Italy acts whilst sclerotic EU dithers

In just the same way that Austria, Hungary and a few of the Balks acted independently of the EU to close the Balkans route for economic migrants last year, Italy is now taking unilateral measures to block the NGO 'taxi service' from points three miles from the Libyan coast to Sicily. The first NGO taxiboat, The Iuventis, operated by a German NGO, has been seized. The Italians have implemented three new requirements; first, migrants picked up should be landed at Libyan, not Italian ports. Second, Italian police and security to be on all NGO vessels to monitor whether, as alleged, the taxi boats are in radio contact with the smuggling gangs, and rendezvous are being arranged to transfer migrants. Finally, ship to ship transfers at sea are banned. 

This is against a background of noises from Austria that she will move armoured vehicles to the Italian border, and stringent French border closures on all entry points from Italy to the West. Hungary is also making determined efforts to pushback against the Soros-funded undermining of European national identity and his suspected covert funding of the Libyan NGO taxi boats. 

And what has the EU been doing whilst all this has been done? Nothing. Nada. Rien.   

Is it 'cos we is Brits?

With security chaos at air terminals across Europe as staff take advantage of new Shengen controls to irritate travellers, British newspapers are asking "Is it 'cos we is Brits?". That the nation now believes that the spiteful, vindictive and self-destructive dwarfs of Brussels are capable of such attempted Brexit sabotage means we have come far since 2016.

But someone needs to explain that no, this is not directed at us, this is just the EU destroying its own tourist industry by humiliating and frustrating the new rich from Beijing and Mumbai and the old rich from Tokyo, New York and London. All for the sake of preserving the sacred Shengen border free zone, more valuable to the Federasts than the entire European tourist economy.  

These people really are arses.

Snouts in the universities pension trough

The cushiest job in the UK today is in a university. No longer need one be gifted academically or have skills as a scholar or teacher; any mediocre administrator who can talk the talk can get in to a university staffroom these days. One has to publish, of course, but given the plethora of niche academic journals with tiny circulations but eye watering costs you can write pretty much academically worthless and semi-literate garbage in order to accumulate a publications list. No-one will read it. It doesn't matter. Then there's the pension; 1/75th of salary and a lump sum of 3/75ths of salary for each year of service. With employee contributions capped at 8% and the university paying 18%. For the new Vice-Chancellor of the Agricultural University of Steeple Bumstead on a salary of £450,000 a year, that 18% employer contribution is worth an extra £81,000 a year. 

Of course, as the FT reports, the next best job to being a Vice-Chancellor is to be a member of the 8-man University Pension Scheme Executive Committee; they were paid an average of £488,000 each in 2016/17. Plus, no doubt, the pension benefits. 

There's only one problem with this academic cornucopia, under which VCs have grown fat as butter and as rich as pre-reformation abbots and even the Head of the School of Pig Farrowing at Steeple Bumstead earns more than the Prime Minister. We can't afford it. The pension fund has assets of £60bn but liabilities of £77.5bn. Something needs to be done. 

Part of the problem is that each participating institution doesn't have to balance its books; Steeple Bumstead can award its teaching staff the most outrageous salaries, salaries that accumulate pension liabilities way beyond the institution's own contributions and share, but the scheme as a whole must meet the costs. The universities can't increase student fees any further, as this will kill the goose. And all those podgy-fingered vice chancellors feasting at their high tables on fine foods and wines won't take a cut in their wedge. So either the taxpayer bails the broke USS out or the pension fund cuts its benefits .... and you can probably see which way this is going. 

Glynis Breakwell, Bath Uni VC on a wedge of £451,000. Not sure who the bloke is.

Corbyn's Labour - the party of naked nepotism

I've lost count of the number of scions of labour politicians who owe their own youthful place in politics to nepotism. As we've seen with the BBC, it's fine to preach equality and equal opportunity but drive a bus through it just so long as you're Labour. Never have I encountered such breathtaking hypocrisy, such stunning and meretricious mendacity as the self-righteous preaching of Labour and the BBC on matters of which they are the guiltiest of all.

 

It starts I suppose with campaigning for comprehensives but sending your own kids to private schools, with attacking privilege then ensuring your own privileged separation from normal folk, with preaching charity and frugality then wallowing in naked greed and avarice, with welcoming migrants into the homes of others but erecting gates on your own. Then it's the corrupt practices, the expenses thievery, the family dog on the payroll. Like Leonora Helmsley, these Socialistes believe that equality laws are for little people. 

