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Hunt supporters - Hammond, Gaulk, Amber Rudd - really should have told Conservative voters all they needed to know. However, the cherry on the cake has got to be the endorsement of Sir John Major. A TBP member rather cruelly spelt it out on Twitter -
The only people who reckon Hunt still has a chance are the desperate hacks at the BBC, Sky news and fairies-at-the-bottom-of-the-garden fantasists such as LBC's James O'Brien, together with a few sad MSM journos who are watching their Remain hope swirl down the pan.
For twenty years I enjoyed rough shooting. I claim in my defence that everything I shot went into my own pot - it was all eaten - and I never, ever, took part in a City Boy driven shoot. If you didn't walk five miles of hedge and fall on your arse at least once it wasn't a proper shoot. If it was a good day, I'd come away with a hare or rabbit, a brace of pheasants and a few wood pigeons. Now I'd rather watch wildlife than shoot it. I've come to the conclusion that you lose a tiny bit of your soul every time you kill an animal.
As I also fish, I'm a bit ambivalent on aquarian species. It all depends how easily they die, really. White fish, trout and arthropods all have the decency to die fairly quickly and without fuss. Dogfish are a bugger - I guess a million years of shark evolution have given them a zombie-like longevity. Long after everything else in the boat is decently dead, Scyliorhinus canicula can still bite. Painfully.
Another hard creature to kill is the eel. I once brought home two live eels for our dinner from the Chinese fish shop on Newport Place, and popped them in the sink in some cold water whilst I headed for the shower. By the time I'd dried off, my then girlfriend had christened them Dylan and Hendrix and they were thirty seconds away from becoming pets. I had to send her off to the co-op on an errand before gripping them in a scouring pad to chop off their heads.
And forty years ago before our Anglian coast had become popular with the Farringdon-on-sea crowd, we would, as a group of youngsters, descend on the Butley Oysterage for both hot and cold smoked Anguilla anguilla. It was like a fisherman's cafe in those days, and you had to bring you own beer if you wanted alcohol. Years later I went back with a London gourmand chum who had never been served an entire smoked eel before and who attempted, for about ten minutes, to treat the skin as one would a succulent piece of pork crackling. As it's also used to cover sword handles, he had little success.
Anyway, eels have become something of a favourite of mine. I'm an eel champion. Their journeys from Sargasso Sea to the head of those tiny Suffolk tidal creeks is truly a natural miracle. And cold smoked eel shredded onto fresh scrambled home-laid eggs is truly a dish fit for the Gods.
Anyway, I was gladdened to hear a piece this morning on Farming Today on a project to re-populate west coast waters with the British eel; it is now as endangered, the programme claims, as the Blue Whale. So no Brexit today, dear readers; spare a half second instead committing yourself to the cause of Anguilla anguilla.
Back in September last year, when the High Court delivered an excoriating verdict on the Electoral Commission's competency, I wrote
The case was brought by 'Remain' on the grounds that the Electoral Commission had given the Leave campaign duff advice based on an inadequate understanding of the law of which they could also have taken advantage had they been given the same duff advice. You will recall that as a consequence of the Commission's misleading Leave and its general incompetence, it crowed like a cock when it itself judged Leave guilty of breaching the regulations and imposed a fine to equal that levied on the LibDems for their breaches.
Reading the court's judgement one finds a litany of arse-covering, post hoc rationalisation, weasel reasoning and straw-clutching on the part of the Commission.
Well, you won't be surprised to learn that it's happened again. Guido has the story - and a copy of a legal letter that with blistering invective catalogues the EC's omissions, distortions and misrepresentations, from which this is just a small sample -
The EC has whined back at the Met Police that they thought the two unelected bodies had an agreement to keep quiet about the EC's unforgivable failures. The Met itself is not innocent and knows all about hiding evidence - police non-disclosure has led to the collapse of several cases recently.
We cannot go on like this. It is high time that the EC is replaced by a body fit for purpose. My conclusion back in September applies equally to the Electoral Commission's current egregious failings -
A democracy needs an authoritative and trusted arbiter of the probity of democratic actions, an unbiased and expert authority vested with moral and legal trust and confidence. Simply, the present Electoral Commission has failed those criteria on every point. It is, as the court found, not fit for purpose as currently constituted and must be reformed. That means both the professional officers, and the appointed Commissioners - who fail utterly to represent the electorate as a whole.
Booker
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We must all mourn the departure of a journalist whose life and work has added immeasurably to the quality of our democracy. We need such people. Reading both the Telegraph Obit and Richard North's appreciation provides a rounded apologia.
After yesterday's round of corrupt appointments to the EU's top crony jobs - including the convicted criminal fraudster Christine Lagarde to the presidency of the ECB - the way is clear for the EU to cast aside its benign disguise of lederhosen and dirndl and assume the breeches and jackboots that have been kept lurking in the closet.
The first victim of the EU's expansionist aggression is to be Switzerland. As AEP reports in the Telegraph, the EU is imposing a blockade of a depth and severity unknown outside wartime. All this because Switzerland refuses to subjugate herself to the EU's corrupt courts and ever-changing laws.
The economic blockade is intended to break the will of the Swiss people. The Swiss globalist political elite is ready to surrender to the EU - much as the UK's political elite were ready to surrender to Hitler in 1939. However, the Swiss system of democracy, which means decisions taken by the elite are subject to popular scrutiny, means the decision will depend on an electorate only 20% of whom back surrender to the EU whilst 67% are ready to fight for Swiss independence. Support for joining the EU has fallen to an all-time low of 13%, reports the Telegraph.
