Archive 26
UkTabloid
The People's News Portal
Sunday 25th April 2010
And yet they house Asylum Seekers
before Native Brits anyway!
A British grandmother who returned home destitute after living in Spain for 23 years has complained after being barred from claiming benefits.
Lorraine Marsland, 52, says officials are classing her alongside asylum seekers even though she was born here and holds a British passport.
Since arriving in Britain in January with her grandson Dylan, she has been denied housing benefit, child benefit, and Jobseeker's Allowance.
Miss Marsland is now surviving on charitable handouts while living with Dylan, ten, in a room in a hostel provided by Havering Council in Harold Hill, Essex.
'The council sent me a letter which said I was classified as a person from abroad and I wasn't entitled to housing benefits,' she said.
'I looked up the law they quoted and it included asylum seekers. I was just stunned. I'm a British citizen, I've got a British passport, I've paid taxes. I feel like a refugee in my own country.
'I rang the Asylum Seekers Association to see if they could help me but they just laughed at me.'
Miss Marsland was born in Liverpool and worked as a croupier before leaving for Spain with her parents Jim and Margaret 23 years ago. Her father died 12 years ago while her mother died six years ago.
Miss Marsland inherited their two-bedroom maisonette in Torrevieja on the Costa Blanca.
She shared it with her daughter Lisa, 30, and grandsons Dylan and Bradley, four.
When she lost her job as a cook three years ago after developing anaemia she decided to sell the £100,000 maisonette to clear the debts she built up while off sick.
She then discovered that her parents had taken out a £35,000 mortgage against the property, which she couldn't afford to pay.
Miss Marsland said the combined cost of the mortgage and her debts meant the property was repossessed, leaving her family homeless.
They eventually decided to return to Britain, although Miss Marsland's daughter has remained in Spain because she needs a copy of her younger son's birth certificate to get him a passport.
Miss Marsland borrowed the air fare to return to the UK and then stayed with friends in Brentwood, Essex, before contacting the council. She has sold her jewellery to raise some money and receives food parcels. 'I've applied for about 40 jobs doing everything - cooking, cleaning, ironing - but I've not had any luck,' she said.
The letter from Havering Council said Miss Marsland was 'ineligible for assistance' under sections in the 1996 Housing Act, which relate to 'persons from abroad' and ' asylum seekers and their dependants'.
A council spokesman said: 'She is not eligible because she is not habitually resident in the UK. It is nothing to do with being an asylum seeker - she has not claimed asylum.
'It is a very complicated case and we are working with her, helping her to look for employment.'
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A Top-secret US unmanned drone used to locate Al Qaeda and Taliban hideouts in Pakistan and Afghanistan could soon be patrolling over British cities to search for hidden terror cells.
The controversial move would allow MI5 and GCHQ, the Government's eavesdropping centre, to step up surveillance operations over the UK. Until now, the £23million Global Hawk aircraft has not been available for foreign sale.
However, US policy has been quietly changed and Britain is now negotiating to buy the drones. America is keen to supply them for British patrols after a string of terror plots threatening the US and its citizens.
These include the attempt in 2006 to detonate liquid bombs on aircraft flying to American cities from the UK. It is not known how many drones the UK wants from manufacturer Northrop Grumman, but earlier this year a senior Ministry of Defence procurement official visited the Pentagon to begin negotiations. Continued
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Deceiving the Public Now and will deceive the public if a hung Parliament occurs!
They have been accused of dressing up their policies – but now the Lib Dems have been caught dressing up as nurses.
Election leaflets by the Liberal Democrats show a candidate speaking to a 'nurse' to illustrate the party’s concern for health system.
But the party was caught out when it emerged that the woman concerned was a paid Liberal Democrat employee and was not a medical professional.
Sian Cliff worked for the disgraced Lib Dem Assembly Member, Mick Bates, who is ironically awaiting a court trial after being charged with assaulting paramedics.
The Lib Dems' impersonation of a nurse undermines Nick Clegg's bid to pitch the Lib Dems as the 'honest' party.
The leaflet had promoted Cardiff North candidate John Dixon, and showed him speaking to the ‘nurse’.
Jonathan Morgan, the Tory Assembly Member for Cardiff North said: ‘They should apologise to my constituents and to the nurses working in Cardiff who will be astonished at this behaviour.
‘It is appalling that the Lib Dems in Cardiff North would seek to deliberately mislead my constituents by using a picture of their candidate talking to a nurse, when I know she is not a nurse and has never been a nurse.’
A spokesman for the Liberal Democrats defended the image: ‘The photo in the leaflet was designed to be illustrative to help us highlight the party's commitment to improving the NHS and we didn't intend to cause offence to any health professional.
‘Our candidate in Cardiff North has a strong record of improving health and social care in the community.’
A Welsh Labour spokesman added: ‘Its one thing pretending your leader could be Prime Minister, quite another having your staff pretend to work for the NHS.
‘Every picture tells a story, and this picture says you can't trust a Lib Dem.’
One Westminster source said: ‘The Lib Dems are the only party not to say they will protect spending in the NHS.
‘It is little wonder they could not get a real medical professional to pose for them’.
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Makers of the Swiss Army knife have warned owners that they risk prosecution if they are found carrying one.
It follows a case in Britain of a man hauled before a court for keeping a penknife in his car.
Generations of people, including campers, sailors, ramblers and farmers, have used the small, practical knives since they were introduced in the 19th century.
But manufacturer Wenger warned yesterday that anyone found carrying one could be prosecuted.
The company spoke out after retired engineer Rodney Knowles, 61, found himself with a criminal record for having a Swiss Army-style knife in his car’s glove compartment.
Following legal advice, Mr Knowles admitted possessing an offensive weapon. But he condemned the law as “stupid”.
Wenger, which has supplied knives to the Swiss Army since the late 1800s, has now warned that anyone carrying a fixed-blade knife in public needs to have a good reason.
Spokesman Garry Woodhouse said: “Some of our knives have a locking blade and the law requires you to have a good reason for carrying one, be it work or an outdoor pursuit.
“We live in troubled times where there is a serious problem in some of our towns and cities with youths illegally carrying knives for personal defence or to get respect.
“But it’s important to remember that knives are still an absolutely vital object that almost everyone uses every day, whether in the kitchen, at the dinner table, at work or during outdoor activities. We would say to our customers who have these products to consider when and where they are carrying it and if they really need to have it in their pocket.”
He added: “People should be aware that, strange as it may seem, your car is still defined as a public place if parked on a public street.”
Mr Knowles, a grandfather-of-four from Newton Abbot, Devon, was charged after police stopped him in his car in February. The keen caravanner used the multi-function knife for picnics during camping trips in the countryside with his wife.
Police discovered it alongside a torch, maps and a first aid kit when they searched Mr Knowles’s car after he had passed a roadside breath test.
The full-time carer assured officers he used it on holidays and to cut up fruit for his wife Pat, 64, who suffers from Huntington’s disease.
He was given a conditional discharge and ordered to pay £40 costs by magistrates at Torquay, Devon, who also confiscated the knife.
Speaking after the hearing, Mr Knowles said: “It’s a stupid law.
“The tool was in my glove box in a pouch along with a torch, first aid kit and waterproofs.” He added: “Now I have a criminal record for the first time in my life.”
Devon and Cornwall police said officers had concerns there was a “potential danger”.
The case marked another blow for the trusty penknife, coming in the wake of advice to Scouts that they should not take them on camping trips because of fears of an epidemic in knife crime.
The Swiss Army knife was invented in the 1800s and quickly became indispensable to Switzerland’s military forces.
Wenger has been owned by Victorinox since 2005. The company produces 50,000 knives a day.
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British taxpayers’ money is poised to join a multi-billion pound bail-out of Greece after the debt-ridden nation formally asked for an international loan deal to be activated.
After figures showing its finances were in even bigger trouble than thought, Greece said it would have to take up a pledge of help from the international community.
On the table is up to £26billion offered by fellow eurozone countries, who do not include Britain.
But UK money is technically at stake if Greece also takes up an offer of as much as £13billion from the International Monetary Fund, to which Britain routinely contributes.
Greece had been refusing to take up the eurozone-IMF loan offer, insisting it could finance its own debt on world markets.
Other EU countries had also hoped the bail-out would not be needed and that the offer itself would calm market fears about the euro and help Greece to get its house in order.
But with confidence in its economic reform programme slipping, and loan interest rates to Greece climbing, aid from the eurozone and IMF became an offer Athens could no longer refuse.
EU governments will now formally consider its request for help before the eurozone states and, separately, the IMF, make a decision.
Chancellor Alistair Darling said it was “absolutely imperative’’ that a deal was struck as soon as possible because the case had a “huge bearing on people’s general confidence’’ in the abilities of international institutions.
He also insisted Britain would not go the same way as Greece, which was a “much, much smaller economy’’ than most in Europe and had problems “not least in actually knowing what is going on with their own statistics”.
The international deal aims to ease the Greek burden by offering loans at five per cent for three years, instead of the commercial market rate of 7.5 per cent or more.
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Families are facing a nightmare future of recycling confusion.
In a regime set to spread across the country, residents are being forced to juggle an astonishing nine separate bins.
There has already been a storm of protest with warnings that the scheme is too complex and homes simply don't have the space to deal with the myriad bins, bags and boxes.
The containers include a silver slopbucket for food waste, which is then tipped in to a larger, green outdoor food bin, a pink bag for plastic bottles, a green bag for cardboard, and a white bag for clothing and textiles.
Paper and magazines go in blue bags, garden waste in a wheelie bin with a brown lid, while glass, foil, tins and empty aerosols should go in a blue box, with a grey wheelie bin for non-recyclable waste.
The strict regulations have been introduced as councils come under growing pressure to cut the amount of household rubbish they send to landfill.
However, they go far beyond anything previously expected from householders and families.
Retired teacher Sylvia Butler is already being forced to follow the new rules.
She said: 'I'm all for recycling and used to help educate the kids about it during my geography classes but expecting us to cope with nine different bins and bags is asking too much.'
Pressure on councils to enforce recycling schemes includes rising taxes on everything they send to landfill and the threat of European Union fines if they fail to hit EU targets from 2013 onwards.
Compulsory recycling is commonly enforced by bin police who can impose £100 on-the-spot fines for breaches like overfilled wheelie bins, extra rubbish left out, or bins put out at the wrong time.
If people do not pay the fines, they can be taken to court, where they face increased penalties of £1,000 and criminal records.
Officials in Newcastle-under-Lyme in North Staffordshire anticipated trouble when they introduced the nine-bin system last month.
They had to publish step-by-step instructions on how to fold down a cardboard box so that it fits into the green bag.
The council also put a film on its web-site in which a recycling officer demonstrates how to put a tenth container - a biodegradable liner - into the slopbucket.
Mrs Butler, 58, who is secretary of her local residents' association in Newcastle and a former councillor, said the terrace homes in her street had no gardens, yet were expected to accommodate bulky bins for garden waste.
Mrs Butler, who lives with husband Nick, 59, a retired lab worker, said: 'I have had to take my brown bin down to my allotment - there simply isn't room in my back yard to house it.'
Under the previous recycling system in the borough, householders had to juggle with the five containers that have become common in compulsory recycling and fortnightly collection schemes throughout the country.
The new system was introduced by the local council to help boost recycling rates from 26 per cent in 2008 to a target of 50 per cent by 2015.
It means only food waste is now taken each week. All other rubbish has to be stored for a fortnight before it is collected.
Mrs Butler said that whereas previously, only one wagon would collect their recycling, now up to three different lorries and crews do the job.
Samantha Dudley, 34, an office administrator from Newcastle, said recycling bags and their contents blowing in the street were a 'constant problem'.
She said: 'This scheme is supposed to increase recycling but the irony is it is creating more rubbish.
'We are on high ground and although you can tie the plastic bags up, the ones full of plastic bottles simply blow away up the street - even when they are full - if they are not weighed down.'
She added: 'I'm used to organising things with two children but even I find juggling nine different recycling bags and bins difficult. I dread to think how elderly people get on.'
Around half the country now has fortnightly collection systems imposed by town halls that prefer to compel their residents to carry out complex recycling than either organise recycling themselves in waste plants or absorb the cost of landfill taxes.
A report for the Environment Department last week revealed that the burning of household rubbish by those trying to evade recycling rules has now become the greatest source of highly poisonous and cancer-causing dioxins in the environment.
Binmen also frequently refuse to take rubbish containers they view as contaminated. Last week in Andover in Hampshire dustmen refused to take away a bin they said was contaminated with a handful of fruit pips.
A spokesman for Newcastle-under-Lyme council, which is ruled by a coalition of Tories and Liberal Democrats, said: 'If residents report litter problems to us our crews will pick it up that day.'
Some Tory-controlled authorities have been among the cheerleaders for compulsory recycling and fortnightly collections despite criticism from their own party's shadow ministers who have accused Labour of forcing councils to behave like 'bin bullies'.
A number of Tory councils are expected to continue to be among the front-runners in enforcing recycling.
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Yesterday he was at it again. Touring Newcastle, Nick Clegg - who, as we now know, was a keen childhood actor - told students he was: 'the only one of the three leaders who actually comes from one of our great cities in the North.'
So just how true is that statement? In fact, the Lib Dem leader was brought up in affluent comfort in the Home Counties.
But to understand just how wealthy his background is, we need to cut to South-West France, and a hill overlooking the hamlet of Curac where an imposing ten-bedroom chateau stands.
The house is approached by a long, straight drive bordered by poplar trees which lead up to two sets of iron gates. Inside is an outdoor swimming pool, four-car garage and spacious outbuildings.
By any reckoning it is an impressive pile and one that, were it in England, would undoubtedly fall foul of the Lib Dem's proposed mansion tax on properties worth more than £2million.
It is possible that Clegg actually dreamt up the tax while in Curac, maybe while splashing about in the pool or strolling through its gardens.
After all, it is his parents' house and one that he and his family often visit.
'It's an idyllic spot, and the Cleggs have made it their home from home,' said a near neighbour, who often bumps into the politician and his Spanish wife Miriam, a successful London lawyer whose annual earnings run into the high six figures, when they are there.
'They come down with their children and always look very relaxed and happy.'
Not a bad place for a summer break. And come the winter there is another alternative. Clegg's parents also own a 20-room skiing chalet in the Swiss Alps.
Most people can only dream of such luxury. For Clegg, it is something he has grown up with. And no doubt that is the reason that he is so desperate to portray himself as an Ordinary Joe.
In the first election debate, he repeatedly referred to his 'own city of Sheffield.'
It may be his constituency but Clegg, whose main home is a £1.5million property in Putney, South-West London, is not a product of it. Anything but.
The third of four children, he in fact enjoyed an idyllic childhood in rural Buckinghamshire.
His father, also called Nicholas, is a banker who is still a chairman of the United Trust Bank, which specialises in financing property developers.
Clegg senior was also co-chairman of Daiwa Europe Ltd; and chairman of Daiwa Europe Bank plc - where he worked with former chancellor and Tory heavyweight Ken Clarke.
Clarke remembers Clegg senior and is clear about his political allegiance.
'He was a Tory, I think, quite definitely,' Clarke recalled. 'It would have been better if Nick Clegg had stuck with the political principles and wisdom of his father.'
Clegg, as is often the case, remembers things quite differently.
He would have us believe that he has no idea as to his mother and father's political orientation. 'I genuinely have never asked my parents how they vote,' he has said.
He also insists that while his father was, indeed, a banker, he was the right sort of banker and in no way responsible for bringing the economy to its knees.
Clegg describes him as a 'radical' who is far more incensed by the behaviour of today's bankers than his son.
Further, Clegg has cleverly used his family's foreign bloodline to portray it as being essentially classless. In fact, in terms of blue blood and privilege it gives David Cameron's background a run for its money.
Clegg senior's parents, who married in 1932, were Hugh Anthony Clegg, a long-time editor of the British Medical Journal, and Kira Engelhardt.
Kira was in fact Baroness Kira von Engelhardt, whose mother, Alexandra Moullen, was the daughter of the former Attorney General of the Imperial Russian senate, Ignaty Zakrevsky.
(Last week, following Clegg's performance in the first TV debate, one Russian newspaper proclaimed: 'Russian aristocrat wants to be British premier').
Clegg’s mother, Hermance van den Wall Bake, is Dutch. Her father was a close friend of the country's royal family and president of the Dutch banking giant ABN.
In 1956, Hermance travelled to England, where she met and later married Clegg senior.
Their foreign roots aside, it is clear that Clegg's parents were keen to give their children the most traditional of English upbringings.
Between the age of seven and 13, Clegg attended the exclusive Caldicott prep school in Buckinghamshire, where boarding fees now are £19,000 a year.
Clegg has claimed that he found the school 'stiflingly conventional' yet he was made Head Prefect in his final year.
From there, Clegg went to Westminster School. While some have argued that as an institution it is in some way fundamentally different to Eton College - Cameron's school - its fees, its history and its elitist traditions are very much of a kind.
Fellow pupils included Michael Sherwood, now co-CEO of Goldman Sachs Europe, Toby Rowland, son of Tiny Rowland, Garth Weston, one of the heirs to the giant Associated British Foods, and Mark Sainsbury, from the J. Sainsbury dynasty. (Clegg's attempt to portray it as an ordinary school is worth repeating. 'It was an urban environment, walking those streets between classrooms,' he observed).
Clegg is remembered by his peers and teachers as an academically bright pupil. Richard Stokes taught him German and tennis between the age of 14 and 18. 'I taught German through music and poetry,' he recalled.
'He was amazingly receptive. We used to go to recitals: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the greatest singer of German song ever. He was absolutely passionate about it.'
By all accounts Clegg was a model student and it is perhaps a desperation to seem less so that explains the way he appears to have embellished the sole incident of teenage rebellion in which he was involved.
He has told how as a 16-year-old he set fire to two greenhouses of cacti belonging to a professor in a drunken prank during a school exchange to Munich.
'We (he and a fellow pupil) wandered around the garden and found two greenhouses, and decided to go inside,' he said.
'It was an accident. One of us had a lighter and turned it on, and this place was jamful of furry, fuzzy cacti, and the flame nicked one of them and up it went. The effect was a beautiful glowing halo of fire, and we obviously wanted to repeat it.'
He then claimed that they later discovered the cacti were part of Germany's premier collection and worth a lot of money.
Clegg does not recount how he was caught, but recalls that his teacher had 'called the place I was staying and a series of expletives tumbled out of his usually mild mouth, and I knew I was in trouble'.
But is the story true? The Daily Mail has tried in vain to find anyone in Germany who remembers the famous cactus firestarter of 1983.
Mr Stokes, the teacher in question, also puts a different slant on the story. 'I didn't give him a severe dressing down,' he said.
'There was absolutely no fire at all, it is simply untrue to say otherwise. He singed four or five, that was all. '
It is not the only instance when Clegg has tried to lay claim to a laddish past.
In an interview with Piers Morgan he famously boasted that he had bedded as many as 30 women before meeting his wife.
But those who know Clegg say he was 'simply not like that'.
Indeed, the Mail has managed to track down only one of his previous girlfriends - a member of a wealthy political, artistic and aristocratic dynasty who he met at public school.
Her name is Corisande Guest-Albert and her brother, Justin, was in the same house as him at Westminster.
It is understood that she was Clegg's first serious girlfriend and that they were still together when he went to Robinson College, Cambridge to read archaeology and anthropology.
Pippa Harris, an old friend from those days, says that when she heard talk of Clegg's 30 conquests she laughed out loud.
'"In your dreams, Nick," we thought', she said.
While at Cambridge, Clegg insists that he was not interested in student politics, recounting a visit to the Cambridge Union where he was confronted by Tory girls in pearls 'braying at each other'.
Again, others recall it slightly differently.
Tory MP Greg Hands, who was in the year above Clegg and in the same college, says that the Lib Dem leader was in fact a paid up member of Cambridge University's Conservative Association.
He has produced documentary evidence to back up that assertion. Continued
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Signs that the Liberal Democrats' new-found popularity may be fading emerged as a poll showed the party slipping back into third place.
An Ipsos Mori survey for the News of the World put the Lib Dems on just 23% - down nine points on a similar poll on Monday - behind Labour on 30% (up two) and the Conservatives on 36% (up four).
It suggests "Cleggmania" may be on the wane after both David Cameron and Gordon Brown put in much-improved performances in Thursday night's second televised leaders' debate.
But three other polls suggested the surge which followed Nick Clegg's runaway victory in the first debate is not receding completely.
A OnePoll survey for Sunday's People newspaper puts the Lib Dems neck-and-neck with the Conservatives on 32%, with Labour trailing on 23%.
The Tories were up five points on a similar poll in the paper last weekend, Lib Dems down one and Labour unchanged.
And a ComRes poll for The Independent on Sunday and Sunday Mirror shows the three-horse race for Downing Street tightening.
The Tories remain in the lead on 34% - down one point on a similar survey on Wednesday - with the Lib Dems in second place on 29% (up two) and Labour on 28% (up three).
Meanwhile, an ICM survey for the Sunday Telegraph put Tories on 35%, Lib Dems on 31% and Labour on 26%.
All of the polls suggest the country is on course for a hung Parliament on May 7.
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Hundreds of Thousands of ‘Asylum Seekers’ Remain Permanently in Britain Due to the Labour/Tory Party
Despite the Tweedledee and Tweedledum parties each claiming to be ‘tough’ on immigration, in actuality, between the two, they have granted amnesty to hundreds and thousands of so-called asylum seekers.
The Tories would have the gullible believe that they have clean hands where immigration is concerned and that the present crisis is largely due to Labour’s lack of control, yet it was former Tory leader Michael Howard who, when home secretary, rewarded thousands of ‘asylum seekers’ with residential status.
Howard, whose family originates from Eastern Europe, quietly increased the number of ‘asylum seekers’ granted exceptional leave to remain — from 2,000 in 1991, to 14,000 in 1993.
Later, in 1996, he once again demonstrated Tory duplicity by giving permission for thousands of overseas students and marriage applicants to remain in Britain.
Boris Johnson, the Tory mayor of London, is alleged to want a change in the current residence rule so as to confer a right of residence to all ‘asylum seekers’ who can establish that they have been in the country for at least five years.
Furthermore, it was the Tories who amended immigration and asylum legislation to give failed ‘asylum seekers’ the legal right to remain in Britain pending appeal against removal — legislation at the very root of the asylum-seeker scandal.
As for Labour, it is public knowledge that they have, since being elected to office in 1997, deliberately facilitated mass immigration in a cynical bid to import Labour voters, a covert policy that defecates on the sacrifice of all those Britons who gave their lives in the last war to defend us from foreign invasion and colonisation.
Yet it was ‘former’ Communist Jack Straw, the son of an Eastern European immigrant, who whilst insisting that there was no question of an amnesty, gave the green light for some 30,000 failed ‘asylum seekers’ to be allowed to stay in Britain.
This was every bit as bad a day for this country as it clearly was a good one for Labour’s crumbling electoral base.
Not to be outdone, Labour home secretary and former leader of “Looney Left” Sheffield Council, David Blunkett, is on record as giving permission for 15,000 ‘asylum seeker’ families to remain in 2003.
Since then experts estimate that the Labour regime has given residential status to around 160,000 illegal migrants, many of whom can reasonably be considered as natural Labour “welfare-state” Party supporters.
The British National Party says that our nation’s asylum policy should be in line with international law. This means that people have the right to seek asylum in the first neighbouring safe country to the one they are fleeing.
People who have crossed 20 safe countries to reach Britain are acting in contravention of asylum rules. The BNP argues that there are, therefore, no legal asylum seekers in Britain.
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- Deputy Director General Mark Byford took plane to Manchester for the Open golf... three hours by train
- Director General Mark Thompson flew to Newcastle for Tory drinks party... and Glasgow for concert
Its viewers are frequently subjected to warnings about climate change. Yet the BBC has spent nearly £5million on tens of thousands of short-haul flights across Britain for its executives, staff and guests.
At a time when programmes regularly highlight the environmental impact of air travel, licence-fee payers have funded more than 68,000 internal trips over the past two years – an average of nearly 100 flights a day.
The BBC’s daily carbon footprint generated by the UK air trips is the equivalent of that produced by the average person in a year, say environmental experts.
Among the users of domestic flights was the BBC’s Deputy Director-General Mark Byford, who flew from Southampton to Edinburgh to watch an England-Scotland rugby match.
Mr Byford, who earns £471,000 a year, also took a flight from London to Manchester to attend the Open golf championship. The same journey would have taken three hours by train.
BBC Director-General Mark Thompson travelled on 16 internal flights. These included a flight to Newcastle from London to attend a Conservative Party reception, and a flight from London to Glasgow to attend a concert. The huge bill for internal flights came to light following a Freedom of Information request.
Critics are bound to question how the Corporation can justify spending such a large sum on short flights – especially in the light of the BBC’s most recent corporate responsibility report, which says: ‘Large organisations like the BBC are under increasing pressure to reduce environmental impacts, use resources more efficiently, and manage their operations in a more sustainable way. We are making progress in all of these areas. Continued
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The first town in Britain to scrap fixed speed cameras has seen no increase in accidents, it was revealed yesterday.
But the number of motorists prosecuted for speeding there dropped by more than 40 per cent.
Swindon switched off its cameras over claims they were a ' blatant tax on the motorist' which did nothing to improve safety.
Yesterday, supporters of the move hailed the figures as proof they were right.
Now the Conservative-run council has urged other authorities to follow suit, saying the money can be better spent on other measures to cut casualties.
In the six months after the fixed cameras were switched off at the end of July, nine accidents were recorded - the same number as in the equivalent period the year before.
Between August last year and January, there were seven minor injury accidents and two serious ones - neither fatal - at the four sites monitored by the cameras.
In the six months from August 2008 there were eight minor accidents and one fatal.
A comparison of speeding fines issued over the two six-month periods reveals a drop of 42 per cent - from 3,681 to 2,120.
Of the 2008-09 total, 1,393 motorists were caught by the fixed cameras that have now been deactivated - the rest by mobile cameras, which remain in use.
The fall was revealed in figures released under the Freedom of Information Act. It means the Government - which receives income from the fixed cameras - has lost revenue of around £80,000.
Yesterday, Swindon Council leader Roderick Bluh said: 'Fixed speed cameras are more about fund-raising than road safety. These figures completely vindicate our position.'
The council admits that with only four fixed camera sites, the figures could be 'a blip', but Mr Bluh insisted the move was for the good of local motorists.
Opposition councillors, however, say it has turned the town into a magnet for 'boy racers'.
Labour councillor Derique Montaut said: 'I know the cameras are very unpopular with some individuals, but removing them hasn't reduced speed levels, it's increased speed levels.'
The Conservatives have pledged in their manifesto to end support for more fixed cameras in favour of other ways of cutting road casualties, such as testing drivers for illegal drugs.
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Unelected prime ministers would be forced to hold a general election within six months of taking office, under proposals being announced by David Cameron.
The Conservative leader will promise to legislate to prevent a repeat of Gordon Brown's three-year tenure at 10 Downing Street before he had to face the ballot box.
Speaking on a campaign visit to Essex, the Tory leader will also announce a plan to provide political parties with taxpayers' money to fund "postal primaries" in which voters will be able to choose their candidates for general elections.
The scheme would mean a £1.6 million cut in the annual budget of democratic watchdog the Electoral Commission.
Mr Cameron's announcements come as Mr Brown continues Labour's push for re-election with a public services rally in the East Midlands, while Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg takes a day off the campaign trail to be with his three sons, who returned to the UK last night after being stranded in Spain due to the volcanic ash cloud.
The Tory leader will also take a break from electioneering later in the day to attend his younger sister Clare's wedding to market research executive Jeremy Fawcus at a private ceremony in southern England. It was Clare, 38, who introduced Mr Cameron to his future wife Samantha when they went on holiday together to Italy.
Three of the last five Prime Ministers - Mr Brown, John Major and James Callaghan - inherited power in the middle of a parliamentary term, rather than winning it in a general election. Of those, only Mr Major has so far gone on to secure his own popular mandate at the ballot box, by winning the election of 1992.
Under Mr Cameron's plans, a Prime Minister who takes office after the death, resignation or overthrow of his or her predecessor will be forced to face the electorate within six months of taking over.
Tories would amend the Septennial Act 1715 - which requires elections to be held at least every five years - to ensure that Parliament is automatically dissolved six months after a change of Prime Minister for any other reason than a general election. Continued
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Labour's open-border policy was laid bare last night after an illegal immigrant bag snatcher who was once given £3,000 of taxpayers’ money was told he would be deported for an astonishing fourth time.
Hakim Benmakhlouf, who was described as a one-man crimewave, was behind bars last night for a violent assault on a police officer at Heathrow.
Isleworth Crown Court in west London yesterday heard how the jobless Algerian had flouted immigration rules. The 28-year-old, who has a string of convictions for stealing at hotels and airports, was given the £3,000 to leave the UK.
But he returned to Britain the very next day by Eurostar to continue his life of crime.
Benmakhlouf, who has no right to be in this country, was first thrown out in July 2007 after he was released early from a three-and-a-half year jail term for theft. As part of a voluntary repatriation package, he was given the cash handout.
He was arrested in April 2008. The following month at Southwark Crown Court, judge John price said: “The Government even gave you £3,000 to go back to Algeria. You did go back then you came back here.
“You should not be here, you are a danger to this society and you should be deported as soon as possible.”
Benmakhlouf was jailed for a further three years for theft but was released less than a year later and again flown home at taxpayers’ expense. This time he did not qualify for the £3,000 handout which is granted only once. He slipped back into the country, however, and was arrested and deported for a third time in January this year.
Yesterday Judge Andrew McDowall ruled that Benmakhlouf would be deported for a fourth time, after serving a six-month sentence for assault.
He said: “As you shouldn’t be in this country it seems there is little purpose in making your sentence particularly lengthy.”
There was outrage last night that the serial offender was repeatedly allowed back into the country to commit crime.
Tory home affairs spokesman Chris Grayling said: “It’s absurd that someone like this can continue to get away with abusing our border controls. We need a dedicated border police force to clamp down on this kind of abuse.”
UKIP Euro-MP Gerard Batten said: “This highlights the idiocy of a system that rewards criminality and encourages bad behaviour. No wonder people across the third world are risking their lives to get here.”
Mark Wallace, of campaign group the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “This man is walking proof that our border controls are an international joke.
“We argued at the time that if you pay people to leave they will just come back in the hope of getting more money, and that seems to be exactly what he is doing.” Benmakhlouf enjoyed a lavish lifestyle with a home in fashionable St John’s Wood, north London, and a collection of designer clothes.
