Archive 27
UkTabloid
The People's News Portal
Saturday 12th June 2010
Labour's Agenda was Clear from the Start
And Communist Miliband confirms it !
A Labour Party rift over immigration was exposed last night after leadership favourite David Miliband called for Britain’s open-door border policy to stay in place.
The former Foreign Secretary – the early front-runner in the race to succeed Gordon Brown – vowed to fight Tory plans for an annual limit on immigration and scrap the measure if he ever becomes Prime Minister.
And he was critical of former premier Mr Brown’s ill-fated “British jobs for British workers” slogan.
Mr Miliband’s remarks came at the first hustings in the leadership contest on Wednesday night.
His words conflicted with rival Ed Balls, who has urged Labour to take a tougher line on immigration in an attempt to win back lost votes.
Mr Miliband told the meeting in London: “Britain is better because of immigration.” He insisted the limit on newcomers would be “either so high it is meaningless or so low it will damage the economy”.
In contrast, Mr Balls yesterday admitted Labour made a “mistake” in opening UK borders to new EU countries in eastern Europe.
The Commie way.. All are equal except those who want to rule us!
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Surrounded by a police protection unit and chauffeured in a ministerial Jaguar, you could be forgiven for thinking that David Miliband did not belong to the party which lost the election.
While his rivals for the Labour leadership pay for taxis and take trains, the bookmaker's favourite Mr Miliband is costing taxpayers thousands of pounds in security and transport costs.
A Labour source said: 'It's ridiculous. He's swanning around in a Jag and the others, who were ministers as well, are trudging around on foot or in taxis at their own expense. It's not as if he's an obvious target.'
Allies of the leadership frontrunner say he is entitled to continuing support from the Scotland Yard police protection unit because of security issues surrounding his status as a former Foreign Secretary.
It is convention for former prime ministers and high-profile cabinet ministers to receive police protection for a number of years after leaving office.
Former Northern Ireland Secretary Lord Mason is understood to still receive full police protection more than 30 years after leaving the Government, while protecting Tony Blair is costing taxpayers a staggering £6million a year.
Mr Miliband's regal progress around the country has irritated supporters of his leadership rivals, who have to keep costs to a minimum as they fight to head their party.
They point out that Mr Miliband was hardly a cheerleader for the war in Iraq or Afghanistan and is unlikely to be a target for terrorists.
Mr Miliband's spokesman said he took the train to a GMB union hustings in Wigan on Monday, but she confirmed that he was met by a car driven by protection officers and driven to the event at taxpayers' expense.
A ministerial Jaguar used by Mr Miliband was also spotted parked on a yellow line outside Church House in Westminster that night, where the leadership contenders did a second hustings for backbenchers. A source close to Mr Miliband said: 'It is very unfair to criticise him for this. All the security decisions are taken by the personal protection unit in the Met.
'David has no say over anything. When he's travelling around the country we always take the train, which is cheaper, greener, more convenient and more comfortable.
'The personal protection people decide what car to pick him up in. There's a pool of cars they use. They decide whether to pick him up in a Ford Fiesta or a Jaguar. They've done an assessment and they still believe he is in need of security. When they think he no longer needs it they will tell him.'
The Home Office, which has responsibility for the protection unit, does not comment on the details of individual former ministers' security arrangements.
A spokesman said: 'The Government is committed to ensuring the costs for protective security arrangements are reviewed continually and withdrawn when they are no longer required.'
See Also:
The family of David Miliband, was branded untrustworthy by Home Office and Foreign Office officials when they tried to migrate to Britain, documents reveal.
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A Muslim community leader given a jail term for falsely claiming to have been kidnapped by members of the British National Party is thought to be in his native Mauritius after skipping bail, a jury was told today.
Noor Ramjanally (pictured), 36, of Loughton, Essex, was given a two-year prison sentence after being convicted of attempting to pervert the course of justice following a trial at Chelmsford Crown Court.
Judge Karen Walden Smith had ruled that the trial could go ahead in Ramjanally's absence and without him being represented by a lawyer after legal discussions.
Prosecutor Matthew Gowan said Ramjanally - who ran a Muslim prayer group and had no previous convictions - absconded earlier this year after appearing in court and pleading not guilty and was thought to be in Mauritius.
Police said they were considering their options.
Mr Gowan said prior to making the "kidnap" claim Ramjanally told police that he had received threatening letters and that someone had tried to set fire to the council flat where he lived.
Jurors heard that more than £10,000 pounds of taxpayers' cash had been spent on investigations and on beefing up security at Ramjanally's home.
Judge Walden Smith said Ramjanally's crime was the "worst type" of justice perversion because it had inflamed racial tensions and wasted public money and police time.
Mr Gowan said Ramjanally had a history of making allegations of being threatened. He said Ramjanally had previously complained of being threatened by the "IRA" and by "Jamaican drug dealers".
He said Ramjanally was also facing allegations of benefit fraud, defrauding and stealing from a local mosque and was an "overstayer" being investigated by immigration authorities.
Jurors were told that unbeknown to Ramjanally police had set up a covert camera in the flat after being told of the "threatening letters" and "attempted arson".
Footage revealed no sign of the "two burly white men" Ramjanally claimed had snatched him at his home at knifepoint in August 2009, said Mr Gowan.
On the day he claimed to have been kidnapped Ramjanally had been taken to a local DIY store by taxi, jurors heard.
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Hold on - why is this bloke called 'British' when he has a 'home country' to flee too ?
There is only one type of Briton, those who have no home nation other than Britain.
The rest are just colonists.
A Muslim community leader given a jail term for falsely claiming to have been kidnapped by members of the British National Party is thought to be in his native Mauritius after skipping bail, a jury was told today.
Noor Ramjanally (pictured), 36, of Loughton, Essex, was given a two-year prison sentence after being convicted of attempting to pervert the course of justice following a trial at Chelmsford Crown Court.
Judge Karen Walden Smith had ruled that the trial could go ahead in Ramjanally's absence and without him being represented by a lawyer after legal discussions.
Prosecutor Matthew Gowan said Ramjanally - who ran a Muslim prayer group and had no previous convictions - absconded earlier this year after appearing in court and pleading not guilty and was thought to be in Mauritius.
Police said they were considering their options.
Mr Gowan said prior to making the "kidnap" claim Ramjanally told police that he had received threatening letters and that someone had tried to set fire to the council flat where he lived.
Jurors heard that more than £10,000 pounds of taxpayers' cash had been spent on investigations and on beefing up security at Ramjanally's home.
Judge Walden Smith said Ramjanally's crime was the "worst type" of justice perversion because it had inflamed racial tensions and wasted public money and police time.
Mr Gowan said Ramjanally had a history of making allegations of being threatened. He said Ramjanally had previously complained of being threatened by the "IRA" and by "Jamaican drug dealers".
He said Ramjanally was also facing allegations of benefit fraud, defrauding and stealing from a local mosque and was an "overstayer" being investigated by immigration authorities.
Jurors were told that unbeknown to Ramjanally police had set up a covert camera in the flat after being told of the "threatening letters" and "attempted arson".
Footage revealed no sign of the "two burly white men" Ramjanally claimed had snatched him at his home at knifepoint in August 2009, said Mr Gowan.
On the day he claimed to have been kidnapped Ramjanally had been taken to a local DIY store by taxi, jurors heard.
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The new chairman of the Conservative Party, Pakistani-origin Saheeda Warsi, has inadvertently revealed her newspapers of choice to the public: Muslim News, the Voice of Black Britain and assorted Arabic language publications.
The insight into where the Conservative Party has gone ideologically was revealed in a video produced by that party to promote Ms Warsi (who is still unelected and was given a seat in the House of Lords by David Cameron to justify her cabinet position).
The video, made to show excited Tories how Ms Warsi is settling into her new job as their boss, pans around the office formerly occupied by 'ex'-Communist Tory cabinet minister Eric Pickles.
Ms Warsi explains the changes she has brought about in the office, including a cupboard for her clothes (possibly the Indian dress she wore at the first cabinet meeting?), some fruit, and then, as the camera pans over her desk, her reading material of choice.
Normal people would think that the chairman of the Conservative Party would read the Times, the Financial Times and other papers of record first, or possibly one of the Tory-leaning tabloids.
The new Conservative Party chairman’s reading list does not appear to include these periodicals.
Instead, as is clearly shown, the new Tory boss is a subscriber to Muslim News and a large pile of Arabic language newspapers.
One of the Muslim News’s more recent stories boasted how “a record breaking number of 26 African, Asian and Caribbean candidates [were] elected to Parliament, up from 14.
“Among Muslims, the number doubled as forecast by the Muslim News to 8, continuing the sequence of the first in 1997, two in 2001 and four in 2005.”
Ms Warsi clearly has no problem with the “Muslim only” policy of her favourite newspaper. The Muslim News organises the annual “Muslim News Awards for Excellence” event to “acknowledge British Muslim contribution to society.”
Ms Warsi's choice of reading material and her subscription to the overtly blacks-only Voice newspaper are confirmation of her party’s desire to put the interests of the indigenous population of Britain last.
Doubtless there will be many Conservative Party voters wondering if this was the ideology and leadership for which they voted.
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Sarkozy apologises to Queen after vandals desecrate British WWI graves in France with racist slogans
Nicolas Sarkozy today personally apologised to the Queen after a cemetery commemorating thousands of British war dead including one of her uncles was desecrated.
The French President said it was ‘revolting’ that Nazi graffiti should have been daubed in bright pink paint around the graveyard in Loos-en-Gohelle, near Lens.
Mr Sarkozy said he also wanted to say sorry to the ‘entire British nation’ which had fought so hard to free France during two world wars.
A dozen graves were covered in swastikas and SS symbols, as well as a monument commemorating more than 20,633 soldiers who died in the infamous Battle of Loos but have no known graves.
They include Fergus Bowes-Lyon, brother of Elizabeth, who went on to marry George VI and later become the Queen Mother.
Captain Bowes-Lyon, of the 8th Battalion, the Black Watch, was 26 when he was gunned down as he led an attack on the German lines in one of the most infamous battles of World War I.
Also commemorated is author Rudyard Kipling’s only son, John, who was just 18 when he was killed on his first day of fighting with the Irish Guards.
France’s veterans minister Hulbert Falco said: ‘The British and Canadian soldiers buried in this cemetery are, mostly, those who fell during the Battle of Loos-en-Gohelle in October 1915.
'They came to die on the soil of France and they made the ultimate sacrifice to defend our country.’
Mr Falco described the attack as a ‘wound on their memory’ and ‘an insult to France.’
There are some 3,000 graves in the Loos cemetery, with the vast majority of those buried being British troops who fell during the battle.
Canadians and a small number of 1939-45 war casualties are also commemorated, but it was just British graves which were attacked.
Last year Mr Sarkozy pledged to provide 24-hour protection to the last resting places of British and Allied troops who died during the two world wars.
A dozen graves were covered in swastikas and SS symbols, as well as a monument commemorating more than 20,633 soldiers who died in the infamous Battle of Loos but have no known graves.
They include Fergus Bowes-Lyon, brother of Elizabeth, who went on to marry George VI and later become the Queen Mother.
Captain Bowes-Lyon, of the 8th Battalion, the Black Watch, was 26 when he was gunned down as he led an attack on the German lines in one of the most infamous battles of World War I.
Also commemorated is author Rudyard Kipling’s only son, John, who was just 18 when he was killed on his first day of fighting with the Irish Guards.
France’s veterans minister Hulbert Falco said: ‘The British and Canadian soldiers buried in this cemetery are, mostly, those who fell during the Battle of Loos-en-Gohelle in October 1915.
'They came to die on the soil of France and they made the ultimate sacrifice to defend our country.’
Mr Falco described the attack as a ‘wound on their memory’ and ‘an insult to France.’
There are some 3,000 graves in the Loos cemetery, with the vast majority of those buried being British troops who fell during the battle.
Canadians and a small number of 1939-45 war casualties are also commemorated, but it was just British graves which were attacked.
Last year Mr Sarkozy pledged to provide 24-hour protection to the last resting places of British and Allied troops who died during the two world wars.
Hi-tech security devices including thermal imaging cameras were installed at Notre Dame de Lorette, the largest war cemetery in France, but others have yet to be made secure.
War cemeteries are often targeted in the area, with those carrying out the attacks attributing them to everything from support for the defeated Germans to the highlighting of ‘war crimes’.
The Battle of Loos took place between September 25 and October 8, 1915, and saw British forces using poison gas for the first time. It is otherwise remembered for the wholesale slaughter of thousands of brave young men from the UK.
Robert Graves, the poet, also took part in the battle and later immortalised it in the military memoire ‘Goodbye to All That’.
The devastating effects of the Battle of Loos on future members of the Royal Family were typical of those experienced by thousands of ordinary Britons.
Just before Fergus’s death in action, 14-year-old Elizabeth had started nursing badly wounded British officers at Glamis Castle in Scotland, and news of her beloved brother’s fate left her inconsolable.
Two years later another brother, Michael, was reported missing in action from his regiment, the Royal Scots, leaving the family suffering huge anguish for three months before he was located in a German prison hospital.
Fergus’s death almost robbed his mother, Cecilia Bowes-Lyon, of the will to live, and she did not return to public life until Elizabeth’s marriage to the future King – the current Queen’s father – in 1923.
Rudyard Kipling, renowned for his brilliant books celebrating marital glory at the height of the British Empire, was also left a broken man when John – a chronically short sighted teenager – was cut down in the mud and rain of northern France.
In his letter to the Queen, Mr Sarkozy said the vandalism was even more upsetting because it took place days before he travels to London to celebrate Charles de Gaulle's famous June 18, 1940 appeal from the BBC, in which he called on the French to resist Nazism.
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The brothers are itching to go on the march again.
Stuck in their nihilistic mindset of the Seventies union bosses want to mobilise the nation against the coalition Government’s deficit reduction programme.
Typical of this mood of confrontation is the call by Mark Serwotka, leader of the Public and Commercial Services Union, for “a massive campaign of resistance to the cuts”, the forthcoming battle to be waged by “a united front unlike any we’ve seen for many years”.
Most rational British citizens accept that our debts are simply unsustainable. With the fiscal deficit standing at 11.2 per cent of output drastic action is needed to prevent a slide into Greek-style chaos.
We are about to pay the price for Labour’s grotesque economic mismanagement over the past 13 years. Yet the trade unions, whose membership is dominated by public employees, refuse to face up to financial realities. They are still living in a fantasy world where there is no end to profligacy by the State.
For the economically illiterate union chiefs the only acceptable course is to impose more taxes on the rich. Any policy that involves cuts in the public sector will provoke widespread strikes, they warn. Already a day of industrial action is planned for the education sector towards the end of June, while union protests are to be held when the Chancellor delivers his emergency budget on June 22.
At this moment of deepening economic crisis it would be a tragedy if trade unions were allowed to hold our country to ransom through their intransigence. Their blinkered bosses paralysed Britain in the late-Seventies with their outrageous militancy, turning us into “the sick man of Europe”. Today, if they stop the coalition from tackling the deficit, they will inflict even worse damage.
Without urgent cutbacks now our economy will ultimately be bankrupted, our currency debauched and our public infrastructure shattered. The unions’ attempted blackmail about cuts shows exactly why they must bear much of the blame for the fiscal catastrophe that has engulfed Britain.
Our descent into near insolvency has been partly caused by the back-scratching relationship between the Labour Party and unions. No less than 60 per cent of all Labour’s funding comes from the unions. In return for this largesse the governments of Blair and Brown not only dished out cash directly to union coffers, with £135 million of taxpayers’ money handed over to the brothers since 1998, but more importantly also poured extra billions into the public sector to boost the pay and conditions of the unionised state workforce.
Under Labour the publicly funded payroll expanded hugely, reaching 7.5 million this year. But thanks to union pressure there was no corresponding increase in efficiency. Most state organisations were more concerned about the rights of their staff than the needs of the public. Attempts at reform were blocked.
Indiscipline and low output were rife, reflected in excessive levels of absenteeism. According to the Office of National Statistics efficiency in the private sector increased by 28 per cent between 1997 and 2008 yet fell by 3.4 per cent in the public sector.
There is a gross injustice about the union-driven bias towards the public sector. For all the militants’ blather about equality they have actually helped create a two-tier system in employment. State workers, especially in the big municipal and Whitehall bureaucracies, enjoy shorter hours, longer holidays, more security and better pensions than their private counterparts.
Even their earnings are higher. Average weekly pay in the public sector is now £459 compared to £411 in the private sector. Union bullying has thwarted all efforts to end this unfairness. A classic example occurred in 2005 when Labour’s union paymasters forced the Government to abandon its plans to reduce the spiralling costs of public sector pensions.
It was an act of ministerial appeasement that has proved disastrous. Unfunded pension liabilities for public employees are now estimated to amount to an astonishing £993 billion.
I have seen at first hand the malign influence of the unions. As a Labour councillor in the London borough of Islington in the mid-Nineties I was chairman of the personnel committee and grew utterly exhausted at the puerile, self serving attitudes of the unions led by the shop stewards of NALGO – the National And Local Government Officers Association, now part of the mighty one million-strong UNISON.
Threats of strikes hung constantly in the air. The unions seemed to believe that every employee should have a job for life, regardless of performance. Negotiations over pay were interrupted by a gang of union representatives bursting into the committee room and chanting at me: “We’re angry, we’re mad, we’re NALGO and we’re bad.”
This is the world that the unions still inhabit. When they talk about “fighting cuts” what they really mean is their partisan determination to protect the unearned privileges of the public sector. That is the very opposite of the spirit of sacrifice and unity our country needs now.
The big unions are not quite the force they once were, their membership having fallen from 13 million in 1979 to 8 million today. But they still have the capacity to make enormous trouble. They must not be allowed to drag Britain to the brink of ruin as they did in the Seventies.
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Nick Clegg's wife has accepted a lucrative job with a major Spanish wind farm firm just weeks after her husband became Deputy Prime Minister.
Miriam Clegg is joining the board of Acciona which has been awarded contracts in Britain.
The high-flying Spanish-born lawyer has risked conflict of interest accusations by acting as an independent adviser to the firm which is the world's largest provider of wind farms.
Her husband's Liberal Democrat party wants 15,000 more large wind turbines built in Britain.
Acciona, which specialises in energy, construction and services, was recently awarded a contract to run Britain's first desalination plant near the Thames Barrier. But it is best known for wind farms.
Energy Secretary Chris Huhne, a Lib Dem, has described them as 'beautiful'. However, many communities regard the new form of green energy as a blight on the countryside.
Mrs Clegg, a 42-year-old mother of three, is already the main breadwinner in the Clegg household earning an estimated £500,000 a year as a partner in the international law firm DLA Piper.
During the election campaign she made clear that her sons and career came ahead of her role as a political wife.
While David Cameron's wife Samantha and Gordon Brown's wife Sarah were rarely far from their husbands' side, Mrs Clegg won admirers for putting her day job over party electioneering.
But she faces a tricky balancing act between her career and her husband's powerful new job.
A spokesman for the Deputy Prime Minister insisted that Mr Clegg's wife had cleared her new appointment with Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell.
She has also agreed to stand aside from any future projects on which Acciona works in Britain.
The spokesman said: 'Miriam is working very closely with Sir Gus and the ethics team to ensure everything is in order. Nick does have an overview of a broad range of domestic policy, but they were all confident that her work did not stray into any of his areas.'
In contrast, Mrs Cameron has stepped down as creative director of Smythson, the Bond Street luxury goods maker, although she will continue to work two days a week as its creative consultant.
Mrs Clegg, the daughter of a Spanish senator, worked for the European Commission - where she met her husband - before joining DLA Piper. The couple's combined wealth is estimated at nearly £2million.
Sir Alistair Graham, former chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, said: 'The wives of politicians should be able to work independently.
'The crucial thing in all these cases is transparency. As long as we know it is happening and she has given assurances that she will not be involved in this company's work in the UK, then there doesn't seem to be an issue.
'It would be helpful, however, that the nature of these assurances are made public.'
Acciona said Mrs Clegg's experience at the European Commission and in international trade would be 'invaluable'.
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Environment Minister Chris Huhne has pushed the EU for tougher climate change targets which could see an extra 2,500 wind turbines going up around Britain.
The Liberal Democrat used his first EU talks since taking office to call for a 30 per cent cut in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions across Europe by 2020 to help stop dangerous global warming.
The EU is already committed to slashing CO2 emissions by 20 per cent, compared with 1990 levels.
The higher target would put even more pressure on the UK to switch from coal, gas and oil power stations to 'green' energy.
Most of that extra electricity would come from offshore wind - adding another 2,500 windmills to the 7,000 already planned for the UK in the next decade.
Mr Huhne said Britain should set an example to the rest of the world.
'We believe a move to 30 per cent is achievable, right for the climate and right for our economies as Europe focuses on a sustainable economic recovery,' he said.
'We can put Europe ahead of the game by taking new low carbon economic opportunities.'
But Mr Huhne warned: 'We can't just click our fingers and hope the rest of the world will follow.
'We've got to make real emission cuts at home, and work constructively with all other nations in achieving that ambitious deal.'
Energy analysts estimate that it will cost Europe around £67 billion to meet a new 30 per cent target. The current target of 20 per cent will cost economies around £40 billion.
He told the BBC: 'We do need to do this in the sense that the biggest challenge we face in the long term is tackling climate change and global warming, and our economies are going to have to adjust.
'The problem with not going up to 30 per cent is that it makes it all the more risky that we will not be able to keep global temperatures below the two degrees limit which scientists reckon to be the real danger point, at which we tip into really disastrous potential weather events.'
Britain is already committing to cutting its CO2 emissions by 34 per cent over the next decade compared to the 1990 levels.
Meeting the existing target will involve a massive shift from traditional power stations to renewables - mostly wind.
Today just nine per dent of electricity comes from renewables and to meet the current target Britain will have to generate 30 per cent of its electricity from green sources, mostly 7,000 turbines.
But if Mr Huhne is successful and forces through a tougher European target, Britain could be forced to cut its CO2 emissions by at least 42 per cent.
That would need an extra 10 to 12 Gigawatts of green energy - or around 2,500 extra wind mills.
A spokesman for Renewables UK said most of these would be offshore.
'If we rolled out what we have in the offshore development pipeline, we would meet the higher target,' a spokesman said.
The CBI is opposing tougher climate change targets.
Neil Bentley, CBI director for business environment, warned last month: 'In the absence of a globally-binding climate deal, talk of unilaterally raising the EU 2020 target is premature.'
Friends of the Earth's head of climate, Mike Childs, backed Mr Huhne's call for tougher targets - but said that should mean a 40 per cent CO2 cut.
'A 40 per cent target would show real international leadership and fast-track the creation of new green jobs and business opportunities - something Mr Huhne says that he wants to achieve,' said Mr Childs.
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The extraordinary extent of Labour's final spending spree - which cost the public purse £1.3trillion even as the economy was sinking - was laid bare for the first time last night.
Bills included £50million to promote ballet and music, £5.6million for pensions for the Royal Household and £38.4million for gipsy encampments.
Details of the spending - which saw public expenditure rise by 15 per cent over two years - are contained in a vast Treasury database which the Coalition has made public.
The so-called Combined Online Information System (Coins) is so impenetrable that experts are having to pore over it to extract details.
The first comprehensive analysis, by software firm Rosslyn Analytics for the Daily Mail, shows that even as the economy was spiralling into recession, Labour kept the spending taps on - sanctioning expenditure that ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous.
A portion of the money will have been to support Gordon Brown's economic philosophy to increase public spending to stimulate the fragile economy. But the figures also reveal a significant level of more questionable spending.
They show that the department run by former Children's Secretary and Labour leadership hopeful Ed Balls lavished nearly £50million on programmes for ballet, dance and music in schools.
The National Measurements Office, which orders retailers to weigh their goods in kilograms rather than pounds, in line with EU diktats, cost £150million. Another quango, Natural England, cost £442million.
The Department for Environment also spent £95million on an obscure 'National Environment Enjoyment programme'. Initially staff could not say what the money was spent on.
They later clarified it was for management of national parks.
The Cabinet Office had to fund £14billion for gold-plated pensions for Whitehall staff, more than double the amount that needs to be cut from public spending this year.
The Coins figures show that pension costs for the Royal Household reached £5.6million, while highly-paid judges received £267million in taxpayers' money for their retirement schemes.
The Electoral Commission, which has been widely criticised for its handling of the election and its failure to prevent postal voting fraud, cost £48million to run over two years.And in the middle of the recession, MPs cost the state £178million in salary and expenses.
Bailing out the banks cost taxpayers nearly as much as funding the NHS over the last two years.
Taxpayers shelled out £132.4billion to bail out financial institutions other than Northern Rock and Bradford and Bingley. Northern Rock cost £ 20.3billion to nationalise while Bradford and Bingley was even more expensive, at £24.6billion.
Overall, pension payouts were the third most expensive area of government expenditure - underlining the high costs to Britain of an ageing population.
At nearly £128.4billion, the cost of paying the state pension is more than double England's £59billion schools budget.
And while Britain is struggling with a recession, the Labour Government continued to send money abroad.
Around £1.6billion was given to the European Union to distribute to poor countries, despite the UK already having its own Department for International Development (DfID).
A further £1.3billion was spent on 'reducing poverty in Asia', the continent that has seen the largest surge in economic growth in the past decade.
The Government has said it will make the database figures more accessible by August.
Mark Wallace, of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: 'The publication of this information is proving a massive eyeopener into the ways our taxes are being spent.'
THE £38.4M GIPSY SITE FUND
As taxpayers struggled to afford their own homes through the recession, more than £38.4million was used to fund sites for travellers.
Councils were asked to apply for the grants through the Department for Communities and Local Government for funds to 'provide amenities and purchase sites for gipsies'.
Previous guidelines released by Labour stated that gipsies needed caravan sites as they suffer an ' aversion to bricks and mortar'. Even areas of outstanding natural beauty were not offlimits.
Yesterday the new Coalition Government axed the grants. A spokesman for the department said: 'The current economic climate means that we need to act quickly and take difficult decisions about reducing grants due to be paid to local government.'
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Gypsies are being given a special DVD filmed at taxpayers’ expense – to teach them how to milk the state for benefits.
The film tells them how to claim for state handouts including income support, housing benefit, childcare and other benefits and even shows the faces of council workers they need to talk to so they can recognise them.
It also has information on schools, healthcare and housing.
More than 250 copies of the film have been distributed by the local Labour council among 2,500 travelers who are living in Haringey, north London.
Last night there was outrage that taxpayers were expected to pay for it. UKIP Euro MP Gerard Batten said: “You learn about this sort of thing with absolute disbelief. This is the sort of local government waste that must be addressed.”
Matthew Elliott of the TaxPayers’ Alliance said: “This scheme is unfairly marking out one group of people for special treatment. The local authority should allow everyone to access services, but spending money on producing a short, patronising film about it is not going to help.”
One Haringey resident said: “I can’t believe the council are spending our money on a DVD teaching travelers how to get hold of benefits.
“The film even shows who the key workers are in the benefits system so they know who they are dealing with when they turn up to claim the money. I barely know who my MP is, let alone who the guy who decides whether I get income support or not.”
The borough is home to more than 400 traveler families and has some 20 official and unofficial gypsy sites. London Mayor Boris Johnson has announced plans for five new extra sites, also in Haringey.
All travelers – whether living on recognised or makeshift sites – are required to pay council tax but the council has one of the worst collection rates. Outreach worker Margaret Forbes defended the DVD, saying it will be of use to vulnerable groups, who may be illiterate.
She went on” “One of the biggest issues is vulnerable families and when we visited these families we saw that they could neither read nor write. We visited them and now they want to access services.”
Gill Brown, of the London Gypsy and Traveler Unit said: “Gypsies and travelers generally are quite a hidden group of people who don’t know where to go to access services.”
Last night a Haringey Council spokesman said: “The DVD was seen as a useful way of communicating with local travelers. It was made by Woodside Children’s Centre to encourage traveler families to use the centre and the services on offer.
“It promotes education, learning, play and health checks for under-fives. There is also a drop-in service for parents if they want support and advices. This is no different from what is on offer to other members of the community.”
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An Anglican vicar conducted hundreds of sham marriages between Eastern Europeans and African illegal immigrants desperate to stay in the UK, a court heard yesterday.
Alexander Brown is said to have been part of a 'massive' immigration fraud, allegedly presiding over almost one bogus ceremony a day at his parish church by the time he was arrested.
He married Eastern European men and women who were paid up to £3,000 to tie the knot with an African who would otherwise have faced deportation, prosecutors said.
Because anyone from an EU country - such as Poland, Lithuania or Estonia - is entitled to live and work in Britain, their spouse gets the same rights.
Prosecutor David Walbank said: 'He [Brown] conducted each of these ceremonies knowing full well they were sham marriages that were part of an immigration fraud.'
The court heard that couples were directed to 61-year- old Brown's church in St Leonards, East Sussex, by a Ukrainian factory worker and a solicitor who specialised in immigration law.
'Most of the so-called couples were not couples at all. Indeed, they hardly knew each other,' Mr Walbank told Lewes Crown Court.
'The Eastern European immigrants came here hoping for a better life, but found themselves living and working in conditions of real hardship.
'They were desperate and willing to consider any means of making cash.
'The Nigerians were equally desperate.They had exhausted all legal avenues and
Between July 2005 and September last year, Brown carried out 383 weddings at the Church of St Peter and St Paul, of which 360 are alleged to be bogus.
He is accused of conspiring to breach immigration laws along with Ukrainian factory worker Vladymyr Buchak, 33, and Rev Michael Adelasoye, 50, a solicitor who is also the pastor of an evaninggelical church called the Ark of Hope. All three deny the charges.
Buchak was allegedly at the heart of the scam, cajoling and persuading many of the Eastern Europeans to take part.
Adelasoye, as a solicitor, 'put himself up as a specialist in immigration law and advised Africans,' Mr Walbank said.
One Nigerian woman who married a Lithuanian at Brown's church in April 2007 spent her wedding night working at a nursing home, the court heard.
Inga Rajaste, a 55-year-old Estonian, was also allegedly paid £3,000 in April 2007 to marry 30-year-old security guard Joseph Nduka, from Nigeria.
Another Lithuanian, 38-year-old Elvyra Ziogeviciene, met Buchak - an illegal immigrant since 2004 living in the UK under a false name - in a sausage factory.
