BBC alone report new Asian child sex ring

Sentences of 18 and 14 years for the two ringleaders Ahdel Ali and Mubarak Ali (top) and others making a total of 100 years for a further seven Asian men have been imposed as a major new trial of Asian child sex offenders - this time operating in Telford, in Shropshire - concludes. The news was the second item on the BBC R4 6 o'clock radio news last night.

Following the mass convictions of Asian men in Rochdale earlier this year for child sex offences, and the scale and severity of the sentencing, the BBC were right in the priority they accorded this news item. The written story on the web site is somewhat harder to find; you need to navigate through to BBC Shropshire to see it. And apart from a brief and well-hidden mention in the online Mail, that's all the coverage the UK national media gives to the story.

The Guardian reports the arrest of a double bass player who allegedly groped someone at a music school, but not this. The Indie wonders whether animated faces in our text messages are dumbing us down but is not nearly so curious about mass long term child sex abuse. The Telegraph warns its readers to get their money out of Spain quickly. 

So why this MSM silence on the Asian sex gangs? We're now filling the best part of an entire prison with Asian men serving hundreds of years for the sexual abuse of white girl-children and this isn't something we should be talking about?

And after Rochdale and Telford, where the hell else has this been going on, and how many more mass-trials of these ugly perverts are we going to see?

Lady Toynbee like Cnut against the tide

As the Labour tide is turning, as those on the left are just waking up to the real dangers and evils of the EU, Lady Toynbee plants her chair firmly in the sand and commands the seas to retreat. Her Euro-sceptic colleagues on the left are really anarcho-conservatives, says the archetypal hereditary capitalist-socialist, who should learn to love centralist, dictatorial institutions for their own good. The people don't know what's best for them and can't be trusted to make the right decision, declares Lady T; and they should not be let anywhere near the ballot box, especially in the downswing of a recession. 

If we left, Lady Toynbee wails, the same isolationism would sweep us out of the European human rights convention too. Do we want to be Belarus? She asks. Um, what, and be able to expel Islamic terrorists at will? Be able to deport prisoners after their sentences are served? Have the ability to allow our own highly skilled, just and capable courts to make case law? Well, yes please, actually.

Just as Toynbee's purblindness cannot imagine a Britain that for eight hundred years led the World in human rights without any assistance from European institutions, she cannot imagine our unique advantages in global location, language, historical links, economic strength and pre-eminence in international institutions amounting to much without Europe's parasitical deadweight. 

Luckily, those on the left who work for a living and don't belong to Lady Toynbee's privileged left-liberal aristocratic and hereditary mileau have always been as sceptical about voting advice from the Big House as they have been of foreign interference in British ways. And when the Referendum comes - and it will - half of them will vote 'No' to the EU.

Price fixing and energy saving subsidies

Suppose the government wanted to encourage the take-up of wood pellet burners. To do so, it introduces a 50% subsidy on purchase cost. Good news all round, you would have thought; manufacturers sell more boilers, householders buy more and the government reduces the nation's CO2 output. Except, of course, it doesn't work like that and never has done. 

What actually happens is that the manufacturers and retailers of the boilers in the subsidised nations double their price. The government subsidy then goes directly to the retailers. Householders see no great price advantage and don't buy, and the government ends up spending a lot of money with no real reduction in CO2.

Take a look at http://kotly.com/ then take a look on eBay UK. Most of this kit is built not in China but in Eastern Europe; it fully meets CE standards and certification and can be installed in the UK without problem. And it's half the price of the same stuff sold domestically.

What's true for solar thermal above is also true for solar PV, except that most solar PV is made in China. Good news for Euro governments intent on increasing PV take-up at minimum cost to the taxpayer, one would have thought. But no. As Der Spiegel reveals, the reaction of the EU is to impose swingeing tariffs on Chinese PV to protect overpriced Euro manufacturers, fat margins and bloated profits. Yet again money is going straight from taxpayers pockets to fatcat corporate investors, revealing again the green-scam for what it is; a business opportunity for the big boys. It's got nothing to do with CO2. 