He was one of more than 23,000 illegal immigrants who were flown home for free and given thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money to stay there.
Described by one detective as “the most skilful bag thief I have ever seen”, he targeted tourists at airports and hotels as well as trains and attractions such as Madame Tussauds.
Prosecutor Gavin Kirkpatrick said he had a history of theft going back over 10 years.
“He was deported last on January 23, 2010. It is unknown when he managed to return to this country.”
Judge McDowall warned Benmakhlouf he faced a long jail term if he ever came back to Britain. He said: “I am prepared to operate on the assumption you are not planning to come back. If you are back again you can expect to receive a significantly longer sentence by way of direct punishment to make sure the message gets home.”
Last night a UK Border Agency spokesman said: “We will seek to remove this individual as soon as the judicial process is concluded.”
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of the News this Week
Gordon Brown’s lies on immigration were exposed again yesterday after it emerged that frontline officers who have arrested 1,000 illegal immigrants in a year are to be axed. Immigration chiefs had claimed that vital staff, with powers to arrest illegal immigrants working without permits, would not be affected in a devastating round of redundancies affecting up to a third of employees.
Four of the nation's most senior policemen were rescued by the Royal Navy ahead of stranded tourists because they 'had to get back to their desks'. Sir Hugh Orde, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, Peter Fahy, Greater Manchester chief constable, Martin Richards, Sussex chief constable, and Martin Baker, Dorset chief constable, all secured places on HMS Albion.
British National Party leader Nick Griffin launched the party's election manifesto today, declaring the document was a 'serious piece of political kit'. The 90-page manifesto, entitled Democracy, Freedom, Culture And Identity, was unveiled in Stoke-on-Trent, where protesters staged a noisy demonstration against the right-wing party.
Nick Clegg struggled to defend allowing asylum-seekers to join the workforce when he came under attack from a panel of first-time voters. With official figures showing 2.5 million out of work, they warned it would be unfair to law-abiding residents.
Despite the best efforts of the main political parties not to talk about it, there can be no denying that uncontrolled immigration is one of the most serious problems facing Britain today.
Boris Johnson has apparently contradicted Conservative policy by saying an amnesty for illegal immigrants should be considered. The Mayor of London was campaigning in Tower Hamlets when Tory candidate Tim Archer said he and the mayor were "at one" on the need for an amnesty.
The Lib Dem leader is in favour of mosques being able to broadcast calls to prayer from loudspeakers in towns and cities across Britain. He says the Islamic “muezzin” cry should be allowed to ring out just like Christian church bells.
Brown’s economic credibility lay in tatters last night after Britain’s borrowing surged to an all-time high of £152.8billion. The UK slumped another £23.5billion into the red in March, driving the country’s public-sector net debt to a record 62 per cent of gross domestic product.
Water bills could soar by 27 per cent above inflation over the next 20 years. The warning comes from Severn Trent, one of the country's biggest water suppliers, which said EU regulations and rising operating expenses will cost the industry billions.
Nearly half a million British Gas customers face a price shock when the cheap fixed deals end Nearly half a million British Gas customers face a price shock when cheap fixed deals which sheltered them from rocketing costs run out.
An energy crisis will plunge Britain into darkness in just SIX years' time, warn Government experts. They predict that power cuts will start by 2016 - THREE years earlier than previously thought.
Violent crime rose sharply in the past year, according to Labour's preferred recording method. Ministers consistently cite the British Crime Survey as they look to trumpet their record. But figures released yesterday showed there were 750 more violent attacks leading to injury every week last year compared with the year before.
Secret Liberal Democrat plans to funnel thousands of pounds of taxpayers money into election propaganda have torpedoed Nick Clegg’s claims to be the new Mr Clean of politics. Leaked documents reveal that party bosses sent their MPs two dossiers on how to milk the expenses system and use public cash for electioneering.
Nick Clegg has admitted taking expenses for business-class air travel while actually flying economy as a member of the European Parliament. The Liberal Democrat leader used the budget airline BMI Baby to fly between Brussels and the UK, but was paid what he admits was 'whopping' expenses based on the price of a business-class seat on a major airline.
Germany's state-owned rail company is to take over one of Britain's biggest train firms. Deutsche Bahn has agreed a £1.59billion deal to buy Arriva, in a move which marks the loss of yet another key element of Britain's manufacturing and infrastructure heritage to foreign ownership.
Britain's public borrowing has soared to record levels, according to official figures that underline Labour’s legacy of deficits and debt. The Government borrowed £163.4billion in the last financial year ending in March, to fund unprecedented public spending amid tumbling tax receipts.
Buyers of new homes face a £14,000 VAT levy under plans drawn up by the Liberal Democrats. The policy – which would see a tax of between five and seven per cent added to the average £199,166 cost of buying a new-build property – came under attack yesterday.
Harriet Harman yesterday reignited Labour’s class war against David Cameron by accusing him of having “a sense of being born to rule”. In her most personal attack yet on the Conservative leader, she branded him “arrogant”, adding: “I’ve always thought... he has a sense of being born to rule, entitlement, it’s like ‘my right to be in Downing Street’, which I find quite objectionable.”
Over-stretched maternity units are turning away hundreds of women, the Tories revealed yesterday. More than two a day were last year told there was no bed for them to give birth in their local hospital.
Alistair Darling, George Osborne and Vince Cable have clashed over whether a hung parliament could be harmful for the UK economy. Mr Osborne said fellow Tory Ken Clarke was right to warn that it could result in the International Monetary Fund having to step in to bail out the UK.
The news that an estimated 600,000 public sector jobs will be cut after the election has highlighted the fact that all three Westminster parties would prefer to spend your tax money on wars, EU membership and foreign aid rather than keeping Britons in work.
Today's unemployment figures show that Labour’s policies just aren't working. Unemployment is at a 16 year high, whilst the number of jobs continues to fall. There couldn't be a worse time to impose a new jobs tax, which will threaten the recovery and cost tens of thousands of jobs.
Indeed! Why are our troops there too? And we don't want the leftist explanation / Spin / Deceit about 'so called democracy' either! (Ed) German soldiers are wearing their hearts on their sleeves - in the form of a badge that protests their country's involvement in the war in Afghanistan.
Greece may need as much as £70billion to avoid defaulting on its debt, the governor of the German Central Bank has warned. The grim prediction was made by Axel Weber, who is also a governing council member of the European Central Bank, as the interest rate that the country borrows at hit new heights yesterday.
Three BBC executives spent an extraordinary £137 a day on taxis - to allow them to make phone calls in private. The bosses, who all earn six-figure salaries, racked up more than £12,000 in cab claims in just three months.
Frontline health services are being slashed across the country in a desperate battle to save up to £20billion over the next four years, say GPs. Blood tests, care for the terminally ill and psychiatric treatment have been cut in many areas, according to a survey of family doctors.
EU Meddling: One night doctor to look after 400 hospital patients as 48-hour working week cuts cover
Doctors are looking after up to 400 patients a night on their own due to the lack of cover in hospitals, a study has found. Experts warned last night that this was a 'disaster waiting to happen'. The 48-hour maximum working week - introduced under EU law last August - is being blamed for insufficient staff cover, poorer training and greater sickness rates among junior doctors.
Climate sceptic wins landmark data victory ‘for price of a stamp’. Belfast ecologist forced to hand over tree-ring data describes order from information commission as a ’staggering injustice’
Al Gore's insistence that global warming is "settled science" has been used to defend claims humanity is on the edge of destroying the world. Now author Brian Sussman, whose book "Climategate" is being released Thursday – Earth Day – agrees it's "settled," as a scam.
Clegg was forced on to the defensive last night over his expenses and lobbying activities. The Lib Dem leader regularly claimed more than Gordon Brown and David Cameron and charged the taxpayer for three kitchen upgrades in six months.
The Lib Dem leader was utterly unequivocal in last week's televised debate. 'What I've supported all my adult life,' he declared, 'is a complete clean-up from top to toe in politics'. It sounded as plausible as his manner proved persuasive. Yet it is a line remarkable chiefly for its audacious dishonesty.
The Lib=Dems’ immigration and asylum policy faced fresh criticism yesterday after it emerged that leader Nick Clegg’s own council is already trying to relax controls. Sheffield City Council, run by the Lib Dems, has asked the Government for a change in rules to let asylum seekers work as soon as their application for refuge is received. Mr Clegg is an MP for Sheffield.
Nick Clegg's secret strategy to imitate David Cameron at the next TV election debate has been exposed, after an aide left the plan in a taxi. An embarrassing dossier compiled by chief party strategists which stresses that Mr Clegg must act more like the Tory leader was found in a cab just hours after the first debate last Thursday.
Nick Clegg, who publicly declared that he was an atheist, claims that Christian values are 'central' to Liberal Democrat policies. Praised for defying political convention when he admitted in 2007 that he was an atheist, Nick Clegg appears to have undergone a rapid conversion.
One of the many remarkable feats performed by Nick Clegg in last Thursday's leaders' debate was to escape the television studio with the public believing he is somehow tough on crime.
Oops! Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, who is being talked up by the Left as a combination of Barack Obama, Winston Churchill and Judy Garland, came a proper cropper yesterday morning. He was quizzed about his parliamentary expenses.
British citizens face being subjected to secret EU 'Big Brother' spying missions. Labour is supporting plans for a dramatic expansion in the powers available to fellow member states who accuse UK nationals of committing even the most minor crimes while visiting.
Thirteen years after Labour took office, nine out of 10 Britons living abroad believe they have a better quality of life than they would in the UK. Lured by higher wages and a better work-life balance, a staggering 92 per cent said the expat dream exceeded their expectations.
The Lib Dems' surge continues to gather momentum, transforming the nature of British politics. For the first time in more than a century, they are the front-runners in an election campaign, something that would have been unthinkable before Nick Clegg's assured performance in last week's historic TV debate.
A British National Party candidate hoping to win votes in Enfield North believes shaking up the benefits system and stopping immigration will go some way to tackling the problems facing Britain. Edmonton resident Tony Avery is due to be on the ballot paper on May 6, hoping to unseat Labour's Joan Ryan in the General Election.
When I saw the row about a Labour leaflet from Birmingham my first impression was: God, Labour have got an especially unattractive team running for election here. I know that politics is showbusiness for ugly people, but this bunch take the biscuit.
A Labour candidate is embroiled in a row with the Liberal Democrats after suggesting they would give convicted murderers and paedophiles the vote. Roger Godsiff, who is standing in Birmingham Hall Green, issued leaflets showing nursery worker Vanessa George, who was jailed for abusing children.
Immigration proved one of the most popular topics at an election hustings held by a leading pensioners' group yesterday. A panel of general election candidates from Ilford South - Mike Gapes, (Labour), Toby Boutle (Conservative) and Ilford North - Lee Scott (Conservative), Sonia Klein (Labour) and Alex Berhanu (LibDem), heard an audience member describe Redbridge as "bursting at the seams".
Independent think tank MigrationwatchUK has slammed the Liberal Democrats for “treating the public like fools” with their immigration policy and have pointed out that less than half of Lib Dem voters actually support their own party’s stance on that issue.
Labour and Tory-supported UAF storm troopers attacked an election hustings in Essex last night while their comrades in Blackpool threatened so much violence that police were forced to call a female British National Party candidate out of concerns for her safety.
A patient lost a testicle during an operation after the surgeon accidentally cut it off, the medical watchdog was told today. Dr Sulieman Al Hourani was only supposed to cut out a cyst on the patient's right testis, but instead he 'mistakenly' removed the whole testicle, the General Medical Council (GMC) heard.
A traffic warden faces the sack after his foul-mouthed rant at a motorcyclist was caught on video. The Westminster council parking attendant is seen shouting at Warren Djangoly and making obscene comments about his wife during a confrontation in the West End.
Chinese family planning authorities have detained 1,300 people to sterilise as part of a crackdown on parents who violate strict birth control rules. Authorities in Puning, a city in southern China's Guangdong province, have detained the men and women against their will in cramped offices, according to state media.
A man who admitted carrying out a sex attack after being mistaken for a taxi driver has been jailed for five years. Manzoor Hassan, 34, from Edinburgh's Tollcross area, was initially accused of attempted rape but pleaded guilty to abduction and indecent assault.
I HAVE watched the debate on the racial and religious division in Tower Hamlets. I am appalled after being politically active in the East End for 35 years now witnessing what we have come to. I hope this is a 'wake up' call.
Gordon Brown's attempt to turn the election agenda back to the economy appeared to backfire today after inflation rose higher than economists had forecast. Sky-high petrol prices sent annual inflation soaring to 3.4 per cent last month after a faster than expected rise in the cost in living.
Gordon Brown’s blundering over funding for regional quangos has landed the taxpayer with a £160million fine from the European bunion, the Conservatives said yesterday. The fines are over the handling of regeneration programmes since 1997.
A Conservative activist charged with trying to rig the voting system in the last general election has been campaigning with shadow cabinet ministers to help the party win a key marginal seat. Jamshed Khan resigned from the Conservative party after police launched an investigation into vote rigging, but is now back campaigning for the party in the Bradford West constituency.
Ministers are under mounting pressure to combat voting fraud at this year’s general election after evidence of continuing abuse emerged. The demand from the Electoral Commission coincides with its latest report, which shows that 48 cases of alleged electoral fraud were investigated by the police after the European and council elections last year.
Four Conservative party supporters from Bradford tried to rig the voting system in the run-up to a General Election in a plot to “harvest” postal votes, a court heard. Mohammed Sultan, Mohammed Rafiq, Reis Khan and Jamshed Khan sent off for postal voting applications under false names or had legitimate applications re-directed to them, Leeds Crown Court heard.
Two Liberal Democrat councillors from Lancashire have been jailed for trying to rig a local election. Manzur Hussain, 58, and Mozaquir Ali, 44, defrauded dozens of voters during the 2004 local government elections.
Beneath the veneer of an apparently democratic local election campaign the battle to control areas of Birmingham involved allegations of death threats, intimidation and bribery. In scenes more reminiscent of a gangster movie, party members used nefarious tactics to ensure a clean sweep of the six available seats in Aston and Bordesley Green, delivering a large and surprising swing towards Labour.
Call for vigilance in run-up to expected May polls Commission wary of close fights and new candidates This year's general election could be marred by more allegations of electoral fraud than ever before as intensely tight margins of victory give rise to a greater temptation for party members to bend the rules, the election watchdog warns today.
Hundreds of thousands of the new electors are immigrants who have been granted British citizenship or who poured in from Eastern Europe. Critics said the increase made the case for changes to the electoral rules allowing non-British citizens full voting rights.
The latest dirty campaign tactics adopted by Nigel Mills (Tory), communist Judy Mallaber MP (Labour) and Tom Snowdon (Lib Dem) have increased in the run-up to the General Election in Amber Valley, Derby according to the excellent Derby Patriot site.
A potential global water crisis in coming decades could cause UK food prices to 'skyrocket' and damage the economy, experts warned today. A report from three engineering groups predicts that a rising world population, growing demand for water and the impact of climate change will make water more scarce in future.
The amount of water used to produce food and goods imported by developed countries is worsening water shortages in the developing world, a report says. The report, focusing on the UK, says two-thirds of the water used to make UK imports is used outside its borders.
Labour was last night facing damaging claims that the public has been 'misled' for years over the true scale of violent crime. A leaked Home Office document reveals civil servants' fears that the British Crime Survey may have been undercounting the scale of violence against children and young adults.
As readers of the paper, this blog and viewers of Channel 4’s Dispatches will know, very disturbing things are going on at Tower Hamlets, the east London council which has fallen under the influence of an Islamic supremacist group, the Islamic Forum of Europe, based at the hardline East London Mosque.
The Left-wing Institute for Public Policy Research, a think-tank that gets large amounts of largesse courtesy of Johnny Taxpayer, has come to the conclusion – less than three weeks before the election – that people are voting for the BNP because they haven’t experienced enough immigration.
A quite bizarre report from the IPPR which attempts to prove that it is not immigration which tempts people to vote BNP, but a lack of “resilience”. This fatuous word, resilience, is used more and more by government and quangos and local councils, usually to transfer blame to ordinary people for the crimes of those in authority.
Welcome to Reality Check. Today I'm scrutinising Liberal Democrat plans for an amnesty for people who have come to Britain illegally. The Conservatives suggest it would actually make the problem worse - but is this true?
I see that the communist Billy Bragg, who these days looks older than his communist boss, Gerry "Unstable" Gable of Searchlight, is still claiming that Barking is his home town, when everyone knows that the only time he visits the place is when he wants to drum up a bit of self publicity to breath live into his rotting corpse of a musical career now that his writing career has failed. (Video Here)
Cameron drops attack on Labour to make 'plea from the heart' election broadcast from his back garden
David Cameron has dropped a political broadcast attacking Labour in order to make a personal plea for voters to avoid a hung parliament. The video, which was scheduled to be aired last night, has been replaced with a statement in which the Tory leader insists only he can deliver 'change'.
Nick Clegg was last night facing fresh scrutiny over his party’s environmental policies after unveiling plans to spend £3billion on “green jobs”. Nick Clegg leader was in Cardiff to reveal his ambitious blueprint for cutting pollution and saving energy.
The purveyors of the “man-made” global warming scam have been dealt another severe blow by the news that Britain and continental Europe could experience even more cold winters in the future — not because of the industrial activities of mankind, but due to low solar activity.
Since 1997, record levels of immigration have boosted our population by more than 2 million, accounting for half the total estimated rise in population of about 4 million. So is Britain getting full?
Jon Venables has been given a luxury prison cell fitted out with widescreen TV, video games and gym equipment, according to claims today. The killer of James Bulger has had his accommodation upgraded amid fears he is contemplating suicide.
A nurse was stabbed and mutilated to death in a frenzied knife attack after arguing with her jealous ex-boyfriend. Katie Cullen, 35, a senior hospital sister, was knifed repeatedly in the face and neck by asylum seeker Iman Ghaefelipour, 28.
A judge sparked outrage after ruling that an illegal immigrant sex monster jailed for preying on two teenage girls should be allowed to stay in Britain. Evil Zulfar Hussain, 48, was to be deported after spending almost three years behind bars for "shocking" attacks on two vulnerable teens.
A third runway at Heathrow airport will leave the UK £5billion worse off, according to a report from an independent think-tank. The £5billion includes £2.5billion of negative impacts on the local community around the west London airport, the report from the New Economics Foundation said.
The Government could be forced to seek advance approval for its budgets as part of controversial plans by the European Commission to drive stronger “economic governance” across Europe.
Disgraced former Tory MP Julie Kirkbride is cashing in on her taxpayer-funded second home by putting it up for rent at £925 a month. Miss Kirkbride, who stood down as an MP for Bromsgrove over the expenses scandal, claimed more than £80,000 in expenses for a three bedroom mansion flat in her Worcestershire constituency.
The English are the least patriotic people in Europe, a St George's Day poll found today. Their fear of being smeared as racist is greater than their enthusiasm for expressing their love of their country, it found.
A '40-year-old black man' who David Cameron quoted in this week's TV debate has criticised the Tory leader for getting details about him wrong. Neal Forde was quoted by Mr Cameron as being ashamed of Britain's 'out of control immigration system.'
A former Labour Minister has accused Gordon Brown of ‘Alice In Wonderland politics’ which have left Britain facing ‘destruction’ by an economic catastrophe in the summer.
Hundreds of millions of pounds promised for the terminally ill, disabled children and carers have been diverted elsewhere under Labour, charities and patient groups claimed yesterday. The 30 organisations, including the Alzheimer’s Society and The Patients Association, issued a joint manifesto pleading for the next government to keep promises made to the most vulnerable.
Gordon Brown today repeatedly refused to rule out the possibility of a coalition with the Liberal Democrats as Nick Clegg's party dramatically seized the lead in the Election campaign. A Mail on Sunday poll reveals Mr Clegg’s sparkling performance in last week's TV debate between the three party leaders has triggered a large rise in support for his party.
Gordon Brown risked an angry backlash over immigration yesterday by telling voters to get the problem in 'perspective'. The Prime Minister suggested that fears about the numbers coming into the country were unfounded as he repeated his controversial claims that net inward migration is falling.
More than 40,000 extra foreign students were allowed into the UK from just seven countries last year casting new doubt on the effectiveness of the Government's "tough" new visa system. Official Home Office figures show 100,000 student visas were granted in the academic year to September 2009 – an increase of almost 40,000 on the previous 12 months.
Britain's grasping MPs delivered a final pre-election hammer blow to taxpayers yesterday after it emerged the public will have to foot a £50million bill to top up their gold-plated pensions. The massive shortfall in Parliament’s pension pot must be paid immediately so that MPs can get hefty payouts once they retire.
Britain is emerging from the recession with one of the weakest economies in the industrialised world as a direct result of Gordon Brown's spending binges, according to a damning analysis. His handling of the nation's purse-strings has been attacked by a highly-respected economic think tank which condemned Labour for saddling the UK with too much debt and borrowing.
Cameron led a spirited Tory fightback yesterday as his party warned that a vote for the Liberal Democrats is a vote for a “European superstate”. In a strong signal to his rivals, the Conservative leader declined to follow Gordon Brown in admitting he had “lost” to Nick Clegg in the presentation stakes during the first leaders’ debate on TV.
A Potential global water shortage could send UK food prices soaring, experts warned yesterday. A rising world population, growing demand for water and the impact of climate change will make water scarce in a matter of decades, the study warns.
Britain is facing a chaotic return to work today with “no end in sight” to the Icelandic volcano’s eruptions. The ban on using UK airspace was extended again yesterday to at least 7 o’clock tonight, leaving up to a million Britons stranded abroad or struggling to get home.
Hundreds of teachers a year would be trained to study and teach Mandarin in primary schools if Labour is re-elected. Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, said that Mandarin lessons would become vital in coming years as Britain strengthened its links with China.
UKIP leader Lord Pearson is facing further questions over a controversial £80,000 donation given to his party by an unincorporated association which he also runs. Pearson admitted this month that the money came from Patrick Barbour, a former Tory donor, who gave £100,000 to the UKIP boss’s unincorporated association Global Britain.
If you were faced with by far the biggest bill of your life, would you not want to be confident that there was a very good reason why you should pay it? That is why we need to know just how far we can trust the science behind the official view that the world is threatened with catastrophe by global warming.
Aussie Skeptic Exposes Climate Data Fraud: 'Exposes 2 fatal flaws in UN IPCC's greenhouse gas theory
'IPCC incorrectly relies on the analogy that the Earth's atmosphere acts like a giant greenhouse, which is doesn't. Secondly, the study then points out that by their own admission, the IPCC admits to 'low' or 'very low' understanding of 80% of all factors impacting climate'
German state-owned Deutsche Bahn is about to buy the Arriva train and bus network in Britain, proving the Tory/Labour privatisation policy to be a shocking hoax which has seen Britain’s infrastructure pass into foreign ownership.
A few weeks back I reported that there were plans afoot to make the denial ogf global warming a criminal offence. I remember at the time people commenting that my reasoning might be a little “speculative” in this particular instance.
Britain is becoming a battleground for the notorious Bloods and Crips gangs that once brought fear to Los Angeles. Around a QUARTER of mobs in London now align themselves with the two crime networks.
A Student walked into his college armed with a baseball bat before launching unprovoked attacks against three teachers and a 16-yearold girl, a court heard. Waqar Ali, aged 18, caused “havoc” when he marched into Bolton Sixth Form College in Farnworth and began hurling abuse at teachers during lessons.
Masked thugs pistol-whipped a man and beat him with martial arts weapons before the gun was stuck in his mouth. The victim was battered unconscious in the frenzied attack – involving at least one gun and nunchucks - outside the Seahawk pub in Trafford.
Two thugs deliberately drove at an 80-year-old Leeds man and left him for dead after he refused their demands for cash. Police are hunting for the two "cowardly" men and the car which they reversed at high speed into the pensioner.
A Good Samaritan was stabbed in the leg after coming to the aid of a woman being robbed in Slough. The woman, in her late 20s, was withdrawing cash in Slough High Street when a man approached her from behind and put his hand around her face.
A man who sexually assaulted two women on board a train was chased down the tracks after forcing open the doors to escape. Concerned passengers raised the alarm with staff after the man inappropriately touched a 21-year-old woman while her boyfriend was in the toilet, and a 19-year-old as he sat opposite her and her boyfriend minutes later.
A Girls’ night out ended in terror when rapist Rasuljon Kuchkarov targeted a complete stranger as she tried to find a taxi in Bournemouth town centre. Kuchkarov, 22, from Uzbekistan, pounced after his victim spurned his advances in the early hours of July 12 last year.
Gordon Brown, recently criticised by the statistics watchdog for using misleading immigration statistics, made further inaccurate statements in the heat of Thursday night's debate. Here, the Mail examines the Prime Minister's claims.
Queen's University in Belfast has been told by the Information Commissioner to hand over 40 years of research data on tree rings, used for climate research. Douglas Keenan, from London, had asked for the information in 2007 under the Freedom of Information Act. Mr Keenan is well-known for his questioning of scientists who propose a human cause for climate change.
Gordon Brown's trusted lieutenants gathered round their leader in the plush penthouse suite of the Grosvenor House Hotel on London's Park Lane. Room service was kept busy and the alcohol flowed as the select handful of politicians and advisers surrounding the then Shadow Chancellor met regularly in the crucial weeks leading up to the General Election of May 1997 to plot the economic future of Britain.
Thursday night’s Tweedledee Tweedledum TV debate between the leaders of the three old-gang parties ignored every single issue vital to Britain’s future, including the EU, multiculturalism and the erosion of British identity through mass immigration, said British National Party leader Nick Griffin.
Nick Clegg is a lucky man. Not since the Twenties has there been such a golden opportunity for a third party leader at a British general election. Labour is deeply unpopular but the public still has strong reservations about the Tories.
Nick Clegg seems to have been voted Britain's new political Pop Idol. He has put the Lib Dems on the map for the first time since legendary Lloyd George ran the most infamous cash-for-peerages racket in history.
The corporate media call them 'anti-fascists'. They are Communists. The people that attacked a BNP meeting yesterday admit they are Communists. Yet the corporate media peddles their anti-BNP propaganda, lies and smears as though it is truth. The Far Left is now an integral part of the totalitarian capitalist system.
A Key counter-terrorist scheme that called on schools to report potential Islamic fanatics was condemned yesterday as an expensive failure after teachers refused to take part for fear of upsetting Muslims.
The sudden appearance of the “superbug” epidemic in NHS hospitals has been linked to the dramatic rise in Third World illegal immigrants working as cleaners, security guards and cooks at hospitals around the country.
An ex-soldier berated David Cameron for failing to help him today as the Tory leader staged a walkabout in his own constituency. The man, accompanied by his young daughter, confronted Mr Cameron as he canvassed voters in the town of Witney.
You could forgive an alien from outer space who happened to drop in on our general election campaign for being perplexed about our voting system. He would have discovered that the findings of a new opinion poll which pushed Labour from second to third in the political 'batting order' would still incongruously make Labour the largest party if translated into the number of seats held in the House of Commons.
Half a million homes have been listed as being in the wrong council tax band – without their owners being told. It means thousands could be paying too much council tax each year even though the wrong valuations are known to tax inspectors.
Her demand for more than £1.1million from the Army for sex discrimination would have enabled single mother Tilern DeBique to return home to her poverty-stricken Caribbean village in triumph as a rich woman.
A civil servant who sold passports and travel documents to illegal immigrants has been jailed for six years. On at least 20 occasions mother-of-four Bridget Eworth, 39, granted 13 Nigerians the right to remain in the UK when they were not entitled to stay here.
Saturday 24th April 2010
Gordon Brown’s lies on immigration were exposed again yesterday after it emerged that frontline officers who have arrested 1,000 illegal immigrants in a year are to be axed.
Immigration chiefs had claimed that vital staff, with powers to arrest illegal immigrants working without permits, would not be affected in a devastating round of redundancies affecting up to a third of employees.
But yesterday, an immigration officer working for the UK Border Agency revealed that at least one of its teams, operating in the migrant- magnet Kent ports of Dover and Folkestone is to be axed.
The whistleblower said the jobs would go in the next three months, adding: “It sent shock waves through the staff, especially the scale of the job losses.
“The Prime Minister talks about being tough on immigration and protecting the frontline.
But Kent is the frontline and we are set to lose an arrest team. It’s sad because the Kent immigration team is highly effective and delivers great results, having removed 1,000 illegal workers in the past year.”
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said: “Can we believe anything Gordon Brown says any more? What he says in public and what he does in private are clearly two very different things. It’s a sham.”
UKIP Euro MP Nigel Farage said: “Weaselly, underhand and dishonest seems to be the basic approach of the Government to immigration – trumpeting how tough it is whilst hamstringing the very men and women paid to do the hard job of guarding our borders. UKIP would triple the staff of the Border Agency, not cut it.”
Reductions in immigration staff will also take place at the UK Border Agency offices in Croydon, Liverpool, Sheffield and London.
The border agency staff in Folkestone and Dover received an email informing them of the job cuts last month. It read: “There will be a discrepancy of 15 staff between what we have on the books and what we can afford.”
Last night, the UK Border Agency confirmed there would be job losses in Kent. A spokesman said: “We are consulting with both unions and staff over the planned restructuring of our Kent immigration team.
“It is anticipated there will be fewer full-time equivalent positions in Kent, with some of these positions transferring to Sussex. It is not proposed the restructure will result in compulsory job losses.”
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Four of the nation's most senior policemen were rescued by the Royal Navy ahead of stranded tourists because they 'had to get back to their desks'.
Sir Hugh Orde, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, Peter Fahy, Greater Manchester chief constable, Martin Richards, Sussex chief constable, and Martin Baker, Dorset chief constable, all secured places on HMS Albion.
They had been in New York but decided to travel to Madrid when the ash cloud cost them their flight back to Britain.
From Madrid they travelled north to Santander where HMS Albion was picking up 450 British troops returning home from Afghanistan.
Around 280 stranded holidaymakers were also given space on the ship which reached Portsmouth on Wednesday. Continued
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British National Party leader Nick Griffin launched the party's election manifesto today, declaring the document was a 'serious piece of political kit'.
The 90-page manifesto, entitled Democracy, Freedom, Culture And Identity, was unveiled in Stoke-on-Trent, where protesters staged a noisy demonstration against the right-wing party.
Mr Griffin, who is standing for election in Barking, east London, said the manifesto offered 'nothing new' on the subject of immigration, adding: 'The media are fixated on immigration.'
