Rescuing Democracy in the United Kingdom from our current Elected Dictatorship
|
Spin,
not face-to-face confrontations with the voters, is the Government's
chosen method of communication. Ordinary people are dangerous. Ordinary
people might ask a question which throws a politician 'off message';
the Cabinet member might reveal himself or herself to be a human being
like us, and not a programmed android. Worse still, he or she might
tell the truth.
Ann Leslie - Daily Mail, September 16, 2004
Blair wants to leave his
mark on history - looks more like a stain to me.
Peter Thorndyke, Diss,
Norfolk - Daily Mail, May 23, 2005
I know I'm me - why do I
need an ID card?
"Sorry, officers, I
don't have an ID card. I never applied for one. It seemed a bit steep
at 300 quid. I do have my free passport, my driving licence and my
London freedom travel pass, each with my photograph. I have my NHS
medical card, with its lengthy number, given me at birth, my RAF
service book with my Armed Forces number, and a chit authorising me to
wear a few gongs -including a General Service Medal with Malaya bar,
for fighting communist terrorists on behalf of my country, or so they
told me.
"I've also got various credit
cards and store cards, all with my signature on the back, generally
good for buying the everyday requrements for life as well as the odd
luxury. If you decide to arrest me, I suppose I'll have to be
photographed and given another number, besides my PINs.
"I'm afraid I haven't got a
pension book; it was taken away."
"By thieves, sir?"
"No ... well, not exactly. By the
Government. By the way, may I see your warrant cards please, gentlemen?"
Oh dear, they've disappeared. E.
Harry Gumer, Romford, ESSEX - Daily Mail, June 1, 2005
NO means NO
When does NO mean MAYBE?
When it's not the answer the EU wants. With the courageous French
NON resounding in their ears, shabby, undemocratic self-interested
leaders of Europe propose ignoring the part of their precious
constitution that requires ratification by all members and
continuing without one of the biggest founder members to
prevent derailing the gravy train.
As in Ireland,
they refuse to accept any NO votes, ignoring the will of the people,
and re-stage votes until they can engineer the 'correct' answer. Sadly,
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw dances to their tune like a puppet on a
string. With tactics such as these, how can anyone really believe the
EU has our interests at heart. Letter from Steve Penny, Kingsnorth, Kent - Daily
Mail, June1, 2005
Surely
the French result makes the £1million the EU recently spent on a
treaty signing ceremony seem a trifle premature and extravagant. Letter from Keith Wiseman, Bury, Lancs. - Daily Mail,
June1, 2005
|
Britain has
traditionally been one of the biggest net contributors to the EU
because we do not get as much money back from Brussels in farm and
regional subsidies as our rivals.
According to
Treasury figures, between 1995-2002, Britain's average contribution
taking the rebate into account, was £2.6billion, or £43.55
per head of population.
The French -
the biggest recipient of farm subsidies - contributed £1billion a
year or £16.08 per head of their population.
|
April 17, 2006 (1073 days since war ended)
Death
Toll: 2376US - 104UK - >60,000? civilians - 25 media
|
Tony
Blair should know that respect comes by example - from the
top. If a country's leader has no respect for the rule of
international law and no respect for the truth, how can
he expect anyone to have respect. Letter
from P.J.Atkinson, Ashford, Kent - Daily Mail, January 12,
2006
The
Chancellor's single greatest act of vandalism in almost
nine years in office has been his wanton destruction of
Britain's private retirement industry. By slapping a massive
tax on pension funds, now worth
£7.3billion a year, he has helped to turn
the best private retirement industry in Europe into a basket-case
in perpetual crisis. Together with the adoption of European
accounting rules - which make it much riskier to operate
a company pension scheme - hundreds of firms have shut their
final salary plans to new employees and slashed benefits
to existing staff.
From
Allister Heath: "I've seen the future and its grey"
in THE SPECTATOR - April 15, 2006
|
Why
can't we simply deport all who abuse our laws, our hospitality
and our citizens?
By
Sue Reid - Daily Mail, April 27, 2006
Marcel
Spirache, a 23-year-old serial criminal and asylum seeker from
Romania, must today be reflecting on his good fortune. After his
conviction for a cash machine swindle in April last year, he was
sentenced to a year in prison at Hove Crown Court in East Sussex
by Judge Anthony Niblett.
The
judge told him: "I wish to make it clear that, had I the
power to do so, had the Home Office not granted you permanent
leave to live in this country indefinitely - I would have recommended
you for deportation. In my opinion, foreign nationals who commit
such offences should be deported because they are detrimental
to the public good."
Spirache,
who had five previous convictions for theft, must surely have
chuckled to himself. The jobless father of five, who was living
on £1,000-a-month in benefits with his Romanian wife in
Tottenham, North London, escaped deportation because he was among
50,000 would-be asylum seekers given leave to remain indefinitely
in Britain during an immigration amnesty ordered by the then Home
Secretary David Blunkett in 2003.
While
many would support the judge's comments, the fact is that there
are thousands of criminals just like Spirache whom the judiciary
would gladly deport, but whom the Home Office allows simply to
return to the community after completing their sentences. Spirache
is typical of the 10,113 foreigners choking our jails. Today,
one in eight of the 77,000 prisoners in England and Wales was
born overseas, and they come from 168 different countries.
They include 2,720 Africans, 1,419 Asians, 597 from the Middle
East and 2.954 Europeans (the majority from the former Communist
bloc) and nearly 2,000 born on the islands of the Caribbean.