Now Corbyn's Momemtum gang of lawless rioters have circulated a class war video that must have been so easy to make - for it caracatures every Janus-faced fault of the party's leader and MPs, every cynical manipulation, every privileged and corrupt malfeasance by criminal Labour bosses. It is the perfect mirror in which Momentum's cynical capos may study their own cesspit morals.  

Euan Blair. The Prescott boy. Jack Straw's lad. Corbyn's boy. Hilary Benn. Dan Snow. Stephen Kinnock. And all the other of the 'red Princes' - as numerous, corrupt and vile as their Saudi Arabian brothers. All bent. All undeserving. All crawling up the foetid stinking beshitten coat-tails of their bent parents like mutant roaches. A party that rids us of these foul abominations, that cleanses our democracy of this depraved and toxic corruption, will ever get my vote. 

Corbyn's son - with a free Labour party job

Blair's Labour ministers should face jail over Diesel scandal

The driver (sic) for Diesel road vehicles came under Bloody Blair's mendacious governance. Now we learn the things are killing us, already costing us £3bn a year in productivity, with a vast store of NHS costs, illnesses and a care bill to come. 

Personally, I love naked Diesels - on boats. Heaven is eating strawberries to the sound of a Lister-Petter. But isn't it right and proper that Blair and his transport / industry ministers are now jailed for these acts of criminal harm?

Chlorine chicken, GM soya, Cheez Wizz and 32oz steaks

Any UK visitor returning from a first trip to the USA came back with food stories. These used to be about quantity - 'All you can eat for $1', regular steaks at 16oz and large at 32oz, piles of pancakes, syrup and bacon strips for breakfast and so on. We were simply astounded at the cheapness and largeness of portions. Then there is the novelty of a manufactured ersatz cheese in an aerosol, and a slight 'Ergh!' at Americans forced to eat GM Frankenstein food and chlorinated chicken. And there you have the British stereotype of American food. Fried chlorine chicken and GM white gravy in the South, hormone and antibiotic saturated factory beef in the North. And each meal triple the entire daily calorie count. 

Friends came home from a US road trip last week, reprising a trip they made seventeen years ago. They were not happy. Everything - food, accommodation, car hire - was no longer cheap. Portions were no longer huge. The $1 breakfast had gone. Cars were smaller and more ... European. And while poor blacks still consumed vast quantities of fried chlorine chicken, the rest of the US had moved upscale. Above all, the real US was absolutely nothing like the box-set US they had expected from watching seventeen years of US serials and soaps. Everything in reality was somehow less American and more global.  

Well, that's trade and globalism. I have no fears that a UK - US trade deal will impose on Britain the stereotype foods of two decades ago. For sure, if our own blacks want fried chicken at £1 for two pieces, imported chlorine chicken is the way to go, but unless it's also Halal it won't crowd out the supermarket shelves. And Waitrose won't stock it. That's consumer choice. 

 

Germans upset and confused as EU Panzer thrust runs out of steam

It really wasn't supposed to be like this. Brussels has a clear plan of exactly how the negotiations should go; First, they set out what the result of the negotiations will be. Then secondly they use a variety of methods to belittle, demoralise and shake the incapable British delegation. Thirdly, Britain must comply absolutely with the EU timetable, do homework as it is set and produce documents and agreements on demand and in the order laid out by Brussels. Only if the EU's negotiation plan is strictly adhered to can an orderly Brexit be achieved. 

But there is a problem. The EU's massive armoured thrust has over-extended itself and has run out of steam; the British have just stood aside to allow it to pass and closed ranks again. We haven't handed in our homework as ordered. We haven't agreed to stuff as we were supposed to. The Federasts thought we would be crawling by now - but instead David Davis and his team seem to grow in confidence by the day, their position clear and firm. We are willing to make concessions if the EU make equivalent concessions in return. We are ready to negotiate. Our team have this power - but it's turning out that Herr Barnier has not. 

There is also a rule in negotiations that one always keeps a tier or two clear of the fray - cooler heads, not too close to the battle, who can maintain a quiet dialogue if needed. David Davis has successfully cast himself in this role, leaving the muppets such as 'Shagger' Johnson to hurl barbs at the Federasts to stand aloof himself from the fray. Sadly, Herr Barnier has failed to do the same - meaning Davis' recourse must be to Herr Juncker. But the biggest problem is that Herr Barnier has absolutely no freedom to negotiate; he's been ordered to achieve the assault's objectives by T+7, T+21 and so on and forbidden from retreating one millimetre, even to 'straighten the line'. 

