Photo ID and the secret ballot

Let's be honest. We all know the real reason for rolling this out is that those from countries, notably those from Pakistan and Bangladesh, which have a tradition of electoral corruption, personation, vote rigging, electoral fraud and criminal politicians, have been caught many times trying the same tricks at UK elections. That's not racist - the Electoral Commission lays it out quite honestly in its 2014 report. 

Now photo ID requirements just for certain ethnic groups is of course highly discriminatory and quite wrong. But the Electoral Commission don't want to make it harder for the innocent majority to vote in the next election. What to do? Well, why not roll out a 'trial ID scheme' in all those places most likely to be subject to voting fraud? The EC identified the following; 

Cue howls of rage and anguish from the corrupt Left whose poll in many red areas depends on voting fraud and corruption. And thereby they also declare that for them, party comes before country. 

Labour's support of democratic corruption left the coalition in 2010 with a voting system of third world standards; Michael Pinto-Duschinsky advised parliament that there were 3m electors on the rolls who shouldn't be, and 3m missing who should be. Our constituency boundaries, and Electoral Quotient, did not even meet the minimum standards for First World standards of +/- 5%, let alone the +/- 3% standard applied by advanced economies such as New Zealand.

Since 2010, and since this blog joined in the chorus of horror and shock at Labour's complacency, from 2008 onwards, the EC have reformed voter registration (new IVR) and made some valuable changes to postal voting. New constituency boundaries are scheduled to be in place by 2020. All that remains (except reversing the Blair corruption of postal votes) is to tackle the South Asian practice of electoral corruption by personation - and this is now being done.  

I think cautious praise is due. It's all been done quietly and incrementally, drawing howls of rage from corrupt Labour each time but the changes have a fairness and equity that the population can recognise and welcome. So well done, the Electoral Commission. Don't let it all be corrupted again.

Woman achievers, stress and cancer

I'm just throwing a thought, a question, out this morning. Along with the headline sudden death of this Christmas, I received in an email exchange with an old workmate news that a woman ex-colleague died of cancer last month. Nothing unusual about that, you may think, but she's either either the fourth or fifth that I know about - albeit over about twenty years. 

They all had certain things in common. They were ambitious achievers, in reasonably senior positions and all worked under greater than usual stress and all have died of cancer in their 40s and 50s. The blokes all seem to be buggering on, with various ailments coming with age but not the attrition rate of the big C. And that's anecdotal, not empirical, so not science.

The science I can find tends to say there's no link between stress and female cancer but the many answers seem to indicate that I'm not the only one seeing a correlation and asking the question. Which is, does busting the glass ceiling, competing with men in a male-normative environment, and coping with above normal stress, increase the cancer risk for women?

H, who died most recently, had actually left her high-stress job more than a year ago to do something far more relaxed, that she enjoyed, in a county city that she loved. So poignant.

Con Coughlin coughing into his cornflakes

Poor old Con Coughlin must be coughing into his Christmas cornflakes this morning. Following instructions from his FCO and MoD masters, poor old Con has being doing his best to talk-up a war with Russia all year. No incident was too trivial to be mis-interpreted, no pretext too minor for Con to rattle his lightsabre on the Telegraph's Defence desk. And all year all the poor sod's earned for his pains is laughter, mockery and regular pillorying in blogs such as this. And now his own paper mocks his efforts; former Moscow Ambassador Tony Brenton writes

"Russia is not a threat to the West. Our defence expenditure is ten times, and our economy 20 times, Russia’s. Putin is ruthless but not stupid – he will not take on those odds. Current western policy towards Russia has failed. Sanctions have cemented popular support for Putin even as the Russian economy resumes growth. The Russians are winning in Syria, and show no sign of letting go in Ukraine. Meanwhile there are important things we should be working on together. Islamic extremism is a much greater threat to both of us than we are to each other. The British government has been among the most vociferous hawks on Russia. Time for us to be more British; lower the volume, and think harder about where our real interests lie."

Amen to that. Peace and fellowship between our Christian lands, and love to all men except the buggers trying to kill us. Have a wonderful Christmas all and thanks for another superlative year - your comments are a joy, and inspire me each day.  

Post-Brexit status of EU prisoners?

