed how Home Secretary Jacqui Smith claims £20,000-a-year expenses by arguing her London ‘digs’ at a house owned by her sister is her main home, not the substantial house in her Midlands constituency where she lives with her husband and young children.
Until October, Mr McNulty was Ms Smith’s deputy at the Home Office. He denied his change of heart had anything to do with widespread condemnation of her conduct.
This is how Mr McNulty has cashed in on the ACA. Shortly after becoming Harrow East MP in 1997, he bought a house in Harrow, which is now worth an estimated £300,000.
He divorced his first wife, fellow Labour activist Gillian Travers and moved into the house with his parents, James and Eileen. By 2001, he had moved to Hammersmith to live with former headteacher Christine Gilbert.
Ms Gilbert, also a divorcee, had bought the house – now worth about £900,000 – in 1994.
The couple married in September 2002. On their wedding certificate, both gave their address as the Hammersmith house, although in a Commons debate on data protection in 2005, Mr McNulty appeared to suggest his main home was in Harrow.
‘I have no copyright on “Tony McNulty”.’ he said. ‘I have no copyright on November 3, 1958 [his birthday]. I have no copyright on . . . [he then gave the Harrow address].’
In addition, he is on the electoral register in Harrow, not Hammersmith, where his wife is registered.
MPs can claim ACA on the mortgage interest payments on a second home – which means those members who have paid off their mortgage can receive nothing.
According to Land Registry documents, Ms Gilbert did not have a mortgage on the property when they moved in together, but Mr McNulty disputed this and insisted Ms Gilbert did have a mortgage at the time.
However, after they set up home together, both took out mortgages on their respective homes. Land Registry records show Ms Gilbert took out a loan on the Hammersmith property with the Bank of Scotland later in 2001, while Mr McNulty took out a fresh loan on his Harrow house with the same bank in 2003.
Mr McNulty said he used the loan to ‘pay off some debts’. His wife had used hers to buy a maisonette beneath the Hammersmith home to make it bigger. Around the same time, Mr McNulty’s second-home expenses nearly doubled – from £7,400 in 2001 to £14,000 in 2002.
Mr McNulty confirmed his wife is still the sole owner of the home, but he pays half the cost of her mortgage.
The weakness of Mr McNulty’s second-home allowance is laid bare by a ‘golden triangle of expenses’ map which shows how close they are to each other – nine miles – and to the Commons. The Hammersmith home is nine London Underground stops from Westminster, the Harrow house just eight stops from the Commons.
Since 2001/02, the first year for which figures are available, Mr McNulty has claimed a total of £59,998 in second-home allowances. In the past five years he has claimed £52,598.
Assuming he claimed a similar amount from 1997 to 2001 and in the current financial year, he is likely to have claimed up to £100,000 in second-home allowances in total.
Asked if he had told the Commons Fees Office, which pays MPs’ expenses, of his decision to stop claiming the ACA, Mr McNulty said: ‘I haven’t . . . I have been too busy. I was planning to do so at the end of the financial year.’ Had he told Labour Whips or Party officials? ‘I’m not sure it’s a matter for party officials.’
Asked what had brought about his change of heart, he said: ‘I have always felt some discomfort in claiming the money, to be frank. I decided that it’s simply time that I stopped – partly because mortgage interest rates have gone down and partly because I can do without it.’
Asked if he planned to pay back the money, he indicated he would not. ‘It’s not that I shouldn’t be claiming. I just feel a lot happier in myself in trying to make sure that I am as sensible as I can be with taxpayers’ money, and that is what I have done.’
He pointed out he had never claimed the maximum £24,000 a year ACA. When he became a Minister and acquired the use of a chauffeur-driven limousine, he stopped claiming for travel to and from his constituency.
Nor did he claim goods for his Harrow home using the notorious ‘John Lewis list’, nor for the council tax there.
Mr McNulty said the Commons should consider following the lead set by Members of the Scottish Parliament.
Those who live within 90 minutes of the Edinburgh Parliament, roughly 60 miles, cannot claim for a second home. But MPs have been resistant to such reforms.
Last July, they threw out an independent review body’s proposal to cut £10,000 from the second-home allowance for Outer London MPs such as Mr McNulty.
The Commons ‘Green Book’ which sets out the rules on expenses makes it clear that ACA claims must be ‘above reproach’ and that MPs ‘must avoid any arrangement which may give rise to an accusation that you are, or someone close to you’ is benefitting from public funds.
MPs are also ‘strongly advised’ to avoid subletting or renting out any property on which they claim ACA.
Mr McNulty and Ms Gilbert met when he was a college lecturer and Harrow councillor and she was the council’s director of education.
She became chief executive of Tower Hamlets council and was Ofsted’s chief inspector three years ago, for which she earns £225,000 a year. Mr McNulty earns £104,050, and both have gold-plated pensions.
Since being elected MP for Harrow East in 1997, Mr McNulty has earned a reputation as an outspoken and popular MP.
His robust defence of Labour’s record has led to him being used increasingly as a Government spokesman – and yesterday on BBC Radio 4, Jonathan Dimbleby dubbed him ‘the Government’s flak jacket’.
Last month he admitted he could not survive on the £60.50-a-week Jobseeker’s Allowance. The McNulty-Gilberts earn that much in an hour and a half. News Source
Disclaimer: This article has been duplicated in its entirety to serve as public information (Ed)
Labour's flagship academies scheme is in disarray after a leading backer was forced to resign over the misuse of taxpayers' money.
Bhatia has quit the City Academies programme after Government investigators found that £60,000 of public money ended up in the coffers of one of his charities and a further £10,000 was blown on a trip to Dubai.
Last night, the peer, a Labour donor appointed to the Lords by Tony Blair, denied the money had been misspent.
Lord Bhatia, 77, was chairman of the Edutrust Academies Charitable Trust (EACT), which has opened one academy in Lincolnshire and has applied to open a further seven across England in September with the help of £500,000 of public money per school.
Last year, after receiving a tip-off from a whistleblower, the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) began investigating EACT's finances.
They found that £70,000 had been misspent, including £10,000 on a 'research trip' to Dubai and £60,000 in 'excess rent' to the Ethnic Minority Foundation, a charity chaired by Lord Bhatia.
The charity, which campaigns on behalf of minority communities, rents out office space to the EACT at its headquarters in London.
The findings led David Bell, Permanent Secretary at the Education Department, to summon Lord Bhatia to a meeting earlier this month.
Later, Mr Bell wrote to Education Secretary Ed Balls to tell him that as part of reforms to ensure that 'similar concerns could not occur again', Lord Bhatia had agreed to resign as chairman and member of EACT.
'I believe that we have safeguards in place to ensure the proper use of public funds by academies,' wrote Mr Bell. He added that the £70,000 had been repaid by EACT.
Married with three children, Amirali Bhatia was born in Tanzania and in 1972 moved to the UK, where he became chairman of Forbes Campbell, a merchant bank.
In 2001 he was appointed a 'people's peer', and later donated £3,600 to the Labour Party.
Last night, Lord Bhatia insisted that the EACT had not misspent the money.
'They were legitimate expenses and I am confident that over the next couple of weeks we will be able to prove this to the DCSF,' he told The Mail on Sunday.
'The trip to Dubai was to talk to potential partners in the academies programme and the rent charged to the EACT is a fair market rent.'
Asked why he had resigned, he said: 'It was always my intention to step down from the trust before long.'
The allegations are the latest blow to the academies programme - Mr Blair's 'big idea' to revitalise underperforming state schools by making them independent of local authorities with the help of money from private sponsors.
Earlier this year the heads of more than 70 academies warned in a letter to Schools Minister Jim Knight that the erosion of their independence under Mr Brown, who has always been sceptical about the scheme, was making it difficult to raise standards.
The letter, signed by Mike Butler, chairman of the Independent Academies Association, concluded that sponsors, chairmen and principals 'are seriously questioning the long-term sustainability of the programme'. News Source
Sunday Roundup of the News this week
Don't want hear? Don't want to see? Don't want to speak out?
It's time time you did and loudly at the polling booth!
Ed Balls is seeking extraordinary new powers to dictate the contents of every GCSE and A-level exam in England, it has emerged. The controversial move could mean the Schools Secretary deciding which history books or works of literature should be read in every classroom. Critics last night branded the authoritarian step “frightening” and said it could lead to ministers meddling directly with what children read.
Gordon Brown Has Excelled Himself. It is difficult to think how the Prime Minister could have betrayed his promise to provide "British jobs for British workers" any more comprehensively than he has already done. But revelations that the Government is now using taxpayers' money to subsidise seminars that instruct employers how to go about recruiting foreign workers from outside the European Union amount to a gratuitous insult to every British citizen thrown out of work in this recession. This time Mr Brown does not even have the excuse that EU rules are thwarting his true political preference.
First, people must be made aware that the organisation known as Hope Not Hate is nothing more than a front for the marxist and state funded Searchlight whose job it is coordinate the attacks on the British National Party. Searchlight are paid agents of the state and are currently under investigation by the Metropolitan Police involving the charity The Phillip Green Memorial Trust and they know that they, along with their political pay masters will be brought to justice once there is a BNP government.
A massive fight broke out in Tooting Broadway last night between two rival gangs of armed yobs. Shoppers ran for their lives as 30 youths aged 14-20 attacked each other with wood, iron bars and bottles in Sainsbury’s car park at around 6pm. It began in Mitcham Road outside McDonald’s, where a group of what are believed to be Somali youths began taunting some Asians, according to one witness."It was like a war zone. We were absolutely terrified.
Truck drivers say they are being regularly attacked by migrants who are trying desperately to get into Britain from France. Dozens of hauliers claim they have been assaulted by the migrants – many armed with knives and batons – who react violently when they are discovered hiding in trucks bound for the UK.
The cost to the taxpayer of unaccountable state-run quangos shot up by four times the rate of inflation last year, it was revealed today. Whitehall-funded organisations set up by ministers cost the public £34.5 billion, a rise of £3.7 billion in the annual quango bill in just 12 months. The 12 per cent increase in the cost of running the quangos compares to the latest level of three per cent of the Government's favoured measure of inflation, the Consumer Prices Index. It is 120 times higher than the 0.1 per cent inflation rate currently registered by the Retail Prices Index, the measure usually considered most reliable.
More than 3,000 extra police officers will flood London during the G20 summit next month in a £10million operation to counter the threat of violent protests. Senior officers fear thousands of anti-globalisation demonstrators will attempt to bring the capital to a standstill.
Millions of pounds believed to be part of the fraud operated by US financier Bernard Madoff have been identified in Britain, the Observer has learned. The Serious Fraud Office is in the process of freezing deposits that it believes were part of the biggest fraud ever perpetrated, a senior source has confirmed. The disclosure comes just days after 70-year-old Madoff was jailed for cheating thousands of investors out of £50bn. It could clear the way for victims to make claims in Britain against assets held by the authorities.
It has often been claimed that the project of "ever-closer union" within the EU is over, killed when the Lisbon Treaty was rejected by the Irish, the only people who had the chance to vote on it. That's a big mistake. The Eurocrats think integration is inevitable and essential – and they are certainly not going to let it be derailed by anything as vulgar as the fact that most of the EU's citizens do not want it.
A Polish delicatessen is refusing to serve English customers, it was claimed yesterday. The store is said to have turned away a college student and a reporter sent to investigate the story. Police and council officials have launched an investigation into the alleged racism.
George Galloway is to be banned from Canada. Border security chiefs have declared the Respect MP “inadmissable” because of his views on Afghanistan and the presence of Canadian troops there. Mr Galloway is due to make a speech in Toronto on March 30, following a US lecture tour, but will be turned away if he tries to enter Canada.
Australia's most controversial sheik, Taj Din al-Hilali, has been caught on videotape kicking in a door at his own mosque before calling police to report an act of vandalism. The head imam at the Lakemba mosque, who caused outrage in 2006 by comparing scantily clad women to uncovered meat, was shown on a CCTV security tape (Can be seen left video panel 3rd down (Ed) kicking open the door just minutes before reporting the incident.
This disturbing video came from a French supermarket. A group of 'youth' (Arab/Muslim) invades a French supermarket on a Saturday afternoon and removes all of the Israeli products from the shelves. If anyone speaks French and wants to tell us what they are saying (other than 'product of Israel'), please do so in the comments. Let's go to the video
A Councillor arrested in a money-laundering inquiry has been dropped by Calderdale Council's Labour group. Zafar Iqbal-Din, pictured, of Park ward, was quizzed by police earlier this month and bailed until May. Labour leader Tim Swift said: "I have informed the council's chief executive Coun Din is no longer a member of the Labour group." He remains a councillor but is no longer a member of the Labour Party.
Stewards confiscated football fans’ 10ft flag of St. George, claiming it could be viewed as a ‘racist symbol’. The group of Blackburn Rovers supporters said they were left stunned by the actions of the officials at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium. A Blackburn councillor, who is deputy chairman of national patriotic group the Royal Society of St George, said the ‘ridiculous move’ had prevented the fans ‘showing pride in their country’.
A second barge to house overseas workers employed at Lindsey Oil Refinery has docked in Grimsby – as it was revealed that policing the strikes earlier this year cost almost £200,000. Hundreds of police officers were taken off the streets of Humberside as they were drafted in to control the protests at the North Killingholme site in January.
The suspended boss of Stafford Hospital, where hundreds died on casualty wards, will receive £15,000 a month while an inquiry investigates his conduct. Experts say Martin Yeates, chief executive of Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust, will also benefit from a gold-plated £2million pension pot worth around £70,000 a year, and a tax-free lump sum of £200,000.