And today as the EU's assault runs out of steam, the German car manufacturers are the first to break ranks and voice their nervousness. We need to continue the terms of the single market for a lengthy transition period, they whine; our car sales in the Reich are down by 3.4% this year already, we can't take a Brexit hit on top without job losses and plant closures.  

Well, fair enough. That suits us all. So long as they don't expect a penny of British tax money to prop up their failing empire beyond 2019. All they have to do now is to give Herr Barnier some authority to negotiate.   

We internet veterans have seen it all before ...

Many seasoned web users will recall when Netscape Navigator was the browser to have, when your modem had to dial the BT internet number, usually managing to connect after about six tries, when newsgroups were the means of downloading huge 56k jpg pics, sometimes downloading an entire image in fewer than ten minutes. Your modem would drop the connection every hour or so, and data lines were so congested that even a page of plain HTML 1.0 text would take several minutes to load. 

So the dire state of the web today - the results of a mash between secure browsers, greedy Flash, ad-blockers and the attempts of commercial sites to overcome them, is really nothing new. The Telegraph crashes Firefox every other time I load it, one can't watch a streaming video and look at the Evening Standard at the same time (browser locks) and the machine sends at least three crash reports a day back to Firefox HQ.  

Even Blogger is becoming unusable - capcha routines that frustrate participation and make commenting a chore, and unexplained faults that just freeze the screen (oops - there's another one!).

Is this all some great plan to get us out in the open more? Because really I'm as brown as a nut already from working outside and graft hard on house renovation during all the lighter hours. C'mon computer folks - the internet wasn't made for mono-tasking. We're quite capable of placing an eBay order, watching the news and making backgammon moves on the same screen at the same time - so sort yourselves out. 

Unimaginative Federasts trying to repeat Greek treatment

Dreary and unimaginative Brussels Federasts are keeping true to form - and are repeating every one of the dirty tricks used on Greece and as described by Yanis Varaufakis. Do these tedious little Eurocrats really have nothing else in their toolbox?

The Telegraph carries a report that details the dirty dealings. First, the outrageous gangster demands and the bullying to agree them. Then a total refusal to provide fiscal and legal justification. Then threats to unilaterally suspend the talks unless the UK agrees to their demands. All to a background of propaganda fed to the Remoaner press that the UK 'isn't coping' - a meme that has gulled even the gifted.

The grubby Federasts even appear to use photo opportunities to try to wrong-foot the UK. However, we have many years of watching our national football team deal with this sort of tactical dirty play from johnny foreigner, and every football-watching Brit will see the sly shin-kicks, ball handling and shoulder-barging for what it is.

So, second session in and I remain hopeful. 

Has Brit Brexit strategy has got Brussels on the back foot?

The next Brexit negotiations resume tomorrow - with an increasingly nervous Brussels starting to whine that David Davis and his team are not following their rules. The EU has already published a whole series of comprehensive position papers in damning detail and is starting to realise too late that this may not have been the best idea. 

The Federasts imagined that they would dominate the whole process to the extent that we would have no choice but to fall in with their programme, but so far what we have done is largely to question the basis of their published positions; what exactly are the legal grounds on which they make their grasping financial claims? How precisely have these sums been calculated?

We have responded to their citizenship / movement proposals but they say we don't go far enough. Shrug. However, having now published their own comprehensive proposals, they can hardly row back on promised rights; to do so would be to appear unbearably spiteful. So they're stuck. 

They simply can't accept that this is a bi-lateral negotiation and we're an equal player in the game, with our own plan and agenda. Our refusal to obey their rules has got them on the back foot, and a nervous and unstable Brussels is starting to aim bitter barbs at Britain. I can find nothing so far for which to criticise David Davis and his team. 

If we get a petulant Federast temper tantrum tomorrow evening, it will be a good indication that things are going well.

Desperate Federasts dig up Blair again

No sooner has Bloody Blair settled back in his casket then desperate Federasts have wielded flying shovels to dig him up again. The publication of the Great Repeal Bill has brought it home to the die-hard remoaners that we really are leaving; Tim Farron, who can now use his child's Oyster Card again on the buses, the egregious 'Lord' Adonis (an American nickname, surely, like those given to black jazz musicians?) and now the late Mr Barrister Tony Blair all seem to be moronic enough to imagine the UK could have another referendum, just in case we've changed our minds.