£30bn a year better off out

The latest CIVITAS paper estimates the benefits of withdrawal from the EU at around £30bn a year. Of this, it estimates the saving in the cost of regulation at about £20bn. As heavyweights such as Lord Lawson start to get behind the figures, we can expect a strong counter-reaction from those firms who benefit most from regulation - the large corporations.

Take the food allergen labelling regulations. A small high street baker, you're adding a fruit cake to your range. It will take you three hours to make and bake two dozen fruit cakes - but thirty hours to find, research, correspond, query and prepare legal food labels to stick onto the packaging. The Allergen Labelling Regulations, for example, compel you to declare any traces of Celery, Cereals containing gluten, Crustaceans, Eggs, Fish, Lupin, Milk (including Lactose), Molluscs, Mustard, Nuts, Peanuts, Sesame seeds, Soybeans or Sulphur Dioxide.

Of course Megapolis Foods and their ten-acre cake factory has no problem complying with all these regulations; they have an entire department for it. They even pay a lobbying firm in Brussels to persuade MEPs and the Commission's officials that even more regulations are needed. If you bake a million cakes a year the overhead costs of regulation are small; if you only bake 500 they're horrendous. 

The incestuous links between the large corporations and Brussels go much further than this. Brussels regularly uses taxes raised from EU nations to stuff the mouths of the big corporations with gold; just take a look at the UK recipients of the EU grants programme HERE to see who will be opposing any withdrawal from the EU. It won't be Britain's small firms and SMEs, the economic powerhouse of growth and the sector most likely to retain economic benefit in the UK. 

During 2011 big corporations shared an EU bribe pot of €4,509,352,492.66. So when you see the Chairman of Global Foods plc on the TV opposing EU withdrawal, check the database to see how much tax money he's had before you believe him.   

Thank goodness for Sir Cliff

As figures from the world of 'light entertainment' as it used to be called tumble like ninepins as sexual delinquents one can only be grateful that one figure at least remains aloof from the whispers and rumour. Sir Cliff has often been derided for his chaste and disciplined life, one underpinned by his Christian faith. Now as his contemporaries are facing public disgrace and prison he can feel vindicated. 

Of course the focus must now move to the eighties and the excesses of the new generation of variety performers and light entertainers; the generation of Ben Elton, Rik Mayall, Rowan Atkinson, Ade Edmondson, Alexei Sayle, Pamela Stephenson and their media contemporaries. There are dark tales of illegal drugs, alcohol in excess and sexual perversions. 

Then of course the nineties and the new media stars such as Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond must come under the witchfinder-general's spotlight. Surely the trio cannot be that cheerful without having committed some gross breaches of good behaviour?

And when of course the deviants themselves and all record of the miscreants, all their shows and recordings, have been removed from broadcast and consigned to a secret locked archive and only Sir Cliff remains as fit to transmit we will all be happy. Won't we?

Whoever

Sometimes you can't have everything. I'd like a cheap and very robust tablet with integral GPS that runs marine chart software and does office functions. I don't need a megapixel camera or to store half a million MP3 songs. In the end, of course, I'll pick the best fit available. And this, I think, is what we will also do with our new choice of four main parties. Out of the Eurofederacy but in free-movement Europe? Tick. My borough no longer over-run by Nigerian women having babies? Tick. H.M. Armed Forces properly financed and effective? Tick. No more bloody windmills? Tick. And most importantly Are they listening to me or just talking at me? Tick.

Ryan Shorthouse, Director of 'Bright Blue' advises Tories today that “Conservatives should not panic and react by trying to be more hardline than UKIP on welfare, Europe and immigration. Instead, we should convince voters we are the only party with enough experience, gravitas and compassion to be really trusted - with the difficult and complex job of government, to sort out the public finances, and with supporting the vulnerable and those struggling in these challenging economic times”

The problem is, people just don't believe it. It lacks sensible credibility. The voters know that if they were stuck changing a tyre on a lonely rain-swept road at night it would be Nigel and not David who stopped to lend a hand. 