The court was told that she was handed £2,000 in cash by Buchak when she arrived at the church for her wedding.
'This case involves a massive and systematic immigration fraud, and at its heart was the payment of cash sums to nationals of EU member states to enter into sham marriages with others from non-EU states,' said Mr Walbank.
'They did not enter into marriage to spend the rest of their lives together, rather they went through the ceremony of marriage for different reasons - one for cash and the other for rights to live and work in the UK.'
The couples involved in the marriages, who will be called as witnesses, have been cautioned by police, the court heard.
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Hundreds of Met Police officers have been convicted of crimes ranging from sex attacks and assaults to traffic offences in the past eight years.
Figures released under the Freedom of Information Act show 639 officers have been found guilty of criminal offences since 2002. A total of 79 were jailed, 73 of whom were dismissed or required to resign. Others who were jailed are believed to have resigned before they were convicted.
Most of the officers kept their jobs after their convictions - the majority of cases involved minor traffic offences. Police insiders say officers found guilty of serious traffic offences such as drink-driving would normally be sacked.
Eight officers were convicted of corruption, three of drugs offences, 43 of violence offences, 21 of sexual offences, five of perjury, 23 of theft and 17 of misconduct or malfeasance in public office. In February, former borough commander Ali Dizaei was jailed for four years for misconduct and sacked.
A total of 137 officers retired or resigned either before or after they were convicted; 112 received a written warning and 124 received advice. Most of the officers - 447 - were convicted for driving offences, including 119 for drink-driving and 98 for driving without due care and attention. Five were convicted of causing death by dangerous driving and seven of dangerous driving. A total of 161 were found guilty of speeding and 20 of driving with no insurance.
All officers convicted of a serious crime face the possibility of a Metropolitan Police Authority hearing to decide if they should lose part of their pension. Last year 39 were convicted of a crime - nine faced such a hearing.
However, the overall number of officers facing formal misconduct hearings - which can lead to the sack - fell significantly last year. This is believed to be due to new procedures introduced in 2008, aimed at reducing a "blame culture" and instead helping officers to develop as individuals in the job.
A Met spokeswoman said the vast majority of the force's 33,000-plus officers "carry out their service in the manner the Met and public expects".
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British troops risk being infected with HIV as Taliban fighters are hiding contaminated needles with their bombs.
Heroin syringes as well as razor blades are being buried in the ground by insurgents in Afghanistan so that they prick bomb squad experts.
It is believed that the needles, used in Helmand province, are contaminated with hepatitis and HIV as the Taliban use increasingly 'despicable' tactics.
Protective Kevlar gloves have been issued to all Royal Engineer and Royal Logistic Corps bomb search teams.
Conservative MP Patrick Mercer, a former Army officer, exposed the tactic. ‘Are there no depths to which these people will stoop?’ he told the Sun.
‘This is the definition of a dirty war.’
Lieutenant Colonel David Southall, Commanding Officer of the Counter-IED Task Force said: 'Improvised explosive devices remain a tactic of desperation and last resort.
'The Taliban know they can’t take us on and win in a conventional toe-to-toe fight – whilst they resort to some pretty despicable IED emplacement tactics, my IED operators, now drawn from all across the three services, are well equipped and up for the fight.'
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Cherie Blair will not be disciplined after she was cleared over comments she made while sparing a violent offender jail.
Several complaints were made over a case Mrs Blair dealt with while sitting as a judge at Inner London Crown Court.
She told devout Muslim Shamso Miah he would not go to prison after breaking a man's jaw 'based on the fact you are a religious person'.
The comment provoked a complaint from the National Secular Society, who said it was 'discriminatory', as well as several others who read media reports.
Mrs Blair, wife of former prime minister Tony Blair, was sitting as a part-time judge using her maiden name Cherie Booth.
The Office for Judicial Complaints said an inquiry was launched after 'a number of complaints' were made about 'comments reportedly made' by Mrs Blair.
A spokeswoman said: 'That investigation has concluded and found that Recorder Booth's observations did not constitute judicial misconduct.
'The Lord Chancellor and Lord Chief Justice have considered the conclusions of the investigation and agree that no disciplinary action is necessary.'
Miah, 25, was jailed for six months, suspended for two years, after the attack in a bank queue in East Ham, east London, when he appeared in court in February.
Friday 11th June 2010
Britain will struggle to handle 'catastrophic' population growth in future unless urgent action is taken, a report has warned.
The predicted increase to 70million by 2029 will put unsustainable pressure on housing, schools and hospitals as well as natural resources such as food and water, experts said.
Current trends will see a city the size of Bristol added to the population of the UK every year for the next two decades.
But sustainable development group Forum for the Future said vast growth would cause huge rises in pollution and waste.
Its report called for urgent action to stop numbers reaching the expected highs and causing a fall in quality of life levels.
And it urged a 'rethink' of the policy of importing labour to take skilled jobs.
Director Sara Parkin warned the debate about population had been hijacked by 'extremist' groups but was a key environmental issue.
'Britons deserve a serious debate about population and politicians need to start planning now to achieve a sustainable future,' she said.
'By recognising population as a vital element in strategies to achieve low-carbon and satisfying lifestyles, politicians can reclaim the issue from the extremists.'
'Only through good leadership and sensitive long-term planning can we make sure that UK population growth falls short of today's high projections and that we are prepared to cope effectively with any growth that does happen.
'We'll need to have more attractive and effective family planning services, and we'll also have to get the right infrastructure into the right places.
'A step change in investment, innovation - and imagination - is essential too so any rise in numbers of people does not mean a rise in CO2 emissions or a fall in quality of life.'
The report, entitled Growing Pains, called for more zero-carbon homes, better water efficiency, more renewable energy and better public transport.
It also called for an 'objective discussion' on immigration to understand its value to UK society and the economy.
Policy-makers should reclaim immigration from 'extremist' groups and not ignore it because it is controversial, it said.
The number of people in Britain shot up by more than three million under 13 years of Labour government.
Around 70 per cent of the increase was due to immigration - either directly through new arrivals or their children.
The count is now 61,398,000 - up by 3,084,200 since 1997.
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MPs HAVE received more than £240,000 in taxpayer-funded interest-free loans and advances in the last four weeks.
The cash was given to allow them to start spending their Parliamentary expenses, reveals the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority.
MPs have long been able to borrow cash for large items like deposits on flats or offices.
It only has to be paid back when they leave the Commons. It means MPs can potentially save hundreds of pounds in interest payments.
But they were given the extra facility to apply for advances on their expenses following widespread complaints about an overhaul of the allowances system. The advances – worth up to £4,000 each – are supposed to be used for upfront set-up costs including stationery, hotel bills and travel.
News of the latest Westminster perks came a day after it was revealed 200 former MPs who left the Commons at the election are eligible for severance payments worth an average £47,706.
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Britain will struggle to cope with an immigration-fuelled population boom that threatens to leave public services in chaos, a worrying report warns.
With the UK population set to rocket to 70 million in 20 years, housing and job shortages will be commonplace.
The Forum for the Future study said a population rise of nine million – equivalent of adding a new city the size of Bristol to the UK each year – would also increase demand for schools, hospitals, food and water and lead to rises in pollution and waste.
Pressure for more housing could lead to greater flood risk, the report claims, especially in the already over-crowded South-east, which will see a 10 per cent surge in numbers.
The charity urges the Government to start planning now to ensure growth does not reach the highs predicted and that a rise in numbers does not mean a fall in quality of life or higher carbon emissions, the sustainable development organisation said.
According to the Office for National Statistics, Britain’s population will increase from 61.4 million in 2008 to 70 million by 2029.
By 2034, the population is forecast to grow by 10 million, with almost all the increase in England. Seven million will be due to immigration. The report sets out seven recommendations, including an “objective discussion” on immigration, to understand its value to society and the economy and tackle pressures making people migrate.
Recommendations also include a call for all public infrastructure bodies to start planning for adequate services, jobs and training.
There are calls for more efficient development, including zero-carbon homes, improved water efficiency, more renewable energy, ways to cut flood risk and better public transport.
The report says: “Immigration into the UK has almost doubled since 1997, and has outpaced an increase in emigration, leading to a significant net population gain.”
It warns “just over two-thirds of the projected total increase in the UK population between 2008 and 2030 is expected to be either directly or indirectly due to future migration”.
Last night Immigration Minister Damian Green said the new Government would reduce net migration “back down to the levels of the 1990s – to tens of thousands rather than hundreds of thousands”.
Measures would include a limit on work permits, action on marriage and regulating foreign students. Sir Andrew Green, of MigrationWatch, said: “You cannot have a population policy without a firm immigration policy.”
Forum for the Future’s founder director Sara Parkin said: “Britons deserve a serious debate about population and politicians need to start planning now.
“Only through good leadership and sensitive long-term planning can we make sure that UK population growth falls short of today’s high projections and that we are prepared to cope with any growth that does happen.”
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As David Cameron warns of painful budget cuts needed to reduce the £160bn deficit, nationalists will be delighted to know that there is still money left for ethnic minorities.
An example of this comes from the Daily Star where a few days ago it reported that a cemetery is to be adapted at a cost of £150,000 to make it suitable for Muslims to be buried there.
Muslim burial plots need to face north-east, with the prophet Mohammed’s birthplace of Mecca to the south-east on their right.
Designated spaces at High Wycombe cemetery in Buckinghamshire are running out.
So the council has decided on new burial areas, walls, paths and steps. Work is expected to start in the autumn.
One local resident, who did not wish to be named, grumbled: “Yet again, thousands of pounds are being spent for the benefit of the Muslim community.” Councils have a statutory duty to provide burial space for people of all faiths.
The idea of burying Muslims alongside Christian graves was ruled out after a report prepared for councillors said it would be unpopular would involve extra maintenance costs.
A request made for land at a local Church of England burial ground to be deconsecrated for Muslim use was refused.
Muslims must try to complete funeral rites within 24 hours of a death.
Bodies are buried in their graves, without coffins, if local laws allow this, on their right sides – which must face Mecca.
Tombstones, flowers and markers are discouraged.
Church of England diocesan registrar Canon John Rees, said: “Everyone resident in a parish has a right to be buried in its churchyard if it is not full.
“In this case control of the cemetery lies with the council, not the church.”
Would the Turkish, Saudi, Pakistan governments spend money to make a cemetery suitable for Christians who want to be buried there?
We know the answer and we cannot blame those countries because, just like us they want to preserve their society and culture, unlike our elected politicians in Westminster.
Let’s not forget that it was our PM a few years ago who stated that, “native Britons should adapt to the Muslim way of life” (para).
You couldn’t make it up.
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The Coalition should know what to do with the deficit without asking the public.
The sport of spotting hypocrisy in politics is giving us some fine spectacles these days, such as in the proclamation by Ed Balls, who would be leader of the Labour Party, that we should restrict immigration. One is deafened by cries from justifiably outraged citizens about why Mr Balls, if he feels so strongly about this matter, kept so quiet on it when he was a minister of the Crown, and therefore in a position to do something about it. However, he has some competition.
Let there be no doubt that we should be pleased by the intention of the Coalition to cut public spending painfully, brutally, or by whatever other adverb of aggression one chooses. However, do those promising to do the cutting – not just in the Tory party, but especially among the Liberal Democrat contingent – have the slightest twinge of conscience about how they conducted the election campaign? Was that campaign, in fact, honest? Do they argue that the unusual circumstances of our having a coalition in fact negate the campaign and the promises or assertions made during it? (That is not a rhetorical question, I should value an answer.)
There was a Coalition document published a fortnight ago that seemed to be a manifesto after the fact of the election, a novelty in what passes for our democracy. Even it did not go so far in its adjectives and adverbs as the Prime Minister did on Monday. One senses that he and his colleagues are playing games.
Of course the campaign was dishonest. The Conservatives were reluctant to talk about the extent of the cuts they knew would be necessary to restore order. They did not want to frighten people out of voting for them. The fear would have had two causes: the first was about the prospect of losing jobs, having houses repossessed and possibly of businesses going under; the second about the "double-dip recession" that economists of the Keynesian Left say will inevitably be caused by spending cuts.
The Tories chose not to confront that fear head on. They chose not to harness a public mood that understood cuts were necessary. They chose not to use the campaign to blame Labour as categorically as they might for the disaster that its incompetence and profligacy has caused. They chose not to say to the Keynesians that, indeed, there might be a double-dip if public spending cuts were all that would happen; but that it might be avoided if part of those cuts was used to finance reductions in personal and corporate taxation. These, in turn, might stimulate demand and encourage private enterprise to mop up some of those who risk losing their jobs in a restructuring of the public sector. That the Coalition is trying to put the bad news over now and in this way is strategically comical.
My colleague Edmund Conway has pointed out one aspect of the Prime Minister's dishonesty in his remarks on Monday. The economy is not worse than the Tories were expecting, it is slightly better (though still horrific). Nor should it come as a surprise that, without reductions in our debt, we shall soon have an interest bill of £70 billion: that figure has been known for some time.
Mr Cameron's performance on Monday merely continued the dishonesty of the late campaign, only in a different way. It was about what the PR men from whom he is descended call "expectation management". In other words, when things aren't quite so gruesome as he has made out – when children are not going to school with their feet bound in rags, when soup kitchens are not to be found on housing estates, when the sick are not dying for want of treatment and the disabled not reduced to selling matches in the street, he will be able to look good, and to view the next general election with something approaching confidence.
This is another manifestation of the rhetorical approach to policy that I despaired of in this column last week. It was supplemented yesterday by the Chancellor of the Exchequer's ridiculous invitation to the British people to advise him on where they would like their public spending cut. I presume when Mr Osborne feels ill and goes to his doctor, the doctor asks him to choose what illness he would like to be cured of. The party's obsession with focus groups, and with following public opinion rather than leading it, reaches new depths.
Instead of simply talking about this urgent problem, or canvassing ideas about what to do with it, some leadership and some action should be required. A predominantly Conservative Government (for that is what, nominally, this one is) should not need to ask the electorate, having just obtained the Queen's authority to govern, what to do in respect of its single most important policy. An outbreak of honesty with the public, unseen during the last administration and still unfamiliar now, would be remarkably welcome.
The state's functions, in a compassionate and ordered society, can be confined to relatively few things. It should protect the public with a police force and armed services. It should provide education and health care, while perhaps finding ways to incentivise people to use non-state provision wherever possible. It should give the support that the elderly and the disabled require to live with dignity. It should see that public hygiene and essential infrastructure are maintained; and that's about it. This requires a revolution in our way of viewing the state's relationship with us. It is not to be viewed as a means of creating bureaucratic employment, either centrally or locally. It is not a charitable resource for foreigners, whether in granting overseas aid or acting as a rich uncle for people from other lands who choose to come here for reasons other than to work. It is, above all, not a charitable resource for what the Victorians called "the undeserving poor". Compassion is important, but only has meaning if applied with discrimination and on the right criteria.
I doubt that any thinking so radical as this has happened, or will happen, in the Treasury or the upper reaches of the image-obsessed parties that now govern us. They will have difficulties enough managing the politics of such cuts as they do make. I do not know how responsible it is for a prime minister to scare the wits out of people who, unlike him and the Chancellor, do not have a well-paid job and a trust fund to fall back on, purely so he can look good when things go better than expected. But I also cannot see what measures are in train to help create jobs in the private sector for the scores of thousands who, if he is right, will lose their jobs in the public.
Perhaps the Budget, in a fortnight, will spell out tax incentives that will do this. These would require heavier, and more immediate, cuts: but if debt reduction and recovery are so urgent as the Coalition says (and they are) why wait, and why take half measures? And why ask the public to fill in the blanks? The cynicism of such a policy, where the blame for crucial economic decisions is shifted away from those who are paid to govern, is shocking. Mr Osborne should have worked all this out before he got into Number 11. The economic disaster was no well-kept secret. It is late in the day to judge where to cut; but he had also better start working out where, and how, to grow.
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If you take a look at Diane Abbott's website you soon see who she is interested in helping. Does living in a 'diverse' (sic) society mean everyone is equal and therefore deserving of an equal amount of help? Evidently Abbot doesn't think so.
On her website she sates:
'I set up Black Women Mean Business in 1992 with the aim of supporting and celebrating black businesswomen. At the time it was the first of its kind in the UK, although since then a number of other similar organisations have taken root'.
Discriminating against white women in their own country is one thing. When she unjustly makes excuses for the poor academic achievement of black children at school however she shows how racist she actually is.
How does the system fail black kids? Is it rather the attitude of these youngsters which leads to them failing themselves?
'I have campaigned for many years on educational issues. In particular I have researched, organised and spoken out on the way in which the education system fails children of African and Afro-Caribbean descent'.
After attending an inner city Birmingham school myself, and several colleges, i have had more than a ample chance to observe your average 'black boy' in the classroom.
They are in most cases, aggressive, rude, disruptive, short (of temper), and if anything hold white youngsters back in the classroom. Routinely they display their predictable 'victim syndrome' and characteristic 'chip on the shoulder' air.
These points clearly explain why more 'black boys' are excluded from school than any other group. Abbott prefers to blame the luckless teachers who have to try and educate these fatherless, unfavourable, and ungrateful individuals. ic1male
'However there is still much to do. It is still the case that black boys are more likely to be excluded from school than their peers, while studies continue to highlight the disproportionate adverse treatment given to black children in the education system from pre-school assessment through to the crucial secondary years'.
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Yes I know she is the token, black, female candidate, I know the pundits say she doesn't stand a chance and that she only managed to gain enough nominations to stand for election as the next Labour leader so that there would be a "diverse" choice of candidates. I know all that .... but .....but...!!
All it takes is for Labour to do something really, really stupid (it wouldn't be the first time, they actually thought Brown was electable - and the Guardian is already worried) then the Con-dom Coalition collapses (it could easily happen) we could have another election within the next twelve months.
Then, if enough idiots, led by the multi-culti zealots in the media, decide "Wow wouldn't it be really neat and politically correct to vote for a totally unqualified black Marxist!!", this women could be the Prime Minister of Britain in a year.
Crazy? beyond belief?, maybe, but it happened in America.
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The Liberals have won a narrow one-seat lead in the Dutch election, putting them in pole position to form a coalition.
With 88 per cent of the votes counted, published partial results showed the Liberals with 31 and Labour on 30.
But the real victory went to Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom (PVV), which demands an end to immigration from Muslim countries and a ban on new mosques. The PVV took its number of seats from nine in the last parliament to 24, and could hope to enter a coalition government.
The far-right leader with his distinctive shock of fair hair called the result "magnificent".
"The impossible has happened," he told a televised party gathering. "We are the biggest winner today. The Netherlands chose more security, less crime, less immigration and less Islam."
The election ousted Christian Democrat Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende from eight years in office.
The Liberals' narrow lead gives leader Mark Rutte a mandate to form a coalition and become prime minister, but sticking to his austerity policies could prove tough because he needs at least three other parties to secure a parliamentary majority.
Earlier, exit polls had showed the Liberals and Labour running neck-and-neck in an election dominated by debate on fiscal austerity after the euro zone's stability was threatened by sovereign debt woes plaguing Greece.
Mr Balkenende conceded defeat for his Christian Democrats when voters turned against the party, nearly halving its seats from 41 to 21. He resigned as party leader.
The election was triggered when his Christian Democrat-Labour coalition government collapsed in a row over extending the deployment of Dutch troops in Afghanistan.
Mr Wilders and his Freedom Party - a possible coalition contender - gained 10 seats to come third behind the Liberals and Labour with 21, reflecting concern in the country about immigration and foreign policy.
"More security, less crime, less immigration, less Islam - that is what the Netherlands has chosen," Mr Wilders said.
The results of the poll will not be finalised for days.
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John Prescott ignited a class war yesterday with a ferocious attack on a decision to prevent 'garden grabbing' by developers.
The Labour grandee's outburst on live radio came during a debate on a Conservative initiative that will make it much harder to turn gardens into housing.
- Back gardens no longer designated 'brownfield sites'
- Councils handed power to defy developers
- Minimum housing density targets scrapped
He angrily accused bankers, millionaires and the wealthy of conspiring to keep 'young kids' homeless.
And in a personal attack on fellow guest Zac Goldsmith, the Tory MP and environmentalist son of a billionaire financier, Mr Prescott declared that the Government was 'going to throw people on the dole, reduce houses, what's new?'
The former Deputy Prime Minister added: 'It's the old Tory policy, spouted by millionaires like yourself, always for the few and not
the many.' The Government yesterday announced curbs on the practice of squeezing new homes onto the gardens of bigger houses. Developers offer to buy a large property confident in the knowledge that they will be able to reap a huge profit by securing planning permission to build on the garden. During Labour's years in power the practice became an industry, particularly in the suburbs.
Nearly a quarter of all new homes have been crammed into residential plots over the last 12 years, provoking dismay in middle-class neighbourhoods and putting pressure on space, roads, transport, health provision and other services.
Local government minister Greg Clark ordered changes to planning rules that mean gardens will no longer be seen as 'brownfield land', ripe for development. This means councils and protesters will have stronger powers to block building.
Developers said the change would increase housing shortages while countryside campaigners protested it would increase the threat to the countryside and Green Belt.
It was Mr Prescott who, as Deputy Premier, introduced the planning rules that equated gardens in leafy districts with derelict industrial land and encouraged their use for new homes.
Despite his fury yesterday, he himself is the owner of a turreted home in Hull with a garden large enough to have accommodated a summer party for 200 guests.
In the debate with Mr Goldsmith, MP for Richmond Park, Mr Prescott told listeners to Radio 4's Today programme that empty space was needed for affordable housing.
Informed by Mr Goldsmith that allowing local people a say on local planning rules was democracy, Mr Prescott exploded: 'Wait a minute. If you talk about democracy, we are talking about the few people here who may object about a house in their street that is going to be for social housing.'
He added that 'the same people' were 'saying to the young kids, you can't live there with your family because we can't give you land space. Go North.'
He accused the Tories of 'totally dismissing' thousands of people waiting for affordable homes. 'I am talking about families who haven't got a ruddy home, for God's sake.'
Mr Prescott told Mr Goldsmith: 'You are cutting the building budget. You are reducing the housing subsidies. It's the many, the people-who are desperate for houses, that you are going to affect in order to help a few wealthy families.'
Mr Prescott went on to say it was 'silly' to accuse Labour of racking up economic problems.
'It might be down to some of your mates who are bankers,' he told the Tory. 'It's the bankers who b***ered up the economy and everybody realises that started in America. Ironically enough, it started with house prices.' Mr Prescott closed his radio appearance trying to speak over interviewer James Naughtie, telling Mr Goldsmith: 'It's about the few at the expense of the many.'
Mr Goldsmith, whose father was financier Sir James Goldsmith, is a close associate of David Cameron. He said: 'If you lump gardens and wasteland in the same category, developers will always go for gardens because it's easier and cheaper.
'We are not saying there shouldn't be development, there are alternatives.
We want to protect gardens.' Labour has been pressing for the construction of hundreds of thousands of homes to accommodate a rapidly growing population - with 70 per cent of the increase accounted for by immigration.
Despite Mr Prescott's charge that the rich in the South have been trying to block development, garden-grabbing has provoked protests around the country, including in communities such as Sheffield, Leeds and South Tyneside.
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So much for Cameron’s pledge to end Britain’s cancer drugs lottery
Cameron’s pledge to end Britain’s cancer drugs lottery faced its first test yesterday from a dying mother who is desperate to see her son start school.
Nikki Blunden, 37, was recently given just three months to live following a scan.
The aggressive form of breast cancer has spread to her brain.
Last week health chiefs denied her the potentially life-extending drug Lapatinib for “clinical and cost-effectiveness” reasons – despite it costing less than the treatment she has been receiving.
Anger was intensified by news yesterday that civil servants at a Government department paid an extra £32,000 for an “executive” range of recycling waste bins to impress visitors.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs bought the “aesthetically pleasing” range of wheelie bins at a cost of £148 each – instead of the standard £57.
It has also emerged that hundreds of pounds of taxpayers’ cash has been wasted on a Government-funded college course to teach girls how to walk in high heels.
Last night Mrs Blunden’s supporters also argued that spending taxpayers’ money to bribe the obese to lose weight or provide expensive treatments for self-inflicted illnesses caused by alcohol abuse mean that there is no cash left to buy time for the terminally ill.
Mrs Blunden’s heart-broken husband Richard, 37, said: “All we want is a little more time together as a family. Is that too much to ask?”
Furious relatives and supporters – aided by local MP Margaret Hodge – have now launched a campaign to force Health Secretary Andrew Lansley and Mr Cameron to live up to their election pledge to provide hope for terminal NHS patients.
“I’ve worked all my life and paid my taxes thinking that in my hour of need, the system would be there to help me,” said hairdresser Nikki at the home in Dagenham, Essex, she shares with Richard and son Thomas, three. Now I feel so let down. I’m not asking for the earth. I just want to try to live for a few more months so that I can see my son start school in September and possibly have another Christmas with him.”
In April, Cameron outlined a plan for a cancer drugs fund with £200million being used to provide more people with drugs. “We want to get drugs together more quickly,” he said. “In the UK today there are thousands of people who want a certain cancer drug, whose doctors tell them they should have one, who don’t get it.”
The Department of Health said the cancer drugs fund would be launched next April which is too late for Mrs Blunden.
And by coincidence, the Government’s health rationing body Nice yesterday announced that it was refusing to fund the drug for thousands of women who need it.
Mrs Hodge has now urged the Health Secretary to turn the Tories’ promise into immediate action. “This drug is the only option left to Mrs Blunden,” she wrote in a letter to Mr Lansley. “How on earth can the Health Service refuse to give her that final chance to live a little longer?
Later she praised the Daily Express for fighting for Mrs Blunden, saying: “I’m delighted the Daily Express is taking this up. ”
A Department of Health spokesperson said it understood the guidance from Nice would come as a great disappointment. “Our priority is to give patients access to the drugs recommended by their doctors on the NHS. We will continue to seek agreement to schemes with pharmaceutical companies, which will enhance access for patients to costly medicines.”
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A high proportion of deaths classed as euthanasia in Belgium involved patients who did not ask for their lives to be ended, a study found.
More than 100 nurses admitted to researchers that they had taken part in 'terminations without request or consent'. Although euthanasia is legal in Belgium, it is governed by strict rules which state it should be carried out only by a doctor and with the patient's permission.
The disturbing revelation - which shows that nurses regularly go well beyond their legal role - raises fears that were assisted suicides allowed in Britain, they could never be properly regulated.
Since its legalisation eight years ago, euthanasia now accounts for 2 per cent of deaths in Belgium - or around 2,000 a year.
The researchers found that a fifth of nurses admitted being involved in the assisted suicide of a patient. But nearly half of these - 120 of 248 - also said there was no consent.
'The nurses in our study operated beyond the legal margins of their profession,' said the report's authors in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. It is likely many nurses ' under-reported' their involvement for fear of admitting an illegal activity, the study said.
But it added that many were probably acting according to their patients' wishes, 'even if there was no explicit request'. Last night, Dr Peter Saunders, director of the Care Not Killing campaign in Britain, said: 'We should take a warning from this that wherever you draw the line, people will go up to it and beyond it.'
'Once you have legalised voluntary euthanasia, involuntary euthanasia will inevitably follow,' he added. But pro -euthanasia group Dignity in Dying said rules that see the patient taking their own life, rather than a doctor administering the drugs, could still work.
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More than 1,200 workers have been banned from flying England flags on their own cars by managers - over fears they could deemed as racist.
Employees at the housing association were sent a group e-mail warning that decking out their personal vehicles with the St George's flags could 'discriminate' against those who don't support England during the World Cup.
Managers at Bolton At Home in Greater Manchester, which manages 18,200 council houses in Bolton, insist cars owned by their workforce must remain 'neutral' in order to treat all its 'customers with respect and without discrimination'.
But today an employee at the organisation said: 'It's an absolute disgrace.
'All we want to do is show our support for the England football team in the World Cup but we are in effect being told it is racist to start waving the England flag.
'A ban would be bad enough on company cars but these are our own vehicles and we should be allowed to do what we like with them. This is Big Brother mentality gone bonkers.'
Another worker said: 'People are decking out the streets and houses in England flags yet the bosses here are being killjoys in the name of political correctness.
'The message seems to be from them that we should be embarrassed to wave the England flag. Yet all of us think we should be waving the England flag with pride. Don't our bosses want England to win the World Cup?'
The rule is part of a set of World Cup protocols employees at the company must follow during the tournament.
All staff were sent an e-mail banning them from displaying car flags, stickers, posters and 'other World Cup merchandise'.
The rule applies to Bolton At Home-branded vehicles, public offices and any personal vehicles used for work and for which an employee claims 'essential or casual car allowance'.
Staff have also been told not to use work mobile phones to check World Cup scores because it is too expensive.
Mark Perryman, head of the official England supporters club, said: 'Banning the use of any flag is wrong and simply suppresses multiculturalism.
'The idea that you can suppress something like this by diktat is ludicrous and incredibly badly thought out.
'South Africa is a country with an appalling history - apartheid, famine, Aids, being badly treated by the empire - but everybody is flying the flag of the rainbow nation. People in England should be doing the same.'
Bolton At Home was set up in 2003 as an Arms Length Management Organisation (ALMO) in partnership with Bolton Council and numerous agencies.
It vows to "work to improve the social and economic conditions of both the estates where our houses are located as well as other disadvantaged areas in the Bolton borough."
It is run by a board made up of councillors, independent members and tenants.
But in 2003, Bolton At Home employees were prohibited from displaying national flags and stickers on their cars following a complaint about an Irish flag on a caretaker's van.
On its website the organisation says: 'Equality and valuing diversity are central to our organisational values.
'We want our workplace to be free of discrimination against any racial or social group, or any individual. We have set out these principles in our equality statement.'
A Bolton At Home spokesman said: 'We believe our working arrangements are simply a common sense approach to honouring our responsibilities for delivering quality customer services during the World Cup.
'The organisation is justifiably proud of its staff and the manner in which they conduct business.
'Bolton At Home has practices in place in order to maintain and improve standards of conduct, as well as protect staff from any misunderstanding or unfair criticism.
'We follow a code of conduct to treat all our customers with respect, and without discrimination.
'We want to avoid the potential for flag displays to be taken out of context and so we believe their use during work-related activities to be inappropriate.'