The Late Mr Blair now claims that Herr Juncker and Herr Verhofstadt are willing to crawl naked down the central corridor of Westminster Palace and kiss the Speaker's bare arse if only the UK reconsiders her decision to take £10bn a year away from the Evil Empire. 

This desperation is risible. Guys, go and put Mr Barrister Tony Blair back in his casket and cover him up again.

EU's destruction of European food quality and cultivars

Young Alois, my Bavarian sparky, threw the last of his lunch away in disgust. "This apple tastes crap." Well, yes. They don't do South African or New Zealand apples here, so it was last year's, and since Austrian agriculture has been 'modernised' would likely be one of just half a dozen long-season high-cropping cultivars now grown and sold from Aberdeen to Athens. Yes, the EU means you can walk into a supermarket anywhere in Europe and buy the same variety of tasteless, textureless apple of uniform size and condition, and up to three years old. 

The same goes for tomatoes, strawberries, potatoes and virtually all of the greengrocery shelves. Milk and dairy quality remains superb, but rather for freshness than taste. You need to visit the bi-weekly farmers' markets to buy real, quality fresh fruit and veg here - or drive forty minutes across the border to the nearest Italian market town. Austria has sleepwalked into the same corporatist hell of consistent mediocrity that has destroyed British horticulture. 

It's not just the EU - it's the power of advertising, fear of uncleanliness and the triumph of the global petrochemical corporates. There's also a Disneyfication of what the natural environment should look like. I am insistent that the environment starts with flies; flies that cluster around cow stalls, thrive on dung and hug the meadows. Fly catchers such as the black redstarts now raising their second brood of the year in my rafters can get through 1.2kg of flies in a season; my cheeky wall-lizards, majestic fire salamanders, graceful grass snakes and adventurous slow-worms and all the other reptiles and amphibians sharing my space here all depend on insects / invertebrates. Once you get rid of your domestic livestock - two cows in the stalls, a pig in its sty, chickens in the yard, maybe a goat or two - you also lose the richness of your reptile and amphibian life. But such things, like outside lavvies, are considered too 'peasant', not consistent with the sophistication of a two-tonne 4x4 with chrome bull bars and a set of brown plastic wicker garden chairs.  

As I write, from my study window I see in the meadow below a roe hind has brought her two fauns from the copse to graze. The meadows are alive with a procession of butterflies, each type appearing in turn as its particular flowers come into bloom, more types of butterfly than I ever saw in a lifetime in England, but here the meadows are unsprayed, chem-free and with a riot of wild flowers that it takes five grand and the Chelsea flower show to achieve in the home counties. 

So the news that Germany is demanding that French agriculture 'modernises' is really not good news for anyone in Europe who values food quality. The only problem with French agriculture is that the farmers think it's their right to be rich. It really isn't. But their refusal to take steps that could 'rationalise' French cheese to six standard types and allow bread factories to sell extended-life baguettes for 14 days after baking is wholly commendable.

Austria has lost her native universal food quality, victim to the EU and the corporates. Only Romania and Bulgaria still maintain sustainable, environmentally good agriculture with a richness of taste and variety, largesse of produce and quality of life - and the manufacturers of EU subsidised tractors and cheap-lease heavyweight 4x4s are already moving in, the horses already on their way to the knacker. 

The EU's hatred of sustainable agriculture will destroy our environment

EU army Battlegroups take shape

There is a quiet and little known story about the way in which Austria's post-war army came into being. You will recall that Austria quickly established the narrative that she was a victim of Nazism rather than a participant, then signalled a future perpetual neutrality. Occupied by the allies until 1955, it was these narratives that left Austria as a sovereign and undivided nation. Germany had to wait until 1989. Even as early as the Summer of 1945, the first Summer of occupation, Austrian officers who remembered the pre-war army hatched a plan to recreate it under the noses of the occupiers. With an officer corps with experience gained in the Wehrmacht's battles from Finland to Sevastapol, Narvik to Tobruk, but who were 'clean' of Nazism, a police auxiliary was formed. While directing traffic, policing the black market and ensuring public order amongst hordes of DPs they were also receiving secret military training; arms were cached, secret command structures created, and so on. 