UKIP's success also spells the death of the LibDems. The corrupt and crooked party funding proposals first from Hayden Phillips and then from Christopher Kelly that would reward the three incumbent parties on the basis of their last voting share - so long as they had MPs sitting - was designed to maintain the status quo and keep the LibDems afloat. Any attempt now to introduce such a scheme would quite rightly provoke a march on Parliament with pitchforks and burning brands. The LibDems, with probably no more than 40,000 members and bereft of all their opposition cash, are now up against the ropes. 

Phillips, Kelly and all the rest of the cosy political establishment have taken a slapping. The real kicking will come with next year's Euro elections - when there's everything to play for.

Reasons to be cheerful

Sorry, no post this evening. I only had £100 on at 5/4 for more than 100 UKIP gains, but when they paid out at about sixixh I found I could afford some alcohol ...

UKIP for change

The problem of warnings that 'Vote UKIP - get Miliband' have is that people really don't care - most can see little difference between Miliband and Cameron and want neither of them equally. I've said on this blog time and time again that people are hungry for change, that they're not 'apathetic' but fed-up with a political class that has betrayed them. Europe has failed, globalisation has delivered benefits to everyone but the West, Corporations have prospered, the obscenely wealthy have become more so, self-interest and greed characterise all our most senior public servants, MPs scrabble with their snouts for yet more money, third-world standards of electoral distortion are maintained for party advantage, immigration has changed the face of our nation without the people ever having been asked about it, the ancient hills are littered with bloody pointless windmills and still they distort and pervert science for lunatic ideology. 

So No Mr Cameron and No Mr Miliband and No Mr Clegg  I really don't care what UKIP's policy on plastic surgery is, or how their sums on the aggregates levy add up. You see, I loathe you all so very, very much right now that I will vote for anyone to slap hard your silly smug privileged faces. 

And however bad the UKIP candidate may be, they're infinitely better than the alternative slaves of the existing metropolitan political clubs.

France and Germany

We may have been mildly shocked at crude and insulting semi-official comments directed at Cameron from the French government. Governments don't speak to each-other in this way, do they? As with John Major, opponents may be 'the Bastards' in private but 'valued colleagues' in public. The Kermits, however, seem to have lost it.

As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard catalogues, the latest exchange of insults between France and Germany is quite unprecedented. And France started it. The problem is that the garlic-munchers blame their woes on everything and everybody but themselves; their sclerotic economy and productivity, an industrial sector on the Liverpool Death Pathway, more hands grasping rewards from the tax-till than can be re-filled, an agricultural sector that takes most of the CAP budget - 22% of CAP money goes to France, which has just 7.8% of the EU's farms over 1 European Size Unit (ESU) - and outdated beliefs in 'Gloire' that make France look as decayed and absurd as Miss Havisham in scarlet lippy. 

It's not just Germany that must contemplate whether to bail-out the Kermits yet again; they cost each working Briton a fortune, keep food prices artificially high, decimate our fish stocks and are taught at birth to sneer. Despite not having produced an international pop star since Edith Piaf. Turkey may once have been the 'sick man of Europe' - but today it's France and not just diplomatic flu, but a basket case. 

But like a huge art-nouveau ocean liner sinking beneath the waves, she'll pull us down too if we're too close to her. And voting for UKIP is important for this alone; who cares what their policy on bloody dormice is when we're struggling to stay alive. 

Beez

TO DO LIST

1. Kill all the bees

2. European farmers pay billions to hand-pollinate crops

3. Sell our special GM self-pollinating varieties at a bit less than (2) costs

4. Collect Knighthood


"The House of Commons environmental audit committee concluded that "neonicotinoid pesticides are not fundamental to the general economic or agricultural viability of UK farming". In fact they can prevent a more precise and rational use of pesticides, known as integrated pest management. The committee reports that all the rape seed on sale in this country, for example, is pre-treated with neonicotinoids, so farmers have no choice but to use them, whether or not they are required." Guardian