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A Muslim community leader, Noor Ramjanally, who claimed he was kidnapped by members of the British National Party was caught out lying by covert surveillance cameras designed to protect him, a court heard.
The 36 year-old falsely claimed he was abducted at knifepoint by racist thugs from the far-right wing political party after being subjected to hate mail and an arson attack, Chelmsford Crown Court was told.
He had told police he had feared for his life when he was kidnapped in broad daylight from his home in Loughton, Essex on August 24 last year and bundled into a car, it was claimed.
Ramjanally then claimed he was driven to nearby Epping Forest where he was threatened and warned to stop holding prayer sessions he had organised.
But he was caught out lying after detectives viewed CTTV footage from secret cameras installed to protect him after his previous claims that he was being targeted by racist opponents, prosecutors said.
The court heard that at the time of his alleged abduction he was actually “wandering around Homebase".
Ramjanally, a married father of one, stood trial in his absence on Tuesday charged with one count of perverting the course of justice.
The jury were not told why he did not attend court and were warned by Judge Karen Walden-Smith not to carry out independent research.
Matthew Gowan, prosecuting, told the court that Ramjanally’s story about the alleged kidnapping was “complete bunkum".
He said that Ramjanally had made up his claims in a call to police that he had been taken by force and later threatened to stop holding Muslim prayer groups.
The court was told that he was one of a group of people who had formed the Islamic community groups, which had allegedly created a "background of tension" that he blamed the BNP for whipping up.
After he had founded the groups several months earlier, he reported a number of incidents to police including a "malicious letter, abuse in the street and a firebomb attack on the front door of his flat.
Mr Gowan said after being released without harm Ramjanally told the media that he believed the far right British National party were responsible for his kidnap.
"It was complete bunkum. He didn't know one crucial piece of information, a vital piece of the jigsaw puzzle,” Mr Gowan told the court.
“Because of the tensions in the area and the allegations he made during the summer, police were worried about his own safety and unbeknown to him, in order to prevent and detect crime they placed covert secret CCTV cameras in the flat where he lived.
"The prosecution case is that at the time of this abduction was said to have taken place Mr Ramjanally can be shown to be somewhere else.”
He added: “Nothing particular was happening. There is footage of him leaving his flat on his own, going down the stairs on his own and he takes a taxi to Homebase."
Mr Gowan said that after trawling the CCTV footage, police discovered Ramjanally had walked to the spot on the edge of the forest, where he claimed he was taken by the BNP, where he was seen dialling 999.
The jury were also shown footage from two hidden cameras at his home before he made the call that showed Ramjanally leaving his home, getting into a taxi and being driven to Homebase.
After his arrest Ramjanally told police in a statement that he had got a taxi to Homebase and had walked home before being abducted. But Mr Gowan said that timing did not fit in with the evidence.
Ramjanally denied the charge at an earlier hearing.
The trial continues.
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Seriously, where is Noor Ramjanally? This guy has caused a lot of grief for a lot of people whilst tarnishing the good name of the British National Party. He must be found, tried and if found guilty, punished for his crimes.
What did he do? Well he was the moslem who "allegedly" (rofl) claimed he had been first threatened by British National Party people, firebombed and then later claimed to have been kidnapped by some of their members and taken for what he thought was a final walk in the woods.
The whole story was laughable from the start and you can read the background here, here and here in our old sites archives(please read) but at the time, The Establishment Press wet themselves with excitement as they ripped into the BNP. The police of course, at first accepted the words of the moslem whose cult instructs them it is ok to lie to the filthy non-believers and refused to talk to BNP councillors in the area, whilst finding time to talk reassure almost every single moslem within the United Kingdom that their hamsters were safe.
But I digress. This bit about the ongoing trial got me interested:
Ramjanally, a married father of one, stood trial in his absence on Tuesday charged with one count of perverting the course of justice.
What I want to know is why the jury were not told where the accused was? Without the jury and the public knowing why Ramalangadingdong did not attend, will only lead them to speculate that he has done a runner to another country or perhaps just decided that washing his hair was a better way of spending his day rather than facing up to British Justice.
And again, by what right does the Judge have to tell people not to carry out indpendent research? If the defendant has done a runner than surely it is the duty of all British Citizens in helping the police locate the fugitive.
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We are eagerly awaiting the apologies that are well and truly over due! Make up your own minds now! Its interesting to note that he doesn't even have to appear himself and no one on the jury is allowed to question or research that!
It would seem that not only does the man get special security (according to the independent news paper its paid for via the local authority and the Police) Something of which some real victims of crime would be happy to receive, but he also doesn't even have to appear in court to answer for his actions!
As well as immediately and unquestionably given full support by the Independent Loughton Residents Association (in our opinion an anagram for LIAR!) Who used this as a campaign against the BNP to their success. As well as all the other prominent local people that put their credibility on the line with backing this man!
Another known anti-BNP councillor (who strangely associates with ex NF members) tried to jump on the band wagon with reports of attacks by the "BNP youth" whilst being in a children's playground, these reports came to nothing but the local paper published the whole story.
We expect a full apology from the Vicar who spoke out against us needlessly, wrongly and refused to reason. We doubt however that he is man enough to do this as publicly as he spoke out against us, but you can only pray that community figure will do the right thing!
We told you that this story was fabricated, we believe the whole lot from start to finish is. This man has tried before to discredit the BNP with fictitious lies.
Interesting also that the man had cameras installed on his house and didn't know they were there, how many of the rest of you have that? and for what sort of reason? To catch you putting to much rubbish in your bins or not recycling properly perhaps? Who knows?
Also good to note that this evidence must have been immediately accessible? So why was the media frenzy dragged out for so long and allowed to be given so much negative publicity towards the BNP? (as if we don't know!)
Even the local paper that printed so much of the fictitious story by the man himself and the group we believe it supports has published this , They mentioned the BNP at every given opportunity when they were smearing us but in their article in the paper today they do not mention the BNP once! they have also omitted the usual comment section below?
In the words of the prosecutor the whole story was "complete bunkum"
If we remember rightly, this lie was reported in certain tabloids before the supposed event actually happened! A bit of mistake that was overlooked at the time Strange but true!
Most of all, a waste of your money!
For the record there was never any community tension until the towns liberals and Searchlight decided to publicise a meeting in the hall that the prayer leader advertised and called a mosque. This was the first the local BNP had heard of the group when it was alleged that there was a sustained hate campaign by the BNP going on.
All we ever did was put one leaflet out saying we did not want the youth facility used as a mosque and carried out a resident survey (that got 500 plus signatures agreeing with us) We believe that the attacks on his home were carried out by the prayer leader himself in the first place! The others in their desperation immediately and without due thought jumped on the band wagon, or maybe it was all planned in a way of preventing the BNP gaining electoral success?
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A Bacon's College employee was facing years behind bars yesterday, after he took indecent photos of more than a thousand children around the world and molested two sisters.
Ugochukwu Okorie, 47, spent years stockpiling the shocking library of images of girls - including one featuring an eleven-year-old girl posing in her underwear in a fake hanging.
Another showed him in a hotel room with a fourteen-year-old he admitted having sex with.
Okorie, who has worked in at least two south London colleges, abused the ten-year-old and her sister aged six while working at their home as a private tutor.
Nigerian-born Okorie worked for Government-backed adult learning company In Training, and previously for Bacon's College in Rotherhithe, and Lambeth College.
He denied any wrongdoing but was found guilty of seven child sex charges following a trial at Inner London Crown Court.
During the last decade he has exploited his status as a tutor during travels to Peru, Chile, the US and Nigeria.
Outside court the officer in charge of the case, DC John Knox, warned parents of the dangers of taking on tutors whose records had not been checked with the Criminal Records Bureau.
In the most recent case Okorie was recommended by a church friend to the victims' mother, who was worried about her teenage son falling behind with his studies.
Okorie began work at the family's home in Camberwell, in January last year, where he taught the schoolboy.
But she decided her young daughters could benefit too, and they started having lessons.
During tuition he sexually abused the girls at least twice a week and warned them not to tell anyone.
In April the ten-year-old complained to an aunt about Okorie touching her.
The youngster told the court by video link how she hid in a cupboard and saw Okorie molesting her little sister as well.
During a raid on his home in Lewisham, police uncovered four CDs and a USB stick containing around 1,200 indecent home made images of children. Okorie, of St John's Court, Lewisham, denied four counts of assaulting a child by penetration, two of sexual assault, and one of possessing indecent images of children and was convicted.
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A doctor 'skipped with glee' when told he could place antiseptic gel on a woman's burnt breasts, it was alleged yesterday.
Dr Anis Akhtar, 37, is said to have 'smirked' before telling the 49-year-old she did not need to wear a bra, the General Medical Council heard.
Then, while bearing down on top of her to apply cream to the wound, he asked what size her breasts were, it is claimed.
Akhtar was is accused of making inappropriate comments amounting to 'sexual titillation' while treating the injured woman in Accident and Emergency at Barnet Hospital, north London.
The childminder, who cannot be named, was treated by the doctor after dropping a mug of steaming tea down her top. She had severely scalded her upper chest and neck.
Giving evidence yesterday, the Pakistani doctor attempted to blame his interpretation of English and said it had been a misunderstanding.
When asked to apply gel, he allegedly said: 'I would love to apply it - thanks for giving me the opportunity'.
But he told the GMC he confused the word 'love' with 'happy'.
Lydia Barnfather, for the GMC, asked: 'You have been taught in the English language at University level. Have you never really understood the uses of the word love?'
He replied: 'Yes. But when using the word in a sentence, according to my perception, the meaning is a bit different.'
He added: 'I know after looking retrospectively it seems enthusiastic but at that time my understanding of it was different.'
Ms Barnfather said: 'It is inconceivable that you did not appreciate the significance and uses of the word love. You were very enthusiastic not just in the use of the word but in your conduct.
'That's right, you skipped almost to get the gel. You were excited. You were titillated by the thought of applying gel to the breasts.
'I am suggesting you are trying to hide behind a language,' she told him.
Akhtar replied: 'It is my second language.
'For me it was a patient, I wanted to apply the gel, finish and move on to the next patient.
'I don't know how many patients were waiting but usually the waiting times are very high and I wanted to finish it off and complete it.'
He is also accused of failing to ask the woman if she would like a chaperone at any point during the consultation.
The doctor admitted he 'should have stopped' applying the gel when the woman's 13-year-old daughter left the room, leaving them alone.
Akhtar also denied he was 'distracted' by the woman's naked breasts.
The patient complained to hospital bosses after the incident on May 1, 2008, and the Trust started an investigation.
In February last year the doctor wrote the patient a letter of apology, blaming his communication skills.
It read: 'I wanted to write to say that I am really very sorry that I made you feel uncomfortable by anything I said when I saw you at the hospital.
'I have already done some training to try to improve my communication skills as I was asked to do by the Trust as a result of your complaint.
'I am going to ask the Trust what further training they can now offer me so I can make sure the same situation does not happen again.'
Akhtar, from Barnet, admits treating the childminder but denies all claims.
The hearing continues.
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This is the sex attacker being hunted by police after an attack on a pregnant young woman in Birmingham.
The fiend stalked his 19-year-old victim as she walked to her hotel from the Arcadian Centre.
He grabbed her around the throat and sexually assaulted the woman.
The brave victim tried to fight him off and her screams were heard by a passing taxi driver and a city centre worker. As they raced to her aid, the pervert fled.
The woman later discovered she was pregnant at the time of the attack.
Police have released the likeness and CCTV footage of the man to the Birmingham Mail and urged readers to name him.
His victim bravely agreed to re-live her ordeal in a bid to help police find him.
“The man who did this was evil and disgusting,” she said.
“ It’s just vile that he thought he had the right to do this to me.
“I was pregnant at the time of the attack but didn’t know. Thankfully, all seems OK with the baby. I just want to put it all behind me. I’m not going to let him ruin my life. I’m looking forward to the birth of my baby.”
The incident happened at about 4.30am on Sunday, February 28.
Police said the woman had left the Arcadian where she had been enjoying a night out with friends and was heading back to her hotel.
He attacked her from behind and pushed her into a doorway near the Old Rep Theatre, in Station Street. Throughout the attack he had his hand around her throat.
“The people at the scene saved me. If it wasn’t for them, goodness knows what would have happened to me,” she said.
“After it happened I was so confused and shocked. None of it seemed at all real. I was in shock for days. I’ve had to try to stay positive and take every day as it comes. Family and friends have been really supportive.
“As a result of the attack I am now much more aware of everyone when I am out. I’m more scared than ever before. I don’t like men looking at me or watching what I am doing.
“I never go anywhere on my own and I always make sure that I have got my phone with me. I would never walk anywhere in the dark on my own now. I want to see him go to prison for a long, long time.
“He is putting girls’ lives at risk. He shouldn’t be allowed on the streets. I don’t want him to do this to someone else.
“Anyone who recognises the e-fit or who knows something please come forward, whatever they know, please phone the police.
“Their information could succeed in getting an evil person put away and stop this happening to someone else.”
Det Con Elaine Dodd, Public Protection Investigator at Ladywood Police Station, said: “This young lady stood little chance of defending herself when attacked so quickly and from behind.
“We are releasing this e-fit and description to encourage members of the public to come forward and help our inquiry. We want to prevent this man from striking again.”
The man was described as Asian, possibly Pakistani or Bangladeshi, in his mid to late 20s, 5ft 11ins and slim with short black hair, a pointy nose and clean shaven. He was wearing a zip-up sports jacket with a drawstring hem, light T-shirt, dark jeans and footwear.
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She was so tiny, she had to sit on four cushions to be seen on the video screen. She played with a toy train as she told a hushed court what her brothers had allegedly done to her.
The seven-year-old schoolgirl claimed yesterday that she was repeatedly raped by her two teenage brothers from the age of four.
The girl shuffled and fidgeted as she described how her siblings, now aged 15 and 13, sexually abused her more than 25 times in their home.
Giving evidence at Birmingham Crown Court, she claimed her older brother, who was 12 when the alleged abuse began, offered her sweets when she told him to stop.
The brothers, who appeared in court smartly dressed and accompanied by their grandparents, deny the allegations.
The tiny girl filled barely a corner of the television screen during the video link. She was eventually given a higher chair after a request from the judge.
The jury was first shown a 30-minute interview with the girl and a specially-trained female police officer, recorded last summer after the then six-year-old allegedly told her mother she suffered attacks, both clothed and unclothed, in the family's living room.
During the interview, the girl - dressed in jeans, a white T-shirt and pink socks - could be seen playing with a toy train as she told the officer she had been subjectedto 'inappropriate things' which she 'did not like' and which 'hurt'.
Asked what happened during the alleged attacks by her older brother, the girl replied: 'I say can we stop.
'He pulls my arm. He says please. I say no. He makes a sad face. He says shhh.'
The girl stared down at her hands, sighed and fiddled with her shiny black shoes before describing how her elder brother hurt her 'in the private... with his private'.
Under cross-examination yesterday by defence barrister Jonathan Ray, acting for the older brother, she was asked where the word 'private' came from.
She answered: 'It's my own word.'
Mr Ray added: 'When yousay it hurt, what sort of hurt do you say it was?
'It didn't hurt to make you shout out, did it? And you didn't cry at any stage, did you?
'And I don't even expect it made you sad, did it?'
The little girl replied: 'No.' She added: 'When I said no, he said he will give me sweets.'
She was attacked about 15 times by one sibling and more than ten by the other over a threeyear period at her home in Birmingham between September 2006 and May last year, the court heard.
The 15-year-old is also alleged to have sexually assaulted another sister, now aged ten. When he turned 13, he became 'extremely sexually forward', prosecutor Mark Heywood told jurors.
The older boy was discovered by his mother lying on top of his sister in the lounge one evening, the court heard.
Both brothers became such a concern that they were sent to live with their grandparents last year.
Mr Heywood said: 'The prosecution case, in a nutshell, is that each of these two boys sexually abused their sister and in the case of the eldest, abused his other sister as well.'
The boys, who were both as young as 12 when the alleged abuse began, were allowed to sit at the back of the court instead of in the dock because of their age.
The barristers removed their wigs and gowns but the judge kept hers on, after hearing that the seven-year- old had been 'looking forward to the colourful robes'.
The 15-year- old denies two charges of rape and four of sexual assault of a child, while his brother denies two counts of rape and two of sexual assault.
None of the family can be identified for legal reasons.
The trial continues.
Wednesday 9th June 2010
Another Politically Correct Verdict in the land of Loony Tunes!
A student at Wolverhampton University who shot three children with an airgun on their way home from school has walked free from court.
Rikesh Patel fired pellets at a 12-year-old girl from his accommodation at Compton Park, Compton Road West, hitting her in the leg and leaving a bruise. Two weeks later, he shot two 14-year-old boys in the head and neck. Both suffered superficial injuries.
After hearing that Patel would be given a suspended sentence, a relative of one of the boys told the judge: “Let’s hope we don’t have another Cumbria.”
The man, who did not give his name, later described the sentence as a “joke” and said it was “ridiculous” that Patel had walked free.
One of the boys had felt a sharp pain and thought a stone had been thrown at him, Wolverhampton Crown Court heard yesterday. Judge Martin Walsh told 20-year-old Patel he could have blinded the boys.
Police were called to the scene of the shooting and a porter said he believed Patel had an airgun. His room was searched and police found the weapon and pellets.
Patel admitted three charges of assault on April 28 and May 6. The two injured boys are pupils at St Edmund’s School, on the same road as the campus, while the girl was at St Peter’s School.
Mr Dean Kershaw, defending, said Patel, who was studying to be an accountant, had since been expelled by the university. He was a bright student with four A-Levels, but behaved like a “buffoon and an idiot”. Judge Martin Walsh said: “The injuries, thankfully, were not severe, but could have been catastrophic.”
Both boys returned to school the morning after the attack.Patel was given three months’ custody, suspended for two years, and ordered to do 180 hours of unpaid work. He was given a curfew for four months from 7pm to 7am.
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D.I.Y. Because the Authorities not bothered!
When a notorious drug dealer moved in next door, Charlie Skinner feared for his young family.
The father of three contacted police after Xiao-Po He started to peddle cocaine and crystal meth on his doorstep.
But when officers failed to respond, telling him instead to keep a log of the activities of the illegal immigrant - who was already on bail at the time for supplying drugs - Mr Skinner decided to take matters into his own hands.
The property developer risked his own life, posing as a customer to slip into his neighbour's flat and challenge the 26-year-old.
He fought off an attack by two of his henchman before chasing the dealer down the street and wrestling him to the ground. Then the 47-year-old held him in a headlock until police arrived.
Searches revealed the former chef was carrying 3.6g of crystal meth and a search of his home uncovered another 4.48g of the drug. Yesterday Mr Skinner was hailed a hero after the dealer was jailed for six years.
He had been on police bail after being caught in November last year with a stash of drugs worth £12,000 including crystal meth, cocaine, the rave drug ketamine and ecstasy pills in a flat in Camberwell, South London.
But when a court granted him bail, the dealer simply moved and set up shop in a flat next door to Mr Skinner, who lives with his wife Sian, 44, and daughters Florence, 12, Maisie, 11, and son Teddy, nine, in Kennington.
Initially, the father reported his concerns to police and was advised to keep a log of comings and goings from the flat.
But he was so sick of the 'constant stream of people' turning up to buy drugs, Mr Skinner decided to confront the culprit on March 13 this year. Continued
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This week sees the launch of a hilarious new campaign called “Inspired by Muhammad” (as we are now all expected to spell Mohammed).
It claims to want to “improve the public understanding of Islam and Muslims”. It is being strongly pedalled by taxpayer-funded Muslim organisations. Which makes it another nice example of the British people being preached to and proselytised in an Islamic way, presumably at our own expense.
The site is well worth a visit. Its “Who was Muhammad?” section is particularly delicious. There are sections on Mohammed “the orphan”, Mohammed “the shepherd” and Mohammed “the husband”. There are, sadly, no sections on Mohammed “the war criminal” or Mohammed “the close friend of a little girl”.
But the campaign’s aim is clear. It is to alter misconceptions that we are told are held by a woefully ignorant British public by telling us all about Mohammed on buses and tube trains. A YouGov poll has been brought out to coincide with the campaign’s launch. Among its findings are that:
58 per cent of people associate Islam with extremism
50 per cent associate Islam with terrorism
69 per cent believe that Islam encourages the repression of women
Now how on earth could this be? Surely these figures must demonstrate the existence of an anti-Islamic plot! Or it is it perhaps because Islam is indeed very strongly associated with extremism, violence and the repression of women, as an observer of any Islamic society can see?
The campaign posters show British Muslims saying things like: “I believe in protecting the environment. So did Mohammed.” Funniest of all is a woman barrister in a headscarf who fronts the poster: “I believe in women’s rights. So did Mohammed.” Unless, like the female poet Asma bint Marwan, you did something Mohammed didn’t like. (According to various hadiths, he had her killed for criticising Islam.) Or unless, like his bride Aisha, you were nine years old and he decided, at the age of 52, that it was time to consummate the marriage.
Anyhow – details, details. As far as I’m concerned, people can believe what they want. But once they try to make other people believe it too by advertising in public places, then they will have to get used to having their platitudes critiqued and ridiculed.
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Elite Home Improvements were told by Sunderland's Labour council that flying the St. Georges Cross was not allowed, following a complaint from a member of the public.
The council's excuse was that bunting wrapped around a lamp-post "could put people in danger"
Resilient bosses at the Houghton Road showroom, to their credit, refused to give in and would not take down their World Cup decorations.
Representatives from Elite Home Improvements told how eight civil servants visited them insisting that their English memorabilia be removed or council staff would do it for them, with the bill being sent to the company.
Thankfully there seems to be a reversal in policy.
Managing director David Turnbull has explained "We've had an official visit from the local authority saying that they can't find any reason to take down our flags."
The Labour Council were influenced by objections by the people of Sunderland.
A business partner of David claimed "People have been sending us pictures of their England flags from all over the country and sending us texts in support.
"We've bought in more flags because we want to give one away to everyone who has supported us. They don't even have to be customers, passers-by can just come in and ask for them."
The council should occupy their time with helping their electorate and not figuring out how to waste their time with persecuting those people who are either patriotic or just wanting to support their national football team.
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Lawful Rebellion.
Some one recently asked me the question; what is Lawful Rebellion?
Rebellion in itself has a number of different meanings and is in fact quite close to another word that seems to be on everyone’s lips; Revolution. Defined meaning of Rebellion;
- 1. Refusal to accept some authority or code or convention.
- 2. An act or show of defiance toward an authority or established government.
Defined meaning of Lawful;
- 1. Being within the law; allowed by law: lawful methods of dissent. (The lawful refusal to conform to the authority that is unjust)
Under article 61 of Magna Carta 1215 (the founding document of our Constitution) we have a right to enter into lawful rebellion if we feel we are being governed unjustly. Contrary to common belief our Sovereign and her government are only there to govern us and not to rule us and this must be done within the constraint of our Common Law and the freedoms asserted to us by such Law, nothing can become law in this country if it falls outside of this simple constraint.
Article 61 shows quite clearly who really holds the power in this country, that being quite simply us the people; we have Sovereignty not any Parliament and nor can this be taken from us by any Parliament who claim to have taken the people’s Sovereignty. As defined above any act passed by a Parliament to remove the power the people possess, or to remove the power from the point of constraint we invested the power in, is invalid as it falls outside of the constraint laid down by Common/Constitutional Law.
This is a simple safeguard put in place to protect our freedoms under said law and to never allow such freedoms to be removed or diminished. So in reality any Act, Statute and subsequent law or legislation formed by these actions, that effects our freedoms asserted to us, is quite evidently unjust, invalid and most certainly illegal.
By invoking article 61 we are quite clearly stating that we feel we are being governed unjustly and after giving the head of state (Her Majesty) 40 day’s to correct this, if this is not corrected, then we can simply enter into lawful rebellion and we do this under the full protection of our Constitutional Law.
Lawful rebellion allows quite simply for the following recourse;
- 1. Full refusal to pay any forms of Tax, Fines and any other forms of monies to support and/or benefit said unlawful governance of this country.
- 2. Full refusal to abide by any Law, Legislation or Statutory Instrument invalidly put in place by said unlawful governance that is in breech of the Constitutional safeguard.
- 3. To hinder in any way possible all actions of the treasonous government of this land, who have breeched the Constitutional safeguard; defined with no form of violence in anyway, just lawful hindrance under freedom asserted by Constitutional Law and Article 61.
Above are listed the three main ways we can as a people rely upon article 61 and what this allows for. The British people were given over 700 years ago a Law to use as there recourse when faced with either a Parliamentary dictatorship, or a Sovereign trying to rule by Divine Right, which amounts to the same thing. We have a right, and a birth right at that, to be governed properly under our birth right law and no other and certainly not by laws introduced on the pretence of being British Law, when in fact all laws passed since 1973 have been European laws in the guise of British law. We have a right to freedom within our true law and no Parliament can remove this for they were not present in its implementation nor did it need any Parliament, or any Parliament involvement, this was quite simply a deal struck between the people and a Sovereign, a deal which can never be broken.
The traitors that reside in the Parliament of this country only fear one thing and that quite simply is us the people and they know that they can never defend themselves, or defend their treasonous actions, lies and deceit against the power of the people, asserted by and given by, the founding document of our Constitution Magna Carta 1215. They realize, as many others do, that once the British public grasps the power of Magna Carta in both hands and start to use it in their defense; their game is quite simply up.
What does Magna Carta stand for?
In stands for freedom, that the people have Sovereignty that cannot be removed by anyone and it stands for the only real true rule of law; that no one, without exception, is above the law.
What does Article 61 (Lawful Rebellion) stand for? You have Sovereignty, realize it, and use it.
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Labour's acting leader, Harriet Harman, today nominated Diane Abbott for the party's leadership.
Ms Harman said she was doing so in the hope of helping to ensure there is a woman on the ballot paper, and will not cast her vote in the election this September.
Her move brings Ms Abbott up to 10 nominations - well short of the 33 she must secure by tomorrow's deadline if she is to join David Miliband, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls in the battle to succeed Gordon Brown.
Ms Harman has made clear that she wishes to remain deputy leader alongside whoever is named leader on September 25.
A source close to Ms Harman said: 'The Labour Party knows that whoever wins the leadership contest, there will not be a men-only leadership at the top of the Labour Party as Harriet will continue in her role as deputy leader.
'However, she feels that the party does not want the leadership election and the debate that it will generate to be men only.
'Harriet will play no part in the eventual outcome, as she will not cast her vote. She will continue to serve as deputy leader alongside whoever wins. Therefore, she has nominated Diane.'
Shadow education secretary Mr Balls, who already has the 33 nominations from MPs to stand, today said anyone else wanting to add their name to his list of backers should support Ms Abbott instead, to help her get on to the ballot paper.
Mr Balls made his surprise plea during a question and answer session at the GMB union's annual conference in Southport.
The shadow education secretary also signalled his support for Ms Harman's call for half the shadow cabinet to be made up of women.
Abbott is the only woman and the only ethnic minority candidate among the six hopefuls seeking the Labour leadership.
Also hoping to secure their place on the ballot paper are shadow health secretary Andy Burnham, who has so far obtained 26 nominations, and left-wing backbencher John McDonnell with 15.
Leading the field with 71 nominations is shadow foreign secretary David Miliband, who today attempted to woo Labour's MEPs by promising to invite their leader to join his shadow cabinet team if he was elected.
The party's 13-strong representation at the European Parliament could play a significant role in the complicated electoral college system being used by Labour to choose a successor to Gordon Brown.
They form part of the MPs' section in the electoral college, which wields the same voting strength as the other two sections - affiliated organisations including unions and grassroots activists.
Writing on his campaign blog ahead of a visit to Brussels, Mr Miliband said that inviting the MEPs' leader to attend shadow cabinet was an 'important and significant' signal that the party was serious about the work of the European Parliament and "wants to lead in a strong, outward-looking European Union".
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Parliament was hit by a new expenses row today after it emerged the 218 MPs who left after last month's General Election are entitled to a total £10.5 million in 'golden goodbyes'
The list includes a string of politicians caught up in the expenses scandal who are entitled to five-figure sums after standing down or losing their seat.
Taxpayers will be left to foot the huge bill as many families are forced to tighten their belts further in the economic crisis.
On leaving the Commons, MPs are eligible for a resettlement grant worth between 50 per cent and 100 per cent their annual £64,766 salary, with the first £30,000 tax-free.
The amount varies according to age and length of service, with MPs aged 55-64 with 15 or more years in the Commons getting the maximum £64,766 payment.
This year's total is higher than usual because of the large turnover of MPs in the wake of the expenses scandal.
They include former MP Douglas Hogg, 65, who put in a bill for the cleaning of the moat at his country home and is entitled to £64,766; 'duckhouse' ex-MP Sir Peter Viggers, 72, who can claim £32,383 and former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, 47, who is eligible for £32,383 and whose husband billed the taxpayer for adult movies, according to the TaxPayers' Alliance.
Its research showed that MP couple Julie Kirkbride, 49, and Andrew Mackay, 60, who were dubbed 'Mr and Mrs Expenses' and forced to stand down over their claims, are entitled to £32,383 and £64,766 respectively.
Commons authorities say the money, which comes on top of the parliamentary pension, 'may be claimed to help former MPs with the costs of adjusting to non-parliamentary life'.
The report found that between them, the 218 MPs who retired or were beaten at last month's election are entitled to £10,432,053.92 - an average of £47,853 each, the first £30,000 of which is tax-free.
However, the report was unable to say how many of the ex-MPs claimed the cash.
Some 43 MPs were entitled to the maximum £64,766 payment, according to Tuesday's report.
A 2007 report by the Senior Salaries Pay Board recommended removing the grant from MPs who stand down voluntarily from the Commons and limiting it to a month's salary for every year's service for those who are defeated or lose their seats due to boundary changes, up to a maximum of nine months.
According to the TPA, this would have reduced this year's bill to £3,276,080 - some £36,248 less than the £3,312,328 to which defeated MPs are entitled under the current system.
John O'Connell, policy analyst at the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: 'This vast sum of money will be frustrating for taxpayers, particularly after the expenses scandal. MPs should be aware that they are entering a contract with a fixed term - if they're voted out it's the end of the contract, not a redundancy.'
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For girls aiming to climb the career ladder, it is one achievement they might be wiser not to put on the CV.