He added: 'The media needn't go scurrying away looking for new things we're going to say on immigration because, while the other parties have now decided to talk about it because of the British National Party threat, we still say what we have always done.
'We say Britain is full. It is the most overcrowded country in Europe and it is time to shut the doors.'
Speaking at the city's civic centre, Mr Griffin said of the manifesto: 'It's comprehensive, it's realistic, it's popular... and we hope that the media will cover it fairly.'
Speaking directly to gathered reporters, he added: 'Frankly, if you don't, we're not particularly fussed because we don't need you.
'We don't need the media now we can speak directly to the British people and we speak for the British people.'
He said the central pledge of the manifesto was to pull British troops out of Afghanistan immediately, alongside a commitment to rebuilding British manufacturing.
The BNP's launch comes after the party was told it faces legal action for using a Marmite jar in its election broadcast on its website.
The Marmite jar appeared in the top left hand corner of the screen - but was not mentioned - when party leader Nick Griffin was addressing viewers in the video.
An unrepentant Mr Griffin appeared to blame Unilever, which makes Marmite, for stealing the BNP's image for use in its most recent advertising campaign for the 'Hate Party'.
Defending the party's pledge to introduce the death penalty for drug dealers, serial killers, child murderers and terrorists, Mr Griffin said: 'We are the party that believes that criminals basically are scum and that victims should be protected.
'All the others see a criminal, they see a victim of society, but we believe there should be tough and effective punishments and deterrents for criminals.
'It's not just a matter of making them better, it's also a matter of frightening the life out of them so others don't become criminal.
'That said, we actually agree with Nick Clegg on one thing - that people shouldn't be in prison. His solution is to let them out into the community to burgle and mug people and rape people.
'Our solution is to put them into work teams, electronically tagged, and make them work.
'Letting them out on the streets is not the solution, making them work their passage is.'
Mr Griffin, who was accompanied by his wife, Jackie, said the BNP would establish a 'penal station' in South Georgia for dangerous and violent repeat offenders, adding:
'There's a certain element within the criminal population - the hard core, the murders or the rapists and so on - who simply could not be let loose even on the hills of Wales or whatever, digging trenches to put internet cables in. What are we going to do with them?
'Well, the Falklands is surrounded not only by fish but also oil and it's Britain's, and we need to develop it and we need to develop it fast.
'There is plenty of work to be done out there establishing a groundwork for that, which is pure labouring work.
'We don't see why criminals who commit the most appalling crimes should be able to be locked away in relative luxury in British prisons, enjoying a better standard of living than pensioners, when they could be somewhere out there working.
'South Georgia is a long way away, they can't escape, but they can do something useful for Britain and the British economy.'
He added: 'I think it is a workable system.
'We've got planes, South Georgia has a landing strip. We can drop a number of old container lorries there which they can live in.
'We can give them equipment and the machinery and the materials they need to build themselves somewhere to live, and that is what they must do.
'Why on earth should British taxpayers pay to keep the scum of the earth in prisons in luxury in Britain where there is no deterrent, where everyone out on the streets is terrified of crime and criminals get soft treatment? It's time to stop it.'
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Nick Clegg struggled to defend allowing asylum-seekers to join the workforce when he came under attack from a panel of first-time voters.
With official figures showing 2.5 million out of work, they warned it would be unfair to law-abiding residents.
The Lib Dem leader said an amnesty would create "a route to earned legalisation for up to 600,000 people who have been living in this country illegally."
But the new voters said the foreigners would be merely taking job opportunities from British people. One asked him: "How can you justify letting these people stay after they have effectively cheated the system for 10 years?” Conservatives said Mr Clegg’s bad reception underlined how bad a policy it was.
“The last thing Britain needs to deal with our immigration challenges is a Lib Dem amnesty for illegal immigrants,” said Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling.
“If Nick Clegg lets illegal immigrants get away with staying here it’ll send a message around the world and more and more people will try to come to this country.”
Mr Clegg’s grilling came as statistics showed how the competition for jobs in recession-hit Britain has got even tougher – dealing a blow to Labour’s claims to be the best party to run the economy.
Unemployment rose 43,000 in the three months to February to its highest level since 1994, the Office for National Statistics revealed.
Economic inactivity – which includes those who have given up looking for work, the early retired, long-term sick, students and carers – soared 110,000 in the latest quarter to 8.16million, more than one in five of the working age population and the worst since records began in 1971.
Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Theresa May said: “Nothing could give clearer evidence that Labour’s policies are not working.”
David Kern, the British Chambers of Commerce economist said the data supported his forecast that unemployment would hit 2.65million this year.
As the grim figures emerged, Mr Clegg was struggling to persuade first-time voters on BBC Radio 1’s Newsbeat to back his policy of an amnesty for illegal immigrants who can prove they have been in Britain for 10 years or more, speak English, have no criminal record and want to pay taxes.
Student Marie Jackson, 19, urged him to justify the measures, saying: “I can’t see how it’s fair.” Mr Clegg insisted his policy was not to let people stay “no questions asked”. Labour and Tory Governments had caused “complete chaos” in the immigration system, leading to large numbers – estimated at 900,000 – coming in illegally, he said.
He stressed the people to whom his policy would apply were “here already”. His interrogators were unimpressed. Ms Jackson complained that those people would then also get access to benefits.
Adam Hatton, 18, challenged him to explain how the illegal immigrants would prove they had been in Britain for 10 years – because they would not have the right paperwork, such as bank accounts and bills.
When Mr Clegg, sounding exasperated, suggested he could not pretend it was not a problem, Mr Hatton shot back: “I’m not pretending at all”.
The Lib Dem leader struggled to put a number on how many illegal immigrants would qualify for the amnesty. He argued it would affect only a “very, very small” number of people but admitted that “of course” he did not know.
Questioner Siobhan Randles, 25, who the day before had put Gordon Brown on the spot over immigration, told him his policy sounded like no more than “lip service”.
The panellists also made clear their outrage at Mr Clegg’s MP’s expenses claims. He has repeatedly said his party had a better record than Labour or the Conservatives.
But in his own lavish claims, he spent £7,000 in a year on kitchen improvements at his Sheffield consituency home. Yesterday’s interrogators also challenged him over spending thousands of pounds of public money on gardening – and £2.49 for an Ikea cake tin.
Lib Dem expenses came under further scrutiny when the Spectator magazine claimed Mr Clegg’s MPs had been urged at a presentation to exploit claims to benefit the party and use the funds for campaign literature.
A Lib Dem spokesman said last night: “This was a presentation designed to encourage MPs to communicate effectively with their constituents. We are proud to be a party that has consistently argued for greater transparency over expenses.”
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Despite the best efforts of the main political parties not to talk about it, there can be no denying that uncontrolled immigration is one of the most serious problems facing Britain today.
With unemployment hitting 2.5million and expectant mothers being turned away from maternity units, at least in part due to the soaring birth rate among newcomers to Britain, its negative impact is being felt across many aspects of life.
So Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg thoroughly deserved the ear bashing he got on the subject yesterday from the overwhelmingly young listeners of Radio 1.
Mr Clegg’s party wishes to grant an amnesty and citizenship for up to a million illegal immigrants living in this country. That would give them full access to the jobs market and to our benefits system. He also wishes to let asylum seekers take jobs, which they are currently forbidden from doing.
That would only encourage new waves of economic migrants to abuse the asylum system. These crackpot policies are a betrayal of the 929,000 Britons aged 16-24 who are out of work. They show that Clegg and his party believe in the highfalutin concept of “global citizenship” rather than in the primary duty of the British state to look after its own people.
Anyone who votes for this man should do so in the knowledge that the more votes he gets, the less intact will Britain be as an independent nation in five years’ time.
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True Colours: Tory at one with Johnson for Amnesty!
Boris Johnson has apparently contradicted Conservative policy by saying an amnesty for illegal immigrants should be considered.
The Mayor of London was campaigning in Tower Hamlets when Tory candidate Tim Archer said he and the mayor were "at one" on the need for an amnesty.
Mr Johnson, who was nodding, then said: "We want a debate about whether we can do more to regularise these people."
A Tory spokeswoman said they "wholeheartedly" rejected the idea.
The spokeswoman explained: "A Conservative government will reduce net migration to tens of thousands per year, as it was in the 1990s, rather than hundreds of thousands.
"The available evidence - such as from Spain and Italy - overwhelmingly demonstrates that amnesties encourage more people to come into this country as illegal immigrants."
But the position appears to contradict Mr Johnson's point of view.
He has previously called for an amnesty, and last week repeated that it would be "worth considering" for immigrants with no criminal record if accompanied by tighter immigration controls.
'Head in the sand'
The Liberal Democrats are arguing for an amnesty during the election campaign.
Lib Dem parliamentary candidate Tom Brake said: "This tells you Tory policy on immigration is all over the place.
"We have Boris Johnson putting forward what could be a partial solution and David Cameron who is sticking his head in the sand."
A London Labour spokesman could not be contacted for a comment.
Labour rejects the idea of an amnesty but their manifesto promises to introduce a points-based system to judge residency applications from immigrants.
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Lib-Dems to speed-up Islamification of Britain
The Lib Dem leader is in favour of mosques being able to broadcast calls to prayer from loudspeakers in towns and cities across Britain.
He says the Islamic “muezzin” cry should be allowed to ring out just like Christian church bells. He described it as “a joyful thing”.
His remarks emerged yesterday as another gaffe, just hours after he was exposed as saying British people have “a more insidious cross to bear than Germany over the second World War”.
Mr Clegg spoke out two years ago after the Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, told of a “creeping”Islamification of Britain.
He also admitted that he was not a practising Christian. Tory MP Mark Pritchard said his views were “disturbing” for “someone who seeks to lead a country based on Judaeo-Christian principles”.
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Brown’s economic credibility lay in tatters last night after Britain’s borrowing surged to an all-time high of £152.8billion.
The UK slumped another £23.5billion into the red in March, driving the country’s public-sector net debt to a record 62 per cent of gross domestic product.
The massive black hole in public finances now stands at a record £107.6billion for the financial year – more than double last year’s £49.7billion – after the deficit widened another £14.8billion last month.
Tories seized on the figures from the Office for National Statistics.
Shadow Chief Treasury Secretary Philip Hammond said: “Only the Conservatives can guarantee action to deal with our debts, stop the jobs tax and secure the recovery.” Data this week revealed a shock surge in inflation to 3.4 per cent and long-term jobless almost doubled in two years.
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Water bills could soar by 27 per cent above inflation over the next 20 years.
The warning comes from Severn Trent, one of the country's biggest water suppliers, which said EU regulations and rising operating expenses will cost the industry billions.
Since they were privatised in 1989, the big ten water companies have generated massive profits from inflation-busting increases in bills.
Despite the rises, a number, including Severn, have failed to tackle repairs and leakage, with customer service often below par.
However, the water firms are pleading poverty following a decision by the industry regulator, Ofwat, to cap increases in bills over the next five years.
A report by Severn said £96billion in capital spending projected over the next two decades and rising operating costs would be difficult to bear for the sector, which is laden with £32billion of debt.
And it warned the increased investment, along with the rising cost of borrowing, would have to be passed on to customers.
More energy-intensive water treatment under EU regulations will also affect its environmental performance, the firm added.
A spokesman for Severn said: 'It is not clear such a continued high level of investment is sustainable in terms of whether it can be financed, whether customers are willing to pay for it and the detrimental impact on carbon emissions.'
In November, Ofwat ordered water firms in England and Wales to cut average bills by £3 to £340 before inflation for the 2010-15 period after the industry called for real terms rises.
Severn, which serves more than eight million customers from the Bristol Channel to the Humber and from mid-Wales to the East Midlands, must cut bills by 4 per cent.
The firm said the complex price-setting process had diverted the attention of firms, leaving the industry 'blinded to the big picture'.
Chief executive Tony Wray said: 'The water industry has reached a pivotal point. While the regulatory model has worked very effectively since the privatisation of the industry, now is the time for change.'
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Nearly half a million British Gas customers face a price shock when the cheap fixed deals end
Nearly half a million British Gas customers face a price shock when cheap fixed deals which sheltered them from rocketing costs run out.
Those households on fixed rates pay around £374 per year less for energy than the average home – but will soon lose that advantage when their five-year deal ends.
uSwitch.com said 460,000 British Gas customers could be in for a shock when they lose the protection of the energy giant’s price protection plan which froze their gas and electricity prices from 2005 onwards.
The comparison site’s energy expert Tom Lyon explained: “Whether by luck or by judgment, everything fell into place for this group of customers.
“They fixed at the right time, for the right price and for the right length of time.”
Customers who locked into a British Gas price protection deal in late 2005 have so far saved an average £1,153 compared to customers on a standard tariff.
They were sheltered from peaks and troughs in gas and electricity prices, in particular the 2008 increases which hit other customers with a painful 42 per cent bill hike in the wake of rising wholesale costs. But the deal runs out at the end of April.
Earlier this year around 4.6million UK households were on fixed or capped energy plans. Some customers saw prices surge in March when their deals with E.ON, British Gas, Scottish Power and EDF Energy ended.
Mr Lyon urged British Gas customers whose fixed deals are about to end to shop around for the lowest possible prices. He said: “The good news is that even if the time isn’t right to fix, consumers can do almost as well by moving to a competitive online plan.”
British Gas said: “We are in the process of contacting all our affected customers to advise them that their deal is maturing and of the options available to them, which of course include transferring to our standard tariff.”
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An energy crisis will plunge Britain into darkness in just SIX years' time, warn Government experts.
They predict that power cuts will start by 2016 - THREE years earlier than previously thought.
The alarming scenario is detailed in a forecast, seen by The Sun, from official energy regulator Ofgem.
Last night The Tories accused ministers of failing to tackle the upcoming crisis, which will be created by demand for electricity outstripping supply.
The Ofgem forecast follows Labour admissions last year that the nation faced its first blackouts since the 1970s by the END of the decade.
Ofgem now says that a "worst case scenario" would mean supply failing at peak times - in the early evenings and during winter months - as early as 2016.
It reckons that every home in the country would be left without power for an average of 40 minutes during the year.
By 2017, that will rise to two hours. The prediction throws fresh doubt on Government claims that green energy, such as wind turbines, will make up for our dwindling nuclear and coal power supplies.
Shadow energy secretary Greg Clark said: "Labour's legacy is Britain on the brink of blackouts.
"For 13 years they've put their heads in the sand rather than face up to securing our energy supplies."
He said Lib Dem policies of refusing to build nuclear power stations would worsen the blackouts.
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Violent crime rose sharply in the past year, according to Labour's preferred recording method.
Ministers consistently cite the British Crime Survey as they look to trumpet their record.
But figures released yesterday showed there were 750 more violent attacks leading to injury every week last year compared with the year before.
There were 1.12million such assaults overall, an increase of 39,000, or 4 per cent.
The Government uses two main measures of crime in England and Wales - actual offences recorded by the police and the BCS, which is a rolling survey of 40,000 people's experiences of crime, whether or not they reported the incident.
In a speech last month Gordon Brown pointed to the British Crime Survey as showing that crime is down by a third since Labour came to power in 1997, with almost one-and-a-half million fewer violent crimes.
CRIME: UPS AND DOWNS
UP
- Violent crime leading to injury up four per cent last year to 1,120,000 offences (British Crime Survey)
- Sexual offences up eleven per cent to 13,200 in the last three months of last year (Police recorded crime)
- Bicycle thefts up eight per cent last year to 121,169 (Police recorded crime)
DOWN
- Household burglary down three per cent last year to 275,972 crimes (Police recorded crime)
- Robbery down five per cent last year to 67,559 offences (Police recorded crime)
- Criminal damage down eleven per cent last year to 858,055 offences (Police recorded crime)
But this week the Daily Mail published a leaked Home Office document revealing civil servants' fears that the BCS may have been undercounting the scale of violence against children and young adults.
Ministers ordered a review of the survey 18 months ago, but have continued to use its figures to claim that violent crime is down.
Separate figures released yesterday showed an 11 per cent rise in sexual offences recorded by the police.
But both police recorded crime and the BCS showed the total number of crimes fell by 7 per cent last year. There were falls in burglary, robbery and criminal damage.
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said: 'The Government has presided over a surge in violence, while Labour's target culture means the police spend more time on paperwork than on the beat.'
But Home Secretary Alan Johnson called on the Tories to accept that crime was going down. 'Labour has invested in record numbers of police,' he said.
'We are committed to using CCTV and DNA technology to catch criminals and have ensured longer prison sentences for those convicted of the most serious offences.'
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Secret Liberal Democrat plans to funnel thousands of pounds of taxpayers money into election propaganda have torpedoed Nick Clegg’s claims to be the new Mr Clean of politics.
Leaked documents reveal that party bosses sent their MPs two dossiers on how to milk the expenses system and use public cash for electioneering.
One document, prepared by Hilary Stephenson, Mr Clegg’s campaigns and elections director, provided MPs with detailed instructions on how to exploit the ‘grey areas’ in the rules.
And in a blatant call for them to maximise their claims on public cash, LibDems were told: ‘There is lots of scope - so be imaginative!’
Mr Clegg’s poll bounce after the first election debate last week was built on his claims that only the Liberal Democrats remained untainted by the expenses scandal.
But according to The Spectator magazine, in a document sent to LibDem MPs in 2008 party bosses told their MPs to ‘maximise the amount being claimed’.
The memo, seen by the Mail, told MPs how they could make taxpayers fund the cost of party propaganda through their office expenses and the communications allowance, a £10,000 a year handout so MPs can send leaflets to their constituents that has now been scrapped.
LibDem MPs were told to spend ‘up to the limit’ on the allowance or it would be ‘forfeit’ and reminded them that extra funds could be moved into the propaganda pot ‘from staffing or IEP’, the shorthand for the office costs allowance. ‘You should be making full use,’ the memo says.
In a briefing on ‘what are the grey areas?’ the document advises that taxpayers can be made to foot the bill for this propaganda if they refer to themselves as ‘Liberal Democrat MPs’ but avoid references to ‘working with Liberal Democrat councillors’.
The memo tells MPs that they can ‘use the logo a bit!’ on newsletters to voters in order to comply with rules that meant only ‘proportionate and discreet use’ of party symbols were allowed.
A second manual, entitled the Liberal Democrat Best Practice Manual, advised MPs how to get around a ban on sending letters to constituents asking for money.
LibDem MPs were told to pay for their newsletters from party funds but then use their office expenses to buy ‘advertising space to include the items which are permissible (eg surgery details, contact numbers and some specifics).’
That amounts to funnelling taxpayers’ money into party coffers to part fund what are effectively party propaganda sheets.
‘Write to any group of constituents you want as many times as you can afford,’ the memo reads.
Close scrutiny of LibDem expenses dodges show that a handful of LibDem MPs, including frontbenchers Lembit Opik and John Leech were even more blatant – paying thousands of pounds of public cash to their own party to rent office space.
Rochdale MP Paul Rowen has paid out £14,000 in rent to a company run by local Liberal Democrats which gave him a campaign donation of £1,793 to help his election campaign in 2005.
Mr Clegg faced double money trouble last night amid new revelations that his party has accepted more than half a million pounds in donations from a businessman who appears to pay minimal tax in Britain.
Marcus Evans, the reclusive owner of Ipswich Town, paid just £7,757 of tax on £55 million of turnover of his British companies in 2007.
But the donations open the LibDems to the charge of hypocrisy since Nick Clegg and his Treasury spokesman Vince Cable are committed to funding their economic policies with a crackdown on tax avoidance.
Since the beginning of the campaign on 6 April, the Liberal Democrats say they have had five donations of more than £10,000 pounds and 6,000 donations of less than £10,000 pounds.
Lib Dem policy is to introduce a cap on political donations of £10,000 per individual or organisation.
Asked about the expenses documents, a Liberal Democrat spokesman said: ‘This was a presentation designed to encourage MPs to communicate effectively with their constituents. ‘We are proud to be a party that has consistently argued for greater transparency over expenses.'
MPs who put YOUR money into Liberal Democrat party
Several LibDem MPs have helped the party by siphoning public money into the coffers of their local parties.
Under the old Westminster expenses rules, MPs were able to rent office space from their own political parties, a practice that will be dissuaded by tighter rules being drawn up by the new Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority.
Others pay money from their office costs allowance to the local party structure to pay for printing and office services, so one branch of the party benefits at public expense.
Paul Rowen (above), the Liberal Democrat MP for Rochdale, is one who has made highly imaginative use of his expenses to funnel taxpayers cash into the party.
When Rowen was a candidate, a company called Rochdale Reform Buildings ‘freely gifted’ him office space. Since his election in 2005, he has paid £14,000 to the company.
Its accounts show it is run by local Liberal Democrats and has donated to his campaign. In October 2005, Mr Rowen registered a £1,793 donation from the firm, but his spokesman said that the money was actually given to him before the election.
Just two weeks after he registered the donation, he charged the Commons fees office an almost identical amount in rent.
In 2005 and in 2006 Mr Rowen also used public money to pay £4,000 to the regional Lib Dem office in Manchester for ‘professional services in support of his parliamentary duties’. In 2007, the ‘Rochdale Liberal Democrat Print Society’ charged taxpayers £6,000 to for a share of an envelope stuffing machine.
The Rochdale LibDems said Rowen’s payments were in ‘full compliance’ with Parliamentary rules. John Leech, the party’s transport spokesman and MP for Manchester Withington, is another to use the tricks. He has claimed expenses for work done by the regional party — £4,000 — and also paid office rent to the branch.
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Economy when eyes were on him and business class when he thought it was safe!
Nick Clegg has admitted taking expenses for business-class air travel while actually flying economy as a member of the European Parliament.
The Liberal Democrat leader used the budget airline BMI Baby to fly between Brussels and the UK, but was paid what he admits was 'whopping' expenses based on the price of a business-class seat on a major airline.
He says he channelled the spare money into paying for his office in Nottingham, where he was then based.
The revelation casts further doubt over Mr Clegg's claim to the moral high ground over expenses and his claim to be breaking the mould of 'old politics'. While the travel allowance was paid automatically to MEPs, rather than being claimed for, he is thought not to have campaigned against the system while working in Brussels.
Mr Clegg was an official at the European Commission and then Euro MP for the East Midlands between 1994 and 2004, during which time he is estimated to have received up to £1.6million in pay and personal allowances. In an unreported radio interview given last year, he described travel allowances as 'one of the biggest abuses or privileges, luxuries' in the European Parliament.
'If I flew back, and I would fly every week between Nottingham which was my home at the time and Brussels from East Midlands Airport, and I could fly - I remember at the end BMI Baby did a fairly good deal from East Midlands Airport - but I kept getting a whopping great big allowance for travel equivalent to first-class ticket on a major airline,' the Lib Dem leader said.
Asked if he had kept the extra cash, which came from EU taxpayers, Mr Clegg added: 'No, what I actually did was I put that money aside, didn't pocket it myself. I used it for my office in Nottingham and so on.'
His precise allowance payments are not known because of the failure of the EU to keep records and the lack of requirements to produce receipts.
MEPs were paid travel allowances based on business-class fares from their nearest airport to and from the European Parliament, which could be claimed regardless of whether the MEP was travelling business or
New rules were implemented and by last year, long after Mr Clegg had left the European Parliament, the travel scam was brought to an end so that MEPs are reimbursed on the basis of costs genuinely incurred.
Critics will ask why, if he has always believed in reform, Mr Clegg did not take a stand by refusing to accept the payments.
He recently attacked outgoing Tory grandee Sir Nicholas Winterton when he complained about MPs being forced to travel second rather than first-class. The Lib Dem leader said on Twitter: 'Sadly some MPs still just don't get it.'
His pay as an MEP totalled around £420,000 between 1999 and 2004, based on average exchange rates at the time. Research by the Open Europe think tank suggests he claimed around £900,000 in the notoriously generous allowances available to MEPs for their travel, office and subsistence.
Alongside his earnings, Mr Clegg is thought to have built up an annual pension of around £14,500 from his two taxpayer-funded jobs in Brussels. There is no suggestion that he broke any rules that existed at the time.
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Germany's state-owned rail company is to take over one of Britain's biggest train firms.
Deutsche Bahn has agreed a £1.59billion deal to buy Arriva, in a move which marks the loss of yet another key element of Britain's manufacturing and infrastructure heritage to foreign ownership.
Furious unions yesterday condemned the takeover, saying DB had 'slashed its workforce by half ' since moves to privatise it began in 1994.
The giant Rail Maritime and Transport union said the firm was 'aggressively raising capital' for further foreign takeovers as it seeks to exploit liberalised European transport markets.
It added that it would be seeking urgent meetings with the company.
Britain's transport 'crown jewels' already under German ownership include Rolls-Royce and Mini, which belong to BMW, and Bentley, which is owned by Volkswagen - itself saved from ruin by the British Army after the Second World War.
Many more firms are under wider foreign ownership, such as Jaguar Land Rover which is owned by India's Tata, and airport operator BAA, which is owned by Spain's Ferrovial.
DB already runs services such as the Chiltern Railways route between London and Birmingham Snow Hill.
It owns the company which runs the Royal Train and recently won the contract to operate the Tyneside Metro in Newcastle and Gateshead. The firm operates in more than 130 countries.
In contrast, Arriva grew from modest roots as a family motorcycle firm founded more than 70 years ago in Sunderland.
The company runs CrossCountry and Welsh rail services, as well as having a 20 per cent stake in London buses and many businesses across Europe.
Gerry Doherty, leader of the TSSA rail union, said: 'If Germany believes railways should be run by the state in favour of the passenger, why don't we do the same here in Britain?
'France, Italy and Spain also run their own railways rather than allow passengers to be ripped off by private profit seekers.'
Bob Crow, RMT general secretary, added: 'This is a huge step in the wrong direction for rail workers and passengers and should sound a warning that we are heading towards a dangerous monopoly of rail and bus services across Europe in which profit comes ahead of safety and service.
'The accelerating pace of acquisitions across Europe will be bad news all round as DB seeks to squeeze both its passengers and its workforce.'
But DB chief executive Ruediger Grube said that the Arriva brand was 'very, very valuable' and the company would keep the current headquarters in Sunderland.
He added that jobs were likely to be created rather than cut.
The company is confident of getting the deal approved by European competition authorities.
Passengers will have to pay the price
Alex Brummer
Almost two decades after the privatisation of British Rail, a large chunk of the country's transport network is back in state hands. The new owner of Britain's biggest rail franchise and a large number of the nation's big city bus networks will be the wholly state-owned German rail operator Deutsche Bahn.
The successor company to Deutsche Reichsbahn, which ran the trains to Germany's Second World War death camps, won control of Sunderland-based transport group Arriva after a £ 1.6billion bid.
The Arriva board, headed by former HM Customs & Excise chairman Sir Richard Broadbent, capitulated.
The Deutsche Bahn bid has triumphed despite Lord Mandelson's promise of a 'Cadbury law' designed to toughen the scrutiny of takeovers to determine if they are in the 'public interest' and make it harder for foreign predators to snatch control of Britain's best companies.
Arriva, which is in charge of the Cross-Country franchise which runs from Aberdeen to Penzance as well as Arriva Trains Wales, is widely regarded as Britain's most efficient transport operator. It has been a pioneer in Europe, which produces 42 per cent of its profits and revenues.
If nodded through by regulators in the UK and Germany it will be another blow to Britain's efforts to lead a free market revolution across Europe.
A series of overseas bids for power and transport companies has shifted control of the privatised enterprises back into European state hands and made a mockery of the competitive model. The domination of the nation's energy supplies by Continental giants such as France's state-controlled Electricite de France and Germany's E.On has left Britain's energy regulator Ofgem fuming over the lack of competition. It is conditions in Europe, rather than an open auction, which set our energy bills.
The German boss of Deutsche Bahn, Ruediger Grube, left no doubt who would be charge of the Arriva companies post the deal. 'We intend to be the drivers not the driven,' he declared. His comments were intended to relieve the anxiety of German politicians who have argued that the state-owned railway may be paying too high a price.
While the bid may be good news for Arriva shareholders (who receive 775p in cash for each share), it is hardly likely to be in the best interests of British rail and bus passengers.
German domestic investment is almost certainly likely to be a higher priority than running the bus networks in Liverpool, Leeds, Leicester, Glasgow and Newcastle.
London faces the unhappy prospect of 20 per cent of the buses potentially carrying the Deutsche Bahn livery.
There will also be some disquiet at the rather unfortunate history of Deutsche Bahn when it comes to confronting its past.
In 2006 the company found itself in major disagreement with the German federal government when it refused to allow an exhibition of Nazi deportations to be shown at stations across the country. Eventually the firm gave in to public pressure.
Until recently the Labour government had refused to become involved in overseas takeovers of British firms, allowing large swathes of industry, from Pilkington Glass to ICI and Hanson, to fall into foreign hands.
By making its offer now, under the deep cover of an election campaign, Deutsche Bahn will be counting on pre-empting any changes in the law.
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Britain's public borrowing has soared to record levels, according to official figures that underline Labour’s legacy of deficits and debt.
The Government borrowed £163.4billion in the last financial year ending in March, to fund unprecedented public spending amid tumbling tax receipts.
The nation’s borrowing almost doubled from £96.5billion in the previous year – and now stands at 11.5 per cent of national output, the Office for National Statistics said.
This proportion is second only to Ireland among the world’s developed nations, and higher even than stricken Greece.
The huge annual deficit, the highest ever recorded in peacetime, has pushed overall national debt to £890billion – or £15,000 for every man woman and child in Britain.
National debt – which is the accumulation of annual deficits over many years – now stands at 62 per cent of Britain’s GDP – the output for the whole economy.
This is way above Gordon Brown’s ‘golden’ benchmark of 40 per cent, and – crucially – also takes the nation over the 60 per cent level required by the European Union’s Maastricht treaty.
The size of last year’s shortfall, though less than that forecast in Alistair Darling’s
Budget last month, is certain to feature as the election campaign reaches a climax.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats say cuts in public spending must be postponed until next year when the economic recovery is secure.
But the Tories insist Britain must get on with the task of slashing spending now, with former Chancellor Ken Clarke, now the Tory business spokesman, warning this week that failure to deal with deficits and debt could lead to intervention from the International Monetary Fund.
But there could be better news for the Prime Minister today with the release of GDP figures for the first three months of the year. Recent data has shown that the recovery is now well under way and forecasters are predicting a jump of 0.4 per cent in the size of the economy.