So when in 1955 the shortly-to-be-free Austria was taking over allied functions some kindly adviser must have said "You'll need an army, you know; not a big one, but enough to defend your neutrality" the country was able to say "Thank you. Here's one we made earlier .." Austrians in the know are secretly proud of this guile, at having fooled the big boys, but I'm not so sure that we didn't actually know all along what was going on and chose to let it roll. 

Although it seems like only yesterday that the EU issued an options paper for a new army, in fact it was the end of May when we reported it.  It seems they have now decided on a full-blown army under EU rather than national control; or rather, this was secretly agreed a long time ago and is only now being unveiled. My earlier comments now prove prescient. Hidden in a piece in Der Spiegel is this;

The most detailed element of future Franco-German relations is military cooperation. German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen and her French counterpart have made significant progress - despite the recent revolving door at the French Defense Ministry. The convergence is taking place as part of so-called "Permanent Structured Cooperation" or PESCO, which refers to the process whereby those EU countries who wish to work more closely together can do so.

The hope is to test out the process for the first time on military issues, an area where the 28 EU member states waste millions each year due to a lack of coordination, particularly when it comes to purchasing new weapons systems. Brexit combined with the election of Donald Trump in the U.S. have acted as a catalyst when it comes to European defense cooperation.

The last significant hurdle is to be removed in Paris on Thursday. France had long been insisting that a key priority of military cooperation should be the battlefield effectiveness of the resulting force whereas the Germans are eager to include as many countries as possible. Now, both wishes are to be fulfilled: The cooperation, European Council President Donald Tusk said in June, is to be "ambitious and inclusive."

 Those interested in joining PESCO must commit themselves to five clearly outlined admission criteria, such as improved coordination of military procurement and constant defense spending increases. The plan also calls for more countries to participate in financing the EU Battlegroups. Formed a decade ago, there has been little appetite for actually deploying them in part because those countries supplying troops to the Battlegroups have thus far had to bear the costs on their own.

I can only imagine that the UK was sick on the day they decided all of this. 

A bonfire of pointless Euro tenders

Any firm bidding for contracts of more than petty value with the public sector will have faced the daunting hurdles of Euro Procurement. The public sector has made a religion out of compliance with all the tedious, bureaucratic, costly, time-wasting, inefficient foolishness required by Brussels in inviting Romanian horse-knackers, Sicilian mafioso and Lithuanian bordello chains to bid on equal terms with UK firms for local, domestic contracts such as building a new school or making dinners for its pupils.  

Tussell (£) reports that in 2016 the UK public sector advertised 17,000 tenders with a value of £301bn that were open to EU firms. The MoD was the largest Euro Advertiser with 700 contracts worth £13bn. Construction and IT are probably the biggest categories of work, but even suppliers of civil service paper clips must bid against Bulgarian wire-benders; 9,000 supply contracts in 2016 worth some £38bn.

Ho, you may huff. At least all that contract money wasted on Kermits and Huns will come back to John Bull. But actually no. The whole lengthy, complicated, expensive, time consuming process that employs the time of thousands of public sector workers is utterly and absolutely pointless. A Parliamentary briefing paper (6029,2015) finds that just 1.3% of public contracts go to European firms - and that UK firms win just 0.8% of other EU public contracts. We'd save billions just by abolishing the inane process - billions more than the public sector saves by compulsory Euro procurement. 

The public sector must be free to decide where best value in procurement lays.* Whether this is the EU, the US, the far East or Grimsby. Without Compulsion. And a bonfire of The 2015 Public Contracts Regulations. I dare say no-one would actually notice if we binned the thing right away and redeployed all those redundant public sector workers into wiping old people's bottoms or something useful. 

*Yes, this is a Suffolkism. For the rest of you read 'lies' 

From the Desk of Mr Barrister Tony Blair

As with Nigerian 419 scammers, Mr Barrister Tony Blair doesn't himself address anyone. Such people imagine that heading a polite written request for £5,000 or an excuse for killing 100,000 people with the words 'From the desk of ...' or 'From the office of ...' adds gravitas to their own actual insignificance. Guys, it really doesn't. 

So we have Chilcot clarifying that the truth for Mr Barrister Tony Blair is what he believes it to be, and that he approached War in the same way an advocate defending a man charged with waving his todger about on the Central Line. For Mr Barrister Tony Blair, an emotional and persuasive appeal always trumps stuff like actual facts, real intelligence and credible evidence. And that probably goes for his Desk, his Office and any other objects that speak for him. 