Nothing too taxing for the holiday period, but looking at the most recent parliamentary prison stats document a couple of things struck me -

• We currently hold about 2,900 prisoners from EU countries - almost a thousand from Poland alone. Will they be included in a Brexit right of residence deal?
• Christians form 50% of the prison population but 60% of the general population while Muslims form 15% of the prison population but only 4% of the General population over 15. Does this prove Christians are better people than Muslims? (Athiests are only marginally over-represented in prison)

On a serious note, younger people are becoming progressively less likely to offend, which suggests the crim bulge may be just that - a moving, ageing crim bulge - and as it works its way through and the drunks, bottlers, tea leaves and  assorted ne'er-do-wells just become too old to be serious offenders our prison population will fall. So perhaps no need for panic - those born before 1976 just seem to be more criminal. 

When will we cut the head from this Saudi terror serpent?

What do virtually all US and European Islamist terror attacks since 9/11 have in common? Easy, isn't it. Not only is anti-western terrorism almost exclusively a Sunni Muslim occupation, but it comes from one single branch of radical Salafist / Wahhabi / Deobandi Islamism. And this originates in Saudi Arabia, is funded, promoted and exported by Saudi Arabia and is nurtured, protected and shielded by Western greed for Saudi blood money. 

Europe's governments, and particularly Germany's government already know this. German Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel told us so last year; "Wahhabi mosques are financed all over the world by Saudi Arabia. In Germany, many dangerous Islamists come from these communities" he told Bild am Sonntag. Austria recently passed a special law to ban foreign funding of mosques and imams - so far the only EU country to do so. Turkey's carpet-chewing dictator Erdogan was bitter in his reaction - the Turkish government directly employed and supplied 60 radical Sunni imams to Austrian mosques, all of whom would be deported and replaced with native-grown ones. And the Saudi patrons of terror are banned from any funding of Islamist organisations. Austrian foreign minister Sebastian Kurz defended the pragmatic new law, which only applies to Islamic funding, from accusations of discrimination; "The influence of foreign countries is a problem we only have in the Muslim community. We do not have this problem in the other religious communities" he shrugged.

The perpetrator of yesterday's Berlin outrage has tentatively been identified as Pakistani / Afghan. No doubt he is a Sunni, and no doubt from one of the Salafist branches. The only other question is whether he was radicalised by a Saudi-funded mosque serving the 25,000 strong migrant camp in which he was located. But I fear neither the BBC nor others of the #fakenews tendency will tell us.

So. We all know the Islamists have been planning Christmas attacks in Europe, ISIS and al nusra / al queda and the other Saudi terror arms have been encouraging their sleepers to commit such acts and now it's happened why should we be surprised? Europe including the UK still allows the Saudi serpent to spread its poison venom across our continent. When will we have the sense to strike the head from this terror serpent?

Update
=======
Adjacent to the Tempelhof camp is the Salafist-funded Ibrahim al-Khalil Mosque. According to Wikipedia, the Moroccan imam has a history of recruiting to Syrian terrorist groups and inciting Islamist violence ...

How the Guardian tells lies

As one of the UK's post-truth behemoths, the Guardian still trades on a reputation established in more honest times, before the paper carried fake news as a matter of course. Jonathan Freedland today condemns what he terms the lies of others - but ignores his paper's own record of journalistic dishonesty. 

In the paper's news content you don't have to look far to find prime examples of those heinous journalistic sins Omission, Distortion and Misrepresentation. It took me just a few minutes today to find the following in this morning's report in the paper of the protests outside the Polish parliament; 'Police use tear gas to clear parliament blockade' reads the headline, but in the piece itself the gassing is hardly mentioned - "Opposition party MP Jerzy Meysztowicz told the television network that police used tear gas to disperse the protesters who tried to prevent the cars from leaving." In other words, the paper has no evidence for the use of tear gas, no independent corroboration, just a hearsay anecdote from one of the protesters.

Nor it seems did the paper's 'journalists' seek to confirm the story with the Polish police - or perhaps they DID check with the Polish police as to whether tear gas had been used. And didn't like the answer, and so lied about it. RT also carries the protest story -  and reports "Warsaw police spokesman Mariusz Mrozek subsequently denied reports that police had deployed tear gas against protesters, claiming that what might have looked like tear gas in fact was smoke from fireworks thrown by demonstrators".  