In what has been described as the country's 'most trivial' course, female pupils are being taught how to walk in high heels.
The six-week 'Sexy Heels in the City' course is designed, it is claimed, to prepare them for the 'business world and their social lives'.
Whether employers will take the same view is yet to be seen. But South Thames College-in South-West London, is paying Chyna Whyne, author of Mastering The Art Of Wearing High Heels, £60 an hour to pass on her expertise to 16-year-old pupils.
Miss Whyne, a former backing singer for Elton John, claims her life was made a misery because she was not taught how to walk in such shoes.
She insists women should be taught the skills at an early age - as singer Pixie Lott has clearly done - as it will be better for them 'in the long run'.
The course also involves learning how to walk on a catwalk and shop for shoes - a skill many men might suggest comes naturally to most women.
Toni Eastwood, of training provider Everywoman, said: 'This sounds like Britain's most trivial course.
'It panders to stereotypes. It's an extraordinary waste of money and time.'
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The late unlamented Labour regime was a grim mixture of authoritarianism, greed, ideology and contempt for democracy.
Those characteristics shone through its approach towards local government. Throughout their 13 baleful years in power Labour ministers displayed a ruthless instinct for Stalinist central control, combined with an enthusiastic appeasement of property developers and a disdain for the views of local residents. Spy cameras in bins, the expansion of the unelected quango state, the destruction of the countryside and soaring council tax bills were all part of Labour’s programme.
Thankfully the new Government is promising to dismantle this legacy. Democracy, claim the Tory-Liberal Democrat politicians, will be restored. Unnecessary taxes and the apparatus of officialdom’s surveillance will be removed. As a welcome start the Communities Secretary Eric Pickles, a commonsense Yorkshireman with long experience of local government, is announcing today that the Government is to ditch Labour’s plan to impose so-called “pay as you throw” charges right across the country, under which householders would be billed by the council on the basis of how much rubbish they put in their bins .
I t was this wretched scheme that led to the rash of spy cameras in our bins . Despite powerful opposition, the Big Brother machinery of wheelie bin oppression was already well advanced. No fewer than 2.6 million spy cameras have been installed throughout Britain, while the former government was hoping that two-thirds of households would soon be covered by the all-seeing eyes of the rubbish commissars.
The Government is right to dump this instrument of tyranny. Though Labour tried to dress up bin taxes in the language of environmental concern, the truth is that these charges were just another method of boosting Government revenues, as if taxpaying Britons were not already hammered hard enough . In its lack of respect for privacy, its destruction of basic liberties and its growth in state intrusion, the entire policy was profoundly un-British. It could have come straight out of the East German communist regime of the Eighties . It is perhaps ironic that the two main manufacturers of the spy cameras used are German .
Furthermore, in the context of the fashionable green agenda, bin taxes have been hopelessly counter-productive. Far from protecting the environment they encourage fly-tipping by householders anxious to avoid the charges. In Norfolk a pilot “pay-as-you-throw” scheme provoked a three- fold increase in fly-tipping.
Only under Labour could such a straightforward municipal task as emptying the bins have been turned into an expensive bureaucratic nightmare . We should cheer as this strategy is condemned to the trashcan of history, just as we should welcome the new Government’s promise to end meddling abuses in the planning process.
Nowhere was Labour’s undemocratic impulse more apparent than in this arena. With their usual autocracy, ministers imposed rigid targets on town halls, telling them that they had to build no fewer than three million new homes by 2020. Hated by local councillors these central diktats were adored by the big property developers who could disguise their avarice with talk of “meeting local housing needs”.
Yet the rhetoric about “housing need” was nonsense. It was driven by Labour’s own cynical decision to let mass immigration reach an annual rate of over 500,000 in recent years.
As a means of accelerating development Labour indulged in a number of ruses. One was to designate all urban gardens as “brownfield sites”, thereby allowing vast swathes of green space to be destroyed by new housing . Another was to encourage high density building . In the same space that would have been used for one house in the Eighties, developers have now been ordered to build three.
In addition, Labour transferred crucial planning powers from town halls to Whitehall or unaccountable quangos . One of Labour’s most grotesque creations was the Infrastructure Planning Commission, established to accelerate the spread of concrete across our once green and pleasant land.
The IPC is unable to perform the task for which it was created as the previous government failed to define the guidelines under which it could operate. It has a budget of £9.3million a year, a chairman, Sir Michael Pitt, who earns £184,000 a year for a four-day week and seven other commissioners on over £100,000, all of them making decisions that should only be exercised by local councils. Fortunately, the Coalition has also pledged to sweep away the unwanted IPC along with all the ridiculous targets and rules on density.
Unfortunately I have direct experience of the absurdity of Labour’s planning system. Next door to our terraced house in a conservation area at the heart of the Kent village of Westgate-on-Sea there used to stand an elegant Edwardian house . But sadly it was pulled down recently by a developer who, having been rejected four times by the council, got permission from the Government to demolish it . Residents, like the council, were opposed to this but our opinions counted for nothing. It was an act of vandalism, entirely in keeping with Labour’s brutal outlook.
We can only hope the Coalition will live up to its promises and not continue this destruction of our nation’s freedoms, environment and heritage.
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Brussels is to grab new powers to vet Britain’s budget figures, amid fears that a Greek-style economic crisis could be repeated in this country.
The proposals, set to be rubber stamped by European finance ministers in Luxembourg today, will allow EU officials to make spot checks on the economic statistics and forecasts used to draw up the Budget.
Five years ago the UK rejected the idea of stepping up EU surveillance of the Treasury's economic calculations and statistics.
But now, in the wake of the economic downturn and revelations about the true state of the Greek economy, British officials indicated that the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, Mark Hoban, would ‘nod through’ the deal.
France, Portugal and other countries have also dropped their opposition to a move which was widely seen as a step too far.
European Commission officials insisted that the move would not affect British sovereignty.
An official said: ‘This is long overdue and we are extremely pleased that member states have now accepted that it is needed.
‘As in the Greek case, where the figures were manipulated, this now allows the supervision that is necessary to be undertaken. But this does not impinge upon member states' sovereignty.'
The Treasury also denied the moves would result in the EU seeing the Budget before British MPs.
The Financial Secretary to the Treasury, Mark Hoban, said the Budget would be presented to Parliament first: 'There is no question of anyone other than MPs seeing it first. Once the Chancellor has presented it to Parliament, it is of course publicly available.'
But the move is likely to fuel concerns that the EU is using the economic crisis as cover for a massive power grab that could ultimately lead to Brussels having a say in Britain’s tax and spending decisions.
Germany is pressing for the introduction of a ‘European economic government’ in the wake of the Greek crisis, which has prompted a £650 billion bailout package.
Chancellor Angela Merkel is urging the introduction of new rules which would allow the EU to vet national budgets.
The move is supported by EU president Herman Van Rompuy, who held talks with David Cameron in Downing Street yesterday.
But Number 10 stressed that the EU would not be given a veto over Britain’s Budget.
A spokesman said: ‘The Budget will be presented to Parliament first, as usual.’
However, the new rules will allow EU officials unprecedented access to Britain’s budget figures.
Officials from the EU's statistical agency Eurostat will have powers to visit Britain to demand the data underlying the official statistics and forecasts on which the Budget is based.
A Commission official confirmed yesterday that the plan on the table is for the EU to be given early sight of all member state national budgets - not just those in the eurozone.
He added: ‘We do not expect to be privy to the full national budget, which would be presented to Parliament first, but we would want an explanation of what the Chancellor is intending to do.’
The former Greek government hid the scale of the its debt and deficit levels, leaving the incoming government to impose drastic public sector cuts and clear up the economic fall-out.
As the scale of the Greek crisis emerged, EU officials said they had no choice but to accept the official economic data from Athens.
Under new rules, the Commission would be able to send in number-crunchers from Eurostat, their statistical office, to vet figures from any member state.
An official insisted that the move would not lead to ‘unannounced dawn raids on national treasuries’.
But he added: ‘The new provisions allow for visits to check on the economic maths, if there are reasons for concern - such as national figures being revised at short notice without obvious reason - or other signals that something may be wrong with the calculations.’
A UK official said: ‘We originally rejected this idea, but we've now discovered just how bad the Greek situation was, and there's an appetite to make sure it doesn't happen again.
'A lot has changed in the last few months, and people are ready to accept some things that they would not have done just a short time ago.’
Chancellor George Osborne last night insisted he was on a mission of 'positive engagement' with Europe.
Mr Osborne called for the imposition of an immediate 'cash freeze' on the EU's budget. The UK's current annual contribution to the EU is estimated at up to £12 billion.
Herman Van Rompuy, the EU’s unelected Belgian president, last night insisted that treaty changes had not been ruled out, despite British resistance to the move.
Speaking after a private meeting with Mr Osborne in Brussels, Mr Van Rompuy said: ‘Changing a treaty takes time, a lot of time, but nothing is excluded.’
Mrs Merkel diplomatically played down the need for a new treaty when asked about it at yesterday’s press conference.
She said: ‘I want to make clear we are at the start of this and even in the eurozone there is no unity on exactly what we should be doing.
'I've made it clear that we need to stabilise the euro but at a later stage we will be able to say what we can do and how should we do it.
'And then we will see what the majority will want and the interests of the eurozone.'
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Despite debunkers attempting to claim otherwise, Bilderberg illegally sets the consensus on policies that are subsequently enacted worldwide
Former NATO Secretary-General and Bilderberg member Willy Claes has confounded claims by debunkers that the secret organization which met in Sitges Spain over the last few days does not set policy, admitting during a Belgian radio interview that Bilderberg attendees are mandated to implement decisions that are formulated during the annual conference of power brokers.
In a radio interview reported on by the Belgian news website www.zonnewind.be, Claes told host Koen Fillet that Bilderberg does indeed decide policy for the coming year. Claes would certainly be in a position to know, being a two-time Bilderberg attendee as well as the eighth Secretary General of NATO from 1994 until 1995.
Claes said that Bilderberg guests are normally given around 10 minutes of talk time, after which a report is compiled of their presentation.
“The participants are then obviously considered to use this report in setting their policies in the environments in which they affect,” stated Claes, according to the translated text.
The host asked Claes to repeat this astounding admission, before Claes went on to explain that no two guest are allowed to sit next to each other more than once at Bilderberg, to enable the maximum exchange of views on important subjects.
A Dutch-speaking reader sent us the article and confirms that the translation is accurate. This represents a solid confirmation of what we already knew through witnessing Bilderberg’s leaked agenda later play out in the real world time after time – that the elitist organization does verbally set global policy in a completely undemocratic and illegal manner.
However, despite Claes, who personally attended the 1994 Bilderberg meeting in Helsinki when he was Belgium’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, confirming the obvious that Bilderberg does manufacture a consensus amongst its participants, which is then implemented as policy in the real world, during the past few days numerous debunkers have claimed that Bilderberg is just a talking shop that has no impact on the global stage.
Iain Hollingshead of the London Telegraph wrote a sophomoric piece in which he dismissed Bilderberg as “a group of willy-waggling old men comparing their security details and dreaming of past glories,” which is a complete misnomer seeing as Bilderberg is routinely attended by active Presidents and Prime Ministers very much in power and very much in a position to have an impact on current events, such as Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who attended this year’s conference with his country on the verge of becoming the next Greece.
Hollingshead claims that because the group is becoming more well known, its allure is on the wane, but fails to mention that this is because of the fine work of activists and real journalists who have spent decades trying to get the castrated corporate media to report on the event while people like Hollingshead either made childish jokes about the whole issue or even denied the very existence of Bilderberg.
One such “skeptic” is Chip Berlet, who works for a group called the Political Research Associates, which is funded in part by the Ford Foundation, founded by Edsel Ford, the son of the notorious Henry Ford, who received awards from Hitler for funding the Nazi war machine with slave labor, which somewhat taints the PRA’s stated objectives, which are apparently to track conspiracy theories and the the right-wing while “advancing an open, democratic, and pluralistic society”.
The Ford Foundation is little more than an attack dog which transnational elitists use, through its offshoots like PRA, to demonize any criticism of their agenda as extremist and anti-semitic, which is quite rich considering the history of the corporation.
Berlet himself has made a career out of characterizing the idea that powerful people might get together and discuss ways of expanding their power as a belief of the lunatic fringe.
Little surprise therefore that towards the end of Berlet’s appearance on Russia Today, in which he stumbles through a broken record of excuses claiming Bilderberg has no power, he invokes the tired old cliche that anyone who expresses concern about 200 powerful men gathering in secret with no democratic oversight whatsoever behind a wall of security is probably a closet racist.
Berlet claims the American Free Press was founded by “one of the biggest anti-semitic, neo-fascist conspiracy theorists in the world,” which coincidentally is also a pretty apt description of the man who founded the company that now pays Berlet via the Ford Foundation funding PRA receives to spew his propaganda – Henry Ford – one of Hitler’s biggest supporters.
Watch the clip.
Berlet demonizes the notion that the Bilderberg Group has any influence over world affairs or is working towards a new world order as “a lot of malarkey,” and “a hoax carried out by people who believe in an elaborate fairy tale about how power is exercised in the world”.
He then completely contradicts himself by admitting “they talk over policy” but then claims “the organization itself has no power” before stating, “The policies that are formulated don’t hold any power within the nation that people who go to the meeting….they go back to their country and say hey I heard this at the Bilderberger meeting what do you think? And the national assembly or the powerful people say I think that’s a lot of malarkey take it back and shove it someplace, so this idea that this is a plot that is carried out to 30 or 40 countries and implemented is baloney.”
Really? So according to Berlet, the Prime Minister of Spain, his Secretary General, and the Queen of Spain, all of whom attended the Bilderberg meeting this past weekend, go back home and are then told to “shove” whatever they discussed at Bilderberg by “the powerful people”. These are the powerful people! These are the people who run the country. Presumably, Berlet believes there are powerful people above the Prime Minister and the Queen of Spain who tell them what to do, which sounds like an even bigger conspiracy theory than the one he is attempting to debunk.
Of course in reality, Berlet knows that the most powerful people in the world attend Bilderberg and he is either completely ignorant or deliberately lying by claiming that Bilderberg has no impact on policy.
Merely on the face of it the claim that Bilderberg does not have an influence on policy is patently ridiculous. This would be akin to claiming that a four-day gathering of 200 MLB officials would have no impact on the future of baseball. Despite the fact that many politicians shunned Bilderberg this year because of the group’s increasing notoriety as a furtive and insidious front for anti-democratic elitists, just take a look at the list of powerful individuals who did attend.
Top CEO’s like Bill Gates of Microsoft and Eric Schmidt of Google, top bankers like Marcus Agius of Barclays and Peter Sutherland of Goldman Sachs, don’t meet with national Presidents, Prime Ministers, big newspaper owners, members of the European Parliament and officials in the U.S. government to talk about tiddlywinks. They don’t get together for four days and surround themselves with a security ring of steel to discuss the weather or American Idol – they’re at Bilderberg to come to a consensus and then to implement it in their respective spheres of influence, just as Claes confirms in the radio interview.
Using bluff and slimy semantics, apologists like Berlet imply that just because no treaties or laws are signed at Bilderberg, that the group has no power. In reality, Bilderberg sets the global consensus for the agenda that is subsequently implemented in the host countries of the Bilderberg members, a process that holds even more power than signing an individual treaty. Bilderberg sets the consensus for a whole gamut of policy areas, from oil, to the environment, to wars, to the economy.
This is confirmed not only by former NATO Secretary-General and Bilderberg member Willy Claes in the radio interview we covered earlier, but it is manifestly evident in the policies that have later come to pass after being formulated at Bilderberg. Continued
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Energy regulators are proposing to levy a £2 million penalty on EDF Energy Networks after almost 100,000 customers were left without power over several days, it has been disclosed.
Ofgem said it was "minded to" punish the utility company after judging that it could have done more beforehand to limit the risk of the blackout happening.
A fire at EDF Energy Networks' Dartford Creek cable bridge in Kent, on July 20 last year, caused power cuts to 94,000 homes and businesses in the surrounding area.
The proposal to penalise the firm comes in a report published by Ofgem and is subject to a month-long consultation. Publication of a final decision is expected in early August.
In the report, Ofgem said it agreed with EDF Energy Networks that the event was outside its control and that it took appropriate steps afterwards to limit the number of customers affected. It also said the firm took proper steps to restore customers' supplies quickly and efficiently.
But it added: "However, we think that EDFE did not take sufficient actions prior to the event to reduce the risk of it occurring.
"The Dartford Creek cable bridge is a strategically important part of EDFE's network. Any major failure on this part of the network will have a very high impact on electricity supply to customers in the LPN network area and also to some customers in the adjacent SPN area."
Ofgem said it thought risk assessments should have flagged this to the company and that it was reasonable to expect it to have had a robust strategy to ensure resilience on this part of the network.
"As a minimum, we think that EDFE should have had a higher frequency of maintenance inspections and a higher level of security than was in place at Dartford Creek at the time of the fire," the report added.
The company said it believed there were a number of inaccuracies in the report and that it maintained it should be viewed as an "exceptional event".
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The Royal Navy wren who smuggled £2million of cocaine on board a warship after a tour of duty in Colombia was part of a gang planning to sell the drugs in Britain, a court heard today.
Teresa Matos was allegedly recruited as a courier by her boyfriend Raul Beia and friend Abdul Banda, who were said to be the ‘controlling minds’ of the operation.
Another man, Dean Langley, was recruited to receive and distribute the drugs in the UK, Portsmouth Crown Court heard.
Matos, 36, allegedly picked up 19lb of cocaine while HMS Manchester was docked at the port of Cartagena in Colombia, South America, last July.
A month later the stash was found hidden in the lining of Matos's clothes insider her locker when the Type 42 destroyer arrived in Plymouth, en route to its home port of Portsmouth.
Beia, 39, is on trial alongside Langley, 20, accused of importing the illegal drugs.
Andrew Oldland, prosecuting, said: ‘These were not, as you might have expected, the proceeds of a successful anti-smuggling exercise.
‘The drugs had been smuggled on board by a wren.’
The trial has heard that Matos, an Angolan-born steward from Gateshead, Tyneside, pleaded guilty to smuggling at a previous hearing.
She will be sentenced along with another member of the alleged smuggling gang, Banda, 34, who has also admitted his part in the conspiracy, on the completion of the trial.
Matos was arrested in Plymouth while Banda, of Ealing, west London, was arrested with Beia, 39, and Langley at Portsmouth's Ibis Hotel.
Mr Oldland said that they had bought plastic containers, clingfilm and scales from Argos and Poundland for the drugs.
Mr Oldland said that Beia and Banda were the ‘controlling minds’ behind the operation while Matos was a courier and Langley was recruited to receive and distribute the drugs. Mr Oldland said that the use of a Royal Navy ship to smuggle drugs was an example of the ‘determination and ingenuity’ of those in the international drugs trade.
Christian Rooker, a civilian canteen assistant who worked on board HMS Manchester, said in a statement to police that he had gone ashore at Cartegena with Matos.
He said they had met a friend of Matos, called Tasha, at a bar called the Club Tropical where they had also met a man who was ‘dressed like an American gangster’.
He said that Matos had gone without him to the city a second time and returned with a large handbag but he was unaware of any other items brought back on board the ship.
The warship had spent time in Cape Verde for counter-narcotics training and had also visited the Falkland Islands, Brazil and Chile.
The trial against Beia, of Clapham, south-west London, and Langley, of Fulham, west London, was adjourned until tomorrow.
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A Pervert who left an 83-year-old woman “shaken” after a sexual assault in Colindale is being hunted by police.
Detectives have launched an appeal after the man “forcibly kissed” the elderly victim on the lips as she walked along Silkfield Road, on May 18. The victim lives in the Colindale area.
Barnet police said the black man, thought to be aged between 25 and 30-years-old, approached the woman, in the street and began talking to her.
A police statement added the man then “forcibly kissed her on the lips using his tongue, against her will, and made off along the A5 towards ASDA”.
The man is described as about 5ft 7” tall, with short black afro hair and clean shaven. He was wearing dark trousers with a zip-up jacket and a light coloured t-shirt.
Trainee Detective Sergeant Steve Aggrey, said: “The lady was shaken by the event and we are keen to find this individual.”
Anyone who saw the incident or has any information regarding the suspect, should contact police on 0300 123 12 12 or call Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111, quoting crime reference number 2411923/10.
Tuesday 8th June 2010
Reports of Religious wars and confrontations all over the world speak for themselves!
Islam is linked to violent extremism in the minds of most Britons, according to a survey.
The YouGov poll also revealed widespread concern about the impact of the faith on British values.
It found nearly six in ten associate Islam with radical views, and two-thirds believe it encourages the repression of women.
Behind the Prophet Muhammed, the person Britons thought best represented Islam was Osama bin Laden.
Muslim groups disputed the findings, saying they did not think the poll represented the true beliefs of British people.
Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of the Ramadan Foundation said: 'I think this is not a fair reflection of the tolerance, diversity and respect people have for Muslims.
'Christians, Jews and people of no faith recognise Islam is a religion of tolerance and peace and they know that people who carry out terrorist attacks do not represent Islam and are not acting in the name of Islam.'
The poll was commissioned by the Exploring Islam Foundation as part of a campaign aimed at improving the image of Muslims.
Posters of Muslim professionals will appear on buses and the London Underground in an attempt to give a positive slant on their contribution to Britain. Each declares why they are, in the campaign's title, 'Inspired by Muhammed'.
It is led by former MTV presented Kristiane Backer, who declares herself to be an 'eco-Muslim'. She said Islam's values were 'universal' and 'sit well with British values'.
But the poll of 2,152 adults found less than one in seven people regard Islam as a peaceful religion and one third see it as actively violent.
Less than one in five believe it has a positive impact on British society and 68 per cent say it encourages the repression of women.
A third of those polled said the Prophet Muhammed best represented Islam, followed by the Al Qaeda leader with 13 per cent.
Just six percent associated Islam with either justice or protecting the environment.
The charity's patron, Labour peer Lord Patel of Blackburn, said the poll caused him 'deep concern'.
'Islam has been a part of British life for generations and British Muslims make an important contribution to the UK’s economic and social well-being, and its rich cultural diversity.
'Yet as this poll demonstrates today there remains a great deal of misunderstanding and distrust at the role of Islam and Muslim in Britain today. As a British Muslim, proud of my faith and my country, this causes me deep concern.'
A spokesman for the Quilliam Foundation, the counter-extremism think tank, said: 'This campaign is important because it can help non-Muslims to better understand the faith that inspires and guides their Muslim friends, neighbours, and colleagues.
'This initiative also helps British Muslims reclaim the Prophet Muhammad as a time-honoured guide for peace, compassion and social justice from those who seek to twist his teachings.'
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An advertising campaign aimed at combating negative perceptions of Muslims has been launched as a new poll showed a majority of people in Britain associate Islam with terrorism.
The Inspired By Muhammad campaign on the London Underground, bus stops and taxis will feature pictures of Muslim professionals including and Islam convert Kristiane Backer.
Campaign organiser the Exploring Islam Foundation said it aimed to highlight the prophet Mohammed's teachings to Muslims on the importance of the environment, gender equality and social justice.
The launch came as an online survey of 2,152 adults carried out last month showed 58 per cent of people associate Islam with extremism - and 50 per cent associate it with terrorism.
Exploring Islam Foundation campaigns director Remona Aly said: "We are a group of young Muslim professionals and a lot of us have given our time voluntarily because we are very concerned about the way our faith is perceived by the public.
"We want to foster a greater understanding of what Muslims are about and our contribution to British society. We are proud of being British and Muslim."
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Anti-terrorism police are installing approximately 150 CCTV cameras in two Muslim areas of Birmingham for reasons unknown to the communities.
Local residents of both communities were told that the cameras were being installed to combat anti-social behaviour, vehicle crime and drug dealing in the area. But The Guardian has reported that the cameras were paid for by the government's Terrorism and Allied Matters fund, which is administered by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO).
In Washwood Heath and Sparkbrooks, Birmingham's main Muslim areas, residents are covered by about 150 automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras – three times more than are used to monitor the city centre. Around 40 of the cameras are covert, meaning they are not in public view.
The £3m funding from the terrorism fund only came apparent when local councillors were briefed on the cameras' introduction.
Salma Yaqoob, a councillor for Sparkbrook, said: "The terrorism aspect was certainly not emphasised in that meeting. In fact it was me having to be portrayed as the awkward squad, or even paranoid, for even raising the issue of whether this was really about counterterrorism. They were very much saying, 'No, this is about burglary and crime.'"
The Safer Birmingham Partnership, which is run jointly by the police and the local authority, will run the cameras. Jackie Russell, director of the partnership, said: "Just because the funding has an interest in counterterrorism doesn't mean that for us, that is our focus. For us, it is about community safety."
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Muslim prisoners are cashing in on their religion to claim hundreds of thousands of pounds in additional benefits, a report revealed yesterday.
A study of Muslim inmates found that 30 per cent only converted during their sentence, while many others were non-practising before, only becoming “active” inside.
Others admitted that one reason they had taken up the religion was “the perceived material benefits offered to Muslims,” according to the report by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons.
It found that many Muslim prisoners realised they were entitled to more time outside their cells and better food, specially prepared at Ramadan.
With 10,300 Muslim prisoners in the system, the extra cost to the taxpayer is believed to stretch to hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Prisoners who convert to Islam are entitled to attend Friday prayers and Islamic classes outside their cells and are offered a Halal meat choice for every hot meal.
They are also granted time with Muslim chaplains, as well as access to the Koran and Islamic Literature.
A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Justice said that prisoners of all faiths were entitled to similar provisions.
Led by Chief Inspector Dame Anne Owers, the report also warned of a need for greater engagement with Muslim prisoners to prevent them turning to extremism.
She said: “There is a real risk of a self-fulfilling prophecy: that the prison experience will create or entrench alienation and disaffection, so that prisons release young men who are more likely to offend, or even embrace extremism.”
Last night, Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “At best, a lot of people are converting to take advantage of extra perks. At worst, there are some really extreme individuals recruiting fellow prisoners to their cause.
“The prison authorities must ensure the system isn’t being played for personal gain, and keep on top of the problem of extremism spreading.”
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There was no official inquiry into the 7/7 Islamist terrorist attacks in London because the Government took a deliberate decision to protect the Muslim community from scrutiny, it has been revealed.
A series of documents released by the Home Office shows that senior civil servants and government officials agreed on the conspiracy of silence in order not to draw attention to the reasons why Muslims in Britain would commit such attacks.
According to the papers released under a Freedom of Information Act request, Home Office permanent secretary Sir John Gieve wrote in a paper sent to then Home Secretary Charles Clarke that upsetting Muslims would be a "potential cost" of ministers agreeing to demands for a full inquiry.
Mr Clarke agreed and a public inquiry was never held, allowing the Government and the Muslim community to avoid the obvious question of why the attack took place.
Instead, the Government issued a “timeline” report of the attacks, diverting attention away from the causes of the Muslim behaviour.
This was exactly the same tactic employed in America following the 9/11 terrorist attacks: the “investigation” focussed merely on the events themselves and not the reason why a group of Egyptians would seek to attack New York’s World Trade Centre.
In his briefing note, Sir John said that any inquiry could generate “potential community tension in the event that any inquiry came to be perceived as an exercise in special pleading by one community, or alternatively if it was believed that it focused negatively on the Muslim community.
“In my view the case is strongest for a narrow inquiry ie [sic] simply telling the story of 7/7 and what led up to it.
"It seems to me we want something low key and probably non-statutory,” he wrote.
Remarkably, Sir John added that there was “strong pressure from Muslim communities" for an inquiry.
He noted, however, that this Muslim demand was driven only by a desire of that community to try and prove that the attacks were not carried out by followers of Islam.
There is also little doubt that the Government denied requests to hold an official inquiry because if the real causes of the terrorist attacks became known to the public (mass immigration and biased British foreign policy), all the Westminster parties would have had to accept responsibility for the atrocities as well.
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Controversial Labour MP Keith Vaz was at the centre of a sleaze scandal last night after bombshell evidence emerged of his 'favour-for-a-favour' relationship with a corrupt lawyer.
A Daily Mail investigation has found that Shahrokh Mireskandari treated the MP's wife Maria Fernandes and their young daughter to a weekend jolly in Rome - just weeks before Mr Vaz intervened in a potentially ruinous court case on behalf of the solicitor.
Mireskandari even flew his female butler to the Italian capital to babysit Mr Vaz's daughter as he, Miss Fernandes, and others in the small party shopped in designer boutiques and dined in top restaurants.
The Daily Mail has also obtained video evidence, tape recordings and previously unseen pictures which demonstrate the closeness of Mr Vaz and his 'very, very dear friend' Mireskandari.
They include two occasions on which the MP delivered eulogies to Mireskandari’s late mother.
Mireskandari, a convicted conman, first came close to the MP three years ago. At the time, Mireskandari was head of an ailing law firm and Mr Vaz was chairman of the influential Home Affairs Select Committee.
The Leicester East MP will tomorrow seek re-election to the post, which gives the holder a key role on law and order issues. Eighteen months ago, the Daily Mail first revealed how Mireskandari, former lawyer and best man for disgraced Met Commander Ali Dizaei - now serving a four-year jail sentence for police corruption - was a crook with bogus legal qualifications.
We also revealed how Mireskandari had cultivated Mr Vaz and his wife with lavish hospitality and entertainment, treating them to regular seats in his executive boxes at Wembley and the 02 Arena. He even treated the MP's wife to a ticket for the gala opening night of the Bolshoi Ballet's season at the London Coliseum.
Our investigation also disclosed how, following the largesse, Mr Vaz tried to head off a possible investigation into Iranian-born Mireskandari by the legal watchdog, the Solicitors Regulation Authority, before intervening in a court case that threatened the lawyer's career.
An investigation into our revelations by the parliamentary sleaze watchdog controversially cleared Mr Vaz of any wrongdoing after the MP insisted he had not benefited financially or materially from his relationship with Mireskandari, whom he insisted was not a close friend.
Mireskandari has been suspended by the Solicitors Regulation Authority and his firm Dean and Dean closed down following the Mail's revelations about his crooked past and dubious business methods.
Our new disclosures about the £10,000 jolly to Rome in February 2008, which included business class flights and accommodation at the five star Hotel Eden, cast doubt on Mr Vaz's version of events and the credibility of the inquiry conducted by John Lyon, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.