But just as learned counsel don't actually deceive the court when they aver that their client claims he was just shaking raindrops from a newly purchased Bratwurst in that tube carriage, and that this could indeed have been the case, that there exists a reasonable doubt, so Mr Barrister Tony Blair wasn't actually deceiving us when he claimed with all his emotional wringing that Iraq might represent a threat. 

The difference is more than a £500 fine. Iraq is a nation drenched in innocent blood and spattered with detonated body parts, home to pain, suffering, desperation and despair, the source of Islamist hatred, and a graveyard for an entire generation. And for that we must thank the Desk of Mr Barrister Tony Blair, 419 scammer and blagger extraordinaire, a man who avoids jail as an eel eludes the hand. 

Coffee needed. I've got a vomity taste in my throat.

Summer migrant surge exposes multiple EU failures

Well, you've read about it here many times. The many millions of young, male, African economic migrants moving North to make the move into Europe, driven by low child mortality rates achieved 15- 20 years ago that have caused a massive population bulge of young men for whom failing, despotic and corrupt African economies can provide no work. Global 3G phones and cheap Chinese crocs and clothing have convinced these poor sods that, from their 8th century barrios, without work, educational or social skills, they can fit right into a 21st century Europe. Even the UN, an organisation now dedicated to the destruction of the old-world nations, admits they're just economic migrants.

So far this year 84,000 have reached Italy and Europe's southern sphincter is tightening. Austria is upping its Brenner Pass border control, France continues a state of emergency and the Visegrad nations continue to flip a middle finger to Brussels. It's five years too late, but just about everyone now realises just how badly the EU has failed in controlling migration. Everyone except the deluded morons in the Berlaymont, of course, who even now see nothing wrong. Any fix at source - in Libya - is also now likely to be achieved by an informal group of European nations as the EU continues to be paralysed by hubris, failure and delusion.

Michael Gove generally visits the prestigious Mayr clinic on Lake Wörthersee each year to have his colon flushed out and to eat weed soup, and I'm sure Sarah Vine appreciates the work he puts in to keep his bowel in good condition - she writes in the Mail that she fears 'dark forces' rising in Italy over migration that may imperil the annual Gove arse-hosing. God save us.

Car lease bubble to burst?

It's the same all over Europe. No-one buys a car for cash any more. The roads are full of cars under five years old most of which seem to have been bought on retail leases, those three or five year deals with low or no deposit, low monthly lease cost but with punitive damage and mileage conditions and a vastly inflated bubble payment at the end of the term should drivers perversely want to buy their cars rather than take out a new lease. 

Here they all go for those vast-tyred monsters that come as close to looking like like a Humvee as road-legal cars can get. With thick chrome roll bars and Bengal plate slab decks. And they pretend they own them. 

What I can't understand is what the car makers' leasing companies, who presumably own all the three year old returned cars, actually do with them. If they released them all on the market then second hand prices would plummet with a tsunami of perfect condition pre-owned cars and fewer people would take the new lease options - so where are they? Shipped overseas? In some vast desert store like the entire 1970s USAF fleet of aircraft? I think we should be told.

For scale, the driver is standing under the front spoiler. Essential for the Munich school run.

That dodgy 'secret' K&C cabinet meeting

In my view the High Court was quite correct to forbid Kensington and Chelsea Council from holding a formal cabinet meeting from which press and public were to be excluded. The Guardian brought the case. 

Firstly, the cabinet has plenty of opportunities to have private meetings - under the name of majority group, leader's meeting, or even outside the Council as a Party event. There is only one reason for meeting formally as a Council cabinet - and that's to take decisions. Now there are circumstances, defined by Schedule 12A of the 1972 Local Government Act, under which cabinet agenda reports can be classed as 'Exempt' and press and public can be excluded from meetings. The reasons are pretty tight. K&C didn't even attempt to use these grounds, for there was no written report to consider. Instead they sought to use a part of the Council's standing orders that covered preventing public disorder. 

So with no report tabled - open or exempt - why the need for a formal cabinet meeting? I suspect that they were intending to take a decision, that a report had been written, and that cabinet could agree to take it without prior publication to all councillors on grounds of 'overwhelming urgency'. If they just wanted a private discussion, why a formal cabinet meeting?

