Rescuing Democracy in the United Kingdom from our current Elected Dictatorship
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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
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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.
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May
28, 2006 (1114 days since war ended)
Death
Toll: 2464 US - 111 UK - >60,000? civilians - 25 media
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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
Nine
years ago the British people were sold a fantasy of clean
and competent government of principle and honesty. Its shiny
wrappings stripped away, the product now reveals its true
nature: Personal greed, arrogance, incompetence, shamelessness,
rash warmongering and an inability to accept - as is clear
to almost everyone else - that it is time to go. Editorial
- The Mail on Sunday, May 28, 2006
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My
fake passport into Britain
Special
Investigation by Sue Reid - Daily Mail, June 3, 2006
In
the week John Reid promised to 'do what it takes' to control immigration,
our reporter bought three forged passports and used them to walk
unchallenged into Britain. No wonder we're the migrant criminal
capital of the world
The
Daily Mail today exposes how our shambolic border controls act
as an incentive for thousands of illegal immigrants to come to
Britain. With frightening ease, foreign terrorists and criminals
can enter this country using fake EU passports made to order in
48 hours at counterfeiting factories in North London.
I
discovered the staggering scale of the scandal when I bought three
forged passports for £1,200 each from an African middleman
named Jonathan. Handing over the money in cash with three pictures
of myself taken at a supermarket photo-booth, I told him my height,
age and the new name I wanted put on the documents. Two days later,
the three fake passports - Italian, French and Portuguese - were
delivered to me in a white envelope at a wine bar near King's
Cross railway station.
In
order to test how easily they could be used to gain entry into
Britain, I sent the Italian passport (number 354167F) by post
to a friend's address in northern France where I planned to collect
it and then come back into the country. I was copying the simple
trick of thousands of illegal immigrants who wait at the French
port of Calais hoping to smuggle themselves to Britain. They buy
a bogus EU passport from London, which is then sent to a box number
at one of the port's post offices for them to pick up a day or
two later.
I
assumed that my bogus Italian document would be spotted by British
immigration officials when I made my illegal journey across the
Channel. After all, the last Home Secretary - Charles Clarke -
lost his Government post over the scandal of 1,023 foreign criminals
being let out of our jails without being considered for deportation.
Worse, a senior Home Office civil servant recently admitted to
MPs that he hadn't 'the faintest idea' how many illegal immigrants
are now living in Britain, although the figure is believed to
be nearing half a million.
The
result? New Home Secretary John Reid has promised to 'do whatever
it takes', and work '18 f***ing hours a day to mend our fractured
immigration system. Surely, I thought, anyone trying to smuggle
themselves into Britain this week - of all weeks - must be caught.
So on Tuesday I took the ferry to Calais, picked up the Italian
passport, and bought a cut-price £14 ticket for the crossing
back to England.
At
Dover I did not face any Customs checks at all
With
the white cliffs of Dover just a tantalisng 20 miles and a 90-minute
ferry ride away, the Channel is a renowned route for illegal migration.
Yet my forged papers did not raise one suspicious eyebrow. I was
waved through into this country with no questions asked. On the
sole occasion that my bogus Italian passport was examined - by
a female British immigration official on the port side at Calais
- it was not spotted as a fake. Although the document bore a false,blatantly
English-sounding name - Susanna Brown - she smiled and wished
me a 'pleasant journey'.
The
official did not even notice that my forged passport bore only
a poor resemblance to official Italian ones. My document was a
deep brown colour, instead of a bright maroon. The pages are flimsy
and the lace for my signature and photograph is at the front and
not at the back as it should have been. Yet she just typed my
name into a small computer, then handed the document back to me.
No attempt was made to scan the passport electronically.
But
more alarmingly, at Dover I did not have to face any immigration
check at all. Three officials wearing yellow jackets stood by
watching passengers disembark from the boat. I then climbed onto
a bus with the others to be taken to the terminal - with my passport
safely in my pocket. There, Customs officials also watched but
didn't approach me - and didn't appear to examine any other passengers'
passports either.
Yet
if I had been a true illegal immigrant, my fake passport would
have opened a Pandora's box in Britain. By showing it at a Job
Centre I could get a British National Insurance number. With the
NI number I could claim benefits, receive free health care and
even ask for subsidised housing or open a bank account. I could
turn to a life of crime or terrorism, protected by the false name
and details provided by the bogus passport. Moreover, within weeks,
I could have built up a multiplicity of identities using all three
of my false documents.
Jonathan,
the middle-man who provided the bogus documents, told me confidently
yesterday after my undercover cross- Channel journey: "If
trained British immigration officials at a port can't spot a passport
as a fake, why would someone working at the Job Centre or the
High Street bank? Thousands of these passports are being made
every day. They are used by people from outside the EU to pretend
they are Italian, French or Portuguese. They allow thousands from
French-speaking parts of Africa to get into Britain posing as
EU citizens. Brazilians come to London on the Portuguese passports,
Russians on Danish passports, lots of South Americans on Spanish
ones. It means they don't have to bother with a visa and can stay
here forever."