The issue about Witchdoctor is this. Witchdoctor is bright, Witchdoctor is analytical. Both Jobbing Doctor and I are led by the intelligence supplied by Witchdoctor. Witchdoctor likes to analyse connections. She recently undertook a investigation into the dubious organisation known as Common Purpose. The theory is that Common Purpose destroys law and order in society.
On 18th march 2009: Shahid Malik talked about the number of Moslems in the house of commons. (See top left video or here on youtube) Now you are going to have be a very thick brick that is even thicker than a UAF supporter to not see the future of Our Country in this short video should the British National Party not prevail. [...]
In an act of political interference which is becoming a commonplace pattern whenever the Labour vote seems in danger of collapsing, clergy from Christian churches, Jewish rabbis and Muslim faith leaders have piled in to support Labour’s faltering campaign against the British National Party. Churchmen from the city proudly stood shoulder-to-shoulder at Manchester Cathedral with the Labour leader of Manchester City Council, Sir Richard Leese, who once called BNP supporters “scum” in a local newspaper, and Labour Councillor Afzal Khan, a leading supporter of the “UAF” organisation.
Police investigating allegations of corruption at Stoke-on-Trent City Council have questioned several councillors. Up to four members of the council's 16-strong Labour group are believed to have been interviewed by detectives in the last 24 hours. None of the councillors was arrested, and all of them agreed to be questioned.
A head teacher today won more than £400,000 damages for being forced out of her school after being branded a racist. Erica Connor, 57, who was head of New Monument School, Woking, where 80 per cent of pupils are Muslim, claimed she had been the victim of a campaign of harassment by some of the school governors who accused her of Islamophobia.
Brown has blocked General Sir Richard Dannatt, the head of the army, from being promoted to lead the armed forces because of his repeated calls for better pay and conditions for servicemen, senior Whitehall sources have disclosed. Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, the current chief of the defence staff, will now have his tenure extended for a year, ensuring there is no vacancy for Dannatt before his retirement.
Britain's budget deficit was heading for a record £200billion, experts warned tonight, after the Government suffered a sharp deterioration of the public finances. Fresh evidence of the heavy toll the deepening recession is taking on the Treasury left Alistair Darling on the defensive.
The cost to the taxpayer of unaccountable state-run quangos shot up by four times the rate of inflation last year, it was revealed today. Whitehall-funded organisations set up by ministers cost the public £34.5 billion, a rise of £3.7 billion in the annual quango bill in just 12 months. The 12 per cent increase in the cost of running the quangos compares to the latest level of three per cent of the Government's favoured measure of inflation, the Consumer Prices Index.
Anjem Choudary could face a police inquiry over calls to his followers to hide evidence from investigators. Scotland Yard is examining a video of a 90-minute speech by Choudary on an extremist website. On the tape he apparently says: 'Your house should be clean. There should be nothing at all there which they can come along and then can form some sort of intention.'
Shortages of food, water and energy will come together in a 'perfect storm' by 2030, the Government's chief scientist is set to warn. Global demand for energy and food will rocket by 50 per cent, while demand for water will soar by 30 per cent, Professor John Beddington will tell a conference in London today. Exacerbated by climate change, the crisis in two decades' time will spark mass migration and violence, he predicts.
World faces 'perfect storm (Guardian)' of problems by 2030, chief scientist to warns. Food, water and energy shortages will unleash public unrest and international conflict, Professor John Beddington will tell a conference today. A "perfect storm" of food shortages, scarce water and insufficient energy resources threaten to unleash public unrest, cross-border conflicts and mass migration as people flee from the worst-affected regions, the UK government's chief scientist will warn tomorrow.
Credit and debit card fraud increased by 14 per cent during 2008 as criminals found ways of bypassing the chip and pin system. Losses on plastic cards totalled £609.9million during the year, up from £535.2million in 2007, according to payments group Apacs.
Skanska has become embroiled in the foreign workers row after union activists unearthed a letter from the firm encouraging trade contractors to recruit more electricians from Eastern Europe. Copies of the document were passed around at a meeting of union shop stewards in London on Monday as they plotted the next stage in their ongoing protest against the influx of overseas labour. The letter is from a senior member of Skanska's employee relations team. It was sent to subcontractors late last year and encourages firms to use a recruitment agency which specialises in eastern European workers because "there is almost certainly to be a labour shortage in 2009-2012".
UK unemployment last month jumped at the fastest pace since records began, driving the number of Britons without work to above 2 million for the first time since the Labour Government came to power in 1997. Figures from the Office for National Statistics released today show 138,400 people joined the dole last month, pushing the number of unemployed to 2.03 million.
Britain is showing signs of sliding towards a 1930s-style depression, the Bank of England says today for the first time. The country is displaying early symptoms of being trapped in a so-called “debt deflation trap” where families find themselves pushed further and further into the red every month, according to a Bank report published today. The stark warning will cause serious concerns, since it was this combination of falling prices and soaring debt burdens that plagued the US in the 1930s.
When the media keep repeating that someone is beyond the pale, some people are bound to believe them. Recent events show that radicals will even try to kill people who have been demonized in this manner. Perhaps that is the goal behind the policy of demonization: to neutralize and remove the people’s democratically elected representatives. Recently, we are being confronted with the bizarre phenomenon of defenders of Western freedoms, including Jews, being demonized as “Nazis,” while subsequently Nazi methods are used to eliminate them.
An islamic religion teacher disputed the testimony of a Nazi camp survivor who recounted his story to students in a Brussels secondary school, Le Soir daily newspaper reported Tuesday. Henri Kichka, 83, from the Union of Jewish deportees in Belgium, had been invited last Friday by the school in Laeken, a Brussels commune, to describe how he survived Buchenwald and his family members were killed in the death camps.
At Hudson New York, Thomas Landen makes a striking point about the way in which the prevailing totalitarian liberal consensus in the west is demonising Jews or anti-Islamofascists as ‘Nazis,’ ‘racists’ or ‘far-right extremists’ who are ‘beyond the pale.’ Pondering examples as various as the demonisation of the murdered Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, German activists opposing the construction of a giant mosque in Cologne and the British Anglican Islam expert Patrick Sookhdeo, Landen observes: People are demonized as Nazis, and subsequently Nazi methods are used to eliminate them. The authorities, meanwhile, do not come to the aid of the victims since the latter are ‘Nazis.’ On the contrary, sometimes the authorities even praise the aggressors for their vigilance and their ‘intolerance’ in the fight against ‘Nazism.’
I have rung the NHS, department of Health, the BMA and the health regulation body - none of them know if the contaminated vaccine has been sent to the UK or whether it has been given to patients. This is scandalous. I have been contacted by one of the UK vaccine licensing bodies and this particular batch of the vaccine did not come into the UK - a close one indeed.
A childminder shook a 10-month-old boy to death because he would not finish his milk, the Old Bailey heard today. Carmen Toscano Naranjo, 34, is said to have murdered little Dylan Salinas just months after she started caring for him while his mother was at work. She lost her temper with the baby because of her strict attitude to children's eating habits, the court heard. The baby's heart stopped beating at Naranjo's three-bedroom flat on April 11, 2007.
Hundreds of UK-bound immigrants rioted in Calais yesterday as tensions reached breaking point. Armed police battled gangs of knife-wielding trouble-makers after violence flared when free lunches were being handed out. The city centre riot came as UK Immigration Minister Phil Woolas said it was a good thing that so many people were massing on the French coast.
Immigration Minister Phil Woolas has been humiliated after his French counterpart flatly denied his announcement that a joint Anglo-French detention centre is to be built outside Calais to deal with thousands of migrants trying to reach Britain. In the surprise move yesterday, Mr Woolas claimed that he has held talks with his French counterparts over a secure camp. He said he was trying to persuade them that it would be the solution to dealing with would-be asylum seekers trying to get into the UK. But in an embarrassing rebuttal to Mr Woolas, French immigration minister Eric Besson insisted today there was 'no question' of a new centre being built
Faced with a worsening economy, wildcat strikes, and, more ominously, with the police fearing a “summer of rage,” a few in the Labour Party have begun to wake up. None, apparently more than Communities Secretary Hazel Blears who acknowledged a few months ago that immigration was out of control, and who recently inveighed against those that have “pandered” to ethnic minorities. Nevertheless, a startling number of British politicians seem unable to grasp the seriousness of the situation, and the damage that the political ideology of “multiculturalism” has done to the country.
The second EU job centre in Africa has been opened in the West African state of Cape Verde. The ‘job centres’ are part of an EU plan to facilitate the swamping of Europe by more than 50 million Africans by the year 2050. Despite rising unemployment in most European nations, the criminals running the EU have decided that the continent needs at least another 50 million Africans for “work.”
Labour has pressed ahead with a plan to close jobcentres across the country despite soaring levels of unemployment. The Government has shut 54 offices in the past year alone, prompting the Tories to pour scorn on ministers’ claims that they are doing everything to help victims of the recession. Figures show that the jobless total has risen by more than 100 per cent in the past year in 50 constituencies where jobcentres have been closed.
The British economy is heading for its worst year since the Great Depression, according to the latest predictions from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The fund shocked analysts during a briefing in which it was revealed that the UK will see its economy shrink by 3.8 per cent in 2009, and a further 0.2 per cent in 2010 – the only large economy predicted to still be in decline next year as well as this. Some believe that the scale of the downturn signals the UK moving from recession to depression.
On Monday 16th March 2009, The Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom published a series of leaked memos from the banking giant Barclays, together with the article: Revenue Investigates Barclays tax mole claims The next day, these documents were removed from The Guardian web archive, as a result of a court injunction obtained in the middle of the night: Barclays - Guardian Injunction Tax Barclays' lawyers, Freshfields, worked into the early hours to force the Guardian to remove the documents from the website. They argued that the documents were the property of Barclays and could only have been leaked by someone who acquired them wrongfully and in breach of confidentiality agreements.
As both the Daily Mail and the Daily Star draw attention today to the potential impact the British National Party could have in the European elections on June 4th, just in case anyone missed the Financial Times yesterday, I can proved you with an N96 generated image. Despite the Skype gremlins yesterday evening my latest piece of punditry on Play Radio is still worth listening to. Obviously I am biased, but nobody in the UK is currently providing this kind of content and consequently I have no problem at all in embedding their content: Who knows where it will all end, perhaps presenting Channel Four News if of course they are still in business in a couple of years time. Not as unlikely as it may seem as this entry in Jon Snow's blog seems to indicate a convergence of thought.
Imagine that you had fallen into a coma the night Tony Blair was elected, and now woke up during the last days of New Labour – what differences would you notice around you? The most striking would be the change in women's fashion. Back in 1997 the country was coming out of recession and the downbeat grunge look, and young ladies were starting to wear short skirts and plunging necklines. Twelve years later and you'll notice the women are dressed more conservatively - far, far more conservatively. Take a tour of any of inner London borough and see how many women are sporting hijabs, jilbabs or niqabs, loan words that have entered the English language since 1997.
A New mosque is set to transform the skyline in a corner of inner city Leeds. Planning chiefs have approved a blueprint for the new Hassan Quba Masjid in Harehills. It will replace the existing Islamic Educational Centre in Shepherds Lane, doubling the size of the prayer hall and general floorspace. It will have two 45ft - high minarets and a large traditional dome.
A man suspected wrongly of carrying out an arson attack on a mosque was beaten up by two men. Liam Cadby was punched and repeatedly kicked in the head during an unprovoked attack in Sherriff Way, Watford, on Wednesday, August 13, St Albans Crown Court heard on Monday. Mohammed Aziz, 18, of High Road, Leavesden, pleaded guilty to ABH, but denies kicking the victim. Peter Shaw prosecuting, said Aziz and another man, Zain Hussain launched the unprovoked attack near the Kingswood subway.
Non-indigenous births will soon account for more than half of all the babies born in Britain, according to shock inside statistics provided to the British National Party by a concerned senior medical practitioner in the NHS. The doctor, who cannot be named for fear of being persecuted by the government, approached the BNP with the figures which, he said: The figures are quite openly discussed in senior NHS circles but which have been forbidden for publication out of fear of a public backlash.
Dozens of teenage school children abandoned lessons and took to the streets of Halifax to 'protest' over the suspension of a maths teacher. But instead of simply voicing their support for the popular teacher, the pupils were said to have hurled stones and eggs at buses and cars, stopped traffic and frightened residents by 'acting like yobs'. One mother spoke of her terror as the demonstrators surrounded and kicked her car while her baby was inside.
A police force is making thousands of pounds by taking a share of the profits generated by callers ringing its non-emergency number. Norfolk Police has pocketed more than £7,000 in four years from residents calling to report crimes or give officers information to help solve them. At peak times the force takes 0.25pence a minute, for each call made to number. The force launched 0845 456 4567 in 2005, hoping more people would use the number instead of calling 999 for minor incidents. Calls to the service can cost up 40 pence a minute, depending on the time of day and what network the caller is using.
More than one million British workers will lose their jobs in the next two years before the end of the recession, according to a leading economic forecaster. Consultancy firm Oxford Economics believes 1.3million will have become jobless by 2010 with some regions taking a decade to recover from the slowdown. London and the south-east should return to pre-recession job levels within five years but Wales, the West Midlands and the north of England may take double that time.