Astonishingly,
almost 900 foreigners in our prisons have no documentation to
confirm which country they are from - a trick which makes deportation
impossible. Many will have cynically destroyed their passports
or identity papers so they can remain here forever.
According to sources (for, significantly, the Prison Service yesterday
admitted it does not keep such detailed figures - an apparent
gesture to the all-pervading spirit of political correctness that
persists in the Home Office) most jailed foreigners are failed
asylum seekers, visa overstayers and illegal immigrants.
The
total of overseas inmates - 13% of the prison population - is
three times higher than a decade ago, when the Government first
began to lose control of this country's borders. Since Labour
came to power, the jail population has risen by 14,000 inmates,
many of whom a foreigners. At London's most notorious prison,
Wormwood Scrubs, more than half of the prisoners do not possess
a British passport.
Yet
that is not the whole story. This week it was revealed that more
than 1,000 convicted foreign criminals, including killers, rapists
and child abusers, have been freed from prison without even being
considered for deportation, and hundreds of them have now gone
missing. Of these, 160 were released back into the community despite
a recommendation by their trial judges that they should be deported
after serving their sentences. All of the prisoners - they include
175 Jamaicans, 59 Nigerians, 58 Iraqis, and 48 Somalis - had committed
crimes that should have triggered automatic assessment for removal,
and the majority should have been expelled from the country.
But
nothing of the sort happened. As one worker at Wormwood Scrubs
said yesterday: "I have watched foreigners of all nationalities
being taken to the prison door on the last day of their sentence.
They are given their possessions in a black bin liner and walk
out on to the street. There is no one from the authorities there
to stop them disappearing. As I drive into work, I have seen recently
released foreign prisoners waiting at the bus stop or hanging
about on the benches outside the Tube Station. Some are clearly
high on drugs or drink even though it is early in the morning.
"Everyone
who works in the prisons knows that the number of foreigners who
get kicked out of Britain at the end of their jail term is next
to nil. The prisoners and their lawyers know it too. If deportation
is even mentioned, these inmates use every nook and cranny of
the human rights laws to fight any attempt to remove them from
Britain."
There's
little doubt that Grant Oliver, a violent mugger, is one of these.
Almost exactly a year ago, the 21-year-old Namibian asylum seeker
was convicted of a violent, unprovoked attack on a passer-by in
an East London street. The late-night assault was so brutal that
the victim, a restaurant worker in his 20s, crawled under a car
to escape the relentless beating and save his own life. But not
before Oliver had kicked the man - whom he had never met - repeatedly
in the head. And for what? To steal a cheap watch, a London Transport
travel card and leather wallet containing just £30.
Little
surprise, then, that at London Snaresborough Crown Court, well-dressed
Oliver, who claimed to be here studying for a degree, was told
by the judge, William Kennedy: "Your continued presence here
is detrimental to this country." In other words, he should
be deported.
So
what happened next? Oliver was sent to prison for 30 months and
has, to date, cost the taxpayers of Britain £36,000. He
was not deported back to Namibia. And all the chances are that
he will never return there after he is released this summer, when
he will have served half his sentence.
Why
isn't the system working? Why can't we simply deport all foreigners
who abuse our hospitality, our laws and our citizens? According
to the Home Office - a ministry that has often been accused of
being under the control of liberal civil servants - such a policy
is practically impossible.
Foreign
nations, it is claimed, are often unwilling to take back their
own criminal fraternity. And the Human Rights Act - introduced
by Labour Government in 2000 - stipulates that prisoners who face
persecution, oppression or loss of family life back in their home
countries cannot be deported.
"The
human rights laws are loaded in favour of the foreign criminal,"
an immigration lawyer said yesterday. "If he has a wife or
children here, then his lawyers will argue he has a family life
that cannot be interrupted by deportation. Even is a judge says
a criminal should be deported, the ruling can be overruled by
the Home Secretary.
"There
is a growing feeling of anger among the judiciary, who time and
again say a foreign criminal should go but find out later that
nothing of the sort has happened," added the lawyer.
The
end result is that during 2004 and 2005, a total of 2,500 foreign
prisoners considered for deportation on release remained in this
country, the Home Office revealed yesterday. Thousands
actually come to Britain to commit crime. Earlier this
year, the Caribbean-born leader of a cocaine-smuggling gang that
raked in £3million a week was recommended for deportation
by a judge who jailed him and his 14-member gang for a total of
178 years.
Ian
Dundas-Jones, 35, from Jamaica, had come to London on false papers.
Like thousands of others, he simply stayed on when no one took
action against him. He lived the high life from the drug profits
of his gang, buying his wife, Sandra, nearly £500,000 worth
of clothes by Prada and Versace. At his home in Romford, Essex,
there was a designer kitchen and sports cars in the driveway.
More than £100,000 in cash was found in a kitchen drawer.
Yet
Dundas-Jones was already wanted for drug trafficking in the French-run
Caribbean island of Guadeloupe when he slipped unnoticed into
Britain. So will he ever be sent home for good? in the current
climate, the chances are very low indeed.
Even
if the Government really wanted to do something, the situation
is out of control. This was highlighted recently when the BBC's
Crimewatch programme appealed to the public for help in finding
12 men suspected of raping women all over Britain. Nine of the
suspects tracked down were foreigners - including an Afghan, a
Turk, a Pole, A Zambian and a Kosovan. Seven were claiming asylum
and two were illegal immigrants.
Now,
no doubt, they are all residing at the taxpayers' expense in jail
with no plans ever to leave Britain.
If you have
suggestions for additional subjects, or material to include in the
pages linked to the subjects listed, please contact the webmaster.