And so the truth emerges. Protesters trying to prevent the convoy of official cars from leaving threw 'fireworks' - in probability marine signal flares - the smoke from which was interpreted by an inexperienced protester in a heightened state of excitement as tear gas, and the Guardian reported this as a fact.

So the Guardian's strap line is simply lousy, unacceptable, fake-news journalism, based on the single uncorroborated hearsay of a single demonstrator and officially denied by the police. It's either omission or distortion, take your pick. And in Freedland's own words, it's a lie.

Post-credulous audience hears evidence of fake news broadcast by post-truth BBC

The video link provided by a commentor in the post below is a scorcher. At a UN press conference, independent Canadian journo Eva Bartlett demolishes the credibility of the fake news from Aleppo promulgated by, amongst others, the Guardian and the BBC.

"..what you hear in the corporate media, and I will name them – BBC, Guardian, the New York Times etc. – on Aleppo is also the opposite of reality"

In a devastating surgical dissection, Bartlett dismisses the BBC's main source of news in Aleppo - one man in Coventry, with an agenda, who calls himself 'Syrian Observatory for Human Rights'. She points out that there are NO international humanitarian organisations in rebel-held Aleppo and NO credible independent sources of news from there. The White Helmets are exposed as an armed partisan force funded by $100m from the US / EU / UK who fake news footage (documented) and are, I strongly suspect, a thin cover for arms shipments to the rebels and for western intelligence organisations.

There is NO evidence, she points out, that the White Helmets have ever been in rebel-held areas of Aleppo at all. Such news is fake.

Bartlett appeared before fellow international journalists, all of whom had full opportunity to question her and require evidence. She comes out as honest, sane and very credible - and the post-truth BBC and Guardian come out as shabby liars and charlatans.

"So they [the White Helmets] are not credible. The SOHR are not credible. 'Unnamed activists' are not credible. Once or twice maybe, but every time? Not credible. So your sources on the ground – you don't have them. You ask why we aren't seeing this. This relates to the other gentleman's question about why most of the corporate media are telling lies about Syria. It's because this is the agenda; if they had told the truth about Syria from the beginning, we wouldn't be here now. We wouldn't have seen so many people killed."

I commend this video. Make a coffee, take a break and play.

Christmas peace for Aleppo's Christians as Islamist butchers routed

The routing of Saudi, Turkish and US backed Islamist butchers from Aleppo by united Syrian and Iranian forces, backed by Russia, will allow the devastated city's remaining Christians  to celebrate a bleak Christmas this year. They may have little for a festive feast - but the gifts of life, family and hope will transcend the horrors of persecution, dreadful torture and genocide under the repressive and murderous regime of the Islamist rebels. 

Assad has many faults but religious intolerance is not amongst them. He protects not only Syria's ancient Christian population but also many other minority faiths, all the target of violence, hate and extinction by the Islamist rebels backed by Saudi Arabia and others. 

Fools including Cameron and George Osborne in the UK have done nothing but prolong the war, extend the agony and add to the heaps of dead and dreadfully injured innocents. Their corrupt links with KSA and Sunni business interests will not stand scrutiny - and they put greed for gold above the lives of the poor suffering innocents of Syria. May they have a miserable Christmas amongst their Islamist chums. 

Just rejoice and spare a prayer of thanks for our brothers and sisters now rebuilding their lives in Aleppo under Syrian government protection.  

President and Mrs Assad attend a Christmas service

Yes, Vladimir Putin should be TIME's person of the year

The headline of Jonathan Freedland's piece in the Guardian is about the only accurate thing in the article. Truly, the Guardian has found its niche in a post-truth world in which omission, distortion and misrepresentation of the truth pads the pages of even the broadsheets. But of course the post-truth meme has a corollary; an informed readership that is post-credulous. We simply don't believe them any more. And with good reason. 

Yes, everyone admits, Boris was quite right, absolutely spot-on about Saudi Arabia, but as a member of the establishment he is required to lie to the public. His fault was not to lie for his government. And if the establishment grudgingly admits that it's lying about KSA, it won't take much to squeeze the admission that they lied over Yugoslavia, Iraq (whoops - got that one already), Afghanistan, Ukraine, Libya and Syria. Only patsies such as Jonathan and Con over at the Telegraph still trot out the feeble old establishment ordure. But the post-credulous don't buy it. 