Unions in Poland want to see strict quotas introduced on the numbers of foreign workers. They claim foreigners are taking jobs and working 'for peanuts'. In a mirror of Britain, trade unions are demanding 'Polish jobs for Polish workers'. Up to 1million Poles headed abroad – more than 500,000 to Britain and 200,000 to Ireland – during the boom years, with many taking jobs apparently for less than indigenous workers. Many have now headed home as the recession bites across Europe to find Chinese and Ukrainian workers doing jobs for less than they would.
The statistics watchdog backed a controversial decision to publish figures on foreign workers two weeks early despite it sparking a bitter row with Government. It came as immigration minister Phil Woolas admitted voters do not believe the Government has "got control" of immigration. Ministers were furious after the Office for National Statistics brought forward data on migrant workers last month and Whitehall sources accused the body of deliberately trying to embarrass Gordon Brown and his "British jobs for British workers'' slogan. The UK Statistics Authority yesterday concluded the ONS decision was consistent with the code of practice after it argued it was influenced by the level of public interest in the topic.
Labour’s descent into the sewer continues. Slimey MP Keith Vaz is caught using his official position to try to stop a court case against a bent lawyer who showered him with freebies. If this was you or me we would be arrested and charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice! Why is the odious “Vaseline” Vaz above the law? As a senior Labour MP, Vaz is chairman of the powerful Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, which presides over law and order issues.
The Government has failed to 'get control' of the issue of immigration, ministers admitted today. Phill Woolas, the Immigration Minister, said he was not surprised by findings of a poll which showed that nearly eight out of ten people believe all unemployed foreign migrants should be asked to leave the UK. Woolas said the the British people would never be comfortable with immigration until they believe ministers have a firm grip on the nation's borders.
The ruling establishment has been terrified out of its wits by a new poll which has found that over three quarters of the public want jobless immigrants to leave the UK - a demand which is British National Party policy. The poll, conducted by an FT/Harris survey, showed that just over fifty percent of adults “strongly” support the idea that unemployed immigrants should leave the country, with about a quarter “somewhat” backing such a policy. In addition, the poll found, fifty four percent of adults are against citizens from other EU countries getting a job in Britain. The finding has struck fear into Labour and Tory politicians alike, who are very aware that the BNP is the only party whose policies encompass this position.
The scramble for jobs in recession-hit Scotland was laid bare last night after it was revealed more than 40 unemployed people are chasing every vacancy in some parts of the country. Figures published by union leaders show that for each post advertised in jobcentres, there are now 10 people on the dole in Scotland who could apply. In some areas prospects are far bleaker, with almost 45 candidates for each available job in the Western Isles.
Dehydrated patients were forced to drink out of flower vases at a hospital where hundreds could have died because of 'appalling' care, says a damning report. Desperate relatives slept overnight in chairs at the Staffordshire General Hospital providing basic care for their loved ones, while other patients were left in soiled linen on filthy wards. Conditions were described as 'Third World' by campaigners who have been fighting for months to get an inquiry. The 'shocking' details of a catalogue of failures were released today after an independent investigation into the treatment of emergency patients by the Healthcare Commission.
More than three-quarters of Britons believe jobless immigrants should be asked to leave the UK, according to a new poll. The finding will raise fears that the far-Right BNP could prosper in the recession as unemployment rises. In addition, more than half of the adults in Britain who took part in the FT/Harris survey opposed the right for citizens from other European Union countries to work here. Outspoken immigration minister Phil Woolas admitted that the Government, despite years of tough talking on immigration, had yet to convince many voters that it had properly tightened Britain's borders.
Australia is set to protect its workers during the looming recession by slashing its intake of skilled migrants for the first time in a decade. The 14 per cent cut in immigration come on a wave of concern that skilled foreign workers could stoke resentment by taking jobs at a time of rising unemployment. One expert slammed the situation as 'madness' after mine workers in Queensland and Western Australia found that their positions were being filled by foreign workers.
Amid rising unemployment, more British-born workers are resorting to the type of low-status jobs that were until recently held predominantly by immigrants, according to the report by Centre for Cities. Yet eastern European workers are preferred because they are often better workers, more punctual and more reliable, it said. Evidence of recruitment agencies in one city operating a "immigrants-only" policy was found. Competition for jobs is expected to intensify as unemployment continues to rise. Official figures released this week are expected to show that the jobless total has exceeded two million.
It is good to see the Labour Government embracing so enthusiastically those sound conservative principles, family values and hereditary rights. It emerged yesterday that almost two dozen ministers, four of them in the Cabinet, employ family members on the public payroll. Husbands, wives, children – all paid handsomely, courtesy of the taxpayer. We have, sadly, become inured to the venality of the political classes, most recently exemplified by Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, who nominates the bedroom she rents in her sister's south London home as her main residence, rather than the constituency home where her husband and children reside, so enabling her to claim up to £24,000 a year in housing allowances.
Families are 17 per cent worse off following a year of plunging house prices and the collapse of the stock market, it emerged yesterday. The average household is £45,000 poorer because the value of their home and savings have crashed in the credit crunch. A report reveals Britain's household wealth is the lowest for 40 years.
Labour's efforts to make us eat fewer crisps, drink less and stop smoking have been a huge waste of money. How to make men good used to be the central problem of political philosophy. Labour has placed a different problem at the centre of its agenda: how do we make people eat fewer crisps, take more exercise, drink less alcohol and stop smoking? Ministers have proved that they have even less idea how to implement their goal than the ancient philosophers did theirs.
A primary school was accused of running a "mealtime Gestapo" after inspecting children's lunchboxes for unhealthy food. Pupils with sweets, chocolate, fizzy drinks or full-fat crisps, had them confiscated and put in the staffroom. They are returned at the end of the day but only if parents ask at Danegrove Primary School in Barnet, North London. One parent, Magdi Cullen, 34, told the Daily Mail: "When I found out about what they were doing, I thought 'This is a primary school, not Guantanamo Bay'.
Two million households now have microchips in their bins in a move by councils that paves the way for the introduction of a pay-as-you-throw bin tax. Figures released using the Freedom of Information Act show 42 local authorities have installed the 'spy' devices in rubbish containers to record how much residents are throwing away. Councils insist the information collected by the microchips, which measure the weight of rubbish placed in bins, will be used to educate households about cutting waste, targeting those who are the worst at recycling. Opponents, however, say the technology will make it easy for the government to resurrect plans for the introduction of a £50 pay-as-you-throw tax on millions of families.
Alistair Darling was facing growing pressure to raise taxes in this year's Budget after experts today predicted the tax take from the financial sector is set to almost halve. The Centre for Economics and Business Research warns the revenue from the City will be £39billion in 2009-10, down from £67billion in 2006/7. The Treasury stands to lose £9billion in corporation tax, £10billion in income tax and national insurance, £2billion from stamp duty and another £3billion in withheld tax.
The firm building the £1billion Olympic Village for London’s 2012 Games is in negotiations to keep its contract – despite not being able to raise cash to fund the project. Australian developer Lend Lease has been hit by the credit crunch. It now means the Athletes’ Village, originally planned as a public-private partnership, is being funded entirely by the taxpayer.
Hate preacher Anjem Choudary is being investigated for allegedly urging supporters to send money to the Taliban. A tape emerged at the weekend of the Brit lawyer – whose supporters demonstrated against returning UK troops last week – allegedly telling a crowd to send cash to Muslim soldiers. Anyone convicted of “inviting another to provide money or other property” for the purposes of terrorism faces 14 years in jail.
Outrage erupted last night as police lavished a 24-hour VIP guard on a Muslim fanatic who branded British soldiers “criminals”. Warped Yousaf Bashir yelled abuse at 200 heroic troops at their homecoming parade from Iraq. He and his 14 cronies waved placards calling the soldiers — from 2nd Battalion, the Royal Anglian Regiment — “the butchers of Basra”, “murderers and terrorists” and “baby killers” in Luton, Beds.
We can expect Luton-style protests and worse in the years to come unless the Government gets a grip on Islamism, says Ed Husain. There is something happening inside Britain's Muslim communities. The disgraceful, treacherous protest in Luton last week at the homecoming of the brave Royal Anglian regiment is an indication of resurgent extremism. Does our Government have the political stamina to fight it?
The Government has not considered how to fit enough new arrivals to create a city the size of London into the already over-crowded South East. The UN predicted last week that the population of Britain would rise to 72 million by 2050. Actually, the increase will probably happen faster than that. According to the Government's own figures, Britain's population will reach 71 million not in 40 years, but in just over 20: its forecast is that we will get there in 2031, because it thinks the number of immigrants who will arrive here is going to be higher than the UN's prediction.
MP Keith Vaz faced calls to resign as chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee last night after the emergence of a letter in which he asked a High Court judge to halt a case in which a friend stood to lose £400,000. The Labour MP intervened on behalf of a Shahrokh Mireskandari, a high-profile solicitor from whom he had allegedly received hospitality. It has now been confirmed that Mr Vaz signed the letter in his capacity chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, sparking claims that he abused his position. Opposition parties have called for the former minister to step down, with Tory justice spokesman Dominic Grieve saying that the news "casts real doubt on his continuing as chair".
Police officers who commit serious offences should lose their jobs! It will come as a surprise to most people to learn that more than 1,000 serving police officers have criminal convictions. There will be an expectation among the public that a police officer who is convicted of a crime loses his job. Yet data obtained by the Liberal Democrats under the Freedom of Information Act show this not to be the case. According to these numbers, each force in the country has on average about 20 officers with a criminal record.
The minds of world leaders are firmly shut to anything but the fantasies of the scare mongers. Considering how the fear of global warming is inspiring the world's politicians to put forward the most costly and economically damaging package of measures ever imposed on mankind, it is obviously important that we can trust the basis on which all this is being proposed. Last week two international conferences addressed this issue and the contrast between them could not have been starker. The first in Copenhagen, billed as "an emergency summit on climate change" and attracting acres of worldwide media coverage, was explicitly designed to stoke up the fear of global warming to an unprecedented pitch. As one of the organisers put it, "this is not a regular scientific conference: this is a deliberate attempt to influence policy". What worries them are all the signs that when the world's politicians converge on Copenhagen in December to discuss a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, under the guidance of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there will be so much disagreement that they may not get the much more drastic measures to cut carbon emissions that the alarmists are calling for.
I was intrigued to note when I bought a £216 air ticket to New York that an additional £80 was charged in tax introduced to combat global warming. When I got home it was reported that 5,000 more UK companies, from banks to hotels, are faced with a yearly cost of £660 million to buy "carbon credits" under the EU's "emissions trading scheme" (ETS).
The dispossession of the British nation of its national assets, started under the Tories and avidly pursued by Labour, has reached its logical conclusion with the literal selling off of the family silver. Labour chancellor Alistair Darling has put the Royal Mint up for sale as part of the plan to sell a string of state-owned organisations to shore up his disastrous economic regime which has depleted the public purse. After spending £9.8 billion on foreign aid, £4.5 billion a year on the illegal Iraq war, an estimated £11 billion per year on the immigration and asylum swindle, and after wasting further untold billions bailing out his criminal bankster friends, Mr Darling has discovered that there is no money left in the kitty.
The Searchlight organisation runs six main operations: is also believed to be under investigation by the Metropolitan Police because of its relationship with the Phillip Green Memorial Trust. Now, this state sponsored organisation, led by the convicted marxist criminal Gerry Gable also appears to be coordinating the recent attacks on British National Party venues and supporters. If they are not, they are certainly seeking and providing information that can be used by political terrorists who are. As you can see in the top image taken from one of their false flag organisations (Hope not Hate), they were actively seeking the venue for the BNP meeting at Leigh with plans to disrupt that legal gathering.
Anjem Choudary, who led protests against returning British troops, has urged his followers to send money to 'mujaheddin' An Islamic cleric, whose supporters led a hate-filled protest against British troops returning from Iraq, has urged his followers to give cash to front-line mujaheddin fighters. A recording has emerged of Anjem Choudary, a self-styled sharia judge and former leader of the banned group Al-Muhajiroun, telling his followers to stop spending their money on their families and divert it to Muslim soldiers waging jihad, or holy war.
A Christian minister who has had heated arguments with Muslims on his TV Gospel show has been brutally attacked by three men who ripped off his cross and warned: ‘If you go back to the studio, we’ll break your legs.’ The Reverend Noble Samuel was driving to the studio when a car pulled over in front of him. A man got out and came over to ask him directions in Urdu. Mr Samuel, based at Heston United Reformed Church, West London, said: ‘He put his hand into my window, which was half open, and grabbed my hair and opened the door.
Hannah Shah had been raped by her father and faced a forced marriage. She fled, became a Christian and now fears for her life. We are all too familiar with the persecution of Christians in countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan. Yet sitting in front of me is a British woman whose life has been threatened in this country solely because she is a Christian. Indeed, so real is the threat that the book she has written about her experiences has had to appear under an assumed name.
"Yesterday's acquittal can have consequences for all future court cases on insulting followers of a faith or ideology, including the notorious case against MP Geert Wilders." The chief problem is that insult is in the eye of the beholder. If a non-Muslim points out that all the Islamic sects and schools of Islamic jurisprudence teach warfare against and the subjugation of unbelievers, Muslims in the West say that they're insulted. But this is to say that they're insulted by the truth, which suggests that in reality they are insulted that a non-Muslim would bring this truth to light when they would prefer to keep it concealed. The Hague, 11/03/09 - The Supreme Court yesterday produced an important ruling in principle in favour of freedom of speech. The highest court of the Netherlands acquitted a man of insulting Muslims although he dubbed Islam a tumour.