In May 2008 Mireskandari even turned up at a Vaz-led Home Affairs Select Committee trip to Moscow. When asked about Mireskandari's presence at a formal dinner and meeting at the Russian parliament, Mr Vaz pretended to fellow MPs that he didn't know him very well.
But the following month, in his capacity as chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, Mr Vaz wrote to the High Court asking that a case involving Mireskandari be delayed pending the outcome of an investigation into complaints he had made against two previous judges involved in the case. He did not seek the permission of fellow committee members, and did not disclose his 'strong' friendship with Mireskandari to the court.
Last night Mr Vaz issued a bizarre statement in which he did not deny his wife and daughter had gone to Rome with Mireskandari.
He added: 'The Parliamentary Commissioner has considered all this information which was entirely based on articles in the Daily Mail and dismissed the complaint which I myself referred to him in September 2008. I did not in any way mislead the Commissioner.
'No "generosity" has been shown to me or my wife. As I explained to the Mail in September 2008 on this same story, I speak at many funerals and deliver many eulogies. I hope when I do so I find sufficient words to comfort the grieving.'
PASSING ACQUAINTANCES...OR FIRM FRIENDS?
Keith Vaz has insisted he was not close friends with Shahrokh Mireskandari. Here the Mail reveals details of their private meetings that suggest otherwise:
When challenged by the Mail in September 2008, Mr Vaz declared: 'I am not a close friend of Dr Mireskandari. I do not have a close friendship with him. This is what the Daily Mail has asserted. The Daily Mail has asserted we are close which we are not.'
However today we can list a number of never-before publicised private events which show that Mr Vaz and the bent lawyer were more than just passing acquaintances.
August 22, 2007
Mr Vaz gave the first of two eulogies to Mireskandari's late mother.
In a recorded speech, the MP said: 'We are here today to mourn the passing of a remarkable woman. I have only heard of her remarkable, absolutely remarkable life, through my friendship - my strong friendship - with her son Shahrokh.' Mireskandari and Mr Vaz then embraced.
The next day, Mireskandari's firm Dean and Dean made an £11,000 donation to the Labour Party.
August 29, 2007
Mireskandari wrote a formal letter to his friend Mr Vaz complaining about his treatment at the hands of the Solicitors Regulation Authority, which had grave concerns about the running of his law firm. The letter cited more than 60 grievances. On September 4, the SRA's chief executive, Anthony Townsend, duly received an official letter from Mr Vaz. It referred to 'a Dr S Mireskandari' and failed to mention the dinners, concerts and gala evenings he and the complainant had enjoyed together.
September 27, 2007
Mr Vaz gave another eulogy at a second memorial service for Mireskandari's late mother. He said he was 'absolutely delighted to be here this evening', although he admitted he never knew the dead woman. 'But I do know her son and count him as a very, very dear friend,' added Mr Vaz in a recording of his speech obtained by the Mail.
December 15, 2007
Mr Vaz was 'guest of honour' at the Dean and Dean Christmas Party at the Hilton, Park Lane, for the bent lawyer's most valued friends and clients. Before handing one of the firm's lawyers an award, the MP told the audience: 'Can I just very briefly join in the tributes of so many other distinguished lawyers and academics.
'A tribute to the amazing achievements of Dean and Dean and, in particular, the vision behind Dean and Dean, Shahrokh Mireskandari. The presence of so many of their clients and friends - and I regard myself as one of their friends - is a tribute to the extraordinary talent of the people who work there.'
February 2008
Mr Vaz's wife and ten-year-old daughter accompanied Mireskandari on the luxury weekend trip to Rome. There is no suggestion that Miss Fernandes had an improper relationship with Mireskandari.
A few days later, at the House of Commons, Mr Vaz was master of ceremonies as the bent lawyer was presented with the 'Asian Lawyer of the Year' award.
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Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman is facing calls to scrap a planned government review of genetically modified foods amid fears that it has been 'nobbled' by the biotech industry.
Startling evidence emerged yesterday of how pro-GM lobbyists helped to draft a major report on the cultivation and sale of such crops.
An email trail revealed close links between the Agricultural Biotechnology Council, which represents GM food giants such as Monsanto, and the Food Standards Agency, which oversees the food industry.
Members of the council succeeded in having controversial pro-GM paragraphs inserted into an FSA report published last year.
They suggested changes including a claim that genetically modified foods could keep food prices down.
And the FSA accepted the GM industry's claim that such foods would inevitably be introduced across Europe.
The council also sent the FSA a list of people it thought should oversee a public consultation exercise which is due to be launched soon following the publication of the report.
Mrs Spelman, whose own links to the biotech industry have been questioned, is now under pressure to drop the FSA's £500,000 consultation on GM foods.
Last week she said she was in favour of GM foods 'in the right circumstances', but criticised the FSA for spending taxpayers' money promoting them.
Until last year the Environment Secretary was a director at her food and biotechnology lobbying company Spelman, Cormack and Associates with her husband, Mark Spelman.
Pete Riley, of pressure group GM Freeze, said: 'The consultation-exercise has lost all credibility. And it is clear that the Food Standards Agency should not be allowed anywhere near it - they clearly have a pro-GM agenda.
'Mrs Spelman must take advice from a wider number of experts on GM. The time has come for the Government to pull the plug on this discredited public consultation exercise.'
Two members of the FSA's steering committee, Dr Helen Wallace and Professor Brian Wynne, have quit recently in protest at its perceived pro-GM stance.
The FSA's report said retailers were 'concerned they may not be able to maintain their current non- GM sources of supply as producers increasingly adopt GM technology around the world'.
One of the council's suggested alterations which made it into the report said that soya protein, which can be grown as a GM crop, was the most cost-effective method of supplementing animal feed.
Emails were exchanged between the Food Standards Agency and the GM industry between 2008 and August 2009, when the report was published.
An FSA spokesman defended its decision to include the GM lobby's suggested changes in the final report.
The spokesman said the Agricultural Biotechnology Council's views were sought 'to ensure the report was balanced', adding: 'Their comments were taken on board in the final draft, as were the comments by other stakeholders.'
A spokesman for Mrs Spelman said: 'The Secretary of State is clear that all future decisions on GM trials and future policy will be based on science, and will consider the potential benefits, but also the real concern that the public have about GM technology.'
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Labour leadership candidate John McDonnell said yesterday he would 'assassinate' Margaret Thatcher if he could go back to the 1980s.
The left-wing MP made the outrageous claim at a hustings as he tried to win over union activists - who hold a third of the votes for the party leadership. Mr McDonnell said he had once been asked in a warm-up question on the BBC's Any Questions what he would do if he found himself in an Ashes To Ashes situation – a reference to the time-travelling TV series where a policewoman finds herself transported back to the 1980s.
To applause from the audience in Southport, Merseyside, he said that he would have liked to go back to that era and ‘assassinate Thatcher’. The MP for Hayes and Harlington in West London - who served as Ken Livingstone’s deputy at the Greater London Council - insisted his comments were ‘a joke and it went down as a joke’.
But remarks have been condemned.
They were made the day before the 84-year-old former Prime Minister, now Lady Thatcher, visits David Cameron in 10 Downing Street. Lord Tebbit, who was Trade and Industry Secretary when the IRA tried to blow up the entire Cabinet in 1984 during the Conservative Party conference in Brighton, said he was appalled by the remarks.
‘I think it is rather in poor taste. After all it was his party’s friends who did try to kill her. His comments would make him absolutely ideal for the leadership of the Labour party,' he said. Lord Tebbit’s wife Margaret was crippled by the blast, which also narrowly missed Lady Thatcher her husband Dennis and killed five people.
Nile Gardiner, a director of the Margaret Thatcher Centre for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation think-tank, called for Mr McDonnell to apologise: ‘I have had the honour of working for Margaret Thatcher, and, like anyone who has had that privilege, knows that she has dedicated her life to serving her country,' he said.
'The political attacks that continue to rain down upon her, nearly 20 years after she left office, are a testament to the great achievements of her leadership. ‘McDonnell’s threatening words however, are simply beyond the pale, and represent a new low in British political debate.
‘I hope that McDonnell will have the decency to apologise to Lady Thatcher for his disgusting, undignified and menacing words. Labour should also swiftly and unequivocally disown and condemn McDonnell’s remarks.’ Mr McDonnell has just ten MPs backing him for the leadership. He needs to get the support of 33 by Wednesday if he is to make it on to the ballot paper.
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It was fair to expect that two teenage boys left home alone while their parents are on holiday might let their hair down a little.
But Orrin and Tyler Elford were not content with the odd party and making a mess - with the World Cup just days away, they decided to get out their paint brushes.
Mother Sara Munro and stepfather Andy returned from a trip to Mexico to find their house in Paulsgrove, near Portsmouth, had been painted like a giant England flag.
Teenagers Orrin, 19, and Tyler, 17, covered the entire front and side of the semi-detached house with a massive St George's Cross.
Fortunately the entire family are equally passionate about football and their parents have agreed the painting can stay - at least until England are out of the World Cup.
Orrin, a carpenter, insists he wants it to stay like that forever if the team win the tournament, but perhaps he is pushing his luck too far.
He said: 'I'd been joking about doing it with my brother-in-law who also has a white house on the same road.
'We did it half to wind Mum and Andy up, and half to surprise them but they ended up liking it.'
He added: 'We used 2.5 litres of Dulux but had to get it mixed especially at B&Q for 20 pounds because you can't buy a bright red pillarbox masonry paint.
'It took us two and a half hours to do and I was using my spirit level and drawing chalk lines to make sure we got it straight. 'It was well worth it though because I think it looks good. We just wanted to get behind the lads.'
The flag has already caused a stir in the local community, with people stopping Mrs Munro, who works for social services, in shops to talk to her about it. Continued
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"England is for life, not just for football!" That is the strong, patriotic message that the BNP will be pushing hard this summer.
While everyone will be engrossed by the impending World Cup tournament, BNP activists the length and breadth of the country will be working round the clock to highlight the terrible state of modern day England.
A special new leaflet has been produced by the Communications & Publicity department that is available for download by all supporters. It is imperative we get as many of these leaflets distributed as possible: to family, friends, through letter boxes, in high streets and shopping centres, from BNP town centre stalls, and so on.
The enemies of our country never rest, and neither must we! That is why everyone reading this
must print off some of these leaflets and spread the word.
The leaflet reads: "As well as cheering on our team during the World Cup, we are also celebrating our English identity. We English have a great history which we should be proud of. When this football tournament finishes keep the flags flying, because England is for life - not just for football."
As part of this campaign, we are also launching a petition to collect as many signatures as possible to make St. George's Day a public holiday.
Download and print off as many copies of the petition as you can manage and ask your friends and family to add their voice to the growing campaign for a St. George's Day public holiday.
Remember to post the petition to the address listed at the bottom.
Download the files:
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A woman dentist has been charged with stealing £1million from the NHS in one of the biggest ever alleged frauds in the history of the health service.
Dr Joyce Trail, 48, has been suspended from her West Midlands practice after being accused of submitting up to 5,000 bogus patient invoices.
The dentist, who also runs a medical spa offering Botox and 'smile makeovers', was arrested after the NHS Counter Fraud Team and police launched an investigation into payment invoices at her surgery.
Dr Trail has been charged with one count of obtaining a false money transfer by deception and three counts of fraud.
The practitioner has run a busy practice in Handsworth, Birmingham, for the past 12 years. She also provided dental treatment at scores of old people's homes.
In 2008 she opened the city's first medical spa next door to her practice, offering everything from Botox to derma fillers, chemical peels, facials, teeth whitening and therapeutic massage.
Dr Trail has previously spoken of her determination to keep her business interests in the run-down area where she grew up.
One group which she helped out, the Community Contact Family Centre, described her in 2006 as 'an amazing individual who has given us a lot of help'.
Dr Trail, of Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham first appeared at Magistrates' Court on April 6 in connection with the charges. She is currently on unconditional bail and has not yet entered a plea.
The alleged fraud is said to have taken place between 2006 to 2009.
Dr Trail told a local newspaper she would fight to prove her innocence but declined to comment further.
She is due to attend a committal hearing at Birmingham Magistrates' Court on June 18.
A spokeswoman for the Heart of Birmingham Teaching Primary Care Trust confirmed that Dr Trail has been suspended.
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Political Correctness strikes again!
A hospital consultant who sold dying patients drugs that they could have received for free on the NHS has escaped being struck off.
Cancer specialist Dr Suhail Baluch conned patients out of thousands of pounds for chemotherapy drugs a friend had bought on the internet.
He told two patients the life prolonging medication - called Tarceva - was only available privately and asked their relatives to write him cheques with the payee line left blank.
They paid him a total of more than £6,000 for the lung and pancreatic cancer drugs.
The General Medical Council found Dr Baluch's actions amounted to serious misconduct but told him he can continue to practice.
He was instead issued with an official warning, which will be removed from his record after five years.
The GMC said the doctor's actions had caused patients distress and anxiety and put them at risk because he had not checked the drugs were real.
But they decided as he had shown remorse for his actions, and attended a course to improve his communication skills, he was unlikely to repeat his offences.
The £100,000-a-year medic worked at Queen Alexandra Hospital, in Portsmouth, Hampshire and St Richard's Hospital, in Chichester, West Sussex.
Allison Stratford, from Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust, said Dr Baluch still remained on a leave of absence.
She said: 'Although a summary of the GMC's conclusions has been provided, the Trust awaits receipt of the full details, which will need to be carefully considered.
'In the interim, Dr Baluch remains on a leave of absence.'
The Patients' Association today said it was important to raise awareness of how dangerous ordering medicine over the internet can be.
Director Katherine Murphy said: 'It is absolutely extraordinary that a healthcare professional would take part in these activities despite the very real risks involved.
'We would hope the GMC is assured that this decision reflects the seriousness of not just taking part in this practice but of undermining a very important public health message.'
Jock McLees, from Portsmouth Patients' Association, said: 'The result of this hearing appears extremely light for someone who has taken advantage of extremely vulnerable people.'
Although Tarceva did not become freely available on the NHS until November 2008, consultants were able to submit an application for the trust to consider individual cases.
Dr Baluch faced being struck off after the GMC panel found 41 allegations against him proven.
It found his failure to identify private patients and inadequate labelling of the drugs he sold were 'unacceptable practice'.
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Cameron yesterday warned that Britain’s vast debt mountain will soon mean that 10p out of every pound raised by taxation will be squandered on interest payments.
In a major speech designed to pave the way for swingeing cuts in public spending, the Prime Minister confirmed the borrowing crisis left by Labour was “even worse” than expected, with the national debt heading towards £1.4 trillion and interest payments on course to hit a staggering £70 billion a year by 2015.
It threatened to be a “terrible waste” of hard-working taxpayers’ cash that could wreck private enterprise and plunge the country into a Greek-style economic crisis.
And signalling the Government’s “unavoidably tough” action to eradicate the deficit, Mr Cameron said: “The decisions we make will affect every single person in our country. And the effects of those decisions will stay with us for years, perhaps decades, to come.”
The Prime Minister was also asked exactly where the “painful” cuts would lie and if the Government would copy Canada a decade ago in making huge slashes to budgets.
He replied: “We have got a proper process for doing this, a Budget on June 22. Then I want to see proper debate take place that involves as many people as possible. I want us to go about this in the best way possible to take people with us.
“While Canada stands as an example of a government that sorted out a debt crisis, the great warning they give is that they put it off for too many years. I am determined that we should not put this off.”
Business leaders last night praised him for coming clean about the scale of the crisis. But unions reacted angrily, accusing him of seeking to slash public-sector jobs.
One described the speech as a “chilling attack on the public sector, public-sector workers, the poor, the sick and the vulnerable”.
With Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander at his side in Milton Keynes, Bucks, Mr Cameron accused Labour of trying to conceal the true extent of the crisis.
He said: “Now we have looked at the figures. Interest payments of £70 million mean that for every single pound you pay in tax, 10 pence would be spent on interest. Is that what people work so hard for, that their taxes are blown on interest payments on the national debt?
“What a terrible, terrible waste of money. This is how far we have been living beyond our means.
“This is the legacy our generation threatens to leave the next.”
Mr Cameron warned that the private sector had been squeezed under Labour while the state sector had enjoyed an unsustainable boom. He added: “Unless we act now, interest payments in five years’ time could end up being higher than the sums we spend on schools, climate change and transport.
“Because the legacy we have been left is so bad, the measures to deal with it will be unavoidably tough. But people’s lives will be worse unless we do something now.”
Public spending had soared by 15 per cent, £120 billion, over the past three years. “So it really has been a tale of two economies, public-sector boom and private-sector bust.”
British Retail Consortium director general Stephen Robertson said: “Cuts are preferable to tax rises. It’ll be growth that gets the country out of the hole it’s in. Private-sector business, with retail in the lead, is the engine that will drive growth.”
But unions and senior Labour MPs reacted angrily. Dave Prentis, general secretary of Unison, who called it a “chilling attack on the poor, sick and vulnerable,” added: “There was nothing in this that told the rich, banking and financial sector or the City speculators that their privileged way of life will change.”
TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: “Deficit reduction through cuts alone will inevitably hit the poor, vulnerable and great mass of middle-income Britain.”
Shadow Chancellor Alistair Darling said: “There’s absolutely nothing now that people didn’t know when I made my Budget statement in March. To somehow claim that he’s opened the books and found things worse than he thought, that’s nonsense.”
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Britain will soon be paying more than a £1billion a week meeting interest payments alone, David Cameron warned yesterday.
In a major speech on the economy he said the debt crisis was so bad the “pain” of Government cuts will be felt for decades.
The Prime Minister said “reckless” Labour spending was to blame and pledged to bring the public sector “back into line”.
Mr Cameron revealed Treasury figures which show that without drastic cuts the national debt will reach an eye-watering £1.4trillion in five years.
It means interest payments will cost the country £70 billion every year – more than the entire budgets for schools, climate change and transport combined.
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Work towards an elected House of Lords will start as early as next week under a cross-party committee of senior politicians, Nick Clegg announced yesterday.
MPs and peers from the three main parties will produce a draft Bill by the end of this year, the Lib Dem Deputy Prime Minister said in his first speech at the Commons despatch box.
Mr Clegg, who will chair the committee, said: “People have been talking about Lords reform for over a century. The time for talk is over.’’
Separately, it was claimed yesterday a major Bill tying together a vote on electoral reform with new Parliamentary boundaries will be ready for publication next month.
But Mr Clegg told the Commons only that he would announce “in due course” the date of a referendum on changing the way MPs are elected, and that it was vital to re-draw Britain’s “unfair” electoral boundaries.
Sources added that while voting reform is a clear Lib Dem priority there was no desire to “rush” the process.
Meanwhile, Mr Clegg also signalled in the Commons there was room for compromise over the proposal that has angered many MPs, particularly Tories, to require 55 per cent of MPs to back dissolving Parliament for a general election instead of the current 50 per cent plus one.
Mr Clegg is in charge of the coalition’s constitutional reform programme.
Announcing formation of the committee to draft the Lords Bill, which will include senior Tories, Lib Dems and Labour former ministers and will hold its first meeting next week, he told MPs: “I will not hide my impatience for reforms that are more than a hundred years overdue.”
The draft Bill will then be scrutinised by a joint committee from both Houses before it begins its formal passage through Parliament.
Mr Clegg said it was the first time legislation for an elected second chamber will have been published, despite decades of discussion about reform and repeated promises to act, including from the last Labour government.
Emphasising the Government was determined to act this time, he declared: “People must be allowed to elect those who make the laws of the land. Change must begin now.’’
Smaller, nationalist parties in the House of commons voiced outrage at their exclusion from the initial working group.
Mr Clegg said the committee included the three UK-wide parties whose manifestos had all promised reform but said all voices would be heard in scrutiny of the Bill.
Mr Clegg said many coalition plans still needed precise details worked out. He declared: “This is a moment where together we have a real opportunity to change our politics for the good.”
In lively exchanges, he accused Labour of “neurotically” assuming proposed reforms were designed to damage it.
That included having more equal-sized constituencies to end “the ultimate postcode lottery, where the weight of your vote depends on where you live”.
Mr Clegg also defended the proposals for 55 per cent of MPs to support a dissolution of parliament, which was part of the coalition agreement’s promise for fixed-term parliaments.
It is designed to stop either party triggering an early general election before the five-year period was up.
He insisted a simple majority would still be able to bring a government down with a no-confidence vote.
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A spin doctor has been hired by a Conservative council on a deal that works out at £182,000 a year - or £40,000 more than the Prime Minister.
Suffolk County Council is employing a new head of communications on up to £700 a day, claiming one of her roles will be saving money.
But the appointment will be seen as a snub to David Cameron’s demands to rein in public spending through ‘painful’ cuts.
Jill Rawlins, a former head of communications at the Countryside Agency, is due to begin working for the council on Monday on a six-month contract.
Her role will involve developing ‘a pro-active approach to communications, particularly in media management, including campaigns, media public relations, marketing, events, publications, branding and web’.
Tonight, the Government insisted the salary could not be justified.
Communities Secretary Eric Pickles said: ‘We are calling time on this reckless attitude to spending taxpayers’ cash on super salaries.
‘Local government must wake up and realise the gravy train is on borrowed time.
‘The days of taking the taxpayer for a ride are over. We must deliver value for money and I believe our plans to throw open the books of councils will put an end to wasteful spending.
‘There may well be a compelling case for this salary but so far it hasn’t been made.’
And Tory Central Suffolk and North Ipswich MP Dan Poulter branded the expenditure ‘a public sector disease’.
He added: ‘I hope the new government brings in legislation to bring it under control.
‘A lot of councils and hospitals are employing spin doctors and their pay is completely disproportionate to those who work in front-line services.’
TaxPayers’ Alliance chief executive Matthew Elliott said the appointment would leave Suffolk’s taxpayers with ‘an astronomical bill, all so that the local authority can tell residents how great they are’.
He added: ‘An age of austerity is coming and the county council should make do with the communications staff they already have.’
The council’s Lib Dem opposition leader, Kathy Pollard, said: ‘What would the public rather have - four new firefighters or one head of communications? We all know what the answer would be.’
The pay grade of Miss Rawlins, whose CV includes a stint as PR manager of BT from 1985 and head of corporate affairs for Somerfield between 1994 and 2001, is between £400 and £700 a day.
Although insiders said it would be nearer the higher end because of her experience.
Other previous workplaces have included drug and alcohol charity Addaction, the Alzheimer’s Society, the Institute for Grocery Distribution.
She replaces communications director Caryl Jackson, who left on May 21 after being on sick leave since Christmas.
Suffolk County Council, which recently announced it needed to save £153 million over ten years because of government cuts, already had one of the highest paid local authority chief executives in the country. Andrea Hill earns £220,000 a year, compared to Mr Cameron’s £142,500.
Last month she said staff had failed to face up to the fact that jobs and services would have to be cut.
But she was later criticised after it emerged the council had hired a Teletubbies expert to speak at a motivational seminar for staff.
Engineer Rex Garrod, who designed much of the set of the children’s TV series, was chosen to help promote an ‘entrepreneurial spirit’.
Mrs Hill has also come under fire recently for spending £122,000 on consultants to tell her how to save money.
The council was criticised on two other occasions in 2008 for wasting taxpayers’ cash.
One project was a £400,000 programme training 400 staff in controversial psychological training known as neuro-linguistic programming.
The other was a £6,000 team-building exercises for 50 senior staff. The training included drumming, singing and chocolate-making lessons.
A council spokesman said yesterday the new head of communications would be enforcing the recommendations of a recent communications and marketing review.
‘The review will deliver significant savings to the county,’ he added.
Monday 7th June 2010
A Labour MP elected last month on a “squeaky-clean” platform of reforming politics advised how his disgraced predecessor could bend rules on claiming Commons expenses, documents reveal.
The Sunday Express has seen damning e-mails written by the newly elected Luton South MP Gavin Shuker.
In them he explains how former boss Margaret Moran could claim taxpayers’ cash for a project he suspects might break Parliamentary rules.
Mr Shuker won the seat after Ms Moran stood down when it emerged she had claimed £22,500 for dry-rot treatment at her partner’s Southampton home.
Last week church activist Mr Shuker told a radio station Ms Moran had gone “badly wrong in the final years” but he was given a part-time campaigner’s post in her office in May 2008.
By May 30, he had sent an e-mail to colleagues warning them not to “get caught out” by guidance on the Commons Communications Allowance. He said questions to be included in a survey sent to Luton voters would be funded only if topics were “local in nature”.
Yet on June 18, he persuaded her office to include questions about the forthcoming Queen’s Speech. By making them appear localised to Luton, he said they could “get away with it”.
He wrote: “I’ve tried a few permutations but I think this must be the only way we’ll get away with it. Having said that, the fees office may rule against us – but it’s worth a try!”
Mr Shuker did not highlight his doubts when he submitted the survey to the Fees Office for funding.
Last night he said: “There is a world of difference between the work I did helping her to communicate with her constituents and her flagrant abuse of the second homes allowance for personal benefit.”
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Religious education lessons in England's secondary schools are worse now than they were three years ago, inspectors have warned.
Teachers are uncertain about what they are meant to achieve when teaching the subject, and some pupils gain only a basic understanding of religion and beliefs, according to a new Ofsted report.
It warns that in schools where the quality of RE was poor, pupils were more intolerant of other faiths, and some schools were unsure how to teach Christianity, leaving pupils "confused".
The report looked at RE in 94 primary and 89 secondary schools, excluding faith schools, between April 2006 and March 2009.
The findings show that the quality of RE lessons in secondary schools is worse now than it was according to an Ofsted survey published in 2007.
Achievement in almost a fifth of schools visited overall was "inadequate", inspectors said, compared with one in ten schools in the earlier survey.
In the last year of the new survey alone (2008/09) achievement was "inadequate" in nearly one in three of the secondaries visited.
Recent changes to the secondary school curriculum are partly to blame for having a negative impact on RE, the study says.
It says: "Despite the very considerable commitment and energy which many teachers bring to the subject, in many of the schools visited the provision was no better than satisfactory quality, or in some cases inadequate, and the effectiveness of much of the RE observed was not good enough."
In primaries, the report found that in many schools the quality of RE lessons was "not good enough", with achievement only rated "satisfactory" in six out of ten schools.
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Dramatic pictures of bloodied Israeli troops being overpowered by pro-Palestinian activists on the stormed Gaza aid ship emerged yesterday.
Images from the Mavi Marmara show them in distress - one appearing to depict a commando at the mercy an angry mob with blood pouring from a stomach wound.
The photos, taken by an unidentified person on the ship, have caused anger in Israel and came as Iran promised a military escort for cargo ships attempting to break the blockade of Gaza. Ratcheting up the tension in the region, Iran's feared Revolutionary Guard offered to protect any more maritime convoys bound for the disputed territory.
Ali Shiraz, a representative of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said: 'Iran's Revolutionary Guard's naval forces are fully prepared to escort the peace and freedom-convoys to Gaza with all their powers and capabilities.'
Two more ships are expected to sail from Lebanon this week and any direct Iranian intervention would be considered an act of extreme provocation by Israel.
The pictures, published yesterday in the Turkish newspaper H¸rriyet, appear to contradict claims from activists that they did not attack Israeli troops in the botched raid on May 31 which killed nine people.
Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev seized on the publication of the photos and claimed they showed 'that our boarding party in fact did face deadly violence from the hardcore Islamist activists on the boat from the fundamentalists'.
An Israeli commando, who claims he shot dead six of the activists in the seizure of the boat, said he landed to find three of his men lying wounded and an activist pointing a loaded pistol at the head of one of his soldiers.
'When I hit the deck, I was immediately attacked by people with bats, metal pipes and axes,' the commando told the Jerusalem Post newspaper. Israel has suffered worldwide condemnation over the raid and the latest pictures will come as a timely boost for its version of events.
But the PR battle over the attack took another twist yesterday as a member of the Turkish group IHH, which organised the flotilla, said the images showed activists 'intervening' or 'tending' to the injured soldiers.
The charity, which said it took the pictures, is banned in Israel because of its close ties to the Hamas militant group.
Meanwhile, the Israeli government last night rejected an offer from the United Nations for an international commission to investigate the deadly raid on the flotilla which killed nine people.
‘The clear intent of this hostile group was to initiate a violent clash with IDF soldiers.’
Mr Netanyahu did not say where the information came from. But Israeli military officials have claimed there is strong evidence that the men who fought the soldiers were hired mercenaries.
The organisers deny the allegations.
Videos released by the army have shown a crowd of men attacking several naval commandos as they landed on a ship from a helicopter, beating the soldiers with clubs and other objects.
The army has displayed pictures of knives, slingshots and metal rods confiscated from the crowd, and other video seized from reporters and security cameras on board the ship appear to show a group of young man brandishing clubs and other weapons ahead of the arrival of the soldiers.
UN Secretary General Ban Kimoon had proposed that Geoffrey Palmer, a former prime minister of New Zealand, would lead the probe along with representatives from Turkey, which lost eight people in the raid. Continued and more photos
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Cameron will today warn that Britain’s economic problems are “even worse than we thought”.
In a speech, Cameron will promise to tackle the deficit in an “open, responsible and fair” way that “unites the country”. The public will be given an unprecedented chance to help decide spending priorities, he will add.
Mr Cameron yesterday suggested Labour’s last growth forecasts were seriously over-optimistic. Today he will say the scale of the problem is far worse than thought and potential consequences “more critical than feared” with “painful times” ahead. Action is vital to retain investor confidence, keep interest rates down and ensure that taxes can be spent on public services.
He will also vow to involve people in the “difficult decisions”. How Government deals with the problem “will affect our economy, our society, indeed our whole way of life. The decisions will affect every person in our country, and the effects will stay with us for years, perhaps decades.”
Chancellor George Osborne and Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander will fire the starting gun tomorrow for a radical spending review and spell out how the public can be involved.
A Treasury source said: “For 13 years, spending reviews have suffered from the assumption that central government knows best. We need to throw open the doors of Whitehall and encourage new thinking.”
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More than 10,000 civil servants, police officers and council staff get both a pension and a salary from taxpayers, research showed yesterday.
So-called “double dipping’’ means that public-sector employees as young as 50 can collect their full pensions – and then return to work.
It will cause anger at a time of public sector cuts and rising unemployment.
The 200 Government departments, councils, NHS trusts, quangos and police authorities surveyed had a total of 10,282 staff getting a pension and pay from the same body.
Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “This will be costing taxpayers millions of pounds a year.
“If public-sector workers want to stay on the payroll they must not be allowed to draw their generous pensions at the same time.’’
HM Revenue and Customs had the largest single number of people – 2,077 of its 85,000 staff – drawing both civil service pension and pay.
HMRC staff can retire at 60 and return to work, but Cabinet Office rules mean in this instance that their combined pension and salary must not exceed their former pay.
Meanwhile, “non-job’’ recruitment continues in the public sector.
Islington Council in north London is seeking a part-time “walking co-ordinator’’ on a pro-rata salary equivalent to up to £31,935 if it were full-time – funded by the local NHS trust – to run its “health walks programme’’.
A caller was told that walking would not be a requirement.
Bracknell Forest Council in Berkshire will pay up to £8.81 an hour for a “weekend explainer’’ to spend eight hours a week helping visitors, hosting birthday parties and presenting science shows at a “discovery centre’’.
Charnwood Borough Council in the east Midlands is advertising for a full-time “access to nature officer’’ earning up to £19,126 a year, funded by the National Lottery but with public sector pension rights.
The objective is to interest people, including asylum-seekers and “disaffected’’ youngsters, in conservation.
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David Cameron today refused to rule out an early referendum on plans to tear up Britain's first-past-the-post electoral system as Nick Clegg insisted an announcement could come 'within days'.
The Prime Minister risked angering Tory Right-wingers by agreeing with his Lib Dem deputy that it was right to address the issue in 'relatively reasonable order'.
Mr Clegg suggested that a referendum could be tied to wider legislation on political reform, including fixed-term parliaments, a right for voters to 'recall' errant MPs and other measures which he will outline in the Commons tomorrow.
However, Mr Cameron appears to have persuaded Mr Clegg that any shift to the alternative vote electoral system must also go hand in hand with Tory plans to redraw constituency boundaries, which currently favour Labour.
A review to make constituencies more equal in size could take 18 months or more to complete.
The timing of a referendum on whether to scrap the first-past-the-post system has been a key flashpoint between the coalition partners.
The Tories agreed to allow the public to decide on a shift to the alternative vote system, which would see candidates ranked by voters in order of preference, as part of their power-sharing deal with the Lib Dems.
The Lib Dems have been pushing for the referendum to be held as early as next May 5, the day of local elections, arguing that if it happens much later it risks becoming an opportunity for the public to kick an unpopular government by voting 'no'.
But Tory sources have previously declared next May 'much too soon'.
Mr Clegg said today that the referendum will be 'pursued in parallel' with the redrawing of constituency boundaries to make seats of more equal size.
He insisted the Tories have less to fear from the alternative vote than many of the party's MPs believe.
Right-wing Conservatives brand the system a 'Tory killer' because they assume most people who vote Labour first will put the Lib Dems second and vice versa.
'I think that's changing rapidly. AV is not anti-Conservative at all. It might be just as beneficial to the Conservatives as any other party,' Mr Clegg said.
'I'm still deciding whether you wrap the referendum and the boundary review issue into a wider piece of jumbo legislation on recall (of MPs), fixed-term parliament, regulation of lobbying, other parts of the political reform agenda which require legislation.
'We do want to get on with it. You can't fight the next general election on different boundaries and on a different electoral system unless you are clear as early as possible in this parliament exactly whether it's going to happen and how it's going to happen.
'I should think within a matter of days, if not a few weeks, we'll be able to announce when the referendum's going to take place. You can't change the boundaries in time for a general election in 29015 unless you get on with it, so everybody wants to get on with it.'
The Prime Minister said he and Mr Clegg had yet to decide the date for the nationwide ballot.
However, he revealed that he might agree to the Lib Dem demand that the referendum should be held as early as next May.
'I see the case for getting on with this in relatively reasonable order,' he said. 'This is one of the issues where we are going to have a healthy debate.'
Asked whether he would rule out a 2011 referendum, he replied: 'No, of course not.'
The Prime Minister insisted he remained a supporter of the present voting system. 'I will not change my view that the alternative vote is not an improvement to first-past- the-post, so I will make that clear at the time,' he said.
However, he suggested he would not lead the 'no' campaign, adding: 'I will have other things to do as well.'
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More than 10,000 public sector workers scoop the jackpot every month because they are paid a pension as well as their salary.
The 'double dippers' can retire as young as 50 on a gold-plated pension but carry on working.
The true number is likely to be far higher, because only 200 of the 800 public sector bodies asked revealed their figures.
The league of 'double dippers' is topped by the Government's tax collectors and inspectors, HM Revenue and Customs.
Nearly 2,100 of its staff have retired and are receiving a pension, but are still working for the department. This is about 2.4 per cent of its workforce.
Many are hired back on a part-time basis because they are experts in an obscure area of tax.
They are not allowed to earn a salary in retirement which is larger than the salary they were paid before. But some could be more than doubling their salary with a gold-plated pension built up after decades of hard work. Yesterday an HMRC spokesman declined to comment.
It was also reported yesterday one 'double dipper' is Andrew Trotter, chief constable of the British Transport Police. He is paid a salary of about £150,000, but after more than 30 years working for the police force, he is also understood to enjoy a pension of about £70,000 a year.
Many county councils also employ large numbers of 'double dippers', with 1,209 at Lancashire, 549 at Nottinghamshire and 522 at Staffordshire.
Pension experts said there was nothing wrong with claiming a pension and a salary since the rules were changed in 2006.
But they said it raised questions about the fairness of a public sector which allows staff to retire on a full pension up to 15 years before most workers in the private sector.
Tom McPhail, head of pensions research at financial advisers Hargreaves Lansdown, said: 'For decades to come, public sector workers will still be able to draw their pension at 60, or even younger. But the state pension age is heading to over 65.'
The coalition Government is planning an independent commission to review the 'long-term affordability' of public sector pensions. The cost is likely to balloon as people live longer, experts predict.
˜ The number of sick days taken last year fell to its lowest level since records began in 1987, at 6.4 per employee.
But public sector workers still take far more than those in the private sector - 8.3 days compared to 5.8 - a report by business lobby group the CBI said.
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Schools are failing to teach pupils about Christian beliefs in religious education classes, an official study has warned.
The education watchdog also raised concerns that Christian students were being marginalised, with more attention given to other faiths.
Too often, teachers simply focus on Jesus' parables to explore pupils' personal feelings but ignore their religious significance, the Oftsed report found.
As a result pupils' understanding of Christianity is 'unsystematic and confused'.
This is despite the fact that the religion is a core part of the compulsory school course and is taught alongside other faiths including Judaism, Islam and Hinduism.
Inspectors looked at RE in 94 primary and 89 secondary schools, excluding faith schools, between April 2006 and March 2009.
Compared with an Ofsted survey three years ago, the number of lessons classified as 'inadequate' in secondary schools has doubled. Achievement in almost a fifth of secondary schools was rated at this level, inspectors said, compared with one in ten schools in the earlier survey.
Over the last year, the figure has risen to one in three secondaries.
In primaries, the report found that in many schools the quality of RE lessons was 'not good enough', with achievement only rated 'satisfactory' in six out of ten schools.
Inspectors singled out the study of Christianity as being a particular source of concern.
The report said: 'In many cases, the study of Jesus focused on an unsystematic collection of information about his life, with limited reference to his theological significance within the faith.
'Insufficient attention was paid to diversity within the Christian tradition and to pupils who were actively engaged in Christian practice.
'Often their experience was ignored and they had limited opportunity to share their understanding. This sometimes contrasted sharply with the more careful attention paid to the experiences of pupils from other religious traditions.'
The findings come amid growing concern Christianity is being marginalised in Britain.
Senior Church of England figures have voiced their fears Christians are suffering from discrimination.
Ofsted warned that primary school teachers were often confused about how to tackle Christianity. The report said: 'The primary schools in particular were often uncertain about whether Christian material should be investigated in its own right, as part of understanding the religion, or whether it should be used to consider moral and social themes out of the context of the religion.'
In one example given, a primary school used the story of the healing of the blind man to help pupils understand what it would feel like to be blind - rather than to gain any understanding of miracles.
The pupils were shown a Braille alphabet and used a 'feely bag' to explore how difficult it is to be blind.
The main task was to write a poem about what they would miss if they were blind. Ofsted said pupils did not learn anything about religion as a result.
Teachers should have asked questions such as 'did Jesus really perform miracles or are these made-up stories?'
'These questions might have helped to place the miracles in context and focus the pupils' attention on central elements of Christian belief,' it said.
Ofsted urged the Government to review the way RE is taught in schools.
Dr Stephen Parker, senior lecturer in education at Worcester University, said: 'The real problem is not having enough qualified RE teachers.
'You need to have a sophisticated understanding of the subject to be able to properly convey it to pupils.'
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A Mother has complained to her council after being told her “inseparable” twins must go to different primary schools.
Faye Churchill, 29, was heartbroken when she learnt identical twins Jessica and Paige Macdonald, four – pictured left with her – would be separated for the first time.
Jessica has got a place at Herons’ Moor primary school in Weston-super-Mare, while Paige must attend Milton Park primary school. Although the schools are only two miles apart it will be the first time the girls, who both attended pre-school at Herons’ Moor, have been parted. The council claims that when Faye’s mailed application arrived late there was only one available place left at Herons’ Primary.
Faye said it was a “nightmare”. She said: “I can’t split them up, they do everything together.” Her application for two places was delayed by a postal strike. The former care worker, whose eldest daughter Georgia, nine, already attends Herons’ Moor, appealed against North Somerset council’s decision but was unsuccessful.
Council spokesman Nick Yates apologised for the “unfortunate” situation but refused to back down. He said: “The Government introduced a limit on all infant classes so that they must not exceed 30 pupils.”
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Race Card for all occasions.. get yours here!
A Black farmer who grew up in inner-city Birmingham has blamed racism for his failure to become an MP.
Mr Emmanuel-Jones, who claims to be Britain’s only black farmer, was born in Jamaica and came to Birmingham, aged four, with his parents.
Growing up in Small Heath – alongside 11 brothers and sisters – he struggled to fit in at school and left with no qualifications.
But as an adult he went on to buy a buy a farm in the West Country, and founded his own range of sausages and bacon.
Neighbours called him “the black farmer” – and this became the brand name for his products. But Mr Emmanuel-Jones was less successful when he was picked as Conservative candidate for Chippenham, Wiltshire, as part of Tory leader David Cameron’s drive to appoint more female and ethnic minority candidates to winnable seats.
Despite increasing the Conservative share of the vote, he failed to take the seat from the Liberal Democrats, who held on with a majority of 2,470.
Looking back at the campaign now, he claimed that his opponents had focused on his race as a tactic.
He said: “When I got selected, there was surprise and concern that the colour of my skin could be a handicap. This was not a safe seat, but a key Lib Dem-Conservative marginal, where colour could be exploited for political gain.
“My rivals well understood the poignancy the term ‘not local’ would have. They used it mercilessly despite their candidate also being an import – albeit white.”
He also claimed many constituents were concerned about immigration, but were reluctant to discuss the issue with him in case they caused offence.
He said: “During the election, my being black was a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it meant I was highly visible, and a curse because the tag of not being local was obvious for people to see.”
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Political Correctness: the UK Loony Tunes of Justice
A Judge has blasted two cousins who took three young girls from the streets of East Lancashire, plied them with drink and drove them 20 miles to a hotel.
Azeem and Tabassum Shah were only caught out when an eagle-eyed night manager at Darwen Travelodge became suspicious about the age of one of the girls and alerted police, Burnley Crown Court was told.
The pair, from Vernon Street and Railway Street, Nelson, respectively, admitted abduc-ting the three girls, aged 14 and 15, in August last year.
Police say there was evidence that the two men and three girls, taken from the streets of Nelson, had all been drinking.
Another charge of engaging in sexual activity, relating to Azeem Shah and involving one of the girls, was allowed to lie on the file by Judge Simon Newell.
Both were given a 12 month prison sentence, suspended for two years. They must carry out 200 hours community service and observe a four-month curfew, between 8pm and 6am.
Lawyers representing Taba-ssum Shah, 24, claimed the father-of-two had not had sex with any of the girls on the night in question. But the judge criticised the two men and labelled them a danger to young women in passing sentence.
Judge Newell said “They were interested in them because they were young and attractive girls.
“I come to the conclusion that there continues to be a risk to young females from you and people such as yourselves who may cruise the town looking for such young women,” he said.
Francis Nance, prosecuting, said the girls had been abducted at around 8pm and were discovered around 1.30am.
The investigation was mounted by the Operation Engage team, which monitors offences of grooming and underage sex across East Lancashire.
Supported by the Lancashire Telegraph's Keep Them Safe campaign, the operation highlights dangers posed by older men who befriend and exploit younger women for sexual purposes.
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A Prostitute and businessman have both been jailed after a teenage runaway was plied with drink and sold for sex in a North-East town.
Claire Dixon, told takeaway owner, Murtadha Elasadi, the girl was 13 when she brokered the deal saying: "You probably won't get one like this again."
The girl was so drunk she vomited on Elasadi's drive before he took her to into his home in Guisborough Road, Middlesbrough, and had sex with her.
Dixon, 31, a heavily convicted prostitute, spent the money on crack cocaine, giving some to the girl, telling her it would make her "feel better".
Anthony Dunne prosecuting at Teesside Crown Court yesterday said the girl had run away to Middlesbrough, but soon went looking for help.
Mr Dunne said: "She did go to a police station to tell police that she would be reported as a missing person.
"She waited there for some period of time, but nobody spoke to her and she left." Later that day, on August 17, 2008, Dixon, of Marshall Avenue, Middlesbrough 'befriended' the girl and took her to a shop for drink.
The girl later told police she was "mortally" drunk when Dixon flagged down Elasadi's car before they drove her away and exploited her for just £40.
Christine Egerton, for Elasadi, said the 35-year-old believed the girl was a willing sex worker, but accepted that she looked 13 or 14.
She said Elasadi, who admitted sexual activity with a child, made no threats and used no force. Miss Egerton said the girl was actually 14 and once admitted to police she was "on the game", but accepted that was some time after the offence.
She said Elasadi's fiancee lived in Morocco and was unable to get to the UK for the time being. Brian Russell, for Dixon, who admitted commissioning a child for sex, said she knew the victim and had initially wanted to offer her protection.
Mr Russell said Dixon's apparent lack of remorse was because she was struggling to accept the "enormity and unpleasantness" of the situation.
Sentencing the pair to four-and-a-half years each, Judge Michael Taylor said he found the two defendants equally culpable for corrupting the girl. He said: "She had left her home and the protection of her mother and took her chances on the street.
"What she was crying out for was care and protection, not exploitation.
"Teenagers often make very poor decisions for themselves and put themselves at risk." Dixon, who has 29 convictions for 45 offences, mostly relating to prostitution, received an additional 18-months for separate drugs offences.
It was accepted she was a front of house operative for a relatively small-time heroin dealer in Middlesbrough.
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Vital advice on swine flu handed to the Government was written by scientists who had worked for companies that make flu medicines, an investigation has claimed.
And a report has concluded that the way both the World Health Organisation and governments behaved during the crisis was a disgrace.
The long-awaited report from the Council of Europe has concluded that it led to a “waste of large sums of public money, and unjustified scares and fears about the health risks faced by the European public”.
The World Health Organisation played a key role in telling governments how serious the pandemic might be and how much medicine they should buy.
But yesterday a separate investigation by the British Medical Journal showed that the scientists who had advised the WHO had done paid work for drugs firms that stood to benefit from the advice. These links were never made clear.
The advice led nations to spend billions of pounds stockpiling anti-viral medications as well as vaccines in order to protect the public.
The revelation is just the latest humiliating blow to the swine flu effort, which saw millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money squandered on vaccines that were never used and a hotline that misdiagnosed patients.
The Government spent more than £100million buying up more than 130 million doses of swine flu vaccine so that every person could receive two doses each – enough to stop them getting ill.
But within weeks of the order, new data showed that only one dose was enough to give adequate protection.
However, the Government had failed to put a break clause in its contract with the drugs firm making the jab, so could not halve its order to take account of the new information.
The Government warned that 65,000 could die in a “worst case scenario”.
But it turned out that fewer than 400 died, many of whom had underlying health conditions.
In the end fewer than five million of the 14 million people advised to get the jab actually had it, forcing the Government to cancel its huge order with drugs giant GSK at a large financial loss to the taxpayer.
The latest investigation, carried out with The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, asked the WHO to reveal any conflicts of interest among the scientists advising it. It refused to respond to these requests.
Further checks revealed that the scientist who prepared the WHO’s 2004 guidance on using anti-virals – drugs which could reduce the severity of swine flu – had received payment from drugs firm Roche, who made one of the drugs, Tamiflu, and also GSK who made another anti-viral, Relenza.
The guidance concluded that “countries should consider developing plans for ensuring the availability of anti-virals” and that they “will need to stockpile in advance, given that current supplies are very limited”.
On top of this, two other scientists who prepared annexes to the WHO 2004 pandemic guidelines also had financial links to Roche.
Dr Fiona Godlee, editor in chief of the BMJ, said the WHO’s credibility has been badly damaged.
The WHO defended its advice, saying drugs firms had no influence on its scientific advice on pandemic flu.
A Department of Health spokesman said: “It is important that we learn lessons.
“A review into the WHO’s handling of the pandemic is currently under way and this is happening in the UK too.”
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Night nurses at a showcase hospital at the centre of a murder inquiry gave patients illegal drugs for years, a damning report is expected to conclude.
The investigation into Airedale General Hospital - where 'angel of death' Anne Grigg-Booth was accused of ending the lives of at least three elderly patients - is also expected to accuse managers of putting Government targets before patients' safety.
Grigg-Booth, who worked at the hospital in Keighley, West Yorkshire, for 25 years, died of an overdose in 2005 while awaiting trial on three counts of murder, one of attempted murder and 13 counts of administering noxious substances with intent to cause harm.
After her death police said she may have killed up to 20 patients, but the cremation of many possible victims made bringing charges impossible. However, the independent probe is expected to conclude that the deaths were not the work of one 'rogue nurse'.
Instead, says a draft version, they were caused by 'systemic failures' at a hospital rated as one of the best in the country.
Airedale Trust hospital bosses, it says, 'failed to recognise or act upon the fact Sister Grigg-Booth was part, if not a symbol, of a system that was not working'.
The report is expected to say that trust's governing body was operating in a 'parallel universe' to the senior nurses who effectively ran the hospital overnight after junior doctor working hours were curtailed the EU.
The inquiry, chaired by barrister Kate Thirlwall QC, also found little evidence of the trust board debating protocols and policies, with hospital bosses blinded by external accolades putting the needs of the organisation before those of patients.
Former Keighley MP Ann Cryer said: 'The NHS s wonderful, but when it goes wrong, it can cost lives.'
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More than 1.1million jobs - half the total created under Labour - were taken by immigrants who could have been refused work permits, it emerged last night.
The total outstripped the number of new jobs gained by British workers by two to one, according to the first independent parliamentary analysis of the New Labour years.
The non-EU migrants were handed the work permits despite there being hundreds of thousands of Britons out of work - many of them young people struggling to find employment.
Critics described the House of Commons Library research as the final proof Labour was lying when it promised 'British jobs for British workers'.
Even during the fallout from the bitter recession, the number of non-EU workers increased. During the same period, the number of Britons in employment tumbled by more than 400,000.
Home Secretary Theresa May said: 'This proves that immigration was out of control under Labour, and it proves beyond doubt the dishonesty of their "British jobs for British workers" campaign. The new government will bring net migration down from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands.'
Tory MP James Clappison, who unearthed the study, said: 'Whatever Labour say now, it is clear they caused or permitted very significant migration from outside the EU as a matter of policy.
'It was a deliberate policy from the outset to increase by two or three times the number of work permits they were handing out.'
Sir Andrew Green, chairman of Migrationwatch UK, said: 'So much for the "tough" points-based system.
'This research shows beyond doubt that British workers have been displaced by foreign-born workers. This cannot be in our wider interests.
'British workers are having their wages held down or even losing their jobs as a result of competition from migrant workers who can afford to work for less.'
Attention has previously focussed on the total number of jobs taken by all foreign workers. This allowed ministers to point to the fact many of the new arrivals were EU nationals, such as eastern Europeans. who could not be refused access to the labour market.
Overall, the effects have been staggering, the research shows. In October 1997, British-born workers made up 92.5 per cent of the workforce. By the same period in 2009, this had fallen to 87.1 per cent. Meanwhile, the proportion of jobs held by foreign-born workers rocketed from 7.5 per cent to 12.9 per cent - almost one in seven.
The total foreign workforce stands at 3,720,000 - up from 2,013,000 in the early months of the Labour Government. But it is the breakdown of where the workers came from that casts new light on how Labour deliberately adopted a policy of allowing the non-EU working
population to flourish. Of the new jobs created by the Government taken by those born overseas, only 576,000 were from within the EU - and who therefore could not be stopped from coming here.
Double that figure - 1,130,000 - were actively granted work permits by Labour, despite Gordon Brown's promise to deliver 'British jobs for British workers'.
The library's report also reveals how British workers took the brunt of the recession.
It says: 'Over the two years to Oct-Dec 2009, employment among UK-born people fell in absolute terms (by 608,000).
'Employment among foreign-born workers rose in both absolute terms and as a share of all in employment.'
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The euro will break up within five years, according to a survey of leading economists.
The dire state of the public finances of Greece and other eurozone members such as Portugal, Spain, Italy and Ireland have driven the single currency to a four-year low against the dollar and cast doubts over its future.
In the first major test of opinion in the City since the election, 12 leading economists said the eurozone in its current form would not survive beyond the end of the British coalition parliament in five years' time - compared with eight who suspected it would.
Andrew Lilico, chief economist of the Policy Exchange think-tank, said there was 'nearly zero chance' of the euro surviving.
He added: 'Greece will certainly default on its debts, and it is an open question whether Greece will experience some form of revolution or coup and I would put the likelihood of that over the next five years as one in four.'
Douglas McWilliams, of the Centre for Economics and Business Research, said the euro 'may not even survive the next week'.
David Blanchflower, a former Bank of England policymaker, added: 'The political implications (of euro disintegration) are likely to be far-reaching - Germany are opposed to paying for others and may well quit.'
In the survey of 25 economists by the Sunday Telegraph, Tim Congdon of International Monetary Research, said: 'The eurozone will lose three or four members - Greece, Portugal, maybe Ireland - and could break up altogether because of the growing friction between France and Germany.'
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Ministers are backtracking on a pledge to introduce quickly a 'Good Samaritan' law allowing householders to protect themselves when confronting burglars.
Days after becoming Home Secretary, Theresa May said she was poised to introduce a law offering both a 'reasonable defence' against intruders and immunity to those who intervene in an attempt to prevent crime or anti-social behaviour.
But the new plans are more complicated than previously thought and will take longer to introduce, Justice Minister Nick Herbert has revealed.
He said: 'I don't think I can promise we are going to see it sooner, but what we have said is that we think there is a need to change the law in this area.'
The minister tried to ease fears that residents wanting to apprehend criminals would face imprisonment if they took the law into their own hands.
'We want to make clear that the responsible citizen, acting to protect other people, to protect himself, will have the law on his side,' he told the BBC's Politics Show.
Senior police officers have warned that the 'Good Samaritan' legislation could be exploited as an excuse by thugs caught up in assault cases.
The current law allows householders to use force which is 'not excessive' against burglars.
Sunday 6th June 2010
The wages of British workers were forced down because the Labour government failed to restrict immigration from eastern Europe, Ed Balls claims today. In a provocative article in the Observer, the Labour leadership hopeful says the party will rebuild trust only if it admits "what we got wrong".
"There have been real economic gains from the arrival of young, committed and hard-working migrants from eastern Europe over the past six years," he writes. "But there has also been a direct impact on the wages, terms and conditions of too many people across our country – in communities ill-prepared to deal with the reality of globalisation, including the one I represent."
Balls, shadow education minister and MP for Morley and Outwood in west Yorkshire, says Labour was wrong to reject "transitional controls" in 2004 that would have prevented migrants working in Britain for a number of years. He argues the "Tories' flawed immigration cap" will do nothing to ease the problem because it does not apply to EU migration. Balls says he is making the comments in the spirit of "pro-European realism" but his comments have attracted criticism.
Tim Finch, head of migration at the Institute for Public Policy Research, said: "I would be very interested to know what evidence [Balls] has for his claim that wages and terms and conditions have been altered – because I haven't seen that evidence."
Finch said the free movement of labour had brought prosperity. "The policy from Labour has been easily tough enough. They should be arguing that it took us a while to get there but by the end Labour responded and put the right policy in place," he said.
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Stringent new checks on foreign doctors have been implemented in Cornwall.
It follows the death of a man who was given an overdose of diamorphine by an out-of-hours German doctor.
Dr Daniel Ubani had been accepted for work by the Cornwall Primary Care Trust (PCT), although his English was not fluent.
The PCT has apologised for failing to carry out adequate checks and said its language testing procedures now followed Department of Health guidance.
Dr Ubani's first application to work in the UK was rejected by the PCT in Leeds, West Yorkshire, after he failed a spoken English test
A subsequent application, however, was approved by Cornwall PCT, but his proficiency in English was not checked. Despite approval, Dr Ubani never actually worked in Cornwall.
His first shift for the NHS was in Cambridgeshire on 16 February 2008 for the out-of-hours GP service provider Take Care Now.
Dr Ubani was called to the home of 70-year-old David Gray who was suffering from renal colic.
He injected Mr Gray with 10 times the normal amount of diamorphine and Mr Gray died a few hours later.
At the inquest into Mr Gray's death, Dr Ubani was described as "incompetent", but Cambridgeshire coroner William Morris heavily criticised the NHS for not properly assessing the doctor's skills.
Cornwall's director of primary care, Antek Lejk, told BBC News the trust accepted its vetting procedures had not been "strong or rigorous" enough.
He said it had relied too heavily on the fact that Dr Ubani's GMC registration had gone through, without following up the necessary checks itself. "It was a poor system which didn't do what it should have done and we apologise for that," Mr Lejk said.
All applications from overseas doctors are now considered by a medical performance panel set up by the PCT.
Suspended sentence
The panel, led by two senior officials, looks at all the necessary evidence to confirm doctors meet the necessary qualifications, which includes fluency in English and medical competency. It also requires proof that the doctor concerned intends to work locally in Cornwall.
Mr Lejk said the trust was confident it now had a "very tight system and doctors who were approved in the past have also been rechecked using the new guidelines.
Mr Gray's inquest ruled he had been unlawfully killed and in Germany last April Dr Ubani was given a nine-month sentence, suspended for two years
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Hundreds of people gathered today for a dedication ceremony, paying tribute to UK armed forces members who lost their lives in the course of duty last year.
The service, held annually at the National Memorial Arboretum in Alrewas, Staffordshire, was led by Bishop John Kirkham and attended by families of the 119 people killed in 2009.
A spokesman for the NMA said the congregation was made up of around 500 people, mostly family members, who were joined by the Earl of Wessex, Andrew Robathan MP and senior military representatives.
He said: 'Today is important for the families from the perspective of helping them to come to terms with what has happened, but it is also an important day for the county to recognise those that made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.
'It was a very dignified service. All of the families were invited to come up to the wall and lay a wreath or a tribute and every single member of the congregation did just that.
'Watching the parents and children of those who have given their lives filing past the wall was very moving, it brings it home.
'It must be incredibly sobering to see for the first time the name of a loved one engraved upon the memorial wall'.
The spokesman said the Earl of Wessex spent more than an hour speaking to the families of the deceased after the hour-long service.
He added: 'He obviously cares very deeply.'
The names of all those being remembered in the service were engraved on to the Armed Forces Memorial in April and May.
The memorial is a tribute to the 16,000 men and women killed on duty or as a result of terrorist action since 1948.
There is space for 15,000 more names but because of the high number of casualties in 2009 - the bloodiest year in two decades - engraving has begun on its one remaining blank wall.
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More and more town hall bureaucrats have been caught snooping on private details held on a giant 'Big Brother' tax and benefits database.
Instances of unlawful hacking of the Customer Information System, which belongs to the Department of Work and Pensions and holds the personal records of 85 million people, have increased sixfold in a single year to more than two a week.
Council staff have looked at accounts belonging to their friends, family members, neighbours and even celebrities.
Some were dismissed as a result - but two thirds were let off with little more than a slap on the wrist.
Astonishingly, the DWP does not hold details of the number of its own staff caught doing the same thing.
This means the real level of unauthorised access could be much higher.
The revelations raised major questions about the number of people allowed to access the system.
In addition to workers at 445 local authorities across the UK, it is open to some 80,000 DWP employees and 60,000 workers from other government departments.
Civil liberties campaigners called for drastic cuts in those allowed to view the data.
Alex Deane, Director of Big Brother Watch, said: 'This just goes to show that our private data is not safe with councils - the less they have of it, the better.'
The database holds a record of every single individual issued with a National Insurance number, including those who have died, each containing up to 9,800 pieces of information.
That includes details of their ethnicity, address, and tax status.
In addition, the system records the full income details of anyone receiving any kind of benefit, including 11.5million state pensioners, 2.65 million people on incapacity benefit and four million who claim pension credit or some kind of income support.
Freedom of Information Act requests revealed 124 security breaches by council staff last year, including those found looking at the accounts of friends, family, neighbours, or celebrities.
That is a sharp increase from just 20 in 2008/9. Of those 26 were dismissed and eight resigned during the disciplinary process. But 37 were given a written or verbal warning and 43 received no reprimand at all.
Officials at the department were so concerned about the scale of the problem that they contacted councils last year to warn of sanctions. But the scale of the problem increased regardless.
Organisations caught up in last year's suspected breaches included London's Islington, Barnet, Lambeth, Greenwich, Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Westminster councils as well as Town Hall staff in Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Sunderland, Liverpool, Bradford, Middlesbrough, Cambridge and Plymouth.
Prof Peter Sommer, an information security expert from the London School of Economics said: 'It is bizarre and deeply unfortunate that DWP appear not to hold these essential security breach statistics.'
A spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions said: 'DWP thoroughly deals with the risk to CIS by the small number of employees who commit unauthorised access.
'DWP works closely with local authorities to investigate suspicions of unauthorised access enabling managers to consider disciplinary action where appropriate.'