Better conditions were confirmed by the employers’ organisation the CBI, which reported an upturn in industrial trends largely fuelled by exports following the 20 per cent devaluation of the pound over the last 18 months.
The next Chancellor may draw some comfort from the latest borrowing figures, with the deficit coming in £4billion below the budget forecast of March. This was due to higher tax receipts following the increase in VAT from 15 per cent to 17.5 per cent in January, and the tax on bankers bonuses, which has yielded some £2.5billion.
Overall, however, 2009-10 was a dreadful year for government tax receipts.
Economic output tumbled 6 per cent in the last calendar year, which resulted in a 19.5 per cent fall in corporation tax revenues, an 8.4 per cent decline in income tax and a 4.1 per cent reduction in VAT.
Shadow Treasury chief secretary Philip Hammond said: ‘These borrowing figures remind us once again of the huge debt that has been built up by Gordon Brown.’
Thursday 22nd April 2010
Buyers of new homes face a £14,000 VAT levy under plans drawn up by the Liberal Democrats.
The policy – which would see a tax of between five and seven per cent added to the average £199,166 cost of buying a new-build property – came under attack yesterday.
Alistair Carmichael, the Lib Dems’ Scottish affairs spokesman, let the cat out of the bag as he launched the party’s manifesto in Scotland yesterday. He admitted homebuyers would face an extra cost of “at least five per cent”.
Stewart Baseley, of the Home Builders Federation, said: “The Lib Dems’ plan would constrain much-needed housing development still further and potentially increase the cost of housing.”
Grant Shapps, the Tory Shadow Minister for Housing, added: “This is a tax bombshell on the housing market.”
But a Lib Dem spokes-woman insisted: “Our plans are tax neutral and would not lead to a net tax rise. It is deeply unfair that you’re taxed more to make improvements to an old home than when you build a new home.”
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Harriet Harman yesterday reignited Labour’s class war against David Cameron by accusing him of having “a sense of being born to rule”.
In her most personal attack yet on the Conservative leader, she branded him “arrogant”, adding: “I’ve always thought... he has a sense of being born to rule, entitlement, it’s like ‘my right to be in Downing Street’, which I find quite objectionable.”
But the Labour deputy leader’s swipe in this week’s New Statesman magazine is ironic. She is the niece by marriage of the late Lord Longford, a Labour hereditary peer, her father was a Harley Street doctor and she was educated privately in London.
She lost her “cut-glass” accent when she became involved in Left-wing politics, once admitting: “I sounded like Lady Diana.”
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Over-stretched maternity units are turning away hundreds of women, the Tories revealed yesterday.
More than two a day were last year told there was no bed for them to give birth in their local hospital.
Figures obtained by the Conservatives show that almost half of local NHS trusts that provide maternity care said they had to close their doors to mums-to-be at least once in 2009. More than one in 10 said this happened at least 10 times that year.
And in some cases women were forced to travel up to 100 miles to have a baby. The Tories said the figures expose Government claims that it has improved maternity services as a sham.
Sharp rises in the number of immigrants of child-bearing age has also put units in some areas under considerably more strain.
Shadow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley said: “Labour have let down mothers by failing to help the NHS deal with the rising birth rate. They have been slow to recruit new midwives and have perversely insisted on closing maternity wings in hospitals.
“It is shocking that mothers are being turned away from their local hospital and are forced to travel great distances under stressful circumstances.”
Of 148 NHS trusts with maternity services, 129 responded to a survey. Of these, 44 per cent closed or diverted women to other units at least once in 2009.
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Alistair Darling, George Osborne and Vince Cable have clashed over whether a hung parliament could be harmful for the UK economy.
Mr Osborne said fellow Tory Ken Clarke was right to warn that it could result in the International Monetary Fund having to step in to bail out the UK.
Speaking in the BBC's Daily Politics Chancellors Debate, Mr Osborne said Mr Clarke made a "statement of fact".
Mr Darling said it was "desperate stuff" from the Conservatives.
Mr Cable said the Tories were "scaremongering" as the three men all attacked their counterparts' plans for the economy.
In other news:
- Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg said Prime Minister Gordon Brown was a "desperate politician"
- David Cameron was struck by an egg thrown by a student while campaigning in Cornwall
- The British National Party called for restrictions on imports from China .
Ken Clarke, the shadow business secretary, said earlier on Wednesday that the political instability caused by an indecisive election result could hamper efforts to tackle the UK's huge public deficit.
He raised the spectre of a repeat of the late 1970s, when the government had to get an emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund.
Mr Clarke said the failure of the Labour government to deal with a crisis in the public finances in the 1970s was partly due to its lack of a big Commons majority which forced it to rely on the Liberals in the Lib/Lab pact - a state of affairs which he said was a "farce and fiasco".
Continuing dispute
The BBC's Laura Kuenssberg said Mr Clarke's comments were very strong and seemingly designed to jog the memory of older voters. However, she said they reflected the real uncertainty caused by the state of the polls and how the parties should respond to them.
Mr Osborne said Mr Clarke was simply saying that the confidence of the financial markets could be badly affected by a hung parliament.
"We have got to be aware in this country of the consequences of political instability… and what that could mean for economic stability in Britain," he said.
Mr Cable said it was incorrect to suggest that a hung parliament would result in political instability, saying instead that it would be better for the economy if politicians cooperated more.
"They [the Tories] are losing the election and they are starting to panic," he added.
Mr Darling said the Tories have "no credible plans, that is what makes markets roll their eyes".
The three would-be chancellors in the next government also used the debate to revisit their continuing dispute over the Conservatives' plan to find an additional £6bn of public sector savings in the current financial year as a means to avoid most of Labour's planned 1% rise in National Insurance from April 2010.
While the Tories say it is essential to start to trim the public deficit, Labour says the proposed "cuts" risk derailing the continuing economic recovery.
"Our first task is to secure the recovery, take away support too soon… would put at risk the economy," said Mr Darling.
Mr Osborne countered that the next government had to start to tackle the public deficit straight away, and that the extra £6bn of savings would prevent the need for Labour's National Insurance rise, which he again called a "jobs tax".
Mr Cable said the Lib Dems were being open and honest about the need for public sector spending cuts, adding that the party would reduce the income tax payments of low and middle earners.
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The news that an estimated 600,000 public sector jobs will be cut after the election has highlighted the fact that all three Westminster parties would prefer to spend your tax money on wars, EU membership and foreign aid rather than keeping Britons in work.
According to warnings issued by economists, some 600,000 public sector jobs will be lost over the next five years “no matter which party wins the general election.”
The Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) has warned that jobs for nurses, doctors and policemen will also be cut “given the scale of the spending cuts needed to balance the deficit.”
The CIPD says that 250,000 jobs are expected to go in local government, 100,000 in the NHS, 50,000 in quangos and at least 50,000 in the Civil Service.
Latest unemployment figures show that “youth unemployment” has reached nearly a million (915,000).
More than a million jobs have been lost in the private sector since April 2008. All three Westminster parties have said that public spending cuts of at least 15 percent are likely.
According to reports, John Philpot, chief economic adviser to the CIPD, has suggested that at least 580,000 jobs will go in the public sector by 2015.
“Under the Conservatives there could be a further 100,000 job cuts,” Mr Philpot was quoted as saying.
“Labour and the Liberal Democrats would be more likely to opt for tax rises if jobs cuts became too sensitive,” he told a newspaper.
The same media source quoted Colin Talbot, Professor of Governance at Southampton University, as saying that up to 100,000 jobs in the NHS could also go. I can’t see how they can cut the number of jobs needed from the NHS without cutting frontline services.”
Meanwhile, all three Westminster parties have endorsed an increase in the foreign aid budget to 0.7 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) which, at current levels, translates to £13 billion per year.
All three Westminster parties have also committed themselves to continued membership of the European Union, which according to the Taxpayers’ Alliance, costs Britain £118 billion every year.
This is equivalent to £1,968 for every man, woman and child in Britain today.
According to figures put out by MigrationwatchUK, immigration costs Britain around £13 billion per year.
In addition, the ongoing asylum racket costs British taxpayers a further £4 billion per year.
Finally, and possibly most appallingly, all three Westminster parties are committed to waging war in Afghanistan, which by the Government’s own estimates, costs £5 billion per year. There is no end date in sight for British involvement in that conflict.
Only the British National Party calls for an end to all expenditure which is not in Britain’s interests.
It is little short of treason to spend billions of pounds on foreign adventures, immigration and war, when hundreds of thousands of British people stare unemployment in the face.
The time has come to put British interests first. The time has come to vote BNP.
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(eGov Monitor)
Today's unemployment figures show that Labour’s policies just aren't working. Unemployment is at a 16 year high, whilst the number of jobs continues to fall.
There couldn't be a worse time to impose a new jobs tax, which will threaten the recovery and cost tens of thousands of jobs.
New figures released today show:
- Unemployment at a 16 year high. Unemployment now stands at 2.5 million, an increase of 43,000 on the last quarter and the highest level since 1994. The unemployment rate now stands at 8 per cent.
- Employment falls by 89,000. Employment fell by 89,000 over the last quarter to reach 28.82 million.
- Record economic inactivity. 8.16 million working age people are classed as economically inactive – the highest number since records began in 1971, and a rise of 110,000.
- 2.3 million economically inactive want a job. 2.34 million economically inactive people want a job but do not appear in the headline unemployment figures.
- Youth unemployment rising again. 929,000 young people aged 16-24 are unemployed. One in five young people is unable to find a job.
- Nearly three quarters of a million long-term unemployed. 726,000 people have been unemployed for 12 months or more, an increase of 89,000 over the last quarter.
- 1 million part-time workers want a full-time job. 1.05 million part-time workers want a full-time job but cannot get one – a record high.
- Half a million fewer jobs in the economy. There were 30.75 million workforce jobs in December 2009, down 119,000 over the quarter and down 533,000 on a year earlier.
- Over 5 million on out-of-work benefits. In August 2009 the number of people claiming key out of work benefits was 5.08 million, up 675,400 from August 2008
Labour came to power in 1997 promising to tackle unemployment. But 13 years on and almost every indicator available shows how things have got worse under Labour. Once again Labour isn’t working:
- Over one in four working age adults doesn’t have a job, with the number of ‘economically inactive’ people – people who have dropped out of the jobs market altogether – at a record high.
- Labour have consistently failed to meet their full employment target of 80 per cent of adults being in work. And the number of private sector workers who were born in the UK is now lower now than it was in 1997.
- By the end of the recession youth unemployment had hit a record high, with one in five young people unable to find a job.
- We have a record number of ‘underemployed’ – people who want to work more hours but can’t find any suitable work.
Labour's big government approach to jobs has failed. Their flagship programme for the unemployed – the New Deal – treats people like statistics rather than human beings. Funding is given to welfare to work providers on the basis of the processes they follow, rather than the outcomes they achieve.
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Indeed! Why are our troops there too? And we don't want the leftist explanation / Spin / Deceit about 'so called democracy' either! (Ed)
German soldiers are wearing their hearts on their sleeves - in the form of a badge that protests their country's involvement in the war in Afghanistan.
Some troops have taken to wearing the cloth accessory that states - ironically - 'I fight for Merkel' in a bid to persuade the German Chancellor Angela Merkel to explain exactly what they are fighting and dying for.
Four more troops were killed, and five badly injured, in Afghanistan last week.
Seven soldiers have died there so far this month, bringing the total to 43 in all since they were first deployed eight years ago.
Unable to engage the Taliban directly on the ground, frustrated by their government’s inability to acknowledge they are even engaged in a war and angered by the lack of popular support for their mission, the badges are a low-key mutiny that has sent shock waves through the top brass of the Bundeswehr.
Soldiers were warned this week that it is illegal to sew the cloth patches on to their uniforms.
But that hasn’t stopped them from buying the badges in their hundreds, in desert beige or NATO green, at the ISAF camp at Mazar-e-Sharif.
'They want the Chancellor, their ultimate boss, to finally find the clear words to put the war against the Taliban into black and white,' Bild Zeitung, Germany’s biggest daily paper, said today.
Chancellor Merkel is to make a statement to parliament tomorrow. Her spokesman said she wants to make clear her 'high-esteem' for the work of the German soldiers in Afghanistan in the light of the recent casualties.
But she will be speaking in the Reichstag after being put under pressure from U.S. General Stanley McChrystal, who arrived in Germany today with a brief from the White House to get the Germans to do more in Afghanistan.
Germany has the third largest presence in Afghanistan after the U.S. and Britain. The German parliament approved the dispatch of a further 850 soldiers in February when it extended the mandate for the military mission.
Yet the political will for German troops to engage the enemy head-on remains lacking.
Cracks are growing in the parties that supported their engagement there up until now.
Ottmar Schreiner, a left-wing member of the opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD), said his party has 'growing doubts' about German involvement in Afghanistan.
He said: 'If things haven't improved in Afghanistan by next year then I don't see where a majority for a new extension of the mandate is going to come from.'
The trouble for Mrs Merkel is that German involvement is deeply unpopular with some 80 per cent of the public, who want the troops to come home. Germany’s disastrous wars of the last century have left its public with a deep pacifistic streak.
The German press has been swift to condemn the government for its indecisiveness.
The Financial Times Deutschland said: 'With every dead German soldier in Afghanistan, the calls for an immediate withdrawal grow louder. This reflex shows that the German public is still not clear about the character of the mission.
'The politicians are largely to blame. Since the beginning of the mission eight years ago they suppressed a realistic description of the situation... Deaths, injuries, battles and heavy weaponry -- none of these suit the picture that was painted back then.'
The left-wing Berliner Zeitung said: 'Why are German soldiers in Afghanistan at all? As the chancellor and her government are still sticking to the military mission there it is their duty to explain it. But she has failed to do so.
'This can be explained by her basic attitude - it is only worth talking about problems when they become virulent.
'In the case of Afghanistan this is particularly catastrophic. Because the government has failed to make its case in what is the biggest foreign policy and security policy challenge in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany.'
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Greece may need as much as £70billion to avoid defaulting on its debt, the governor of the German Central Bank has warned.
The grim prediction was made by Axel Weber, who is also a governing council member of the European Central Bank, as the interest rate that the country borrows at hit new heights yesterday.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Mr Weber told German politicians that Greece's debt situation was worsening and that the 'numbers are changing all the time'.
His comments unnerved markets already made jittery by delays to the arrival in Athens of European and International Monetary Fund officials for talks on an aid package.
Until yesterday, the EU had put a figure of £40billion on a joint EU/IMF bail-out package for Greece.
It had been estimated that the UK will have to stump up £650million because it is a large contributor to the IMF.
But Mr Weber's remarks will fuel fears that British taxpayers will have to pay far more, although the UK remains outside the 16-strong eurozone. Interest rates on Greek debt with a ten-year maturity jumped to a record 7.84 per cent.
Last night, Greek finance minister George Papaconstantinou declared the nation 'won't be left high and dry'.
Negotiators from the IMF and European Union are due in Athens today to finally start ten-day talks.
Struggling to cope with a debt pile of £263billion, Greece needs to borrow about £47billion this year alone. It has a projected public debt of more than 120 per cent of gross domestic product.
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Three BBC executives spent an extraordinary £137 a day on taxis - to allow them to make phone calls in private.
The bosses, who all earn six-figure salaries, racked up more than £12,000 in cab claims in just three months.
This included a total of £4,862 claimed in fares by director of vision Jana Bennett.
Miss Bennett, who earns £412,000 and previously billed the BBC £500 for a stolen handbag, spent £675 on cabs in just two days last November.
Erik Huggers, director of future, media and technology, claimed £647 for the four-day hire of a car and driver for him and colleagues when visiting Seoul in South Korea.
He ran up £3,908 for taxi bills over the period, including six which cost more than £100, while Caroline Thomson, the corporation's chief operating officer, spent £3,880.
Together the three ran up £12,650 for the third quarter of the financial year, which is the equivalent of 87 £145.50 licence fees.
But a BBC spokesman defended the claims, saying: 'Jana Bennett's diary is incredibly busy, so she has to use her time as efficiently as possible.
'Whenever she is travelling to meetings, she will schedule in a number of business calls to make the best use of this travel time.
'Because of the confidential nature of these discussions, it is not possible to hold them in public.'
Yesterday it also emerged that spending on hospitality by the top BBC bosses, including lunches and parties, shot up by more than 15 per cent.
Expenses claims for the corporation's 107 top staff revealed hospitality spending over three months rose to £27,425.
Bosses also increased what they spend on hotels by a staggering 56 per cent from the first quarter of last year to almost £26,000 in the third quarter.
Nic Newman, controller of future media, even had a £3,600 accommodation bill paid for him by the BBC - despite having gone on sabbatical to the Reuters Journalism Institute.
Director general Mark Thompson spent £1,463 on hospitality in three months including £113 for a farewell lunch with Sir Terry Wogan.
In November he and a colleague went to Australia on behalf of BBC Worldwide, which cost £6,005 each for flights and was funded by the BBC's commercial arm.
There was also continued use of business class flights despite BBC attempts to rein in its spending on air fares.
While these figures were down, several top executives still racked up thousands on flights.
Creative director and TV presenter Alan Yentob booked a return business class flight costing £3,381 to New York. He also ran up taxi fares of £1,640 last September.
The BBC said that overall taxi spend was down. Total expenses have also been cut.
The overall tally for the latest figures came to £173,527.04 - down from £188,284.98 for the previous three months.
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Frontline health services are being slashed across the country in a desperate battle to save up to £20billion over the next four years, say GPs.
Blood tests, care for the terminally ill and psychiatric treatment have been cut in many areas, according to a survey of family doctors.
Health visitors are also being sacked - leaving new mothers and the elderly without vital help.
Labour ordered the 'efficiency savings' of between £15billion and £20billion between 2011 and 2014 to ensure the Health Service does not become bankrupt after the general election - and has repeatedly claimed they will not affect the front line.
But on Monday, Health Secretary Andy Burnham refused to rule out the loss of frontline jobs after the election.
The survey of GPs, in Pulse magazine, shows that patient services are being directly affected by the Whitehall directive.
Pulse asked 370 GPs whether cutbacks were occurring in their
areas. Fifty-five per cent said they were, and another 33 per cent said they were planned within the next few months.
Dr Krishna Chaturvedi, a GP in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, said he was seeing cuts in his region, including in blood tests and the loss of a health visitor.
Community nursing is also suffering, as is end-of-life care and dietetic and nutrition services. 'The list is endless,' he said.
Tory health spokesman Andrew Lansley said: 'This news makes a mockery of Labour's claims to be protecting the NHS front line.'
Liberal Democrat health spokesman Norman Lamb said: 'The NHS does need to save money but we should start by cutting back on management, quangos and top-level pay, not cherished local services.'
A Department of Health spokesman said the NHS had been asked to make 'efficiency savings' to reinvest in improvements in the quality of services.
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EU Meddling: One night doctor to look after 400 hospital patients as 48-hour working week cuts cover
Doctors are looking after up to 400 patients a night on their own due to the lack of cover in hospitals, a study has found.
Experts warned last night that this was a 'disaster waiting to happen'.
The 48-hour maximum working week - introduced under EU law last August - is being blamed for insufficient staff cover, poorer training and greater sickness rates among junior doctors.
A report from the Royal College of Physicians investigated the impact of the European Working Time Directive on hospitals in England and Wales.
It found each doctor cares for an average of 61 patients each night but the range covers one to 400 patients.
In comparison, a doctor cares for just 11 patients on average during the day.
The data from 670 medical teams also revealed that junior doctors with less than two years' experience on NHS wards can often be the most senior person on duty at night.
There are currently no guidelines about the maximum number of patients a doctor should care for or level of consultant cover at night.
An anonymous survey was sent to all consultants in England and Wales asking them to record the make-up of their team and how many patients were being cared for.
The snapshot survey was carried out at 11am and 11pm on November 5 last year.
Data was collected from 887 hospital teams at 11am, including 4,004 junior doctors caring for 18,854 patients, and from 670 teams at 11pm, including 2,263 junior doctors caring for 97,561 patients. At 11pm, 63 teams had a junior doctor in their first two years of training as their most senior medical cover.
In comparison, only 40 teams said consultants were involved in the direct delivery of overnight care.
The study, to be published in the journal Clinical Medicine, found day cover on wards ranged from two to 65 patients per junior doctor, with fewest doctors in Wales and most trainees in London.
Almost six in ten consultants reported high sickness rates among their trainees since the introduction of the directive.
The highest rates were among second year trainees, 'possibly reflecting a loss of team working and sense of belonging in doctors a year into their training', said the college.
Last night, John Black, president of the Royal College of Surgeons, said: 'This new evidence corroborates what surgical trainees have been telling us for months.
'Under the European Working Time Directive, rotas are unworkable to the point of being dangerous, and junior doctors without adequate supervision are being asked to make critical decisions beyond their competence.
'We have overwhelming evidence from the frontline that safe and effective hospital cover, especially at night, cannot be sustained under the EWTD.
'You only have to look at the situation at Mid Staffordshire Trust, which was heavily criticised in an independent report earlier this year, to know that one trainee covering all surgical wards at night is a disaster waiting to happen.'
Dr Andrew Goddard, director of the medical workforce unit at the Royal College of Physicians, said: 'The very low number of doctors per patient at night in some hospidoctorstals raises serious concerns for patient safety and there are also worrying reports of very junior doctors being left unsupported.'
Dr Goddard, who led the survey, said rotas compiled to fit in with the directive limited the time juniors spend learning and that 'patient care is being spread too thinly'.
He said: 'In the daytime, care for many patients is carried out by junior doctors, which limits their time shadowing more senior doctors and improving their knowledge and skills. The 48-hour week was brought in to improve the wellbeing of doctors, and by extension prevent mistakes in patient care.
'The apparent rise in sickness rates of junior doctors since the introduction of the EWTD highlights the additional stresses that are being put upon trainees by new rotas.'
A spokesman for the doctors' pressure group RemedyUK said: 'This depressing report confirms that doctors are being stretched to provide a full clinical service, and that training and supervision are both suffering.'
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(Watts Up With That?)
Climate sceptic wins landmark data victory ‘for price of a stamp’. Belfast ecologist forced to hand over tree-ring data describes order from information commission as a ’staggering injustice’
An arch-critic of climate scientists has won a major victory in his campaign to win access to British university data that could reveal details of Europe’s past climate.
In a landmark ruling, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office has ruled that Queen’s University Belfast must hand over data obtained during 40 years of research into 7,000 years of Irish tree rings to a City banker and part-time climate analyst, Doug Keenan.
This week, the Belfast ecologist who collected most of the data, Professor Mike Baillie, described the ruling as “a staggering injustice … We are the ones who trudged miles over bogs and fields carrying chain saws. We prepared the samples and – using quite a lot of expertise and judgment – we measured the ring patterns. Each ring pattern therefore has strong claims to be our copyright. Now, for the price of a stamp, Keenan feels he is entitled to be given all this data.”
Keenan revealed this week that he is launching a new assault. On Monday, he demanded the university also hand over emails that could reveal a three-year conspiracy to block his data request.
Keenan has become notorious for pursuing a series of vitriolic disputes with British academics over climate data. Two years ago, he accused Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia of “fraud” over his analysis of data from weather stations in China. Jones recently conceded he may have to revise the paper concerned.
The latest ruling comes from Graham Smith, deputy information commissioner, who in January said information requests to CRU from climate sceptics were “not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation.” In the Belfast case, as well as insisting the university hand over the data, Smith has accused the university authorities of “a number of procedural breaches.”
The case goes back to April 2007, when Keenan asked Queen’s University for all data from tree-ring studies by Baillie and others. The data covers more than 7,000 years. They contain upwards of 1m measurements from 11,000 tree samples, mostly of oak. The university turned down Keenan’s request, citing a range of exemptions allowed under both the Freedom of Information Act and the European Union’s environmental information regulations. Keenan appealed to the information commissioner.
more at the Guardian
It will be interesting to see what independent analysis shows.
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(By Bob Unruh)
'Climategate' author unveils evidence of 'every deception imaginable'
Al Gore's insistence that global warming is "settled science" has been used to defend claims humanity is on the edge of destroying the world. Now author Brian Sussman, whose book "Climategate" is being released Thursday – Earth Day – agrees it's "settled," as a scam.
Sussman unveils in his book evidence that the move to restrict carbon dioxide emissions, tax a multitude of energy programs and create a "Big Brother" that would limit household energy use, among other programs is a move to give government unlimited control over people.
National Public Radio reported in 2007 how Gore took his "climate change crusade" to Congress and said the science on the issue was "settled." Then in 2009 the Environmental Protection Agency declared carbon dioxide and other emissions are endangering the future of the world.
Sussman's book, the newest title by WND Books, has been charting for several weeks already among Amazon's top 10 preordered titles. It warns that believing global warming is "settled science" is a danger itself.
He writes that the now-notorious intercepted e-mails that reveal leading global warming supporters exchanging plans to squelch critics and falsify data are just the tip of the iceberg.
If you thought the record cold winter, expanding polar ice and other factors would make global warming supporters "chill out," guess again, he writes.
"These people have a plan and they intend to control much more than your thermostat," the book says.
In "Climategate," he explains the science of the subject and how politics have taken control of the data. Further, he explains how many of the global warming promoters are out to make a buck for themselves.
"It's obvious to everyone that this global warming facade is in meltdown mode," said Joseph Farah, publisher of WND Books and founder and CEO of WorldNetDaily.com. "Now Brian's important book comes along just in time to reveal exactly why this Big Lie was foisted on us to begin with and what we can do to stop it cold."
Among other things, "Climategate" reveals the underlying fraud of environmentalism in America. It also depicts the myth that global warming is the consensus of the scientific community.
The book traces the origins of a "climate-scare" agenda to the "diabolical minds of Marx and Engels in the 1800s – down the ages to the global governance of the United Nations today."
On the issue of carbon dioxide, the book points out that nature needs carbon dioxide and generates it through multiple natural processes to ensure its availability.
"Decomposing vegetation, the carcasses of dead animals, forest fires, smoldering peat bogs, volcanoes, plowed soil, weathering rocks, human utilization of fossil fuels, and even termites and crustacean shells – all exude carbon dioxide beneficial to the plant kingdom," he writes. "And the more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the more content the plants become – just ask anyone who has worked in a greenhouse.
"In fact, that is a portion of the carbon dioxide debate no one bothers to address – the plant kingdom would abound if carbon dioxide levels were to increase in the global atmosphere," he writes.
WND previously reported among the topics discussed in the book is whether there soon could be "Green Goon Squads" at your door, checking your energy usage.
The author explains federal legislation includes a set of regulations for energy efficiency that will be enforced "by a national, green goon squad."
"The legislation also authorizes the Secretary of Energy to 'enhance compliance by conducting training and education of builders and other professionals in the jurisdiction concerning the national energy efficiency building code.''
Sussman warns the focus is not to save energy and money.
"It's a social engineering scheme, designed and promoted by the federal government to change your behavior," he said.
Pollution actually has been decreasing, significantly, he documents.
From 1980 to 2005, for example, he wrote, "Fine particulate matter declined 40 percent. Ozone levels declined 20 percent, and days per year exceeding the 8-hour ozone standard fell seventy nine percent. Nitrogen dioxide levels decreased 37 percent, sulfur dioxide dropped 63 percent and carbon monoxide concentrations were reduced by 74 percent. Lead levels were lowered by 96 percent."
Neither are temperatures rising, he documents. Full Article
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Clegg was forced on to the defensive last night over his expenses and lobbying activities.
The Lib Dem leader regularly claimed more than Gordon Brown and David Cameron and charged the taxpayer for three kitchen upgrades in six months.
He also billed for foreign phone calls, napkins, cake tins and for hundreds of pounds to prune his fruit trees.
Questioned over his expenses relating to his constituency property, he hit back, bizarrely saying: 'It's not my home, it's yours.'
As the Lib Dems faced unprecedented media and public scrutiny following their extraordinary poll bounce:
- It emerged that Mr Clegg worked as a partner of a major European lobbying firm, G-Plus, only five years ago
- The Lib Dem leader repeatedly refused to say which main party he would back in a hung Parliament
- The spotlight turned on to the expenses claims of other Lib Dem MPs
- Figures showed half the Lib Dems' recent donations came from a figure linked to disgraced benefactor Michael Brown
Clegg's claim to be a straight-talker was undermined by his repeated refusal to indicate which party he would back if a coalition was necessary to form a government.
'I'm Nick Clegg, I'm not Nostradamus,' he said yesterday.
Last night there were the first signs that the X Factor-style poll boost the Lib Dems have enjoyed since Mr Clegg's widely-praised performance in last week's leaders' TV debate may be fading.
Questioned about lobbying earlier this week, Mr Clegg failed to mention that he worked as a partner for Brussels-based GPlus, a major European lobbying firm, from April 2004 until his election as an MP at the 2005 general election.
GPlus works for major multinationals to influence European policy on their behalf. Clients include bailed- out RBS, Wal-Mart and Russia's Gazprom.
Electoral Commission figures showed that £10,000 - half the cash donated to the Lib Dems in the first week of the election campaign - came from longstanding supporter Paul Strasburger.
He helped the party's disgraced supporter Michael Brown, who donated £2.4million, in his failed legal battle against fraud charges.
Leader's £4,000-a-month mortgage
He claims his constituency house is a modest, pebble-dashed semi that is far from 'palatial'.
But last night it emerged that Nick Clegg's Sheffield home is a four-bedroom property in one of the city's smartest streets.
The Lib Dem leader's neighbours include doctors, lawyers and dentists and houses on the street have sold for nearly £500,000.
That compares with the average house price in Sheffield of just £161,418.
According to Lib Dem sources, Mr Clegg had to send aides to the house to make it look more lived in before an interview there.
Work he has billed to taxpayers includes a new kitchen, a new garden wall and Ikea homewares. He also claimed £260 a month for a gardener to work four hours a week. Full Article Here
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The Lib Dem leader was utterly unequivocal in last week's televised debate. 'What I've supported all my adult life,' he declared, 'is a complete clean-up from top to toe in politics'.
It sounded as plausible as his manner proved persuasive. Yet it is a line remarkable chiefly for its audacious dishonesty.
For one of the urgent reforms Westminster needs is to rid the corridors of power of the influence of lobbying firms, which seek to gain advantage for their corporate clients by developing close links to policy makers.
It is therefore bitterly ironic that far from being the man to clean up this system, Nick Clegg is himself a former lobbyist.
Although it has been air-brushed from his official Liberal Democrat CV, Mr Clegg joined lobbying firm GJW in the early 1990s.