A Muslim who advised the Government following the July 7 London bombings has been arrested after an alleged stabbing. Inayat Bunglawala, 39, was held on suspicion of attacking another man at his £300,000 home. Mr Bunglawala, who also briefed former Security Minister Tony McNulty on the threat posed by Islamic radicals in the UK, was arrested two weeks before Christmas last year.
Householders who put 'the wrong sort of rubbish' in their bins are to face re-education visits from council officers at their homes. They will be told how they are failing to recycle properly and will be encouraged to 'do better'. Bureaucrats are using microchips placed in bins to measure the volume of rubbish thrown away - and the contents may also be analysed in a search for plastic, glass or other items that should have been recycled instead. Those who break strict rules will first be contacted in writing, but may be confronted by a council officer on their doorstep if they offend again.
Soaring unemployment has left on average 10 workers chasing every vacancy, figures released today show. Ministers were on the defensive amid claims that unemployment is climbing sharply in areas where job centres are closing, and will burst through the 2million mark this week. The Government is having to divert hundreds of officials from other posts to serve as welfare advisers as the recession deepens. Nearly 1000 civil servants working on child maintenance and disability claims had been drafted in to reinforce jobcentres.
The amount of money the state can confiscate from Matson drug dealer Angela Woolliston has halved because of the credit crunch, a court heard. In November last year Judge Martin Picton ordered that Woolliston, 44, should pay back £11,960.64 of the £161,000 she made from her crimes. But Recorder David Bartlett has ordered that the confiscation figure be reduced by £6,000 because of the falling value of her home. The Recorder said the principal ingredient within the confiscation figure ordered in November was the "likely equity" of the defendant's property.
Barclays, the high street bank, is alleged to be making about £1 billion a year from an international web of financial schemes designed to avoid paying tax in the UK and abroad. The claim has been made by a whistle-blower who passed internal Barclays documents to Vince Cable, the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats. The documents — seen by The Sunday Times — detail a trail of transactions allegedly created to legally avoid tax by a team within Barclays Capital, a subsidiary of the bank.
A controversial chemical found in baby bottles will not be banned in Britain – even though safety fears have led American manufacturers to stop using it. Bisphenol A, known as BPA, is widely used in plastic food and drink containers, but there is growing concern that it poses a health threat to young children. Experts say the chemical may leak into babies’ food when bottles are heated. Studies have linked high levels of BPA consumption to growth problems and an increased risk of heart disease and diabetes.
A British National Party (BNP) member was attacked with a hammer when protesters arrived at a campaign event in Greater Manchester. Violence broke out as 30 people surrounded a BNP vehicle outside the Ellesmere Pub in St Helens Road in Leigh on Friday evening. Tony Ward, 48, was hit with a hammer and later treated in hospital. A 25-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm, Greater Manchester Police said. Officers arrived at the pub to discover the BNP's trailer had been overturned, said a police spokesman. A traffic diversion was put in place on St Helen's Road, while the trailer was removed and the road was closed. It has since reopened. One witness told BBC News: "They had hammers and they smacked the vehicle to pieces, smashed all the windows and tore off the bumper, completely decimated it. "I was shocked at what I saw."
The ultra-successful Battle for Britain Road show hit Wigan last night raising an amazing £2,200 for the Euro election fund despite a violent attack on BNP members elsewhere in the area by Labour-Party supporting thugs and police harassment which saw three venues threatened into closing. The evening itself went off without a hitch thanks to the superior organisational ability of the road show team. The standing room only crowd of well over one hundred people were treated to speeches, a film, re-enactors and a sound and light show which left not a dry eye in the house.
A Muslim fundamentalist leader today told of his vision of Britain under Sharia law. Anjem Choudary said he wanted the “flag of Allah” flying over Downing Street, all women wearing burkas and caning for drunkenness. He is the leader of Ahlus Sunnah wal Jamaah, founded as a successor to the banned fundamentalist sect al-Muhajiroun, which was led by now-exiled preacher Omar Bakri Muhammad.
This was the scene that greeted homecoming soldiers in Luton this week. Behind it is a community where integration has abjectly failed, breeding a small but rabid band of poisonous fanatics. The call to morning prayers begins at dawn: 'Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar' (Allah is the greatest, Allah is the greatest). The voice echoes across the rooftops from an amplifier on a minaret at Luton Central Mosque. Outside, men in beards and tunics are arriving. They slip off their shoes, douse their faces in water, then kneel with foreheads meeting the carpet.
The British live 'like animals in a jungle' with their alcohol, gambling, prostitution and pornography. That is the stated view of Anjem Choudary, the preacher of hate who this week insulted the families of dead soldiers and branded their marching comrades as cowards. The extremist wants Britain to be brought under Sharia law, with women forced to wear burkas and put to death for adultery. Yet before he grew his beard and turned to fundamentalism, Choudary, 41, was very much the life and soul of the party at Southampton University. Photographs obtained by the Mail suggest 'Andy' - as he was then known - should be inflicting on himself the 40 lashes he prescribes for drunkenness. As well as downing cider and lager, the cleric is shown playing drinking games with cards, clearly forbidden under his strict Islamic laws, and holding a cannabis joint between his lips before smoking it.
Appearing on the BBC's Question Time on Thursday, I felt frustration. It seemed to me that good people, both on the panel and in the audience, had somehow been led into the wrong place. In a sense, we were all agreed. Everyone condemned the killings of two soldiers and a policeman in Northern Ireland. And everyone, except for one Muslim member of the audience, condemned the demonstrators who had insulted the returning members of the Royal Anglian Regiment in Luton. Hearts were in the right place. But the arguments put forward took too much comfort from the concept of the "vast majority".
In yet another act of conciliation on the part of Western religions towards Islam, the Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano has voiced its approval of Islamic finance. The Vatican paper wrote that banks should look at the rules of Islamic finance to restore confidence amongst their clients at a time of global economic crisis. “The ethical principles on which Islamic finance is based may bring banks closer to their clients and to the true spirit which should mark every financial service,” the Osservatore Romano said. “Western banks could use tools such as the Islamic bonds, known as sukuk, as collateral”. Sukuk may be used to fund the “‘car industry or the next Olympic Games in London,” the article says.
UN Watch, a human rights monitoring organization based in Geneva, denounced a new U.N. resolution circulated today by Islamic states that would define any questioning of Islamic dogma as a human rights violation, […] UN Watch obtained a copy of the Pakistani-authored proposal after it was distributed today among Geneva diplomats attending the current session of the UN Human Rights Council. Entitled "Combating defamation of religions," it mentions only Islam. […] “This is an Orwellian text that distorts the meaning of human rights, free speech, and religious freedom, and marks a giant step backwards for liberty and democracy worldwide,” said [UN Watch executive director Hillel] Neuer.
More than six hundred scientists, economists, legislators, and journalists from around the world met in New York on March 8-10 for the second International Conference on Climate Change. Presentation after presentation documented the pseudoscience and dictatorial intentions behind the climate alarmism of the UN, EU, and Obama administration. Conference keynote speaker Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic and the European Union, described environmentalism as a new collectivist religion that doesn't want to change the climate but rather us. He lamented that the debate between climate warming alarmists and critics such as himself hadn't advanced since he keynoted the first Climate Change Conference a year ago.
Doctors said that people were coming forward to complain of itching, burning and skin inflammation after exposure to the bulbs' ultraviolet light, according to the Daily Express. Dr Robert Sarkany, a consultant dermatologist at King's College, London, told the newspaper: "Reactions to fluorescent lights are not well understood. "But I am seeing regular handfuls of patients who are complaining of skin allergies when exposed to them, as are my colleagues. "Common symptoms are severe stinging, burning and itching of the skin, along with red rash. We don't understand these symptoms well yet, but they do exist."
Four Eastern European men were arrested yesterday after a 17-year-old boy was murdered on his way home from a night out in a cathedral city. Student Darren Loader was beaten to death in a savage attack under a railway bridge after being ambushed by two men as he walked with two girls. He received horrific head injuries in the attack in Hereford on Thursday night. One of the girls suffered a broken arm as she tried to fend off the attackers.
Running a home for vulnerable children was a lucrative sideline for Cathryn Wiles. So successful was the establishment she called Cherrywood, she was able to splash out on top-of-the-range BMWs, have an extension built on her house and regularly take exotic holidays. But, in reality, the children's home never existed. It was a guise used by Wiles, a finance officer at Blackpool Council, to divert £617,000 of taxpayers' money into her own bank account.
Four in five yobs caught with knives are still escaping prison sentences despite Gordon Brown's promise that they would face stiff punishments. The Prime Minister, in response to a spate of tragic knife killings, last year suggested the culture of handing out cautions to knife thugs would end. But Ministry of Justice figures released yesterday show cautions are still being handed out at the rate of 20 a day. Shadow Justice Secretary Dominic Grieve said: 'The tragic reality is that whilst fatal stabbings have increased by a third under this Government, just one in five convicted of carrying a knife goes to jail.
UK ISPs will be required to hand over records of customers’ internet surfing habits, including IP addresses and times of use, to police and intelligence agencies from Sunday. As part of the EU Data Retention Directive, all ISPs must retain customers’ names, addresses and user IDs, as well as records of email and internet telephony communications, for a year.
The travel plans and personal details of every holidaymaker, business traveller and day-tripper who leaves Britain are to be tracked by the Government, the Daily Telegraph can disclose. Anyone departing the UK by land, sea or air will have their trip recorded and stored on a database for a decade. Passengers leaving every international sea port, station or airport will have to supply detailed personal information as well as their travel plans. So-called "booze crusiers" who cross the Channel for a couple of hours to stock up on wine, beer and cigarettes will be subject to the rules.
Saturday 21st March 2009
George Orwell's 1984 nightmare is almost complete!
Ed Balls is seeking extraordinary new powers to dictate the contents of every GCSE and A-level exam in England, it has emerged.
The controversial move could mean the Schools Secretary deciding which history books or works of literature should be read in every classroom.
Critics last night branded the authoritarian step “frightening” and said it could lead to ministers meddling directly with what children read.
The attempted power-grab has been identified in the Government’s Apprentices, Skills, Child ren and Learning Bill, currently being debated in Parliament.
We can see it now scrap traditional authors for the likes of William Morris (1834-1896) or Henry Hyndman (1842-1921) or even E. Belfort Bax (1854-1925) (all Marxist Authors) amongst others. This is a truly frightening concept of social engineering! (Ed)
It follows widespread criticism that Labour has tried to dump traditional teaching in favour of trendy new methods.
Under the shake-up, the Schools Secretary is seeking the power to set “minimum requirements” for exam qualifications.
Whitehall guidance published with the Bill says the rule could be used to specify “which authors’ works needed to be studied for someone to gain a GCSE in English”.
The proposal – buried in clause 138 of the Bill – was uncovered by Liberal Democrat schools spokesman David Laws.
He said: “It is unbelievable that Ed Balls wants to give himself the power to dictate the detailed contents of the curriculum, including precisely which books should be taught at GCSE and A-level. What is taught in schools should not be dependent on the whim of some here-today-gone-tomorrow politician.
“The idea of Ed Balls or Gordon Brown determining which parts of history children are taught or which books and poems they should read is a rather frightening one.”
The move also showed that the Government’s claim to be creating a more independent system of qualifications was a “sham”.
Mr Laws said: “What is actually happening is that ministers are retaining huge powers to meddle in both what is taught and how standards are measured.”
Officials at the Department for Children, Schools and Families yesterday insisted the proposals were merely “tightening up” existing powers.
Exam content was currently overseen by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, which was accountable to ministers.
Officials insisted the Schools Secretary would only intervene in exceptional circumstances, such as to ensure that key texts such as Shakespeare’s plays remained on the school curriculum.
Schools minister Sarah McCarthy-Fry said: “There is currently nothing in law to stop ministers intervening on anything in relation to qualifications, so by establishing an independent regulator of qualifications that is accountable to Parliament, ministers are actually putting limits on the influence they can have.”
A Parliamentary committee scrutinising the Bill is due to meet next Tuesday, when opponents will attempt to scrap the proposed new power.
A spokeswoman for Cambridge Assessment, the parent company of the OCR exam board, said: “Cambridge Assessment believes that teachers and academics are the best people to decide what goes into a qualification.
“However, if politicians must keep their hands on the levers of qualifications, this clause needs checks and balances.” News Source
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George Orwell Nightmare?
Its only a short step to banning books and burning them!
Gordon Brown Has Excelled Himself.
It is difficult to think how the Prime Minister could have betrayed his promise to provide "British jobs for British workers" any more comprehensively than he has already done.
But revelations that the Government is now using taxpayers' money to subsidise seminars that instruct employers how to go about recruiting foreign workers from outside the European Union amount to a gratuitous insult to every British citizen thrown out of work in this recession.
This time Mr Brown does not even have the excuse that EU rules are thwarting his true political preference.
Facilitating the import of yet more workers from outside Europe is something he is doing entirely off his own bat.
For many years the Government's claim that immigrants are used only to plug shortages of labour and "skills gaps" has been untrue. But in the context of rocketing unemployment and 10 workers chasing every vacancy it is palpable nonsense.
Labour is now pursuing a policy of encouraging uncontrolled immigration for purely ideological purposes.
A party that once represented the British working class now appears determined to abolish it. That would amount to the greatest betrayal in political history. News Source
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First, people must be made aware that the organisation known as Hope Not Hate is nothing more than a front for the marxist and state funded Searchlight whose job it is coordinate the attacks on the British National Party.