• Every Google web search could be stored for up to two years under a controversial EU proposal that has the backing of more than 300 Euro-MPs.
'Written Declaration 29' is intended to be used as an early warning system to stop paedophiles.
But civil liberty groups say it is 'completely unjustifiable' intrusion into citizens' privacy - and would not be effective because most paedophiles operate in chatrooms and private communication.
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An oil field discovery in the Falklands was hailed yesterday as potentially the biggest discovery of its kind since North Sea Oil.
Shares in Rockhopper exploration soared 52 per cent yesterday as the company said it expected to pump out at least 242 million barrels of oil from the 'Sea Lion' well - the expedition's first major oil find.
And some predicted there could be millions more barrels of oil lying untapped in the area - sparking hopes that the region could hold as much oil as the North Sea.
Experts yesterday said it was highly unlikely the oil field could be sitting in isolation.
'Our analysis of the data from the Sea Lion well suggests that there is significant potential upside on our acreage,' Rockhopper said in a statement yesterday.
Commercial production could lead to an economic boom for the remote British territory, which is home to about 3,000 people.
But the news is sure to spark tensions in the region.
Argentinia, which invaded the British territory in 1982, has vowed to block British oil-drilling projects in the islands.
In 2007 the Argentinian government scrapped an oil agreement which would have entitled it to a share of the spoils.
And any drilling in the region is likely to come under intense scrutiny following the disastrous BP oil spill in the gulf of Mexico.
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Maverick Labour MP Frank Field has been asked by David Cameron to lead an investigation into poverty in Britain.
Downing Street confirmed the Prime Minister had recruited the former welfare minister to chair the review on poverty and life chances.
Mr Field quit as a minister less than a year after Labour swept to power in 1997, when Gordon Brown - then the Chancellor - blocked his radical proposals for shaking up the welfare state.
He also had rows with Harriet Harman, who was then Social Security Secretary.
He has resisted previous attempts by the Tories to recruit him but has now agreed to look at antipoverty reforms.
He will report back to Mr Cameron by the end of the year on what 'non-financial' measures can be brought in to speed up social mobility.
The Prime Minister said that he was 'pleased that Frank Field is undertaking this work'.
Mr Field said: 'This is a real opportunity to influence the next stage in how our counter-poverty strategy develops, and I am pleased to be offered this chance to lead the review.'
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It is my turn, tomorrow, to take Eric to his canine correctional facility over the back near Odiham, where he and I will be working on his dominance problems.
He is a small-to-medium Manchester terrier with quite pretty manners except towards other dogs – he will lunge at anything from boxers and rottweilers to Shetland ponies. So I have to make him look me in the face to show that I am the dominatrix around here and he should drop the blokey aggression. He resents looking me in the face.
I was practising my homework in the kitchen when I became aware of blokey Australian voices coming out of the kitchen radio discussing men's sheds. I am not that interested in men's sheds, or anybody's sheds, frankly, and couldn't work out why Woman's Hour was suddenly taking an interest in men's sheds, but I came to understand it was a Gender Politics discussion rather than a chat about DIY.
I have very little left these days of the passionate feminism of my young womanhood, when I frothed and yelped at anything that appeared to be "sexist". Many things were, back then, from the patronising language on legal forms advising one to get Daddy or Hubby or "your fiancé" to help you fill them in, to the handicapped entry into various nice jobs that a woman might want. But the winnable battles are won now, and young women's life-chances are more equitable, to use the horrible jargon. So my feminism has faded and I am beginning to fret about unkindness to both genders.
Of Australia's 2,000 annual suicides (not that vast a number), 80 per cent are male, with the majority being older men. Though more men commit suicide than women all across the world, the Australian male suicide rate is going up, and a charity, the Australian Men's Shed Association (AMSA), has been beavering away for some years now, trying to get it down. They call themselves Shed Men and they aim to provide men with sheds, so they can become Shedders. I know, I know.
But this is the thing: the stereotypical idea of the Australian male is of a swaggeringly macho XXXX-drinker with unassailable confidence, which is fine until the Bruces and Barry McKenzies grow old or are retired or bereaved or otherwise vulnerable. The stereotype fails and they become isolated. So the Shed Men provide community sheds, where there are bits and bobs of tools and machinery lying about. There's the wherewithal to make yourself a cuppa.
There is comfortable enough seating and a sense of people being about, whether or not you care to address them. But the genius bit is that "men find it much easier to talk to one another when they are shoulder to shoulder rather than face to face", said the woman on Woman's Hour.
Men working shoulder to shoulder is a pretty thing to see. It's always interesting for a woman to watch a bunch of assorted men crowding around to heave up some enormous thing by manpower when there's no hydraulics handy.
They settle their feet like golfers taking a putt, they all lean in, one of them says: "On a count of three. One! Two!" and lo – the thing heaves upward. I never get how they do that. I'd still be waiting for "Three!"
Do men not look each other in the face while they're heaving stuff? I guess not: I live with a man who will barely look himself in the face in his own bathroom mirror. And with a dog who won't look me in the face for fear of being dominated.
I think we might adopt the Shed Men's thing for chaps over here. Blokey places where women don't go, where there are things to fiddle with and where you stand shoulder to shoulder with the other fella. We used
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Some of Britain’s biggest firms were last night accused of ‘spying’ on their customers after they admitted ‘listening in’ on disgruntled conversations on the internet.
The companies include BT, which uses specially developed software to scan for negative comments about it on websites including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Budget airline easyJet, mobile-phone retailer Carphone Warehouse and banks including Lloyds TSB are also monitoring social networking sites to see what is being said about them.
The firms claim there is nothing sinister about the practice, with BT insisting it is merely acting as ‘a fly on the wall’ to ‘listen and engage with our customers’. But privacy campaigners have accused them of ‘outright spying’ while legal experts have suggested that firms making unsolicited approaches to customers could fall foul of data protection laws.
There are also fears the technique could be used to inundate customers with sales pitches and advertising, or be used by political parties.
Research published last year found that a negative review or comment by a frustrated customer on the internet can lose companies as many as 30 other customers.
A negative comment from a celebrity can be even more damaging. Earlier this year, BT was forced to act quickly after singer Lily Allen wrote on her Twitter page:
‘Anyone know who the CEO of BT is? I’d find out myself but my internet connection is so bad I can’t even Google. Such bad service, awful.’
BT is using software called Debatescape, which trawls social networking sites for keywords to identify anyone making negative comments about the company.
Angry customers are then contacted by email suggesting ways BT can help to solve the problem. The move comes as many of BT’s customers turn to the web to air their complaints because of the difficulties in getting through to its call centres.
Ironically, many of the comments on BT’s own Twitter page are written by those complaining they are not able to reach service staff. Managers overseeing BT’s social networking operation claim ‘most of the feedback we get is positive – customers like it when we pick up on their BT-related issues without them asking directly’.
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Discovered: The deficit is about spending. The crisis, its speculators and its victims. Nuclear excuses. Islam and the open society. Burkas for pictures. When opposing fundamentalists insult the moderates.
1. A headline that was not but that could have been “Obama visits: Conditions in the Gulf of Mexico deteriorate.”
2. Ignored interrelationships. (1) There is only one way to reduce the deficit caused government outlays. Would you believe this? It is by cutting spending. (2) There is a reason why item 1 is so hard to digest. Reducing expenditures may be good economics but amount to bad politics. The less deserved an allocation the more vigorous the support it generates.
3. Markets are efficient. At the same time, this efficiency is limited by the rationality of those that participate in them.
4. Not the guesses of inebriated roulette players have caused the losses of investors. Market participants acted on falsified data and they were influenced by the politically inspired and market-defying signals that governments had emitted.
5. It is a ritual to pillory “speculators” that are claimed to be responsible for conspiring to ruin tottering debtor states. Actually, behind the charged term there are savers. Often they acted as members of pension funds. As such, they turned over what they put aside for a rainy day to a state they naively trusted.
6. The UN has boldly taken a position to advocate global nuclear disarmament. Subtly it is to begin with Israel. This must be a splendid idea as nuclearly virginal Iran cheers it. Naiveté is potentially deadly. This is the derivate of a reoccurring delusion that is embedded in that attitude. Gullibility feeds on an assumption that amounts to a mirage. Accordingly, even self-declared foes are, if treated with forgiving kindness, as ”nice” as the sucker considers himself to be. This fact-ignoring innocence prompts those that suffer from the ailment to pursue a policy what amounts to suicide. A cute example comes from a recent letter to the editor. Its translated version is “Once Israel has dismantled her atomic weapons, no state of the Near East will continue to have the wish to acquire this instrument of power”. The assumption behind this forecast is that the “Muslim Bomb” is a means of dissuasion protecting those that Jerusalem threatens with extermination. In the light of the repeatedly expressed future foreseen for the “Zionist Entity”, a de-nuclearized Israel becomes a convincing reason to acquire WMDs.
7. The 64-thousand dollar question is whether Islam does fit into a democratic system. In a way, the question is not a question. It has been answered numerous times, both in theory and in the praxis. Alas, the results unearthed have always been the wrong, that is non-PC ones. The central problem issues from the concept of the desirable relationship between state and church. Even in case of the devout, in the advanced democratic and mainly Western entities, the principle of separation prevails. Here one would argue that the arrangement is to the benefit of both the worldly and the spiritual order. Islam’s tradition considers that the state is a worldly expression of the heavenly order. This determines not only the purpose of the state but also makes it subject to the supervision of those whose mandate comes from God. A democratic order will limit – and subject to revision – the power of all parties that are subject to its jurisdiction. At the same time, it upholds the right of any minority to take peaceful action designed to become a future majority. In fact, much of the effort of politics is to channel this process. Implied is a right to criticize but also to hold any order and its laws to be transitory. Democracy not only allows that the governors be deprived of power through a peaceful process but also assumes that this will happen in the future. In sum, democracy’s leadership, goals and order is alterable. Its detailed ordnances are regarded as fallible and disobedience, meaning dissent, – if within the law that protects all – is regarded as natural and constructive. Islam’s provisions for guiding the worldly order are not only different but also irreconcilably in contradiction. Islam does not believe in the separation of powers. Separating the branches of power and limiting their purview implies that, at times, they might be wrong. Serious conflicts are also to be found in the area of minority rights. Democrats assume that minority and majority roles are subject to a healthy rotation. No decision is irreversible. Eternal and unalterable qualities relating to right and wrong have nothing to do with achieving and losing pluralities.
At the same time, Islam assumes that legitimate government is an instrument of God and not of men. Therefore wanting to overturn and even criticizing a rule that claims a mandate of heaven is not a right. Nor is it a fitting subject to be decided by the judgment of a voting majority. For Islam, power comes from God. The worldly order is a blurred mirror image of the heavenly one. The order to which men are capable of is, due to man’s limited comprehension, inferior to what Deity ordains. The result produces men that are assumed to be inferior to those that are enlightened. Therefore, disagreements with the anointed interpreters of God do not amount to a right. Much rather, such dissent constitutes a crime against the natural order and that demands chastisement. Given that disagreement is not a legitimate position flowing from an alternative understanding of potentials and interests, there can be no minority rights – only, at best, a limited tolerance for deviants. As a result, opposition is a sin and its expression must be suppressed by the righteous.
In the abstract, Muslims might be right. At the same time, it stands as proven that, the views and values of their perspective contradict the assumptions and conditions of democratic theory and practice.
8. Shut down the museums. Mohammed, in one of his tantrums, had stated that all painters wind up in hell. The obvious reason for this pronouncement must be the work they do. This our fashionably sympathetic intellectual elites ignore as long as their exhibitions continue to be subsidized by the taxpayer. Sin involved in the activity as well as in what artists depict, makes museums into collections of evil works committed in the service of Satan.
Anticipate a future non-negotiable demand. The assemblage of evil works should be closed to the entire public because such collections disturb the sensibilities of some fellow-residents. Alternatively, there are ways to insure that the items exhibited are prevented from causing harm by giving rise to dirty thoughts. How about just enclosing the offending items into a burka?
9. That, as it is repeatedly emphasized, not all Muslims are radicals is obvious. This, however, does not solve the problem created by those that are. A pronounced affinity to radicalism among the adherents is undisputed. Even Communism has not produced per capita nearly as many radicals as Islam does in its current state of development. The cited observation plays a role in the struggle between laissez-faire native culture and immigrant intransigence. This is the case when Islamist encroachments that propose to curtail the rights of the indigenous to pursue their way of life, is to be countered. Those that like to remind host society of the limited following of radicals are, with questionable logic, inclined to oppose measures against subversive fundamentalists by pointing out that these would insult “all Muslims”. If this would be so then, the implication is that “all” Muslims are closer to the radicals than to the values of the majority whose hospitality they have petitioned to enjoy.
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Labour's plans for pay-as-you-throw bin taxes will be dumped tomorrow, freeing householders from the threat of £100 charges for producing too much rubbish.
Local Government and Communities Secretary Eric Pickles will announce the end of the hated proposal.
The move comes as Freedom of Information documents reveal how Labour buried concerns from charities and health groups about the plan.
A senior source at the Department for Communities and Local Government said pilot schemes underway would be “consigned to the dustbin of history,” making good on a Tory election promise.
Pay-as-you-throw taxes would have been policed by an army of snoopers backed by microchips in bins.
The chipped bins would have been weighed on dustcarts, allowing town halls to bill householders for any waste they deemed excessive. Critics said this would fuel a surge in fly-tipping and “bin rage” if householders were caught trying to put rubbish into neighbours’ bins.
Alex Deane, director of civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, said: “Bin taxes symbolise the worst of our Big Brother state, snooping on our private waste and charging us for the privilege. The sooner these punitive and vindictive taxes are scrapped the better.”
Pay-as-you-throw charging was drawn up by the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to encourage recycling and cut the amount of rubbish left for collection. Based on schemes in Holland and other European countries, it would have left average families facing charges of up to £100 a year for putting out too much rubbish.
Defra ignored concerns from town halls that charging would be unpopular and costly to administer and pushed ahead with legislation in the Climate Change Act.
Labour Ministers had been pressed to publish responses to “technical guidance” on their proposals but they refused to do so ahead of the General Election.
Finally published under FoI, the responses reveal widespread concerns from charities and groups representing the elderly and families about the effect of the bin taxes.
Labour Ministers were warned large families, the frail and children suffering certain medical conditions would be hardest hit by waste charges because exemptions were not clearly defined.
The Paediatric Continence Forum warned: “At present there is only a vague recognition that some people may produce higher than normal volumes of household waste through no fault of their own and not as a result of poor recycling practice.”
The Association of Charity Shops warned that they would become particular targets for “silent hours” fly-tipping as householders dumped extra waste outside their doors.
Mr Pickles said: “It is scandalous that the last Labour government has been caught red-handed again trying to cover up the wall of opposition to bin taxes.
“It is widely accepted that bin taxes will spark a surge in fly-tipping leaving a blot on the landscape, fuel a rise in backyard burning, damaging the environment and spark a flurry of neighbourhood bin wars as angry householders dump their rubbish in a neighbours bin in an attempt to avoid being hammered by another stealth tax.
“Bin taxes are not a green tax. They were simply another excuse by Labour to tax by stealth.”
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It was the perfect day for basking on the beach or in a park.
But yesterday clearly wasn’t ideal for standing perfectly still while wearing a 2lb bearskin hat – as this unfortunate Scots Guardsman found when he fainted at a final rehearsal for next weekend’s Trooping The Colour.
Even Prince Philip was looking a touch hot and bothered as temperatures in London hit 80F (27C).
Tradition dictates that guards are not allowed to move their heads or eyes while on parade, so the soldiers were unable even to acknowledge their fallen comrade’s plight.
The MoD said the guard had recovered fully.
Sunday Roundup
of the News this Week
A Council has been accused of “pandering” to Muslims by spending £150,000 to extend a cemetery so that graves can face Mecca. High Wycombe cemetery in Buckinghamshire has a separate Muslim burial section. But this is due to run out of space in 2012. Council offi cials fear that mixing Muslim and Christian graves could lead to a backlash in public opinion.
Tony Blair has become an adviser to Colonel Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator's son has sensationally claimed. Saif al-Islam Gaddafi said the former prime minister has secured a consultancy role with a state fund that manages the country's £65billion of oil wealth.
Brussels is to make another attempt to claw back the £3billion-a-year European Union rebate won for Britain by Margaret Thatcher in 1984. The EU's Polish budget commissioner Janusz Lewandowski said national contributions needed to be simplified - and warned this 'will lead directly to the question of the British rebate'.
Health chiefs have wasted £26million paying a private firm for operations that never took place. The NHS signed a £70million contract with South African company Netcare to carry out 9,000 operations a year at the Greater Manchester Surgical Centre in Trafford.
A great grandmother died just two weeks after banging her head because doctors failed to spot her broken neck. Maud Cole, 86, was admitted to hospital after a fall but medics discharged her on the same day, claiming an X-ray was unnecessary.
Waste in the NHS was highlighted yesterday when it emerged that a private health firm was paid £26million for operations that never took place.
Declaring a swine flu pandemic was a 'monumental error', driven by profit-hungry drug companies spreading fear, an influential report has concluded. It led to huge amounts of taxpayers' money being wasted in stockpiling vaccines, it added.
Genetically modified crops were last night given enthusiastic backing by the Environment Secretary. Caroline Spelman shocked colleagues by suggesting that the coalition government will take a more pro-GM stance than its Labour predecessor.
Labour ministers spent an astonishing £1.8billion on consultants in a single year - double the amount of the previous 12 months, it was revealed today.
Climate Depot's Morano on UK radio: 'We are witnessing a secondary collapse of man-made global warming fears'
Shock new evidence of a NASA scientist faking a fundamental greenhouse gas equation shames beleaguered space administration in new global warming fraud scandal. Caught in the heat are NASA's Dr. Judith Curry and a junk science equation by the space agency’s Dr. Gavin Schmidt creating disarray over a contentious Earth energy graph.
Here is a moderate Mullah! Many people would wonder why Hazrat Mirza Sahib said : “Do not say funeral prayers of such people.”
For a country that has aspirations to join the Western comity of nations, Turkey certainly has a strange way of going about it.
Well, the media are creeping out of the woodwork preparing us for the fall I see by making headlines out of the Bilderberg Group which previously only nutters, idiots, conspiracy theorists and people like me and you knew about but were never believed.
For those who still don’t get it, let me spell out just why the response by Cameron, Clegg and Hague to the Turkish terrorist flotilla incident is so despicable and so terrifying.
The number of men contacting a debt charity for help has soared by 51per cent during the past three years, research showed today.
It is still just about possible to go through life without spotting how Britain is being changed by immigration – if you are a hermit, or live on one of the more remote of the Hebridean islands, or are insulated from the realities of everyday life by money or power.
The number of migrants entering Britain from outside the EU soared by a fifth last year despite Labour’s supposedly tough new points-based immigration rules.
Dozens of people have been reported to police as part of a new scheme to root out potential terrorists in East Lancashire. The Channel Project aims to prevent 'vulnerable people' becoming radicalised.
Why do so many people hate the British? I say "British", but what they actually hate is England, and the English. The frequent interchanging of 'England' and 'Britain' has caused a common confusion of meaning.
An Albanian immigrant was on the run today after shooting a female judge dead and killing a legal assistant with an axe in a row over housing benefit. Isabella Brandon, a Belgium Judge of the Peace who specialised in family matters, and André Bellemans, died instantly from wounds to the head.
A Birmingham fast food restaurant owner has been given a suspended jail sentence after hygiene inspectors saw mice running along a kebab rotisserie. Environmental health officers who went into East Pizza in Smallbrook Queensway also saw mice eating discarded chips.
A family were left stunned after they found a squatter secretly living on their roof under a makeshift tent. Mother-of-two Steph Wallace, 35, made the shock discovery while she was putting the rubbish out in the backyard of her maisonette.
The Tory Party, which campaigned on “rolling back the EU’s powers,” has remained predictably silent on the latest European Union Greek bailout power grab which has seen the Lisbon Treaty “fundamentally changed” overnight without being voted upon in any way.
Millions of patients face losing NHS care as bosses prepare to axe treatments to make £20billion of savings by 2014, a top doctor has warned. Among procedures being targeted by health trusts are hernias, joint replacements, ear and nose procedures, varicose veins and cataract surgery.
Rising food bills have driven Britain's inflation rate to the highest in the Western World. The UK's Consumer Price Index (CPI) figure of 3.7per cent is two or three time higher than similar economies across Europe and beyond.
Almost half of the places on a coveted BBC journalism trainee scheme have gone to candidates from ethnic minorities, a Freedom of Information Act request has shown.
Croydon’s biggest benefit fraudster tried enlisting the help of a white witch’s celestial fixers to save her being deported. Failed asylum seeker, Adesuwa Ojo-Osagie - also known as Queen Hanson - tried to get help from the spirit world after she scammed more than £100,000 out of the tax payer.
Victims of a notorious Islington gang are being moved to other parts of the borough for their own safety - but they are "disgusted" they are the ones leaving.
A desperate father says the system has failed to protect his 14-year-old daughter from being groomed at the hands of a paedophile ring operating in Keighley.
The relatives of an innocent shopper killed by a violent thug in a Sainsbury's queue spoke of their disgust yesterday that he could be free in less than a year. Kevin Tripp, 57, had been buying buying organic apples when Tony Virasami struck him with such force that he flew backwards and smashed his head on the floor.
A councillor joined in as a group kicked and punched a man during a dispute in the prayer hall of a mosque, a court heard. Luthfur Rahman, a Labour party councillor for Manchester’s Longsight ward, stands jointly accused of assault with four other men, all said to have waded in during an attack in the Shah Jalal mosque, in Eileen Grove, Rusholme, following Friday prayers.
Nearly a month into Britain's new coalition government and perhaps the defining image of Prime Minister David Cameron shows him strolling casually along Westminster, without security, mingling with the crowd.
Something’s got to be done about immigration. A new wave of migrants is about to beat down our doors – coming here with full rights to jobs and benefits. The 500,000 Ukrainians and Serbs – whose own countries aren’t currently members of the EU – will have access to the NHS.
Britain was last night warned to expect a new wave of immigration from Eastern Europe after almost half a million Ukrainians and Serbians were given the right to live, work and claim benefits in the UK.
Councils have been given the green light by European judges to evict frail pensioners from their care homes if it saves money, it emerged yesterday.
Britain would be 'overrun' by rats under an EU plan to ban a rodent poison on health and safety grounds, pest controllers have warned. They claim the law will remove the most effective weapon against a soaring rat population.
Israel is a nation permanently under siege. Without an unceasing struggle for self-preservation the Jewish state would be “wiped off the face of the earth”, to quote the blood-curdling words of Iran’s President Ahmadinejad.
The Israeli military today released footage of weapons it says were found during deadly commando raids on a flotilla of ships bound for Gaza. Improvised explosives, knives, machetes, catapults and gas masks were among the cache allegedly retrieved from the six-strong fleet which was stormed on Monday.
In yet another example of the insanity which pervades ConDemLab Britain, the eighth annual Liverpool Military Show has been cancelled because it was not “diverse enough” and it had the potential to offend Muslims in Merseyside.
Accusations of racism have been levelled at Bristol City Council, for advertising a management training scheme purely for ethnic minorities. The city’s largest employer is looking for two graduates in a bid to address its lack of minority employees and better match the ethnic diversity of the city.
Travellers who were told to stop building a two-storey house on a greenbelt site have claimed they are not breaking the law 'because it is just a shed'. The large breeze block house, complete with roof joists and gaps for window, has been built on the site of a former wooden shed in Wickford, Essex.
The Coalition Government insisted yesterday that it would not be blown off course by the storm over Liberal Democrat ministers’ expenses. Last night ministers were braced for the possibility of fresh allegations but were “confident’’ they would have a “robust’’ defence to any accusations, according to a senior source.
New Treasury minister Danny Alexander has charged taxpayers more than £13,000 for his wife to make 62 journeys between London and Scotland. The Chief Secretary, who stepped in after David Laws resignation for abusing his expenses, ran up the highest bill of any MP for using the little-known perk last year.
A Senior detective investigating paedophiles has been suspended after being charged with a series of child sex offences. Detective Inspector Glen Boulton, had been acting as detective chief inspector and has advised the Government on child protection. He is accused of abusing two young girls in the 1970s and 80s.
Harriet Harman’s political judgement has been called into question after it emerged that she once advocated the watering down of child pornography laws.
Two victims of child abuse threatened legal action and a third demanded the resignation of the former Islington council leader, the dream looked like it had turned into a nightmare.
Hodge who, as leader of Islington council from 1982 to 1992, spectacularly failed to deal with a paedophile ring abusing children in her council’s care. Heavily criticised for presiding over lethal chaos and a climate of intimidation in the town hall , she later tried to pass the buck onto her officials, claiming to have known nothing about the abuse at the time
NATO boss and Blair government insider Lord Robertson has threatened to sue Scotland's leading independent newspaper over internet allegations that he not only used his influence as a Freemason to procure a gun licence for child killer Thomas Hamilton, but was also a member of a clandestine paedophile ring reportedly set up by Hamilton for the British elite. And Don't forget to visit the expose site liars buggers and thieves
John Prescott has revealed the reason behind his extraordinary decision to accept a peerage: He wants to save the planet. The former Deputy Prime Minister had previously declared he would never accept a seat in the House of Lords and has been a vocal critic of 'flunkery and titles'.
Taxpayers are forking out more than £44million a year to maintain the drug habits of thousands of prisoners. Shocking figures out yesterday show that every day the state pays for one in six of the entire prison population to be given methadone or other heroin substitutes.
Middle-class families have been on the wrong end of deeply damaging Government policies designed to fix a social mobility problem which does not exist, academics warn today.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an African brought up in Africa. She comes from Somalia, and has also lived in Ethiopia and Kenya. Her fame derives from the fact that she boldly and absolutely rejected the Muslim faith in which she grew up.
An attempt by David Cameron to give a peerage to a major Conservative Party donor has been blocked amid apparent concerns over his tax affairs, it emerged yesterday.
The new Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander was last night forced to defend himself against allegations that he avoided paying capital gains tax on the sale of his second home.
Once again the sullen, obtuse, obdurate defenders of the absurd and revolting fantasy known as ‘ADHD’ advance hopelessly, sightlessly, like zombies, across the shell-cratered mud, yelling and droning their unresponsive nonsense and pretending that they know what they are talking about. They don’t. Like zombies, they are immune to all the normal rules of argument, especially to facts or logic.
See Also: BBC: Prozac found in drinking water
Traces of the antidepressant Prozac can be found in the nation’s drinking water, it has been revealed. An Environment Agency report suggests so many people are taking the drug nowadays it is building up in rivers and groundwater.
Thousands of families are raking in housing benefit worth more than £26,000 per year, according to an analysis of the welfare system. A total of 3,400 people are receiving the bumper handouts - the equivalent to having an interest-only mortgage worth around £650,000.
Council apologises for 'over zealous' binmen who refused to take rubbish because of 'scrap of bread'
A householder was left fuming after 'over zealous' binmen refused to collect his rubbish when he accidentally left a 'tiny scrap of bread' in his wheelie bin. Michael Carter received a note through his door saying the binmen could not take his recycling because of 'food waste contamination'.
A South African who moved his family to Stoke-on-Trent more than two years ago to look after his ill mother is being booted out of Britain.
A union leader has blasted Labour for its record in government, and insisted that the party needs to be reclaimed for working people, pensioners and the unemployed.
The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government’s foreign aid policy has kicked off with the donation of 45 million condoms to Uganda and the appointment of an Egyptian to oversee the “prioritisation of aid” to Afghanistan and Pakistan — while at home, the ConDem tricksters prepare their first wave of domestic budget cuts.
If Zionists control the media, and the EDL are Zionists, then why does the media constantly attack, abuse, denigrate and smear the EDL as 'fascists, racists or thugs' ? Do you see the disconnect here ?
Anti-smoking campaigners today called for pictures of the health effects of smoking to be emblazoned across 80% of cigarette packs in future.
Britain’s premier scientific institution is being forced to review its statements on climate change after a rebellion by members who question mankind’s contribution to rising temperatures.
Bickering and defensive, climate researchers have lost the public’s trust. Blame economic worries, another freezing winter, or the cascade of scandals emerging from the world’s leading climate-research body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But concern over global warming has cooled down dramatically.
The home secretary, Theresa May, is facing a stiff test of the Conservative party’s claims to oppose radical Islam after her officials chose to allow a misogynist Muslim preacher into Britain.
Britain may be forced to boost its navy to protect itself from mass immigration triggered by global warming, it was warned yesterday. Grandfather of the green movement James Lovelock enthralled and inspired fear in equal measure as he spoke at the Hay Festival.
Thousands of Bosnians and Albanians could soon join Eastern European migrants in gaining illegal entry to Britain after the EU announced an end to visa restrictions.
Towns in southern England will see their populations swell by nearly a fifth over the next eight years, official predictions revealed yesterday.
A British family returned from a short break to find eight Romanians had moved into their home and locked them out. The squatters had installed their own TV satellite dish and were drinking champagne when Abu-Taher Ahmed confronted them.
Angry mum Sam Fardon says her toddler son was ordered off a bus – because the driver found his England shirt "offensive"! Two-year-old Dylan Hall was with his mum and baby brother Adam, aged 10 weeks, when they were told to leave the 34A service from Newcastle Bus Station.
Up to 40 per cent of murder suspects in parts of Britain last year were immigrants, the News of the World can reveal. And a staggering one-in-three of those charged with RAPE in other regions of England and Wales also came from abroad. These worrying statistics provided by police forces will fuel political debate about Britain's porous borders and the link to serious crimes.
The ConDem-controlled Treasury will announce their plan to cut £12 billion off the public services expenditure next Monday, with half of that being reinvested in health, defence — and foreign aid.
They have been sent to remote Pacific islands and to the Indian Ocean – now asylum-seekers intercepted in Australian waters may end up in the middle of the desert, in a near-empty former gold-mining town.
Google has again been accused of invading privacy after secretly collecting details of millions of home wi-fi connections to help it sell adverts.
The Solidarity Trade Union, fresh from its successful defence of teacher Adam Walker, has warned private or public employers who seek to persecute employees because of their political beliefs that they will “have a fight on their hands.”
"Cycling City Project Officer x2 £21,519 - £23,708 This is a temporary post until March 2011, but with a possibility of extension should the project be successful.