They
don't need to get visas and can stay here forever
I
began my investigation after Scotland Yard warned last month that
passport fraud is so lucrative that gangs in London and other
cities are offering 'forging franchises' to underworld fraudsters.
In a 'passports 'R' us' scam, false travel documents are being
bought off the shelf by illegal immigrants to Britain.
One
senior officer, Detective Superintendent Bob Murrill, spoke in
chilling terms of our need for a national border surveillance
agency. "We don't have, as a society, full control of what's
going on. In fact, I would say it (passport fraud and illegal
immigration) is out of control."
Scotland
Yard believes that there are now 170 gangs in London alone involved
in passport fraud with links to drug dealing and people trafficking.
They come from 22 different ethnic groups and nationalities. Detectives
say that it is the multi-million-pound trade in bogus travel documents
that is providing the 'oxygen' for ever-increasing foreign criminal
activity in Britain.
In
the first instance, it is the trade in fraudulent travel and identity
documents that encourages foreign criminals and terrorists to
target this country so relentlessly. Once here, their new persona
means their real identities are erased. Crucially, they are able
to evade checks made against the police national computer.
Those
living under a plethora of different names can also frustrate
any attempt by immigration authorities to find them. As one official
at a deportation centre for illegal immigrants told then Mail
this week: "A huge number of those sent here to await removal
are operating under false identities. They include those with
suspected terrorist links and criminal pasts. Many will have slipped
into Britain using bogus passports or false documents in the beginning."
A
typical example is Olga Efimosa, a beautiful Russian woman who
arrived on a false passport and is thought to have played a major
role in the trafficking of Eastern European girls to London. The
blonde 32-year-old from St. Petersburg was discovered with 27
fake Western European passports hidden in a safe deposit box in
Knightsbridge. One was in the Dutch name of Cornelia van Voorden.
Two more, from Norway, were signed by a Kate Brun. And a fourth
passport, also Norwegian, gave the name of Nina Laumann.
All
are believed to have been used to bring Russian teenagers here
to work in the escort industry. Olga Efimosa was caught by Scotland
Yard and deported after serving a prison sentence. But the Mail
has now been told - and has informed the police - that she has
slipped back into Britain using another false passport. Today
she is suspected of running her seedy business exploiting trafficked
foreign girls from a plush flat in South Kensington.
This
story does not surprise Jonathan, my middle man. He is not a counterfeiter
or a criminal. But as a member of an ethnic community in London
he knows the right people to approach for false papers. They in
turn, have links to the master forgers.
When
I first met him - introduced through an African friend - he told
me not to ask questions about where in London the passports were
going to be made. He added: "If you want others I can get
you a Dutch and Danish passport, too."
But
on our second meeting - when I had handed over the money in £50
and £20 notes - he revealed that the distinctive passport
covers of different countries - with blank pages inside - are
forged in Thailand. From there, they are flown to London to be
stored by a gang based in Brixton. The gang takes orders for what
are simply called 'blanks' from counterfeiting cells all over
the country.
When
I ordered my passports, the counterfeiters in North London bought
the 'blanks' they needed - French, Italian and Portuguese - from
the Brixton gang and went about their intricate work. They put
my photograph inside and sealed it with an embossed see-through
stamp. They made up an address for me in the capital of each country
and printed it n the passport.
In
the case of the Italian passport it was Via Stefano No 53, Roma.
I have since discovered that the address does not exist. The only
suspicious thing about the three false passports which I - as
an untrained layman - could spot at first was the smell of fresh
glue. They were certainly good enough to fool the French immigration
service, which is much more vigilant than Britain's own.
French
officials were fooled by my documents
A
week before my Calais to Dover trip, I tried out the Portuguese
passport on a train journey through the Channel tunnel from Paris
to London's Waterloo. At Gare du Nord, the railway station in
Paris where the internal Eurostar terminal is based, I bough a
single ticket to London in the name of Susanna Brown and showed
my fake Portuguese passport. Then it was on to passport control
and a check by French immigration staff.
I
proffered my passport - which stated that I was born in Lisbon
- and waited for it to be looked at. Immediately, a uniformed
official became suspicious. He peered at the picture of myself
on the second page and tried to put the passport through a scanning
machine. The machine bleeped and a red light flashed.
I
was told to stand aside as the young official turned to one of
his senior colleagues for advice. Together, they tested the passport
by trying to tear it apart - unsuccessfully. One of them put a
small penknife blade under my photograph to see there was another
underneath. There wasn't.
They
they went to a private room to confer - my passport in their hands.
Five minutes later they were back. The officials silently handed
the passport to me. They suspected *I was guilty, but couldn't
prove it. Soon, I was on my way to Britain illegally, like thousands
before me - and thousands to come.
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