Searchlight are paid agents of the state and are currently under investigation by the Metropolitan Police involving the charity The Phillip Green Memorial Trust and they know that they, along with their political pay masters will be brought to justice once there is a BNP government.
Now these political terrorists have managed to get a meeting at Broadclyst's Victory Hall cancelled after publishing the venue's booking secretary details on one of their sites and "encouraging" people to politely ring him voicing their disapproval.
Gerry Gable, of anti-fascist magazine Searchlight and the Hope not Hate website, defended his actions in publishing Mr Elkin's telephone number.
"This is a tactic we have used around the country and it is proving effective," he said.
"We always ask people to be polite to the person who answers the telephone when they make their point.
"We are perfectly within our rights to be doing this.
Well as a recipient of many calls from the state paid agents of Searchlight, I know just how polite those calls are. They always imply that if I or the person called does not "desist" or submit to their demands, then I should not sleep that night, make sure my insurance is paid and be prepared to be burned alive. I have two taped conversations that I intend to use at the right time. Searchlight - Anti fascists my arse(sorry ladies). They are the real Nazis.
And sometimes, just sometimes Searchlight manages to do what its secret agenda aims to do. Incite some brain dead moron to actually attack the person or venue concerned. By publishing inflammatory lies about the BNP they are guilty of incitement to hatred and violence. We will not forget. We never forget.
Searchlight, like their allies, the violent storm troopers of the Unite Against Freedom(UAF) do not stand in elections. They have no purpose other than that of destroying opposition to The Establishment that funds them.
They are violent, foul mouthed knuckle dragging vermin of the highest order and those stupid people who support them are just their tools.
It does not matter whether you agree or disagree with the British National Party, they are a legal entity and in a democracy they have every right to put forward their views.
If you disagree with them then fine, campaign in a non violent fashion and stand in elections. That is the British Way. Do not allow yourself to be used by this evil organisation that is run by a convicted communist criminal. News Source
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Labour's Multiculturalism the Social engineering of a society!
The Shape of things to Come? It is now a frequent occurrence!!
A massive fight broke out in Tooting Broadway last night between two rival gangs of armed yobs.
Shoppers ran for their lives as 30 youths aged 14-20 attacked each other with wood, iron bars and bottles in Sainsbury’s car park at around 6pm.
It began in Mitcham Road outside McDonald’s, where a group of what are believed to be Somali youths began taunting some Asians, according to one witness.
The teenagers, some of whom had their faces covered with head scarves, chased each other down an alleyway and into the car park, witnesses said.
Mark Shaw, 46, frontman of 80s band Then Jerico, was caught in the chaos while carrying his shopping to the car.
He said: “They picked up sticks and anything they could find. There were people screaming and shouting.
"It was like a war zone. We were absolutely terrified.
“It makes me feel angry and disgusted with the Government because this country is being over-run by little scumbags.”
Within minutes, three police cars arrived but the youths bolted and it is not yet known whether any were arrested.
Rob Sanson, manager of A Bar 2 Far, witnessed part of the fight but said it was no different to normal.
He said: “There’s always antisocial behaviour, throwing bottles, smoking weed, selling drugs and everything.
“We are trying to run a clean business but we are being sidetracked by them. They are putting off our customers.”
Several months ago McDonalds employed a security guard to stop troublesome teens congregating there, but locals say the gangs just moved onto the streets.
In April, Mr Shaw, who has lived in Graveney for ten years, was badly beaten up by a gang further down the same road.
It is not known whether there were any serious injuries as none of the youths called an ambulance.
The police have been contacted for comment. News Source
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Truck drivers say they are being regularly attacked by migrants who are trying desperately to get into Britain from France.
Dozens of hauliers claim they have been assaulted by the migrants – many armed with knives and batons – who react violently when they are discovered hiding in trucks bound for the UK.
The British drivers are now calling on ministers to put pressure on the French government to take tougher action against those who are targeting them, sometimes on a nightly basis.
Mervyn Osgood, 54, a haulier from Maidstone, Kent, said: ‘I’ve been threatened with a Stanley knife – it’s happening once a week.
‘They’re not afraid to use violence – they’ve got nothing to lose. But I’ve everything to lose; this is my livelihood and I’ve been doing it for 35 years.
‘You’ve got to be a brave bloke to tackle them – they carry home-made batons as well. They get a length of hosepipe, shove metal bars down the end and start waving it at you – it’s a nasty piece of kit.
‘But the French police aren’t interested so you have to round up the fellas and get them out of your trucks yourselves.’ And he criticised the authorities for trying to pin the blame on drivers.
‘British immigration are worse than the French,’ Mr Osgood said. ‘They try and blame us for letting them on our trailers – they think we’re taking bribes.
‘I had four stow away with me in October and I was arrested and held for six hours. I’ve still got an £8,000 fine hanging over me.’
Gary Saunders, 50, a haulier from Basingstoke, Hampshire, who has been working the Dover to Calais route for 30 years, said: ‘There are hundreds of migrants trying to break into the trailers every night.
‘They wait for a back door to open if they think a truck is about to go and climb on board. And they hide in the bushes at the end of the road – the police know they’re there but nothing is done.
‘But if we don’t stop at the stop sign at the end of the road we get fined 40 euros. It’s a no–win situation.’ News Source
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Immigrants are unlikely to return to their homelands during the recession, according to a report, putting further pressure on the jobs market.
The study claims that foreign nationals who have put down roots in Britain are here to stay, and will not move back home just because of rising unemployment, which has just breached 2million for the first time in more than a decade.
Almost 3.7million foreign nationals moved to Britain between 1997 and 2006, according to the Migration Policy Institute's new study, while 1.5m people born in this country emigrated, leaving net migration at 2.2m.
And migration levels are predicted to remain high despite the economic downturn, making it more difficult for low-skilled Britons to find work and risking clashes with people born overseas.
There were protests across the country in January after Italian and Portuguese contractors were given jobs at the Lindsey Oil Refinery in North Lincolnshire, while support for the far-right British National Party is said to be increasing amid fears that British workers are losing out to foreigners in the hunt for scarce jobs.
The report published said: "Return migration is not likely to be highly responsive to rising unemployment for most immigrant groups... as strong social and family ties encourage immigrants to remain in the country.
"Extensive evidence from past downturns strongly supports the argument that migration flows are only partially sensitive to economic conditions.
"Furthermore, in the long run, the underlying drivers of migration... will remain strong, suggesting that migration flows will pick up again during the economic recovery."
Sir Andrew Green, Chairman of the campaign group Migrationwatch UK, said: "In the past, a recession has only had a temporary effect on immigration but we are now in an entirely new situation where large numbers of European citizens can enjoy the full benefit of the welfare state rather than go home.
"So it would be no surprise if they do just that."
Solution and not part of the problem?
But Trevor Phillips, the Chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the Government watchdog that ordered the study, insisted that immigration is part of the solution to economic problems, not part of the problem.
He said the solution was not to "clamp down" on people wanting to move to Britain but to help workers improve their skills so they can compete for jobs more effectively.
Why should British people compete in their own country and how can you compete against lower wages as it has been seen to be happening all around the country especially with the construction industry! (Ed)
Mr Phillips said: "The solution will lie in adapting our workforce for the new economy – an economy that will be more knowledge-driven, not built around the large hulking industries and even more reliant on innovation and skilled workers to fuel growth."
Hazel Blears, the Communities Secretary, claimed migration "probably will reduce" in the future.
She said: "I think it will go down but I don't think it's going to disappear tomorrow."
As The Daily Telegraph reported this week, all immigrants arriving in Britain from outside the European Union will have to pay a "tax" of £50 to help cover the added burden they place on public services such as GPs' surgeries and schools.
Wow that will really cover the costs.. we think not! And where will this money go? To the government retirement fund? (Ed)
Ministers are also considering giving new powers to councils that would prevent houses being converted into cramped accommodation for migrant families. News Source
That's the real reason why they want to build more houses and destroy the green belts! Not for the native population but for Immigrants. see below! (Ed)
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The cost to the taxpayer of unaccountable state-run quangos shot up by four times the rate of inflation last year, it was revealed today.
Whitehall-funded organisations set up by ministers cost the public £34.5 billion, a rise of £3.7 billion in the annual quango bill in just 12 months.
The 12 per cent increase in the cost of running the quangos compares to the latest level of three per cent of the Government's favoured measure of inflation, the Consumer Prices Index.
It is 120 times higher than the 0.1 per cent inflation rate currently registered by the Retail Prices Index, the measure usually considered most reliable.
The vast leap in the cost of bureaucracy was blamed by David Cameron on high salaries for chiefs and senior officials in state bodies.
In a speech the Tory leader said that the head of the body responsible for regulating independent broadcasting is now paid more than more than five times the salary of his predecessor eight years ago
He promised a cull of the quangos if Tories win power.
The cost explosion among state bodies - whose nickname derives from the 1960s term quasi autonomous non-departmental organisations - was set out in a report from the Cabinet Office.
It said the number of non-departmental public bodies listed as such in Whitehall has fallen since Labour came to power in 1997, from 857 to 790.
But their cost is rising, with the taxpayer asked to pay £34.5 billion of the full £43 billion price of the system in the 12 months up to last March.
The bodies now employ 92,500 staff.
Quangos run from tiny bodies like the Government Hospitality Advisory Committee for the Purchase of Wine to major organisations like the £1 billion-a-year the Environment Agency, which is responsible for rivers, flooding and controlling pollution.
Quangos set up outside government ministries can be given jobs that would otherwise have to be done by civil servants, and they can be used to carry blame or distance politicians from state initiatives.
For example Hilary Benn's Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs insists that it does not tell councils to abandon weekly rubbish collections or bring in complex recycling rules.
Yet it pays £70 million a year to a quango, the Waste and Resources Action Programme, which tells councils how to do just that.
WRAP has told town halls to drop weekly collections during winter to avoid summer smells from uncollected rubbish, and to avoid cutting rubbish collections at election times.
Mr Cameron said today: 'Spending on public sector salaries has ballooned under Labour. Where this has gone to nurses, doctors, teachers, police and people who operate our frontline services professionally and efficiently, that is money well spent.
'Where money hasn’t been so well spent is on the wage bill for those who work behind the front line particularly in the vast quangocracy that has mushroomed under Labour. The people in its plum jobs earn frankly astonishing salaries.'
The Tory leader referred to media regulator OFCOM and its chief executive Ed Richards.
'In 2001 the Chairman of the Independent Television Commission earned £77,590 a year,' he said.
'The Chief Executive of the ITC’s replacement, OFCOM, earned £417,581 last year – more than a five-fold increase. In fact, fourteen OFCOM executives are now paid more than the old ITC Chairman was.'
Mr Cameron said: 'At a time when private sector employees are accepting pay freezes to keep their jobs, how can this be right?'
Official figures this week showed that public sector pay is going up at four per cent a year while private sector salaries are stalled at 1.4 per cent. While unemployment his risen to more than two million, 46,000 public sector jobs have been created in nine months. News Source
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I see that yet another "Charity" funded by ratepayers has vanished off the face of the earth, taking with it £64,000 of Sheffield rate payers money.
This time it is the Mama East African Women's Group that has disappeared.
The commission opened an inquiry into Mama after visiting its derelict premises in April in search of the trustees, who had failed to turn up to a meeting to review their progress in implementing prescribed reforms after an earlier investigation.
The regulator's report criticises the charity's trustees for failing to discover that one of their number was an undischarged bankrupt and therefore not qualified to act as a trustee.
It also says the trustees showed "poor conduct" by failing to answer commission letters or turn up to the meeting. It says the commission will continue to monitor Mama until it is formally wound up and removed from the register.
The more I discover about these "Local Authority" funded charities, the more I wonder and worry.
You can bet that had there been a British National Party controlled council in Sheffield, those 64,000 spunderos would have been put to better use. News Source
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More than 3,000 extra police officers will flood London during the G20 summit next month in a £10million operation to counter the threat of violent protests.
Senior officers fear thousands of anti-globalisation demonstrators will attempt to bring the capital to a standstill.
An alliance of radical protest groups are believed to be plotting to use trucks to dump huge quantities of sand in the streets.
Commander Bob Broadhurst, who is responsible for the operation, said police will be stretched to the limit as a series of high-profile events coincide.
Dozens of diplomats, including United States President Barack Obama, will begin to arrive on Tuesday, March 31.
The next day campaigners will focus on institutions in the Square Mile in a series of annual April Fool's Day anti-globalisation and climate change demonstrations.
As the G20 summit begins on April 2, the spotlight will shift to the Excel conference centre in Docklands.
In the same week, the president of Mexico will conduct a state visit, England will play Slovakia and Ukraine at Wembley and the Varsity boat race will take place.
On the Saturday, March 28, Put People First, a campaign group involving the TUC and 120 other organisations, will hold a march and rally in Hyde Park calling on world leaders attending the G20 to ensure decent jobs and public services for all.
Mr Broadhurst said officers from six forces will be involved in the massive security operation.
He said officers are working hard to try to second guess 'innovative' protesters who are determined to evade traditional security arrangements.
The senior officer said: 'We have to be flexible and mobile. One of my concerns with public order policing is if we police the last problem we had we will be caught out.
These are innovative people and we must be innovative as well. I have encouraged officers to try and think about what these people might try and do and hopefully we will have something to mitigate that.
'It will be an exciting couple of days to say the least.'