Among the firm's clients was the state of Libya, which was seeking to burnish the reputation of dictator Colonel Gaddafi. This, only several years after the Lockerbie bombing and the murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher by a gunman from inside the Libyan embassy in London.
Although the Lib Dems have been keen to emphasise that this was at an early stage in Mr Clegg's career, it is not the only example of his direct involvement in lobbying - nor the most serious.
Between leaving the European parliament and being elected to Westminster in 2005, Mr Clegg joined one of the EU's largest lobbying groups GPlus as one of just five partners.
At the time, GPlus was active on behalf of widely condemned Russian energy giant Gazprom and Russia's then leader Vladimir Putin, whose authoritarian rule coincided with a number of alleged political killings including the fatal polonium poisoning of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko in a London hotel.
Although he held this senior role just five years ago, his spell there is also mysteriously absent from his official CV.
But surprising though this may be, Mr Clegg is by no means the only member of the Lib Dem party hierarchy to have intimate links to the lobbying industry.
These links extend across the breadth of the party both in the House of Commons and the House of Lords and have been maintained even into the current election campaign.
Mr Clegg's own chief of staff Danny Alexander, who wrote the Lib Dem manifesto in which cleaned-up politics feature so prominently, is formerly director of communications with the fervently federalist European Movement, itself an organisation that has been criticised for funnelling taxpayers' money into pro-EU lobbying.
Nick Harvey, the Liberal Democrat MP appointed by Mr Clegg to the position of defence spokesman, has an extensive history with the industry.
After five years in the 1980s with corporate PR consultants Profile PR and Dewe Rogerson, he moved to Harrison Cowley, a lobbying practice whose interests include the defence industry.
Despite the clear conflict of interest, he maintained links with the firm for two years after being appointed defence spokesman, only breaking the connection as recently as 2008.
The current Lib Dem leader in the House of Lords, Lord McNally, has also retained his position despite a long lobbying past.
Once the head of the Hill Knowlton public affairs firm, he is also a former vice-chairman of Weber Shandwick, which has consistently attracted criticism for its work with Nestle, at a time when the food giant was said to have been trying to get African mothers to use their brand of formula milk.
The lobbying links continue. The party's Treasury spokesman Jeremy Browne has worked with at least three lobbying firms, including Dewe Rogerson.
Lord Newby, who represents the Lib Dems on the Treasury in the House of Lords, has worked for the public affairs firm Matrix Communications.
The connections continue even to the man Mr Clegg has charged with responsibility for the future shape of the British political system - Lord Tyler, Liberal Democrat spokesman on constitutional affairs. He spent several years working as senior consultant for the lobbyists Good Relations, where he was responsible for political issues.
Then there is the current treasurer of the party, Lord Clement- Jones, who is involved with the global government relations department of the firm DLA Piper.
This is the same firm at which Mr Clegg's wife Miriam works. Although the party has largely succeeded in having her firm described as a law practice, its lobbying arm accounts for a large part of its business.
The firm refuses to publicise its clients, but they are believed to include the British Bankers' Association - a trade body which represents the interests of the self-same City giants whose bonus culture the Lib Dems' boast they will clamp down on.
Further down the party ranks, no fewer than than 20 new Liberal Democrats candidates are lobbyists, among them Sandy Walkington, running for the party in St Albans, a former telecoms lobbyist who boasts that 'the same skills are needed in public affairs as politics'.
Indeed, far from distancing themselves from old- style politics, it seems that the Lib Dems are utterly immersed in the one industry that has done so much to erode the public's faith in parliamentary affairs.
Look beneath the spin, and Mr Clegg's claim to have supported a clean-up of politics 'all his adult life' looks less like the bracing arrival of a radical reformer and more like a deception of the very first order.
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The Lib=Dems’ immigration and asylum policy faced fresh criticism yesterday after it emerged that leader Nick Clegg’s own council is already trying to relax controls.
Sheffield City Council, run by the Lib Dems, has asked the Government for a change in rules to let asylum seekers work as soon as their application for refuge is received. Mr Clegg is an MP for Sheffield.
The idea also features in the party’s election manifesto, which claims that letting asylum seekers work would “save taxpayers’ money and allow them the dignity of earning their living instead of having to depend on handouts”.
Critics said it was another example of the “laughable” immigration and asylum policies Mr Clegg’s party is asking voters to back.
Documents reveal that Sheffield council has formally asked the Government “to allow asylum seekers the right to work in the city once their application for asylum has been received”.
The council’s application, under the Sustainable Communities Act, which allows local authorities to submit communities’ ideas for improving their neighbourhoods, conceded that national rules would also have to change.
Most arrivals are currently not allowed to work while awaiting a decision on their application for asylum, although they can apply for permission to work if they have waited more than a year.
Official minutes released this month suggest the Government opposes the idea of allowing new arrivals to take jobs, arguing that letting asylum seekers work “would be likely to encourage asylum applications from those without a well-founded fear of persecution, seeking to circumvent the managed migration route, hence slowing down the processing of applications made by genuine refugees and undermining the integrity of the managed migration system”.
In 2008 Sheffield Hallam MP Mr Clegg backed such a rule change, saying he was “shamed” by the “bone-headed stupidity, lack of moral leadership and fibre” that governed the “uniquely unfair” asylum system.
He has also praised Lib Dem council leader Paul Scriven, who is standing for election as an MP for Sheffield Central.
Sir Andrew Green, chairman of campaign group Migrationwatch, warned last night: “We already have asylum seekers queueing in Calais. If you allow them to work you’re just hanging out the welcome sign.”
He added: “Lib Dem asylum policy is simply laughable. Its only effect will be to attract yet more bogus asylum seekers.”
The key Lib Dem policy on immigration is an amnesty for up to 600,000 illegal immigrants if they have been in Britain for 10 years. A spokesman for the Lib Dems in Sheffield said the idea of letting asylum seekers work came from local people.
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Nick Clegg's secret strategy to imitate David Cameron at the next TV election debate has been exposed, after an aide left the plan in a taxi.
An embarrassing dossier compiled by chief party strategists which stresses that Mr Clegg must act more like the Tory leader was found in a cab just hours after the first debate last Thursday.
Entitled 'I'm Not Here Right Now', it gives a run down of how Clegg faired during the last debate in comparison to his rivals and advice for the next leaders' debate.
It tells Mr Clegg to steer clear of the nuclear deterrent argument and reads: 'DC (David Cameron) talks a lot in the language of values. We need to do this.'
On the question of the Lib Dem policy to axe Brain's Trident nuclear deterrent, is spells out in block capitals: 'Avoid unilateral disarmament implication'.
And the paper accuses Mr Clegg of being 'offensive' by comparing assisted suicide to putting down a pet.
It contains harsh criticisms of his performance in rehearsals, calls him 'offensive', and states he speaks too quickly, uses too much jargon and is too hesitant.
The plan urges him to distance himself from Gordon Brown - who is characterised as 'weird' and 'old politics' and launch a class war attack on the Tory leader.
It prompts Mr Clegg to point out failings like 'weird language, no real promises and lots of fudge' and tells him to speak of opponents who do not live 'in the real world' and who 'don't understand'.
The dossier, seen by the Sun, was written by John Sharkey, chairman of the Lib Dem election campaign team and Mr Clegg's strategist and communications adviser, and left in the back of a taxi following a journey from Parliament to North West London.
In a press briefing today Mr Clegg tried to laugh off the mistake: 'I'm glad to see my top team preparing for government by developing a habit of leaving secret dossiers in the back of cabs.
'Look, I've always been advised just to be myself in the TV debates and that's exactly what I was and what I will continue to be.'
Mr Clegg is also told in the dossier to 'constantly stand back' from his Labour and Tory rivals.
Lowest of the Low
The war book advises Clegg to copy the Tories, whilst also attacking Mr Cameron's claims.
On the crucial question of whether the Lib Dems would do a deal in a hung parliament, the leader is told to say 'yes' but only if his party's policies and values are put into practice.
Mr Sharkey, ex-boss of ad firm Saatchi and Saatchi, reveals he is so far unhappy with Mr Clegg's efforts on the hung parliament. 'No convincing answers yet,' the briefing note reads.
The Lib Dem leader is even warned to stop falsely claiming the party was not tarnished by the expenses scandal.
On the question of Mr Clegg's debating style, his aides were vociferous.
The dossier reads, in capitals, that he needs 'more passion/conviction', to 'speak more slowly, and that he is being 'too repetitive'.
Mr Sharkey also urges him to look more relaxed and to use 'shorter, simpler answers' and to stop rambling 'answer first...not discursive tour'.
And Mr Clegg is told to be more aggressive, ensuring he interrupts Mr Brown and Mr Cameron and not to be hesitant about it.
An additional revelation from the lost dossier it that Lord Rennard, who quit as the party's chief executive last year following a row over his expenses, is heavily involved in planning the Lib Dem manifesto launch.
Last night the taxi driver, who picked up the man who left in the dossier, told the Sun: 'It's extraordinary that someone like him could just leave this stuff in a taxi.
'It's very sloppy to say the least and I thought people should know.'
Last night a spokesman for Lib Dems said: We need time to get our story straight and work on the spin we will thrust upon the public.
Last night a spokesman for Lib Dems said: 'We are investigating. Until we know more, we are not able to comment.'
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Nick Clegg, who publicly declared that he was an atheist, claims that Christian values are 'central' to Liberal Democrat policies.
Praised for defying political convention when he admitted in 2007 that he was an atheist, Nick Clegg appears to have undergone a rapid conversion.
The Liberal Democrat leader, who was criticised by David Cameron for his "holier-than-thou" attitude in the first of the televised leaders' debates, has written an article for The Church of England Newspaper in which he claims that Christian values are "central" to his policies.
"My objective is to make space in society for every individual to pursue their [sic] own beliefs, and to achieve their potential," he writes. "For me that means being willing to take a stand, even on issues that may be unpopular."
Clegg, whose wife, Miriam, is a Roman Catholic, gave the sermon at an Anglican church in Surrey on Sunday. "We are proud to support specific campaigns organised by Christian groups," he says. "We are in no doubt that these are policies that will make our country fairer."
Although he voted in 2008 for abortions to continue to be allowed up to six months into a pregnancy, Clegg claims that the Lib Dems could help right-to-life campaigners.
"On 'conscience' issues like abortion and stem cell research, where no party has a united view, it will be possible for every elector to have their say about these questions by supporting candidates who share their views," he says.
Curiously, he could not find space anywhere in the article to mention that he does not believe in God.
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One of the many remarkable feats performed by Nick Clegg in last Thursday's leaders' debate was to escape the television studio with the public believing he is somehow tough on crime.
Like his performance on immigration - in which he promised to end the 'chaos in the system', while neatly glossing over his plan to grant amnesty to hundreds of thousands of foreign migrants living here illegally - it was a masterclass in deception.
Of course, he was quick to talk about how 'angry' he was with the mess that successive Labour and Tory Governments have made of the justice system and of how he would flood the streets with 3,000 extra police, paid for by scrapping the ID card scheme.
And there was a neat, heavily-spun sound bite about how our prisons have become 'overcrowded colleges of crime'.
But there was no dwelling upon the real ideology behind his party's law and order policy: a desire to keep as many criminals as possible out of the prison system.
So what's the reality in this oh-so politically-correct idealism?
The fact is, if the Lib Dems had their way almost 60,000 convicts who would otherwise be in jail would be walking the streets free.
Among them would be 285 sex offenders, 3,565 burglars, 446 drug dealers and traffickers, two kidnappers, 102 people convicted of knife offences and 4,742 people convicted of serious violence.
These criminals would be the beneficiaries of the devastating paragraph tucked away in the innocuously titled Your Community chapter of the party's manifesto.
This reads: 'We will ... Introduce a presumption against short-term sentences of less than six months - replaced by rigorously enforced community sentences, which evidence shows are better at cutting reoffending.'
It cuts to the very heart of a party which obsessively clings to the belief that an offender must be given a second, third or fourth chance to go straight. Scant regard is given to the victims of such offending - or the fact that if burglars are in jail they cannot be ransacking homes.
Even more worrying is the way that Mr Clegg - a former home affairs spokesman - does not appear to have grasped the implications of his own policy.
He claims that: 'We have now about 4,000 people going into our prisons on short-term prison sentences.'
Yet, in 2008, no fewer than 58,076 people were sentenced to a prison term of six months or less - among them the specific categories of criminal listed above, from sex attackers to housebreakers.
This was either a serious slip - or a carefully calculated deception which, thankfully, did not take long to unravel.
Such carelessness is typical of the sleight of hand that characterises the Lib Dems' manifesto, much of which requires careful decoding.
For instance, it talks of ensuring that: 'Financial resources, and police and court time, are not wasted on the unnecessary prosecution of drug users and addicts. Police should concentrate their efforts on organised drug pushers and gangs.'
What this means is that criminals addicted to drugs should go completely free, provided they agree to treatment. When it comes to drug classification, the manifesto says the party would: 'Always base drugs policy on independent scientific advice, including making the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs completely independent of Government.'
The results of such a policy, had it been in place in recent years? The potentially lethal dance-drug ecstasy would have been downgraded from class A to B on the Council's advice
This would have sent out the clear message to young people that its dangers have been overstated. Cannabis would have remained a class C substance, rather than being upgraded back to class B. To hell with the many tales of anguish from parents whose children have been destroyed by the super-strength skunk variety of the drug.
But for every controversial policy that is carefully camouflaged, you will find one that is simply naive - such as promising drunks the legal right to make the driver of a night bus let them off between stops.
Again, the miscreant is protected and encouraged to continue their anti-social behaviour, while the victims of the drunken behaviour are ignored. Even Labour - whose own record on law and order is, in so many respects, woeful - believes that the Lib Dem's law and order policy is idiotic.
Home Secretary Alan Johnson describes the party as 'soft on crime and criminals', and insists their record of voting against five-year sentences for carrying a gun and tougher sentences for murder, sexual and violent offences and for causing death by dangerous driving shows that 'they can't be trusted'.
Equally worrying is the way that, under the Lib Dems, Europe would be allowed to run riot over the British criminal justice system.
The manifesto says they want to: 'Keep Britain part of international crime-fighting measures such as the European Arrest Warrant, European Police Office, Eurojust, and the European Criminal Records Information System - while ensuring high standards of justice.'
But the reality of supporting such measures is that a British citizen could be extradited for an offence that is not even considered a crime in Britain - including minor misdemeanours.
He or she could be placed on a plane to, say, Latvia, without the authorities in this former Eastern European state having had to establish a provable case against the individual. It is chilling, reminiscent of a totalitarian regime.
By supporting such an EU intrusion into British life - the Lib Dems cast a shadow over their otherwise laudable record for defending freedom and civil liberties.
Indeed, they are even in favour of the deeply controversial idea of a European public prosecutor, who critics says would be able to bring charges against British citizens in our courts without the permission of our authorities.
Initially, the EU has said the prosecutors' authority would be confined to 'crimes affecting the financial interests' of the EU.
But the treaty allows this to be expanded in the future to any serious cross-border crime - a broad definition which could apply to dozens, if not hundreds of offences.
So this is the choice offered by the Lib Dems: tens of thousands more criminals walking the streets, a softer policy on drugs, the EU meddling in British justice and a commitment to reduce prison numbers.
The party is right to say that Labour - obsessed with gimmicks and short-term solutions - has been a law and order failure.
But the fix is hardly to be found in taking a lax approach to drunkenness and the drug addicts and the violent thugs who have cast such a malign shadow over vast areas of British life.
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Conclusion:
Oops! Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, who is being talked up by the Left as a combination of Barack Obama, Winston Churchill and Judy Garland, came a proper cropper yesterday morning. He was quizzed about his parliamentary expenses.
It was like the moment in an art film when an air-gun pellet pierces the skin of a child's party balloon. A slow-motion pop, caught in minute detail by a closeup camera, the sound distorted to resemble a low groan.
That rotter Andrew Neil, from the BBC, was responsible.
He noted that Cleggy regularly pocketed more than Gordon Brown and David Cameron on expenses.
At Chateau Clegg in Sheffield there was a £5,000 kitchen, a gardener to prune his fruit trees, a handyman to build a wall for his rose garden, overseas private telephone calls and £10,000 for stamp duty.
All this from the man who is meant to be the new Mr Persil White, Mr Anti-Politics.
Ooooooh dear. Cleggy blushed. He started stuttering - 'this is money that is, is, is available'.
He then came out with a marvellous line that this home on which he had hosed so much of our money was not his home but the people's home.
'That's a home on loan to me from the taxpayer,' he said, bluffing like mad. 'It's not my home. It's yours, the taxpayer.' It was therefore in our interest that its garden should be tiptop and that the cushions should come from Ikea.
He claimed that the place had been a dump before he got there. Furthermore, he said, the house was pebble-dashed.
The cur. What is wrong with pebble-dashing? MP claims a fortune for doing up his pad: a nation rejoices. Don't you love it? This from an ex-lobbyist who has been a fully-fluffed member of the European Parliament, an aide at the European Commission.
At Westminster he has treated expenses the way an anteater approaches a nice juicy mound of fresh termites.
No doubt the doubloons he was paid as a Eurocrat were also in our interest. We should count ourselves lucky to have such an expensive politician. You look after yourself, sunshine. You splurge, squire. Treat yourself. We deserve it.
Vince Cable, standing alongside Mr Clegg, tried not to move a mouth muscle. It would not have done to have laughed out loud at his leader's pratfall.
Poor old Vince. A week ago he was the one being feted as the Lib Dems' great hope.
Now he has been shunted to the back of the train shed and the media are clambering over a different locomotive. Like Puff the Magic Dragon, Vince is suddenly ignored. No one wants to play with him any more. Boo hoo!
He tried to interrupt at various points during yesterday's event - eager to be heard - but he was not quite on form. His best line was about the doziness of City regulators. He said they were as gentlemanly as the English Cricket Board.
Messrs Clegg and Cable were talking about their banking policy. They intend to set targets for banks on lending. Watch out, you giants of Wall Street and Shanghai, you global investment whizzes from Singapore and Tokyo.
If that telephone rings it could be the Lib Dems' 'Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury', Jeremy Browne, telling you how much money you have to lend to Sid and Doris Bonkers for their extension on the granny flat.
Mr Clegg kept talking about 'greedy bankers'. He was asked if this term extended to his father, himself a City type.
Mr Clegg said that his father was an 'old-fashioned banker', and therefore all right.
He has repeatedly talked of the need to be straight with the electorate, yet Mr Clegg declined the chance to say whether he would coalesce with Labour or the Conservatives after any narrow election result.
'Anything is possible...This is a fluid environment ... Things are moving quite fast ... This election is wide open ... These are deals and negotiations that are not taking place...I'm not going to put the cart before the horse.'
These were all different ways of saying 'I'm not going to tell you'. So much for Mr Straight.
Wednesday 21st April 2010
British citizens face being subjected to secret EU 'Big Brother' spying missions.
Labour is supporting plans for a dramatic expansion in the powers available to fellow member states who accuse UK nationals of committing even the most minor crimes while visiting. Under the plans, other countries could get the right to demand surveillance on a UK resident who has returned home, and access to his or her bank records.
They could also be entitled to demand British police take a suspect's DNA or other samples. Civil liberties groups across the continent are furious at the proposals, designed to bolster the controversial new European Evidence Warrant - a partner to the deeply controversial European Arrest Warrant.
Cases to which the arrest warrant has been applied include a man accused of the 'theft of a dessert' in a Polish restaurant. Under the proposed new regime, such a person could be placed under surveillance or have his bank records accessed to check that he had paid for the dessert, critics say.
Minutes of a parliamentary committee show Labour is quietly backing the idea. Home office minister Meg Hillier said: 'We would in principle support a new and comprehensive instrument based on mutual recognition that covers all types of evidence'.
Last night Tory justice spokesman Dominic Grieve said: 'Giving states which do not afford citizens the same legal protections as the UK the right to demand DNA samples, intercept communications or snoop on the personal data of British citizens is a worrying development. 'In supporting this proposal, Labour is yet again showing its relish for surveillance and disdain for civil liberties'.
The new evidence warrant will allow magistrates or judges in one EU state to authorise searches of a person's property in another state, and seizure of evidence. But a European Commission Green Paper proposes going much further by enabling authorities in any member state to engage in 'real time' interception of communications in another EU state, monitor a person's bank account, and demand bodily samples, DNA or fingerprints.
In this country, police may require a DNA sample only from someone who is under arrest for a serious enough offence to warrant a jail term. Concerns about the proposal are based on the way the European Arrest Warrant has been abused. The campaign group Fair Trials International said it had led to people from all over Europe being sent to other EU states for the most minor offences, or jailed after unfair trials.
In 2008, nearly 14,000 warrants were issued across Europe, with 351 people extradited from the UK alone. One case involved a carpenter who fitted wardrobe doors and then removed them when the client refused to pay him. In another, Polish authorities requested the extradition of a suspect for theft of a dessert.
There are also fears that the proposed new regime could place enormous pressure on UK police, already struggling to cope with the number of European Arrest Warrant requests they are receiving.
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Thirteen years after Labour took office, nine out of 10 Britons living abroad believe they have a better quality of life than they would in the UK.
Lured by higher wages and a better work-life balance, a staggering 92 per cent said the expat dream exceeded their expectations. An increasing number also said they wanted to stay on in their new country after their contracts end, citing fears over unemployment and standards in the NHS and schools.
Just 19 per cent now say they are prepared to come home – compared to 26 per cent in 2008. Researchers asked 1,306 Britons living in Australia, Canada, China, France, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Portugal, South Africa, Singapore, Spain, UAE and the US why they enjoyed living overseas. The natural environment topped the list, followed by climate, culture and leisure, healthcare, education, safety and security, financial well-being and infrastructure.
Dave Isley, head of NatWest International Personal Banking, which conducted the study, said: “The fact that fewer expats say they will return to the UK in the future proves that the pace of life, work-life balance and earning potential abroad means life as an expat is sunnier in more ways than one – and that they are weathering the financial storm.” More than 90 per cent have had an increase in pay over the last three years, with expats saying they are able to earn up to £20,000 more overseas.
Almost six out of 10 workers are confident they will be better off financially in five years’ time, according to NatWest’s third annual Quality of Life report, although that figure drops to 53 per cent of those living in Spain, 52 per cent in Canada and 48 per cent in America. A total of 87 per cent of expat Britons say their work-life balance is better thanks to shorter working hours and a reduced commute.
And life abroad is not all about money. Those in the highest earning countries – Singapore, UAE, China and Hong Kong – ranked bottom of the quality index and the majority said they planned to return home.
Mr Isley added: “There seems to be more to having and leading a fulfilled life than just money. British expats have built their lives abroad on solid foundations with the climate, culture and leisure, healthcare and education all deemed more important than financial security.”
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The Lib Dems' surge continues to gather momentum, transforming the nature of British politics. For the first time in more than a century, they are the front-runners in an election campaign, something that would have been unthinkable before Nick Clegg's assured performance in last week's historic TV debate.
A key part of their growing appeal is their claim to be the party of moderation and honesty. That was certainly the tone that Nick Clegg adopted on Thursday night, posing as the honest man of reason who could be trusted to hold the centre ground and be straight with the British public.
Yet, on perhaps the most important issue that British society faces, the Lib Dems are anything but moderate, reasonable or straight.
On the question of immigration, the chief concern of many voters after more than a decade of Labour's disastrous open-door policy, Clegg and his party are ideological extremists.
Hard as it may be to believe, the Lib Dems are even more determined than Labour to dismantle our borders. The Liberal Democrat leader continually boasts about his 'honesty', but by far the most dishonest moment in last Thursday's debate was when Clegg talked tough about immigration.
With frightening hypocrisy, he spoke of a crackdown and more rigorous frontier controls, while also accusing Brown of presiding over 'chaos'.
But Clegg's words were hollow. For in its advocacy of an extraordinarily lenient policy on migration, his party's manifesto represents a huge blow to Britain's social cohesion and national identity. For too long already under Labour, immigration has been out of control, with 5.4 million people settling here since 1997.
During recent years the annual number of arrivals has been running at more than 500,000, and that doesn't include the countless number of illegal immigrants. Even in 2009, after all Labour's noisy rhetoric about new restrictions, the immigrant total was still 518,000.
Never in our history has this nation been through such a dramatic demographic change, and the trend is speeding up. No fewer than a quarter of all births in Britain are to foreign- born mothers, with the figure rising to an astonishing 55 per cent in London.
Any politician who cared about the future of our country would be calling for action to reverse this destructive pattern. But the Lib Dems, while cynically adopting a populist posture on the campaign trail, are dogmatic enthusiasts for more uncontrolled immigration.
They are like the worst sort of earnest student radicals, clinging to policies wholly out of tune with the public mood. For the Lib Dems want to institute a full amnesty for illegal immigrants living in Britain, meaning such law- breakers could work, demand benefits and gain British citizenship.
Using the language of sophistry, the party's manifesto asserts that this would not only boost our economy by turning illegals into taxpayers, but also free up the police to concentrate on real crimes.
But such claims insult the intelligence. The truth is that, once granted, an amnesty would act as a magnet for migrants from all over the world, as others would quickly realise that they would almost certainly be treated with the same welcoming leniency if they were to come here illegally.
Human trafficking would rocket. Relatives of illegals, from spouses to distant uncles, would pour into the country. The Government admits that it 'doesn't have a clue' how many illegal migrants there are in Britain, but reliable estimates point to at least 750,000.
If an amnesty were implemented, that number could be more than trebled by the subsequent, completely legal arrival of all their dependants. An amnesty would stretch our overly generous welfare system to breaking point.
The great myth of the pro-immigration lobby is to pretend that newcomers have been the engine of economic prosperity. True, many have made a wonderful contribution to this country.
But the fact is that any economic gains have been outweighed by the colossal costs to the public sector in housing, education, healthcare and social security. As a host of authoritative studies shows, migrants are more likely to be in receipt of benefits than the British-born population.
It is one of the reasons why our public finances have sunk into massive deficits during a period of unprecedented immigration. Moreover, there is a terrible injustice about an amnesty, in that it both makes a mockery of the law by rewarding criminals and is grossly unfair on those who settled here legally.
And the modern history of the western world is that amnesties do not work. Since 1980, Italy has had 20 of them and Spain six, as a result of which immigration in both countries has soared.
Similarly, the U.S. instituted an amnesty in 1986 when the number of illegals stood at 3.5 million. Today, that figure is thought to have reached 20 million. Far from serving as a symbol of decency, an amnesty represents a surrender to illegality. Such a move is a sign that a country has given up trying to maintain its borders.
But that is the entire thrust of the Lib Dems' policy. This is a party that no longer believes in the integrity of the United Kingdom. An 'EU-wide asylum system' is called for in the party's manifesto - meaning we have to surrender some of our border controls to bureaucrats in Brussels.
In the same undemocratic vein, the Lib Dems want to take power away from the Home Office and set up an 'Independent Agency For Asylum', as if Britain were not already drowning in state bureaucracy. At least the Home Secretary is answerable to Parliament and the electorate.
This quango, no doubt packed with the politically correct brigade, will be a law to itself, a honey-pot for Left-wing lawyers. In an even more unworkable measure, Clegg wants to introduce a 'regional points-based' system for the awarding of work permits, by which migrants would be encouraged to go 'to parts of the country which are short of workers'.
With more than five million Britons of working age living on benefits, the idea that there are any genuine shortages of workers is absurd. We should be pushing our own people into jobs, not importing yet more foreign labour by dishing out permits like confetti.
Furthermore, the regional basis of Clegg's plans is also hopelessly flawed - there is nothing to stop migrants gaining a permit for one area, then bringing in their family and moving to another area, where a full range of benefits can be claimed.
The Lib Dems' other policies in this area are similarly ill thought through. Everything about the Lib Dems is soft. They urge an 'end to the detention of children in immigration detention centres,' which, while sounding humane, in practice means yet more families being freed to live on the dole, since someone will have to look after these children.
They want to go easy on the deportation of failed asylum-seekers, another recipe for an explosion in bogus claims. In addition, they call for the abolition of the ban on asylum-seekers being allowed to work.
Given that a huge majority of refugees are economic migrants, this proposal amounts to a further incentive for more foreigners to arrive here, reciting their empty mantras about 'persecution'. In practice, the ban will just end up as another form of amnesty.
Yes, the British are a tolerant people but this small island and its social structure cannot cope with those numbers. The public is crying out for toughness on immigration, not more laxity and definitely not Clegg's scheme for even greater expansion of foreign incomers.
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A British National Party candidate hoping to win votes in Enfield North believes shaking up the benefits system and stopping immigration will go some way to tackling the problems facing Britain.
Edmonton resident Tony Avery is due to be on the ballot paper on May 6, hoping to unseat Labour's Joan Ryan in the General Election.
He told the Enfield Independent that society in Britain has declined and offer some remedies to the problems he perceives.
He said: “Immigration and benefits are linked, there seems to be a left wing liberal view that we should be kind to everyone, but the laws of nature don't work that way.
“People living here illegally are not entitled to benefits at any time. We should close the borders for a time.
“We simply have to employ some way of stopping willful immigration for the time being.”
The BNP is campaigning for a complete withdrawal of troops from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Mr Avery said the troops would be much better deployed to patrol the UK's borders.
He put crime as the third tenet of his campaign, advocating tougher sentences for criminals and calling for foreign nationals in British jails to be repatriated.
He said: “Crime is a major consideration for elderly people who don't dream of crossing their doors after dark.
“Our streets are dangerous, and the police can't guarantee the safety of our streets. Stiffer sentences will go someway to addressing this.”
Mr Avery, 56, taught English as a foreign language in the past, but has recently been working at City Hall for BNP representative Richard Barnbrook.
He is standing against Labour's Joan Ryan, Nick De Bois (Cons), Paul Smith (Lib Dem), Bill Linton (Green), and Madeline Jones (UKIP).
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(Ed West - Telegraph)
When I saw the row about a Labour leaflet from Birmingham my first impression was: God, Labour have got an especially unattractive team running for election here. I know that politics is showbusiness for ugly people, but this bunch take the biscuit.
Then I realised that they’re actually a bunch of serial killers, paedophiles and stranglers, among the 80,000 prisoners the Liberal Democrats intend to give the vote, according to the leaflet, which declares:
“Libdems reconfirm their policy is to allow convicted murderers, rapists and pedophiles to be given the vote. WHY? BECAUSE EUROPE SAYS SO.” And just in case they thought they hadn’t sunk low enough, they’ve included, alongside pictures of convicted criminals, a picture of the local Lib Dem candidate, who himself looks like a 1970s serial killer.