Women on banknotes

I am all in favour of depicting women on our banknotes so long as they are Britannia, Boadicca, Queen Victoria or Florence Nightingale. I would add Mrs Thatcher, but the previous convention seemed to be that they were 'historical' figures, from the 19th century or earlier. As Winston will now adorn the fiver perhaps these things are flexible. The problem is, there are few truly famous women from past ages, and it will only be in the 2200s that we'll start to feature the rich seam of more contemporary achievers. If we have to do it now, let's at least make-up some historic figures rather than keep re-using the two worn-out obscurities we have:-

Ethabell Scrathwick - Leader of the Luton Spoon-planishers strike of 1873, demanding equal wages with knife-grinders and price-controls on Bengal grit, the essential material for her trade, then a monopoly commodity in the hands of the Marquis of Slough. Transported to Australia for 7 years. 

Meena Jones - Daughter of Lascar parents who both worked as stokers for the Red Star Line (and therefore black) she married Hywel Jones of Swansea. She never forgot her maritime ancestry and spent her life providing comfort to wounded sailors. She also cooked them favourite Goan dishes. 

Lily Priestley -  Scientist. She noticed that larks boiled in saline and Orpiment produced a gas she called 'demelancholised air' which she recorded in her journal for 1758 'produced amongst those servants I tested it on great gusts of laughter and joy'. She is credited with discovering Nitrous Oxide but passing the facts to her son, Joseph, as women were not then permitted to be clever. 

Ada Crabbe -  Daughter of a Methodist clergyman, Ada invented sex education in 1894 but was so shocked by what she had discovered she died, still unmarried, shortly after. Her journals were discovered in 1986 and are now held by the Winnie Mandela Cultural Institute in Tottenham. 

Where did crime go?

News this week that I live in the most violent borough in Britain induced a slight frisson of unwarranted pride, I'm afraid. Unwarranted because I've lived here since 1995 without once having been the victim of crime, excepting being defrauded by my bank (which took a County Court summons to solve). Mine is typical of several wealthy inner London boroughs; three or four massive council estates separated by swathes of middle-class Victorian terraces, two or three town centres and a score or more tube, rail and DLR stations. The violence happens around the council estates and town centres late at night, when we gentrifiers are either abed or on our way home from the opera to our safe local station. The last burglary in my street was in 1997. Then there was the prolonged shouty incident of 2001, in which two black women spent twenty minutes verbally abusing eachother over a distance of fifty metres. Despite a keen middle-class audience peering from every window they declined to fight, however. Life in Britain's most dangerous borough is, er, safe, unworrying and comfortable. So where did all the crime go? Look at the graphics below;

Since the turn of the century, crime has plummeted everywhere. Andrew Rawnsley writes in the Observer today seeking the reasons why, and finding multiple credible answers but no single cause. And there is no correlation whatsoever between the number of police officers and levels of crime. Nor has it risen again since 2008, as predicted (wrongly) on this blog and elsewhere.

Are the buggers putting bromide in the tea or something?

More cruelty than justice in these prosecutions

Prosecutions that are unreasonably delayed often have more cruelty than justice in them; defendants may have lost access to evidence to disprove stale prosecutions, and with the exception of the abilities of new technologies such as DNA identification, if a plaintiff has a good cause of action they should pursue any claim with diligence and timeliness.  

The Charging of Max Clifford for alleged offences committed between 29 and 47 years ago brings to mind several similes which I cannot lawfully share with you, this matter now being sub judice and any comment a contempt of legal process, so please be careful if you leave your own comment.

The attempts in Germany to charge and jail 50 men who are thought to have served with the SS-Totenkopfverbände before they die of natural causes is an even more extreme example of justice delayed - in this case some 69 years after their membership, there being no actual evidence of any offences on which basis to charge them. 

My own view is that a 15 year limitation for prosecution of the most serious offences is appropriate, with a 5 year limitation on minor offences. But then I also believe that we will all be judged and have to answer for our lives.  