Previous world economic summits and conferences have been targeted by anarchists, anti-war campaigners, anti-globalisation protesters and environmentalists.
All police leave in the capital has been cancelled for the two days and businesses have been told to cancel unnecessary meetings. Continued
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Well, well, well it appears that the Times is having a 'Bash The BNP' week along with the Telegraph. -
No doubt the Tory party supporters and owners of The Torygraph The Barclay Brothers, having in a fit of pique closed down all of Sark as the peasants on the Island dared defy their imperial orders ( Dont you know who we are - we are the Lord Vader Brothers ), have now ordered their Torygraph minions to attack the BNP, along with Rupert Murdoch who owns the Times.
Plutocrats of the world unite - press freedom is your bitch.
First we had Alex Simpleton yesterday now this Tory Alice Thomson.
Below here article I will write my response in italics between her vomiting.
Two nations: those who work, those who won't
Blaming immigrants for our unemployment levels misses the point: the problem is
people who are bone idle
Alice Thomson
Michael's alarm still goes at 5am every morning, by 7am he has cleaned his Notting Hill house, at 8am the children have a three-course breakfast and by 9 he has walked them to school and is sitting at his desk sending out his CV. Six weeks after he lost his job at Goldman Sachs, he still works a 14-hour day. He now waits tables at his favourite restaurant, sweeps the leaves from the communal garden tennis court and helps the neighbours' Filipina housekeeper to clear the drains.
( 'Michael' also known as Superman also wears his pants on the outside of his trousers and can leap tall buildings in one bound. If you believe this rubbish then I have a bank account in Nigeria with 7 million dollars that you can have if you send me a postal order made out to C.ash. Its just so nice to see him helping out her Filipina maid. How middle class is that. I wonder if Alice has a Filipina maid as well. Come alice whatcha say. )
Paul Bright, a factory manager for a paper doily factory in Essex who has also been made redundant, has the same drive. At 60, he could retire. “All I want to do is work again,” he says. “I am like a smoker who doesn't know what to do with his hands once he's quit. I need to feel useful.”
The Chawners wouldn't understand. Mr and Mrs Chawner and their two daughters insist that they are “too fat to work” because they have a combined weight of 83 stone - so they watch television all day living off their £22,000 benefits. In the past 11 years, only the youngest daughter, Emma, has attended a job interview and that was on The X Factor, where she was kicked out in the first round. Mr Chawner explains: “Often I'm so tired from watching TV I have to have a nap. I certainly couldn't work. I deserve more.” Continued - Please Read in Full
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Millions of pounds believed to be part of the fraud operated by US financier Bernard Madoff have been identified in Britain, the Observer has learned.
The Serious Fraud Office is in the process of freezing deposits that it believes were part of the biggest fraud ever perpetrated, a senior source has confirmed. The disclosure comes just days after 70-year-old Madoff was jailed for cheating thousands of investors out of £50bn. It could clear the way for victims to make claims in Britain against assets held by the authorities.
The source said: "This is money that was held by a third party but it is believed to have been generated by Madoff's Ponzi scheme." News Source
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I am having difficulty keeping up with all the publicity we are getting at the moment, but I'll make a start with the BBC South coverage from today. You can access this by clicking on this link.
The Daily Mail has followed this up online and quite possibly with hard copy tomorrow in quite a fair manner. If you check out the link to the Mail's site you can see the article in its full context.
Churchill would never support 'party of hate', claims furious grandson as BNP hijacks wartime leader's image
Tory MP Nicholas Soames today called for action to be taken against the British National Party to stop it using an image of his grandfather Sir Winston Churchill on a campaign leaflet.
Mr Soames, MP for Mid Sussex, said he 'very strongly' objected to the use of Sir Winston's face on a on a leaflet entitled 'This Britain is yours!' and will write to democracy watchdog the Electoral Commission asking it to investigate....
Mr Darby defended the leaflet and said the Electoral Commission would be powerless to stop the party using the picture.
He also said Sir Winston would be 'ashamed' of his grandson, who he described as a 'typical fat-cat professional politician'.
'There's nothing the Electoral Commission can do about it, but Mr Soames is more than welcome to try,' Mr Darby said.
'At the end of the day I think Winston Churchill, by default, would be in the BNP if he was still alive because of his views on immigration and Islam, or Mohammedism as he called it.
'I cannot believe that Mr Soames is ignorant about his grandfather's speeches but they are a matter of public record. And I think Sir Winston would be ashamed of Mr Soames rather than by association with the BNP.
'Mr Soames is a typical fat-cat professional politician, and I say that in the kindest possible way.
'We hear a lot of bluster and fuss but when we say we are not going to remove it that's what we mean. That image is staying as part of our campaign and that is the end of it.
'If we were misrepresenting the views of Sir Winston then Mr Soames would have a point and I would be on the defensive, but when you look at what he said on the British, immigration and Islam he is pretty much on our wavelength.'
But Mr Soames rejected the claim that his grandfather would be a supporter of the BNP, saying: 'How could Mr Darby possibly know?
One thing Mr Darby definitely does know is that there are currently at least three World War Two Spitfire pilots who are members of the British National Party. All of them are in their eighties and you will be seeing pictures of at least two of them standing next to Nick Griffin very soon.
Meanwhile in East Anglia, the BBC's regional news programme Look East, will feature the BNP's campaign in the Eastern region. Eddy Butler and Emma Colgate will be featured with a follow up piece being shown on the region's version of the Politics Show on Sunday. If anyone can track down the URL I would be most grateful.
For the time being I'll leave you with this picture taken last night in Salisbury. News Source
From the Press Office of the Mid West British National Party
Nearly 200 people gathered in a village hall (booked in the name of The British National Party) on Salisbury Plain on Thursday night to hear Party Chairman and future MEP Nick Griffin warn of the dangers of a European super state and the eventual Islamification of Britain.
The Battle for Britain Road Show with it's World War II theme stresses to party members and guests that this really is the ultimate battle for Britain and in June 2009 people from all backgrounds can choose for themselves whether to vote for the usual gang of 3 and send Britain into a Eurabian super state or vote BNP, the only party that genuinely wants Great Britain to withdraw from the EU and return all power back to Westminster and the British people.
As well the keynote speech by Mr Griffin, who was escorted into the hall by a pair of Scottish pipers, members were treated to a cheese and wine buffet and donated over £1600 to the region's Euro election fund. The evening was rounded in usual BNP fashion by the singing of the Party anthem, "Jerusalem". For further information on this story contact the local press officer, Michael Simpkins on the above number or visit www.bnp.org.uk
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It has often been claimed that the project of "ever-closer union" within the EU is over, killed when the Lisbon Treaty was rejected by the Irish, the only people who had the chance to vote on it. That's a big mistake.
The Eurocrats think integration is inevitable and essential – and they are certainly not going to let it be derailed by anything as vulgar as the fact that most of the EU's citizens do not want it.
Perhaps the best example is an imminent change to the justice system, designed to make it easier for one state to imprison citizens who live and work in another. Under the present rules, the Government is not obliged to hand over a British citizen who has been convicted of a crime in another EU country. There are very good reasons for that. The procedures of justice are not of a uniformly high standard across the EU.
Organisations such as Fair Trials International have many examples of British citizens who have been convicted of crimes in countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and even Portugal, where the most basic elements necessary to a fair trial were absent, and where the defendant was not even present.
It is true that British judges do not always treat claims by, say, a Romanian court that a British citizen was given "a fair trial" in his absence with the scepticism they deserve. However, British courts do have the power, at present, to decide that it would not be in the interests of justice to extradite a Briton who was not present at his own trial to serve his sentence in a foreign jail.
Under the new regulations, we will lose that power: our courts will be compelled to order the extradition of British citizens to any EU country that wants them. The state that wants to extradite a Briton will simply have to sign a form which says that it told the Briton of his trial, and gave him some form of legal representation.
Such an assurance will, in many cases, be worthless – at least without independent investigation and verification.
Bulgaria, for example, is the only country in the EU that claims to have implemented "99 per cent of EU regulations". In fact, even the EU recognises that almost none of its regulations is complied with in Bulgaria. That country is also universally recognised as being totally corrupt, with the police and judiciary being particularly rotten.
The EU enthusiasts, however, simply pretend that "variations in the standards of justice" do not exist. So once the forms have been received by the British government, that will be that – you will have to be packed off to serve the sentence imposed on you by a Bulgarian court, at a trial at which you were not present, and may not even have been told about. And it doesn't matter what the offence is: it could be a traffic misdemeanour, it could be misuse of your credit card, or it could be murder.
Or it could be something you said eg. criticise a government for oppression or simply state you are unhappy with the current state of immigration! It could be anything that dosen't conform to one of the governments of a country in the EU! (Ed)
Our Government has not just enthusiastically endorsed the new regulations: it has sponsored the legislation, passed by a huge majority in the EU Parliament last September. Why? No one seems to know.
The Ministry of Justice has said the change will "help our citizens", but I cannot see how it will help anyone to lose any protection that the British government might have been able to provide against the injustices perpetrated by foreign courts. That, however, is the only "benefit" that this new regulation will deliver.
Do not be fooled by Labour's weasel words. This is about showing the EU bureaucrats that we are committed to "ever-closer integration" – and if that means giving up our ability to protect British citizens from injustice, then that's just fine by our Government. News Source
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Is this is the integration into British society? Racism cuts both ways!
A Polish delicatessen is refusing to serve English customers, it was claimed yesterday.
The store is said to have turned away a college student and a reporter sent to investigate the story. Police and council officials have launched an investigation into the alleged racism.
The student, Kaley Leighton, stopped at the store on her way home from sixth-form college in Goole, East Yorkshire.
The 17-year-old said: 'While I was in there looking at the drinks the man working in the shop came over and asked me if I was English.
'When I said I was he said to me "get out of my shop" twice.
'He said it really aggressively and I didn't know what to do because I was on my own, and he was a big man. I just said okay and left. Ifelt angry, upset and embarrassed and couldn't believe what had happened.'
She said she had visited the store because her mother had suggested she try out new things.
The health and social care student spoke to officials at East Riding Council and made a complaint of racism.
Her mother, Julie Eldin, 40, said: 'I was fuming when Kaley told me what had happened.
'I work in a shop and can you imagine what would happen if the boot was on the other foot, and I refused to serve someone because they weren't English? It's just racism.'
Emma Franklin, a reporter on Goole's newspaper, was also told by one of the shop assistants that they did not serve English people. She says he quickly retracted this statement when she revealed who she worked for.
Yesterday, Michail Bak, the owner of the Polski Sklep store, strongly denied refusing to serve anyone for being English and insisted Miss Leighton was mistaken.
'I don't turn anyone away from my shop - I serve Russians, Latvians, Brazilians and Portuguese,' he said.
Except the English of course! (Ed)
A spokesman for East Riding Council said: 'Humberside Police's community cohesion officer and the council's senior policy officer are looking into this and working together to help resolve any issues that may have occurred.'
The store, located on a busy shopping street, is sparsely stocked with tinned food, drinks, pastries and pickles.
Goole is twinned with the Polish town of Zlotow and at the time of the last census in 2001 there were only 60 Poles living in the town.
Numbers have increased significantly since then although there are no official figures available.
A relative of Miss Leighton has set up a Facebook petition to protest about the 'English ban' and by yesterday afternoon 300 people had signed up to it. News Source
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George Galloway is to be banned from Canada. Border security chiefs have declared the Respect MP “inadmissable” because of his views on Afghanistan and the presence of Canadian troops there.
Mr Galloway is due to make a speech in Toronto on March 30, following a US lecture tour, but will be turned away if he tries to enter Canada.
The Canadian High Commission in London was last night contacting the MP’s office to inform him of the decision.
Canadian rules say he will be allowed in only if he has a special permit from immigration minister Jason Kenney.
But Mr Kenney’s spokesman said: “George Galloway is not getting a permit — end of story.
He defends the very terrorists trying to kill Canadian forces in Afghanistan.”
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Australia's most controversial sheik, Taj Din al-Hilali, has been caught on videotape kicking in a door at his own mosque before calling police to report an act of vandalism.
The head imam at the Lakemba mosque, who caused outrage in 2006 by comparing scantily clad women to uncovered meat, was shown on a CCTV security tape (Can be seen left video panel 3rd down (Ed) kicking open the door just minutes before reporting the incident.
The Nine Network's A Current Affair last night broadcast the videotape from March 9, showing the incident, which Sheik Hilali initially denied.
"There is a trick in this camera. There is a trick in this film," he told ACA.
But in a letter sent by Sheik Hilali's lawyers to ACA yesterday, he admitted kicking the door, saying the damage had already been done to the door before he kicked it.
"What he did do was to kick open a door to the mosque that had already been damaged by others in order to gain entry to it," the letter said.
Lebanese Muslim Association president Shawky Kassir said they had called the police "for a little problem, but we have fixed (it) and everything is under control".
The footage shows four young men locking the door behind them at 10.28pm.
Nine minutes later, Sheik Hilali checks the lock and pushes on the top of the door, bending it on its hinges. After checking the corridor, he disappears from view before rushing towards it and kicking it open at 10.46pm.
It is understood the name of the suspected culprit was put forward to NSW police, but it is not known if he was interviewed by the authorities.
A NSW Police media spokesperson said they started to investigate the matter but three days later were told by a mosque official that he did not wish to take the matter any further.
"The matter remains under investigation. Further senior members of the local community will be consulted to discuss the incident." News Source
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This disturbing video came from a French supermarket.