The gruesome Bradford killings have sent a shudder down the nation’s spine. At least three prostitutes working in the Yorkshire city appear to have been murdered.
Two events last week led me to muse on the links between the man who is now our Energy and Climate Change Secretary, Chris Huhne, and the extinction of the woolly mammoth.
The trips included a visit to the Maldives where MEPs stayed in a five star luxury private island resort while researching electoral practice.
David Laws made history last night by becoming the shortest serving Cabinet member in modern British political history. The Liberal Democrat MP served as Chief Secretary to Treasury for just 16 days before the expenses story broke and he decided to resign.
Submarines could be used to smuggle cocaine into the UK, the Royal Navy warned yesterday. Traffickers are already taking drugs to the US using midget subs to dodge tough international patrols.
As we try to fathom our contemporary situation we see everything that once gave us our bearings is being broken down. Our natural society made up of homogeneous communities is being de-constructed for the creation of a pre-meditated artificial society.
The Iraq war inquiry is demanding access to a secret Ministry of Defence report into the shambles surrounding the invasion. The document by a former British commander in Iraq has been classified as highly secret because its contents are so explosive.
Britons spend more than half of each working day earning money just to pay taxes. Analysis relating the tax burden to the working day suggests that the average 9-5 worker takes until 1.21pm to cover their tax bill and then spends three hours 39 minutes working for themselves.
Funding for gypsy and traveller projects is being slashed by two-thirds as the Conservatives and Lib Dem coalition tries to reduce the country’s debts.
David Cameron's coalition Government was plunged into crisis last night after his star minister David Laws quit over an expenses scandal involving his gay partner.
Binmen have been threatened with the sack if they fly England flags on their wagons during the World Cup. MDrivers in Liverpool were ordered to sign contracts forbidding the St George’s Cross due to apparent ‘health and safety’ risks.
Bureaucrats in Brussels want to raise the retirement age for millions of British workers on a regular rolling basis to avoid another financial crisis.
A Cyclist whose bike was stolen claims police told her they did not have time to watch two hours of CCTV footage to catch the thief.
She has spent the past week in Los Angeles, bemoaning her misfortune in private and setting about her rehabilitation in public.
Jaguar Land Rover today announced plans to build cars in China for the first time - just as it prepares to close one of its three factories in Britain.
Tasers are being used on elderly people and children, figures revealed on Friday.
Angry parents staged a protest outside a secondary school demanding teachers instil a culture of discipline and respect in pupils.
David Laws, the man in charge of slashing public spending, was under pressure to resign this morning after it was revealed that he funnelled £40,000 of taxpayers' money to his secret gay lover.
Saturday 5th June 2010
A Council has been accused of “pandering” to Muslims by spending £150,000 to extend a cemetery so that graves can face Mecca.
High Wycombe cemetery in Buckinghamshire has a separate Muslim burial section. But this is due to run out of space in 2012. Council offi cials fear that mixing Muslim and Christian graves could lead to a backlash in public
opinion.
Plans were approved this week to extend the cemetery to provide Muslim burial space for 15 years. But some residents claim enough has already been spent catering to the needs of the Muslim community.
One man, who did not wish to be named, said: “Yet again many thousands of pounds is being spent pandering to the local Muslim community.
“Just like when they fenced off all the Muslim graves in the local cemetery to protect them from vandalism yet left all of the graves from other racial/religious groups wide open to vandalism.”
Campaign Against Political Correctness, added: “I hope the council are not doing this for politically correct reasons and that they have consulted widely with members of the public.”
The council had made a request for land to be de-consecrated for Muslim use at a separate Church of England burial ground in High Wycombe but this was refused.
The council has a statutory duty to provide cemetery space for people of all faiths. An Equalities Impact Assessment report said an extension would “meet the needs of the Muslim community with relation to grave design and orientation so that graves are facing towards Mecca”.
Alternatives would “not allow for best usage of space” and were “likely to lead to negative public reaction,” it said.
The plan was backed by High Wycombe Town Committee and work will begin in the autumn if approved by the council’s cabinet.
Councillor Mahboob Hussain said: “We need another site to be ready for the future. I fully support the proposals.”
The Bishop of Buckingham,the Rt Rev Alan Wilson, said: “People of all faiths and none are regularly buried in Church of England churchyards and other consecrated ground all over the country.
“We are not exclusive about it and are delighted to serve the community in this way.”
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Tony Blair has become an adviser to Colonel Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator's son has sensationally claimed.
Saif al-Islam Gaddafi said the former prime minister has secured a consultancy role with a state fund that manages the country's £65billion of oil wealth.
In an exclusive interview, Saif described Mr Blair as a 'personal family friend' of the Libyan leader and said he had visited the country 'many, many times' since leaving Downing Street three years ago.
If true, the claims will plunge Mr Blair - now a Middle East peace envoy - into a fresh row over potential conflicts of interest between his public and private roles.
His business affairs have attracted widespread controversy because they are deliberately shrouded in secrecy.
Last night, families of the 270 Lockerbie victims accused Mr Blair of breaking bread with people who 'have blood on their hands'.
They have in the past raised questions about Mr Blair's relationship with Colonel Gaddafi especially over a prisoner transfer agreement with Libya that paved the way for the return of the Lockerbie bomber last year.
Saif made clear that the agreement - drawn up when Mr Blair was prime minister - was key to creating a 'special relationship' between Britain and Libya.
Saif suggested Mr Blair was involved in 'Africa projects' with his father, alleging: 'He also has some consultancy role with the Libyan Investment Authority.'
Mr Blair was adamant last night he had no relationship whatsoever with the LIA. However he is advising several firms seeking a slice of the massive revenues from Libya's oil reserves.
Saif, speaking in his private suite in Mayfair's five star Connaught Hotel, said: 'Tony Blair has an excellent relationship with my father. Continued
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Brussels is to make another attempt to claw back the £3billion-a-year European Union rebate won for Britain by Margaret Thatcher in 1984.
The EU's Polish budget commissioner Janusz Lewandowski said national contributions needed to be simplified - and warned this 'will lead directly to the question of the British rebate'.
He did not specify whether he wanted the rebate scrapped, but Britain's European neighbours, notably the French, have long clamoured for that.
The comments provoked fury from Eurosceptic MPs, who accused the EU of 'squandering' hefty British contributions but providing nothing in return.
They also provide an early test of Prime Minister David Cameron's promise to defend Britain's interests in Europe.
Mr Lewandowski said: 'Too many corrections are being made for political reasons.'
He added that budgetary negotiations, due to be finalised next year, would have to 'find a compromise between the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and the British rebate'.
The Commissioner said he wanted to take an 'ambitious' approach to negotiations on the shape of European financial policy for the next six-year budgetary cycle, covering 2014 to 2020.
Protection of the rebate was made a cornerstone of British policy in Europe after Baroness Thatcher fought to secure it 26 years ago.
It was seen as compensation for the disproportionate amounts demanded from UK taxpayers for CAP, which benefits British farmers to a much less extent that their French and German counterparts.
Tony Blair's government was widely condemned for giving up part of the rebate in 2005. Treasury papers revealed last year that this concession will have cost British taxpayers £9.3billion between 2007 and 2013 - the equivalent of £344 for every household.
As a consequence, the value of the rebate to Britain from the EU fell from £5.6billion in 2008/09 to £5.1billion in 2009/10. The rebate will produce only £3.3billion for 2010/11, driving up the UK's net payments to Europe from £ 4.8billion last year to £6billion.
Tory MP Douglas Carswell said: 'Mr Lewandowski's comments are further evidence that Europe is dragging us down financially and economically. Membership of this club is already extremely expensive and we pay far more than most other countries.'
Fellow Eurosceptic Conservative MP Philip Davies added: 'This threat is a disgrace.
'The British public are sick to the back teeth of giving more and more money to a wretched organisation that it is so badly run that it couldn't even get its accounts signed off on time.
'The system is a joke. 'All this money we provide goes to pay for infrastructure abroad like new roads in Poland when we can't afford to pay for our own roads in Britain. It's like asking Asda to build supermarkets for Tesco.'
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Health chiefs have wasted £26million paying a private firm for operations that never took place.
The NHS signed a £70million contract with South African company Netcare to carry out 9,000 operations a year at the Greater Manchester Surgical Centre in Trafford.
However, fewer than two thirds of the operations ever took place.
But under the terms of the deal with Netcare - which ended last month - the NHS had to pay for the lot.
The amount of money wasted is enough to pay the salaries of 1,000 nurses for a year.
Paul Mainwaring, from Greater Manchester patients’ watchdog the Patients' Council said: ‘This is a huge amount of money and it could have been so much better spent.’
The £26million would also have been enough to fund 100,000 overnight stays in hospital and is more than it cost to set up the Wolfson Molecular Imaging Centre, in south Manchester - one of the world's most advanced cancer research units.
The 10 Greater Manchester PCTs have only used 62 per cent of the Netcare contract since it was signed in 2005.
Health bosses say the contract has helped reduce waiting lists dramatically and more than 34,000 people have been to the treatment centre, which has carried out 27,000 operations.
At the time of the agreement, some patients were being forced to wait 15 months for operations.
Almost 90 per cent of general surgery operations bought were used, 70 per cent of orthopaedic ops were used and just 30 per cent of ear, nose and throat procedures.
The centre will transfer back to Trafford NHS Trust, as planned during the summer.
NHS North West declined to comment.
A Netcare official said: ‘Whilst the level of activity completed at the GMSC is lower than what was contracted, this difference may be attributed to the GMSC helping to decrease NHS wait times much sooner than anticipated.’
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A great grandmother died just two weeks after banging her head because doctors failed to spot her broken neck.
Maud Cole, 86, was admitted to hospital after a fall but medics discharged her on the same day, claiming an X-ray was unnecessary.
An inquest ruled that the pensioner, who was recovering from a stroke, died of a broken neck and her family are now considering legal action against Doncaster Royal Infirmary.
Retired caretaker Mrs Cole, who lived in a care home at Askern, Doncaster, was described as mobile and independent by staff.
After being discharged she was readmitted to the hospital eight days later after her condition deteriorated.
Five days later Mrs Cole, who was complaining of neck pain, went for a CT scan and the break was detected.
Her condition worsened rapidly after she was considered unsuitable for surgery and she died the next day.
The Doncaster hearing was told Mrs Cole, who had a pacemaker, had a bone infection which made her more susceptible to broken bones.
Mrs Cole’s son Michael told the inquest: ‘The circumstances that surround her death make me feel uncomfortable, not for vengeance or financial gain, but the fact is an 86-year-old lady had a broken neck that was missed on examination.’
He said staff at the care home were ‘surprised’ his mother had been discharged so quickly from hospital after she banged her head in the fall on February 7 last year.
Mr Cole said: ‘They said they were extremely surprised she had been let back to the care home on the same day as her neck was distorted so much that they couldn't administer eye drops without laying her down.’
The pensioner was examined at hospital but doctors thought she was uninjured.
Dr Rashed Hussain said she was not complaining of neck pain and he decided there was no need for an X-ray.
Dr Jason Stone told the inquest that it could only take a ‘minor trauma’ to cause a fracture.
Recording a narrative verdict, Doncaster's deputy coroner Fred Curtis said it was ‘more likely than not’ she sustained the broken neck but it was not found on examination.
He said: ‘Following readmission to the same hospital on February 15, 2009 a CT scan confirmed such fracture which in post mortem investigations revealed to be influenced by a pre-existing bone infection.
‘Her condition deteriorated and she died at Doncaster Royal Infirmary on February 21, 2009.’
After the hearing, Mr Cole said he is considering taking legal action against the Doncaster Royal Infirmary.
A hospital spokesman offered condolences to the family and said officials would be happy to meet relatives to discuss any ‘outstanding concerns’.
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Waste in the NHS was highlighted yesterday when it emerged that a private health firm was paid £26million for operations that never took place.
Bosses signed a five-year contract costing £70million for 9,000 operations to be carried out annually.
Although fewer than two-thirds of the procedures went ahead, the taxpayer has had to foot the entire bill under the terms of the deal.
With the NHS facing big cuts in its budget over the next four years the bungled contract makes a mockery of efforts to save money, say critics.
The amount lost would cover the salaries of 1,000 nurses for a year.
The deal with the South African firm Netcare was signed in 2005 and expired last month. In that time the 10 Greater Manchester primary care trusts used only 62 per cent of the operations Netcare was contracted to undertake at the Greater Manchester Surgical Centre which it took over from the Trafford NHS Trust.
Paul Mainwaring, chairman of watchdog the Patients’ Council, described the waste as “a huge amount of money which could have been so much better spent”.
Health chiefs say when the contract was signed some people in the region were waiting 15 months for operations but as hospital waiting times fell dramatically thanks to Netcare’s efforts, fewer opted to go to the private unit.
The centre will transfer back to the trust as planned later this summer.
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Declaring a swine flu pandemic was a 'monumental error', driven by profit-hungry drug companies spreading fear, an influential report has concluded.
It led to huge amounts of taxpayers' money being wasted in stockpiling vaccines, it added.
Paul Flynn, the Labour MP charged with investigating the handling of the swine flu outbreak for the Council of Europe, described it as 'a pandemic that never really was'.
The report accuses the World Health Organisation of grave shortcomings in the transparency of the process that led to its warning last year.
The MP said that the world relied on the WHO, but after 'crying wolf', its reputation was in jeopardy.
The report questions whether the pandemic was driven by drug companies seeking a profit. Mr Flynn said predictions of a 'plague' that would wipe out up to 7.5million people proved to be 'an exaggeration', with fewer than 20,000 deaths worldwide.
Britain braced itself for up to 65,000 deaths and signed vaccine contracts worth £540million.
The actual number of deaths was fewer than 500 and the country is now desperately trying to unpick the contracts and unload millions of unused jabs.
The focus on swine flu also led to other health services suffering and widespread public fear.
Pharmaceutical companies, however, profited to the tune of £4.6billion from the sale of vaccines alone.
Mr Flynn said: 'There is not much doubt that this was an exaggeration on stilts. They vastly over-stated the danger on bad science and the national governments were in a position where they had to take action.
'In Britain, we have spent at least £1billion on preparations, to the detriment of other parts of the health system. This is a monumental failure on the WHO's part.'
The Council of Europe inquiry heard allegations that the WHO had downgraded its definition for declaring a pandemic last spring - just weeks before announcing there was a worldwide outbreak.
Critics said the decision to remove any need to consider the deadliness of the disease was driven by drug companies desperate to recoup the billions of pounds they had invested in developing pandemic vaccines after the bird flu scares.
But the WHO said its basic definition of a pandemic never changed.
Mr Flynn said: 'It doesn't make any sense as to why they should have changed the definition a month before declaring an outbreak.
'In this case, it might not just be a conspiracy theory, it might be a very profitable conspiracy.'
An investigation earlier this year revealed more than half of the swine flu taskforce advising the Government on its strategy had ties to drug companies.
Eleven of the 20 members of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies had done work for the pharmaceutical industry or are linked to it through their universities.
Concerns about drug companies' influence are also highlighted by a separate investigation by the British Medical Journal and the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
It found that key scientists behind the WHO's advice on stockpiling pandemic flu pills such as Tamiflu had financial ties with the drug companies that stood to profit. The WHO last night firmly rejected all the criticism.
Spokesman Gregory Hartl said: 'There is no question of this being a fake pandemic. If fits the criteria for a pandemic, which is a new virus to which human beings have little or no immunity and which has spread around the world.
'It spread from zero to 74 countries in the space of 9 weeks - that's a pandemic.'
He said that not all ties to drug companies were necessarily conflicts of interest.
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Genetically modified crops were last night given enthusiastic backing by the Environment Secretary.
Caroline Spelman shocked colleagues by suggesting that the coalition government will take a more pro-GM stance than its Labour predecessor.
The Tories have traditionally taken a sceptical approach to so- called 'Frankenstein foods', and at present no GM varieties are cultivated commercially in the UK.
Labour ministers shied away from promoting GM foods in recent years over concerns about a public backlash.
But Mrs Spelman insisted last night they could bring 'benefits to food in the marketplace'.
Her intervention drew fierce criticism from anti-GM campaigners, who accused her of getting her facts wrong and highlighted her background as a lobbyist for biotechnology.
Mrs Spelman set up a food and biotechnology lobbying company Spelman, Cormack and Associates with her husband, Mark Spelman, in 1989. Although she resigned as a company director last year, the firm remains in the hands of her husband.
esterday Mrs Spelman said she was in favour of GM foods 'in the right circumstances', though she insisted they should not be promoted using public money and expressed concerns-about some aspects of the technology. 'GM can bring benefits in food to the marketplace. The sale should not be promoted by the taxpayer,' she said.
'Lord Henley [the new environment minister] has approved a trial of a potato blight-resistant variety. That's the kind of modification that can reduce the amount of agro-chemicals which need to be applied.'
She added: 'There are benefits to developing countries, like drought resistance or resistance to high salt content in water. The principle of GM technology is [ok] if used well. The technology can be beneficial.'
However, she criticised Labour's £500,000 official public consultation into genetically modified food, which is in turmoil following protests that it has been rigged. This week, two academics on a Food Standards Agency committee resigned in protest saying they could not support a spin exercise to promote GM food.
'The Food Standards Agency should not be spending taxpayers' money promoting GM foods,' Mrs Spelman said. Aides insisted last night that the minister had been speaking before any firm policy on GM crops has been established.
Pete Riley, director of GM Freeze, welcomed her remarks about the GM consultation. But he added: 'The Secretary of State needs to check very carefully before making claims about
'There are no salt tolerant or drought resistant crops on the market and none seem likely in the foreseeable future.
'Non-GM blight resistant potatoes are already on the market, whilst the GM ones are still being developed despite a £1.7million investment of public money to date.
'Mrs Spelman needs to be very careful in how she deals with GM issues given her background as a lobbyist in the area and should take advice from a far wider spectrum before making policy.'
Mrs Spelman also said she would block the practice of building on green belt and create new green belt areas.
She confirmed that badgers would be culled in England and that there would be a free vote on repealing Labour's hunting ban.
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Labour ministers spent an astonishing £1.8billion on consultants in a single year - double the amount of the previous 12 months, it was revealed today.
The figure was unveiled in the first publication of the government's entire expenditure. For the first time ever, the Treasury released a massive database which details spending line by line.
Labour’s spendthrift habit was laid bare across the 24 million individual entries for the year 2009-10.
Sources from the incoming government said they were ‘shocked’ at how much Labour had spent on consultants, particularly at the height of the economic crisis.
The Department of Health was the biggest spender, splashing out nearly half a billion pounds - £480,420,000 in one year alone.
It was followed by the Department for International Development, which spent £288,100,000 on consultants, despite its main aim being to provide aid to the world’s poor.
The scandal-plagued Home Office hired consultants to the tune of £194,116,000.
The £1.8billion consultancy bill is the equivalent of nearly a third of the cuts that will be felt across Whitehall departments and public services this year.
In 2007/8, the 16 biggest Whitehall departments spent £909million on consultants.
The Combined Online Information System released yesterday has the apt acronym, COINS.
But the Con-Lib government’s claim that it heralded openness was met with some scepticism, as the database is too vast and unusable for anyone but computer and data experts to decipher.
Before they were in government, the Conservatives had talked up the prospect of the database creating a £6billion private industry which would crunch and analyse the data.
The party’s manifesto said: ‘Our plans to open up government data and spending information will not only help us to cut wasteful spending, but according to new research... it will also create an estimated £6bn in additional value for the UK.’
Danny Alexander, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, said it paved the way for more transparency across government.
‘For too long, the previous government acted as if the public had no right to know where their hard-earned taxes were spent.
‘Today we have lifted that veil of secrecy by releasing detailed spending figures dating back to 2008.
‘This data is complex, but this is a major step forward and shows we are delivering on our promise to make this government more open and transparent while ensuring we deliver value for money for the taxpayer.
‘I hope people will take the opportunity to scrutinise carefully how their money is being spent – as I am doing every day in preparation for the spending review.’
‘We plan to release more data in the coming months that will be easier for the general public to understand.’
The Taxpayers' Alliance welcomed the publication of the database, and hailed it as a victory for its campaign to unveil the public finances.
Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: ‘The publication of the COINS database is another fantastic victory for transparency.
'The TaxPayers’ Alliance has long campaigned for this level of openness about public spending, as the public have a right to know how their taxes are being spent.
'It is right that this data is out in the public domain, saving departments time and money responding to Freedom of Information requests.
‘The next step is for this trend to continue, so that all information about government spending is available, allowing the public to call the government to account.
'There is an army of enthusiastic, skilled amateurs out there who will gladly explore and use this information to suggest ways in which the Government can save money and improve public services.'
Former Labour minister Jim Knight, warned that there could be privacy implications however.
He said: ‘These days, people can mesh government data with commercially available data. That can give you data right down to the level of a few houses.
‘It won't be hard to get down virtually to the individual. Some would argue that gets pretty scary.’
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Climate Depot's Morano on UK radio: 'We are witnessing a secondary collapse of man-made global warming fears'
'All they have left now are shrill claims from government funded science organizations...this was a political movement at its heart, it was not a scientific movement...It was a con job through and through and they are facing utter disgrace and they deserve every bit of it' -- 'As long as the UN IPCC chief Pachauri stays, the better off all citizens of the world are because the UN IPCC will continue to have no credibility'
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Shock new evidence of a NASA scientist faking a fundamental greenhouse gas equation shames beleaguered space administration in new global warming fraud scandal.
Caught in the heat are NASA's Dr. Judith Curry and a junk science equation by the space agency’s Dr. Gavin Schmidt creating disarray over a contentious Earth energy graph.
The internal row was ignited by the release of a sensational new research paper discrediting calculations crucial to the greenhouse gas theory.
NASA in Internal Spat over Data
Hot on the heels of my recent scoop that the U.S. space agency may have suppressed evidence from the Apollo Moon landings that invalidated the greenhouse gas (GHG) theory, an internecine fury among NASA employees over fudged equations is set to further embarrass the current U.S. Administration’s stand on global warming.
Word is getting round that junk equations were threaded into the GHG theory to artificially inflate the heating effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by a factor of two.
The spark to this cataclysmic revelation was lit in April 2007 after a public gaffe (see below) by the space administration’s Dr. Gavin Schmidt, who fronts popular pro-global warming website, ‘Real Climate.’
Click PDF file to read FULL report from John O'Sullivan
File attachment: GreenhouseGasTheoryDiscredited.pdf
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Here is a moderate Mullah! Many people would wonder why Hazrat Mirza Sahib said : “Do not say funeral prayers of such people.”
He is openly saying that because Ahmadiyya jamaat is making progress even in Pakistan its members should be put to death. So much for a moderate, tolerant Islam he is supposed to preach.
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For a country that has aspirations to join the Western comity of nations, Turkey certainly has a strange way of going about it.
Its government may not have personally sanctioned the dispatch of a flotilla of militant aid activists to Gaza, but it has lost no time in leading the international chorus of condemnation for Israel's cack-handed response.
Ahmet Davutoglu, the foreign minister, has claimed that the military interception of the flotilla, which resulted in the deaths of nine "peace" activists, has become Turkey's 9/11. The Turks even achieved the remarkable feat of persuading the Nato alliance to come to its aid. But throughout the tumult, they appear to have conveniently overlooked the damning evidence that, far from being innocent aid activists, many of those on board the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish-registered ship that led the flotilla, were hell-bent on an armed confrontation. How else do you explain the presence of gas masks, bullet-proof vests, knives and axes on the vessel?
The team of Israeli commandos that rappelled from a helicopter on to the ship's upper deck were met by a lynch mob, some of whom had openly professed a desire to achieve martyrdom prior to the voyage. In some cases, it appears their wishes were met.
While the Turkish government says it was not directly involved in sending the Mavi Marmara on its doomed mission, Israeli security officials claim the charity responsible for chartering the ship does have links to Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party.
What is not in dispute is that Turkey's bold attempt to forge an important diplomatic alliance with Israel now lies in tatters. For more than a decade, Turkey has delicately balanced the needs of its restless, predominantly Muslim, population against the strategic interests of collaborating with Israel on regional security issues. Its tilt towards Israel was in part motivated by a desire to isolate Syria, which allows the Kurdish PKK terror group to launch attacks against Turkey from its northern border.
But the Turkey-Israel partnership, which extended to the spheres of military co-operation and intelligence-sharing, was also indicative of Ankara's long-held ambition to forge closer ties with the West, in particular the European Union. As a founder member of the Nato alliance, modern Turkey did see its destiny as lying with the secular, democratic institutions of the West rather than the autocratic, repressive and increasingly Islamist regimes in its former Ottoman dominions.
Those aspirations, however, have been crudely thwarted, not least by the stance of Germany and France, who have steadfastly refused to countenance the accession of a predominantly Muslim state into the EU. Nicolas Sarkozy has been particularly patronising, pronouncing Turkey as an Asian country, not a European one. The Turkish government now increasingly finds itself on a collision course with the West. Before the Gaza flotilla had even set sail, there were a number of worrying signs that Turkey was growing weary of its unrequited courtship of the West.
For example, the Turks claim that the recent deal they negotiated with Tehran over its stockpiles of enriched uranium is a major breakthrough in Western attempts to resolve the crisis over Iran's nuclear programme. It is nothing of the sort. The Turkish deal throws a diplomatic spanner into the painstaking efforts of the Obama administration to build an international consensus on dealing with Iran. Indeed, Barak Obama believes he has secured the support of both Russia and China for a new round of sanctions, a truly impressive achievement given their historic reluctance to take the Iranian threat seriously.
Now all that hard work is in jeopardy, with Turkey and Brazil, which helped to negotiate the nuclear deal with Tehran, taking advantage of their current membership of the UN's security council to campaign against further sanctions. Meanwhile, the Turkish government's support for Iran's right to develop nuclear technology is becoming increasingly vocal.
The election of a hard-line nationalist government in Turkish northern Cyprus has also put paid to any immediate hopes of negotiating a peace settlement with their Greek Cypriot neighbours. Resolving that dispute had been one of the EU's key requirements for giving Turkey's membership application serious consideration.
Consequently, a country that was once the sick man of Europe has become the angry man of the East. The fear now is that it may become another Pakistan, and the frustrations of millions of frustrated secular Muslims may lead them down the path of Islamist radicalisation.
Die-hard supporters of Kemal Ataturk's secular post-First World War settlement have always scoffed at the prospect of Turkey ever adopting the hard-line Islamist ideology that prevails on the other side of its border with Iran. But they would do well to note that many of those involved in arranging the Gaza flotilla have close ties to radical Islamic groups such as Hamas.
Certainly the West cannot afford to ignore Turkey's disturbing involvement in the whole affair. Its geographical location alone makes it imperative that it remains a close and valued ally, and is not allowed to drift to the wilder shores of Islamist extremism.
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rugfish - Green Arrow & Friends
Well, the media are creeping out of the woodwork preparing us for the fall I see by making headlines out of the Bilderberg Group which previously only nutters, idiots, conspiracy theorists and people like me and you knew about but were never believed.
I mean it's not like the British National Party leader has been talking about a Marxist plot to take over the world or anything, heaven forbid the media would actually report that!
But at least they are mentioning it.
Okay, maybe I should for once give the BBC a bit of credit for covering at least part of the Bilderberg story in 2004, which I got a link HERE and placed on my blog 2 weeks ago HERE.
Fair's fair so they say so I can only presume that the reporter responsible is still working.
But I'm pleased to see the Daily Telegraph reporting the problems of maintaining a dud currency - the Euro, and I also noticed Speigel online yesterday which mentioned its demise in a report that blamed politicians (Merkel and Sarkozy), for doing more to save their political skins than to actually save the economy.
The Times however hits half a nail on its head with its headline: 'Secretive Bilderberg Club ready for protests'. Note: This is the same paper which released Mandelson's book story yesterday, who just happens to be attending the Bilderberg Group in case you missed it.
But! It might be all a bit fruitless and pointless other than for the secret puppeteers to have 3 days leisure facilities of course, because after all is said and done, us people are already caught on to them and with the current economic system there is actually NO WAY OUT OF THE MESS WE'RE IN except to cancel debt.
Cancel debt?
What debt?
Oh, it's THEIR DEBT. Yes don't worry, you don't owe a thing and neither does our government because it's all imaginary money with imaginary secret backers who have suddenly all agreed to enlighten us of their existence I imagine because they are preparing to be compensated.
You see, me being a true cynic which takes a lifetime to learn, I understand their moves before they make them because I look around and listen and watch what others do.
People like Daniel Estulin for example who is shortly about to release his new book Shadow Masters which is the culmination of his 13 years worth of investigations into the Bilderberg Group which he describes as a 'limited company', of the 'aristocracy of the progressives', which he says holds more wealth than nations and acts purely in its (their), own interests, which is funnily enough what we think too and tried to tell papers like the Times all about it but were always written off as 'theorists'.
Maybe if they play their cards right, Mr Griffin could tell them what we all know about Marxism too and how together with capitalist swine who think they can create a real new world order if only we keep believing that those who own all the paper they created are actually 'rich' and intelligent enough to get 'us' out of 'the mess THEY are in', whilst wondering how to convince the rest of us that the paper they created is actually worth something so we'll continue to let them remain in 'control' of the very countries we once called ours.
It's the same trick a magician or conjurer does when he brings a rabbit out of his hat and part of the audience will swear blind it is magic but most of us know he got it from under the table.
That's the real world of money.
It never existed in the first place and only by hypnosis can you be made to believe that it ever did.
Okay, I don't believe in magic and I don't believe in fairies although I can see Peter Mandelson is real.
So now it's over to The Bilderberg Group and its media pawns to convince me that I can be hypnotised against my will which I also know is impossible. Or, to take one of a couple of measures: 1) Sit back and let the governments of the world pretend that the economic system is collapsing, 2) Pump more fake money in to make Bilderbergers dreams come true, 3) Cancel debt and start again, or 4) Resign from office and hand it over to people who always knew that money never grew on trees.
I don't have much hope they'll do any of them so if anyone is visiting the Dolce hotel in Spain over the next few days could they put their ear to the window and tell the rest of us what went on?
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For those who still don’t get it, let me spell out just why the response by Cameron, Clegg and Hague to the Turkish terrorist flotilla incident is so despicable and so terrifying.
At a time when much of the western world has turned itself into a kind of global Nuremberg rally – this time wit