Can you imagine how high-horsey Labour would get if the Tories had produced something so basic? They’d all be on the BBC News, talking with their eyes closed while calling for more mature, grown-up politics, and saying that the public are put off by “ya-boo” politics. Which is not true – the Liberal Democrat policy on allowing the European Court of Rights to dictate we give votes to prisoners, just like their policies of shorter sentences and immigration amnesties, are genuinely rubbish ideas that belong in a sixth-form common room.
Voting Liberal Democrat is simply a way for the self-righteous middle-class to feel good about themselves, Quakerism without all the meetings and self-sacrifice, all of which will be suffered by the poor when sentences are reduced even more and the full disaster of the immigration amnesty becomes clear. These things should be publicised as widely as possible.
And there’s also something a bit irritating about this mood of passive-aggressive, self-righteous “positive” politics, which says we can’t be “negative” about each other. Politics has got to its current state because there isn’t enough negativity, not enough real argument, which is a pre-requisite of real debate. More election leaflets with murderers, please.
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Stuff the EU!
When you take away a Victims 'Human Rights' and are convicted where penalty is Prison.. They should Forfeit their Human Rights too!
A Labour candidate is embroiled in a row with the Liberal Democrats after suggesting they would give convicted murderers and paedophiles the vote.
Roger Godsiff, who is standing in Birmingham Hall Green, issued leaflets showing nursery worker Vanessa George, who was jailed for abusing children.
He defended the move, saying his opponents were evading scrutiny, but Labour have now scrapped the leaflet.
The Lib Dems said they would not give those currently in prison the vote.
However, they stressed the issue needed to be looked at following a 2005 ruling by the European Court of Rights that found the UK's ban on extending the vote to convicted prisoners was unlawful
Ministers have been consulting on how to respond to the ruling since then with critics accusing them of kicking the issue into the long grass.
High-profile cases
Leaflets distributed under Mr Godsiff's name asked: "Do you want convicted murderers, rapists and paedophiles to be given the vote? The Lib Dems do".
The leaflets contained pictures of a number of high-profile criminals including Vanessa George and Steven Wright, convicted in 2008 for the murder of five women in the Ipswich area.
Mr Godsiff defended the campaign tactic, saying the Lib Dems' policy on the issue was "black and white" but they were not making that clear to voters.
"I agree that the imagery is strong but I do not accept that it is any stronger than anything that has been put out by my opponents," Mr Godsiff told the BBC.
"The leaflet has been distributed in certain areas but it does not contain anything that is factually incorrect. I have put out some negative campaigning when my opponents do not tell the electorate what their position is.
"It is right and proper to ask whether they support or do not support whether people convicted of serious crimes can vote. I have invited other candidates to make their position clear....I have made my position clear."
'Legal minefield'
Asked whether he had personally sanctioned the leaflets, he said he would not discuss the "mechanics" of his campaign but accused the Lib Dems of lying about his policies and voting record.
However, Labour have acted to defuse the row, saying the leaflet was not approved at a national level.
"This was a locally produced leaflet," Ray Collins, the party's general secretary, said. "As soon as it came to my attention I immediately ensured that no more of these would be distributed."
The Lib Dems said they were "unhappy" with the claims and did not favour any attempt to give already convicted prisoners the vote, describing such a step as a "legal minefield".
But, in future, they said judges should be given discretion to decide, upon sentencing, whether to strip someone of the vote, depending on the length of sentence and the nature of the crime.
Once a new system was in place, they said existing prisoners should be given the right to launch an appeal to try and secure the vote.
However, they insisted that those guilty of the most serious crime should never be able to do this.
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Immigration proved one of the most popular topics at an election hustings held by a leading pensioners' group yesterday.
A panel of general election candidates from Ilford South - Mike Gapes, (Labour), Toby Boutle (Conservative) and Ilford North - Lee Scott (Conservative), Sonia Klein (Labour) and Alex Berhanu (LibDem), heard an audience member describe Redbridge as "bursting at the seams".
Mr Berhanu, originally from Ethiopia, said immigration was a good thing, but there had to be a cap.
Mr Scott said immigration had to be tackled but he warned: "Don't leave it to the fascists."
Labour's Mr Gapes informed the meeting organised by Redbridge Pensioners' Forum at the Gloucester Room, Ilford Central Library, that Ilford was "built by immigrants" and echoed Mr Scott's plea not to let the issue be taken over by extremists.
Flooding Britain beyond manageable levels isn't extremist? Blatantly lying to the public about Immigration isn't extremist? Accusing Candidates of extremism isn't extreme itself without giving any details or proof to back up these statements? The REAL extremists are pictured above! Words are so easy to spout. (Ed)
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Independent think tank MigrationwatchUK has slammed the Liberal Democrats for “treating the public like fools” with their immigration policy and have pointed out that less than half of Lib Dem voters actually support their own party’s stance on that issue.
“[The Liberal Democrat manifesto] is immigration with no limits whatsoever but spiced up with two unworkable proposals — a regional immigration policy that would be impossible to enforce and an amnesty that is certain to encourage still further illegal immigration,” said Sir Andrew Green, chairman of MigrationwatchUK.
“The Lib Dems are treating the public as if they were fools,” he added, pointing out that a new opinion poll “shows that the two flagship Lib Dem policies on immigration have failed to convince voters. Indeed, less than half their own supporters agree with them,” Sir Andrew said.
The poll, conducted by YouGov between 14–16 April, asked voters whether they supported or opposed the Lib Dem policy of giving a two year work permit leading to permanent settlement to those who have been living illegally in the UK for ten years, subject to civic and language tests.
Some 54 percent were opposed to this plan, and 36 percent were strongly opposed to it. Most importantly, of those intending to vote Lib Dem, less than half supported the policy.
The other flagship policy is to offer special incentives to encourage economic migrants to settle in less populated regions of the UK, MigrationwatchUK said in a statement.
As Scotland is most frequently mentioned by the Lib Dems in this context, voters there were asked for their opinion. They opposed it by almost two to one.
Fifty-one percent were opposed to it, and 30 percent were strongly against it. Again, of Lib Dem supporters in Scotland, less than half supported this proposal.
“When people look more closely at Lib Dem immigration policy they realise just how weak it is,” Sir Andrew continued.
“They can see that what amounts to an amnesty will simply encourage further illegal immigration as both Italy with five amnesties and Spain with six in the past 25 years have found to their cost.
“As for the much touted regional immigration policy it is clearly unpopular even in Scotland which they invariably mention as a candidate. No wonder less than half their supporters agree with these policies.”
In an earlier statement, Sir Andrew also slammed the Labour Party’s manifesto as “deeply unconvincing. The authors were clearly ducking and weaving to avoid the commitment that really matters to the public, namely a broad policy objective to achieve a sharp reduction in immigration.”
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Labour and Tory-supported UAF storm troopers attacked an election hustings in Essex last night while their comrades in Blackpool threatened so much violence that police were forced to call a female British National Party candidate out of concerns for her safety.
In Essex, BNP parliamentary candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green, Julian Leppert, was addressing an election hustings at Chingford Assembly Hall when the UAF thugs gatecrashed the hall and attacked the meeting.
Several audience members asked them to stop, saying they wanted to hear the debate, reported local papers.
The UAF thugs, which included the Labour Party candidate as an active participant, ignored the local people and attempted to disrupt the proceedings for at least half an hour.
Mr Leppert compared the struggle of the British people to retain their identity to the oppression of Tibetans by China and called for a return to the “social cohesion of the 1950s,” according to local reports.
In Blackpool, BNP candidate Debra Kent withdrew from a hustings with other candidates at the Marine Hall in a debate organised by Fleetwood Churches Together after the UAF announced its intention to attack that meeting as well.
Miss Kent’s partner and BNP Blackpool organiser, James Clayton, was quoted as saying that the UAF “is the group that last year attacked one of our members with a claw hammer in Leigh and also attacked a BNP campaign launch in Croydon last week.
“Given that Debra is a lady and also my girlfriend I am not prepared to risk her being assaulted. As our security team are also busy during this period and cannot provide cover for her at short notice, I have decided to pull her out of this debate for her own safety.”
Miss Kent told BNP News that a number of threats had been against her personally on UAF forums and blogs.
“The police finally called me up, concerned for my safety and asked if I was going to attend the hustings,” Miss Kent said. “The threat of violence had reached such levels that the police felt driven to intervene.”
“It was unfortunate that the violent thugs caused my cancellation, but it was in the interests of the public who were attending,” she said.
“I was looking forward to challenging my rival candidates to break their conspiracy of silence on issues such as mass immigration, the EU, the war in Afghanistan and other topics.”
Miss Kent said that the threat of violence by the UAF thugs had to be taken seriously following the recent arrest of its secretary general, Weyman Bennett, for planning violent disorder. Mr Bennett is also an executive member of the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party.
“The Labour candidate in my constituency, Clive Grunshaw, organises and attends the UAF events and demonstrations in the area,” she said.
Tory leader David Cameron is also a supporter of these violent extremist Communists. He has officially endorsed the UAF organisation, along with Labour MP and long-time violent street activist Peter Hain, Keith Vaz MP (head of the Labour Party’s “Black Socialist Society”), expenses swindler Harry Cohen MP, and Lib Dem MEP Chris Davies, amongst many other MPs from all three parliamentary parties.
“The UAF have become the establishment’s storm trooper street thugs who have been given free rein to suppress democracy in modern Britain,” Miss Kent concluded.
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A patient lost a testicle during an operation after the surgeon accidentally cut it off, the medical watchdog was told today.
Dr Sulieman Al Hourani was only supposed to cut out a cyst on the patient's right testis, but instead he 'mistakenly' removed the whole testicle, the General Medical Council (GMC) heard.
Dr Al Hourani, who worked as a locum surgeon at Fairfield General Hospital in Bury, Greater Manchester, is accused of misconduct over the error and faces further charges of injecting himself with a drug meant for a patient and stealing tablets.
The medic, who is now practising in Jordan, is not present or represented by lawyers at the Fitness to Practise Panel which is hearing his case at the GMC in Manchester.
The panel decided to proceed with the case in his absence as he had been notified of the hearing but chose not to 'engage' with the GMC or appoint lawyers to represent him.
Sarah Prichard, counsel for the GMC opening the hearing, said a man, known only as patient A, had gone into hospital for the cyst to be removed on September 5 2007.
He was the first patient of the day and his medical notes made it 'perfectly clear' the procedure was to be 'excision of right epididymal cyst'.
Ms Prichard added: 'The theatre staff will tell the panel that their impression of what happened was that Dr Al Hourani had mistakenly removed the testicle rather than the cyst and expressed him(self) rather quite surprised the testicle rather than that which the patient had consented for was removed.
'Staff had no discussion or issue raised by Dr Al Hourani in the procedure as to why he was changing from excision of a cyst to removal of a testicle.'
Ms Prichard said the mistake was made as one nurse helping the surgeon turned her back to get a stitch and when she turned around the testicle had been removed.
'Literally as the nurse turned away to get a transfixion stitch the incident occurred and the testicle removed.
'Such was the level of concern they immediately realised it could be a serious medical incident and took steps to complete the relevant documentation.'
A month later it is alleged the doctor, who qualified after studying at Jordan University of Science and Technology, stole two boxes of dihydrocodeine from a treatment room on a ward at the same hospital.
An investigation was launched and the doctor was dismissed by his employers, Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, who ran the hospital.
The panel was told of another incident involving Dr Al Hourani more than a year earlier, on Sunday August 27 2006.
He had consulted a colleague and was advised to inject a patient with 10 milligrams (mg) of midazolam, a powerful sedative drug.
Instead Dr Al Hourani, who was the only surgeon at the hospital that day to treat patients, gave the patient 8mg and injected himself with the other 2mg.
Hospital staff said the doctor appeared unsteady on his feet, bumped into boxes, held on to a wall and was 'weaving' down the corridor.
He was later found in the doctors' mess room, 'deeply asleep' and taken in a wheelchair to A&E.
An internal inquiry at the hospital was launched and during disciplinary hearings he confessed to self-injecting the drug, telling colleagues it was the 'worst thing he had done in his life' and he was ashamed of himself.
A year later while still at the hospital he removed patient A's testicle by mistake, the GMC was told.
The hearing, scheduled to last three weeks, was adjourned until tomorrow morning.
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A traffic warden faces the sack after his foul-mouthed rant at a motorcyclist was caught on video.
The Westminster council parking attendant is seen shouting at Warren Djangoly and making obscene comments about his wife during a confrontation in the West End.
Mr Djangoly, a management consulant from Barnes, said the abuse was “totally unprovoked”.
The warden, who has not been named, has been suspended after a video of the abuse, filmed by another biker, was posted on YouTube.
The recording shows the warden appearing agitated at being photographed, and saying: “Don't be taking my picture,” before he snaps at Mr Djangoly: “Go and give that to your wife because I'll be f***ing her soon.”
He repeats the comment as he turns his back and walks away.
Mr Djangoly, 46, said it was effectively a “threat of rape”, which he said was particularly alarming as private parking contractors have access to the DVLA database, including motorists' home addresses.
He told the Standard: “I was shocked when he swore at me but I didn't realise exactly what he said until I saw the video. It's really quite appalling. It was also totally unprovoked.
"I only said to him not to bother giving me a ticket because I was going, and he got all aggressive, saying don't tell me what to do'.
“What came out of his mouth next was astonishing and absolutely outrageous. It's very concerning when someone says that to you, and it was really quite traumatising because there's the worry that these people have access to our records.”
He said he has spoken to the police about the incident in New Cavendish Street this month, but is not sure whether to make a formal complaint.
He is also demanding a full apology from Westminster council and its parking enforcement contractor NSL Services, which employs the warden.
Dr Leith Penny, Westminster's strategic director of city management, said: “Our parking attendants do a difficult and challenging job. However, Westminster council demands the highest standards from its parking staff and we do not tolerate this kind of behaviour which is clearly unacceptable.”
NSL spokesman Tim Cowen said the warden's language was “shocking” and an investigation had been launched.
He added: “The civil enforcement officer in question has been removed from the Westminster operation and suspended while that investigation takes place.
"Behaviour like this is not acceptable and would usually result in dismissal if the case is proven.”
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Chinese family planning authorities have detained 1,300 people to sterilise as part of a crackdown on parents who violate strict birth control rules.
Authorities in Puning, a city in southern China's Guangdong province, have detained the men and women against their will in cramped offices, according to state media.
There they are being forced to listen to lectures on laws limiting the size of families.
Officials in Puning last week launched a 20-day campaign to sterilise 9,559 women or their husbands who they suspect of planning to have a second or third child.
State media said that half of that number have so far agreed to comply.
The Nanfang Countryside Daily reported that those detained included parents who refused to undergo a surgical sterilisation procedure and their 'relatives'.
Among those held are the elderly parents of those who have tried to evade the family planning authorities. The newspaper claimed that on April 10 some 100 people, mostly old, were seen inside a 200 metre square building at a family planning centre.
The newspaper reported: 'There were some mats on the floor, but the room was too small for all the people to lie down and sleep, so the young ones had to stand or squat. Due to the lack of quilts, many cuddled up to fight the cold.'
An employee at the Puning Population and Family Bureau told the publication: 'It's not uncommon for family planning authorities to adopt some tough tactics.'
Among those being held was the 64-year-old father of Huang Ruifeng, who already has three daughters.
Mr Huang told the Global Times: 'Several days ago, a village official called me and asked me or my wife to return for the surgery. Otherwise they would take away my father.'
China launched its 'one couple, one child' rule in the late 1970s. The policy has some exceptions for groups including rural farmers whose first child is a daughter and ethnic minorities.
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A man who admitted carrying out a sex attack after being mistaken for a taxi driver has been jailed for five years.
Manzoor Hassan, 34, from Edinburgh's Tollcross area, was initially accused of attempted rape but pleaded guilty to abduction and indecent assault. The attack happened in February 2009 when the 20-year-old female student mistook the car for a taxi near Edinburgh's South Bridge.
The judge said the sentence would not be reduced for pleading guilty. Judge Lady Smith said the victim had already travelled to give evidence before the plea. The judge was shown CCTV footage of the victim heading away from a nightclub in Market Street, apparently drunk and trying to look at a map.
She had become separated from her classmates from Dublin University, who were enjoying a weekend in the city. At the High Court in Edinburgh, Lady Smith told Hassan he had taken advantage of a vulnerable young woman who was a stranger to the city.
Advocate depute Derek Ogg QC, prosecuting, said the student was trying to hail a taxi in the early hours of 1 February last year. She made her way to South Bridge and got into the back of Hassan's car.
Instead of correcting her mistake, Hassan began to drive around and took her to the Longstone area of the city. The court heard he got into the back of the car at a former B&Q store in Inglis Green Road and subjected the 20-year-old to a violent indecent assault.
Mr Ogg said after a struggle the 20-year-old fled barefoot, leaving her underwear and other possessions in Hassan's car, and was able to make it to a nearby house for help. Solicitor advocate Jim Keegan QC, defending, said Hassan was shocked and shamed by his behaviour.
Excuses: 'Smoking cannabis'
"He fully accepts that what he did was wrong," he said. "He has been smoking cannabis for a long time but he maintains that what he did that night was out of character."
Passing sentence, Lady Smith said the CCTV footage as the student left the nightclub showed her to be "extremely vulnerable". The judge said: "What she needed was a licensed taxi to uplift her and take her safely back to the hostel where she was staying.
"What she did not need was the nightmare experience which followed, an experience for which you were entirely responsible." The judge made an order extending Hassan's licence conditions by three years and put his name on the sex offenders register.
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I HAVE watched the debate on the racial and religious division in Tower Hamlets. I am appalled after being politically active in the East End for 35 years now witnessing what we have come to. I hope this is a 'wake up' call.
I was involved in setting up the first housing co-ops in the East End back in the 1970s after a joint campaign of squatters and the homeless from all ethnic backgrounds, which morphed into resistance to the National Front.
The demonstrations against the NF presence at the top of Brick Lane every Sunday was a joint effort of all ethnic groups.
That's something which would be impossible today, so great is the racial and religious divide.
My years working with the Bangladeshi community as a founder of the Bengali Housing Action Group have given me an insight into how it all went wrong.
It started with political opportunists in the community who demanded and got 'mother tongue' teaching. English, for example, was now taught in Bengali to youngsters born here!
The liberals at the Town Hall who ran the system and handed out the money were too frightened of being called 'racist' to resist the self-appointed community leaders who, with the arrival of Ken Livingstone and the Loony Left, became political power brokers who could decide policy because of their ability to turn out their supporters to shout 'racist' at anyone who stood in their way.
The mess we are in today started for these beginnings.
Without the rise of 'political' Islam and the opportunists of Respect, it would never have got as bad as it is now.
We have a council which is effectively run by Islamic Forum Europe. The photo of the Council Leader and Mayor leaving a meeting with the Immam of Mecca says it all (East London Advertiser, October 30, 2008). This is like me inviting the Pope over for tea!
The sense of 'victimhood' and oppression is reinforced at every turn with young Bangladeshis being told that their unemployment, overcrowding and lack of opportunities are the fault of white society, which is one reason for the rise in racists attacks on white people.
Finally, enter Respect, a political coalition of a Scots carpet bagger, a bunch of ultra-Left admirers of the mass murderer Leon Trotsky and the real powers behind the throne, the village power brokers from Syhlet.
We had the situation of a supposedly ultra-Left group ditching its defence of gay and women's right to ally themselves with some of the most reactionary political forces in the world today, to achieve a 'revolution' of the kind that Eastern Europe decided it didn't want.
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Gordon Brown's attempt to turn the election agenda back to the economy appeared to backfire today after inflation rose higher than economists had forecast.
Sky-high petrol prices sent annual inflation soaring to 3.4 per cent last month after a faster than expected rise in the cost in living.
Consumer Prices Index (CPI) inflation leapt up from 3 per cent in February after petrol prices rose by 2.7 per cent in the month, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
Today's figures will put pressure on the Bank of England to raise interest rates to try and control the price rises.
The CPI rise - bigger than the 3.1 per cent figure economists had forecast - presents a headache for the Government at the start of a crucial week for economic data in the General Election battle.
The data is the first in a flurry of economic indicators in what could be a decisive week in the General Election campaign, culminating in the eagerly awaited estimation of first quarter gross domestic product on Friday.
Before then, there are the latest statistics on unemployment, minutes of the last interest rate meeting, retail sales and borrowing figures for the full financial year.
Shadow chief Secretary to the Treasury Philip Hammond said: 'This is worrying news for families who are already feeling the pinch.
'Gordon Brown’s decision to freeze tax allowances while inflation is soaring means that people will pay more of their income in tax - the last thing they need when they are already struggling to balance their budgets.
A hung Parliament could lead to an even weaker pound and even higher inflation, with the risk of higher interest rates to tackle it.
James Hughes, chief economist at Black Swan Capital wealth management, said:
'The UK economy has some very deep, fundamental problems that won’t be solved simply by installing a new government, and this sharp increase in UK inflation to 3.4 per cent is possibly just the start of an inevitable and unstoppable slide towards double-digit inflation and interest rates within the next few years.'
The inflation figures came amid a row with the statistics watchdog over a decision to give Mr Brown key economic data before Thursday's second election debate.
The release of the information to the Prime Minister will mean only he will know whether the UK has fallen back into recession before the debate.
Sir Michael Scholar, Chairman of the UK Statistics Authority, said the situation was unacceptable. City experts expect the figures will show Britain has not crept back into recession.
Today, the ONS said energy prices also contributed to the rise back up in inflation, with the majority of the recent gas reductions not having yet taken place, compared with falls last March.
But the significant upward pressure from petrol threatens to draw attention to Labour's 1p hike on duty imposed on April 1.
Motorists have been facing record costs at the petrol pump, with oil prices hitting recent 18-month highs.
The AA said the average cost of a litre of petrol is now 120.9p, against 95.2p a year earlier.
Retail Prices Index (RPI) inflation - which includes the cost of mortgages and housing - also rocketed last month, reaching 4.4 per cent in March, which is the highest since September 2008.
CPI inflation had eased back sharply in February to 3 per cent from 3.5 per cent in January and economists had only expected the benchmark measure to rise to around 3.1 per cent last month.
If CPI remains more than 1 per cent above the Government's 2 per cent target in April, Bank of England Governor Mervyn King will be forced to write another letter of explanation to the Chancellor.
He last wrote to Alistair Darling after CPI's spike in January, but the Bank has forecast that inflation should ease back to target by the third quarter.
Today's ONS figures show a record uplift from transport costs, including petrol prices and air fares, with the annual rate of inflation 11.3 per cent - the highest since at least January 1997.
Food costs also pushed CPI higher, with vegetables affected from the adverse weather at the start of the year.
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Gordon Brown’s blundering over funding for regional quangos has landed the taxpayer with a £160million fine from the European bunion, the Conservatives said yesterday.
The fines are over the handling of regeneration programmes since 1997.
Tories claim the massive punishment for “financial irregularities” will hit programmes designed to help rundown areas and businesses at a time when public finances are stretched to breaking point.
The fines follow probes by the European Court of Auditors. It found breaches of procurement rules, lack of paperwork being kept and no evidence to justify how funds were spent.
They relate to the European Regional Development Fund in the North-west and North-east, Business Link programmes and the Interreg programme, which has been funding programmes including the Transmanche Atlas showing England as part of France.
Shadow Communities and Local Government Secretary Caroline Spelman, said: “This is a financial scandal that Labour ministers have tried to brush under the carpet.”
The TaxPayers’ Alliance, added: “It is incredible that the Government’s failure to ensure proper financial control in these programmes is set to cost taxpayers so dear.”
The Tories said £47million fines have already been paid out to the European Commission by the Department of Communities and Local Government.
The fines were revealed in Parliamentary Questions and Whitehall accounts.
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A Conservative activist charged with trying to rig the voting system in the last general election has been campaigning with shadow cabinet ministers to help the party win a key marginal seat.
Jamshed Khan resigned from the Conservative party after police launched an investigation into vote rigging, but is now back campaigning for the party in the Bradford West constituency.
Khan, 65, from Bradford, West Yorkshire, along with three other defendants, faces a charge of conspiracy to defraud the electoral registration officer. They all deny the charge and are due to appear at Leeds crown court in June.
Last week he appeared at a party event in Bradford with Eric Pickles, the Conservative party chairman. The next day he was canvassing in the city and sharing jokes with Andrew Mitchell, the shadow international development secretary. Khan is regularly seen in the local party offices.
One disgruntled party worker said last week: “What on earth is going on? He shouldn’t be anywhere near this campaign.”
In the last general election, the Conservatives lost the seat by just over 3,000 votes. An investigation was launched, however, after suspicions that some Tory activists were fraudulently using postal votes to try to bolster their candidate.
The Conservatives insist Khan is not part of the Bradford West campaign team, but a local party source claimed Khan in fact had a significant role. He claimed Khan has a section of the electoral roll for campaigning purposes and was being used to galvanise support in the ward he once represented. “He is the king of that ward,” said the source.
An undercover Sunday Times reporter attended the party offices on Thursday evening and Khan was in attendance, chatting to party supporters. The room was packed with boxes of campaign material, and lists of street names were posted on the wall where voters needed to be targeted.
The next day Mitchell, attended a community centre in Bradford. Khan has a role at the day centre attended by the minister, but after the event he walked the streets with Mitchell and other activists handing out Conservative leaflets.
Khan told the reporter he was part of the Conservatives’ campaign team. This was also confirmed to the reporter by another senior party worker.
Bradford West is being visited by senior party figures because it is a target seat. On Wednesday, Pickles was out canvassing voters in the city. Among the party activists bustling around him was Khan.
Mohammed Rafiq, who is also charged with electoral fraud and will appear with Khan, attended the same event with Pickles. He was also pictured among the party supporters greeting Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, during his visit to Bradford West earlier this month.
When asked whether the defendants in the case were helping with the Conservative party’s campaign, Zahid Iqbal, the party candidate in Bradford West, said: “Well, I don’t know. I don’t know which individuals you are talking about.”
When specifically questioned about whether Khan was a member of the campaign team, he declined to answer the question and asked for it to be put in writing to his office.
Conservative party headquarters later said Khan was not part of the campaign team. “We take allegations of electoral fraud extremely seriously,” it said. “This person is not a member of the party and does not have an official campaign role in Bradford West.”
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Ministers are under mounting pressure to combat voting fraud at this year’s general election after evidence of continuing abuse emerged.
The demand from the Electoral Commission coincides with its latest report, which shows that 48 cases of alleged electoral fraud were investigated by the police after the European and council elections last year.
By the end of November, 17 of these cases remained under investigation by the Crown Prosecution Service or the Crown Office in Scotland.
Two cases have resulted in prosecution. In Bournemouth two people received prison sentences for giving false information when registering to vote, while in Cannock, Staffordshire, one person was sentenced to four months’ imprisonment for pretending to be someone else at the ballot box.
Five charges have also been brought against a candidate who stood at the May 2008 election for applying for a proxy vote in another name. The trial will be held in April.
The number of cases has fallen since the Government introduced new legal safeguards for postal voting after a campaign by The Times and pressure from the Electoral Commission.
However, more than half of the cases investigated in 2009 involved false registration information or a false postal vote application.
The Times highlighted widespread postal vote fraud in the 2004 European and local elections when postal ballots were mandatory in four regions. An investigation suggested that many voters had been intimidated into handing over blank ballot papers to party activists.
In 2007 the Government introduced a requirement for voters to provide a signature and date of birth when they applied for a postal vote and when they filled in their ballot paper. Last year, after pressure from the commission, ministers went further by announcing individual registration for all voters to stop household heads from filling in proxy forms for bogus voters. This measure is voluntary and will not come into effect until 2014.
The Electoral Commission is still concerned that existing laws are not tough enough. At present election officers are required to cross match at least 20 per cent of the postal vote identifiers — signatures and dates of birth — when they process ballot papers.
Officials fear that there could be high levels of fraud slipping through in the remaining 80 per cent. The commission is pressing the Ministry of Justice to introduce mandatory 100 per cent cross-checking for the general election.
David Monks, from the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives, said that he had already asked most authorities in the East of England to voluntarily check 100 per cent of ballot papers. He said that this could be hampered nationwide by scarce resources and would delay the election results.
“It will be almost impossible to check more ballot papers without extra staff. The Government has indicated it will give us extra cash for the general election but we have still not been told how much,” he said.
Jenny Watson, chairwoman of the Electoral Commission, said that the recorded cases of electoral fraud were lower than the previous year and therefore encouraging.
“However, no one involved in elections should be complacent and we will continue to work with returning officers and the police to prevent fraud,” she said. “We are still calling on returning officers to check 100 per cent of postal ballots and believe the Ministry of Justice should make this mandatory and provide the funding needed to make it possible.”
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(Recap: November 2009)
Four Conservative party supporters from Bradford tried to rig the voting system in the run-up to a General Election in a plot to “harvest” postal votes, a court heard.
Mohammed Sultan, Mohammed Rafiq, Reis Khan and Jamshed Khan sent off for postal voting applications under false names or had legitimate applications re-directed to them, Leeds Crown Court heard.
Their aim was to get “their man” Haroon Rashid, 39, elected to the Bradford West seat in the 2005 General Election, said prosecutor Mark Ainsworth.
But the conspiracy failed because they did not send off all the applications to Bradford Council’s electoral registration officer, following concerns over a police investigation, said Mr Ainsworth.
Mr Rashid was beaten by 3,026 votes in the battle for the Bradford West constituency.
“The fact that the electoral fraud was not successful does not matter,” said Mr Ainsworth.
“The defendants set to manipulate the electoral system to make sure that their candidate would have enough votes to be elected.”
He said each of the defendants played their part in the conspiracy, which saw applications made in the names of people who did not live at certain addresses or who “had no idea” that postal voting applications were being made on their behalf.
The “fraudulent” postal vote applications, which would have been considered by the electoral registration officer, would result in “fraudulent” votes, the prosecution said.
Mr Ainsworth said: “They could access the ballot papers that they could fill in themselves and vote for whoever they wanted elected in the General Election.”
He said evidence had been gathered by forensic investigators which implicated the men, as part of West Yorkshire Police’s Operation Talmine into vote rigging.
The jury was shown different examples of postal voting applications which the prosecution claims were filled in with false details. Some were written in the defendants’ handwriting while others had their fingerprints on them, said Mr Ainsworth.
He said: “The four defendants were involved in an agreement to rig the voting system… to enable false votes to be cast in the general election. It was only the inherent threat of a police investigation that prevented these conspirators, we say, from harvesting all the false votes.”