A group of 'youth' (Arab/Muslim) invades a French supermarket on a Saturday afternoon and removes all of the Israeli products from the shelves. If anyone speaks French and wants to tell us what they are saying (other than 'product of Israel'), please do so in the comments.
Let's go to the video (or here, Left video panel 4th down (Ed)
Aren't there laws in France? Why didn't the store owners call the police?
UPDATE: Translation
First man: On this day, we solemnly ask the Carrefour's direction for the last time why they do not indicate on their products if they come from Israel. Why do we not know if they come from the "occupied territories", like avocados or pineapples? It's not indicated at all. It's illegal. Why doesn't Carrefour sell products from "palestine"?
Second man: Israeli peppers... from occupied, colonozied territories, they steal the lands. We see it clearly, nothing left.
Boycott
Small tomatoes. Israeli tomatoes. It's written there, just there. Israel.
We don't know where those are from, those might be coming from Israel.
Direction: the fruits
They steal the land, and then come to sell at Carrefour. It's shameful. It's taken from the "palestinians", on the "palestinians' land". What a shame. With the "palestinians' water".
Orange juice from Israel. We can see it clearly. Israel. They are sold at carrefour. Shameful for France. On territories stolen, land stolen, they steal their water, then we sell it at Carrefour, what a shame.
Old woman: South Africa started to shake once all countries started to boycott their products, so what you're doing, I find it good.
Second man: Thank you madam
Second man: They back Israeli criminals, more than 400 children killed, at least 1500 people assassinated, here l'Oréal backs these war criminals. Well we don't accept that. In the trash can. All of you who support Israel, look at what's waiting for you.
See, it's empty now, we don't want these products in our home. We're at home here, we're in France, we're not in Israel.
Let's go to the Israeli wet tissues, it's cheap, number 1, let's remove everything from the shelf, in the trash.
Third man: It's written here, imported from Israel. It's written in big letters there. Imported from Israel.
Second man: We're giving a message to Sarkozy, political message, if they don't want to act, we will act.
Wet tissues for babies, sold here to the French, it's unacceptable. They kill babies then they want to sell wet tissues for babies after that.
Here, the brand Tex, fabricated by Delta Galil in Israel, and sold here to the French, it's unacceptable. It's from the colonies.
Young woman: L'Oréal, it's not an Israeli company, but they built factories there, they boast in the chamber of commerce that they have the best customer base in Israel. Of course, "palestinian" women do not care about their beauty, they care about feeding their children. So we buy them? Those clementines from Yaffa, they are bombs to destroy houses, lived-in houses, schools, mosques, do we buy them? By wearing and buying those clothes, we participate in the occupation, it's illegal. When we see these peppers, we see pretty colors uh? We think they are for diversity, well they treat "palestinians" like racist, they treat them back like in the times of apartheid. Do we buy them?
First man: A lot of us contacted the direction of Carrefour, to receive satisfying answers to our questions. To this day, unfortunately, no answer. Each customer has the right to know what he is buying, especially the right not to contribute to the massacre of the "palestinian" people. We are many associations here today, and these types of operations are happening all over France, all over the world. We will continue to boycott and inform the population. Today, this is Israeli products and products without origin that we boycott. Without a quick answer and changes from Carrefour, tomorrow it's Carrefour that we will boycott!
Then they chant "Boycott! Boycott! Boycott! We are all "palestinians!"
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Money Money Money..
An asylum seeker was on the run last night after he helped to set up a £5million car insurance fraud.
Hussein Hassani staged hundreds of fake road crashes to cash in on the no win, no fee personal injury market.
His henchmen smashed up their cars deliberately before saying they had been run into by another driver. They would claim on insurance taken out by fellow fraudsters.
A string of convincing “victims” managed to hoodwink doctors, including a consultant surgeon, of neck, back and whiplash injuries.
Detectives believe the racket involved up to 1,000 conmen and the masterminds are still being hunted.
Hassani, 29, of Edmonton, north London, was jailed for four years in his absence at London’s Blackfriars Crown Court yesterday. He had denied a conspiracy to defraud.
Suspicions were raised by a surge in cases featuring fake-sounding names and just a short period between a policy’s start and a claim.
One begun in March 2006 involved someone called “Franchesko Touty” – a poor spelling of the Italian soccer star Francesco Totti.
A month later, a man who identified himself as “Touty” told his insurer how he had crashed into a vehicle carrying three people. They got compensation and cash was paid for damage to the car.
Another defendant, Ahmad Bolkhari-Ghahi, 24, of Kentish Town, north London, was jailed for three years after admitting the charge. News Source
Reader Submitted Link. Thank You. Les
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Almost one in 10 schoolchildren in Lancashire speak English as a second language, new figures have shown.
In Blackburn, the figures rises to 38.2% of the school population – one of the highest figures in the North West.
Blackpool has just 283 children, or 3% of school pupils who speak English as a second language.
Preston's school figures are included within the overall Lancashire figure.
The figures were released by the Department for Children Schools and Families (DCSF) after a Parliamentary question from the Conservative Party.
Shadow immigration minister Damian Green said: "These shocking figures illustrate how difficult life is for many teachers because of the Government's long-term failure to control immigration.
"The number of pupils with English as a second language makes life difficult for teachers, parents and pupils."
A DCSF spokesman said: "The language of instruction in English schools is and always has been English.
"We have listened to concerns of headteachers and are increasing funding in the Ethnic Minority Achievement Grant to £206m by 2010, to bring students weak in English up to speed." News Source
Reader Submitted Link. Thank You. Les
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Two Sheffield-based projects working with refugees have been awarded a total of more than £630,000 by the Big Lottery Fund.
Refugee Support, part of the Metropolitan Support Trust, receives £366,266 to continue the Station Foyer project for three years, running a 20-bed accommodation centre for refugees and migrants aged 18 to 35 to help them live independently and integrate into life in the UK.
The Children's Society is being given £266,443 to continue its Embrace project to help young refugees and new migrants in South Yorkshire for a further three years. News Source
Reader Submitted Link. Thank You. Les
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Nearly £3 million is to be pumped into West Midlands public services to help cope with the effects of immigration.
Four out of ten Birmingham primary school children have English as a second language.
And the cash will help to alleviate some of the problems this can cause.
The money is to come from visa fees paid by immigrants, and will be shared between police, schools, health services and local councils.
Local Government Secretary Hazel Blears announced the region was to receive £2.9 million under a scheme to ensure immigrants contributed towards extra costs involved in helping them use services.
But Conservatives claimed the only way to relieve pressure on public services was to impose limits on immigration.
They published figures obtained from the Government which showed four out of ten primary school pupils in Birmingham had English as a second language.
Of 79,340 primary school pupils in the city, 31,869 speak a different language as their first language. The figures also showed that a third of secondary school pupils in Birmingham – 23,069 out of 69,298 pupils in total – had English as a second language.
It means teachers in parts of Birmingham will be coping with classrooms where a large number of children have a poor command of English.
Damian Green, the Conservative shadow immigration minister, said: “These shocking figures illustrate how difficult life is for many teachers because of the Government’s long-term failure to control immigration.” News Source
Reader Submitted Link. Thank You. Les
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Surprise Surprise.. Another Labour councillor in deep water!
A Councillor arrested in a money-laundering inquiry has been dropped by Calderdale Council's Labour group.
Zafar Iqbal-Din, pictured, of Park ward, was quizzed by police earlier this month and bailed until May.
Labour leader Tim Swift said: "I have informed the council's chief executive Coun Din is no longer a member of the Labour group."
He remains a councillor but is no longer a member of the Labour Party.
Councillor Iqbal-Din said he had been arrested and bailed as part of an inquiry into a friend's activities.
He said he was one of around 15 people who lent a man money for a deposit on a property. News Source
Reader Submitted Link. Thank You. Les
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Brown's battle against protectionism has suffered yet another blow after Renault said it was moving some production back to France in return for state aid.
The French car firm announced it will move production for its Clio Campus model from Slovenia to a site north of Paris, creating 400 jobs.
Under the terms of a £3billion rescue deal from the French government, Renault is not allowed to slash jobs in its home country or close factories.
France had promised three weeks ago there would be no link between the aid and the location of Renault's production and the bailout was agreed by the EU on those terms.
But today its industry minister Luc Chatel described the move as a 'repatriation' that was a 'result' of the state's help for the motor industry.
The move immediately raised concerns about protectionism at a EU summit in Brussels.
EU officials have warned French President Nicholas Sarkozy not to let his efforts to help the French auto industry cost jobs in other countries.
European Commission spokesman Jonathan Todd expressed surprise that Mr Chatel linked Renault's decision to state aid.
It was an 'apparent contradiction' to what France had promised at the time the bailout was approved, he said.
Brown is desperate to avoid any protectionist measures in Europe and wants leaders to unite behind a co-ordinated approach to pull through the recession.
It is feared the economic crisis could be even worse and more prolonged if countries start only looking after their own rather than working together.
Renault says its decision will not mean job cuts at the Slovenian plant in Novo mesto, where it makes the Twingo and Clio models.
The plant is currently at full capacity so the site near Paris will be used to meet increased demand for both cars. The jobs there will be temporary contracts.
Sarkozy is under huge pressure to show that his government is helping ordinary people through the downturn.
Trade unions have been protesting and striking this week, with more than one million people on the streets.
On Monday, workers lobbed eggs and shoes and lynched effigies of their bosses at a protest over the impending closure of a tyre plant run by Germany's Continental AG.
New figures showed yesterday that the French economy is shrinking at the fastest pace in more than 30 years.
The car industry provides jobs for around 10 per cent of the French work force and has been particularly badly hit.
This week's EU summit has been a disappointment for Mr Brown, with his dream of spearheading the world's economic recovery looking seriously battered.
He is banking on world leaders uniting behind a global stimulus at next month's G20 summit but there are already deep rifts.
EU leaders have rejected his call for a further stimulus package after Germany and France refused to back them.
They instead want to implement the £188billion spending hikes already pledged to combat the downturn. News Source
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Meanwhile
Car production slumped a massive 59 per cent in February in the fifth straight month of decline, new figures reveal.
Just 59,777 cars were built last month as struggling firms continued to slash jobs and production in a bid to survive the recession.
Commercial vehicle production fell even more sharply, down 71.6 per cent compared to last February.
The dire new figures were released 24 hours after the cancellation of next year's British International Motor Show. It is the first time in peacetime it will not take place.
More than 300,000 cars have been lost from the total number of vehicles produced in the past 14 months, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.
Chief executive Paul Everitt said: 'The large fall in February's vehicle production is a direct result of weak demand and the need to protect the highly-skilled workforce and valuable industrial capability in the UK automotive sector.'
He called on the Government to give immediate support to firms and help them gain access to the necessary credit, as well as start a vehicle scrappage scheme.
This would see drivers paid to trade in their old cars for more eco-friendly models and has already been introduced in many European countries.
Business Secretary Lord Mandelson sidestepped questions about the possibility today as he insisted car manufacturers could pull through the downturn.
'The car manufacturers, their huge supply chain, are a cornerstone of our manufacturing sector,' he said.
'They employ very, very many people, so their survival is important, and they will survive, they will thrive in the future, as long as they make the right decisions now.' Continued
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Now The English flag is Racist
Stewards confiscated football fans’ 10ft flag of St. George, claiming it could be viewed as a ‘racist symbol’.
The group of Blackburn Rovers supporters said they were left stunned by the actions of the officials at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium.
A Blackburn councillor, who is deputy chairman of national patriotic group the Royal Society of St George, said the ‘ridiculous move’ had prevented the fans ‘showing pride in their country’.
Arsenal FC said it had decided to ban all national flags following a row over a fan’s Turkish Cypriot flag in 2006.
Supporters from the Havelock Inn, Havelock Street, Mill Hill, unfurled their English flag, emblazoned with “Havelock Blues”, at the stadium before Saturday’s game.
David Iley, 24, of Bamber Bridge, a regular at the pub who arranged for the flag to be made, said: “When we got there we started putting it out, and the steward came up and told us we couldn’t. “It never entered my head at first that the St George Cross wasn’t allowed. I thought it was just that we couldn’t put it there.
“So we hooked it over the hoardings at the front instead, and the next thing we know a steward was taking it away, saying it could be seen as a racist symbol.
“I couldn’t believe it. When we took it to Hull the stewards even helped us put it up. It’s the national flag and its absolutely stupid that Arsenal should ban it.” Since it was made just a month ago, the flag had already travelled Hull and Fulham with the pub fans with no problems. Spokesmen for Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool all confirmed that national flags were allowed at their home grounds .
He said: “We are planning a St George extravaganza on April 23, and giving out St George’s flags all over town, and yet we have those same English flags being confiscated. It’s ridiculous. Continued
Friday 20th March 2009
A second barge to house overseas workers employed at Lindsey Oil Refinery has docked in Grimsby – as it was revealed that policing the strikes earlier this year cost almost £200,000.
Hundreds of police officers were taken off the streets of Humberside as they were drafted in to control the protests at the North Killingholme site in January.
As reported, construction workers were angry that hundreds of Italian workers were employed to work on the new HDS-3 project at the refinery.
The workers have been housed in a floating hotel berthed on Grimsby docks – and another vessel, believed to be called the Coral Pearl, arrived yesterday.
Hours after the vessel docked in Grimsby, Humberside Police confirmed that policing the nine-day strike, which began on January 28 and ended on February 5, cost the force £90,406.