There is something very dodgy about the behaviour of K&C cabinet members here. Sadiq Khan, though, is just making silly little boy's political capital with his request to Mrs May to put the Council under special measures - he knows full well this is reserved for cases of egregious corruption such as the Muslim mafia takeover of Tower Hamlets. London's mayor has just proven himself to be a junior league failure, not fit to play with the big boys. He will be a one-term wonder. 

However, the council's new Tory cabinet needs to up its game to prove it can do the job. 

Khan - a failing one-term wonder

EU is failing again in the Western Balkans

If I could draw a cartoon it would be the statelets of the western Balkans fighting in a furious 2020 dustball of fists and boots whilst an EU President as shamefaced as a labrador who has copiously fouled the bedroom rug looks on, with the caption "You had one job ..."

The EU's foreign policy is a litany of failure, yet these hubristic Federasts want their own army to reinforce that failure; whilst they poke Putin in Ukraine, the Western Balkans are being lost to Russian expansion and Salafist pollution, corrupted through Turkish influence with Saudi money into a hotbed of radical Islamism. Reports in both the Republican American Interest and the Lefty Der Spiegel  catalogue the loss of interest by the EU in further Balkans accessions and the loss of interest by the Balks (if they can be so termed) in the EU; latest polls indicate that just 18% of Serbians really want to join the Federation. As Russia protects Christian orthodox nations, newly groomed Islamist statelets throw up new Saudi-funded mosques staffed by Saudi-supplied imams, to radicalise a new generation of Islamist terrorists. 

The Washington Post thinks it is a failure of democracy, that Balkans statelets are 'halfway democracies' and offers reasons for this. The paper misses the biggest reason of all. That the EU has the role of democracy mentor and monitor, and that the EU is in itself the most profoundly anti-democratic of regimes. It's like giving the job of Civics teacher to Pol Pot. What sort of lesson do the Balkans get from a corrupt Brussels EU regime that believes that the secret ballot and universal suffrage are obstacles to be over-ridden, that plebiscites can be repudiated and overturned, that solemn treaties can be broken for political ends and that threats, bullying and hubristic posturing are equated with statesmanship?

We should not forget that the Balkans are exporting their violent men who return even more skilled in crime and violence; Islamists fight for ISIS and pass back and forwards through a complicit Turkey, Albanian cocaine gangs dominate Europe, Serb people traffickers cross Europe in trucks filled with Afghan migrants. The reason why Austria can't put cigarette prices up to over €4,50 a pack is the ease with which white brands are smuggled from Balkans factories. Now that Croatia is part of the EU, there are a quarter million more Croatian passport holders than there are Croatians; well, who speaks enough Serbo-Croat to know? 

I have little doubt that the western Balkans will blow up again, and the dirty EU labrador whose fault it will be will wring its paws and ask for British peacekeepers and US ground attack aircraft to clear their shit up.

The one key factor in EU migration

You will all be used by now to everything from constipation to Summer lightning being blamed on Brexit; the remoaners know no limits in seeking to establish Brexit as the cause of every ill. Cow dries up? Crop fails? Late hail? Ewe aborts? Brexit. A few hundred years ago the same people blamed witches for everything that went wrong with their lives. Today they blame Brexit. 

EU staff are fleeing the NHS in terror, apparently. If you read the Guardian, you'll get a picture of the UK as a fearful panic nation in which stoic Hungarian nose-surgeons brave being spat at on the bus for talking funny. It's utter rubbish of course; the Guardian is an open sewer and its content just as palatable. Now the Indescribablyboring runs its own 'Brexit panic fear brain-drain exodus'  made-up news story. Sigh.

There's really only one factor that determines more than any other the level and pressure of inward EU migration to the UK; the £ - € exchange rate. When it stood at €1.35 - €1.43 to the £, every raspberry was picked, every ward swabbed and every bathroom tiled. Now it's €1.13 and housing costs in London and the South East are through the roof, EU workers are asking 'what's the point?'

If politicians had known they could reduce EU migration so effectively by weakening the pound, they would have done it before.  If the Peso hit $0.50 rather than $0.05 then Mr Trump would not have to build a wall. People simply don't uproot and migrate unless it's worth it. Until Greece defaults, the entire Italian banking system folds, Deutsche Bank drops or Spain goes bust, and so long as the pound is weak, our EU gastarbeiter will drift home.