I was enjoying drinks with some undergrads from Vienna a couple of weeks ago. Without any diminution of their proper patriotism (for Germany and Denmark as well as for Austria) they all expressed their admiration for Putin. He's everything they want our own leaders to be - smart, ruthless, patriotic, daring, skilled and cynical. And yes. For all his successes evident in 2016, he deserves TIME's appellation more than Trump. Russia has just the GDP of Italy yet still strides the world stage like a colossus. And outsmarts and outfoxes all of Europe's dull, failing, ineffective unelected officials with all their dreary policy blunders. 

What a perfect time for that leprous old fossil, himself the very Father of Fake News, bloody Blair to appear with the intention of founding a new public disinformation service, pumping out prime fake news better than the rest. And he may even have an establishment fair wind; a well informed comment over at CAW reveals that

Raedwald, I strongly suspect it is the National Security Council not the "the numpties at the FCO" that is responsible for the UK line on Syria, and I suspect the NSC is strongly under the influence of the Cabinet Office / Joint Intelligence Committee / PM. For example the new-ish £1+ billion Conflict, Stability and Security Fund (CSSF) seems to be driving UK spending in Syria now, and that has been under NSC control since 2015, using money largely transferred away from DfID. (eg spending on the White Helmets is now cumulatively £32+ million, part of "capacity building for civil society"). Also £5.3+m for "media activists" - bloggers, tweeters and facebookers? More alarming £1.4 million UK CSSF money spent on the "Syrian rebel coalition's lobbying bill in Washington DC and the UN" - pretty weird stuff.

So who better than Blair to head up the government's own fake news channels? New Blair - New Disinformation?

Top Human Rights lawyer to be struck off for lack of integrity

P.Shiner - to be struck off

The first of a number of corrupt human rights lawyers to face legal action is set to be struck-off after admitting a raft of charges of recklessness and lack of integrity. Shiner is contesting a further raft of dishonesty charges, which if proven could lead to his being jailed. 

Shiner's firm PIL has already been shut down. Other 'human rights' lawyers who were part of the frenzy of improper and unprofessional bottom-feeding coprophagia led by Shiner and his firm may also now face charges. 

Even as Shiner's life now lies in ruins - some justice, many will think, for the misery and persecution his scum-sucking business brought to members and ex-members of HM Armed Forces - other bottom-feeding scum lawyers are even now unearthing unreliable anecdotes and prejudiced memories of the Troubles in the province of Northern Ireland. Their aim is to find wrongdoing in the actions of members of HM Armed Forces in order to extort 'compensation' from UK taxpayers to meet both their own fat fees and a payoff for any 'victims' they can find.

They will no doubt by now be on notice as to how they proceed. Shiner's downfall is not only for his own malfeasance but pour encourager les autres.

Boris spot-on about the head-choppers & crane-hangers

Boris' leaked comments about the primitive native barbarism of the uncivilised head-choppers of Saudi Arabia and the crane-hangers of Iran are actually spot on. The effete old maids of the FCO, perhaps the most utterly useless bunch of tossers in charge of foreign policy since the Dutch fleet sailed up the Thames to poop in the king's river, are having camp vapours at the honesty. 

Of course these two champions of the Sunni and Shia branches of the Islamic superstition are fighting proxy wars all over the Middle East of the most primitive barbarity, but wars waged with all the technological weapons that these oil-rich spear chuckers haven't the wit or the means to make for themselves. Half of Europe is shovelling in the cash whilst maintaining the pretence that the Islamic savages are actually allies. 

As Boris might say, Pish.

Forced Muslim integration - painful but necessary

I'm going to annoy some regular commentors by re-stating that I have a problem with the Islamic faith, not Muslims and with primitive native fetishes, not people with brown skin. Muslims are never going to be deported en masse, sent to concentration camps, compulsorily sterilised or chemically lobotomised. So get over it. Those that are here legally are here to stay, and we can act to modify any exhibition of deviant behaviour within the law but that's it. 

Even a year ago writing the paragraph above would still have been seen as the action of a right-wing extremist, a racist or a dangerous swivel-eyed loony by the coercive, bullying and illiberal neo-libs. Today it's mainstream. This week the floodgates have opened and the pushback by a sensible, humane and intelligent majority against the bigoted zealotry of lefty neolibs is gaining momentum.