Two-Up

In case you missed it, yesterday was the day it was legal to play 'two up' across Australia, despite state laws prohibiting the unbelievably simple gambling game. ANZAC day is also the day on which 'gunfire' - coffee with rum - is traditionally drunk at breakfast. As the centennial anniversary of the War next year approaches, and the last survivors of those battles have been laid in their graves, one touching tradition continues to be observed on ANZAC day. 

At 5am yesterday at Hyde Park Corner the dawn 'stand to' was called, commemorating the call of Reveille in the still empty moments of first light that preceded so many attacks. Likewise in Australia and New Zealand, soldiers (largely) will have turned out at dawn to commemorate their predecessors. It started as a quiet, wordless gathering of old soldiers alone, before the later 11am commemorations involving family, dignitaries, bands and public occasion. Now it's become something of a matter of pride for those serving in the Australian and New Zealand armed forces to attend. 

Events a century ago have seared themselves into our collective psyche like no others; did they still remember the 30 years war in the same way in 1748? Or Crimea in 1954? There is something so epochal, so important about the Great War that we have determined collectively to remember it always. 

UK Left falls out of love with EU

I seemed to the UK left like they were so well suited; the EU was redistributionist on a massive scale, enforced an equality across whole nations, regulated the minutae of people's lives 'for their own good' and governed by centralist command-and-control with all the panoply of quotas, rationing and allocations. What was there not to like? 

Then the doubts started to creep in. The EU was favouring banks and big corporations at the expense of labour; crushing wage rates were being used to devalue the Euro. That fabled equality wasn't equality after all, but corporate homogenisation. And all that command-and-control meant that they had no say in decisions that were being made. Then there were all the little signs that maybe they didn't love us back; they wanted access to our bank account but wouldn't share theirs, there were secret meetings with other nations from which we were excluded. And they ate all the fish. And at first when they sent their mates round to stay for the night it was OK; we got some decent plumbing repairs and some good tiling out of it. But now they were sending some very odd sorts with no skills at all except emptying the biscuit tin. 

Earlier this week a Mr Barroso, an unelected functionary styling himself 'President' of an unelected cabal of functionaries calling themselves the 'European Commission' complained that his dream of an unelected Europe was being undermined by ordinary people committed to democracy. So when the Guardian published the results of a recent Europe-wide poll showing a continent wide slump in confidence in the European project, you might have expected the CIF comments to the piece to have been a rallying-call to back the Eurocrats. Not a bit of it. The comrades are truly out of love with Mr Barosso's European project. Some are positively savage. Many are satisfyingly staunch in their defence of democracy, if perhaps a little late at the table. All of which must now send Mr Miliband a-thinking. 

Paying less, caring more

Do a rough mental calculation. Take half your annual Council tax and multiply it by four. The result is roughly what you're paying in tax each year to 'protect' other people's children. As Christopher Booker has catalogued in his Telegraph columns, the child 'protection' racket has grown into a national industry, fully sanctioned by populist horror at baby Peter, Victoria Climbie and all the other tragic victims of adult abuse. Your local council will close every library, see each street lamp doused and let rubbish pile-up in windrows on the streets before they will willingly cut a single pound from their child 'protection' budgets.

And yes, of course 'protection' is in quotes. Most children taken from their parents into the care of the State are at infinitely greater risk under the State's 'protection' than without it. Edward Timpson MP writes in the Telegraph this morning on the recent abuse of young girls by Moslem men in Rochdale, girls without exception in the 'care' of the State. Other enquiries are examining allegations that powerful Tory figures grazed à la carte on young boys being held in a State 'home'. Suicide and self-harm figures for children held by the State are abnormal. So yes, under the State's 'protection' is the very last place you'd want a child to be.

Timpson is acting the Muppet in calling for even more investment and greater spending to prevent another Rochdale. We need a radical alternative. We need to make major cuts to State spending, and child 'protection' is a massive one; we really have to face it. Cityunslicker writes on the C@W blog

However, there are no votes in this approach from a populace used to the Nanny state; so what to do? I can see the default position being minor cuts, more tax rises and a slow Japan style death with the national debt slowly climbing towards Italian and then Japanese levels whilst politicians hand out the treats to harvest votes.