Sultan, 51, of Toller Lane, Bradford; Rafiq, 69, of Cecil Avenue, Great Horton; Reis Khan, 39, of Whetley Hill, Bradford, and Jamshed Khan, 55, of Russell Street, Bradford, all deny conspiracy to defraud. Another man, Alyas Khan, 51, of Hilton Road, has already pleaded guilty to the charges.
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(Recap: November 2006)
Two Liberal Democrat councillors from Lancashire have been jailed for trying to rig a local election.
Manzur Hussain, 58, and Mozaquir Ali, 44, defrauded dozens of voters during the 2004 local government elections.
The men, who were sitting on Burnley Council at the time, collected signed proxy vote forms door-to-door and filled them in themselves.
At Preston Crown Court they were each sentenced to 18 months for falsifying postal proxy votes.
Detectives in Lancashire were alerted by the returning officer at Burnley council, Gillian Taylor, after a massive increase in proxy applications in the Daneshouse and Stoneyholme ward.
Both councillors were arrested in October 2004.
'Exploited a loophole'
A total of 167 proxy votes had been submitted to Burnley town hall on behalf of people who were unaware of what was going on. Usually, the number of proxy votes submitted is about 10.
The court heard Mr Ali was declared the winner by 369 votes, and that the rigged votes had not made a difference to his victory.
Judge Andrew Gilbart QC said it was "ironic" that many of the voters who were duped said they would have voted Lib Dem anyway.
The judge went on to say the councillors had "exploited a loophole" in which the law did not require proxy vote applicants to complete the form themselves.
He urged the Electoral Commission and the Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs to close the loophole.
Both men were convicted of conspiracy to defraud Burnley Council's returning officer following a three-week trial at Preston Crown Court last month.
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Beneath the veneer of an apparently democratic local election campaign the battle to control areas of Birmingham involved allegations of death threats, intimidation and bribery.
In scenes more reminiscent of a gangster movie, party members used nefarious tactics to ensure a clean sweep of the six available seats in Aston and Bordesley Green, delivering a large and surprising swing towards Labour.
At the height of the skulduggery was a "vote-rigging factory" set up by Labour activists in Aston and run from a disused warehouse. There, the three candidates - Mohammed Islam, Muhammed Afzal and Mohammed Kazi, who maintained their innocence and described yesterday's judgment as a "dark day for democracy" - and their supporters altered bags stuffed with ballots to ensure that they were elected.
A midnight raid by police on the eve of the election found them sitting at a table with 275 unsealed postal votes scattered on a table in front of them. The find proved to be the tip of the iceberg.
They had collected the ballots in a variety of ways. The most common was to get hold of a copy of the electoral register, apply for a postal ballot in someone else's name and have it sent to a "safe" address where it could be picked up.
This could then be submitted with a forged signature and false witness confirmation, and the ballot could be accepted. Another method was to get activists to go door to door collecting papers, signed or unsigned, which could then be doctored.
Typical of the victims were pensioners Arthur and Joan White, in Bordesley Green, who were visted one night by a young man claiming to be from the council collecting ballot papers.
Mrs White, 77, said: "He told me to fill it in as he was standing there and asked me to put a cross in all three boxes for the main parties, which I did. I didn't think it was right but I knew it was a new system and he said he was from the council and so I presumed he knew what he was talking about."
Mr White, 80, later discovered that the signature on his ballot was forged by the time it was entered into the election.
During investigations by The Telegraph, other allegations were made, including an attempt by Labour activists to bribe postmen to hand over blank ballots without going through the "middle men" of the voters.
One illiterate man is said to have had his name used on more than 50 ballot papers. Activists stood over voters while they filled in their form, pressuring them to vote Labour.
The hearing was told that the Labour candidates opened sealed papers before changing the vote and re-sealing them, knowing that checks by the council were useless to stop them.
There was uproar on the day of the vote when three "unexplained", unsealed ballot boxes appeared at the count and were included, along with a plastic bag stuffed with votes for Labour.
It became apparent that the postal voting system was hopelessly susceptible to malpractice. The application form required the voter's name, address and signature.
No form of identification was needed. The applicant could have had the form sent to any address, filled it in and sent it back with a false witness name, an illegible squiggle for a signature and it would have been accepted.
Even if the paper had clearly been altered, with crosses for one party deleted or just scribbled over with a vote case for another party, it had to be included in the count.
In Bordesley Green, of the 7,000 postal votes cast, up to 2,000 were either stolen, altered with correction fluid, diverted or falsified in Labour's favour. The party succeeded in ousting the People's Justice Party's two councillors by 441 votes. Similarly in Aston, where at least 1,000 votes were fraudulent, the Liberal Democrats lost by 514 votes.
The defeated parties brought a petition against the winning councillors under the Representation of the People Act 1983 and the hearing took place at the Birmingham and Midlands Institute.
The Bordesley Green councillors, Shafaq Ahmed, Shah Jahan and Ayaz Khan, were not present. They walked out of the hearing on the first day after the Labour Party withdrew its legal support and the judge declined them more time to prepare their case.
Ayoub Khan, 31, a Lib Dem councillor who lost his seat at the election, said: "It was a very tough door to door campaign, and it really was as bad as it sounds. I knocked on doors where the householder would say he'd been offered £10 for his vote. In Aston, one of the most deprived areas in the country, you can see how people are easily tempted.
"It may seem like extreme lengths to go to just to get a council seat, but that seat opens up a doorway to a lot of power locally and attracts huge amounts of funding from Britain and Europe."
He added that the fraud was made easier because community elders held great sway over their extended families.
Mr Khan, who was one of the petitioners, said he had received "numerous death threats" since the hearing began, with telephone messages "threatening to blow my kneecaps off".
The danger now is that the general election becomes a false ballot in key constituencies where candidates are persuaded to use underhand tactics. The Electoral Commission has issued a code of conduct signed by all parties, and police have vowed to keep a much keener eye on proceedings.
But Chris Game, senior lecturer at Birmingham University's Institute of Local Government Studies, said the hearing was "like a guide to postal vote manipulation". He added: "The Birmingham cases show how the vote can be undermined very, very easily by postal vote fraud".
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Call for vigilance in run-up to expected May polls Commission wary of close fights and new candidates
This year's general election could be marred by more allegations of electoral fraud than ever before as intensely tight margins of victory give rise to a greater temptation for party members to bend the rules, the election watchdog warns today.
The Electoral Commission says the combination of local elections in large metropolitan areas, the knife-edge general election and a high number of new candidates could lead to more claims of fraudulent votes or unfair campaigning practices this year.
The warning comes in a report of an inquiry into fraud in last year's local and European elections by the commission. It reveals very few cases of malpractice – just 107 allegations out of 22m votes cast. Allegations included claims of people personating other people to cast a vote or register to vote, officials tampering with ballot papers and bribery.
The report reveals that electoral fraud squads have been set up in every police force to combat and report the problem with a named officer responsible for overseeing any complaints. Every police officer will be briefed on how to respond to allegations of electoral malpractice.
But Jenny Watson, the commission's chair, warned against complacency in the run-up to the general election, which is widely expected to fall on 6 May when local elections are due. Watson said: "This year is going to be an important one for voters with a general election and English local elections. These figures are encouraging for voters who want to know that they can cast their votes safely and that they will be counted.
"However, no one involved in elections should be complacent and we will continue to work with returning officers and the police to prevent fraud."
The report finds no evidence of "widespread, systematic attempts" to defraud votes during last year's European and local elections. Some 48 cases were investigated, the largest proportion relating to personation offences.
Other cases included undue pressure being put on voters by party campaigners and allegations of bribery. Seventeen of the 48 cases are still under investigation. But the report acknowledges that because of the nature of the elections – European and local elections with fairly low turnout – they did not anticipate high rates of allegations.
In comparison it highlights the "high- profile and closely contested" nature of this year's general election. With a high number of new candidates "the likelihood that many candidates and their election agents will have very little experience or knowledge of electoral law may lead to controversies and publicity for allegations which would otherwise have remained more locally contained", it says.
Of this year's local elections, it warns: "Historically, these have been the areas where the most significant allegations and cases of electoral malpractice have originated." It says that with the margins of victory being so small, electoral malpractice would have a more significant impact on the results.
The report suggests postal voting could expose the system to fraud and cautions about the security of ballot boxes when the count is delayed until the day after the polls close.
"Misunderstandings or poor communication about any of these challenging issues could lead to a greater risk of allegations of malpractice, even where there is little or no substance," it says.
The Speaker of the Commons, John Bercow, last week urged local authorities to continue the tradition of counting votes on election night after it emerged that up to half are considering delaying the count until daylight hours to cut their wage bill. One concern is that ballot boxes would be left for hours on end, opening up an opportunity for them to be tampered with.
A spokesman for Bercow said: "The Speaker has already made his concerns public about the large number of deferred counts and declarations. The fear of fraud or perception of fraud surely reinforces that argument further."
Gareth Cann, assistant chief constable of West Midlands police and spokesman on electoral fraud for the Association of Chief Police Officers, said: "We remain vigilant and will investigate where evidence of wrongdoing emerges."
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Is Immigration simply Electoral Fraud?
(Recap: More applicable today than back in the 2008 report)
Hundreds of thousands of the new electors are immigrants who have been granted British citizenship or who poured in from Eastern Europe.
Critics said the increase made the case for changes to the electoral rules allowing non-British citizens full voting rights.
Some MPs have also voiced concerns that the system could be open to fraud.
Applicants do not have to provide documents proving their identity or even that they are in this country legally.
They simply fill in a two-page form including a declaration that all their details are accurate and correct.
Officials insist any false details could be spotted by local residents and reported as the electoral register is open to the public.
The huge surge in voter numbers began in 2005, when almost 300,000 names were added to the register for local elections.
It increased sharply the following year by 513,000 and in 2007 another 463,340 names were added.
There is a separate register for general elections only, which was boosted by 307,669 last year. It had 223,172 additions in 2005 and 371,770 in 2006.
The difference between the two registers is roughly the number of new voters from the EU, who can only vote in local and European elections. This numbered around 150,000 in each of the last two years.
The vast bulk will be Eastern Europeans, who have flocked in since the controversial expansion of the EU four years ago.
The growth in the overall register also reflects how immigrants coming to the UK since Labour came to power are now being granted citizenship.
With passports being handed out at the rate of 100,000 every year, all these people can vote.
There have also been thousands of arrivals from old Commonwealth countries.
Citizens from almost 50 countries, British Dependent Territories and the Republic of Ireland-can vote in local and general-election as they were classed as "British subjects" in 1918.
The total number thought to benefit is around one million. But only Ireland and some countries in the West Indies have a reciprocal agreement.
Migrationwatch UK said one million votes
could swing a close electoral campaign.
Chairman Sir Andrew Green said: "This announcement brings to light the absurdity that Commonwealth citizens have the right to vote in local and general elections. Indeed, they can do so within a fortnight of their arrival."
The Ministry of Justice said the increase in voters on the electoral roll was down to efforts to make as many people as possible register.
Elections Minister Bridget Prentice said: "We need as comprehensive an electoral register as possible so everyone is able to have their say."
The department said voter security was improved in 2006, including the new offence of supplying false information.
One million new voters have been added to the electoral register in only two years ? taking the total to a record 46 million, it emerged last night.
Hundreds of thousands of the new electors are immigrants who have been granted British citizenship, or have poured in from Eastern Europe.
Critics said it made the case for changes to the electoral rules ? which allow non-British citizens full voting rights.
Some MPs have also voiced concerns the system could be open to fraud.
Applicants do not have to provide documents proving their identity, or that they are in the country legally.
Instead, they simply fill in a two-page form, which has a self-declaration all the details are accurate and correct.
Government officials say that, as the electoral register is available to the public, any false details could be spotted by local residents and reported.
The huge surge in voter numbers began in 2005, when almost 300,000 names were added to the register which covers local elections.
In 2006, it increased sharply to 513,000, and last year 463,340 names were added.
A separate register for general elections only includes all of the above, except for EU nationals who are allowed to vote in local and European elections only.
This was boosted by 223,172 in 2005, 371,770 in 2006 and 307,669 in 2007.
The difference between the two registers is roughly the number of new voters from the EU ? around 150,000 in each of the last two years.
The vast bulk will be Eastern Europeans who have poured in since the controversial expansion of the EU four years ago.
The growth in the overall register also reflects the fact immigrants who have arrived in the UK since Labour came to power are now being granted citizenship.
With passports being handed out at the rate of 100,000 every year, all these people gain the right to vote.
There have also been thousands of new arrivals from old Commonwealth countries.
Electoral law grants citizens from almost 50 Commonwealth countries, British Dependent Territories and the Republic of Ireland the right to vote in both local and general election because in 1918 they were classed as 'British subjects'.
The total number thought to benefit is around one million.
But only the Republic of Ireland and a small number of countries in the West Indies have a reciprocal agreement.
Migrationwatch said one million votes could be sufficient to swing a close electoral campaign.
Sir Andrew Green, chairman of Migrationwatch UK, said: 'This announcement brings to light the absurdity that Commonwealth citizens have the right to vote in both local and General elections.
'Indeed, they can do so within a fortnight of their arrival.'
The Ministry of Justice, which is in charge of electoral rolls, said the increase was down to efforts to make as many people as possible register to vote.
Elections Minister Bridget Prentice said: 'We need as comprehensive an electoral register as possible so everyone is able to have their say.'
The department said new security measures were introduced in 2006, including the offence of falsely applying for a postal or proxy vote and the criminal offence of supplying false information ? or failing to supply information ? to the electoral registration officer at any time.
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(Green Arrow & Friends)
The latest dirty campaign tactics adopted by Nigel Mills (Tory), communist Judy Mallaber MP (Labour) and Tom Snowdon (Lib Dem) have increased in the run-up to the General Election in Amber Valley, Derby according to the excellent Derby Patriot site.
First up is the lies given to people on their doorstep. People, especially the aged, are being told it is illegal to vote for the British National Party.
Secondly, well, you can see for yourself the leaflet above that has been posted around the Amber Valley.
The illegal leaflets, required by law to name the printer, have been delivered by the Lib/Lab/Con backed communist SWP/UAF thugs to houses around BNP members addresses. Anyone who has information on the creators and distributors of these illegal leaflets should inform the police.
Is there no end to the depths these scum sink?
While they send out their disgusting 'literature' which incites violence against BNP members, the BNP grows stronger. No amount of intimidation or bullying will stop a true patriot; it only serves to advance our cause.
The British National Party candidate is Mr Michael Clarke
Ripley born Michael Clarke has been selected as the British National Party's candidate for the Amber Valley constituency in the forthcoming election.
After attending Shirley Road Primary and Swanwick Hall Grammar Schools, Michael built an award winning furniture design company and is married with three children.
Michael, 53, said: "I am delighted to have been given this opportunity to promote our common sense policies. I will be campaigning on the nation changing issues that the other parties fear to address – mass immigration, the EU and the loss of our Christian heritage will be my priorities, along with the illegal war in Afghanistan, a better deal for our pensioners and cutting crime.
"Many of us are still angry about the expenses scandal and other sleaze allegations coming out of Westminster. By voting BNP you can get your own back."
Tuesday 20th April 2010
Overpopulation! Need more be Said?
A potential global water crisis in coming decades could cause UK food prices to 'skyrocket' and damage the economy, experts warned today.
A report from three engineering groups predicts that a rising world population, growing demand for water and the impact of climate change will make water more scarce in future. This could push up food prices, affect economic growth and even spark conflicts, posing a 'serious threat to the UK', the study warns.
Water is one of the most undervalued natural resources in the world but it affects national security through its impact on economic growth, food supply and healthcare, the researchers said.
Direct water consumption in the UK is around 145 litres per person per day, but the report raises concerns that we rely on too much 'virtual water' embodied in the food, clothes and goods we import.
It claims this hidden water accounts for more than two thirds of the UK's water footprint and is worsening water shortages in other countries.
According to the research, one kilogram of beef requires 15,500 litres of water to produce, more than 10 times that required to grow the same amount of wheat.
A typical cotton T-shirt brought in Britain requires 2,700 litres of water to produce, much of which will have been used in growing the cotton, often in water-stressed areas such as central Asia or Egypt.
When 'virtual water' is taken to account, the average daily water footprint of people in the UK is 4,643 litres per person, of which around 3,000 litres is imported, according to figures from environmental charity WWF.
Mike Haigh, one of the engineers involved in today's study, said the reliance on 'virtual water' could have a 'disastrous' affect on the UK and called for more to be done to raise awareness about the importance of conserving water.
'We think this is an issue that faces poorer nations but it's not. A lot of the United States is under high water stress and the south east of England is not immune to these problems,' he said.
'The UK must recognise its own water footprint and how it is exacerbating the water stress in already water-strained countries by importing food, clothes and goods.'
Mr Haigh admitted it would be an 'uphill struggle' to make people aware that their water consumption was not simply confined to what they drink each day.
Recent wet summers had led people to take warnings about water shortages and climate change less seriously than before, he said.
Professor Roger Falconer, one of the report's authors, said that this meant 'people are not thinking about the problems coming our way in five, 10 or 15 years'.
He said members of the public needed to be educated so they understood their individual water footprint and urged businesses to look at the use of virtual water in their supply chains in the same way they were now doing for carbon.
Professor Peter Guthrie, the lead author of the report, said: 'Our virtual water footprint is critical and we need to give it far greater attention.
'We should ask whether it is right to import green beans - or even roses - from a water-stressed region such as Kenya.'
The report concludes that the UK Government should put water at the centre of its international development policy and calls on the UK to take a lead by reducing its water consumption.
It calls for the UK to manage its water more sustainably from 'cloud to coast' and declares that water impacts should be considered alongside carbon footprints in the face of climate change.
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The amount of water used to produce food and goods imported by developed countries is worsening water shortages in the developing world, a report says.
The report, focusing on the UK, says two-thirds of the water used to make UK imports is used outside its borders.
The Engineering the Future alliance of professional engineering bodies says this is unsustainable, given population growth and climate change.
It says countries such as the UK must help poorer nations curb water use. Continued
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Labour was last night facing damaging claims that the public has been 'misled' for years over the true scale of violent crime.
A leaked Home Office document reveals civil servants' fears that the British Crime Survey may have been undercounting the scale of violence against children and young adults.
Ministers secretly ordered a review of the methods used by the official survey 18 months ago but have yet to make any findings public.
In the meantime, they have continued to trumpet the BCS as proof that violent crime has fallen under the Labour government.
Separate figures from the independent House of Commons Library - pointing to a 44 per cent increase in violence since 1998 - have been rubbished by ministers.
Last night, Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said: 'The fact that they have quietly launched this investigation will completely undermine the Government's claims about its record on crime and in particular will throw a huge cloud over its claims on violent crime.
'This document clearly shows that ministers believe the real level of crime may be much worse than they have been suggesting but that they have buried the reality until after the election.
'Gordon Brown has already been caught several times misleading the public over policing. It looks like he's now doing the same on crime.'
Ministers rely on the BCS - a survey of 40,000 households - to bolster their controversial claim that violent crime is falling.
In a speech last month, Gordon Brown said: 'The British Crime Survey - the most consistently reliable picture of the reality of crime available in any country in the world - has been asking tens of thousands of people about their experiences of crime in the same way for nearly 30 years.
'This is what it says. Crime is falling. Fact. Down by more than a third since 1997. Fact. Almost one-and-a-half million fewer violent crimes. Fact.'
At no stage has Labour placed the caveat on its boasts that the BCS may be failing to properly record youth crime - currently among the country's biggest law and order concerns.
But leaked minutes of a meeting of the Home Office's Surveys, Design and Statistics committee - which took place on September 23, 2008 - reveal private concerns about the quality of the BCS.
The meeting said a review was needed to 'consider whether the BCS possibly under-reports the crimes committed against males and females aged 16-24 living in areas with high levels of crime and social deprivation and thus may have generated underestimates in levels and trends in crime, and to consider the implications of this.'
The findings are unknown. Nor was the public aware it was even taking place.
The latest BCS report, for 2008-09, shows that those aged 16-24 are by far the most likely age group to be the victims of violent offences. According to the study, 8.2 per cent of them have suffered violent crime.
However, only 1,515 people aged between 16 and 24 were interviewed, compared with 5,827 25-34 year-olds and 9,323 35 to 44-year-olds.
The BCS also found that 55 per cent of violent crimes were committed by 16 to 24-year-olds.
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As readers of the paper, this blog and viewers of Channel 4’s Dispatches will know, very disturbing things are going on at Tower Hamlets, the east London council which has fallen under the influence of an Islamic supremacist group, the Islamic Forum of Europe, based at the hardline East London Mosque.
The Labour council leader, Lutfur Rahman, squirmingly refuses to deny that he was elected to his job with the IFE’s help. Several key officials and councillors are closely linked to the IFE. Various organisations controlled by the IFE, including a youth group called the Osmani Trust, have been given enormous amounts of council money.
The Osmani Trust, run by leading figures in the IFE, is a recent merger of two IFE youth organisations, Blyda and Elite Youth. Part of its purpose, according to critics, is to take vulnerable young people off the streets and imbue them with the values of the IFE.
The man in charge of its project working with local gang members, Muhammad Rabbani, is the same person who trains young IFE recruits. Last year, he told them: “Our goal is to create the True Believer, to then mobilise these believers into an organised force for change who will carry out dawah [preaching], hisbah [enforcement of Islamic law, eg Sharia law] and jihad. This will lead to social change and iqamatud-Deen [an Islamic social, economic and political order.]… We have to bear in mind that victory is for Islam and Muslims.”
Despite the exposure of all this, the council’s cabinet brazenly decided on April 7 to hand another £500,000 to the Osmani Trust. Perhaps aware of what it might do to the Labour vote at next month’s election, the decision was taken in secret – only to be notified to the public once Labour was safely back in power. But I’ve been leaked the papers. Sorry, chaps!
In September 2008, Tower Hamlets decided to spend £3.3 million on building the Osmani Trust a new youth centre, even though there is already an existing, secular youth centre just round the corner, recently refurbished by the council at massive public expense. This sum then mysteriously rose to £4 million. It then mysteriously rose again, in June 2009, to £4.4 million.
This month, the Osmani Trust was secretly granted yet another half-million, taking the total council contribution to this project to £4.9 million – nearly 50% higher than the original amount. It will be given in the form of four and a half years’ free rent on the premises the council has just built them and is supposedly because the Osmani Trust has agreed to raise a similar amount from its other income for fixtures and fittings of the new building.
In fact, of course, quite a lot of the Osmani Trust’s “other income” also comes from… Tower Hamlets council. Last year Blyda and Elite Youth together scored a handy £400,000 worth of grants from the council, excluding money for the new building. They got a further £365,000 from other public sector bodies, including the NHS and the Big Lottery Fund. Nearly 70 per cent of their funding comes from the public purse.
As well as being done in secret, the decision to give the extra half-mill was taken under an unusual “urgency procedure”. So the alternative explanation for the council’s action, of course, is that they are anticipating defeat – and need to shovel as much public money as they can into the Islamists’ coffers before that happens.
Whatever the reason, the continued willingness of Tower Hamlets council to act as a paymaster for Islamists needs to be exposed to the public while they still have a chance, at the polls, to stop it.
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The Left-wing Institute for Public Policy Research, a think-tank that gets large amounts of largesse courtesy of Johnny Taxpayer, has come to the conclusion – less than three weeks before the election – that people are voting for the BNP because they haven’t experienced enough immigration.
“The more immigration an area has experienced, the lower its support for the far right,” argues a new report. “It seems that direct contact with migrants dissuades people from supporting the BNP.
“In places where people have had significant contact with migrants, most are not concerned enough by immigration to vote for the BNP. This is in direct contradiction to the story being told by the party itself.
“Immigration to an area appears, on the whole, to make people less likely to vote for the far right.”
So what is behind the BNP’s success, then? “Socio-economic and political exclusion are the major factors at work. Specifically, people feel dejected and alienated in the following situation: in areas where there is a low average level of qualifications, and where many are likely to be struggling to find good quality work; where there is a lack of social cohesion and residents feel that people from different background don’t get along.”
Ah, the old “it’s not enough resources” argument. And yet, if this is the case, why do they vote BNP and not for one of the various loony tune Left-wing parties on offer, all of whom count as a big two-fingers to the establishment and of whom would throw even more money at poor white areas?
The majority of BNP voters in the north switch from Labour, so it’s more logical to vote for a far-Left party; it also involves far less personal stigma, since supporting the BNP is so unmentionable in polite circles that everyone who even mentions the BNP in a comment piece is supposed to preface it with a condemnation of the party (Microsoft Word should create a programme for journalists that automatically types out “of course I loathe the odious BNP and everything they stand for…”). No one is obliged to write the same things when discussing the Socialist Workers Party.
The IPPR’s conclusion that people in immigrant-heavy areas don’t vote for the BNP because they make lots of new foreign chums is also highly dubious. In most cases areas with high levels of immigration in 2008/2009 (the one year on which this report is based on) already had large numbers of immigrants and their offspring in place.
It’s a self-selecting population, in the sense that residents who object to immigration for whatever reason left ages ago, often to places that become BNP strongholds. No one votes BNP in Hackney or Tower Hamlets because any potential BNP voter has long since moved – those who stayed are either happy to live in a multi-racial area, or too poor to do anything about it.
And political parties also depend, to a certain extent, on social networks and on getting people involved. Who’s going to join the Hackney BNP exactly and pound the pavements? Walking down Kingsland Road with a red, white and blue rosette today would be not dissimilar to Bruce Willis’ first task in Die Hard III – suicide.
There are two schools of thought in this area; contact theory suggests that contact makes people get on, conflict theory that it causes people to hate each other. There is truth in both ideas – but suggesting that the increased support for the BNP since 1997 is a result of too little immigration is a sign of faulty logic.
The Left’s attitude to immigration increasingly resembles that of a man in the deluded last stages of hypothermia, ripping off his clothes because he thinks he’s burning to death. The answer to anti-immigration politics is – more immigration!
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A quite bizarre report from the IPPR which attempts to prove that it is not immigration which tempts people to vote BNP, but a lack of “resilience”.
This fatuous word, resilience, is used more and more by government and quangos and local councils, usually to transfer blame to ordinary people for the crimes of those in authority – such as putting up with mass immigration, or being poor, or having rotten schools, or being badly educated. “Resilient” communities are simply affluent, white communities – Richmond Upon Thames, Wokingham and so on.
But what a deluded report, and how weak its terms of reference. The IPPR cross referenced where the BNP did well with levels of immigration and concluded: “Areas that have higher levels of recent immigration are not more likely to vote for the BNP……in fact the more immigration an area experiences, the lower its support for the far right.”
This astonishing statement is explained by the IPPR’s faulty methodology. How do they define areas with “higher levels of recent immigration”? They simply took the new National Insurance stats for ONE YEAR, 2008/9.
How ludicrous is that?
The effects of immigration are not felt immediately; it occurs over years and even decades, as local authorities struggle to cope with a new dependent influx and the nature of the area changes.
It also ignores the fact that in the south, particularly, but also in parts of Yorkshire (Barnsley, for example), the areas where the BNP have done well are white flight towns where the local people have migrated from areas with high immigration, because they did not like the immigration, or areas where they see what has happened nearby and do not wish it to happen to them.
Even then, the IPPR admit an anomaly - in Barking, where the BNP has seen its greatest successes; yes, they admit, there’s been loads of immigration there. Bit of a large anomaly, isn’t it?
A crude way to put its conclusion is that people vote BNP because they are thick and poor and it has nothing to do with immigration – which was the premise they started with, and the premise upon which Labour policy has been based these last 13 years. It’s wrong, obviously, in every possible way.
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Welcome to Reality Check. Today I'm scrutinising Liberal Democrat plans for an amnesty for people who have come to Britain illegally.
The Conservatives suggest it would actually make the problem worse - but is this true?
Nobody really knows how many "irregular migrants" there are in the UK, but one recent estimate by the London School of Economics put it at 618,000 - within a range of 417,000 to 863,000.
The Liberal Democrats say it is now time to "regularise" those who have been here longest, so they can integrate into the legal economy and contribute to the exchequer by paying taxes.
They are calling it an "earned route to citizenship", but they also say they have no idea how many people would qualify.
Their manifesto says: "We will allow people who have been in Britain without the correct papers for 10 years, but speak English, have a clean record and want to live here long-term to earn their citizenship. This route to citizenship will not apply to people arriving after 2010."
Probed further, party officials tell me that those who qualify will then have to serve a probationary period of two years during which they would have to work and pay taxes.
Then they would have to pay a fee or do voluntary service as "penance" to qualify for full citizenship.
Would it work?
Such amnesties have been tried before.
Researchers at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society at the University of Oxford have looked at previous studies, in particular ones of a United States amnesty in 1986.
They found that "almost all show that the large-scale amnesty implemented in 1986 has not reduced, and has in fact increased, undocumented migration to the US, since it established new migration flows due to networks and family ties".
A total of 2.7m qualified for the amnesty in 1986. By 2000 there were an estimated 9.3m illegal immigrants living in the United States.
Meanwhile, Spain had six amnesties in 20 years. In that time the illegal population rose from 44,000 to 700,000 - a 15-fold increase.
However, the Liberal Democrats argue there is no link between the amnesties and the later rise in the number of illegal immigrants entering the two countries.
In fact, leader Nick Clegg told Reality Check it was far better to be "smart about this" and get such immigrants "out of the shadows" and into the hands of the tax man.
He also questioned how illegal immigrants could be deported when the authorities didn't know where they lived.
Tougher laws wanted
But what is clear is the Liberal Democrats are sticking their neck out on this. A recent opinion poll by Ipsos-MORI suggested that 65% of the population want tougher immigration laws , against just 4% who want the laws relaxed.
Some of the party's policies do involve tightening up rules. For example they want to immediately re-introduce exit checks - or embarkation controls - on everyone leaving the country.
But there are other relaxations too, like allowing asylum seekers who are still awaiting a decision on their case to take up employment.
The Liberal Democrats say the other parties simply do not have policies to deal with the large numbers of people living in the UK without proper papers.
They also say honesty is their best policy and they point out that in polling immediately after last week's TV debate, Mr Clegg was scoring higher on immigration than Tory leader David Cameron.