First the Policy Exchange survey, watered and bowdlerised but still effective, graded the way.  Then came the Casey Review, which pulled no punches at all. Trevor Phillips followed-up with a hard hitting piece entitled "White liberals have speeded segregation in the UK. The great struggle now is to reverse it" and today I delight in another piece in the Telegraph by Allison Pearson;

It sounds good – but what the Casey report really tells us is unbearably bleak. Immigration needs to be restricted, marriages to “cousins” must be stopped (that means closing any ruses about coming in through Europe, too). Any man whose wife needs his permission to leave the house is not a patriarch, he’s a criminal. Islamic schools that brainwash their pupils, and treat boys differently from girls, must be closed. It’s no good pretending that all “faith schools” are equal; how many “British Catholic” primaries do you know that are incubating extremists? There is no place in a liberal, equal society for sharia courts. Oh, and ban the wretched burka, please.

And on that final point even Mutti Merkel is a convert. Yes, trash the ghastly dehumanising rags and let's see the faces of our fellow citizens. Forcing the backward and superstitious Muslim people of Britain to integrate will hurt both them and us - but it's entirely necessary.

Austrians are neither cowards nor fascists

The volume and viciousness of the internet invective directed at the Austrians yesterday surprised me. Their crime was to have swung about 8% since the last time they voted, defeating the candidate of the right. The rabid UK right on the web angrily branded them leftist green cowards, whilst the Guardian's own little Owen Jones waspishly asked why was he supposed to praise Austria because only 46% of them had voted fascist. Both extremes of hate are prime examples of gobbing-off without knowing one's arse from one's elbow. 

I strongly suspect Van der Bellen was supported because he stood as an independent, has stressed he represents all Austrians, is a more presidential figure than Hofer, defends the status quo and will do nothing to rock the boat - in other words, he will do exactly what a largely ceremonial President is expected to do. But Hofer is no fascist, nor even is he 'far right' as the BBC insists on terming him. He's just a deeply conservative Austrian traditionalist embodying the fear that Austrians are losing control over their own destiny. A Venn diagram of the two candidates would actually show a large overlap - giving the lie to uninformed UK commentors who see a divisive polarisation.  

Austrian politics are largely consensual. A Red-Black coalition - socialists and conservatives - has effectively been in power since the war, and only recently is being challenged in the Nationalrat by the Greens and Hofer's Blues. It's as if Theresa May was in coalition with Labour, and had Hillary Benn as her Foreign Secretary. Crazy, but it works. 

But perhaps more deeply ingrained in voters is Austria's post war irrevocable declaration of Permanent Neutrality. Never again, pledged Austrians, would their nation strike the spark of European war. I don't think that's cowardice. 

The country's conservative traditionalism does not make it a comfortable place for migrants. Dispersed to small rural communities around Austria, housed in barracks and youth hostels, fed boiled pasta three times a day and de-loused, disinfected and medicated as efficiently and bio-organically as any dairy herd, restricted to riding bicycles or using country postbus services, it is not the instant wealth, apartment and Audi they dreamt of. Add to those discomforts the insistence of cheery Austrians in greeting them a score of times a day with "Grüß Gott!" in praise to the Christian three-person God, a profusion of lovingly tended roadside crosses and Marian shrines, and Alpine valleys that ring with the echo of church bells three times a day and you can understand why the migrants drift to Germany and elsewhere where the Ummah has taken stronger hold.   

So neither cowards nor fascists, Austrians made a decision that will be comfortable for all Austrians to wear. And they did it for themselves, not for rabid incendiaries in foreign lands nor for ill-informed and illiberal scribblers like the Guardian's little stars. 

I can live with that.

Yes, Richmond matters - but it's not what they think

The minor frisson of joy that swept through the butthurt remoaners at the Richmond result has been poorly interpreted by the political class in the MSM. It is not the start of a Brexit fightback, it is not the rollback of leaving the EU. It does, however, mark the start of our voting for MPs based not on party but on whether they are Brexiteers or Remoaners. 

David Lammy, a politician who usually wears a mask of crassness and stupidity, knows this. His London constituency is solid remoaner, and the value of his declaring that he will vote against Article 50 before the debate has even been tabled, let alone the arguments heard, is high. He has already started cementing his place for 2020. 

If the parliamentary obstructions, the acts of sabotage, are too great or progress too delayed, then 2020 will cause the greatest upheaval in Parliament for a century, with a strong Brexiteer government facing a sparse remoaner opposition across the house.