A spokesperson for the force also confirmed they are expecting a bill from other forces – whose officers were brought in to assist in the operation – of around £100,000.
The details of the operation were revealed following a request by the Grimsby Telegraph under the Freedom of Information Act.
A spokesperson for the force said: "The knock-on effect was that, on occasions, policing across the Humberside Police area was affected because officers and staff were taken from their normal jobs to go to the refinery.
"Humberside Police, on occasions, used officers who were on rest days, which had an additional cost burden to the force, which has meant money that was allocated to provide additional staffing will now not be available to be spent on other policing activities.
"It would be true to say that policing the refinery dispute did adversely affect normal policing.
"In consequence, there were on occasions fewer officers on duty in parts of the force than there would otherwise have been."
At the height of the protest, 165 police officers were deployed to the strikes.
The row erupted after LOR handed a contract to Italian firm IREM to provide contractors to work of the project at the refinery.
A spokeswoman for Total, which owns the refinery, said the overall number of overseas workers will not increase.
She said: "As planned, a second accommodation barge has docked in Grimsby to provide facilities for IREM workers currently working on our HDS-3 construction project.
"When the barge has been fully set up for operation, it will house approximately 200 workers. The overall number of IREM workers has not been increased from the original plan that has already been discussed with unions." News Source
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Under Labour the whole of UK
is degenerating to that of a third world country!
The suspended boss of Stafford Hospital, where hundreds died on casualty wards, will receive £15,000 a month while an inquiry investigates his conduct.
Experts say Martin Yeates, chief executive of Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust, will also benefit from a gold-plated £2million pension pot worth around £70,000 a year, and a tax-free lump sum of £200,000.
Mr Yeates, 50, has been suspended on full pay while managers investigate his leadership of the trust, which runs Stafford and Cannock Chase hospitals.
The disgraced chief executive's salary is between £150,000 and £180,000 a year - the trust will not disclose the exact amount - meaning he will receive up to £15,000 a month as long as the inquiry lasts.
Mr Yeates could also receive a six-figure pay-off depending on the result of the inquiry into Stafford's A&E department.
A damning report by the Healthcare Commission watchdog found hundreds of patients died because the trust's board was more interested in meeting Government targets and attaining elite 'foundation' status than in patient care.
The Daily Mail can also reveal that Mr Yeates received a pay rise of up to £40,000 when the trust was granted foundation status in February last year - at the height of the scandal.
Last night, critics demanded that Mr Yeates should not be rewarded for failure - and called for compensation for the victims.
A local MP also claimed that corporate manslaughter charges should be considered if it could be proved that any of the deaths had been caused by 'gross failings' at the A&E unit.
Yesterday, Health Secretary Alan Johnson announced two inquiries into the failings - one to check whether standards had improved, and another to consider how the NHS could spot problems more quickly.
However, he pointedly failed to demand that Mr Yeates should not receive a pay-off.
Two years ago, however, Mr Johnson intervened when Rose Gibb, chief executive of Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust, received a golden goodbye of £150,000 despite 270 patients dying in superbug outbreaks.
She is now back in court demanding the full amount.
The Healthcare Commission report, published earlier this week, revealed how dehydrated patients at Stafford Hospital were forced to drink out of flower vases, while others were left in soiled linen on filthy wards.
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The issue about Witchdoctor is this. Witchdoctor is bright, Witchdoctor is analytical. Both Jobbing Doctor and I are led by the intelligence supplied by Witchdoctor.
Witchdoctor likes to analyse connections. She recently undertook a investigation into the dubious organisation known as Common Purpose. The theory is that Common Purpose destroys law and order in society.
Cyril Chantler appeared in an email between Paice and Elizabeth Paice some days ago. The message was sent regarding a post on the Doctors Only Website. Through a post by Witchdoctor, we then discovered that Cyril Chantler was a member of The Media Trust which is a special arm of Common Purpose.
Jobbing Doctor tells us all what the Common Purpose is. CP Exposed details the strange and dubious character of the organisation. It is worth reading CP Exposed in detail. It contains many documents related to Common Purpose.
"Common Purpose claims that more than 120,000 people have been involved in Common Purpose and 25,000 leaders from every area of the UK have completed one or more of their programmes.[3] Further Common Purpose claims that 70 per cent of the FTSE 100 companies have used their programmes to develop their leaders.[4] - [5]"
If Common Purpose is as dubious as billed, we really are all in trouble.
Dr Neil Bacon used to be CEO of the Doctors Only website. Sir Cyril Chantler is on the board of the Doctors Only website. So there is a common purpose between them :).
Bacon tells the world that he wants to move into Charity Work. Witch doctor kindly supplies this link. Anyhow, no doubt, Cyril Chantler will be discussing a thing or two about common purpose [ won't you Cyril]. Fresh from his prowling on the Doctors only website, he is really making a show of it now. Cyril used to haunt the hallowed halls of the General Medical Council in 2003. This is what he said at the General Medical Council
"Opening the Governance session Professor Sir Cyril Chantler said: ‘It is essential for our governance proposals to be open to detailed scrutiny by all our stakeholders. Medical regulation in this country is professionally led and in partnership with the public ... [for this] to be successful then it must have the support of both the public and the profession. It would be folly for us to proceed without doing our utmost to gain that support.’
So lets have the truth about Common Purpose then Sir Cyril? Let the stakeholders see what you and your General Medical Council partners for common purpose have been doing? Sir Cyril may wish to know that the GMC is less than transparent, concealing vital documents from hearings, concealing evidence based documents from everyone really.
They all have a common purpose of course.
So the interesting thing about attendance is this, much can be gleaned from meetings designed to ensure common purpose.
"The event was attended by Sir Muir Gray, chief knowledge officer of the NHS, Sir Cyril Chantler, chair of The King's Fund and Sir Donald Irvine, chair of Picker Europe, as well as PCT and acute trust directors".
Connecting against health with Neil Bacon eh. That is a cosy party really. Neil Bacon appears to be a Common Purpose Graduate. [2001-2002] Follow the second link down from here. Thankyou Witchdoctor for that intelligence. A diet chocolate bar minus tax for you.
We do worry considerably about the fact that Gromit has unwittingly signed up Diabetes UK to iwantgreatcare. Diabetes UK really should be advised to dissociate their services from Neil Bacon. While there is database sharing going on, we suggest that no one joins Diabetes UK. Perhaps Diabetes UK will extract themselves from the dubious Neil Bacon.
So, what is even more disturbing is the fact that two people with blatant associations with Common Purpose ran the Doctors only website. One still continues to run it. Companies House may have further links of common purpose. That won't be for us to say. It might be for Witchdoctor to dig deeper into the depths of the methodology on how doctors are sold out to the GMC in common purpose of course. Shall we mention Debra Shepherd? Perhaps we shouldn't mention her because her name seems to drive a axe of fear through the GMC and the Doctors Only website. News Source
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On 18th march 2009: Shahid Malik talked about the number of Moslems in the house of commons. (See top left video or here on youtube)
Now you are going to have be a very thick brick that is even thicker than a UAF supporter to not see the future of Our Country in this short video should the British National Party not prevail. [...]
[...] Following EDIT by JohnOfGwent
GA asked me to insert a point I raised in a comment below into the main body of the article, so here you go. I was listening to this video and I was about to say something like "well, two can play that game, here's to the British National Party's first MP in 2010, and when people see they do the job they're paid to do, their numbers will double and quadruple too".
And then it hit me like a sledgehammer.
He Said 2009
Listen to his words again. Now I have no doubt the party spinmeisters will say this is just a bit of poetic licence, 1997, 2001, 2005, 2009 etc. And it may be.
But wait. This man is on this podium boasting about being a Minister of the Crown. Of having one constituency's non-indigenous ghetto vote him into Westminster from where he squirmed (and what else too, I wonder) his way to the seat of power. This is a man who knows things about which he is required to keep his own counsel.
And he just said in 2009/10 there will be eight moslem MP's. But listen again to how he said it. He paused, as if struck dumb, between "2009" and "2010". It was a parody of his boss in Prime Minister's Question Time fluffing his lines and saying "Depression" and then correcting himself after a noticeable hesitation. He says "In 2009 ..." and then he pauses as if realising he has revealed the greatest secret, before stuttering to correct himself by adding 2010.
Listen again and tell me I'm wrong. In fact I hope I am imagining it, because if I am not, it means two things. First, it means Gordon Brown knows the Tory Party grows stronger by the week but in their own words in today's 6:30 news their spokesperson was urging their party faithful on, saying the battle for the next election must be fought and won, victory will not be easy .... so they are not yet battle-ready. And maybe, just maybe, Gordon Brown is planning to strike now while they are unready, and maybe hold an Autumn Election in the hope of salvaging something - maybe even keeping his own seat. It would not be the first time such a move was made.
But if this is true there is a second and even more worrying problem. It means Malik is in on the best kept secret in Westminster - the date of the next election.
Why would that be ?
Well how about "so he can get out there and curry favour with his fellow believers to persuade them to get out there and vote for the only party that will keep them on their road to power" ...
Following Edit By Green Arrow
They may also hope that by calling an election, say in October 2009, that the British National Party War Chest is empty after fighting the European Elections and therefore unable to field a full slate of candidates. News Source
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In an act of political interference which is becoming a commonplace pattern whenever the Labour vote seems in danger of collapsing, clergy from Christian churches, Jewish rabbis and Muslim faith leaders have piled in to support Labour’s faltering campaign against the British National Party.
Churchmen from the city proudly stood shoulder-to-shoulder at Manchester Cathedral with the Labour leader of Manchester City Council, Sir Richard Leese, who once called BNP supporters “scum” in a local newspaper, and Labour Councillor Afzal Khan, a leading supporter of the “UAF” organisation.
The cathedral meeting followed a prediction by the Bishop of Manchester, the Rt. Rev Nigel McCulloch, that the credit crunch and job losses will lead to a growth in support for the British National Party.
McCulloch has apparently just realised that the economic downturn could create resentment by British workers who are condemned to the dole queue by Labour’s tidal wave of mass immigration.
Seemingly oblivious to their own declining moral influence, and their dwindling congregations as churches are converted into mosques up and down the country, the Christian leaders signed a statement which read: “Let’s beware of making certain groups in our society scapegoats in the current economic downturn. It is untrue - and only adds to the suffering.” The hypocrisy inherent in the statement, which obviously seeks to scapegoat supporters of the British National Party, also seems to have entirely eluded the churchmen.
Following the Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent fulsome endorsement of Islamic Sharia law, here is yet further proof that most leaders of today’s Church of England in particular, stand for nothing and believe in nothing, other than political opposition to the survival of the British way of life. To a bishop, it seems, “thou shalt not vote BNP” is now the eleventh and only important commandment.
More disturbingly, it appears from the media reports that not one of the “Christian” clergy who participated in the Labour love-in at Manchester cathedral had the common decency to utter a single word of condemnation of the Labour-UAF claw hammer attack on a BNP activist at Leigh last Friday. This is especially reprehensible in view of the role that the dehumanising rhetoric of establishment figures has played in promoting anti-BNP hysteria among some of the more violent Labour-UAF thugs.
Reacting to the clergy’s pro-Labour intervention, Manchester BNP organiser Derek Adams said: “It seems amazing - the church is supposed to give moral leadership, and Britain’s laws have been formed on that moral basis.”
“They’re fighting against the only party that stands up for Christian values. It’s no wonder people are leaving the church in droves.”
“They’re not giving any leadership. The clergy are meant to be giving moral guidance.”
“The churches are being turned into mosques and these so-called leaders are doing nothing about it.” News Source
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Police investigating allegations of corruption at Stoke-on-Trent City Council have questioned several councillors.
Up to four members of the council's 16-strong Labour group are believed to have been interviewed by detectives in the last 24 hours.
None of the councillors was arrested, and all of them agreed to be questioned.
The move follows the arrest of Labour elected mayor Mark Meredith on March 6 on suspicion of misconduct in public office and complicity in corruption in public office.
He was picked up exactly a week after Conservative councillor Roger Ibbs was arrested on suspicion of corruption in public office.
Both men have since been bailed until June, pending further enquiries.
The councillors who were spoken to are understood to have been questioned about the council's attempts to shut the splash pool at Dimensions Leisure Centre, in Burslem, last year.
Councillor Dave Conway, who was bitterly opposed to the closure and called on top officers to issue a public apology over the matter, is known to have been among those interviewed.
Labour group leader councillor Joy Garner confirmed she was also questioned but declined to comment in detail about the interview.
"If any of our members were asked to help the police with their inquiries it would be or duty to do so and we would be pleased to help," she said.
Burslem North councillor Jean Edwards is also expecting to be questioned. She said this morning: "All I can say is that I am going to be interviewed by the police, but I can not talk about the case.
"It is in the police's hands and they are calling a lot of councillors in."
A Labour Party source, who did not wish to be named, said: "The police questioned four of our members.
"They weren't arrested, but they were warned it would not be advisable to refuse to be interviewed. We've been told not to be interviewed unless there is a Labour Party lawyer present.
"The party is now going to be talking to the police about who else they want to question about this, to make sure they get proper legal representation."
The comments would suggest that detectives may need to speak to more members of the council's 16-strong Labour group.
The party announced last week that it was postponing its annual general meeting, and the election of the group's leader, because of the ongoing corruption inquiry.
Staffordshire Police refused to confirm or deny reports that the councillors had been questioned.
Stoke-on-Trent City Council also declined to comment. News Source
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A Precedent!
A head teacher today won more than £400,000