Anyone but Blair

As reported in the Ephraim Hardcastle column in the Mail this morning, Baroness Thatcher's death leaves a vacancy in the Order of Merit, limited to twenty-four living holders. In fact, there is not one but two places vacant in the list - in which technologists, scientists and historians figure largely. Denying the atrocious Blair a place is a sine qua non, but who to appoint to block him?

Well, the waspish David Starkey must surely be a prime candidate (Antony Beevor and John Keegan may have to wait as Michael Howard holds the incumbent military historian spot). As must both Brian Eno and Peter Maxwell-Davies, there being at present no musicians in the Order. And if Tom Stoppard is a member, why not Alan Bennett? Or even David Hare?

There are clearly many millions of Britons more deserving of public honours than Blair, surely it can't be that hard to find just two?

French and German woes

The Telegraph terms it 'disillusionment' that has come to France, but it could as well be the realisation that the post-war model of ever-increasing national wealth funding ever-increasing social welfare has come to an end. The astonishment is that the character of French rural society has survived despite this post-war wealth rather than because of it; "That spirit of solidarité – the instinct of people to help their fellow man — runs wonderfully deep here. The sun is still shining and the trains still run on time. Entire villages conjure up feasts and sit down to them together, just as they always did". It is, in human history, more frequently adversity and shared hardship that forges bonds of community.

In Germany, the wheels are falling off the Industrial-Educational compact. If the essence of France is the bond between commune and terroir then the essence of Germany has been its system of industrial apprenticeships. As Der Spiegel reports, a dual-track system of vocational and academic educational streams has helped maintain Germany's competitive advantage. Now, just when the UK is moving to adopt the German model, Germany is moving to adopt, er, the British model. 

And in the UK it's with mixed emotions that I must report the demise of the Quantity Surveyor; India and Malaysia both still base construction mensuration on SMM7, published by the RICS, and consequently 'taking off' a bill of quantities from a set of drawings is something that can now be done in Mumbai or KL at a fraction of the cost of employing a chap from Richmond. Consequently, QSs have been re-inventing themselves as Project Managers or Cost Consultants, and the merest suggestion that they might usefully do a bit of taking-off is met with the expression of a surgeon asked to change the patient's bedsheets. Ah well.

Asparagus and Strawberries

Native, English Asparagus and native, English Strawberries, of the sort growing not in polythene tunnels but in the open air, are set to be delayed this year. Bad news for Asparagus, which can only be picked until mid-summer's day, but possibly good news for consumers, if a sudden glut of fat, pale spears hits the market and pushes prices down. But not, alas, for April - the one month in which in good years one can enjoy a dozen Colchester natives and a plate of fat spears on the same table. Ah, such is England.

Ditch this wretched shackle

Against every military maxim, the EU Parliament and Commission are hell-bent on reinforcing failure. The Euro is crippled; like the Heer in 1945 it lacks metaphorical air cover, fuel, munitions and transport but keeps surviving due to tactical moves of desperation, sometimes brilliant, that squeeze every gram of advantage from each embattled position. 

And now with proposals for Euro-wide extraordinary wealth taxes - preferably in a form that will also catch non-Eurozone EU nations - it is moving to the equivalent of calling-up 15 and 16 and 65 and 66 year olds. Already parts of Europe are plunging into real poverty, and the spectre of disease and hunger, of Typhoid, Diphtheria and Cholera, not seen in Europe for seventy years, broods menacingly over the economic wreckage and spoilation caused by these zealots. With a fanaticism bordering on lunacy, they will see Europe burn to cinders before they will relinquish their belief in the Euro. Human lives and an ocean of human misery are of little consequence to the Berlaymont Gauleiters strutting like fat pheasants in their insulated, privileged world of make-believe.

But across Europe ordinary people are coming to recognise the enemy in Brussels, and the danger it poses to their very way of life. It's not 'populism' but a hunger for real democracy that is driving members to UKIP and its equivalents across Europe. People are choosing between freedom and the Empire, and more and more are backing freedom. The harder the Empire tries, the more support it loses.