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(Green Arrow & Friends)
I see that the communist Billy Bragg, who these days looks older than his communist boss, Gerry "Unstable" Gable of Searchlight, is still claiming that Barking is his home town, when everyone knows that the only time he visits the place is when he wants to drum up a bit of self publicity to breath live into his rotting corpse of a musical career now that his writing career has failed. (Video Here)
Bragg, who is no more British than I am a poached egg, is a third generation immigrant from the Land of Ice Cream and that is what his illiterate Italian grandfather did for a living when he arrived here. Sold Ice Cream. I am sure it must have been better than his descendants music which is almost as bad if not worse than rap crap. Should you be short of toilet paper you can buy Bragg's book The Progressive Patriot for under £3. Considerably less than its original price of £17.99 but be warned, Bragg's writing is worse than his music.
In the article in today's Guardian, that also has an embedded video, Bragg is pointing his finger a little bit too much for my liking at the elected London Assembly Member of the BNP, Richard Barnbrook. Richard is to be congratulated for his restraint in not reacting violently on having a grubby red finger constantly pointed at him.
When Richard and the aged Red Wedge geriatric met on the streets where Bragg was doing his bit for Searchlight, who are pouring tens of thousands of pounds of taxpayers money into spreading anti-BNP literature around the streets of Barking. A Barking that Bragg barely remembers since becoming a champagne socialist and whose real home in Dorset featured in Home and Gardens, Bragg shot his big stupid mouth off and shot himself in the foot a few times in the process.
Bragg incidentally once joined the British Army but found he could not handle them and bought himself out after just a few month. Nothing to be ashamed of there Billy, you will not be the first or last Italian who could not handle the British Army and run away from them.
Now Bragg who does not even live in London let alone Barking, had the gall to say to Richard, who does live in London, that the BNP, with all their elected councillors in Barking do not represent the people of Barking.
Well Bragg, given that you do not even live there or have the balls to stand in elections, just what gives you the right to interfere with the democratic political process of somewhere far away from where you actually live in Dorset.
For reference, the peroxide blonde dope wearing the Hope T-shirt in the video is Sam Tarry. Another "favourite" of Gerry "Unstable" Gable of the communist run and state sponsored Searchlight organisation that is currently running The Establishment election campaign.
A super big Hat Tip to our own Sarah:Maid of Albion for discovering the unedited Billy Bragg lyrics
And a BIG hat tip to Green Arrow Himself for Excellent Editorials which say exactly how things are, and we so much enjoy reading. (Ed)
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Stop it, just Stop it.. it's embarrassing!
Cameron drops attack on Labour to make 'plea from the heart' election broadcast from his back garden
David Cameron has dropped a political broadcast attacking Labour in order to make a personal plea for voters to avoid a hung parliament.
The video, which was scheduled to be aired last night, has been replaced with a statement in which the Tory leader insists only he can deliver 'change'.
The last-minute tactical change is evidence of how seriously senior Conservatives are taking the Liberal Democrat surge in the wake of the first prime ministerial debate last week.
In the broadcast, recorded yesterday evening in the back garden of his London home, Mr Cameron is seen speaking directly to the camera.
His comments are interspersed with footage from key speeches on issues such as the economy, family and MPs' expenses.
Mr Cameron admits the televised debates have 'shaken up' the election battle, and said people were 'looking at the parties in a way they weren't before'.
'In many ways I'm not surprised,' he says. 'People are desperate for change and they're looking for anything different or new.'
He says the electorate wants a 'strong' Prime Minister who will 'talk to people straight - not just tell people what they want to hear'.
Mr Cameron insists the Tories have a 'big idea', to create a 'Big Society' that will 'smash apart the old politician-knows-best system'.
'But the only way we're going to get that change is through a clear, decisive result at this election,' he adds.
'Any other result would lead to more indecision and more old politics - we might even be left stuck with what we have now.
'That's why we need a new, Conservative government with a strong mandate to come in and blow apart the old way of doing things from day one.'
The new election broadcast comes as two polls have now shown Nick Clegg's party taking the overall lead in the General Election race, while others suggested it has leapfrogged Labour into second place.
Due to the nature of the first-past-the-post system, a strong showing for the Lib Dems on May 6 would be likely to result in a hung Parliament.
The broadcast hammers home a point Mr Cameron was making as he campaigned in the South East today.
On the stump in south London, he said the public was 'grabbing on to anything new' in a bid to find a different direction for Britain.
But he warned there was a risk the country could end up mired in 'uncertainty, fudge and division'.
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Nick Clegg was last night facing fresh scrutiny over his party’s environmental policies after unveiling plans to spend £3billion on “green jobs”.
Nick Clegg leader was in Cardiff to reveal his ambitious blueprint for cutting pollution and saving energy.
They include a £140million bus scrappage scheme to help firms replace old polluting vehicles with new low-carbon ones.
The Lib Dems also called for a “green economic stimulus plan”.
This would include promoting wind energy, energy efficiency in public buildings, an eco-cashback scheme and encouraging home- energy improvements.
Clegg said: “The opportunity is before us to use the crisis of climate change, and climate science tells us that this is our last chance for change, to use that crisis to help mould and shape a fundamentally new approach to growth in the British economy.”
He added: “Over the longer term, we will fund the transition to a green economy through a UK Infrastructure Bank – an idea first set out by Vince Cable and now adopted by the other parties.”
But critics last night warned that the Lib Dems were pledging dozens of unfunded polices that could cost taxpayers billions.
Tory chairman Eric Pickles said: “Nick Clegg had a good TV performance but voters need to examine Liberal Democrat policies carefully.”
Lib Dem energy and climate change spokesman, Simon Hughes, had earlier outlined plans to create 30,000 jobs by investing in wind energy, energy efficiency in public buildings and homes, and bring 250,000 empty homes back into use through renovation.
He claimed there would be extra support for young people with 800,000 internships to help build up their experience.
He said up to a million people could take part in an “eco-cashback” scheme to give people £400 towards energy-efficient home improvements.
They will be able to apply for the cash to help pay for double-glazing, boiler upgrades and micro-generation such as solar panels, and domestic wind turbines.
Mr Hughes said: “We don’t want this just to be a scheme that deals with the public institutions or the corporate sector, we want real people to start feeling they can make a contribution and that would be a £335million package, creating 8,000 jobs.”
He said he wanted to make schools more energy-efficient. They could be lent money for improvements, which could be paid back through savings on their bills.
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The purveyors of the “man-made” global warming scam have been dealt another severe blow by the news that Britain and continental Europe could experience even more cold winters in the future — not because of the industrial activities of mankind, but due to low solar activity.
Researchers claim to have identified a link between fewer sunspots and atmospheric conditions that are responsible for the colder than usual conditions in Europe during the winter months.
The same researchers go on to claim that the phenomenon effects Europe in particular and that it would not “alter the overall global warming trend”; however, seeing as they are based at the government-funded University of Reading, then perhaps the addition of the almost obligatory “global warming” caveat is not surprising.
The researchers, led by Professor Lockwood, compared solar activity records with reliable temperature records for central England, which date back to the mid-seventeenth century.
The records show a high degree of correlation between periods of low solar activity (indicated by a lack of sunspots on the solar surface) and low temperatures across central England.
Conversely, periods of high solar activity (with many sunspots visible on the sun’s surface), corresponded to higher temperatures recorded across the region.
With respect to Britain and continental Europe, the team believes that solar activity could influence the jet streams, the high speed winds that circulate at very high altitudes above the earth, causing them to “block” warmer air currents from reaching Europe during periods of low solar activity.
Research indicates that Europe is particularly susceptible because it lies directly beneath the northern hemisphere’s main jet stream.
This winter, for instance, it is suggested that a prolonged “blocking” occurred which prevented warmer air from reaching Britain and Europe; the phenomena being directly responsible for the long spell of freezing weather experienced.
The solar activity factor thought most likely to impact on weather conditions on earth is Ultra Violet (UV) radiation output.
When solar activity is high, the amount of UV released by the sun increases, which, in turn, reduces the “blocking” effect of terrestrial jet streams, allowing warmer air to circulate into more northerly climes.
When solar activity is low, so is the amount of UV released and the impact on the jet streams reduced accordingly; allowing an intensification of the cold-inducing “blocking” process in our atmosphere.
The rather obvious implication of this research is that “man-made” global warming plays little or no part in determining global temperatures, the activity of the sun being the overwhelmingly determinant factor.
Although there has been no response from the Government to this latest piece of damning research, it can be confidently predicted that it will be ignored.
This is because the “man-made” global warming myth has little to do with scientific fact and everything to do with imposing phoney “green taxes” to fund the United Nation’s covert programme leading to what it describes as its “New Green World Order” and “global governance”, by 2050.
This programme will cost $54 trillion dollars, a colossal sum to be raised through “green taxation” ofy the industrialised world over the next 40 years.
The “man-made” global warming scam is not just another fraud; it is potentially the biggest heist in history.
The British National Party is alone in British politics in both exposing this globalist project and the phony science that underpins it.
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(BBC - Watch on BBC Player)
Since 1997, record levels of immigration have boosted our population by more than 2 million, accounting for half the total estimated rise in population of about 4 million.
So is Britain getting full?
With immigration projected to drive two thirds of our population growth, the polls suggest voters think the answer is "Yes".
Next to the economy, immigration is the second most important issue, beyond even crime and the NHS.
In last week's televised election debate, all three main party leaders said they would be tough on immigration.
The Office of National Statistics say that over the next two decades the UK population is on course to grow by eight million to 70m.
That is roughly the equivalent of adding eight new cities, each the size of Birmingham.
Quality of life
If that happens it will have profound implications for public policy: England expects to take 90% of that growth. Yet, aside from Malta, England is already the most densely populated country in Europe, according to UK and UN statistics.
Where will all the new houses and shops be built?
And from where will come the tens of billions to build the infrastructure - the sewers, water treatment plants, power stations, railways lines, roads, schools, and hospitals?
This, at a time when we are about to enter one of the most deep and sustained periods of public spending cuts in our history.
Most of the new homes are needed because more people are living longer or alone. But four of out of every 10 new households will be accounted for by immigration - the only factor amenable to government control.
How might our quality of life be affected?
Many of us could end up feeling distinctly squashed - new houses being built today already have the smallest dimensions in Europe.
The average commuting time to work is now among Europe's longest. That is likely to grow as the number of households forming continues to out pace new home completions, driving up the price of properties and forcing people further from major towns and cities.
For families not able to buy or rent privately, our growing population and the mass sale of the most desirable socially rented homes have contributed to an acute shortage of council housing.
In the London borough of Barking and Dagenham, up to 600 families compete for every three-bed home that becomes available.
Katy Thorndike has been on the waiting list for more suitable accommodation for herself and her five children for five years.
Her flat is riddled with damp and when it rains she says the carpets squelch.
She was born and raised locally but she believes migrant families have been getting preferential treatment.
Housing crunch
"We do see a lot of migrants coming into the borough and getting the properties straightaway, " she said. "I do think it's unfair. I'm stuck in a slum like this."
The BNP is challenging here, in what has been a traditionally safe Labour seat.
Miss Thorndike said I do think that maybe people from this borough should be given preference over people who are not."
Barking and Dagenham council insist migrants do not get preference over housing allocations.
But inevitably, increased numbers of migrants lengthen the queue, resulting in increased competition.
Across England, there are now 1.8m households waiting for social housing.
Schools are also feeling the stress from our fast growing population.
At Mount Carmel Primary in north Manchester head teacher Patricia Ganley has had to turn her office into a classroom.
"There's been a big explosion of people coming into the area," she said. "We've had a lot of families from overseas."
How many marks out of ten did she give the government for planning? "About a two or three" she answered.
Across the UK, births are up by 11% since 2004.
At North Manchester General Hospital, Denise Woods, Community Midwifery Matron, said 2,800 women are giving birth a year - an increase of 600 a year from 2002.
A higher birth-rate among new immigrants is contributing significantly to this rise.
In England, one in four births - 170,000 a year- is now to a mother born abroad.
Points system
However, immigration minister Phil Woolas does not give the ONS population projection much credence.
"I don't believe we will get to 70m" he said.
The government has no control over EU migrants.
But Prime Minister Gordon Brown has insisted that the government's new points based system allowing in only economic migrants and students from other countries who score sufficient points through their skills, jobs and financial status is reducing net migration.
ONS projections do not take account of such changes in government policy.
On the other hand, its recently retired head Dame Karen Dunnell says: "We have actually greatly improved the quality of statistics over the last five years."
The latest finalised ONS statistics - for 2008 - do show a fall in net migration from 2007. But since then immigration has still added around 300,000 to the UK's population.
So what are the differences between Labour and the Conservatives? Not, perhaps, as sharp as Mr Brown and Conservative Leader David Cameron might wish voters to think.
The Tories say they will impose an overall cap on the number of work permits wherever they impact adversely on public services. Yet that limit may not, in practice, be very different from the numbers allowed in by Labour.
Shadow immigration minister Damian Green said: "I do think government should control that. I think the immigration rate should be substantially lower than it has been under the current government."
But he declined to give a figure on what the work permit cap should be, except to say that net migration - the difference between immigration and emigration - would be cut from the current 163,000 to "tens of thousands".
Under both Labour and the Conservatives, permits are likely to be dictated primarily by the level of skills shortages in the economy as independently assessed by officials.
Where does all this leave the ONS projection of 70 million?
Crowded southeast
Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrats home affairs spokesman, said the fact that Thames Water is having to build a desalination plant in the Thames Estuary to increase the water supply vividly demonstrates how the population of London and the South East are "reaching clear environmentally sustainable limits".
Even so, for Mr Huhne the issue is not whether the UK reaches "65m, 70m (or) 75m".
What matters is how migrants are distributed across the country, he said.
The Liberal Democrats under Leader Nick Clegg, he said, want to restrict them to less densely populated parts of the north and Scotland to help rebalance the economy away from the south east and financial services towards more traditional forms of wealth creation, such as manufacturing.
By contrast, Phil Woolas said: "I don't think our country could cope easily at all with 70m."
Given the vicissitudes of the economy, precisions by any of the parties about the annual reduction in net migration is not possible.
But to avoid getting to 70m, the reduction will have to be substantial - down from 163,000 to, at most, an average of 50,000.
Whichever party wins the election, the ONS population projection will present them with an acute dilemma - without substantial falls in immigration, house prices and rents will go yet higher, increasing the divisions of an already deeply divided society.
The alternative is a massive building programme. But that would mean borrowing even more at a time when national debt is already at record levels. Politics is, indeed, about tough choices.
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And all because.. He's Depressed
The Sort of Luxury in today's prisons we commented on yesterday!
Jon Venables has been given a luxury prison cell fitted out with widescreen TV, video games and gym equipment, according to claims today.
The killer of James Bulger has had his accommodation upgraded amid fears he is contemplating suicide.
Prison officials fear the 27-year-old, who was recently sent back to prison following alleged breaches of his parole licence over child porn, is depressed and suicidal.
It comes after staff allegedly found a stash of painkillers hidden in his bed.
Venables, who along with Robert Thompson abducted and killed James Bulger in 1993, hoarded 20 strong co-codamol pills after pretending to take them.
A source told the Daily Mirror: 'Staff have noticed a deterioration in his mental health. There is no suggestion he has made any attempt to take his own life, but the pills raise serious questions.'
Venables, who along with Robert Thompson abducted and killed James Bulger in 1993, hoarded 20 strong co-codamol pills after pretending to take them.
A source told the Daily Mirror: 'Staff have noticed a deterioration in his mental health. There is no suggestion he has made any attempt to take his own life, but the pills raise serious questions.'
Concerns about his mental state and the effect that round-the-clock isolation is having on him has prompted officials to deck out his cell with entertainment.
As well as a TV, gym and Nintendo GameCube, Venables - who is living under a new identity -has been provided with a music system and a guitar.
He has also been provided with board games and a shower, and wardens have been urged to keep him engaged in conversation in order to control his mood swings.
The revelations are likely to upset the family of Bulger, who was two-years-old when he was murdered by the pair of ten-year-olds.
The pair were controversially released from custody in 2001 but Venables is the first to get in serious trouble again.
The source added that a lack of contact with other inmates was also affecting the prisoner.
'On one hand, this protects him from revenge attacks and helps maintain his anonymity. But on the other hand, the lack of interaction with others hampers his well-being and is becoming an issue.
It was claimed that Venables enjoyed listening to rock music and bands including Coldplay, before attempting to strum the tunes on a guitar he was given from wardens.
A decision on whether to charge Venables with child porn offences will be made within weeks.
The Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, received a police fine on the allegations facing James Bulger's killer on Friday.
Detectives believe there is sufficient evidence to bring charges. However Mr Starmer and his senior lawyers could rule it is 'not in the public interest' to mount a prosecution.
Legal sources said Mr Starmer's decision would be 'free from political pressure' and would be based on the evidence gathered by the police.
One said: 'He is a robust character and will authorise charges if he believes it appropriate'.
Should Venables stand trial, the case could be the subject of unprecedented reporting restrictions to protect his new identity.
The logistics of how the prosecution would be managed will be considered when a decision on charges has been made, legal sources said.
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A nurse was stabbed and mutilated to death in a frenzied knife attack after arguing with her jealous ex-boyfriend.
Katie Cullen, 35, a senior hospital sister, was knifed repeatedly in the face and neck by asylum seeker Iman Ghaefelipour, 28.
Iranian-born Ghaefelipour was furious when Miss Cullen dumped him for stealing more than £3,000 from her bank account.
But when his plan to win back his former lover failed he fell into a violent rage and stabbed her more than 130 times.
After she had died Ghaelfelipour gouged out her right eyeball and attempted to sever her right hand with the knife.
He was today jailed for a minimum of 23 years after he pleaded guilty to her murder at Manchester Crown Court.
The jury heard Miss Cullen, a highly-respected senior sister in cardiology at the Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital, began dating Ghaelfelipour in 2008 after attending a number of salsa classes at a nightclub.
Initially the couple had been close and he was introduced to her family and they talked of moving in together.
But the six-month affair soured when Miss Cullen discovered her jobless boyfriend had been stealing money from her bank account.
She initially went to police but decided against pressing charges after he vowed he would pay the money back in instalments.
The pair continued to communicate by text but the court heard Ghaefelipour failed to make some of his repayments.
Graham Wood QC, prosecuting, said: 'There is evidence of affectionate communication in text messaging right to the end of 2008 although Katie was describing him as possessive and very controlling to her friends.
'In the early part of 2009 communication began to become more businesslike and a relationship of boyfriend and girlfriend ground to a halt.
'The repayment arrangement which they had agreed upon was to be her downfall because in the months ahead it provided him with an excuse to keep in regular contact with her. It is plain his affection for Katie had not diminished.'
In June last year Miss Cullen began a relationship with another man and Ghaefelipour attacked him in a jealous rage when he saw them together.
On October 20 last year Ghaefelipour went to his ex-girlfriend's home on the pretext of discussing the outstanding money he owed.
Shortly after his arrival neighbours heard a scream and loud thudding noises coming from her terraced home in Stockport, Cheshire.
Ghaefelipour, of Urmston, Greater Manchester, fled and later went to hospital where he claimed he had been mugged and was treated for cuts to his hands.
The 28-year-old was later arrested by police officers as he boarded a bus though he initially denied her murder.
Judge Ernest Ryder told Ghaefelipour: 'No-one could have known that the misfortune she had in meeting you at a salsa dancing class was going to be the trigger for her untimely death.
'There was nothing in her blameless life of public service which could have predicted what happened to her at your hands.
'Katie's family are bereft, devastated and haunted by the circumstances of her death and the brutal and senseless way you took a valuable life.'
After the case her mother Diane Cullen, who is also a nurse said: 'Katie was a very special daughter and sister and we are completely devastated at her tragic death.
'She saw only goodness in everyone and had a generosity and selflessness that made her special. She loved people and enjoyed life and was warm-hearted, compassionate and sincere. The feeling we have that we were unable to protect her will haunt me for ever.'
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A judge sparked outrage after ruling that an illegal immigrant sex monster jailed for preying on two teenage girls should be allowed to stay in Britain.
Evil Zulfar Hussain, 48, was to be deported after spending almost three years behind bars for "shocking" attacks on two vulnerable teens.
But an immigration judge has ruled he can stay in the UK after the sex offender mounted a legal challenge.
Hussain and accomplice Qaiser Naveed, 34, were jailed after being found guilty of plying the two girls with booze and ecstasy before having sex with them in the back of a car.
The Pakistani nationals were both sent to prison for five years and eight months after being found guilty of child abduction, sexual activity with a child and supplying youngsters with ecstasy.
The judge is believed to have acted in Hussain's favour after hearing that he would be persecuted if he was forced to return to Pakistan.
Hussain — due to be released from prison in a few weeks — is now expected to return to the home he shared with his wife and children in Blackburn, Lancashire.
Child safety campaigner Paul Houston, whose daughter Amy was killed by an illegal immigrant driver, slammed the decision as "appalling".
Justice minister Jack Straw called the move "concerning" and backed the Home Office's decision to appeal Hussain's bid to stay in the country.
A Home Office spokesman confirmed that they are seeking to appeal the decision to allow him "leave to remain", saying: "We always seek to remove those foreign nationals who break the law, focusing on the serious offenders as a priority."
Hussain and Naveed were both ordered to sign the sex offenders' register for life and banned for life from associating with girls under the age of 16 at their sentencing at Preston Crown Court in August 2007.
The court heard how the two girls, who were both in care, had sex with the two older men over several months.
In one incident Naveed, from Burnley, had sex with one girl on the back seat of his BMW car while the second girl remained in the front of the vehicle with Hussain.
Police had described the girls as "vulnerable", with one living in a children's home and another taken out of foster care after repeated truancy and placed in another home in Wales.
At sentencing, Judge Andrew Gilbart QC said: "This is a truly shocking offence. When young girls such as these are placed in care it can be because they need protection from themselves. They need nurturing. They need help."
Naveed — also a Pakistani national — is not opposing his deportation and will be sent to a high-security Immigration Removal Centre until he is deported to Pakistan.
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A third runway at Heathrow airport will leave the UK £5billion worse off, according to a report from an independent think-tank.
The £5billion includes £2.5billion of negative impacts on the local community around the west London airport, the report from the New Economics Foundation said.
Labour reiterated its support for an additional runway at Heathrow in its General Election manifesto last week, but the Conservatives and Lib Dems said they were opposed to expansion plans at the airport.
To evaluate the third runway's benefits, NEF said its researchers had used the same economic modelling programme as the Department for Transport (DfT), but updated the input data on economic growth rates, exchange rates, carbon prices, fuel prices and other variables.
The researchers also estimated the costs of a new runway to the local community.
This included revisiting the DfT's estimates for noise disturbance and air pollution, and, for the first time, calculating the cost of additional surface congestion and community blight.
Nef said the DfT had predicted a £5.5 billion net benefit from a third runway.
Nef said its report presented 'the formidable environmental hurdle faced by proponents of a third runway because of the climate change impacts of air travel".
Helen Kersley, co-author of the report, added: 'With such high social and environmental costs associated with Runway 3, the burden of proof should lie squarely with those who are in favour of the expansion. It's up to them to demonstrate that Runway 3 is in the public interest.
'With a rapidly diminishing timeframe in which to tackle climate change it is imperative that we allocate our carbon budget in the most efficient and equitable way, and to schemes that will create the most social value.
'This must surely be the test for any proposed infrastructure project in the future.'
Plans for the runway hit a snag last month after the High Court ordered ministers to take the project back to the drawing board.
In a major blow to Labour, the court said the Government's support for the scheme was untenable and ordered a fresh inquiry into its impact on traffic congestion and climate change.
Opponents of the runway welcomed the ruling as a major victory and urged ministers to scrap the plans once and for all.
The Government came out in support of a third runway at Europe's busiest airport in 2003 and confirmed its backing in January last year.
But a coalition of local councils, residents and green groups have argued that the increased air traffic and pollution caused by the airport expansion was at odds with Britain's climate change targets.
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What will it take before we leave the damned EU?
The Government could be forced to seek advance approval for its budgets as part of controversial plans by the European Commission to drive stronger “economic governance” across Europe.
Plans to have national budgets approved in advance by other European governments to avert excessive deficits met a cool reception from finance ministers meeting in Madrid at the weekend.
Although euro zone monetary policy is united, fiscal policies differ, and some countries – notably Greece – have run into trouble during the global crisis with budget deficits exceeding 10 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) helping to weaken the euro.
Olli Rehn, economic and monetary affairs commissioner, outlined the “peer review” proposal, which will be presented in full on May 12th. He proposed “a systematic and rigorous assessment of national budgets before they are presented to national parliaments”, leading to “remedial actions” if necessary.
Jean-Claude Juncker, the Luxembourger who chairs the euro group, supported the idea.
“It makes sense to discuss among the finance ministers the broad lines of the budget before these budgets are introduced in the parliamentary procedure,” he said, denying this would diminish the rights of national assemblies.
Other member states, however, immediately poured cold water on the possibility of restricting or supplanting national sovereignty over budgets. Elena Salgado, the Spanish finance minister, said there was no question of European ministers voting on the national budgets of other countries.
“They are not going to substitute the decisions made by national parliaments,” she said. “Nation states are complicated and budgets are complicated.”
Joerg Asmussen, Germany’s deputy finance minister, also rejected the idea of diluting national control of budgets. It was “quite clear that national budget authority has to remain unrestricted, although we are obviously subject to the rules of the stability and growth pact”.
This euro zone stability pact – a widely abused agreement that was supposed to limit annual budget deficits to 3 per cent of GDP – is the existing, imperfect framework for co-ordinating Europe’s fiscal policies, and some of the more fiscally rigorous northern EU states are in favour of strengthening it.
Ireland’s budget deficit is on track to be around four times this limit in 2010, the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) said last week.
Meanwhile, a mission of European officials and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to Greece to make arrangements for a potential aid deal has been delayed by the volcanic ash cloud, the Greek government said yesterday.
The mission, which had been scheduled to begin this morning, has been postponed until Wednesday at the earliest. – (Financial Times/Reuters.)
See Also:
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Disgraced former Tory MP Julie Kirkbride is cashing in on her taxpayer-funded second home by putting it up for rent at £925 a month.
Miss Kirkbride, who stood down as an MP for Bromsgrove over the expenses scandal, claimed more than £80,000 in expenses for a three bedroom mansion flat in her Worcestershire constituency.
The former Tory MP even used taxpayer funds to help pay for a £50,000 extension so her brother could live in the flat - jointly owned with her former Tory MP husband Andrew Mackay - for free.
The flat was last week being advertised as furnished accommodation in a 'splendid historic hall', while the lounge was said to offer views over 'beautifully landscaped gardens'.
The couple's political careers were wrecked when it emerged that they were funding both their London home and the flat out of parliamentary expenses.
They each claimed expenses on different 'second' homes - meaning their bill for living costs was almost entirely
subsidised by the taxpayer.
Between them they claimed more than £170,000 in accommodation expenses over four years.
Mr Mackay is believed to be enjoying a parliamentary pension package and pay-off estimated by Hargreaves Lansdown, the financial adviser, to be worth £1.8million — the highest of any MP. He is reported to have secured a job with Burson-Marsteller, the lobbying firm.
Miss Kirkbride, who was an MP for 13 years, will receive a pension of more than £20,000 a year.
She also claimed £1,040 for photo shoots, including pictures of her posing in a hayfield.
It also emerged that she paid her sister Karen Leadley £12,000 out of the public purse to work as her secretary, even though she lives 140 miles from the constituency.
Louise Marnell, who was chairwoman of the Julie Must Go! campaign in the constituency, said: 'This is disgusting. She’s making money from a property that should belong to the taxpayer. It’s one rule for them and another rule for us.'
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The English are the least patriotic people in Europe, a St George's Day poll found today.
Their fear of being smeared as racist is greater than their enthusiasm for expressing their love of their country, it found.
Only one in ten would happily fly the cross of St George to celebrate their national saint's day.
Double that number said they thought they would be instructed by authorities to remove the St George cross if they flew it from their house.
And almost half said that England had lost its identity in the face of European interference and political correctness.
The findings were published in advance of St George's Day, which, as two thirds of those polled did not know, falls on this Friday, 23 April.
They showed that on average, English people rate their patriotism at slightly below six on a scale out of ten, far behind the Scots, Welsh and Irish, and trailing in the wake of the Dutch, the most patriotic people on the continent.
The magazine This England polled nearly 6,000 people across nine European countries to assess their state of patriotism.
Its editor Stephen Garnett said: 'We are incredibly disappointed that English people are afraid of displaying the St George's Cross on our patron saint's day.
Monday 19th April 2010
A '40-year-old black man' who David Cameron quoted in this week's TV debate has criticised the Tory leader for getting details about him wrong.
Neal Forde was quoted by Mr Cameron as being ashamed of Britain's 'out of control immigration system.'
But he got 51-year-old Mr Forde's age wrong by 11 years and also wrongly told the audience of nine million he had served in the Royal Navy for 30 years when it was actually six.
Cameron referred to Neal, who runs a business supplying kitchen worktops, while speaking about immigration during the debate on Thursday evening.
'I was in Plymouth recently and a 40-year-old black man...said, 'I came here when I was six, I've served in the Royal Navy for 30 years, I'm incredibly proud of my country.
'But I'm so ashamed that we've had this out-of-control system with people abusing it so badly'.'
But Mr Forde said he didn't believe the Conservatives had the answers to Britain's immigration problem and, like Labour, had 'forgotten the British people.'
Mr Forde, of Plymouth, Devon, said he had been teased by his friends and colleagues because of the inaccuracies in Cameron's anecdote.
'He said I spent 30 years in the Navy. I was actually in for six years, as a marine engineer serving on HMS Intrepid and HMS Berwick.' 'At least he took 10 years off my age.'
He added: 'What I find unacceptable is that the politicians - Labour, Tory, I can't say Lib-Dem because they haven't been in power - seem to care more about everybody else and forget the British people.
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A former Labour Minister has accused Gordon Brown of ‘Alice In Wonderland politics’ which have left Britain facing ‘destruction’ by an economic catastrophe in the summer.
The doom-laden prediction came in a ferocious personal attack on the ‘abnormal’ Prime Minister by senior Labour MP Frank Field.
Ignoring pleas by Labour chiefs not to rock the boat in the run up to the Election, Mr Field savaged the Prime Minister’s economic record and said Britain might never recover unless swift action is taken to save the nation from bankruptcy.
‘Our country is in such a state,’ said Birkenhead MP Mr Field. ‘We’ve printed money to buy our own debt. It’s real Alice In Wonderland politics.
'We have to ask the world if they want to lend us money. If we can’t shift the debt we’re finished.’
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