The EU blockade, says AEP,
.. will become increasingly painful as the pressure ratchets up. The EU is determined to shut down the idiosyncratic “Swiss model”. It aims to bring the country within its legal and regulatory control once and for all under a new framework agreement.
This means suspending 120 bilateral accords one by one as they fall due, progressively shutting the Swiss out of the EU’s economic, transport, and political system until they capitulate. It amounts to a sanctions regime.
Energy too is on the menu and this risks escalation into areas of national security. “Energy access for Switzerland is slowly deteriorating,” said Professor Paul van Baal from Lausanne's Polytechnique Fédérale.
Well, there can be few cretins left in Britain who will doubt the EU's true character now that the gloves are off. They can no longer hide their aggressive and expansionist intentions. It's time for the UK to boost defence spending.
Having put their man Martin Selmayr into one of the EU's top posts, the Germans thought there would be little opposition to giving another, Manfred Weber, one of the EU's five unelected presidencies. Everyone accepts, after all, that Germany really runs the EU so why not cut the pretence and improve efficiency by openly giving all the top jobs to Germans?
"He's just too boring" complained the other EU26 "he even puts his wife to sleep telling her about his day at work. He's an utterly mediocre unknown nobody whom even his own mother doesn't recognise in the street. No."
So far the EU Council have met for three days to allow the Germans to get their own way, but so far without success. The appointment of the EU's presidents is an exercise in gangsters splitting the loot an important decision affecting the lives of hundreds of millions. So its quite appropriate that it should be stitched up in private by horse dealing without the people having a vote on it to ensure that all the right snouts have access to the trough.
The latest proposal being considered, reported by politico.eu, is to put the socialist Timmermans into the Commission presidency job and bumping the dreary Weber over to be president of the EP. However, this would push out the favourite Guy Verhofstadt who covets the EP job as an child covets a Christmas X-box. The suggested solution? Make them both presidents. The EU already has five presidents - people will hardly notice another one.
Edit-update
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Superb! Opening session of the EP this morning and the Brexit Party turn their backs as the Antidemocracy Anthem is played - hats off! Is that Ann Widdecombe to the left? Video available at http://www.europarl.europa.eu/ep-live/en/plenary/video?date=02-07-2019 (I see the Sommelier is waiting in the gangway - Herr Juncker must be on his way)
Having written below of the very same reality that Nigel Farage presented to his mass meeting yesterday, I can only claim that some things are so obvious that they need no special powers to discern. And so with Russia. I have written in the past - and still believe - that Russia belongs to the Christian north rather than the non-christian south of the world, and if ever north and south should oppose eachother over food, water, energy or whatever we will need to stand together. That's really not the same as saying I approve in any way of Putin's regime. Boris has the nub of it today;
The country that possesses these essential building blocks of liberalism will succeed; the country without them will – eventually – face disaster. To put it simply, if your property can be arbitrarily confiscated by the wife of the president, or by his son-in-law, then you won’t start a business in that country and you won’t invest. If you can lose a contract unfairly to some politician’s chum, then you won’t bother to put your money there. And if there is no way that politician can be democratically removed, then corruption will increase, and inefficiency will increase, and the people will suffer, and poverty will grow.
I don’t want to put too fine a point on it, Vladimir, but there are some countries where capitalism is believed to be in the hands of oligarchs and cronies, where journalists are shot, and where “liberal values” are derided, and where according to the Russian statistics agency Rosstat, a third of the country cannot afford to buy more than two pairs of shoes per year; where 12 per cent of the population still has to rely on an outdoor toilet, and where real incomes have declined for each of the past five years.
Now many of you will see parallels between the EU and Putin's Russia; the political and economic corruption, the anti-democracy, a per capita GDP substantially lower than the UK's, ailing economy and sclerotic growth. I don't believe the parallels are accidental. A want of democracy coupled with an authoritarian and didactic central State kills growth and innovation and does a disservice to citizens.
The decisive battles of the Brexit war will be fought this year. If we're to win, we need everyone on board, and everyone pulling their weight. This weekend it's becoming clearer that the pieces are being moved on the board to allow a major Brexit offensive, including an autumn general election -
Boris is forming a war cabinet to deliver Brexit in 100 days
Sedwill is being moved and Robbins is expected to jump
Other mandarins out-of-tune with a Brexit government will also disappear
Arron banks / Leave EU are continuing to help cull Remainer Tory MPs
Farage is selecting PPCs and outlining an initial manifesto
No-one is talking openly yet, but the closer we get to a GE the greater the realisation that the Conservatives need to leave TBP a clear field in the old Labour heartlands outsides London. Some 148 currently Labour constituencies voted Leave - and these must be the first target of TBP where they have a chance of winning. Overall there are some 410 Leave-voting seats to around 240 Remain constituencies.
Against us we have a Remain establishment and media looking to exploit every vulnerability, every knuckle-dragging social media embarrassment. The Leave side are also now catching up on playing the social-media archaeology game - as the outing of the hapless Maitlis' sock-puppet debate 'guests' demonstrates.
The end is within sight. Do not discount the Brexit Party gaining 30 or 40 seats in the GE from Labour - and being in coalition government with my Party before Christmas.
DO NOT screw it up.
Postscript
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The most glorious day here - too hot in the Sun, but a chance to clean and tidy the workshop whilst listening to the England innings (216 for 3 at writing) free from BBC geoblocking on the superb https://www.guerillacricket.com/schedule. Now a few carrots for the horses, who will welcome the rain tomorrow ..
